Category: Volume 31 – Number 3 – May 2021

Sharon P. Holland is the Townsend Ludington Distinguished Professor and Chair of American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of Raising The Dead: Readings Of Death And (Black) Subjectivity (Duke UP, 2000), and co-author of a collection of trans-Atlantic Afro-Native criticism with Professor Tiya Miles (American Culture, UM, Ann Arbor) entitled Crossing Waters/Crossing Worlds: The African Diaspora in Indian Country (Duke University Press, 2006). She is the author of The Erotic Life of Racism (Duke University Press, 2012), a theoretical project that explores the intersection of Critical Race, Feminist, and Queer Theory. Her next book, an other: a black feminist consideration of animal life, is under contract with Duke University Press. You can see her work on food, writing, and all things equestrian on her blog, http://theprofessorstable.wordpress.com.

Chelsea Oei Kern is an ACLS Leading Edge Fellow with the Community of Literary Presses & Magazines, where she leads projects related to diversity, equity, inclusion, and access. She earned her doctorate from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2021. Her research focuses on contemporary literature and its relation to digital technologies.

Alberto Moreiras is Professor of Hispanic Studies and Latinx and Mexican American Studies at Texas A&M. He has taught at University of Wisconsin-Madison, Duke University, and the University of Aberdeen, and has held visiting positions at numerous institutions (Emory, Johns Hopkins, Minas Gerais, Chile, Buffalo). He is the author of Interpretación y diferencia (1991), Tercer espacio: literatura y duelo en América Latina (1999), The Exhaustion of difference: The Politics of Latin American Cultural Studies (2002), Línea de sombra. El no sujeto de lo político (2008), Marranismo e inscripción, o el abandono de la conciencia desdichada (2016), Infrapolítica. La diferencia absoluta de la que ningún experto puede hablar (2019), Sosiego siniestro (2020) and Infrapolítica: Instrucciones de uso (2020). He is a coeditor of Política común, and of the “Border Hispanisms” Series at University of Texas Press.

Susanna Paasonen is Professor of Media Studies at University of Turku, Finland, and author of Carnal Resonance: Affect and Online Pornography (MIT Press 2011), Many Splendored Things: Thinking Sex and Play (Goldsmiths Press 2018), and NSFW: Sex, Humor and Risk in Social Media (with Kylie Jarrett and Ben Light, MIT Press 2019).

Miriam Posner is Assistant Professor in the UCLA Department of Information Studies. She’s also a digital humanist with interest in labor, race, feminism, and the history and philosophy of data. Her book on the history of supply-chain management is under contract with Yale University Press.

Steven Ruszczycky is Assistant Professor in the department of English and a member of the Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. He is the author of Vulgar Genres: Gay teaching faculty in the department of Women’s, Gender, and Queer Studies at the California Pornographic Writing and Contemporary Fiction (University of Chicago Press, 2021).

Travis Workman is Associate Professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. His recent work includes essays on humanism and area studies and a forthcoming volume of translations of Korean literary and cultural criticism. He is finishing a book on North Korean and South Korean film melodrama of the Cold War era and starting one on neo-feudalism and contemporary media.

Sean A. Yeager is a doctoral candidate in English at The Ohio State University. Before joining Ohio State, Sean was an Assistant Professor of Physics and Mathematics at Pacific Northwest College of Art. Sean earned their M.Sc. in Physics from Texas A&M University by working as a data analyst for the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search. Sean earned their M.A. in Critical Studies from PNCA by performing a data-driven analysis of temporal structure in narrative. Sean currently studies contemporary literature through the lenses of narratology, digital humanities, and neuroqueer theory.

Sean Yeager (bio)

A review of Prescod-Weinstein, Chanda. The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred. Bold Type Books, 2021.

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein’s new book, The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred, offers one possible answer to Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s question, “how might black feminism … imagine a relation to science, physics in particular, that offers a challenge to the microfundamentalism of our present?” (637). Physicists have long acknowledged that naive reductionism is incompatible with the mathematical phenomenon of symmetry breaking.¹ Yet Prescod-Weinstein addresses a different type of fundamentalism that is far more prevalent among scientists, encapsulated by a quip that’s usually attributed to Richard Feynman, namely that “the philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.” Prescod-Weinstein counters by arguing that “scientists are acting unscientifically when they do not acknowledge the history, philosophy, and sociology of their fields” (223). Yet Prescod-Weinstein isn’t particularly concerned about abstract losses of epistemic potential. They² focus instead on the material and systematic ways that the physics community crushes the dreams of those who do not fit the traditional mold (i.e. white and male) of scientific “genius.”

Large tracts of the book work through Prescod-Weinstein’s observation that “it can be hard to see the wonders of the universe through the social crud” of a field that is dominated by white men (161). The casual tone of this indictment is ubiquitous throughout the book, creating an atmosphere that is welcoming, lucid, and funny. This accessible style should not be mistaken for a lack of rigor, however, for it belies a deeply interdisciplinary methodology. Prescod-Weinstein engages in cultural studies by way of canonical literature (Mansfield Park and The Invisible Man), science fiction staples (Star Trek and Black Panther), and poetic all-stars (June Jordan and Audre Lorde). They undertake historical work through their recovery of Caroline Herschel’s scientific labor, a complex endeavor that carefully attends to the intersections of racism and sexism. They also use autobiographical methods to produce some of the book’s most powerful and damning segments. This interdisciplinary strategy challenges the disdain that scientists sometimes hold for experiential knowledge while simultaneously showing that narration plays a role in everything from the personal to the cosmological. In Prescod-Weinstein’s words, “I am a griot of the universe—a storyteller” (67).

The book’s interdisciplinary nature is perhaps most noticeable in its critiques of the Thirty Meter Telescope on Mauna Kea. These sections are equally informed by Prescod-Weinstein’s personal family history, by Indigenous Hawaiian epistemologies, and by the #WeAreMaunaKea activist movement. Some of Prescod-Weinstein’s comments will be old news for humanist readers—e.g., cherished Foucauldian dogma like “science is inextricably tied to power” (197)—yet these arguments inevitably hit harder when delivered from within. Prescod-Weinstein never relinquishes their wonder for the natural world, even as they demand a fundamental reckoning with what it means to be a scientist.

Part of this reckoning involves rewriting the stories that scientists tell, both to ourselves and to lay audiences. For Prescod-Weinstein, this sometimes means critically reexamining the playbook rather than throwing it away. For example, they title the book’s first “phase” (i.e., section) “Just Physics” and explicitly evoke the influence of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos (6). This first phase is sometimes quirky, as evidenced by the chapter title, “I <3 Quarks,” which offers a crash course in particle physics. Other times it is awe-inspiring, as seen in “The Biggest Picture There Is,” which offers a succinct history of the universe as understood by physicists. The chapter “Dark Matter Isn’t Dark” critiques the nomenclature of dark matter itself, stating that dark matter “has a public relations problem because it’s got a bad name, literally,” since the substance in question does not interact with light in any capacity (34).³ Special praise is due to Sharifah Zainab Williams’s illustrations, which are enlightening and hilarious.⁴ Lay readers will likewise appreciate that Prescod-Weinstein follows Stephen Hawking’s example by including only a single equation in the entire book.⁵ As someone who stepped away from a career in physics research to focus on physics education, I found these chapters to be exemplary of cosmological pedagogy.⁶

Yet the protagonists in this telling of the universe’s story are different from the usual suspects, who are here relegated to the sidelines for their unusually suspect behavior. Isaac Newton, for instance, is not lauded as the father of classical physics but offhandedly mentioned as the sadistic warden of The Royal Mint, a man who “was said to enjoy his ability to burn at the stake, hang, and torture coin counterfeiters” (7). Other household names like Erwin Schrödinger and Werner Heisenberg are entirely absent. Instead, physicists such as Vera Rubin, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, and Elmer Imes are foregrounded for their work, respectively, on galactic rotations (one of the earliest indicators of the existence of dark matter), pulsars (Bell Burnell was controversially overlooked as a co-recipient of the 1974 Nobel Prize), and infrared emission spectra (an early piece of evidence for the validity of quantum mechanics). Furthermore, Prescod-Weinstein purposefully reaches beyond the traditionally accepted domain of physics to incorporate the many generations of “Black women [who] have looked up at the night sky and wondered. Those women whose names I do not know … are as much my intellectual ancestors as Isaac Newton is” (7).

Phase two, “Physics and the Chosen Few,” focuses on another of Prescod-Weinstein’s goals: “creating room for Black children to freely love particle physics and cosmology” (8). The first chapter in this phase, “The Physics of Melanin,” builds on their article for Bitch Media. This chapter not only discusses the molecule’s fascinating properties, hailing it as “the stuff of Afrofuturist techno-dreams” (108), it also interrogates the molecule’s artificial appropriation in the construction of race, noting that “our melanin—and our lack thereof—tells stories about what my ancestors endured” (110). The following chapter, “Black People are Luminous Matter,” will be of special interest to science fiction readers. Here, Prescod-Weinstein offers a compelling critique of Sheree Thomas’s analogy that “dark matter : Black people” (114). The analogy states that Black artists often shape the US’s cultural zeitgeist, yet rarely receive credit for this work. Prescod-Weinstein counters that Black folks are hypervisible in certain contexts, such as police brutality. They also worry about the potential for exoticization: “We know almost nothing about dark matter, but we know a lot about Black people” (116). They offer instead the analogy of weak gravitational lensing as a way of describing their experiences with racism. The gist of this analogy is that weak gravitational lensing, a complex astronomical phenomenon, is difficult to perceive unless one is well-versed in the appropriate modes of pattern recognition. The analogy is helpful, but Prescod-Weinstein’s strictly verbal description of the phenomenon itself feels like a missed opportunity to include another of Zainab Williams’s brilliant illustrations.

Prescod-Weinstein shifts to a more autobiographical mode in phase three, “The Trouble with Physicists.” Some of this section’s critiques will be familiar to many self-conscious academics, such as the observation that “cultural, structural issues” do not “magically go away with admissions and diversity initiatives” (155). Others are disciplinarily specific: “every Black woman physics PhD I’ve discussed this with had someone in a position of authority and influence tell them that they weren’t cut out to be a physicist” (157). Queer theory also informs this phase, shaping Prescod-Weinstein’s discussion of the ways in which the physics community marginalizes trans experiences. Likewise, a materialist analysis of labor distribution leads to the critique that “progress in science happens not just because of the scientists in the room but because of how their presence in the room is made possible” (192). Prescod-Weinstein also advances the critical concept of “white empiricism,” which they describe as the “practice of ignoring information about the real world that isn’t considered to be valuable or specifically important to the physics community at large, which is oriented toward valuing the ideas and data that are produced by white men” (170). The phase’s final chapter, “Rape Is Part of This Scientific Story,” is emotionally powerful and theoretically rich. It explains how “rape forms a through line in [their] story” and unpacks how the aftermath of sexual assault continues to frustrate Prescod-Weinstein’s ability to practice physics (203). Out of respect for Prescod-Weinstein’s concern that “media coverage will only focus on this chapter rather than the whole book,” I’ll say simply that there is no shortage of scientists who would do very well to read this chapter (201).

After unloading on the current state of physics, Prescod-Weinstein begins phase four, “All Our Galactic Relations,” with a question: “can we situate ourselves, collectively and humanely, in the universe?” (211). This phase features the critique of the Thirty Meter Telescope, which is informed by Indigenous theorists, scholars, and activists such as Winona LaDuke, Katie Kamelamela, Eve Tuck, and Wayne Yang. It also contains “Cosmological Dreams Under Totalitarianism,” which analyzes science’s entanglement with the militaryindustrial complex, pointing out that “science and totalitarianism … have typically had a pretty cozy relationship” (235). J. Robert Oppenheimer features centrally in this discussion. Prescod-Weinstein describes him as “a fascinating and terrifying figure,” yet expresses little sympathy for his tendency “to cling more to an institution than to his humanist values” (245). Other topics include problematic funding structures—”an inordinate amount of time in science is spent begging for money” (246)—and the involuntary human experiments performed at Holmesburg Prison and in Tuskegee. The phase’s final chapter, “Black Feminist Physics at the End of the World,” is rooted in ecocritical Indigenous scholarship, yet also draws from the transformative justice movement and from anarchist thought. Prescod-Weinstein asks if it’s possible to build “a community of scientists hell-bent on using our visionary imaginations” to reconfigure humanity’s relationship with the world (271). This chapter feels like a natural companion to the tales in Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements, edited by adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha. Here, brown and Imarisha develop the notion of “visionary fiction” to describe “science fiction that has relevance toward building new, freer worlds,” noting that “decolonization of the imagination is the most dangerous and subversive form there is: for it is where all other forms of decolonization are born. Once the imagination is unshackled, Imarisha and brown’s collection resonates strongly with Prescod-Weinstein’s hope of building a model of science that is “undergirded by a commitment to being in good relations with the world that is to come, and that requires imagination and a sense of wonder at the universe that is” (271). This final phase is followed by a deeply personal short letter from Prescod-Weinstein to their mother, which doubles as an epilogue.

Scholars might wonder how The Disordered Cosmos compares to Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway. Both texts perform feminist physics outreach, yet they do different work for different audiences. Barad’s book is primarily geared toward academics, and it pushes boundaries within the relatively niche field of quantum foundations; it foregrounds elaborate descriptions of experimental apparatuses and introduces ten-dollar terms like “ethico-ontoepistem-ology.” Certain readers—including myself—are enticed by such maneuvers, but others are alienated by them. Prescod-Weinstein casts a wider net, with the explicit aim of reaching those who’ve been excluded from the academy. This necessarily involves sacrificing some of the depth and jargon afforded by specialist discourse.⁷ Barad asks questions like, “What, if anything, does quantum physics tell us about the nature of scientific practice and its relationship to ethics?” (6). Though this is deeply entangled with the questions that Prescod-Weinstein asks—like “Who is a Scientist?” (131)—it provokes a different response. Both texts offer crucial perspectives on physics and philosophy, but it’s sadly telling that Prescod-Weinstein through physics but through [their] work in Black feminist science, technology, and society The Disordered Cosmos will receive a similarly lukewarm reception within the physics community, though it seems inevitable that Prescod-Weinstein’s text will make a substantial impact on the humanities.

My only disappointment with The Disordered Cosmos is its relatively cursory engagement with disability. Prescod-Weinstein briefly discusses Linda Chavers’s writings on multiple sclerosis (123–4), and also talks frankly about some of their own disabilities,⁸ but these comments do not seem to warrant compilation within the book’s index.⁹ Even though Prescod-Weinstein’s engagement with disability feels offhand when compared to their fully integrated analyses of race, gender, and colonialism, they are light-years ahead of most scholars, who tend to be utterly ignorant of Disability Studies. Still, a phrase like “the biology of the disempowered” (106) craves the company of disabled thinkers like Nirmala Erevelles, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Sara Acevedo, M. Remi Yergeau, and Therí Pickens.¹⁰

In summary, The Disordered Cosmos is groundbreaking. In the words of Sylvia Wynter, Prescod-Weinstein has composed a “deciphering practice” for physicists that will “reveal their rules of functioning rather than merely replicate and perpetuate these rules” (Wynter 261).¹¹ The text is brilliant, relatable, and eminently quotable—and it never pulls an upward punch. More broadly speaking, Prescod-Weinstein raises the bar when it comes to interdisciplinary investigation, and scholars who flippantly appropriate this buzzword (e.g. “my interdisciplinary close reading of Romantic poetry incorporates both historicist and Freudian methods!”) may wish to re-evaluate their own worthiness of the term.

Sean A. Yeager is a doctoral candidate in English at The Ohio State University. Before joining Ohio State, Sean was an Assistant Professor of Physics and Mathematics at Pacific Northwest College of Art. Sean earned their M.Sc. in Physics from Texas A&M University by working as a data analyst for the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search. Sean earned their M.A. in Critical Studies from PNCA by performing a data-driven analysis of temporal structure in narrative. Sean currently studies contemporary literature through the lenses of narratology, digital humanities, and neuroqueer theory.

Notes

Acknowledgements:

I am extremely grateful to Brian McHale, Amy Shuman, Ark Ramsey, Preeti Singh, Sean Downes, and Kortney Morrow for their feedback and support.

1. See, for instance, P.W. Anderson’s influential 1972 paper, “More is Different.”

2. Prescod-Weinstein uses both they/them and she/her pronouns professionally, but I stick to the former out of respect for their assertion that “I am genderless yet in my everyday life I am gendered by others” (175).

3. Prescod-Weinstein proposes several alternatives, such as “‘invisible matter,’ ‘transparent matter,’ or ‘clear matter’” (34) as well as “non-luminous ether” (126), but I’m unsure that any of these more accurate choices will catch. The misnomer is simply too widespread – and has too much pizzazz. Physics has a long history of similarly misleading names, spanning everything from “electromotive force” to “the God particle.”

4. Any physicist worth their salt, for instance, will laugh at Zainab Williams’s rendition of a spherical cow (30).

5. Hawking famously joked that each equation in A Brief History of Time would halve his sales, yet he still included physics’ most famous equation, E = mc². Prescod-Weinstein chooses one of Einstein’s more complex formulations, G_μν = 8πT_μν, a tensor equation that describes the curvature of spacetime. A physicist’s favorite equation offers much insight into their character.

6. But as a queer person who currently studies narrative temporalities, I worry that humanists will ascribe undue radicality to some of Prescod-Weinstein’s statements in the chapter “Spacetime Isn’t Straight.” For instance, their framing of the Palikur people’s curvilinear coordinate system as “more accurately describing the movement of stars across the night sky” than the Western framework feels somewhat misleading (49). So far as I can gather from Prescod-Weinstein’s source, Lesley Green and David R. Green’s Knowing the Day, Knowing the World, the two systems seem to predict the same stellar motion, though the Palikur’s curvilinear system might certainly be more efficient at describing it (much as long division is easier with Arabic numerals than with Roman). Regardless, I concur with Prescod-Weinstein that “intuition about space and time isn’t universal and that it has cultural and experiential context” (51).

7. The difference in depth, however, is also partly due to a difference in page counts: Barad’s book is nearly double the length of Prescod-Weinstein’s.

8. And yes, I too am disabled—or, to use the clinicians’ parlance for autism: “disordered.”

9. Despite Prescod-Weinstein’s explicit discussions of disability on pages 108, 134, 243–4, and 252, the subject has less indexical presence than racist soap dispensers (314).

10. And also, perhaps, the biologists Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb. It’s worth mentioning too that Moya Bailey’s work is cited, but not within the context of disability.

11. For an illuminating summary of Wynter’s richly complex theory, see Jackson’s forthcoming “Against Criticism.”

Works Cited

• Anderson, P. W. “More Is Different.” Science, vol. 177, no. 4047, 1972, pp. 393–96. EBSCO, doi:10.1126/science.177.4047.393.
• Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke UP, 2007.
• Green, Lesley, and David R. Green. Knowing the Day, Knowing the World: Engaging Amerindian Thought in Public Archaeology. U of Arizona P, 2013.
• Hawking, Stephen. A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes. 10th Anniversary ed., Bantam, 1998.
• Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman. “‘Theorizing in a Void’: Sublimity, Matter, and Physics in Black Feminist Poetics.” South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 117, no. 3, 2018, pp. 617–48. Duke UP, doi:/10.1215/00382876-6942195.
• —. “Against Criticism: Notes on the Decipherment and the Force of Things.” No Humans Involved, DelMonico Books/Hammer Museum, 2021.
• Wynter, Sylvia. “Rethinking ‘Aesthetics’: Notes toward a Deciphering Practice.” Ex-Iles: Essays on Caribbean Cinema, edited by Mbye B. Cham, Africa World Press, 1992.

Steven Ruszczycky (bio)

A review of Florêncio, João. Bareback Porn, Porous Masculinities, Queer Futures: The Ethics of Becoming-Pig Routledge, 2020.

It is difficult to overstate the impact that the HIV/AIDS epidemic has had on gay erotic culture. Whether one experienced life in the bathhouses before its outbreak or came of age in the chastened era of “safe sex” and antiretroviral therapy, for the past forty years HIV has served as the principal risk contouring not only gay men’s pleasures and intimacies but also their politics. However, as João Florêncio argues in his fascinating study Bareback Porn, Porous Masculinities, Queer Futures: The Ethics of Becoming-Pig (2020), the rise of new antiretroviral therapies, which effectively prevent the transmission of HIV between serodiscordant sexual partners, has catalyzed a significant change in that history. Comprising the second entry in Routledge’s new Masculinity, Sex, and Popular Culture series, which explores masculinities at the conjunction of texts and practices, Florêncio’s book provides a sophisticated account of the gay masculinities now proliferating in the bars, backrooms, and pornographies of Europe and North America, an account of erotic practices that echo the relational experiments that characterized gay public sex during the 1970s. While facing significant criticism both from national cultures that prefer their gay men sexlessly monogamous and from gay leaders who view pig sex as self-indulgent backsliding, gay “pig” masculinities, as Florêncio terms them, have enabled forms of queer world-making that harbor a potential for ethical and political transformation. Far from idealistic, Florêncio is in fact well aware that gay pig masculinities are inextricable from a mode of modern biopower that operates at the level not just of bodies and populations but also of hormones and molecules. Still, as he passionately and often convincingly argues, it’s in the pig’s creative use of antiviral drugs, and not in the screeds of Larry Kramer or the white papers of Mayor Pete, that many gay men have found what HIV and the phobic politics it inspired threatened to deny them: a queerer path to the future.

So, what exactly is a pig? A pig is what a pig does, and what a pig does is revel in excess. More precisely, and unlike other subcultural subjectivities that entail the acquisition of appropriate apparel or a particular body shape, one never simply “is” a pig the way one might be a twink or a bear; instead, one engenders gay pig masculinity through erotic practices using those areas of the body most intensely policed by shame and disgust. As Florêncio succinctly puts it: “gay ‘pigs’ ground their masculinity in their holes” (79). Accordingly, the pig’s erotic repertoire includes not only rough fucking and fisting, but also—and perhaps more importantly—the ingestion of recreational drugs and the exchange of body fluids, including piss, shit, and cum. Yet gay pig masculinity isn’t about the egoinflating pleasures of pissing on others, as normative masculinities might have it; instead, it treats such practices as a means of self-augmentation that repeatedly overruns the imaginary boundaries of the body. Pig sex thus exemplifies the flows of Guy Hocquenghem’s deoedipalized “groups,” for which the anus and anal pleasure supplant castration as the privileged metaphor for the production of subjectivity (Hocquenghem 110). Put differently, gay pig masculinities eschew the phallus and its false promise of coherent identity for the disorienting uncertainties of becoming. In that regard, a pig’s work is never done; there’s always another stranger to welcome, another hole to penetrate, and another load to take. It’s in the practice of such a radical openness to the world that Florêncio locates an ethics of porosity that recalls and revitalizes the experiments in erotic relationality conducted among queers during the 1970s. While conditioned by the biopolitical management of HIV, becoming-pig enacts, borrowing from Michel Foucault, an “aesthetic of existence” that makes trouble for processes of normalization and control (qtd. in Florêncio 91).

As one might expect given Florêncio’s background in art history and visual studies, the book’s archive consists primarily of moving-image pornography, yet it distinguishes itself from other works of porn studies by reading those videos in relation to a range of other materials, including Renaissance sculpture, avant-garde photography and video, pornographic novels, and classified ads. In a sense, Florêncio’s approach is as fluid as the subject he investigates, but this makes it exciting. The growth of porn studies as a field out of feminist film and media studies has meant that porn scholars tend to privilege moving images over other kinds of media, yet Florêncio shows that their histories cannot be so easily disentangled. Still, his study is not primarily historical but instead draws heavily on continental theorists, including Hocquenghem, Paul Preciado, and Peter Sloterdijk, whose efforts to think beyond a subject discreetly bound by its material embodiment inform his account of porn-mediated pig masculinities. In that regard, the book has more in common with the kinds of theory-heavy critiques that characterize much of European porn studies, including the work of Susanna Paasonen, Peter Rehberg, and Tim Stüttgen, than with the historical and sociological work more frequently produced by US-based scholars, many of whom, including Heather Berg, Angela Jones, and Mireille Miller-Young, are less interested in porn’s consumption than its production. However, Florêncio’s book also draws occasionally on interviews with subcultural participants and, less frequently, on autoethnographic accounts regarding his interactions with the subculture, and so the book delightfully eludes easy categorization in terms of the differences that may characterize porn studies’ various regionally and disciplinarily bound discourse communities.

While the book’s omnivorous approach to its subject may irritate some readers, I consider it one of its principal virtues, particularly as it regards Florêncio’s analysis of gay pig masculinities as an international phenomenon stretching across North America and many parts of Europe. Much in the same way that scholars continue to privilege moving-image porn, they have also focused their attention on US pornographies and the material conditions informing their production. This is beginning to change for a number of reasons, including that proliferating internet and mobile digital technologies have decentered US-based studios as the primary means through which porn is made and distributed. The journal Porn Studies has also helped to highlight the ways in which porn, as editors Feona Attwood and Clarissa Smith observe, “[refuses] to be contained within strict cultural and social boundaries even if [it is] located within particular geo-economic regions” (5). In both its approach to its subject matter and in drawing on the work of scholars based in North America, Australia, and Europe, Florêncio’s book contributes to the goal that Attwood and Smith identify for their journal, yet it does not exactly herald a transnational turn for the field. For example, it provides little sense of how gay pig masculinities might depend on not only pharmacological mediation but also on the globalizing forces of the internet and the markets that have helped to establish places like Berlin as premier destinations for avant-garde erotic culture. That’s not exactly the question the book sets out to answer, but it’s nonetheless worth asking in order to encourage porn scholars to develop critical frameworks that may better account for the ways porn not only depicts flows but also itself flows—or doesn’t flow—across particular borders.

In highlighting the various ways in which pornographers have represented pig masculinity on screen, Florêncio’s book makes a number of significant interventions. Perhaps the most notable is its effort to displace bareback sex and the attendant risks of HIV transmission as the central problematic of gay porn studies. Of course, it’s possible to find excellent studies of gay pornography that have little to do with the virus, but the bareback subculture and its pornographic representation have dominated the subfield for roughly the past decade, giving rise to monographs, special journal issues, and at least one edited collection on the subject.¹ This focus is indebted to the practice’s inherently controversial status, and also reflects the influence of Tim Dean’s Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking (2009), which challenges the sociological and psychological literature that explained gay men’s deliberate abandonment of condoms in terms of shame or the failures of safer sex activism. In the era of Treatment-as-Prevention (TasP) and Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP), Dean has updated his reading of barebacking to argue that what is now simply called raw sex engenders fantasies of unadulterated communion between subjects that troublingly elide their biopolitical mediation (Dean). Florêncio, by comparison, argues that such claims downplay technology’s potential for queer world-making projects. The difference between the two is a matter of emphasis. Both persons living with HIV and practitioners of pig sex remain vulnerable to intense stigmatization, often within the same communities in which they practice. That point is clearest in a fascinating interview in which a Berlin-based pig describes to Florêncio the mix of pride and shame he feels when exhibiting his anal prolapse during fisting orgies. Still, the crucial point here is that HIV transmission is no longer the principal problem contouring gay men’s lives. Under the current biopolitical regime, dimensions of such erotic practices once overshadowed by HIV can now become available for thinking.

On that point, however, there is at least one subject in the book that feels a little too familiar. Florêncio devotes much space to the work and personality of pornographer Paul Morris, the notorious head of Treasure Island Media. Following Dean’s Unlimited Intimacy, which introduced the pornographer to many academics unfamiliar with his oeuvre, Morris has become an object of fascination in gay porn studies for his studio’s rejection of the safer sex protocols that shaped studio-produced porn for much of the 1980s and 1990s. The commitment to raw sex exemplifies the studio’s renegade ethos, which it proudly proclaims on its website, marketing materials, and varieties of TIM-branded merchandise, including a recently announced line of couture leather and fetish clothing (Adams). Morris is a significant figure in the history of pornography, yet Florêncio turns Morris into a modern-day philosopher who embeds big ideas in his porn for those clever enough to extract them. Morris is smart and charismatic, and he’s also a shrewd entrepreneur. Pig sex may thwart the “capitalisation of identity that [has] come to define neoliberalism” (Florêncio 6–7), but what are we to make of its capture and mediation by an international porn studio? It’s on this question that Preciado’s notion of pharmacopornographic power seems underutilized, insofar as the term diagnoses not just biopower but also “biocapitalism” (Preciado 54). In order to understand the political potentials of gay pig masculinities, then, we need a clearer sense of their relation both to the masculine subjectivity that provides the ground for neoliberal politics and to the mode of capitalism for which pleasure, intoxication, and the production of subjectivity are key elements.

How might porn scholars in general be a bit more piggish about their work? My misgivings about the status accorded to Morris aside, Florêncio’s book can serve as a model, albeit an imperfect one, for the rest of us. Like pig sex, porn draws one’s attention to thresholds, as Attwood and Smith suggest, and it tends to generate the most consternation in those moments when it threatens to overrun the boundaries that contain it and give it stable definition. One of the most basic yet important insights of porn studies is that porn isn’t a single thing; hence, the frequent tendency among porn scholars to speak not of pornography but of pornographies. That pluralization entails a recognition of different forms and histories that may or may not overlap with each other. A further compounding issue, as Anirban K. Baishya and Darshana S. Mini explain, is that the concepts, methods, and histories developed within Euro-American porn studies may require significant modification—when not abandoned altogether—before they can be useful to thinking about the pornography and erotic culture produced elsewhere in the world. Porn scholars’ fascination with US pornographies may be as much a matter of the global hegemony of US culture as of the styles of reasoning that inform Euro-American scholarship. “Translating porn studies for each historical and cultural location,” Baishya and Mini argue, “must start from places of contact and exchange, mutations and borrowings” (8). I sense potential common ground between their description of translation as a mediated, self-reflective, and multi-directional flow of ideas and Florêncio’s ethics of porosity derived from the joyful and sociogenic fluid exchanges of pig sex. If one does it right, then one should not expect to walk away from such exchanges unchanged or uncontaminated by the ideas of others.

On that last point, one of the most interesting yet inchoate points in Florêncio’s book is the extent to which gay pig masculinities are irreducible to the kinds of embodied subjects historically defined as “gay.” Most of the bodies described in Florêncio’s study remain largely codable as cis gay male, yet by my lights one of the book’s most interesting examples of gay pig masculinity appears in Fuck Holes 3 (2015), which stands out as “the first Treasure Island Media production to feature not only cis gay men but also a trans and a cis woman” (79). While a big deal for TIM, queer porn producers have been producing videos that feature a diverse array of bodies for some time, as Florêncio notes, yet the decision not to engage further with that archive seems a missed opportunity. That thought reoccurred to me when reading Florêncio’s subsequent explication of Tom of Finland clones in the Catacombs, the famous San Francisco sex club devoted to fisting. That space, Florêncio observes, “[brought] gay men together and catalyz[ed] forms of intimacy and more or less lasting bonds that cannot be fully captured by the normative discourse of ‘rights’ that has come to dominate LGBTQ+ politics since the 1990s” (134). However, while gay men may have comprised the bulk of the Catacombs’ patrons, butch lesbians and trans men also participated in its erotic culture. The elision of just how un-clonelike the Catacombs could be makes it harder to grasp one of the more crucial points of Florêncio’s analysis: that pig sex and gay pig masculinity are not synonymous with gay men.

One of the more important pornographer-cum-documentarians of that history is not Paul Morris but the writer Patrick Califia. For example, Califia’s short story “Holes” recollects his experience as a butch dyke cruising the Catacombs only to wind up fisting a hunky deaf muscle queen named Jim. The unusual pairing forms the basis for Califia’s meditation on the queer intimacy produced during a night working his fist into Jim’s welcoming asshole. “I was amazed yet again by the power and generosity of an unabashed bottom,” Califia recounts. “I’ve never understood how someone can do that, simply let go and invite me into their psyche and their orifices” (250). At the story’s conclusion, Califia mourns not only the loss of her friend to AIDS but also the loss of the erotic culture that brought the two together: “The Catacombs has been closed for decades. And I find that it is pretty difficult for me to go looking for another grinning, good-natured sex pig to wear for a bracelet” (256). Jim’s death is unredeemable, but erotic pig culture may survive, albeit radically transformed in the ways that Florêncio describes. Yet if one were to find in that history a means to “build a new speculative ethics of co-habitation” (Florêncio 162), then such a project may be best served by devoting time and attention to practices of masculinity that allow very different kinds of subjects to share with one another not only space but also their bodies.² While there are moments when Florêncio’s book feels a little too familiar, there is much to be excited about, including a valuable framework and a useful set of conceptual tools with which to take porn studies and masculinity studies into the next decade.

Steven Ruszczycky is Assistant Professor in the department of English and a member of the Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. He is the author of Vulgar Genres: Gay teaching faculty in the department of Women’s, Gender, and Queer Studies at the California Pornographic Writing and Contemporary Fiction (University of Chicago Press, 2021).

Footnotes

1. For an example of the influence of Dean’s Unlimited Intimacy and a sampling of the current conversation regarding barebacking, see Varghese.

2. In making this suggestion, I’m inspired by the work of the trans theorist Nicholas Clarkson.

Works Cited

• Adams, J. C. “Treasure Island, Spitfire Leather Launch Fetish Clothing Collection.” XBiz.com, 30 Apr. 2021, https://www.xbiz.com/news/258890/treasure-island-spitfireleather-launch-fetish-clothing-collection. Accessed 31 May 2021.
• Attwood, Feona, and Clarissa Smith. “Porn Studies: An Introduction.” Porn Studies, vol. 1, no. 1–2, 2014, pp. 1–6. Taylor & Francis Online. doi:10.1080/23268743.2014.887308. Accessed 31 May 2021.
• Baishya, Anirban K. and Darshana S. Mini. “Translating Porn Studies: Lessons from the Vernacular,” Porn Studies, vol. 7, no. 1, 2020, pp. 2–12. Taylor & Francis Onlinedoi:10.1080/23268743.2019.1632540. Accessed 31 May 2021.
• Califia, Patrick. “Holes.” Hard Men, Alyson Books, 2004, pp. 242–56.
• Clarkson, Nicholas. “Sexing Trans Theory.” National Women’s Studies Association Conference, San Francisco, CA, November 14–17, 2019.
• Dean, Tim. “Mediated Intimacies: Raw Sex, Truvada, and the Biopolitics of Chemoprophylaxis.” Sexualities, vol. 18, no. 1–2, 2015, pp. 224–246, Sage Journals. Accessed 31 May 2021.
• Hocquenghem, Guy. Homosexual Desire. Translated by Daniella Dangoor, Duke UP, 2006.
• Preciado, Paul (Beatriz). Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era. Translated by Bruce Benderson, The Feminist Press, 2013.
• Varghese, Ricky, editor. Raw: PrEP, Pedagogy, and the Politics of Barebacking. U of Regina P, 2019.

Susanna Paasonen (bio)

A review of Roach, Tom. Screen Love: Queer Intimacies in the Grindr Era. SUNY Press, 2021.

What would follow from detaching considerations of hookup apps from simplistic, pessimistic diagnoses of neoliberal commodification and exploitation, and from coupling critiques of the data economy with a potential queer ethics of relating instead? These are some of the questions that Tom Roach asks in Screen Love: Queer Intimacies in the Grindr Era. The approach of the book is that of both/and: it addresses the destructive, expansive, and intrusive dynamics of neoliberalism, while also arguing, in response to Audre Lorde, that the master’s tools might just be used to dismantle the master’s house (127). That is, the dynamics of neoliberal capitalism—where all subjects are seen as ultimately replaceable cogs in the machine, and where social media platforms treat their users as data points visually represented within horizontal grids foregrounding sameness—can bring forth a queer ethics premised on fungibility and shared alienation. Roach’s doesn’t shy away from complexities and ambiguities that make culture, society, and the self. This approach is refreshing, not least because much contemporary analysis of social media tends to be more unequivocal when outlining what apps and platforms do, and can do. The lines of argumentation are rich, and the examples and comparisons drawn often surprising. For me, Screen Love reads as a welcome invitation to think about networked sexual screen culture through the logic of both/and.

The founding argument of Screen Love suggests that, by presenting individuals seeking company as horizontal elements of an endless grid, m4m (“men seeking men”) media such as hookup apps Grindr and Scruff foreground nonidentical sameness and equivalence in ways disinterested in personal connection or inner depth. In so doing, m4m media allow for escapes from their own neoliberal logic. Working with and through Leo Bersani in particular, Roach argues that treating social media users as fungible—both in their visual representation as profile pictures within a grid, and structurally as data points used to aggregate broader patterns of tastes and preferences for targeted advertising—is at once a neoliberal operation of power and an opportunity to foreground an ethical, nonidentical equivalence between people that makes it possible to see life as mattering only as part of a larger composition (17, 22, 50).

In presenting users as types (“the jock,” “the daddy,” “the bear,” “the twink,” etc.) rather than as unique characters, m4m media, Roach agues, hollow out personality and perceived individual uniqueness in favor of anonymised, depersonalised patterns. Roach here thinks against or at least beyond most standard analyses of objectification, which see the reduction of people into things as a violent dehumanization that intensifies social hierarchies and relations of exploitation and that is to be resisted at all costs. This does not entail blindness about historical or present practices of racial dehumanization within which fungibility operates as a means of denying the value of an individual person or life. For Roach, fungibility as equivalence does not undo hierarchical relations or stand for equality insofar as in a fungible structure different bodies and data points are differently valued (57). Rather, fungibility becomes an exercise in self-lessening: attending to sameness—from which differences sprout—so that a given self could, by and large, just as well be someone or something else.

Screen Love is at its strongest in mediating something akin to thinking in action, as examples, anecdotes, and theoretical flights spring out of and intermesh with amalgamations where Marcel Proust meets the interface design of Grindr, and where Aristotle’s takes on philia (brotherly love) frame promiscuous cultures of cruising. Some comparisons and analogies—such as thinking about the grid-like design of Grindr in relation to the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt (107–109) that treats all deaths with equal weight regardless of a person’s fame, or Andy Warhol’s soup cans that repeat so that gradual differences emerge from similarity (144–148)—are likely to rub critics who would foreground the contextual specificity of cultural objects the wrong way. This, however, is not a line of critique I wish to pursue here: in terms of aesthetics and design, the analogies stand.

The book is less strong in tackling the politics, forms, and shapes of social media and the data economy within which apps such as Grindr operate. This is not primarily a media studies book, and it is something of a tired gesture to critique a volume for what it does not argue, cover, or achieve. At the same time, its focus on hookup apps and social media and its engagement with research on these topics do make it a media studies book. The comparison that Roach draws between queer kink cultures and social media interaction options in terms of their codes and forms of action—for example, suggesting that in their protocols, S&M dom and sub roles are like Twitter’s 280-character limit, and that hanky codes are governed by protocols in the way Facebook’s “like” interaction button is (101–102)—fails to grasp their fundamental differences. A like button may be used to express affective alliance in routine fashion but, functionally, it is a key marker of attention within the data economy, and is used in analyses of patterns of preference for the purposes of targeted advertising (advertisers arguably being the actual customers of social media). A Twitter character limit undoubtedly delimits action and impacts the style and form of interaction in concrete ways. Yet a feature engineered by design, resulting from the choices of a tech company, cannot be compared easily with the roles of play within sexual subcultures, even without considering the mercurial possibility of a switch in S&M. It is undoubtedly productive to think about queer sexual cultures and social media in tandem; it is, however, also crucial to understand the operating logic of social media.

Rather than uncoupling this logic or pointing to scholarship that does, Screen Love uses social media from Facebook and Twitter to Grindr, Scruff, and Tinder as something of a metaphor or symbol for neoliberalism. Roach frames social media as “‘the language’ of neoliberalism, efficient, utilitarian” (6), where clarity of expression is valued over opacity or ambiguity, and users, wrapped up in self-promotion, performance, brand-management, and endless competition, fight over visibility and popularity. This coupling of neoliberal politics and ethos with social media allows for clarity of argumentation, as it engages, if only partially, Jodi Dean’s notion of communicative capitalism. For Dean, “obligatory transparency and expressivity” (Roach 154) do not characterize the logic of communicative capitalism. Rather, the optimized flow and circulation of data for the purposes of monetization lie at its heart, so that content—let alone clarity of expression—ceases to matter. In Dean’s analysis, data streams decouple messages and updates from senders and recipients, politics and agendas, so that communicative capitalism ultimately eschews meaning and so limits social activism on social media platforms (58). This argument is not too distant from Roach’s interest in the “sensual nonsense” of m4m media that operate outside of and that resist neoliberal norms of clarity (162), yet it also runs counter to it in resisting the exceptionalism of such platforms. Furthermore, ambivalence, nonsense, and absurdity abound in online cultures within and beyond social media—communicational transparency is hardly the general norm and never has been (Phillips and Milner).

Roach’s take on social media is more optimistic than Dean’s, although it would be inaccurate to identify it as optimistic overall. It is similarly concerned with the invasive powers of capitalism. In fact, neoliberalism becomes nearly synonymous with contemporary U.S. culture and its societal and economic dynamics in ways that make it difficult to consider other neoliberalisms, or neoliberalisms differently played out, in tandem with the neoliberalism discussed in the book. What would a queer ethics of fungibility look like in a neoliberal society with universal health care—say, Canada—operating according to similar ideological tenets yet with different principles, such as to safeguard the value of and rights to life? Fungibility may be key to neoliberalism, but it is also differently yet profoundly key to socialism and communism, although socialist and communist societies have historically rarely advanced, respected, or acknowledged gender diversity or sexual rights. Without meandering further along this path, there are crucial differences between fungibilities pertaining to ideology, economy, and the struggle for social equality. It is a virtue for cultural inquiry to be specific in focus and with regard to its material, yet further discussion is needed to see how neoliberalism and U.S. culture shape and condition each other, and to discover what follows from conflating neoliberalism with a specific national context.

In its call to consider cruising—online, offline, and in between—a practice of learning from strangers wherein one remains receptive to the foreign while also acknowledging the fundamental sameness of individual subjects, Screen Love bears some similarity to João Florêncio’s 2020 book, Bareback Porn, Porous Masculinities, Queer Futures: The Ethics of Becoming-Pig, which maps out a queer ethics based on sexual communion with and receptivity and generosity to strangers. Unlike Florêncio, who foregrounds the material intensities and dynamics of sexual pleasure in the making of queer male sociability, Roach does not engage with the notion or practices of pleasure, operating with Foucault’s declaration that sex is boring instead (62). Here, Screen Love contributes to a longer debate on the role and centrality of sexuality in queer inquiry, as advanced in the 2011 anthology After Sex, edited by Halley and Parker exploring the decoupling of queer inquiry from the topic of sex. Seemingly paradoxically, this is done by exploring hook-up apps.

This chosen line of argumentation is noteworthy in that it is easy to identify the unproductive excess of sex and sexual pleasure as fundamentally resistant to neoliberal norms of productivity and the optimization of performance. If seen as autotelic, sexual pleasure is an end in itself, requiring no instrumental purposes or interests (although it may of course be tethered to these, as well). Considered in this vein, the issue is not one of positioning sexuality as a “truth” concerning the self, nor of exaggerating the importance of sexuality in terms of identity or community so as to pin down the assumed meaning of sex or indeed of the self. Sexual desire and pleasure both make and unmake the self within and across categories of identity, so that there are myriad ways to conceptualize their importance and transformative potential well beyond the potential boredoms involved in analyzing what people do, how, why, or with whom (even though I can personally think of much more tedious intellectual tasks). Thinking further with Kane Race’s discussion of experimentations across screen media and sexual likes could have opened up further avenues for considering the ethics of promiscuity as rooted in pleasure.

Despite its title, Screen Love is not centrally concerned with a notion of love beyond the general framing of philia as an ethical claim. Intimacy, another key term in the book’s title that gestures toward Tim Dean’s Unlimited Intimacy, weaves through the different chapters even as there is notably little conceptual work done with it. Intimacy is left to point somewhat ephemerally toward or to stand in for sexual exchanges, while also suggesting something else. If, following Lauren Berlant’s critique of couple normativity and its heterosexual economies, intimacy involves “connections that impact on people, and on which they depend for living” (284), then intimacy comes steeped in vulnerability, suggesting the centrality of others to the making of the self. Furthermore, this formulation suggests that such connections are not merely of the human kind, so that an app such as Grindr—assembling interface design with avatars standing in for people, platform vernaculars connected to interaction forms and styles of writing, and invasive forms of data extraction—can impact lives in important ways.

For Roach, an ethics of fungibility emphasizes vulnerability (22, 54), yet he does not quite explain how it does this. If fungibility entails fundamental horizontality such that any individual (or their screen profile) can be replaced with any other, then contact between individuals—be it an in-app reply or a fuck date—is ultimately either meaningless or only meaningful as one node in a broader pattern of exchanges devoid of personal traits. It would then seem that it would not matter if one were to get no reply or to be rejected on a dating app. If ethical intimacy means not connecting on a personal level and being indifferent “to the sexiness of psychological depth” (15), does this not do away with vulnerability in such encounters? If one contact is the same as any other, what spaces are there for vulnerability in the connections on which we depend for living?

That a book invites its reader to think and question is, by default, a sign of its merits. In its partly open-ended and lively conversational style, interspersed with conceptually dense and neatly sculpted sentences, Screen Love achieves the difficult task of showing that, however powerful the dynamics of neoliberalism, it is crucial to hold on to spaces that enable alternate understandings of those dynamics and their implications. The book outlines pockets and patterns of possibility, virtualities that may or may not actualize, but which greatly matter.

Susanna Paasonen is Professor of Media Studies at University of Turku, Finland, and author of Carnal Resonance: Affect and Online Pornography (MIT Press 2011), Many Splendored Things: Thinking Sex and Play (Goldsmiths Press 2018), and NSFW: Sex, Humor and Risk in Social Media (with Kylie Jarrett and Ben Light, MIT Press 2019).

Works Cited

• Berlant, Lauren. “Intimacy: A Special Issue.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 24, no. 2, 1998, pp. 281–288.
• Dean, Jodi. “Communicative Capitalism: Circulation and the Foreclosure of Politics.” Cultural Politics, vol. 1, no. 1, 2005, pp. 51–74.
• Florêncio, João. Bareback Porn, Porous Masculinities, Queer Futures: The Ethics of Becoming-Pig. Routledge, 2020.
• Phillips, Whitney and Ryan M. Milner. The Ambivalent Internet: Mischief, Oddity, and Antagonism Online. Polity, 2017.
• Race, Kane. The Gay Science: Intimate Experiments with the Problem of HIV. Routledge, 2018.

Sharon P. Holland (bio)

A review of Bennett, Joshua. Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man. Harvard UP, 2020.

Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman. Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World. New York UP, 2020.

No one will dispute that the SARS-CoV-2 virus has set the stage for deeper engagements with our collective feelings about racial disparity and the natural world. Black scholars are at the forefront of thinking through these perilous times into a future that might, finally, be able to hold us. In Joshua Bennett’s spare and gorgeously written Being Property Once Myself, we are asked to begin this journey through “a black aesthetic tradition” that “provides us with the tools needed to conceive of interspecies relationships” (4). He asks: what are the ethical concerns that come forward from negated personhood, legally and philosophically? The title of Bennett’s book is taken from a Lucille Clifton poem in which kinship with the natural world produces black life. Zakiyyah Iman Jackson travels brilliantly in the same psychic life of blackness in Becoming Human, which shares similar objects and theoretical underpinnings; both texts explore the impactful nature of an antiblack world. As Jackson states in her “Introduction,” she wants to take note of “our shared being with the nonhuman without suggesting that some members of humanity bear the burden of ‘the animal’” (12). Her text strives to unmake the terms of the debate itself, offering up even its title as an oxymoron in black thought, as the works of African American, African, and Caribbean literary and visual artists “displace the very terms of black(ened) animality as abjection” (1).

Bennett’s work reads across the canon, and reimagines sociality, interiority, and feeling through the prism of black studies, ecocriticism, and affect theory as he engages in extensive and rewarding readings of literature, focusing on the ways in which these authors “render animal life” (9). His text is not interested in the “undertheorized plight of nonhuman animals.” Rather, Bennett’s analysis wants to draw attention to animal life as “a site of recognition and reckoning” (11). Each chapter is devoted to thinking with animal life as a figure for a remapping of black interiority. The first chapter, “Rat,” explicates Richard Wright’s attention to animal life as a mediation of black death. Beginning with Tara Betts’s poem, “For Those Who Need a True Story,” Bennett deftly navigates the complexity of non-human animal life and black life and the significance of the language of pests, infestation, and vermin that demonstrates the meaningful co-habitation of black human and animal life. Students of Wright’s work will immediately understand the originality of Bennett’s reading as he utilizes Wright’s purposeful foreclosure of sympathy for Bigger as a way to understand what actually subtends an antiblack world. In this reading, Bennett is quick to remind us that we judge Bigger’s actions as his “natural inclination toward cruelty” rather than as a “sociological problem.” Wright wants to lay bare this problem in writing about Bigger’s predicament: “Bigger is more violent than he is kind, and that is precisely the point. He is in the world and of it” (39). His reading of Wright’s literary critics is nothing short of brilliant. Along the way, he exposes the flawed infrastructure obscured by a one-to-one correlation between Bigger and the rat: that the relationship between these two beings is one of contestation. That contest is at issue in Bennett’s work. In this theatre, rat and human co-create—out of contestation, perhaps, but what then happens to that ethical life as a potentiality for the kind of kinship, rather than objectification, that Bennett seeks to engage? If Bigger’s future might be bound with the symbol of the rat but the rat’s future cannot be seen or told, does the consideration of non-human animal life still rest upon a contestation that produces a human/animal distinction? This is the deeper problem of representation that Bennett’s reading yields and that proponents of pessimism engage: “relation always occurs within representation” (Wilderson 315). And in this scene of contestation, of animal life, of black feeling, I wonder too about Bessie—the black female who cannot be taken with Bigger or left behind, and whose death is made in the reflection of the primal “pest” that begins Wright’s narrative. Nevertheless, the chapter ends with a stunning reading of Wright’s unpublished Haiku, where the imaginary landscape for the insurgent figure of the rat imagines a world otherwise, “an open space” as “respite from the unrelenting danger of the domestic sphere” (65).

Perhaps the gnawing feeling left in the wake of Bessie’s death propels itself into Bennett’s substantial contribution to masculinity studies in the chapter titled “Cock.” Here, he is “interested in working through and against discourses that imagine little else for black men beyond the grave.” Forging “a theory of the black masculine,” Bennett begins with one of the authors of our collective interiority, Toni Morrison (67). As he reminds us, Morrison’s works—Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, and particularly Beloved—reveal a noticeable gendering of the “properties of animals” (68). Following on the theorizations of the affective life of blackness in works like Kevin Quashie’s The Sovereignty of Quiet, Bennett explores “unreciprocated affection” and “burden without release” (73), beginning with Morrison’s insurance agent in Song of Solomon, Mr. Smith. Remarkable in this chapter is the way Bennett demonstrates that he is both a critic in the pessimist tradition and a critic of it, as he turns to forms of embodiment in black literary production—like Milkman’s limp and his relationship to his own physicality—opening up a space where the body and its affective life can and do count. Quoting from a 1977 interview with Morrison in which she cites her interest in black men “almost as a species” (100), Bennett crafts this distinction in Morrison as primarily one of masculinity’s relationship to property—the provenance of whiteness. In doing so, Bennett’s argument leaves room for the ways in which this “white-supremacist patriarchy acts differently … on black men and black women” (107). Bennett is right to emphasize a persistent problem in black literary criticism: that gender difference (politically speaking) is elided so that the project of black uplift can cohere. One of the chapter’s most compelling arguments is actually left unspoken: Bennett doesn’t try to parse his use of the term “cock,” preferring instead to compel us to be smart(er) about this male figure and fantasy as he tracks black male feeling.

In many ways, Bennett continues this work on gender in his chapter on “Mules,” recalling a representation of the mule in Zora Neale Hurston’s work as a representation of “invisibilized interiority” in “a black feminist apositionality” (117). There is an important reading of Hortense Spillers (“Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe”) in this chapter that parses “flesh” and its relationship to culture—to the “vestibulary” nature of the black female’s place in the ordering of gender and of animal life. Bennett observes: “ungendering is also a transformation at the level of species; it is how one is forcibly removed from the province of the human and placed elsewhere” (122). This particular argument has great implications for black feminist praxis and moves the dialogue about human/animal relation forward. What it also brings to the fore is the nagging presence of suffering as a kind of mutual bond in the dreamscape of ethical relation. This is a component of utilitarian praxis embedded in Animal Studies that produces the animal as object through a simile that cannot hold if ethical action is our stated goal. Nevertheless, Bennett comes closest to unraveling this dialectical trauma when he ends with this thought: “there is no communion to be had with the animal without the possibility of death” (139).

Bennett’s study ends with the chapters “Dog” and “Shark.” His readings of Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones and the trope of the Middle Passage in African-American creative thought only add to the stunning arguments laid out in previous chapters. To say that Being Property Once Myself is an achievement is an understatement. It is a paradigm-shifting work that does justice to the stuff, the stardust from which all being emerges.

In Becoming Human, Jackson’s thoroughgoing argument is that those African-descended peoples who traffic in representations of blackness are neither striving for a bankrupt humanity nor negotiating a set of terms upon which their humanity will be recognized; instead, they gesture to another way of being altogether. I couldn’t agree more with this assessment, and scholars in Animals Studies should take note that a much more interesting engagement with animal life is here to stay. This study destabilizes the dominance of philosophical and scientific thought on the animal by taking seriously “alternative conceptions of being” in Africanist thought (3). The focus here is more decidedly on “black female flesh … as the limit case of ‘the human’” (4). Jackson’s is the most systematic critique of the ways in which philosophical texts persistently misread blackness and are unclear on the effects of sex/gender upon modes of worlding since Charles Mills’s The Racial Contract.

By positing a renewed theory of plasticity, Jackson changes the terms of the playing field. She offers us a critique of plasticity that sees its “somatic potential” in the ability to mold a substance while maintaining some form of life as grounded in the work of antiblackness and the black form as “infinitely mutable” (11). And there is no other work more important to this prevailing negation than that of producing terms like “mother,” “woman,” or “female body” (11). We are reminded here that the biopolitical is the substantiation of the thought that the African is animal, and not the commonly held idea that the African symbolizes the animal (14). While I do not think that many critics would balk at this pronouncement, claims that “animalizing discourse that is directed primarily at people of African descent” might become ungrounded if we think of colonization across other regions and peoples of the globe (15). Despite these more universalist claims for the study of blackness, Jackson’s necessary critique settles on the controversy, debate, and dissention of an assumed and settled humanity (16). She sees the question of whether the black is a human being as fundamentally flawed, and asks instead: “If being recognized as human offers no reprieve from ontologizing dominance and violence, then what might we gain from the rupture of ‘the human’?” (20). For Jackson the discourses of animality and antiblackness forge each other so that we cannot talk about animal life without giving way to antiblack thought, and her precise readings of Hume, Hegel, Jefferson, and Kant bear fruit on this point.

In the chapters that put these arguments and theories at play, Jackson beautifully articulates a grounding movement in black thought: we strive to “transform” rather than “assimilate.” Taking on the human as a heuristic model, Jackson’s reading of Morrison and Douglass is a masterful articulation of a mutually constituted sentimental and identity-based understanding of ethical engagement. Central to this work is the following understanding: “New World slavery established a field of demand that tyrannically presumed, as if by will alone, that the enslaved, in their humanity, could function as infinitely malleable lexical and biological matter, at once sub/super/human” (47). Jackson clearly articulates the brutality of demanding a simultaneity in blackness, giving “form to human and animal as categories” (48). Reading Beloved against Derrida’s musings in The Animal that Therefore I Am, Jackson offers “that blackness is the missing term” (59) in his analysis, as his query into philosophical bestiary, a matter of origins, falls short of what it needs to understand itself. Derrida’s text may itself play with what is missing without naming it, just as the biography of the philosopher himself cuts through the text, submerged as it is in what he and his compatriots cannot see. Taking a look through the gaze of Mister (a rooster) and Paul D in Morrison’s text, the staging of ethical relation here is always already at the site of hum/animal relation—it is an ethics that looks outward for its muse. From this discussion we come to the importance of the slave’s “infinite malleability” (72), where plasticity gets its most sustained attention. Jackson’s point is that “trans-species correspondence, rather than oppositional difference,” is the mode of black thought (73).

The next chapter, “Sense of Things,” soars as Jackson confronts the messy obligation to nothingness that blackness seems to secure. Seeing blackness as a “profound intensification” of “a politics of sex-gender” (85), her readings move through the constructions of a hierarchical world in philosophical thought, rendering them bankrupt and noting some equivocation in Heidegger’s strict parsing of ontological boundaries. Central to the argument at this stage of this shape-shifting book and to her explication of Nalo Hopkinson’s speculative novel Brown Girl in the Ring is that we cannot understand black relationship to the subject/object paradigm without taking into consideration “black peoples’ fungibility with objects” (112)—to consider blackness in this regard is to remake prevailing aesthetic arrangements. Indeed, “the nature of reality itself” is always already at stake (112). And the argument in this chapter and the next, “‘Not Our Own,’” where Jackson considers the importance of Octavia Butler’s work, rests upon what and how black womanhood figures for this artificial separation of subject and object, as she attempts to illuminate the ways in which the structured relationship of black femaleness to settled and archetypal philosophical ruses represents a kind of telling “inoperability” (117).

The move to Octavia Butler’s speculative fiction is well-timed. It opens up a realm of possibilities for work on flesh, matter, and meaning. Jackson notes that “Butler’s fiction. … radicalizes and transforms the aesthetico-affective-cognitive politics of embodied difference rather than attempt to overcome (the movement of) differentiation” (129). Her reading of Bloodchild and the “unusual accommodation” (qtd. in Jackson 149) made for a male character’s pregnancy is masterful, and when we land on “an articulation of embodied subjectivity that is typified by receptivity rather than mastery,” the stakes of the project deepen. At this point readers will perhaps want Jackson to move through the “network of relations” (150) outlined here—what are the terms of our being that cannot be dictated by the figure, presence, or will of the human? Instead, we move to a philosophical unpacking of the project of symbiosis across feminist and science fiction and its uncomfortable marriage of race and species. There is no race without species, no species without race. Perhaps the most interesting phrase in this stunning examination is “directionless becoming” (157)—but the queerness promised in this chapter’s reading of sex/gender and reproduction is a thread that still requires untangling at its close.

In the end, we have “body” and “flesh” (194) in the last chapter of the book, “Organs of War,” which focuses on Lorde’s Cancer Journals and the visual-cultural terrain of Wangechi Mutu’s work. Jackson saves her reading of Spillers’s most important and oft-cited moment in her famous 1987 essay for last, departing from some received understandings of “flesh” in Spillers’s thought as that which comes before the imprint of culture. This cultural lexicon allows Jackson to take on the medicalized language of health care, which does not meet its stated objective at all, in both Lorde’s and Mutu’s approach to the body’s shattered materiality. Again, what makes this work queer—besides the stated sexuality of the author(s) studied—remains at stake, and I can only imagine that Jackson’s next body of work will take up this important thread.

The animal as a trope or a symbol or even relation must be reimagined. Bennett and Jackson remind us that such reimagining has already taken place. There is no single event, only a process, and the time has come for philosophy and, yes, science to take a look beyond the scrim that has obscured even the terms of their forgetting. Taken together, these two books obliterate the literal ground upon which humanity or the humane gain purchase on and access to thought. They offer much needed and welcome insight into the complexity of black thought and our manner of engaging it. No discourse about hum/animal difference, alignment, or liberation can move forward without moving through the work of these scholars. And for that, I am exceedingly glad.

Sharon P. Holland is the Townsend Ludington Distinguished Professor and Chair of American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of Raising The Dead: Readings Of Death And (Black) Subjectivity (Duke UP, 2000), and co-author of a collection of trans-Atlantic Afro-Native criticism with Professor Tiya Miles (American Culture, UM, Ann Arbor) entitled Crossing Waters/Crossing Worlds: The African Diaspora in Indian Country (Duke University Press, 2006). She is the author of The Erotic Life of Racism (Duke University Press, 2012), a theoretical project that explores the intersection of Critical Race, Feminist, and Queer Theory. Her next book, an other: a black feminist consideration of animal life, is under contract with Duke University Press. You can see her work on food, writing, and all things equestrian on her blog, http://theprofessorstable.wordpress.com.

Works Cited

Wilderson, Frank B., III. Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. Duke UP, 2010.

Chelsea Oei Kern (bio)

Abstract

This essay brings together Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida and Ruth Ozeki’s documentary Halving the Bones in order to situate the conceit of maternal photography within discourses of social and racial reproduction. Although Barthes’s theory of photography neglects race, it prepares the ground for a logic of maternal reproduction through photography that is not realized within Camera Lucida. Ozeki extends Barthes’s theory of photography-as-mothering to posit film as a medium that meets the needs of a contentious, mixed-race Asian body—both to escape narratives of race as enforced through the photograph, and to ensure the continued visibility of that body.

We approach the young woman from behind, creeping up on her as she sits at a desk in a cluttered room. As the camera shifts to capture her face, the narrator explains, first in Japanese and then in English, “This is Ruth. She is half” (00:01:47–50). Half American and half Japanese, that is: two parts of a whole, but somehow still only “half.” This first scene of Ruth Ozeki Lounsbury’s (hereafter Ozeki¹) autobiographical film Halving the Bones (1995) opens on Ruth in her apartment, sorting through old photographs of her grandparents. The narrator is a young woman with a thick Japanese accent who later identifies herself as Matsuye, Ruth’s maternal grandmother. As Matsuye continues to speak, the camera follows Ruth’s movements around the room in a series of shaky close-ups: her hands, her face, the photographs and documents that she looks at. It is an intimate perspective, and Ruth seems entirely unaware that she is being watched. Then, just a moment before the scene ends, she looks into the camera and smiles. With this move, Ruth transforms the film from biography to autobiography. By looking at the viewer directly, Ruth prevents the film from participating in an external representation of her character and violates the conventions of fictional film.² To Matsuye’s assertion that “This is Ruth. She is half,” Ruth replies in her upbeat American accent: “My name is Ruth, but I don’t like it” (00:04:05–10). As she takes over from and contradicts the previous narrator, she begins the process of undermining other representations of her by a medium that would view her as “half,” or as anything else that Ruth can claim she does not “like.” Seizing control of the filmic medium, she leverages it as a tool of autobiography against the ordering narratives of photography and family history.

Halving the Bones is about mothers, photography, and film—and about the power that each can exert over daughters. The film tells the story of Ruth’s journey to give her grandmother Matsuye’s cremated bones, which she has saved for several years in a small tea can, to her mother, Masako, from whom she has grown apart in recent years. The first part of the film presents Matsuye’s life in her own words, ostensibly from an autobiography that she wrote before she died, and through photographs and home movies shot by her husband in Hawaii. Ruth’s grandfather and Matsuye ran a photography business together until World War II, when her grandfather was taken to an internment camp, his photographic equipment confiscated. As this section closes, however, Ruth makes a confession: the autobiography never existed, and the movies are fabrications, with Ruth playing the part of her own grandmother in order to recreate the films that were destroyed during internment. The documentary thus takes a turn toward fiction even as it represents the true history of Ozeki-as-Ruth and her family as they negotiate being Japanese in America during and post-World War II. The construction of their race as a visual quality—communicated through photographs and other visual propaganda such as the government-issued How to Spot a Jap (1942)—shapes the narratives of their lives, and Ruth’s. At the same time, the demands of white supremacy continually attempt to erase the Japanese and mixed-race bodies of the film. From the mandate to have an English name that turns out to be unpronounceable by her Japanese relatives, to the confiscation of her grandfather’s photographic and filming equipment (and the destruction of his films) during his internment in WWII, to her white father’s hope that Ruth will be an “All-American kid,” visible Japanese-ness is continually under attack. While Ozeki develops an autobiographical response to the external construction of her body through photography, she is also invested in asserting the valued presence of a racialized body that is always contested.

At its heart, Ozeki’s film is concerned with questions about authenticity and reproduction in photographs, which she asks with an understanding that the search for the meaning of photography is a search for her mother. So, too, in Camera Lucida (1980), perhaps the most well-known inquiry into photographic meaning, Roland Barthes entwines his search for the meaning of photography with maternal longing following the death of his own mother. Barthes’s most telling reflections on photography come about because of the Winter Garden Photograph, a picture of his mother as a child in which Barthes “finds” her, but which he never produces in the text. Like Ozeki’s false home movies, Barthes’s missing maternal images are the centerpieces of his theory of photography. Both Halving the Bones and Camera Lucida thus hinge on the absences of a mother and a photographic or filmic object that are nevertheless integral to the works. The formal similarity of recantation (Barthes’s “palinode,” Ozeki’s confession) also organizes both the film and the book. The unsteadiness of this model (revising, going back, confessing) underlies the oblique autobiographies that these texts produce as they waver between self and mother. The convergence and thematic resonance of these two autobiographical texts occasion my reading of their meditations on photography, film, and mothers.

This essay reads Halving the Bones alongside Camera Lucida in order to explore how these two works grapple with and subvert the idea of photography as a documentary, truth-telling form that is metaphorically and even literally tied to motherhood. A photograph is procreative like a mother, Barthes suggests, because it produces bodies out of itself through the indexical relationship to the photographed subject. While Barthes’s insistence on the indexicality of the photograph has been hugely influential in subsequent photography theory, less attention has been paid to his more bizarre and personal claim that photographs not only indexical but also maternal. Highlighting photography’s mothering role inscribes photography with a familial significance that is always personal as well as theoretical. Camera Lucida and Halving the Bones share this interest in maternal photography as an intimate heuristic for thinking through visual representation of bodies. Much of the criticism on Camera Lucida has taken a psychoanalytic approach to the work, drawing on Barthes’s own engagement with Freud and the text’s focus on the mother as a structuring figure. While this scholarship also underpins some of my analysis, and while Barthes’s text is a place where psychoanalytic concepts and methods make themselves felt, I focus instead on how mothers, bodies, and their representation in photographs provide insight not into psychoanalytic relations but into the social contexts of such terms. This essay examines the connection of photographic indexicality on a social scale to the personal experience of being and creating photographic bodies as the child of a mother and a family. A mother, in my reading, is not merely the resonant childhood home of psychoanalysis but also the sociallydetermined body that produces new bodies and family histories: she is the mechanism through which racial difference propagates.³

Despite their different provenances, I bring Ozeki’s and Barthes’s works together in order to situate the conceit of maternal photography within discourses of social and racial reproduction. Fred Moten and others have shown that Barthes’s theory of photography inadequately addresses the racialized body. Here, I follow Moten’s essential observation that Barthes performs a violent “disavowal of the historical in photography” when his work leans on images of racial difference only to “justify a suppression of difference in the name of (a false) universality” (Moten 203, 205). But of course, photography, with its presumed indexicality, has played a central role in the construction of race as a visual marker, contributing to what Alessandra Raengo calls the “photochemical imagination” of racialized bodies (23). Despite Barthes’s failure in this regard, I argue that his theory of maternal photographic reproduction prepares the ground for a logic of social reproduction through photography that is not realized within Camera Lucida. I revisit Barthes’s claims in order to bring together discourses of the mother in photography with the conversation on photography as a technology of race. If the photograph is both personal and social, then it is also part of the way that individuals negotiate their own autobiographical representation through visual media.

Ozeki, extending and expanding Barthes’s theory of photography-as-mothering, posits film as a medium that meets the competing needs of a contentious, mixed-race Asian body—both to escape socially-determined narratives of race as enforced through the photograph and to ensure the continued visibility of that body in visual media, asserting its historical presence against the erasure of white supremacy. Nicholas Mirzoeff writes of the potential for photography to intervene in the visual construction of race with an attempt “to make the indexicality of race incoherent to the point of failure” such that it “might become the document of the complexity of lived, embodied experience” (125, 126). Ozeki troubles the indexicality of the photograph by filtering it through film, where indexicality falters so that individual embodied experience can come to the fore. And yet, Ozeki’s work with photography still recognizes that social context through the double function of the mother as an individual mother and as a reproducer of socially legible bodies. Barthes is often ambivalent about film. For him it is variously “in opposition” to photography, but still impossible to separate from it, “not … hav[ing] completeness,” not being “‘normal,’ like life,” or “an illusion … oneiric” (CL 3, 89, 90, 117). As Neil Badmington shows, however, film underpins many of the reflections on photography in Camera Lucida, including the central concept of the “punctum.” Ozeki’s engagement with the medium in both Halving the Bones and her fiction takes up this ambivalence to use film as an in-between space: moving and still, referential but fictive, ordered but not ordering. Ruth’s grandmother Matsuye and mother Masako emerge as the simultaneously present and absent mothers who at once create and suffer from the racialized bodies of the family as they are represented in photographs. In shuttling between photography and film throughout the work, Ozeki makes space for the inherited and personal experiences of racialized, photographed bodies. Ultimately, manipulating her representation in photography and film allows Ozeki to both claim and escape from the ordering narratives of race that her mothers and history have created for her.

Photographic Bodies

In both Halving the Bones and Camera Lucida, photography becomes linked to mothers through their shared ability to create bodies out of themselves, a connection that I take up to situate photography as a reproductive technology within the context of social and family history. For Barthes, the photograph is remarkable among other forms of art for its ability to certify the existence of its subject. Unlike painting, sculpture, or literature, Barthes argues, photographs have actual, chemical relationships to the objects they depict. This indexical relationship makes the photograph a record, rather than just a representation, of its referent. Because photographs are a way to capture the emanation of light from real objects, “the ‘photographic referent’ [is] not the optionally real thing to which an image or a sign refers but the necessarily real thing which has been placed before the lens, without which there would be no photograph” (CL 76). What we see in a photograph must exist, Barthes says, as the photograph’s existence is contingent on the existence of the thing in the picture, which emits the rays of light that the camera’s mechanical and the darkroom’s chemical processes capture: “The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here” (80). Due to its relationship to its referent, then, “the Photograph is never anything but an antiphon of ‘Look,’ ‘See,’ ‘Here it is’” (5).

Because of this indexical relationship, Barthes says, photographs produce bodies when they make the self, once immaterial or fluid, legible as a body. Speaking about his aversion to being photographed, Barthes writes, “I feel that the Photograph creates my body or mortifies it, according to its caprice” (11). Photographs of people fix the body in place, and in doing so, produce it as a body, “heavy [and] motionless,” rather than the self, “which is light, divided, dispersed” (12). Portraits produce bodies out of selves by forcing the unfixed, immaterial sense of self to become an unmoving image. But this process is not limited to pictures of people. All photographs, because of their relationship to the real objects that they depict, become linked in Camera Lucida to the human body as a marker of their materiality. The abiding connection between photography and the body appears in Barthes’s intent to begin with a series of photographs that are meaningful only to him: “Nothing to do with a corpus: only some bodies” (8). From the figurative corpus, Barthes moves to an etymological pun, and in doing so claims a bodily nature for all photography.

As Elissa Marder writes, “because photography, unlike all other modes of communication, can only assert the real and necessary existence of its (prior) material referent, it resembles biological reproduction more than it does artistic representation” (“Nothing to Say” 31). This is the basis of Barthes’s intriguing claim that photography is procreative in the same way as mothers: it produces bodies out of itself. Barthes explains: “No doubt it is metaphorically that I derive my existence from the photographer … with the anguish of an uncertain filiation: an image—my image—will be generated” (CL 11). The photographer who generates the image (the body) through the medium of the photograph is an individual who passes on traits, as a mother might, to the child-image that the photograph depicts. But it is the photograph itself, not the photographer, that has the power to fix bodies in space, and thus exerts this procreative force—literally rather than metaphorically. Produced through the body of the referent, the photograph is a “a process of reproduction that, like the mother, gives birth to a series of images—through chemical means—which create, preserve, and destroy their subjects” (Cadava and Cortés-Rocca 25).

This capacity for mortification, preservation, and destruction points to the overwhelming power of photography’s maternal role in Camera Lucida. By coercively producing bodies, photography becomes an almost oppressive force that precludes individual agency to selfdetermination within the larger social structure. Through its referential insistence on the photographed body, Marder writes, the photograph “endows the modern subject with a social, codifiable, collective body” (25). This body, unlike the light and dispersed “self” that Barthes imagines for himself, is beholden to the rules of social and family life. Barthes describes how photography operates on revealing “likeness” between a photograph and its referent, but “more insidious, more penetrating than likeness: the Photograph sometimes makes appear what we never see in a real face … : a genetic feature, the fragment of oneself or of a relative which comes from some ancestor” (CL 103). In this way, the photograph “gives a little truth, on condition that it parcels out the body. But this truth is not that of the individual, who remains irreducible; it is the truth of lineage” (103). This “truth of lineage” causes some confusion: Barthes reveals that he sometimes mistakes another mother and child for himself and his own mother, or a photograph of his father for himself or his grandfather. While the individual is “irreducible” in photographs due to the undeniable presence of the referent, photography also reveals the existence of a larger structure that forms and informs each individual. That larger structure, as Barthes’s confusion indicates, can in fact cast the specific individual into doubt by blurring her into the faces of those who have come before, trapping her in the preserved body of the image. It is for this reason that photography’s genetic function is “insidious”: it reveals the usually hidden ways in which each referent—each individual—relies entirely on the reproductive power of the mother andher social and genetic roles, and therefore on the reproductive power of photography too.

“…making a family album?”

Halving the Bones also begins with photographs. While Matsuye’s voice narrates, Ruth goes through a box of photos and other items taken from her late grandmother’s apartment. In one little sleeve, labeled “Snapshot Memories,” she finds several photographs of her grandfather in Hawaii: a Japanese man standing with arms folded in a field of sugarcane, dressed in a threepiece suit. The camera is shaky, positioned partially behind Ruth’s head, and the glare on the glossy paper makes it difficult to see the photos properly. And yet, these blurry images, along with the bones themselves, are the seeds for the film’s exploration of Ruth’s maternal family. As in Camera Lucida, photography is at once a welcome vehicle for memory and a threatening presence in the family archive, one that aids in the construction of their bodies as othered Japanese bodies.

Throughout the film, a family history of photography haunts each generation like a persistent genetic trait. While both her father and mother were invested in photography, Ruth’s mother Masako notes:

Interesting, this interest in photography skipped me, but the strange thing is that my daughter [Ruth], to whom I have never introduced photography, somehow picked it up! And the camera and the movie machine that my father sent me she took an interest in them and now she’s interested in photography enough to make that her profession! So it’s very interesting it should jump a generation and develop this way.(00:29:36–30:16)

“Awakening in me the Mother”

Although the mother figure is in many ways a threatening or controlling one, both Camera Lucida and Halving the Bones revolve around the search for an absent mother. For Barthes, this is both the actual mother who has died and the “universal theory of Photography” that she implicitly represents. To explain his attraction to a landscape photograph, Barthes remarks: “Freud says of the maternal body that ‘there is no other place of which one can say with so much certainty that one has already been there.’ Such then would be the essence of the landscape (chosen by desire): heimlich, awakening in me the Mother” (CL 40). The mother is the original home, and Barthes finds himself attracted to these landscapes which conjure up for him the maternal sense of being-at-home.⁶ It is to this home, which is both literal and photographic, that he wishes to return through the writing of Camera Lucida. As Ruth notes near the beginning of Halving the Bones, her name in Japanese (留守) means “not at home,” and thus the absent mother who should provide that home forms part of her character from the very beginning (00:04:33). The film itself is a search for the composite mother figure whom Ruth hopes to understand in order to make some sense of her family’s difficult history.

Both works “find” this elusive mother through visual mediums that come to stand in for the original. And yet, both also maintain a conspicuous absence of the images that would actually constitute a “certificate of presence” that Barthes claims is a necessary part of every photograph. This absence is an attempt to regain control over the image and move away from the socially-determined body that it produces. The Winter Garden Photograph is Barthes’s great “rediscovery” of his mother as a child, and he devotes the second half of Camera Lucida to exploring photography through this single image. Throughout this process, he fails to produce the actual photograph, even though the text includes many of the other photographs that Barthes discusses. “I cannot reproduce the Winter Garden Photograph. It exists only for me,” he says (73). Unfortunately, this failure to provide the photograph to readers makes its absence suspect. Perhaps it really does only exist for him.⁷ Barthes stresses the truth-telling power of the photograph by contrast to writing: “It is the misfortune (but also perhaps the voluptuous pleasure) of language not to be able to authenticate itself” (85). Language, unlike photography, is always separate from its referent, which may or may not exist somewhere else. Thus, when Barthes says, “Here again is the Winter Garden Photograph. I am alone with it, in front of it,” we cannot know for sure (90). Instead, Barthes constructs the photograph through language—what Marder calls his “photographic writing,” or E.L. McCallum terms the “verbal photograph” (Marder, “Dark Room” 251; McCallum n.p.). This strategy “cannot show anything directly; it animates a potential field of associations through which the time ‘before’ is awakened otherwise and, when read, brings the ‘déjà vu’ of a possible, impossible future to life” (Marder, “Dark Room” 251). Like a photograph, photographic writing can invoke the “prick” of time, the impossible history before the self. But unlike photography, this writing cannot “authenticate” itself—it instead activates a form of history that does not include the fixed, socialized photographic body of the subject.

Thus, instead of relocating his lost mother, Barthes’s attempts to find the mother actually reinforce her absence and subsequently take her place through the process of procreative reproduction. His procreative power over the subjects of the photograph (who do not have a “certificate of presence” exterior to this language) positions Barthes himself as a mother figure who is able to produce bodies as mothers and photographs do. The particular photograph is important, as “it is the concrete and particular photograph of Barthes’s mother as a little girl that promises mythically to resolve death by extending the fantasy of reversing not just life but also birth order and the life cycle, giving Barthes the sense of ‘engendering his mother’” (Casid 110). By producing the linguistic image of his mother as a small child, Barthes the adult takes the position of the mother figure who produces the infant. Barthes in fact characterizes the entire process that Camera Lucida describes as one of reproduction: “Photography thereby compelled me to perform a painful labor; straining toward the essence of her identity, I was struggling among images partially true, and therefore totally false” (CL 66). Barthes represents his search as “labor,” at once pointing to the difficulty he encountered and punning on “labor” as related to birth and motherhood.⁸ The process of writing Camera Lucida thus becomes his metaphorical pregnancy, the Winter Garden Photograph (and the mother therein depicted), the child. In becoming a photographer (through writing), Barthes becomes a mother—his own mother. By producing the image of his mother in the Winter Garden Photograph he produces the image of himself. The photograph becomes, in other words, a mode of autobiography, despite its alleged subject.

Furthermore, Barthes’s full control of the Winter Garden Photograph returns the photograph to the realm of aesthetics, where it can be controlled and manipulated to serve whatever purpose Barthes desires. Namely, the turn to language allows Barthes to escape photography’s power to produce and fix bodies in time and space. Previously, he relegated the photograph to a realm outside of art because “Whatever it grants to vision and whatever its manner, a photograph is always invisible: it is not it that we see” (CL 6). Photography as a medium, as a category of artistic representation, does not register for the ordinary viewer. Instead, Barthes argues, photographs simply are what they represent. Unlike the other photographs in the text, however, the Winter Garden Photograph does not have a concrete referent that hides its medium. It exists only as language. This strategy, Erin Mitchell argues, “protects the text from the uncontrollable excesses and hermeneutic possibilities of the image qua image” (326). If images, as Barthes explains extensively, always exceed their medium to point to the real, “Writing photography, then, privileges the voice and writing above the image, even as it acknowledges the frailty of words, the necessary failures of attempts to represent a human life” (Mitchell 326). In other words, by presenting the Winter Garden Photograph only through language, Barthes prevents the (potentially) real photograph from “fill[ing] the sight by force” through its almost violent insistence on the presence of its referent (Barthes, CL 91). Barthes wants to claim the photograph for art. But he cannot do so because of its abiding relationship to the body, which insists upon its singularity and resists abstraction into symbol or icon. On the other hand, language is never a guarantee of its referent. As Barthes says, “No writing can give me this certainty” (85). Rendering the Winter Garden Photograph (which, like all photographs, threatens to produce a “heavy, motionless, stubborn” body) in words rather than image frees Barthes from the tyranny of the body so that his “light, divided, dispersed” self, his “neutral, anatomic body, a body which signifies nothing” can stand in its stead (12). The missing Winter Garden Photograph and its construction through language thus allows Barthes to recover the photograph as a site of potential personal inscription.⁹

But what does Barthes mean by a “neutral, anatomic body, a body which signifies nothing?” How could such a thing ever come about, and who can have one? For Barthes, Leslie Hill argues, the body is outside of all possible theorizing or ideology; it is exhausted in “the arabesques of its own singularity … like a handful of dust … like some indeterminate remainder” (125). The body is utterly singular, slippery. Such a reading of bodily presence is, I would suggest, only possible for a white body. And yet, as Jonathan Beller also points out, Camera Lucida is full of Black bodies: the Richard Avedon photograph of William Casby, Born a Slave, and the James Van Der Zee portrait of the Black family, among others both pictured and not pictured (107). But the fact of race is for Barthes never the point (the prick). Instead, the disappearance or irrelevance of the context of race is what allows for the development of the punctum that truly touches him. The “discursive disappearance of slavery establishes the facts of photography” for Barthes, Beller writes (109). Margaret Olin points out the strange elisions and mistakes that Barthes commits when discussing the Van Der Zee portrait: transforming a pearl necklace into a gold one, for example, which allows Barthes to identify the Black woman in the photograph with his own aunt (105). This is a process in which Barthes “colors himself and his Aunt Alice under the darkness of the woman,” Carol Mavor writes. “Nourished by the blackness” of the photograph, Barthes seeks his own singular ties to it (48). The bodies here—Barthes’s and the Black subjects of these photographs—become the occasion for Barthes’s aspirational self-reflection. The ease with which Barthes “colors himself,” however, is a kind of racial slippage available only to those for whom race is an affectation—a costume—rather than a binding social reality.¹⁰ His neutral body can go wherever it pleases, light and dispersed, as he “pass[es] off the position of the objectified onto others” (Smith 103). For this reason, Barthes’s maternal theory of photography falters where it could be the most provocative. Can we instead imagine photography as a way to acknowledge, dwell within, and resist the coercive narratives of social and genetic lineage?

Home/Mother Movies

To move forward on the promise of personal inscription while attending to the lived experience of racial difference, I turn to Halving the Bones, where Ozeki balances autobiography with history. It is through the mother that Ruth inherits her socially legible, racialized, visibly Japanese body, produced in the confluence between photography and reproduction. Understanding this complicated family history is the rationale for Halving the Bones, which organizes photographs and films into a documentary. However, like Barthes, Ozeki engages in a key deception about these materials: Matsuye’s alleged autobiography and home movies turn out to be fictions. Ruth’s belated confession reveals them both to be fabrications:

Up until now I haven’t been 100% accurate. There are a couple of things that I made up. Like my grandmother’s autobiography for example. She never really wrote one, so I made it up from the real family stories I’d heard from her and also from my other relatives. I did sort of the same thing with these home movies. I’d seen a photo of my grandfather holding a movie camera, so I know he really did make movies, but his cameras and films were all confiscated after Pearl Harbor. I made up these things because I never really knew my grandparents, and now they’re dead and I didn’t really have much to go on. I thought I would understand them better if I just pretended to be them. Anyway, I just wanted to set the record straight, even though I made up the way I represented them, the facts of their lives are all true, and I did have my grandmother’s bones in my closet for the last five years, and now they’re in the car and I’m going home to deliver them to mom.(00:21:58–22:55)

In light of Ruth’s recantation, the presence of the movies and Matsuye’s voiceover merely points to the now more conspicuous absences of the actual mother figure whom they are meant to represent. These absences complicate the narrative of “found” mothers that structures the resolution of the film. Instead, Halving the Bones offers up film as a fitting replacement for the absent mothers of Ruth’s family. Whereas Barthes retreats from the photograph as image, taking control through language to avoid being made into a body, Ruth turns to film as her alternative to photography, extrapolating from the photographs she has in order to fabricate the absent autobiography and home movies.

What is at stake in this turn to film? In Ozeki’s 1998 novel My Year of Meats, the protagonist, a mixed-race Japanese American woman named Jane, works as a documentary filmmaker for a television program called My American Wife! At the outset, her goal is to “make programs with documentary integrity, [portraying] a truth that exist[s]—singular, empirical, absolute,” and she sets about her work with a sense of righteous purpose (176). Soon, however, she and her crew encounter the paradoxical reality of documentation: “It’s a lie” (29). In one early show, a single rump roast is basted over, and over, and over again, the happy housewife in question has recently been left by her husband, and the reunion kiss at the end was shot before their marital disaster struck. Even the recipe, the centerpiece of the program, is a sham: instead of Coca-Cola, “It’s Pepsi … Not the real thing at all” (30). Though the people, objects, and actions that they film are real enough, something shifts between the initial filming and the finished product. Editing intervenes in the middle, where individual frames and scenes are pieced together into a narrative whole. Jane’s editing process weaves together real moments into something unreal as she finds herself “taking out the stutters and catches from the women’s voices, creating a seamless flow in a reality that was no longer theirs and not quite so real anymore” (179). As opposed to photography, then, My Year of Meats suggests that film slips loose from its chemical, referential origin in photography and gains the capacity for narrative.¹¹

Though a film’s “raw material is photographic” (Barthes, CL 89) and thus participates in the same reproductive mechanisms as photography, Christian Metz points out that film involves the added dimension of progressing through time with the illusion of continuity, “so that the unfolding as such tends to become more important than the link of each image with its referent” (Metz 82). Because film develops over time, it moves beyond the original moment that captures a body in image: it is “protensive,” as Barthes says, always moving forward (CL 90). As a film progresses, Metz argues, the photographic guarantee of the real in each frame paradoxically functions in service to the unreal narrative of the whole, just as on a broader level Jane’s editing in My Year of Meats weaves together the real shots of Pepsi and a housewife into a narrative about the familial bliss of Coca-Cola-basted rump roast. Through the addition of time and movement, a film straddles the boundary between the concrete referentiality of photography and the mechanisms of painting, language, and other representational art, which portray but do not reproduce the objects they depict. In this sense, film undoes the embalming work of photography, which produces static bodies that have been arrested in time. Instead, film proceeds “in a stream of temporality where nothing can be kept, nothing stopped” (Metz 83). Both Metz and Barthes argue that whereas photographs resist interpretation through their continual insistence on the preserved body of the referent, film includes these bodies in every frame but also moves past and through them in each moment. Therefore, film is able to transform Jane’s housewives’ “stutters” into “a seamless flow” that is “not quite so real” (Ozeki MYM 179). For this reason, both Metz and Barthes note that film participates in the “destruction” or “domestication” of photography’s reproductive excess (Metz 85; Barthes CL 117).¹²

Choosing film as her medium for narrating a history of photography, Ozeki both insists on the body’s presence and transforms that presence into something productive rather than stultifying. The materials that Ruth provides as parts of her grandmother’s autobiography and home movies become suspect, as noted above, once Ruth makes her recantation. The home movies, which mostly show “Matsuye” walking in a forest behind a screen of vegetation, are easy to take at face value upon first viewing. They are grainy and discolored, and demonstrate the interest in both botany and his wife that Ruth’s grandfather supposedly had. Matsuye herself is frustratingly elusive in the clips. We never see her face, and for good reason, since Ruth soon reveals that it is not Matsuye on the screen but herself attempting to recreate the lost films. As Barthes says, “it is always something that is represented” in a photograph (and by extension, in film, as Metz has noted), because a photograph “can lie as to the meaning of the thing, being by nature tendentious, never as to its existence” (CL 28, 87). Although Matsuye is not in fact featured in the films, there is someone in these clips: Ruth. Through this substitution, Ruth takes her grandmother’s place as the referent of the movies and thus becomes the grandmother that she has lost. In “pretending to be” her grandparents (Matsuye through impersonation, and her grandfather through shooting the movies in the first place) Ruth, like Barthes, takes over the role of mother figure in a literary and photographic sense. Her deception restores the loss of her grandfather’s work in film, but with the added benefit of self-representation—self-mothering.

Similarly, the bones of Halving the Bones, which would seem to assert the true referent of the grandmother through her bodily remains, in fact become an assertion of Ruth’s presence rather than Matsuye’s. The bones are the original catalyst for Ruth’s family inquiries, and, as the only physical remains of her grandmother, serve as the most convincing evidence that Matsuye Yokoyama did and to some extent still does exist in the world. Like Barthes’s photographic referent, the bones are physical objects that assert their presence through the filmic medium, proof that “‘That has been’” (Barthes CL 77). The title of the documentary is a pun on “having” the bones: because Ruth has the bones, her grandmother remains present and alive despite her absence. Until the final few scenes of the film, the bones remain hidden within their tea cannister, allegedly present, but as yet unproven, like Barthes’s Winter Garden Photograph. The moment of revelation, when Ruth gives the bones to her mother, is doubly significant as a moment of poignant family emotion and photographic proof (00:53:55–55:36). When Masako opens the can and sees the bones for the first time, her surprise, delight, and discomfort are all apparent. “My mother’s bones,” she says again and again, “Isn’t it pretty?” Masako’s first look is our first look as well, in a close-up where the bones and the reflective interior of the can fill the entire screen. The bones become real and present, as undeniable as the photographic referent. But Ruth does not let this moment last for long before she reminds us that “The bones I have are hers [Matsuye’s], but they’re not the same as the ones she had here [in the home movies]” because bones change and grow along with a person as they age, not to mention that by the time Ruth can carry them around in a can, Matsuye’s bones have been through fire and more (00:14:00–04). The bones are not the same because Matsuye is no longer a young woman—but they are also not the same because Matsuye never was “here.” The movies to which Ruth refers are of course the fabricated ones that feature Ruth herself as her own grandmother. Through this deception, the bones instead come to stand again for Matsuye’s absence rather than her presence, and allow Ruth to take Matsuye’s place as the original young woman.

By doing so, Ruth successfully evades photography’s control over her body, the control that traps her within a racial and familial narrative set into motion far before her birth. And yet, film’s vexed relationship with bodily presence allows her, unlike Barthes, to insist on the relevance of that social body while retaining influence over its deployment in her own life. Barthes prefers the retreat into language as a way to remain bodiless—”light, divided, dispersed; like a bottle-imp,” or at least with a “neutral, anatomic body, a body which signifies nothing” (CL 12). But for Ruth, a neutral, anatomic body is neither possible nor desirable: her experience of racial difference, her desire to be a daughter to her Japanese family and to explore her “halfness,” demands a body. Film allows her to exploit its ambivalent relationship with bodies to insist on the importance of the racialized body in Ruth’s experience, while also freeing her from its grip over her reproduction in images.

In a last act of filial piety, Ruth reinforces her own role as a mother—her own mother. Near the end, Ozeki’s film imagines a future in which Ruth takes over for her mother(s) when it presents footage of Ruth throwing what we must assume are both Matsuye’s bones and Masako’s ashes into the Hawaiian surf. The scene is overlaid with Masako’s narration, recorded during the earlier interview in which Ruth presents her with the bones. “What do you want to do with them?” Ruth asks, and Masako hesitates before answering:

I would like to keep them. I would like to keep these bones with me until I die. And I hope that I can somehow get myself cremated. And then the bones—well, it might be different in America, but it doesn’t matter. Maybe it’s all ashes. Have my ashes put into a container like this. And then, I would like you to go back to Hawaii sometime, and throw both of them into the ocean. (1:00:51–02:24)

As Masako speaks these words, Ruth walks through a field of grass and to the edge of a cliff overlooking the sea. The narration ends as she tosses handfuls of something into the ocean. The implication is that Masako has died, and Ruth is carrying out her wishes for her ashes and the bones. But the credits reveal that Masako was still alive and well as of the film’s release. This scene stages a desire, not necessarily for the death of the mother but for the moment when the daughter will be able to become fully independent through the mother’s absence.

In the next moment, Matsuye’s voice returns to describe Ruth: “My only grandchild came to visit me at the nursing home today. She is a very big girl, and seems to take after her father. She does not visit me often, which is perhaps due to the name she has been called … She takes after her mother and me in this way” (1:02:46–03:23). Matsuye’s words reinforce the separation of the mothers and daughters (“she does not visit me often”), but in the same moment the viewer’s knowledge of Ruth’s earlier deception turns the moment into one of reconciliation, self-determination, and autobiography. As we will soon learn in the credits, Matsuye’s voice is Ruth herself, speaking with a false accent. In this moment then, just after Ruth has staged the scattering of her mothers’ ashes, she makes her mothers speak her. That is, Ruth’s character—her traits and her name—comes out of Matsuye’s mouth, which is also Ruth’s own mouth. The replacement of the mother figure allows Ruth this moment of autobiography, when, as Barthes does in Camera Lucida, she is able to temper the photograph’s excess to take control of the representation of her own body.

In the last scene of Halving the Bones, another “home movie” shows Ruth’s father rolling a baseball to a toddler Ruth, who picks it up and then clumsily kicks it back. The girl is not Ruth and the man is not her father, as the credits will reveal, but nevertheless the scene seems to provide some kind of closure to the tension set up in the beginning: “This is Ruth. She is half.” Yes, Ruth is half, and here is the other half. Ruth’s father becomes important as a resolution within the maternal lineage structured around loss and absence. And yet, Mr. Lounsbury, too, is absent, even more so than Matsuye (who at least has her photographs) and Masako (whom we meet face-to-face). Once again, film is given an aura of authenticity due to its placement in this autobiographical narrative but presents a false face. “He wanted me to be an All-American kid,” Ruth intones before the frame freezes on the little girl, turning her into an impromptu photograph (1:06:51–52). Here we encounter another structuring family desire, one that imposes photography upon the girl’s moving form in order to capture her in this moment along with America’s favorite pastime. But the preceding hour of footage, which spells out exactly how complicated Ruth’s All-American identity has become, frustrates this desire. Compounded with the actors standing in for the supposed referents, the conflict between Ruth’s All-American and Japanese identities makes it clear that Ruth is in full filmic revolt against her photographic family. But this last image of the girl sits uneasily between photography and film, highlighting again the complex relation between them.¹³ Who is really depicted here, and why? What does this body, which exists, tell us about the narrative of All-American Ruth, who does not? In its wavering between these two mediums, Halving the Bones, like Camera Lucida, interrogates the truth-telling properties of both photography and film. Each of them, with their demonstrated ambivalence towards reality and fiction both, allows for this kind of blurring to take place. The unstable images and the bodies that they display are malleable, open for the kind of impersonation—the kind of mothering—that Ozeki and Barthes perform. In Ozeki’s not-home movies, in Barthes’s falsely ekphrastic language, the absent mother can be found, and spoken through as an affirmation of the self. As Ruth’s turn to the camera in the very first scene signals, these explorations of photography and film are autobiographical projects, ones that inhabit the past’s bodies in order to claim them.

Chelsea Oei Kern is an ACLS Leading Edge Fellow with the Community of Literary Presses & Magazines, where she leads projects related to diversity, equity, inclusion, and access. She earned her doctorate from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2021. Her research focuses on contemporary literature and its relation to digital technologies.

Footnotes

1. Halving the Bones was written, directed, and produced by Ozeki, who released it under the name Ruth Ozeki Lounsbury. Ozeki has since become well-known for her novels as Ruth L. Ozeki. I will refer to her as Ozeki for this reason. Though the distinction between Ozeki and the autobiographical character of Ruth whom she plays in Halving the Bones is often slippery, I use Ozeki to refer to the filmmaker and Ruth to refer to the character represented in the film.

2. Her direct smile departs from Roland Barthes’s assertion in Camera Lucida (1980) that “the Photograph has this power … Of looking me straight in the face” but “in film, no one ever looks at me: it is forbidden—by the Fiction” (111).

3. See, for example, the work of Elissa Marder on both mothers and photography in Barthes in “Dark Room Readings: Scenes of Maternal Photography” and “Nothing to Say: Fragments on the Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”

4. For more on these four photographers, see Robinson in Elusive Truths. Lange’s uncensored photographs were published in Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment in 2006. Adams’ work was published as Born Free and Equal: The Story of Loyal Japanese-Americans in 1944 (following a gallery show of the same name). An overview of Toyo Miyatake’s work appears in Toyo Miyatake Behind the Camera, 1923-1979 (1984).

5. Barthes frames his perceptions of his father through his mother, one step removed: “The father, dead very early (in the war), was lodged in no memorial or sacrificial discourse. By maternal intermediary his memory—never an oppressive one—merely touched the surface of childhood with an almost silent bounty” (RB 14). In Camera Lucida, the father is a figure of metaphorical connections, rather than the bodily connections that characterize the link to the mother. Photography is haunted by the ghost of painting, Barthes says, and “it has made painting, through its copies and contestations, into the absolutely, paternal Reference, as if it were born from the Canvas … At this point in my investigation, nothing eidetically distinguishes a photograph, however realistic, from a painting” (Barthes, CL 30–31, emphasis added). Painting is paternal to photography in the sense that it is visually related: photographs and paintings can look alike, nearly identical. The link, however, turns out to be false: “it is not (it seems to me) by Painting that Photography touches art, but by Theater,” which shares with photography the connection to reanimated bodies (31). Compared to the maternal connection, paternal relationship is merely a distraction, a false connection that does not have the weight of the maternal body.

6. Marder notes that this landscape is one of several photographs in Camera Lucida that Barthes describes in detail but does not include in the text. “Instead of writing about the image, he writes on it, inscribing it with diverse kinds of written texts, thereby transcribing the visual components of the image into a new composite form of writing (“Dark Room” 234–235). As I explore below, this method of writing is crucial to Barthes’s negotiation of the maternal, fixing capabilities of the photograph.

7. Barthes’s Mourning Diary, written in the two years following his mother’s death and published in 2009, reveals that Barthes did encounter a photograph that matches this description prior to beginning work on CL (Mourning Diary 143). However, Badmington points out that in CL Barthes reports the date of this discovery as occurring in November, shortly after his mother’s death, whereas his diary entry puts it more than six months later, on June 11, 1978. This move, according to Badmington, adds “further weight to the claim that the book on photography can be read, at least in part, as a work of fiction. In simple terms, the decision could be seen as an aesthetic one” (309). The “real” Winter Garden Photograph then does not affect our reading of CL‘s absent version of the same.

8. “La photographie m’obligeait ainsi à un travail douloureux; tendu vers l’essence de son identité, je me débattais au milieu d’images partiellement vraies, et donc totalement fausses” (Barthes, La chambrè claire 103). The French “travail” imparts the same double meaning as the English “labor.”

9. For more on autobiography in Camera Lucida, see Dyer xii, Olin 104, and Tsakiridou 284.

10. As Mavor writes, it is easy to read Barthes’s description of the Van Der Zee photograph as a narrative of “patronizing racism” that casts the family portrait as a “naïve” grasp at “the White Man’s attributes” (Mavor 29; Barthes CL 43). Barthes’s relation to race is “Neither racist nor not racist” (Mavor 44), except, of course, in the sense that as a white man writing about Black people his every word is inflected with his relation to race. Mavor also points out that Barthes’s other sensitive and incisive critiques of Western imperialism and racism demonstrate his ability to engage with race with nuance. The point here is not to condemn but to note that if photography is an art form / an artistic medium that produces bodies, it of course must reckon with what a body is: who is allowed to own them, look at them, hide them, keep them?

11. My Year of Meats also deals extensively with the politics of women’s reproduction as/versus production in film. For more, see Shameem Black, Leigh Johnson, and Cheryl Fish.

12. Film has its own kind of excess. As Dana Polan writes, “The inexorable flow of images through the projector creates a force that, for Barthes, is beyond analysis, beyond any possible demythologizing or demystifying stance” (42). As opposed to the overwhelming real, Barthes identifies the overwhelming experience of encountering film, which buries the referential qualities that could form the basis of analysis.

13. Louise Hornby writes of the freeze frame that in these moments “film imitates photographic stillness, but as a way to reassure us of its difference and distance” (45).

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Travis Workman (bio)

Abstract

This essay discusses contemporary film and media in relation to the political economic concept of neo-feudalism. Questioning the application of a science-fiction dialectics to these media and the tendency to see them as symptoms of the rise of neofascism, the essay rather connects their themes, narratives, and visual styles to Marxist (Dean) and classical (Hudson) discussions of capitalism’s transition to neo-feudalism, as well as to the affect of ressentiment as a means of “governing by debt” (Lazzarato). It then turns to the films of Bong Joon-ho, including Parasite (2019) and Okja (2017), to show how they critique neo-feudalism while also remaining limited by ressentiment and individual acts of revenge. The final part reads the more complex treatments of identity and performance in Jordan Peele’s Us (2019) and Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You (2018) through the connections they make between neo-feudalism and racial capitalism (Robinson).

Fascism or Neo-Feudalism in Contemporary Media?

A number of films and television series of the last decade address social class in what appears to be a simplified fashion. They focus on the affective aspects of exploitation by politicizing performances, attitudes, and behaviors of class, and their intersections with race, rather than providing an exposition of the structures of productive labor processes. They depict apocalyptic scenarios, violent resentment, and revenge as the available responses to injustice, rather than suggesting the possibility of transforming social and economic conditions for the general public good. They create allegorical worlds of entrenched social and spatial hierarchies by including fantastic elements, instead of confronting the everyday symptoms of capitalist crisis in a descriptive manner. They may give the impression that they are merely updating the welltrodden dystopic worlds of science fiction, including classic invocations of the specter of historical fascism, and speculating about a future return to primitive forms of economic and political power. Although interesting as popular culture, they might seem inadequate for a political economic analysis of capitalism that is focused on the commodification and alienation (Entfremdung) of productive labor power as the primary form of exploitation. However, the emphases of these films and television series on affect and direct appropriation rather than production and consumption, and on vengeful violence instead of revolution, are not simply an effect of a reductive social analysis. They are both diagnostic and symptomatic of the contemporary transformation of neoliberal capitalism into an even worse system: what some political economists, both classical and Marxist, call neo-feudalism. Though conscious of the social process of what Jodi Dean refers to as “capitalism turn[ing] in on itself” in neo-feudalism (“Neo-Feudalism” 11), they largely repeat its structures, affects, and moral worldview by depending on individuated revenge narratives and their foreclosure of space for collective resistance. They take the lack of an outside in the communicative and neo-feudal mode of capitalism as a sign of an infinite cycle of exploitation and ressentiment, and thereby tend to reinforce its modes of division and control.

Bong Joon-ho’s Okja (2017), which I discuss in detail below, depicts the global range of the sovereignty of corporations and the limits of their ability to address ecological issues. The events in Bong’s Snowpiercer (2013) take place on a continuously moving luxury train after an attempt at climate engineering has gone wrong, instigating a second ice age. The train is divided between luxury cars in the front inhabited by the elite, and horrific tail cars inhabited by the destitute masses; passage between the two sections is prevented until the rise of an insurgency. Although fantastic elements are more limited in his Oscar-winning Parasite (2019), that film also depicts a bifurcated world of wealthy elite families and working-class families living a precarious life of semi-basement apartments and temporary gigs and cons. Joker (2019), The Handmaid’s Tale (2017–), The Man in the High Castle (2015–19), Years and Years (2019–), and many episodes of Black Mirror (2011–) also use allegorical worlds to represent class opposition, entrenched spatial hierarchies, and apocalyptic scenarios. As I discuss in the final section of this essay, other treatments of neo-feudalism present more incisive critiques of its political economy, because they confront the intersection of race and class within it: Jordan Peele’s Us (2019) takes up the doppelgänger motif to present an uncanny version of neo-feudal race and class relations, and Boots Riley’s dark comedy Sorry to Bother You (2018) deals with the governing power of debt and affective labor.

The popularity and lucrativeness of these globally distributed dystopias, which have an aura of intellectual and political seriousness lacking in most previous apocalyptic blockbusters, suggest that real neofascism and the popular democratic critique of its politics have entered into mainstream popular media. Because of this popularity and the generic science fiction and fantasy elements of these media worlds, it is tempting to analyze them through a familiar science fiction studies framework, such as Darko Suvin’s theory of science fiction utopias as “estrangements” of the mundane, empirical present. From that perspective, projections of speculative worlds and their dialectical relation with naturalist representations would contain the kernel of the texts’ political meanings. Likewise, common liberal or neoliberal readings of such worlds see them as allegorical and speculative warnings against the possibility of fascism, posing the question: if X were to happen, then what countervailing force, or resistance, could prevent the economic and political order from devolving into fascism? The scenarios themselves sometimes purposefully represent fascism as the obverse of liberal democracy. Years and Years begins with the premise of a second Donald Trump presidential term, as though democratic electoral politics could prevent the many horrors that ensue. Although more astute as political critiques, Us and Sorry to Bother You still represent the biological engineering of new slave classes through fantastic elements, and reference contemporary prison labor in the US only indirectly. The Handmaid’s Tale imagines a decisive victory of the most fervent evangelicals in a second American Civil War as a liberal warning against extremism. Snowpiercer imagines a climate engineering catastrophe and the resulting disappearance of class mobility, but within a cartoonish version of the future. The Man in the High Castle takes up Philip K. Dick’s premise in the original novel: what if Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan were victorious in World War II? Only this series includes direct references to historical fascist states, and the reversal of the typical geographical location of fascism reveals Dick’s insights into the science fiction genre in the US in 1962, which tended to repress the fascist or authoritarian tendencies internal to US politics by projecting them outward onto various external or futuristic others.

Each of these works poses the problem of a return to fascism by speculating about its future iterations. Because they can be read as warnings about normative liberal society’s future return to fascism, they can carry a mass appeal in societies that remain, for the time being, supportive of neoliberal capitalism and liberal democracy. That these media worlds incorporate the supposedly alien aesthetics, politics, and cultures of historical fascism emphasizes their exceptionality to a normative neoliberal system. In Snowpiercer and The Handmaid’s Tale, elements of the mise-en-scène are obviously drawn from the motifs of historical fascism and their remediations. Although the equisapiens are darkly comical hybrids, through them Sorry to Bother You raises the specter of biological racism and the engineering of a new man (as does Us). These works’ tendency to turn to historical fascism highlights the ingenuity of Dick’s premise when he formulated it in 1962: what if fascism is not something external that has been defeated by US liberal capitalism and Pax Americana, but rather something internal to and repeated within it? The specter of fascism and its influence on the science fiction and fantasy genres do not provide a sufficient explanation of the speculative politics and economies represented in these films and series. Just as expressed fears of a return to fascism among liberal intellectuals and media commentators tend to ignore fascism’s origins in capitalism, reading these media according to a traditional science-fiction dynamic between normative liberal democracy and the speculative return of fascism obscures their engagement with contemporary political economy and its transformations.

Fascism took shape within industrial capitalism in its monopolistic and imperialist stage, and reappeared in different forms during the era of developmental dictatorships and Cold War anticommunism. Considering the development of the service, communicative, and financial sectors of the capitalist economy, and the intensification of finance- and debt-based exploitation and accumulation, it is necessary to reconsider the iterations of authoritarian rule being projected in media worlds and experienced in everyday life as no longer conditioned primarily by the industrial and imperialist form of capitalism of the early twentieth century (even though media reference that period obsessively). We should consider whether or not the resurgence of the specter of fascism in contemporary media, including in film and television, should rather be understood as a political response to a new stage of capitalism, understanding that no stage completely displaces earlier forms. A new stage is rather the emergent aspect within an uneven and overdetermined structure (as Althusser has argued). If the enabling economic and social basis for the contemporary political resurgence of right-wing ideologies differs significantly from the imperialist capitalism analyzed by Rosa Luxemburg, Vladimir Lenin, and, eventually, Nicos Poulantzas, then, despite the quotation of historical fascism in these works, returning to an analysis of the history of fascism could be of limited value for contemporary political economic analysis or for an understanding of the projection of speculative authoritarian regimes in media cultures today—the media of neo-feudalism.

The primary political question posed by these films and series is not if normative liberal democracy will be able to resist the rise of a new form of fascist hegemony. It is instead: What political and economic forces are at play in contemporary intensifications of exploitation? As Jodi Dean has argued in “Communism or Neo-Feudalism,” describing the primary conflict of the contemporary moment as one between democracy and fascism obfuscates the economics underlying the politicization of democratic societies to the Right:

capitalist democracies are dictatorships of the bourgeoisie, systems of rule arranged for the benefit of capital and the enjoyment of the powerful. …

To view our present in terms of democracies threatened by rising fascism deflects attention from the fundamental role of globally networked communicative capitalism in exacerbating popular anger and discontent. The rhetoric of fascism prevents us from considering why ostensibly democratic societies appear to be turning to the Right.(9)

“Globally networked communicative capitalism” differs from early twentieth-century industrial capitalism, as well as from the network of Cold War dictatorships, particularly in the way that political affects—including anger, discontent, resentment, and other mass moods—are disseminated through digital media platforms rather than by centralized news and propaganda organs. For Dean, the way the contemporary Right articulates itself through digital platforms, and particularly through social media, means that revived liberal critiques of fascism cannot adequately address transformations in economy and mass politics.

When the film and television series I discuss in this essay call to be read as allegories of a possible fascism, and infuse their narratives with ressentiment by way of limited revenge scenarios, they reproduce the bourgeois morality underpinning neo-feudalism’s governing by “infinite debt” (Lazzarato). It is in this sense that the allegories in these narrative works mediate neo-feudalism through a reductive kind of Hegelian theater. They play out neo-feudalism’s contradictions while offering idealist modes of sublation, such as moral and melodramatic representations, that are symptomatic of its cultural and economic systems. In the following section I discuss some of the primary characteristics of neo-feudalism according to both Marxist and classical economists, and connects these to narrative representations of debt and morality in the films of Bong Joon-ho. The final section connects Us and Sorry to Bother You to Cedric J. Robinson’s theory of racial capitalism to show how they complicate neo-feudal allegory by reflecting on the consequences of racial differentiation in affective labor and the reproduction of class exploitation under conditions of infinite debt.

Bong Joon-ho and Ressentiment

In order to understand the political economy as well as the affective and cultural dimensions of neo-feudalism, it is necessary to connect the neo-feudal institution of infinite debt as the dominant form of governmentality to the narrative and aesthetic forms of neo-feudal media. Transformations in political economy will be discussed through Dean and Hudson, which I connect to affect through Maurizio Lazzarato’s Nietzschean reading of infinite debt and bourgeois morality. In their foregrounding of ressentiment rather than revolution, these media of neo-feudalism—which are in many ways diagnostic and critical of the neo-feudal mode of capitalism—can nonetheless become symptomatic of the affects and narrative logics that reinforce it. Although a fuller analysis would go deeper into the formal and visual qualities of these works—including their hyperreal violence, their mimicking of the aesthetics of online media, and their creation of uncanny worlds through special effects—the following readings focus mainly on narrative in order to establish a ground of comparability between the films of Bong, Peele, and Riley by way of their allegorizing of neo-feudal social relations. This attention to narrative and allegory also opens up points of comparison with the extensive scholarship on the literatures of neoliberalism and financialization, which is particularly significant as streaming film and television have become more literary in their narrative structuring of abstraction and affect (Smith; Shonkwiler).

Dean asserts that neo-feudalism “is characterized by four interlocking features: 1) the parcelization of sovereignty; 2) hierarchy and expropriation with new lords and peasants; 3) desolate hinterlands and privileged municipalities; and, 4) insecurity and catastrophism” (2). By “the parcelization of sovereignty” she means that monopoly corporations and financial institutions assert sovereignty over the people without granting them even the illusion of the individual autonomy granted by the liberal bourgeois state. Political and economic authority blend together, and corporations and wealthy elites control increasingly fragmented and localized domains, largely through the power of primitive accumulation, debt, and rent. Although Dean admits there is no full analogy between neo-feudalism and feudalism proper, under neo-feudalism society is increasingly divided between “lords” who own and govern physical and digital domains, and “peasants” who live in debt-peonage and must rent access to liquid, fixed, cultural, and social capital. The centrifugal character of finance capital and the digital economy creates hinterlands, exacerbating the stark urban-rural divide we see in contemporary US party affiliations, for example. Finally, environmental and epidemiological catastrophes exacerbate the effects of inequality and create a deep sense of insecurity that leads to apocalyptic worldviews.

The degree of reality of the “theoretical object” of neo-feudalism remains to be seen (Althusser, Balibar, et al., 351; Shonkwiler x). However, the concept has currency beyond theoretical Marxists such as Dean or media theorist McKenzie Wark. Since the financial crisis of 2007–2008, the term neo-feudalism has been applied to the US economy by self-described “classical” economists such as Michael Hudson, who are not concerned with revolution, but rather with reestablishing the power of the productive economy and the sanctity of contracts in the face of the domination of an autonomous financial sector and the reemergence of debtpeonage. Reflecting on finance capital’s complete absorption of the social conflicts of industrial capitalism, Hudson wrote in 2012:

Industrial capitalism’s familiar class conflict between employers and wage labor is now being overwhelmed by financial dynamics. It is appropriate to speak of debt pollution of the economic environment, turning the economic surplus into debt service for leveraged buyouts, real estate rents into mortgage interest, personal income into debt service and late fees, corporate cash flow into payments to hedge funds and corporate raiders, and the tax surplus into financial bailouts as banks themselves succumb to the economy’s plunge into over-indebtedness and negative equity. (5–6)

Hudson warned that the total debt overhead cannot be paid and that “the question is, just how will it not be paid?” (20). In other words, governments’ failures to enact debt write-downs and the continued selling and gambling on enormous debt bundles will “permit massive foreclosures to tear society apart and reduce debtors to neo-serfdom” (20). He suggested that a neo-feudal system could result:

Unlike serfs, debt peons are free to live wherever they wish—or at least wherever they can afford. They may buy land by taking out a mortgage and paying its rental value to the bank. But wherever they live they take their debts with them, from student loans to credit card debt.(21)

Even classical economists who see the capitalist system as redeemable analyze the economic system emerging in the last decade as a more exploitative and unstable system. Its reduction of workers and consumers to neo-serfs and its massive, unregulated marketization of debt means that the production of profit has been increasingly delinked from productive labor and surplus value and linked to what Marx calls the realization of “surplus profit” (751–950). In contrast to surplus value, surplus profit is not appropriated and realized through the production and exchange of commodities, but rather gained from financial speculation on debt and the proliferation and intensification of forms of ground rent, from access to landed property to digital domains and intellectual property. Hudson’s desire to return to a manufacturing economy with regulations and honored contracts downplays the severity of crisis in the circuits of production and consumption prior to the hegemony of communicative and financial capitalism. Hudson is equally aware, however, that the rise of debt-peonage was a result of capital seeking to create new sources of profit as the US industrial manufacturing sector shrank.

As Lazzarato explains in Governing by Debt, politics, economy, and ideology blend together through the modes of subjection and governmentality enabled by spiraling debt at all levels of the global economy, from individuals to nation-states. In place of the Protestant work ethic described by Max Weber at the height of industrial capitalism, according to Lazzarato’s Nietzschean reading (83-90), the masters of contemporary capitalism subject their servants, or neo-serfs, through the slave morality of indebtedness, which, as Hudson argues, follows them wherever they may move. Neo-feudalism marks a difference in modes of subjection. Wage labor remains a site of exploitation in neo-feudalism, but the percentage of that labor performed in the service industries, and as affective labor, has increased greatly alongside the creation of massive debtor classes. If work ethic and the fetishization of labor were the primary modes of subjection operative in industrial capitalism, debt has now become a significant, if the not the primary way of creating subjects of capital. In a critique of David Graeber’s conflation of Adam Smith and Nietzsche, Lazzarato explains why a Nietzschean philosophical and psychological approach to subjection makes sense for the morality of the debtor economy, and therefore provides a way into the relation between spectator and the commodified image that centers on a set of affects somewhat distinct from fetishism and alienation. For Lazzarato, the “slave morality” of bourgeois culture is the mode of governing that allows for a society based on debt to reproduce itself, and the primary affect of this morality is ressentiment. In the 2007–2008 economic crash, after which Hudson warned of the rise of neo-feudalism, the massive buying and selling of debt, especially bundles of poorly rated subprime loans, was premised on the notion that either enough neo-serfs would remain psychologically committed to servicing their debt eternally or that the government would intervene to finance the loans once they went into default (as the US government essentially did when it bailed out the banks that owned the debt). Ressentiment is an essential affect for producing surplus profits out of debt. In order to be lucrative, making loans, as well as purchasing and selling debt, both require a general culture in which individuals desire to be good debtors with a high credit score and consistent income and define themselves against evil debtors—the defaulters—who take loans without the intention or the capacity to pay them back. Ressentiment is directed both inwardly and outwardly, operating as a mode of selfgovernment and as a way of shaming the other and oneself. In relation to state social programs in the US, this kind of shaming has its roots in Reagan-era global neoliberalism, as does the debtor economy as a whole (Harvey). Rachel Greenwald Smith argues that narratives of neoliberalism frame negative affects, including resentment, as the moral responsibility of the individual (7). The media of neo-feudalism narrate the intensification of the negative affects of the neoliberal self, introducing a circuit between the increasingly mystified context of the political-economic whole and often violent revenge against the conditions of debt. The self becomes a narrative and affective mirror to absolute subsumption.

Ressentiment is the most prevalent affect of neo-feudal media to the degree that it is difficult for narratives to contain it within a single frame, ideology, or worldview. In neo-feudal media, good and evil appear around relations of debt, service, affective labor, and the expropriation of life and bodies. On the exploited side of the economic ledger, resistance to the system of debt more often takes the form of revenge against the masters rather than a revolution that has specified goals or is grounded in alternative ideas for society. A truly transformative, heroic, or noble response to debt would be a political deed: the abolition and non-payment of debt. However, in lieu of that possibility, particularly in platformed media productions that are complicit in the neo-feudal economic system that they critique, individual revenge or payback against the master serves as a temporary relinquishment of debt by way of messianic violence. Without having the space for a discussion of the anti-Semitic undertones of Nietzsche’s discussion of the slave morality of Abrahamic religions, I wish to draw from the connection he makes between the affect of ressentiment and the desire for values and revenge, which is pertinent to neo-feudalism’s institution of infinite debt and political responses to it: “This slave revolt in morality begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values: the ressentiment of natures that are denied the true reaction, that of deeds, and compensate themselves with an imaginary revenge” (36). Conversely, the same bourgeois morality based in ressentiment can also pathologize the other’s revenge, cynically presenting its violence as part of a cycle of immorality: an eternal return without difference, as opposed to Gilles Deleuze’s version of Nietzsche’s eternal return as intensive and differential (Difference and Repetition 222–61).

Revenge has always been an important plot element in socialist and anticolonial literature and film, but the media cultures of neo-feudalism find it difficult to articulate an ideological framework for revenge. Due in part to its history of Cold War military dictatorship and chaebol capitalism, South Korean films of the last two decades, and Bong Joon-ho’s films in particular, have been ahead of the curve in mediating neo-feudalism. “Hell Joseon,” a satirical term of ressentiment popular since 2015, refers to the feudal Joseon period and is directed at educational and economic systems that disguise class privilege as meritocracy while subjecting young adults to grueling college entrance exam preparation, post-graduation unemployment, overwork, and debt (Nahm). Tellingly, both the political Left and the political Right use the term. Hell Joseon has nothing to do with the notion of feudal remnants, or other stagist historical explanations for the fascist form of East Asian capitalism in the twentieth century. As with the term “neofeudalism,” Hell Joseon rather creates analogies between feudalism proper, the contemporary intensification of neoliberalism, and the turning inward of real subsumption. Already in 2007, leading up to the global economic crisis, Rob Wilson identifies the social relations appearing in the major mode of South Korean film exports, including Park Chan-wook’s Vengeance Trilogy, as “killer capitalism.” Contrasting representations of killer capitalism to more minor, independent modes in South Korean film, Wilson connects “vengeance” (boksu) and the spectacular violence that enacts it to a Pacific Rim economy formed through a layered history of genocidal colonialism, war, and rapid capital accumulation.

Bong’s insights into economic relations and his critical focus on social class in the context of US imperialism have proven refreshing to viewers who have grown tired of the occlusion of class in Hollywood cinema. Bong’s willingness to address class is in part responsible for Parasite‘s popularity and its Best Picture win at the 2020 Oscars, as evidenced by the somewhat overblown credit he gets for recognizing that the social effects of global capitalism supersede those of local national contexts. In an interview with The Black List, he says: “After Cannes, I was at the Sydney Film Festival, Munich, Telluride, Toronto—the reaction was all the same everywhere. I think maybe there is no borderline between countries now because we all live in the same country, it’s called capitalism.” Bong understands rightly that the class themes of the film have allowed it to travel more easily; however, the film also does not move beyond the vengeful violence typical of revenge dramas in South Korean film. During the melee at the end of the film, the father of the poor family, Kim Ki-taek, murders the wealthy Mr. Park after Park recoils from the smell of Geun-se, who had been living secretly in Park’s basement for many years. The film’s use of olfactory affects as class markers is no doubt an interesting and meaningful element that connects Ki-taek to Geun-se at that moment even though they are at odds for most of the film. However, Ki-taek’s violence is represented as a momentary, psychotic response to class discrimination, in line with the rest of the film’s moral ambivalence about the criminal way the Kim family responds to their oppression. Caught in a cycle of ressentiment, no one in the film is capable of formulating an alternative morality to the bourgeois morality of good and evil. After his escape, Ki-taek simply takes the place of Geun-se, living as a near nonhuman in the mansion’s basement.

What, then, are the characteristics of this “same country of capitalism,” and how are Bong’s films embedded within it? In the cycles of apolitical ressentiment endemic to neofeudalism, more than one article on Parasite points out the irony that the film was bankrolled and produced by CJ Group and its vice chair Miky Lee, an ultrawealthy heiress to the Samsung Corporation who was on stage at the Academy Awards to accept the Best Picture award along with Bong. Making an obvious comparison with the house of the Park family in Parasite, a Dirt.com article includes an aerial photograph of the Lee family’s 8-acre Beverly Hills estate and its two mansions (McClain). It is possible to read such contradictions as ironies or hypocrisies at the level of the individual, but they also have bearing on the limits of class politics in Bong’s films and on the media cultures of neo-feudalism more broadly. These antagonisms suggest what is obvious: we do not all occupy the same positions within capitalism, even if we all live there. Just as cinema and television of the broadcast era struggle to self-consciously address their own often exploitative conditions of production and consumption, the cinema and streaming media of neo-feudalism contain these antagonisms within their narratives and visual modes.

Let us take Okja as another example of the insight and the limitations of the representation of neo-feudal economic relations in Bong’s films. The world of this film seems like a popular cinematic and televisual prefiguration of Jodi Dean’s theory of neo-feudalism. The cartoonish opening sequence utilizes web-style aesthetics in its critique of Grandpa Mirando’s old industrial factory: Lucy Mirando (Tilda Swinton) says that the Mirando Corporation committed atrocities against working people and the environment. She claims that in order to overcome that history, the Mirando Corporation will feed the world with non-GMO, eco-friendly super pigs derived from a super piglet discovered on a Chilean farm. In a competition that is later revealed to be an exercise in greenwashing, she says that the Mirando Corporation has given out a super piglet each to local farmers in twenty-six countries where it has offices, and each farmer will raise it “honoring traditional techniques unique to their respective cultures.” Whoever raises the biggest and most beautiful super pig over ten years will be given an award at an event in New York City where the twenty-six super pigs will be unveiled. After the opening credits, the film cuts to a rural mountain farm in South Korea ten years later, where a young girl, Mija (Ahn Seohyun), and her grandfather (Byun Hee-bong) have raised one of the super pigs, Okja. Television zoologist Johnny Wilcox (Jake Gyllenhaal), the face of the Mirando Corporation, shows up with a television crew and a scientist who has been monitoring Okja’s vital signs remotely through a digital black box attached to Okja’s ear. But when Okja is en route to New York City, the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) captures the pig and inserts a camera into the black box, which eventually records the inside of Mirando’s highly secure New Jersey factory farm where the super pigs are bred en masse for slaughter. Mija follows Okja to New York, and with the help of the ALF breaks into the factory farm, where with a gold pig statue given to her by her grandfather she purchases Okja from Lucy’s twin sister, the more cutthroat CEO Nancy Mirando, and returns the super pig to her family farm.

The parcelization of sovereignty under neo-feudalism appears in the film in Mirando’s control and surveillance over the twenty-six super piglets in the countries where it has offices. Nation-state borders and regulations are circumvented by the capital of corporations, and by the digital technologies that connect the various local farms and allow the corporation to surveil its property in the hinterlands. The launch at the beginning of the film invokes the apocalypse of overpopulation and food shortage as a tool of governing, because it couples the fear of impending ecological disaster with the marketing of a greenwashed commodity solution. The lords of Mirando expropriate the farm family’s affective and physical labor for ten years, solely with the purpose of creating a digitally reproducible spectacle of competition. Mija is under the impression, created by the grandfather, that Okja belongs to the family, an illusion that is shattered when Mirando comes to repossess the super pig after the ten-year rental. The exploitative relation of rent is tied to Mija’s and her grandfather’s physical and affective labor of loving and caring for the animal. Mija sees ownership as care, whereas the corporation (and the grandfather) see it in terms of capital and control over rent and competition. The grandfather is reconciled to his relation as debtor to Mirando, remaining morally loyal to an unequal contract that only promises the family temporary capital and temporary digital connection to the global economy, as well as the speculative possibility of future earnings. Mija however refuses to feel that indebtedness or to recognize its contract, and is driven solely by her desire to save Okja from being made a cultural commodity or, worse, slaughtered. Her refusal to participate in the economy of care and indebtedness set up by Mirando makes her the hero of the film and distinguishes her from the activists of the ALF, all of whom reveal their moral limitations at some point.

Like Bong’s earlier monster film, The Host (2006), Okja grafts a political critique of the negative social and ecological effects of the US military and corporations onto blockbuster-style genre, action, and melodrama. It also engages in penetrating ways the new forms of sovereignty, class relations, spatiality, and apocalypticism that have emerged with neo-feudalism. However, like Parasite, Okja does not address the political question posed by Dean: How can the Left respond to neo-feudalism without simply reinforcing its tendencies? It would be naïve to expect that streaming media such as Okja could be politically self-conscious in an exhaustive way, yet the ending of the film exhibits a common limitation of the media cultures of neo-feudalism. The antagonisms and contradictions in the film are resolved through melodrama, which naturalizes the neo-feudal system as an unbreakable cycle and represents political conflict as an expression of individual ressentiment. Dialectics are replaced with individual redemption. The melodramatic mode presents a Manichaean moral universe structured by Nietzsche’s “bourgeois morality”—inner goodness and innocence are contrasted with an external evil and are redeemed by way of an allegorical magic. The origin of the grandfather’s gold pig is unknown, but it is so valuable that Nancy Mirando accepts it as payment to release Okja, who is back on Mija’s family farm at the end of the film. On the one hand, the gold pig is a humorous symbol of the value of family heirlooms and provides for a purposefully anticlimactic and microcosmic conclusion to the conflicts, reminiscent of a fairy tale. However, the gold pig is also magic capital, seemingly from nowhere, that brings order, normalcy, and comfort to the weighty issues of sovereignty, class exploitation, marginalization, and even apocalypse. The individual debt is paid, the family pet rescued, and the small Korean farming family can remain good; however, the system of genetic engineering, animal abuse, and exploitation is undeterred.

The social and economic issues in Okja are perhaps too large, pertinent, and encompassing for us to feel satisfied with a melodramatic (and comedic) conclusion that dissolves all of the film’s fascinating conflicts while expressing hesitancy about the effectiveness of organized political action. Although the ending of Parasite is more tragic in tone than is Okja‘s, the gold pig and the return of Okja to the family farm serve the same narrative function as Ki-taek’s revenge killing of Park and his exile in the basement of the mansion. They both present as intractable the power of neo-feudalism and its corporate sovereigns, lords, and elites to individuate collective social and political conflicts through its technological sovereignty and control of space. Ressentiment detached from deeds transforms into a desire for values, revenge, and a moral feeling of security. Under neo-feudalism, such desires are prevalent on both the Left and the Right. If nothing can really change, at least good and evil, self and other, can be clarified, and the identity of the individual maintained. Bong’s films, and much of the media of neofeudalism, express both the repressiveness of capitalism’s contemporary transformations and present in alienated form those affects through which indebtedness and the moral order reproduce themselves.

Perhaps the idea of “mutual aid” of Peter Kropotkin, who supported the liberation of his family’s serfs in 1861, has regained such widespread use and effectiveness in contemporary political and social movements because it is one antidote to the ressentiment of lords and serfs and the fallacies of Social Darwinism (ix). The interspecies connection between Mija and Okja is based in an affection of mutual aid, or cooperation in Kropotkin’s original naturalist formulation, that occurs outside cycles of debt and exchange (notwithstanding that Kropotkin himself largely remained tied to the notion of species). So the film does hint at a political response to neofeudalism but stops short, in its allegorical fairy tale, of articulating this response more fully outside the framework of individual morality, ownership, and vindication.

Racial Capitalism within Neo-Feudalism: Us and Sorry to Bother You

Although they sometimes deal with the US military and corporate occupation and sovereignty over South Korea, Bong Joon-ho’s films are not particularly nationalistic. Okja ends with the super pig returned to the family farm in the remote mountains of South Korea, but it would be a stretch to claim that the ending of Okja presents a clear political contrast between an idyllic and pastoral Korean hinterland and the evils of US capitalism. Bong largely stays true to his statement that we all live in a single country called capitalism and addresses US empire not by asserting Korean national identity, but rather by engaging creatively with Hollywood genres in order to critique various intersections between capital, empire, and the nation-state. There are moments when this critical play with genre brings to light political and social perspectives that would not appear in a typical Hollywood film, and other more typical moments of return to identity, security, and individuation, by way of ressentiment and revenge.

Jordan Peele’s Us and Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You are also revenge narratives of a sort. However, these films disrupt the more sanguine, cyclical representation of neo-feudal exploitation by reintroducing the problem of racial capitalism, a term of Cedric J. Robinson’s that has increased in popular political usage with the growth of the Black Lives Matter movement. These films present fantastic worlds that are divided into lords and serfs and reproduced through indebtedness. Rather than melodrama returning the characters to their individuality and their proper morality, however, they remain what Deleuze calls “dividuals”—the effect of multiple techniques of control and multiple performances and mutations of class, race, and species (“Postscript”). It is Bong’s tendency to universalize that occasionally gets him into trouble when he humanizes his characters without recognizing the irreconcilability of the multiple positions of the dividual. By virtue of his revenge murder of Park and his exile in the basement of the mansion, Ki-taek’s and the family’s double identities are resolved, just as Mija returns to her family farm through her magic payment of her debt. In both Us and Sorry to Bother You, in contrast, characters are at least double throughout, and actually multiple. What do the doppelgänger motif in Us and the hybridity of the equisapiens in Sorry to Bother You have to do with racial capitalism under neo-feudalism? Why do the two worlds of these films remain open at the end, rather than being defined by mythical cycles of exploitation and revenge?

In contrast to Peele’s earlier Get Out (2017), which depicts wealthy, mostly White liberals luring Black people to the countryside to hypnotize them and sell them as slaves, Us does not refer directly to slavery or to the origins of American capital accumulation in racial capitalism. Every American, regardless of race, seems to have a tethered double who lives underground and is eventually organized by Red (Lupita Nyong’o)—who we later find out is actually Adelaide—for the revolution of untethering. Dressed in red jump suits and wielding scissors, they go above ground to kill their doubles and enact their own version of Hands Across America, an event in 1986 when Red attacked Adelaide and switched places with her. (Presumably, Hands Across America was one of impressionable Adelaide’s last memories from her life above ground). The relation between above-ground Americans and their tethered doubles seems to be primarily an allegory of class, of lords and serfs. The government initially created the tethered doubles to control their originals, but the program was unsuccessful. The tethered are driven underground and mechanically act out the actions of their originals, because they share a single soul with them, and many go mad because of their lack of freedom. According to this spatialized “double-consciousness (Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 13), the materialistic and shallow bourgeoisie cultivate their commodities and their superficial appearances above ground while the tethered below are forced to perform these same labors with none of their affective meaning or value.

In his theory of racial capitalism, Cedric J. Robinson complicates the economic determinism of the Marxist understanding of slavery, showing that slavery was neither an effect of nor was ended by capitalist development and the formation of a proletarian class of wage laborers. Slavery was rather born of the racialist worldview of Western civilization, which informed all political defenses and critical responses to industrial capitalism and its immiseration of society—the liberal, conservative, socialist, nationalist, and eventually fascist politics of the European bourgeoisie—from the eighteenth century to the present (Robinson 1–70). Racist state and civil institutions, including nation-states as racial states, cannot be understood by economic or historical determinism, nor can the history of capitalism be considered without regarding them as fundamental.

The fantastic horror world of Us presents an allegory of a double consciousness of both Black and White characters, which is in line with Du Bois’s understanding of it (he did, after all, also give the Hegelian treatment to White people in the “The Souls of White Folk”), and also introduces divisibility into the representation of subjects and their control. In the hall of mirrors Adelaide enters in 1986, that leads to the world of the tethered, there is a sign pointing to the entry door: “Vision Quest: Find Yourself.” Of course, being a horror film, this vision quest does not lead to the hominess of the self and family, but rather to a confrontation with the uncanny, that is, the foreign and the strange in what is supposedly the most familiar. (Freud spends a number of paragraphs in “The Uncanny” on the doppelgänger motif.) Once the tethered are above ground, enacting their violent uprising, Peele uses the uncanny aesthetic to full effect, showing that when enslavement is no longer a matter of ownership of Blacks by Whites and the direct conflation of skin color with economic and political rights and power, then the dividing of the self into multiple intersecting racial, class, and gender identities as a technology of control is essential to the reproduction of capitalism. When Red (Adelaide) states that “we are Americans,” it is obvious that “we” and its correspondent Us refer to both family and nation, and that the divided selves of the characters refer to two or more Americas, to the multiple positions within the same country of capitalism. Prior to the insurrection of the tethered, this dividing of racial subjectivity is already in operation. The Wilsons’ consumer life is a cheaper version of the Tylers’, and Gabe is jealous of the White family’s commodities. Meanwhile, Kitty Tyler hates her husband, gets plastic surgery, and is jealous of Adelaide’s beauty, and the twins Becca and Lindsey Tyler call Jason Wilson “weird” when they talk to Zora on the beach.

In often comedic ways, the insurrection of the tethered magnifies this racialized ressentiment between the two families. After the Wilsons escape their tethered, they go to the house of the Tylers, who have already been killed. There the Wilsons have to defend themselves against the White family’s tethered. Because they are fighting the zombie versions of the White family, they can express their built-up aggression toward them—Gabe symbolically leads Tex (Josh’s tethered) to Josh’s boat and shoots him with the flare gun; a low angle shot captures Zora as she beats a twin’s double overzealously with a golf club. Jason, who is often suspicious of his mother, watches disturbed as Adelaide (Red) finishes off Dahlia (Kitty’s tethered). The scenes at the Tylers’ house are particularly uncanny and humorous. The Wilsons show that they are capable of brutal violence, and their actions blur further with those of their doubles.

Neo-feudalism is an intensified capitalist system, and the capitalist system is a racialist system. In the aftermath of the 2007–2008 financial crash, it became apparent that the predatory lending practices of subprime loans were made disproportionately to Blacks (G. White). The explanation is clear and documented: lower credit scores, lower income, and smaller down payments and collateral—all effects of centuries of unequal capital accumulation—mean higher interest rates and more expensive mortgages. Through predatory lending and other financial practices that exploit racial minorities, the financial sector of neo-feudalism, with its dependency on the marketization of debt, reproduces class inequalities in a racialized manner. Attention is rightfully given to police brutality and the prison industrial complex—including prison labor and the exploitative cash bail system—in contemporary analyses of American racial capitalism, but the uneven distribution of debt and credit along racial lines is equally important. Within Us‘s myth of neo-feudal class relations, the animosity that the Wilsons harbor for the Tylers is not racially neutral.

Borrowing is a mode of impersonation that splits consciousness. On the one hand, people gain access to the accoutrements of middle-class life, such as houses, cars, and boats; on the other hand, they lose their future freedom from work and their freedom of movement, because they must service the debt that makes their impersonation of class mobility possible. The degree of wealth inequality in the US would be impossible to maintain without the governmentality of debt. While Us does not address financial debt directly, the division of America into creditors and debtors, lords and serfs, is certainly in the background of the film’s mythology. Debt creates a duplicity between the consuming self and the working self, a duplicity that is structurally distinct from commodity fetishism because of the intermediation and primacy of finance capital rather than of production in the splitting of the subject. Unlike in Okja, in Us none of the characters returns to a stable individuality through ressentiment, not only because we find out that Adelaide is actually Red but also because the conflict with the tethered is not a Manichaean one that would allow for the reestablishment of a stable sense of good and evil through revenge or magic. Neo-feudalism is a system of control that governs through multiple divisions of the subject that occur differentially according to racialized positions within capitalism, and dividuals inhabit the country of capitalism according to their multiple connections to racial violence and disenfranchisement. One strength of Us is that it tracks these multiple political relations while foregoing any final determination of “us” and “them”—racial positions are differentiated by class, and class positions are differentiated by race.

Sorry to Bother You is one of the more radically anti-capitalist mainstream American films to come out in the last decade and pinpoints several characteristics of neo-feudalism and its modes of subjection. As his fellow workers at the telemarketing company Regalview organize and strike for better pay and benefits, the aptly named Cash Green (LaKeith Stanfield), who makes huge sales as a telemarketer using his “White voice” (played by David Cross), gets promoted to the elite upstairs offices of Powercallers, where he makes million-dollar deals in slave labor for Worryfree (a company dealing in human [variable] capital that signs its workers to lifetime contracts while housing and feeding them in massive cramped dormitories). Cash’s success pits him against the labor movement, his friends, and eventually his girlfriend Detroit (Tessa Thompson), and is directly connected to the housing crisis and the gentrification of Oakland. His primary motivation is to pay off the mortgage of his uncle Sergio (Terry Crews), who says he is going to default on the loan and work for Worryfree. Cash’s debt to Sergio and Sergio’s debt to the bank drive Cash to use his White voice technique, taught to him by older Regalview employee Langston (Danny Glover), in order to move up the corporate ladder until his job is to sell workers into the very slavery from which he manages to spare his uncle. Just as Us explores the uncanny horrors of impersonation created by indebtedness to an invisible other, Cash’s friends react with queasiness when he uses his White voice outside of the workplace (e.g. at the bar), when his alienated and racialized affective labor blurs into the sphere of consumption and comradery.

Like Okja, Sorry to Bother You takes up the problem of the parcelization of sovereignty, but even more negatively. Worryfree is not simply a multinational corporation but also a sovereign that replaces the social contract of citizenship with lifelong labor contracts whereby workers trade in their worry about the future for enslavement as human capital. Interestingly, Steve Lift (Armie Hammer), a casual Bay Area bro, says that his company Worryfree will “save America” from the very phenomena that Marx discusses in Volume 3 of Capital before Marx gets to the discussion of surplus profit: an overproduction of goods, unemployment, and decreases in consumer capacity and in relative surplus caused by increases in the efficiency of capital and the immiseration of the proletariat, as well as the concomitant tendency for the rate of profit to fall. More than any other work of neo-feudalism, Sorry to Bother You points to the contemporary economic crises within which Right and Left political positions emerge and disseminate. On one side, you have a response to capitalist crisis that insists on the intensification of the biopolitics of neoliberal governmentality, the transformation of Gary S. Becker’s “human capital” into new forms of serfdom or even slavery (Worryfree’s slave labor is not a speculative proposition if we consider private corporations’ use of prison labor not as some sort of rehabilitative response to crime, but rather as a neo-feudal response to capitalist crisis) (Becker; Foucault 226–30). Responding to capitalist crisis, corporations devise new ways to produce profit by institutionalizing marketable debt and controlling access to capital through rent. At the economic bottom you have forms of subjection embedded in racial capitalism and the affectations required (e.g. White voice) for Pyrrhic success in the service economy. On the other side, there is a desire to return to the social-democratic nation-state as a protector of workers’ rights against the excesses of capital.

Sorry to Bother You does not present its politics without self-reflection. It also points to the interventions of the technologies of neo-feudalism, including the fascist mediation of violence symbolized by the fictional TV show I Got the Shit Kicked Out of Me and the meme of a striker hitting the scab Cash in the head with a soda can, as well as the engineering of human capital in the creation of the equisapiens—horse-human hybrids that serve as chattel slave labor. By showing Cash literally falling into people’s living rooms when he makes his telemarketing calls, the film directs our attention to a problem that also concerns Jodi Dean. If social space is now dominated by communicative capitalism to the degree that there are no more outside spaces, then even modes of resistance to neo-feudalism can very easily reinforce its modes of division and control. Cash depends on the mediation of mass communication in order to hide his blackness. If the cinematic fantasy of equisapien revolution at the end of the film has any bearing on the real problems that Sorry to Bother You analyzes, it would need to be more than a fantasy of revenge that only amounts to a temporary catharsis of ressentiment. After all, such catharsis is readily and continuously available through the very digital platforms that reproduce the relations of debt. In so far as the nation state remains an agent of racial capitalism, imperialism, and ecological ruin, a revolution beyond revenge would also need to avoid being contained by the national borders of electoral politics and social democracy. The fantastic elements and revenge sequences of the more lucrative media cultures of neo-feudalism lead us to realize that global revolutionary politics are both beyond their narrative scope and exceed the political economy of their production and distribution.

Travis Workman is Associate Professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. His recent work includes essays on humanism and area studies and a forthcoming volume of translations of Korean literary and cultural criticism. He is finishing a book on North Korean and South Korean film melodrama of the Cold War era and starting one on neo-feudalism and contemporary media.

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Miriam Posner (bio)

Abstract

Supply chain management (SCM) deals with the procurement and assembly of goods, from raw material to the consumer. With the growing prevalence of offshore manufacturing and suppliers’ reliance on “just-in-time” inventory management, SCM has become both astoundingly complex and critical to companies’ competitiveness. This essay examines how data works in global supply chains, focusing on SAP SCM, the huge but hard-to-access SCM software with the greatest market share. It argues that SCM is characterized by two countervailing tendencies: the demand for perfect information about goods and movement, and the need to erect strategic barriers to the fullest knowledge about supply chains. Counterintuitively, this selective obscurantism is what makes supply chains so fast and efficient.

In March 2020, as it was becoming clear that COVID-19 was going to seriously disrupt our lives, the necessities of American life—toilet paper, cleaning solution, paper towels—began disappearing from supermarket shelves, for days at a time. It was hard enough to find flour; forget about N-95 masks, hand sanitizer, and other personal protective equipment (PPE). The predicaments of individual consumers were magnified, with much higher stakes, at hospitals around the country. Without access to the basic equipment they needed to do their jobs, health workers were swathing themselves in garbage bags and jury-rigging CPAP machines. The photos and stories are surreal.

But perhaps they shouldn’t be. The disruptions to the global supply chain didn’t surprise people who had been watching closely. To most American consumers, the global supply chain looks like a firehose: goods just keep coming and coming, lots of them, all the time. But to those professionals immersed in the day-to-day work of supply-chain management, the firehose looks more like an assemblage of garden hoses, each one springing new leaks as fast as previous ones can be patched. We designed it that way. Or perhaps we didn’t not design it that way. Many global supply chains, under normal conditions, are ruthlessly efficient. But their speed and efficiency are the products of some of the same conditions that make them vulnerable. Global supply chains, to a startling degree, are highly uncoordinated, even those of the largest corporations. Both their speed and their vulnerability are the result of constant, unceasing, untraceable improvisation. For all the talk about the internet of things and QR-coded merchandise, no one has any idea, in most cases, what a supply chain looks like in its entirety—least of all the companies whose labels are on the box.

Consider the iPhone. A complex product like a smartphone is assembled from hundreds of separate parts, most produced in disparate offshore locations, each of which needs to get from a supplier to a manufacturer through a distribution channel and ultimately to a customer as fast as possible. The ubiquity of offshore manufacturing, combined with the practice of just-in-time production and rapid cycles of obsolescence mean that managing an intricate supply chain, like that of an iPhone, is astoundingly complicated.

In fact, the term “chain” is misleading; many supply networks more closely resemble rivers or neural pathways. Rather than a single stream, the network takes the form of multiple tiny tributaries that begin where components are mined or produced, leading into larger canals where they are assembled, and then to even bigger channels where they are shipped overseas. When commentators discuss Apple’s supply chain, they often focus on its Foxconn assembly plants in China. But these large manufacturers are only part of the story. The iPhone’s components, like those of many complex products, come from all over the world. And these supply pathways are never static. As we will see, large companies’ supply chains can change on a dime, triggered by global economic conditions or events on the ground. It is hard to take a snapshot of a supply chain because it moves too fast. Many companies have no clear idea themselves which vendors comprise the entirety of their distribution network. Like most consumers, corporations themselves are often at least partly in the dark. How did we get to this point, where companies can choreograph their supply chains with exquisite timing and precision, but still (truthfully, as I will argue) claim to be ignorant about the conditions of their products’ assembly?

I am not the first to ask. As the implications of the modern global supply chain have played out in politics and in our daily lives, numerous journalists and scholars have turned their attention to understanding and explaining the logistics industry. The website Fusion published an eight-part audio documentary about global supply routes, and The Box, Marc Levinson’s history of the shipping container, became an unexpected bestseller. Within the fields of geography, media, and the history of infrastructure, a number of scholars, most notably Deborah Cowen, have examined the routes mapped out by supply chains, as well as the physical infrastructure necessary to support these networks (Cowen, Deadly Life; Lichtenstein, Wal-Mart). Ned Rossiter and John Durham Peters have each examined the relevance of logistical infrastructure for the field of media studies. Scholars in Black studies, such as Christina Sharpe, Stefano Harney, and Fred Moten, have described the inseparability of logistics from slavery. Separately, anthropologists and historians have conducted research at manufacturing plants and port cities, helping to shed light on the lives of the people whose labor keep the supply chain moving (Thomas; Chu; West; Ngai and Chan). These studies inform a body of theoretical work that seeks to understand the implications of globalization for capitalism, politics, and human understandings of the world. These scholars of “critical logistics” argue for an understanding of logistics as “a calculative rationality and a suite of spatial practices aimed at facilitating circulation—including, in its mainstream incarnations, the circulatory imperatives of capital and war” (Chua et al.).

For all that has been written about logistics, however, we still know very little about how information moves along the supply chain and what that movement can tell us about the way data interacts with global capital. And yet, supply chains of course consist of information as much as they are composed of shipping containers, cranes, and ports. How else would companies be able to choreograph deliveries with such astounding speed and accuracy? This essay, then, investigates the ways that supply chains use data by focusing on one question in particular: how is it that supply chains can be so dependable, in the sense that we know exactly when our Amazon package will arrive, and yet so unknowable, in the sense that both suppliers and consumers have only the vaguest idea of where the package comes from?

I argue in this essay that global supply chains work as efficiently as they do only because of strategic gaps in our knowledge about them. A supply-chain expert might find this observation surprising, since “visibility” and “transparency” are watchwords of the profession: with each new technological innovation comes new promises about more and increasingly complete data. Yet a thorough investigation of the structure and function of supply chains reveals that these circuits of commerce depend on black boxes and omissions as much as they depend on access to information. These strategic uncertainties are part of the appeal not just of global supply chains, but also of algorithmic decision-making in general. The truism that we live in the age of big data evokes visions of avalanches of information from all over the globe, synthesized and processed in order to arrive at unprecedentedly precise solutions. But, as I show here, a critical hallmark of what scholars have called “algorithmic life” is a pattern of strategic uncertainties that serve to elide precisely those moments in which our most important decisions get made (Amoore and Piotukh).

I highlight this peculiar informational zone—this dance between omniscience and ignorance—as a critical feature of supply-chain software and the industry at large. Drawing on instructional materials, industry literature, and an analysis of supply-chain software, I argue that logistical capitalism’s enabling condition is a careful disavowal of particular information, even as the supply chain ravenously consumes other data. I connect this state of knowing-while-notknowing to defining moments in the supply chain’s emergence, most notably in the calculations that characterized the maritime slave trade. Seeing like a supply chain depends upon and reinscribes some of the key assumptions of colonialism, both about human difference and about the way value can be captured and transmitted.

Efficient as they are under normal conditions, a major global disaster like the COVID-19 pandemic can bring large parts of the system to a halt. As we look closer at supply chains, we see how the constant alternation between knowing and not-knowing introduces hidden cracks and fault lines into global trade routes. Like scratched glass, the supply chain’s cracks are shallow enough, under most conditions, that the glass remains intact. But when struck with an event of sufficient force, these fault lines have the ability—as we have seen—to compromise the entire structure.

Fantasies of Omniscience

Understanding how supply chains use data requires us to contextualize and historicize the industry itself. Logistics (the term is often used interchangeably with “supply-chain management”) has always been, and still is, intimately tied to military activity (Cowen, Deadly Life). Logistics as a field began in earnest following World War II, when military veterans applied to business the lessons they had learned about transporting wartime materials. The name “logistics” is in fact a military export to the private sector, just as many corporate logistics experts started their careers in the military (Bonacich and Hardie).

The 1943 propaganda film Troop Train, produced by the United States Office of War Information, contains many of the elements that would continue to define rhetoric about logistics throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In the “nerve center” of a troop-transfer operation, military personnel busily make notes and phone calls before a wall painted with a map of the United States rail system, which resembles a giant semiconductor. A sequence of phone calls, flipped switches, and a battalion of typists creates the impression of an information epicenter, from which logistics personnel can monitor the movement of people and goods with seamless speed and accuracy. Troop Train depicts logistics headquarters as a zone of perfect information, where monitors keep tabs on conditions with flawless efficiency.

And yet, even as “nerve centers” attempt to monitor every movement of resources, a countervailing tendency has also characterized supply chains: that of the black box, the zone where information is disavowed in favor of efficiency. Its most visible emblem might be the shipping container, whose modularity allows it to travel the world with unprecedented speed, even as its contents remain shrouded in interchangeability. It, too, is a wartime invention, deployed in quantity for the first time to run goods between California and Cam Ranh Bay during the Vietnam War. The shipping container’s main selling point was its modularity: by standardizing the container’s dimensions, shipping companies and manufacturers began to regularize, automate, and impose order on what had been a relatively unpredictable industry (Levinson).

As companies expanded and logistics professionalized in the 1950s and 1960s, a steady drumbeat sounded in the literature about distribution: the demand for information. Logistics experts demanded more information from every tributary of the supply chain. Only in this way could specialists provide the precise information about supply levels and location that modern corporations demanded. Yet despite their critical role, logistics professionals complained, corporations failed to recognize the importance of what they did.

It was in this spirit that Peter Drucker, the well-known management expert, wrote “The Economy’s Dark Continent,” often cited as one of the founding documents of modern supplychain management. American companies, Drucker claimed in 1962, were completely failing to embrace the possibilities of modern logistics. Distribution, he wrote, constitutes “the economy’s dark continent. We know little more about distribution today than Napoleon’s contemporaries knew about the interior of Africa” (103).Drucker’s rallying cry was echoed by a number of contemporaneous logistics experts, who saw in Drucker’s article a reflection of the frustrations they experienced. (I take up Drucker’s colonialist metaphor later in this piece, for it reveals some important facets of supply-chain logic.)

In its modern incarnation, supply-chain management emerged in the context of increasing competition from Japanese manufacturers, and particularly Japanese innovations in just-in-time (or “lean”) manufacturing, in which a supplier aims to keep the absolute minimum inventory on hand to fulfill demand. With just-in-time manufacturing, the supplier can avoid tying up capital in unsold inventory. But this mode of distribution also means that information about demand needs to be near-perfect and near-instantaneous in order to avoid product shortages (Lichtenstein, “Supply Chains”). When a company maintains very low levels of inventory, it cannot deliver goods to consumers effectively if any component gets stalled at any station along the supply chain. Japanese companies pioneered these techniques in the 1960s through the 1980s, and American companies quickly followed suit, outsourcing goods to a patchwork of suppliers in order to maximize speed and profit.

In the twenty-first century, supply-chain management techniques have evolved to respond with extraordinary subtlety to consumer demand. If a Wal-Mart store begins to run low on a certain brand of diapers, for example, that information is automatically communicated to a supplier who initiates the restocking process, all with very little human intervention. This shift from “push” to “pull”—that is, the tendency for manufacturing and delivery to be “pulled” into an outlet by retailers rather than “pushed” in by suppliers—means that suppliers must be prepared for a high degree of volatility in demand. Gone are the days when a manufacturer could plan stocking levels according to the season or even the month (Lichtenstein, Wal-Mart).

Sixty-five years after Troop Train, the information nerve center reemerges within the interface of SAP SCM, the most widely used supply-chain management software, which I describe in more detail below. The Supply Chain Cockpit, the highest-level view of a company’s supply chain, depicts distribution centers, shipping routes, and manufacturing locations, all arrayed on a map, as though they can be monitored from above. In fact, however, this vision of perfect information has always been a fantasy. The Supply Chain Cockpit is not real-time; it is a forecast. Conditions on the ground can easily supersede the vision planners have laid out, and neither the Cockpit nor most actors in the supply chain will register the change. Despite planners’ pleas for more information, however, this selective obscurity is not a bug but a feature: supply chains could not be as efficient as they are if they were centrally coordinated and observed.

In his essay on the geopolitics of capitalism, David Harvey lays out a model for understanding the relationship of space and capital that is startling for the way it seems to presage an interface like the Supply Chain Cockpit (Harvey). For a capitalist economy to function, Harvey explains, capital has to keep moving. It can’t ever stop, and an economy must always grow. But as capital increases, it must be reabsorbed. If it can’t be reabsorbed and recirculated, it accumulates, and this causes a crisis. If, for example, goods pile up in a warehouse, they’re not circulating, and they lose their value. Because capital needs to find more and more places to go, the system of global capital has devised what Harvey terms the “spatial fix”: it expands outward, looking for ever more ways to keep capital moving. But the fix Harvey describes is a double-edged sword: like a junkie’s fix, it is temporarily satisfying but ultimately insufficient. Capitalism, according to Harvey, is structurally compromised by this internal contradiction between the need to grow and the need to absorb, and it must at some point confront this contradiction.

When Harvey describes the spatial fix, he means physical infrastructure and building plants. The spatial fix explains why North American cities teem with empty luxury condos, while millions of people go unhoused. But perhaps this need to keep capital moving can also describe the Supply Chain Cockpit, the event handler, and the optimization algorithm. Capital’s need to circulate unceasingly has been translated into a software suite that—at least in theory—addresses potential crises with marvelous speed and sophistication. No potential accumulation can take place without triggering a solution, and models borrowed from the structure of our brains chart paths designed to eliminate even the slightest latency. Yet even as the spatial fix seems to reach the apogee of its elaboration, it’s pushed toward ever greater heights of information speed and efficiency.

In a complex supply chain, some waystations might be large, easily identifiable plants, such as the Foxconn facilities that make Apple products. But the components of goods must themselves be procured from another vendor, and those from another, and so on, until we reach the site where the source materials themselves are mined, extracted, or farmed. Some of these nodes may be no more than garages retrofitted into small workshops. It is only a node’s neighbors, not a central planner, that must be aware of its existence. Should something happen to one of these workshops, such as a labor strike or natural disaster, the neighboring stops on the supply chain might easily substitute a replacement, without anyone else being aware of the change. This tangle of procurement is compounded in industries with high product turnover, such as the apparel industry. Supply-chain nodes might number in the thousands, and vendors are continuously swapped out and replaced. To attempt to coordinate this activity would mean slowing it down, potentially endangering a company’s ability to bring products to consumers with the speed that the market demands.

This decentralized arrangement works well for commerce under normal conditions. A broken link can easily be popped out and replaced with another supplier. But this assumes that a battalion of suppliers are standing at the ready, waiting for the word to take their new place. This was not the case during the COVID-19 pandemic. The disease knocked out (at least temporarily) not just a smattering of suppliers but suppliers everywhere, and no one was available to plug these gaps. Had large companies been aware of potential weaknesses in their supply chains, they could have analyzed trade routes, prepared for disruption, and created redundancy within the supply chain. But of course they didn’t know about these weaknesses, since they could not obtain that information without compromising the terrific speed of the system on which they depend (Choi et al.).

This is not to say, however, that all supply-chain data eludes manufacturers. Operations within the facilities a manufacturer itself controls may, in fact, be closely planned and monitored. And yet even within these monitoring operations, strategically placed barriers and black boxes prevent any individual onlooker from viewing the supply network in full.

Breakpoints and Black Boxes: Inside SAP

The industry standard for monitoring business operations—everything from sales projections to transportation to human resources—is a suite of software called SAP (the acronym stands for Systemanalyse und Programmentwicklung, or System Analysis and Program Development) (Pollock and Williams). SAP was founded in 1972 by five German ex-employees of IBM (Pollock and Williams). Its conception was part of the push toward “systems integration” that characterized management thinking of the period. Under this systems integration concept, businesses focus not on one single functional unit of a business at a time, like distribution or marketing, but on the throughline that connects each part of the product’s travel through the company, from idea to the customer’s hands. For the modern corporation, this is the supply chain. This crosscutting approach to a company’s operations demanded software that could integrate information from every aspect of the business (Cowen, “Logistics’ Liabilities”). SAP emerged to fill that role.

SAP is not the only software for business operations, but it is the system with the most market share. Although few laypeople have dealt directly with an SAP interface, it is one of the largest software companies in the world, earning $22 billion in revenue in 2016 (Plunkett et al.). SAP software handles a wide variety of businesses’ functions, from human resources to financial planning, inventory control, and invoicing. Over its four decades in existence, SAP has grown rapidly in size and ambition. Its current initiatives include a push toward cloud-based computing (in which businesses outsource their functions to an offsite server, rather than manage everything in-house), machine learning, and its own proprietary database software.

As one might imagine, a business system designed to handle a product’s journey from idea to raw material to the customer requires highly complex software. In fact, the term “software” is misleading, for SAP’s product is not a single application, but a suite of tools joined together through a shared database. This model of database-driven software integration is a clear outcome of the push for systems-integration that characterized the late 1960s and ’70s; only if managers conceive of a business as a continuum of interlocking information would a shared database be desirable.

Modularity, in which highly complex functions are “black-boxed” so that an engineer need only deal with one set a time, is a key feature of SAP software. The SAP suite is subdivided into numerous products, called “components,” which are then subdivided into function-specific “transactions.” SAP professionals usually specialize in one of these larger components, passing a job over to another professional when it enters the domain of another component. For example, an SCM (supply-chain management) specialist can manage production and transportation planning, but will look to an ECC (Enterprise Resource Planning Central Component) specialist to modify and maintain the suite’s master data. Depending on a company’s needs, SAP engineers can link various modules together to form a continuous suite of software.

In a company that makes use of an integrated SAP suite for supply chain planning, planners pass data along a chain. The data begins as a months-long forecast and moves, with increasing granularity, down the line, until it reaches workers on the factory floor. Planners forecast product demand in the Demand Planning (DP) component, and then pass that information to a Supply Network Planning (SNP) specialist, whose job is to ensure that production is timed and organized to meet the demand plans. The SNP specialist produces a plan, with necessary output keyed to particular dates and locations, and passes that plan to a specialist in Production Planning and Detailed Scheduling (PP/DS). The PP/DS specialist breaks the SNP plan into smaller units of time and space, determining workers’ shifts, lot production, and product movements, in intervals as small as one second. The three specialists thus work in different time scales, or “time horizons,” in the parlance of SAP: DP forecasts demand at the level of months; SNP works in weeks; and PP/DS breaks time into units as small as one second (Knolmayer et al.; Snapp; Wood).

At each point in the process, a planner has the ability to make use of predictive or optimizing algorithms. SAP’s DP component incorporates several types of regressions, with which a planner can take into account seasonal variability, sales promotions, and historical trends. Within the SNP component, a planner can make use of tools SAP classifies as “heuristics,” “capacity leveling,” and “optimizers.” SNP’s heuristic function distributes production across dates in order to meet the targets identified in the demand plan, while capacity leveling considers the constraints of available materials, plant capacity, and labor in order to ensure that the plan is feasible. Finally, the optimizing algorithm incorporates storage, transport, and labor costs, iterating rapidly through multiple scenarios to generate a production plan that minimizes cost and maximizes profit. PP/DS likewise makes use of heuristics and optimizers to ensure that labor and production is optimized to furnish the desired quantities of goods at the lowest possible cost.

The information chain within SAP is composed of a combination of explicit data and production imperatives derived from obscured algorithms. The locations of warehouses, the number of available machines, the length of time it takes to get from one place to another are all sensible, if sometimes elusive, data points from the business perspective. But the process by which these values are converted into concrete production plans is more mysterious. The algorithms used to make these calculations are derived from work published in journals of supply-chain management, but few supply-chain specialists can be expected to grasp them fully. (Indeed, that is why the algorithms are implemented within the software interface, rather than manually calculated.) Thus, the process of moving from knowable business values to actionable production plans always involves an algorithmic black box. At each interval within the planning process, a specialist passes a set of data through a breakpoint, where her expertise ends and another specialist’s begins. The data package transmitted between specialists contains the information necessary to begin that stage of work, but not the underlying data from which the plan was derived. Thus, a production planning specialist, for example, could not understand the data basis of a supply network planner’s production calendar, even if she wanted to. A worker at a manufacturing plant feels the effects of this modularity keenly. Should she object to outrageous work demands, this person’s supervisor might wield in his own defense a PP/DS plan, sent to him by someone who worked with a different set of data, produced by someone else entirely. A forecaster, meanwhile, can, with some justification, disclaim responsibility for factory conditions, since she produced only a high-level prediction about demand.

As Andrew Russell and others have demonstrated, modularity has particular effects on the communication and synthesis of information. Because no single person working on a modular system has access to all of the information contained within the circuit, it is possible for every person in the system to disclaim responsibility for the system’s particular effects. Modularity is, as Russell puts it, a supremely useful “means for confronting and managing complexity in a dynamic and systemic context” (258), but it also strategically obscures knowledge.

The “bullwhip effect” is a mainstay of supply-chain management theory. First described by Jay Forrester in 1958, the effect refers to the way information about demand is distorted as it travels from a distribution site to the manufacturer (Forrester). As a whip amplifies a flick of the wrist, so do supply chains’ information networks inflate consumer demand as it travels from person to person. A store manager, noting that a product’s stock levels are low, may order more cases than he thinks he needs immediately in order to avoid a shortage. The manager of a regional warehouse similarly nudges her numbers up, and so on, until the several-times-inflated number reaches the manufacturer. Meanwhile, consumer demand has not actually increased, so the manufacturer’s product languishes on the shelves.

SAP’s market forecasting functions are designed to mitigate the bullwhip effect, but as they do so, they produce another kind of whipping motion. Small tweaks in forecasts and pricing travel through SAP’s circuit of components. As the data moves, it is systematically scoured of any latency, as one might press down on an air mattress to squeeze it into the tightest possible roll. As the time horizons move from months, to weeks, to days, and finally to seconds, the demands for productivity become increasingly concrete and inexorable. The predictions meet reality only when they are conveyed to workers on assembly lines, where small increases in predicted demand are translated into longer working hours, lower pay, or unsafe working conditions.

The speed of manufacturing networks is sure to increase in the years to come, even as these networks maintain their distinctive combination of perfect detail and perfect ignorance. In the last five years, SCM software like SAP has incorporated machine-learning algorithms to help managers run supply chains more efficiently. In a supply chain, machine learning can work in two directions: “demand forecasting,” in which corporations attempt to calibrate supplies to consumer behavior; and, on the other end, requisitioning supplies from the appropriate vendors. Demand forecasting may be relatively familiar to most people: a large company can derive predictions from actual consumer behavior and then use those predictions to determine how many and what kind of goods to have on hand. For example, the retailer Target famously uses predictive analytics to guess, with eerie accuracy, whether a customer is pregnant (Duhigg).

But machine learning can work on the other end, too: to devise and revise supply routes for manufactured goods. These techniques can be applied in several different ways. In one approach, companies use neural networks (a kind of machine learning) to assign a degree of risk to individual suppliers based on “training data” composed of information about suppliers’ past performance. The algorithm can then devise a critical path—that is, an optimized sequence of steps—to hand the raw materials through the stations of the manufacturing cycle (Teuteberg).

Another approach is based on a “multi-agent system” (MAS) model: a bundle of “agents” that interact with each other with little human intervention. An agent is really a piece of software designed to mimic a function of the supply chain. Each is programmed to act independently of its fellow agents in accomplishing its designated tasks. The “disruption management” agent monitors an incoming flow of data. When it detects an abnormality—such as slower-than-expected delivery times—the agent is programmed to trigger a solution, such as switching suppliers or reconfiguring products. The agent can then coordinate with the other agents in the system to adjust the entire model to accomplish its solution. This pool of potential solutions is itself refined and ranked in terms of desirability based on machine-learning algorithms. Over time, the MAS learns to favor those solutions that lead to optimal outcomes. In theory, at least, these agents can build, reconfigure, and optimize supply chains without the need for any ongoing human guidance (Giannakis and Louis). In this scenario, as in SAP’s SCM components, no one holds all of the information. Rather, the supply path is created through machine-learning protocols into which no individual person can really claim full insight.

Machine learning is a data-hungry field: “Data is the sole nutrient in a machine-learning diet,” as one SAP white paper puts it. “Algorithms need to binge on it constantly to lead a healthy and successful life” (Wellers et al., 8). And yet, logistics professionals’ pursuit of perfect data is (and always has been) much more dream than reality. Even though industry newsletters tout the precision and power of machine learning, SCM depends in reality on a great deal of “noisy” data and human intervention: invoices transmitted as PDFs, rather than machine-parsable data; vendors who disclose imperfect information; humans who scan the wrong barcodes; suppliers who prefer to conduct business over the phone. Yet, the fantasy of what companies call “end-to-end visibility” remains hugely compelling.

It is clear, however, that even what business managers call “visibility” is actually strategic obscurantism. Were one to view the supply network in its entirety, its complexity would likely make it illegible. Moreover, the “perfect data” that supply-chain managers demand is put to use in algorithms that apportion labor and resources in ways that SCM software is designed to obscure. From the way a T-shirt manufacturer swaps out a cotton supplier, to the way an optimization algorithm delineates workers’ schedules, the supply chain is fine-tuned to produce speed and efficiency by way of strategically-placed lacunas. This algorithmic no-man’s land, this realm of both knowing and not-knowing the details of what transpires, is the subject of the next section of this piece. How and when did we authorize this informational regime in which it is possible to think about capital, movement, and human life in the terms offered by the supply chain?

Heavy Weather: Cargo, Capital, and Data

The slaver ship Zong set out in September 1781 from West Africa, carrying 440 enslaved African people. Three months later, near to port but faced with illness and a shortage of water, the Zong‘s crew made a calculation: if the enslaved people were to die onshore, the ship’s owners would not recover their cost. If they were to die onboard of “natural causes,” their value to the enslavers would likewise be lost. The ship’s insurance, however, did cover the jettisoning of cargo. So, over a period of three days in November 1781, the crew of the Zong threw 133 men, women, and children into the sea, where they perished.

The Zong became a flashpoint for the abolitionist movement because it so baldly exposed slavery’s unthinkable inhumanity. Christina Sharpe observes that the Zong also has other layers of significance (Sharpe, ch. 2). The Zong makes clear that globalized logistics is impossible without the systematic oppression of those who are racialized as other. The death and enslavement of millions of people are not the unfortunate byproducts of global capital, but the necessary condition for it. In this light, Peter Drucker’s offhand reference to the “interior of darkest Africa” is perceptive: supply chain logic has always depended on depriving some of liberty in order to create capital and consumer products for others. Examining the hold of slave ships, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten write: “Modern logistics is founded with the first great movement of commodities, the ones that could speak. It was founded in the Atlantic slave trade, founded against the Atlantic slave. … Modernity is sutured by this hold” (92–93). Ian Baucom’s Specters of the Atlantic helps to connect the line between the Zong and the data-driven supply chain. Part of what Baucom perceives in the Zong is a kind of apotheosis of global finance capital. The value of the slaves has taken wing, evacuated their bodies; why else could the crew throw the slaves into the sea and still receive payment for them? The enslaved body is understood as one manifestation of a circulating system of credit—but not, in this case, the most important one. In finance capital, as we see on the Zong, value can reside in different places at different times, without any handover actually taking place.

But the Zong is relevant here not only because the episode demonstrates how value works in finance capital. It is also relevant for Baucom’s claims about the kind of knowledge on which the Zong and its creditors depended in order to make the specific calculation they made: that of the “typical” (96–107). The embrace of the notion of the typical—that is, the qualities one can expect from the kind of thing one is dealing with—is a hallmark of finance capital. An insurer or investor must cast the particular into types in order to sort them into categories on a table (or in a database), which he then uses to make a calculation about risk and reward. The translation of a human being into a predictable value, and thus a unit that can be circulated and traded, depends on the classification of that human being into a particular category. Without categories, there is no insurance, and without insurance, there is no Zong. This is the metamorphosis that took place even before the slaves were forced onto the Zong: that of the particular body into one of a range of computable values on the actuarial spreadsheet. Indeed, it is precisely to recover Black lives from this merciless logic of categorization and value that M. NourbeSe Philip, in her poem cycle Zong!, disarticulates and then reassembles the court case that declared the enslaved passengers insurable. Philip rips apart the clockwork madness of the Zong‘s legal case in order to argue for a different kind of confrontation with the material of history. In Sharpe’s words, “The dead appear in Philip’s Zong! beyond the logic of the ledger, beyond the mathematics of insurance” (38).

This classification of human beings is the oft-unspoken precondition for globalized labor. The sophisticated software and dizzying speed of today’s supply-chain networks tempt us to see these chains as symptoms of a very modern kind of global hypercapital. But the Zong reminds us that the actions of the contemporary supply chain have been authorized and made thinkable at least since the eighteenth century. The first kind of data necessary for a supply chain is data about labor—which is to say, about human beings. What happens to human beings in a supply chain may be disastrous, but it is also an algorithmic imperative. A calculation about human value demanded the murder of enslaved people on the Zong, just as it demands that workers at a Samsung supplier in Huizhou, Guangdong, earn an average of 238.55 USD per month (An Investigative Report on HEG Technology). These decisions, at least rhetorically, are beyond anyone’s immediate control. Companies like Apple and Nike may occasionally say they want to clean up working conditions for their subcontractors, but in truth, of course, they depend intimately on the kind of logic that categorizes and assigns lower value to the labor of people in the global South; otherwise, we wouldn’t have global supply chains, at least not to any great extent.

Echoes of the Zong reverberated in 2015, when the Associated Press broke the news that Burmese migrants are being forced into slavery to work aboard shrimp boats off the coast of Thailand. Logan Kock, the shrimp company’s vice president for responsible sourcing, said the following: “The supply chain is quite cloudy, especially when it comes from offshore. Is it possible a little of this stuff is leaking through? Yeah, it is possible. We are all aware of it” (Mason et al.). For the shrimp executive, the problem in the supply chain is climatological, not systemic; supply chains are cloudy, they leak, events unfold. Again, we find ourselves in a noman’s land, in which events simply unfold and all responsibility can be disclaimed. We know when our shrimp will arrive, but their route to us is saturated in a dense fog.

The supply chain depends on this balance between the information it can assimilate into itself and that it cannot; information that is accepted and information that is refused. Data in the supply-chain model is supremely interchangeable. In practice, in structure, and by design, SAP and similar systems have taken great pains to assimilate the heterogeneous data that passes through its systems. But even as the supply chain cannot abide heterogeneity in its data, it depends, ultimately, on other kinds of difference for its very existence—difference in standards of living, so that Chinese workers can be paid so little; racial and gender difference, so that it seems natural that Bangladeshi women, for example, should work for a pittance in a dangerous apparel sweatshop, or that Burmese men would find themselves enslaved on shrimping boats far from home. To accommodate these competing demands, the company in supply-chain capitalism must operate in a peculiar informational zone, one in which it ravenously consumes some data—such as that about price and location—even as it cannot absorb other data—such as that about labor practices. In other words, it wants perfect access to information, but only some information. The result of all this is goods whose arrival we can predict to the hour, but whose conditions of assembly remain mysterious by design.

It is worth considering whether this pattern of strategic omission is unique to supply chains or part of other informational infrastructures. We might think here of the Uber driver, who is told exactly where he must go to pick up a passenger but has no idea when or if he will be called upon to drive that evening. We might also consider the retail employee whose working hours are determined not by her own availability but by an algorithm that requires her to show up exactly when she’s needed, with very little advance notice. Like global supply chains, these informational landscapes combine exquisite precision with a larger context of enormous uncertainty. The particular combination of the exacting and the vague seems only to grow more common as gig-economy labor takes a deeper hold on the structure of commerce.

Scholarship on infrastructure tends to focus on the way in which its component parts come together to make a functional whole. Yet this essay’s observations of global supply chains suggest an alternate line of inquiry: what goes unsaid and unseen in the way business teaches us to perceive the world? Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle have argued, following Fredric Jameson, that an inability to map the operations of capital leads to a state of disorientation—a situation of helplessness when we confront a faceless, shapeless edifice of power (Toscano and Kinkle, “Introduction”). To accurately visualize the operations of global capital would require us to connect the nodes represented by labor and resources at every station of a commodity’s journey across the globe. The close scrutiny of information’s movement through global supply chains can help us understand why visualizing global commerce has proved so difficult. Its scale is massive and its speed is dizzying. But, more pressingly, information drops out of the circuits of global capital flow at crucial junctures in its journey. It is too easy to view global logistics as a kind of unstoppable juggernaut: an assemblage so powerful and omniscient as to be invulnerable. And yet, as we have seen, the power of global capital derives not from omniscience but from a kind of selective sight. To map the movement of commerce, as Toscano and Kinkle encourage us to do, would require filling in gaps that defy even the most sophisticated technology’s attempts to ascertain. Understanding the power of logistics is therefore not a matter of ascribing potency to key people or corporations but of shedding light on precisely those operations that have ducked out of our sight. We need to understand these informational black boxes not as vulnerabilities within infrastructure but as strategic omissions that are as critical to the operation of the system as the parts that we can see at work.

Most of the time, the informational dance between the selectively-known and unknown works surprisingly well. But large portions of the global supply chain came crashing to a halt in the first quarter of 2020 and continue to founder late into 2021. When enough waystations on the global supply chain shut down, it was as though supply-chain managers were left clutching the ends of strings that had suddenly been snipped. Ordinarily, products make their way through the maze of intermediaries; exactly how they do that is rarely clear. But since no one really knew what had happened all the way down the chain, they could not predict how long it would take to self-heal. Gathering intelligence on these suppliers and sub-suppliers could take years, as it did for one Japanese company that attempted to map its supply chain in the wake of the 2011 tsunami (Choi et al.).

In 2020, the supply chain eventually managed to self-heal to a great extent, thanks largely to China’s rapid and effective pandemic response. But its sudden, if temporary, vulnerability is instructive. Critical logistics scholars are very interested in “choke points,” junctures at which supply chains have hidden vulnerabilities (Alimahomed-Wilson and Ness). But the pandemic response suggests that the most critical breakpoint is not one particular link in the chain, but the chain itself: the way that it coils and recoils, unsupervised, through a labyrinth of contractors. The dance between knowing and not-knowing is intricate and feverishly fast. Miss a step—know too much, or too little—and the players risk crashing down.

Miriam Posner is Assistant Professor in the UCLA Department of Information Studies. She’s also a digital humanist with interest in labor, race, feminism, and the history and philosophy of data. Her book on the history of supply-chain management is under contract with Yale University Press.

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Alberto Moreiras (bio)

Abstract

This essay examines Alain Badiou’s claims concerning the historical end of what he calls “the Age of the Poets”: a configuration of thought that keeps philosophy sutured to poetry, which can never be the only condition of philosophy but merely one of them. The Age of the Poets stretches from Friedrich Nietzsche to Paul Celan, and Martin Heidegger becomes its major upholder and representative. For Badiou, undoing the poetico-philosophical suture is a condition of the freedom of philosophy. This essay proposes that Badiou’s liberation of philosophy from poetry is simultaneously a liberation of poetry from philosophy that makes a better encounter possible.

Who today would claim that he is equally at home in the essence of thinking and in the essence of poetry?

—Martin Heidegger, “Why Poets?” (206)

Is it true? Badiou states: “Since Nietzsche, all philosophers claim to be poets, they all envy poets, they are all wishful poets or approximate poets, or acknowledged poets, as we see with Heidegger, but also with Derrida or Lacoue-Labarthe” (Manifesto 70). This provocation is the least of it, because Badiou’s main thesis is even more disturbing: “I maintain that the Age of Poets is completed” (71); “the fundamental criticism of Heidegger can only be the following one: the Age of Poets is completed, it is also necessary to de-suture philosophy from its poetic condition” (74). Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe responds gently but in a somewhat panicky tone:

Should poetry cease to be of interest to philosophy? Must we—as a necessity or an imperative—sever the tie that for two centuries in Europe has united philosophy (or at least that philosophy that is astonished at its origin and anxious about its own possibility), and poetry (or at least that poetry that acknowledges a vocation toward thought and is also inhabited by an anxiety over its destination)? Must philosophy—by necessity or imperative—cease its longing for poetry, and conversely (for there is indeed reciprocity here), must poetry finally mourn every hope of proffering the true, and must it renounce?

We would not be asking such a question, or we would be asking it differently, if Alain Badiou had not recently situated it at the very center of what is at stake today in philosophizing—in the very possibility of philosophizing.(Heidegger 17)

This discussion took place in the 1990s but is very much alive today, because we are on the verge of a new epoch of radical disorientation that, alas, has not been preempted by Badiou’s conceptualization: “it is no longer required today,” he said in 1989, “that disobjectivation and disorientation be stated in the poetic metaphor. Disorientation can be conceptualized” (Manifesto 74). Let me anticipate that the full philosophical expression of both “disobjectivation” and “disorientation” remains for Badiou the task of a reflection that cannot be passed on without a radical loss of thought’s potentiality to any of the so-called conditions of philosophy—that is, neither to poetry (or art) nor to politics, mathematics (or science), or love. Indeed, the very attempt to solve the problems of the present (of any given present, in exclusive or even overly dominant reference to any of the conditions that produce its truth) results in what Badiou calls a “suture,” whose undoing then becomes imperative for the sake of philosophy’s own freedom. Philosophy does not produce truths, because philosophy is not a truth procedure. It is, rather, a reflection on the truth procedures that define any specific age according to its conditions. Poetry, for instance, can produce its own truth, but poetic truth does not totalize or exhaust the possibility, or the necessity, of philosophy’s task. Undoing the poetico-philosophical suture restitutes philosophy’s freedom to think on the basis of its four conditions. (Of course the same can be said if the suture of philosophy under examination were politics or scientific procedure.)

Badiou’s work on modern poetry is extraordinary both in its rigor and in its capacity to abstract formal procedures from the poetic corpus under study. It is not to be considered literary criticism—it is something else. It is, precisely, the philosophical attempt to extract and explicate a truth procedure from one of philosophy’s conditions. But it has a polemical intent, which is what I study and present in this essay. We could summarize it as an anti-Heideggerian intent, and Badiou radically objects to what he calls the “sacralization” of the poetic word that seals in Martin Heidegger the void of an historical situation. This becomes explicit, for instance, as we will see below, in Heidegger’s essay on Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry, particularly in its introductory remarks on the poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin (“Why Poets?”). But I would like to proceed slowly and cautiously in my own argumentation and not offer conclusions prematurely, not without having allowed readers to see for themselves. This calls for a certain architecture in my essay, which must rely heavily on Badiou’s own statements. I will first offer a reading of what Badiou says about Fernando Pessoa, for Badiou one of the major poets that defines “the age of the poets.” The presentation of Badiou on Pessoa leads directly to Badiou’s self-identification with a “metaphysics without metaphysics,” to be understood both as a corrective and as a certain acceptance of the Heideggerian problematic vis-à-vis historical metaphysics. I think it is fair to say that the totality of Badiou’s meditation on poetry, and therefore also his “scandalous” announcement of the necessary end of the age of the poets, is made from the position described as metaphysics-without-metaphysics. I will continue this argument through a short engagement with Badiou’s essay on “The Question of Being Today,” where the idea that we must undo the Heideggerian notion of a “saving reversal” in thought concludes with the rejection of Heidegger’s sacralization of the poem, which is also the point where Badiou finds in Heidegger a disavowed metaphysics. The liberation of philosophy from metaphysics is another way of reading the necessary undoing of the poetico-philosophical suture. After those considerations I engage with the series of essays Badiou published on the age of the poets, collected in English in The Age of the Poets. The analysis of what Badiou calls the “fourth relation,” a path that Heidegger could have taken but rejected, is crucial for understanding Badiou’s rupture with Heidegger on poetry. I finish the essay by arguing that there is no end to the age of the poets except as an end concerning the poetico-philosophical suture at the service of a resacralization of existence. This is not a critique of Badiou’s position—I only mean to explicate it, even though my explication may have a bit of a bite, given that I end with the dangerous thought that Badiou may be considered a “left Heideggerian.” In any case, I can only hope that, for those readers not familiar with Badiou’s complex work, it will become clear by the end of my essay that sustained attention to Badiou on poetry reveals not at all a dismissal of the truth dimensions of the poetic word but rather its contemporary rescue—a rescue that I would not hesitate to call “antiphilosophical”—over against the particular mystique of a resacralizing thought that appropriates poetry’s truth and places it at its service.

The annotations that follow take up Badiou’s work after the precise articulation of his historical diagnosis in Manifesto for Philosophy that the age of the poets is complete. They focus on the first four essays included in his Que pense le poème? (2016), which are also, in slightly altered order, the first four essays of his The Age of the Poets (2014), edited and translated by Bruno Bosteels with an introduction by Bosteels and Emily Apter. They are essays from which criticism does not seem to have extracted the necessary consequences, and which have been insufficiently read.¹ Beyond achieving as precise as possible an understanding of what Badiou proposes concerning the poetico-philosophical suture and its dissolution, my interest is to determine the way in which Badiou enables a new presentation of the thought of the poem no longer beholden to the suture of philosophy and poetry, going beyond Heidegger and leaving behind what he considers “archi-metaphysical” (and therefore ontotheological, albeit disavowedly so) in Heidegger’s metapoetics.² I do not want to suggest that the four essays I discuss exhaust the reach of Badiou’s thinking on the age of the poets, roughly to be understood as the age after which we must reinvent the possibility of thought’s freedom. Badiou has other things to say on this and related scores, and he says many of them in his major works, starting with Being and Event, which includes sections on Friedrich Hölderlin and Stéphane Mallarmé, but also in works such as Conditions, The Century, and Handbook of Inaesthetics, and in his seminars.³ The subject has ramifications that extend well into Badiou’s concern with “antiphilosophy” and what he calls sophistics. At some point in The Age of the Poets he says that poetry is to the sophist what mathematics is to the philosopher (47).⁴ But Badiou himself, on the basis of his own articulation of the historical specificity of the age of the poets, knows that such a statement is reductive and unsatisfying. After all, he credits the poetry of the age of the poets with momentous developments in the history of thought. In Manifesto he writes:

If poetry has captured the obscurity of time in the obscure, it is because it has, whatever the diversity or even the irreconcilable dimension of its procedures, dismissed the subject-object “objectifying” frame in which it was philosophically asserted, within the sutures, that the element of time was oriented. Poetic disorientation is first of all, by the law of a truth that makes holes in it, and obliterates all cognition, that an experience, simultaneously subtracted from objectivity and subjectivity, does exist. (73)

And: “Until today, Heidegger’s thinking has owed its persuasive power to having been the only one to pick up what was at stake in the poem, namely the destitution of object fetishism, the opposition of truth and knowledge and lastly the essential disorientation of our epoch” (74). To declare the completion of the age of the poets is to declare that Heidegger’s thought must be left behind in the name of a new conceptualization that solves all the impasses in his thought. That is easier said than done. Badiou’s conceptualization, important as it is, does not have the power to kill what cannot be killed: not Heidegger’s thought, but the problems that his thought attempts to confront.

One of the more interesting aspects of Badiou’s philosophical self-positioning is his acknowledgment that philosophy is endlessly and irreducibly contaminated by the singular experience of existence, which no scientific discursive thinking—that is, no dianoia—can capture. There are as many universalities out there as there are individuals. Poetic truth must be placed and understood in the context of an experience of life that cannot be disposed of by any kind of deductive or apagogic reasoning. And poetry, together with art in general, is better positioned to express the singular than either science or politics. The present essay is just a beginning of work on these issues, as it aims to establish a point from which to proceed, a succinct, but I hope accurate, perspective. My intent is to show that, no matter how powerful Badiou’s critique, the notion of the end of the age of the poets should be circumscribed to the precise end of the poetico-philosophical suture, that is, to the paradoxical pretense that only poetry was a reasonable resource for thought. The age of the poets may have been completed, but Lacoue-Labarthe need not fret so much about the severance of the tie of philosophy and poetry, not even in Badiou’s own thinking. Poetry is not the only reasonable resource for thought, but it is one of them, and it remains an essential one. There has been no end to the poetic drive in philosophical thought, even if the suture itself—the stitching, sewing, tightening up of the borders of philosophy to the borders of poetry—must be given up.

Metaphysics Without Metaphysics

Badiou came to know the work of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa late in life. The encounter was enlightening and led Badiou to say that “philosophy is not—at least not yet—under the condition of Pessoa. Its thought is not yet worthy of Pessoa” (Handbook 36). He explains his excitement, suggesting that Pessoa’s “thought-poem inaugurates a path that manages to be neither Platonic nor anti-Platonic. Pessoa poetically defines a path for thinking that is truly subtracted from the unanimous slogan of the overturning of Platonism. To this day, philosophy has yet to comprehend the full extent of this gesture” (38). These are rather extraordinary words for a thinker who has long defined himself as Platonic, in addition to being an obvious disclaimer of his position that “the Age of the Poets is completed.” He adds a significant observation that might offer a clue to the simultaneous suspension and affirmation of Platonism in Pessoa’s work, which Badiou endorses: “To be worthy of Pessoa would mean accepting the coextension of the sensible and of the Idea but conceding nothing to the transcendence of the One. To think that there is nothing but multiple singularities but not to draw from that tenet anything that would resemble empiricism” (44). Pessoa’s “diagonal path” (39) becomes for Badiou expressive of a poetic truth that sets a condition for philosophical reflection, which must henceforth “follow the path that sets out … in the interval that the poet has opened up for us, a veritable philosophy of the multiple, of the void, of the infinite. A philosophy that will affirmatively do justice to this world that the gods have forever abandoned” (45). The latter, as we will see, is a disparaging observation concerning Heidegger’s work. Badiou’s intention to catch up with Pessoa’s poetic truth takes place on the way to a radical desacralization of thought.

In the same text, and in a manner consistent with the idea of Pessoa’s double relation to Platonism, Badiou mentions the phrase “metaphysics without metaphysics” (42), which he attributes to Judith Balso.⁵ Badiou uses the phrase several times, frequently but not always in reference to Pessoa, and most recently in L’immanence des vérités. In this book he goes so far as to say that the only difference between Pessoa and himself is that “Caeiro, s’inscrivant … dans ce que j’ai appelé ‘l’âge des poètes,’ écrit sa métaphysique sans métaphysique sour la forme de courts poèmes et non de longs traités” [“Caeiro, inscribing himself into that which I have named ‘the age of the poets,’ writes his metaphysics without metaphysics in the form of short poems and not long treatises”] (L’immanence 191; my trans.).⁶ But “metaphysics without metaphysics” also appears without reference to Pessoa in the final paragraph of a less cited but significant essay, “Metaphysics and the Critique of Metaphysics” (2000).⁷ Badiou writes:

A contemporary metaphysics would deserve the name of metaphysics to the degree that it both rejected archi-metaphysical critique and upheld, in the Hegelian style, the absoluteness of the concept. On the contrary, it would not deserve this name if, elucidating from the beginning the infinity of being as mathematizable multiplicity, it would lack any reason whatsoever to postulate the undetermined.

Doubtless this would no longer properly speaking be a dialectical metaphysics, if it is indeed the case that it would no longer need to have recourse to the theme of a historical auto-determination of the undetermined. Rather, it would affirm, in a Platonic style (and therefore metaphysically) albeit in a style bereft of any hyperbolic transcendence of the Good (and therefore outside of metaphysics) that for everything that is exposed to the thinkable there is an idea, and that to link this idea to thought it suffices to decide upon the appropriate axioms.

This is why one could propose that such an enterprise should present itself under the paradoxical name of a metaphysics without metaphysics. (190)

In these sentences Badiou defines his own thought in a way that is strictly parallel to his observations regarding Pessoa’s work, as he will later do in L’immanence des vérités. Yes, the concept is absolute, as the power of the idea is always able to capture the totality of the real. Thinking is being, axiomatically so.⁸ But being is not the One: it is multiple, infinite—it is an infinite multiplicity—and atheistic. Badiou’s work, and not just Pessoa’s, should be thought of as a “metaphysics without metaphysics.” In what follows I take my own “diagonal path” into Badiou’s work to point out the significance he assigns to poetic truth in the context of his philosophical production, and therefore of his understanding of metaphysics.

Heidegger’s Question of Being and Thought’s Freedom

In “The Question of Being Today” (1988), Badiou attributes to Heidegger a commitment to a “saving reversal” (40). I think Heidegger’s thought can be at least partially used, as Badiou himself uses it, in a different direction. After all, Heidegger is the one who denounces metaphysics as “the commandeering of philosophy by the one” (40), which is Badiou’s starting point in that essay. His critique comes in the form of a question, which he tends to answer negatively:

can one undo this bond between being and the one, break with the one’s metaphysical domination of being, without thereby ensnaring oneself in Heidegger’s destinal apparatus, without handing thinking over to the unfounded promise of a saving reversal? For in Heidegger himself the characterization of metaphysics as history of being is inseparable from a proclamation whose ultimate expression … is that ‘only a God can save us.’ (40)

But this is not entirely fair. The sentence from the posthumously-published interview does not need to be taken literally, and there is in Heidegger no promise, no guarantee, of a saving reversal.⁹ He repeatedly alludes to the possibility that the last epoch of metaphysics, in its very exhaustion, might show on its reverse side a way out. He quotes Hölderlin on “the saving power” that comes with danger, but it is a quotation, even if repeated, and its metaphorics do not strictly belong to Heidegger. To my knowledge, Heidegger never says that there is a way out of the destitute or desolate world at the end of metaphysics (any more than he says that a God would save us), only that perhaps there could be one. He also says that poetic truth could and should show the way, which may not be all that different from what Badiou says.¹⁰ Indeed, the way out is what Badiou is searching for. He thinks he can find it, for philosophy, in at least one of its conditions, namely mathematics in its Cantorian and post-Cantorian form, because mathematics offers the example of a pure “ontology” of the “multiple-without-oneness” (“Question” 41). But he also finds it in art, in politics, and in love, to the extent that these truth procedures are in effect purveyors of truth. The task is then to pursue a philosophy based on the renunciation of the power of the one, on the renunciation of any hermeneutical Versammlung, not necessarily for the sake of “dissemination” in the Derridean sense, but rather for the sake of getting rid of the “historical constraint of ontotheology” (41). And our task is to show how, according to Badiou, poetic truth might help.

Badiou’s “The Question of Being Today” accepts the effects of ontotheological metaphysics as diagnosed by Heidegger in Introduction to Metaphysics:¹¹ “the flight of the gods, the destruction of the Earth, the vulgarization of man, the preponderance of the mediocre” (40). Badiou finds in those very effects a “saving” power as well:

Thus the flight of the gods is also the beneficial event of men’s taking-leave of them; the destruction of the Earth is also the conversion that renders it amenable to active thinking; the vulgarization of man is also the egalitarian irruption of the masses onto the stage of history; and the preponderance of the mediocre is also the dense luster of what Mallarmé called “restrained action.”(40)

Philosophy’s task, in order to produce whatever it can produce in the way of “saving” or beneficial effects, is to think through “the immemorial attempt to subtract being from the grip of the one” (40). One could say that this amounts to an announcement of a metaphysics of subtraction over against any metaphysics of presence, and that this is therefore a radically anti-Heideggerian project. But that would be wrong, because mere subtraction does not found a metaphysics but destroys it, and because a final commitment to presence (or to the presentation of presence) is not a conclusion one can comfortably derive from Heideggerian thought.¹² It is possible to accept subtraction as an extremely effective way into the destruction of any metaphysics of presence, always linked to the presenting of the one, and such a procedure of thought does not seem to me incompatible with a certain Heideggerian inheritance, or with a certain way of appropriating that inheritance.

Badiou’s essay goes on to read Plato’s correction to Parmenides on the notion that only being is, that being is the one, and that the one can only be—the one is not, and what about it?—which Badiou discusses in several of his seminars. From there the essay examines the impossibility of any definition of the multiple (“definition is the linguistic way of establishing the predominance of the entity” [43]), as testified by Lucretius and then by axiomatic, mathematical thought. In mathematical ontology (which is not philosophy but only a condition of it), Badiou finds the necessary resource to move away from destinal constraints into a freedom of thought whose exercise is the task of philosophy in the present. Subtractive thought is primarily an-archic thought: “once ontology embraces … a thinking of pure inconsistent multiplicity, it has to abandon every appeal to principles. And conversely … every attempt to establish a principle prevents the multiple from being exhibited exclusively in accordance with the immanence of its multiplicity” (45). An-archic thought has been linked to Heidegger by Reiner Schürmann and others.¹³ Badiou is as committed as Heidegger to an a-principial thought away from hegemonic commonplaces, but he still thinks Heidegger is a thinker of a specifically salvific teleology. He says: “Thought—albeit at the price of the inexplicit or of the impotence of nominations—tears itself from everything that still ties it to the commonplace, to generality, which is the root of its own metaphysical temptation. And it is in this tearing away that I perceive thought’s freedom with regard to its destinal constraint, what could be called its metaphysical tendency” (44–45).

A Mutual Liberation

Mathematics is not philosophy, only one of its conditions; in the same way, poetry is not philosophy, but philosophy must think poetic thought and bring poetry into its form of reflection, not being itself poetry. Some readers today are put off by Badiou’s insistence on an ontology of the multiple-without-oneness derived from post-Cantorian mathematics, partly because they know no mathematics and feel disoriented by his appeal to it. Others are equally put off by what they assume to be Badiou’s abjuration of poetry in his declaration that Paul Celan, confronted by the silence of the philosophical master, brought the age of the poets to its end, as if that meant that poetry is finished as a resource for thought and from now on we can only think politically or mathematically, or preferably mathematico-politically.¹⁴ They fail to understand that what Badiou means regarding the end of the age of the poets is at the same time a liberation of both poetry and philosophy into, respectively, its truth and its conditions. This is subtle, but not excessively subtle: the end of the age of the poets is an end to the “suture” of philosophy and poetry as an exclusive source of meaning, but it is not an end to the philosophical import of poetry or the poetic import of philosophy.

The point for Badiou, speaking as a philosopher and not as a poet, is that the end of the age of the poets liberates poetry from its suture to philosophy as much as it liberates philosophy from its suture to poetry. The suture itself was epochal, that is, historically contingent, and a derivation of a radical malaise in thought: given that philosophy—in the guise of positivism and analytic philosophy on the one hand, and in the guise of Marxism and historical materialism on the other—found itself sutured to science and to politics, a dissenting faction emerged whose most eminent representative would prove to be Friedrich Nietzsche. On the philosophical side, and through procedures that Badiou later names antiphilosophical, Nietzsche initiates a suture of thought to art, initially through his engagement with Richard Wagner’s work and orientation.¹⁵ Heidegger is the second great name of philosophy in the age of the poets, which is why his failure to respond to Celan’s demand concerning the Nazi Holocaust destroys the suture and opens a new path, an imperative both for philosophy to respond to poetry’s demands and for poetry to persist in its own specific register, now liberated from the need to account for a sense of the world and for a sense of sense. Far from establishing a new or renewed destitution of thought, the end of the philosophical age of the poets enables philosophical reflection by cutting the knot that sutured it to poetry and doomed it to think of itself as a producer of poetic truth—in the specific sense of sacred or auratic truth, as we shall see.

Philosophy must now think of poetry as merely one of its conditions. This is probably an even more demanding predicament: the task for philosophy regarding poetry could yet be more arduous today than it was during the age of the poets, and hence even more important. This is also the case for philosophy regarding political or scientific truth, or the truth of love. The stakes have gone up in and after the process of the necessary de-suturing of philosophy from its conditions. Badiou’s work actually says nothing else. The liberation of philosophy from its suture to truth procedures rescues it from its twentieth-century impasses and restores it to its position as the holder of the site of thought’s freedom. The freedom of thought is a not-so-paradoxical consequence of the fact that philosophy is under no obligation to produce political truth, scientific truth, erotic truth, or poetic truth. It only inhabits their paths, and learns from them, and perhaps subverts them.

The Fourth Relation

In the third essay of the series I am concerned with, titled “The Philosophical Status of the Poem After Heidegger,” Badiou detects three historical “regimes” (38) for the link between poetry and philosophy in order to postulate a “fourth relation between philosophy and poetry” (41). Because this fourth relation is the relation that Heidegger fails to establish, in Badiou’s assessment, it is at least plausible to think that this is the relation Badiou favors. If so, it is the relation that will determine the link between philosophy and poetry at the end of the age of the poets, or more precisely, after its end. “What will the poem be after Heidegger—the poem after the age of the poets, the post-romantic poem? … This is something the poets will tell us, for unsuturing philosophy and poetry, taking leave of Heidegger without reverting to aesthetics, also means thinking otherwise the provenance of the poem, thinking it in its operative distance, and not in its myth” (41–42). Badiou then mentions “two indications” (42) that amount, if not to a definition, then at least to a naming of the task of poetry. We must take them to be proleptic indications, to the extent they were provided by poets of the age of the poets and not by poets after Heidegger. One of them comes from Mallarmé and concerns “the moment of the reflection of its pure present in itself or its present purity” (qtd. in Badiou 42). The poem, in the purity of its present, names “what is present only insofar as it no longer disposes of any link with reality to ensure its self-presence” (42). Poetry would then be “the thought of the presence of the present” insofar as the present would have transcended its reality into a form of eternity (42). The second indication comes from Celan. Badiou glosses: “when the situation is saturated by its own norm, when the calculation of itself is inscribed in it without respite, when there is no more void between knowing and foreseeing, then one must poetically be ready to be outside of oneself” (43). The step outside of oneself is an event extracted from the void of sense, from a lack of signification: a leap. Badiou concludes his essay by saying not that those two indications define the poem of the future, but rather that they define what a poem “liberated from philosophical poeticizing” “will always have been”: “the presence of the present in the traversing of realities, and the name of the event in the leap outside of calculable interests” (43). We take this to be the conception of the poem in the fourth relation, according to Badiou. What are the first three, and how is this fourth relation post-Heideggerian?

In Parmenides’s poem there is a tension between the sacredness of the mytheme, which is the structure of authority under which the poem declares its truth, and the truth the poem itself purports to convey, which we could sum up in the notion that only being is.¹⁶ The latter, Badiou says, is necessarily desacralizing. The desacralization of apagogic reasoning, which medieval philosophy called reductio ad absurdum, has no need to rely on anything but its own force of argumentation. “The matheme, here, is that which, making the speaker disappear, emptying its place of any and all mysterious validation, exposes the argumentation to the test of its autonomy, and thus to the critical or dialogical examination of its pertinence” (37). This is the regime of what Badiou calls fusion, where the power of the argument is subordinate to the sacral authority of the enunciation itself. In Plato, however, rather than fusion, a relation of distance obtains. Plato wants to expel the poets from the Republic, as he has understood that “[p]hilosophy cannot establish itself except in the contrast between poem and matheme, which are its primordial conditions (the poem, of which it must interrupt the authority, and the matheme, of which it must promote the dignity” (38–9). The Aristotelian moment, which is the moment of the third relation, is a moment of inclusion in which the poem comes under the jurisdiction of philosophical knowledge, which it classifies as a regional discipline that will later be called aesthetics. The poem has now become an object and is to be treated as such. “In the first case, philosophy envies the poem; in the second it excludes it; and in the third it classifies it” (39).

Badiou, who wants to take his own distance from Heidegger, wishes now to know what Heidegger’s thinking is. He says: “Heidegger has subtracted the poem from philosophical knowledge, in order to render it into truth” (39). Heidegger thoroughly ruins the aesthetic approach without however compromising with Platonic distance. As a philosopher of the age of the poets, Heidegger privileges the “operations by which the poem takes note of a truth of its time,” which, for the Heideggerian period, becomes the destitution of the category of objectivity in ontological presentation, which is a radically anti-Platonic gesture (40). This means—”unfortunately” (40), says Badiou—that what is left is either a return to the sacralization of the saying or the thinking out of a “fourth relation” (41). Heidegger opts for the former: “Heidegger prophesies in the void a reactivation of the sacred within the undecipherable coupling of the saying of the poets and the thinking of the thinkers” (41).

The fourth relation, which opens up at the end of the age of the poets and is a condition of the renewal of a desutured link between philosophy and poetry, is therefore what needs to be thought out or understood beyond the “two indications” given above, which refer both to pure presentiality and to a leap in the void beyond all calculation. If we understand Badiou correctly, this means that pure presentiality and the need for a leap in the void beyond calculation become not philosophical truths but conditions of philosophy. Let me now move to the essay published as the second chapter in Que pense le poème?, that is, “The Age of the Poets.” The English publication places it as first chapter. Badiou is very clear: the “age of the poets” is neither a historicist nor an aesthetic category. It does not mean to put all poetry of the time under a periodizing category; it does not pass judgment on what poets, by belonging to the age, are therefore the greatest poets. It is rather a philosophical category: “the moment proper to the history of philosophy in which the latter is sutured” to poetry (4). This applies to certain poets, or to certain poems within the epoch’s poetic production. They would be poets that accept the suture, and its injunction, and respond to it. Among them Badiou mentions Arthur Rimbaud and Mallarmé, Georg Trakl, Pessoa, Osip Mandelstam, and Celan. In their work “the poetic saying not only constitutes a form of thought and instructs a truth, but also finds itself constrained to think this thought” (5). Thinking the thought of poetry, which poetry in the age of the poets does, is already a move towards the poetico-philosophical suture. It enables it without constituting it.

Take the poems of Alberto Caeiro, one of Pessoa’s heteronyms. “For Caeiro, the essence of thought is to abolish thought” (7). In Caeiro’s poetry, “being does not give itself in the thought of being, for all thinking of being is in reality only the thinking of a thought” (8). Caeiro abolishes the cogito in order to liberate being to its radical exteriority: “I try to say what I feel / Without thinking about things I feel” (qtd. in Badiou 8). For Badiou, conscious reflection is an obstacle to the purity of presence, and it must be abolished so that being may come into its own. Caeiro’s operation is an example. Other operations configure the truths of the poem in the age of the poetico-philosophical suture. Badiou names three, and I propose that they be added to the “two indications” in the fourth relation of poetry and philosophy. The first is “counterromanticism,” which subtracts the poem from the image and the dream in favor of the presentation of a counter-image in the form of a “tacit concept” (13). In the age of the poets, there is a prohibition of the image in place in the thought of the poem. The second is “detotalization” (13). There is a “separate, irreconcilable multiplicity” that is also inconsistent (14). And the third one is “the diagonal” (13), which is the attempt or the wager “that a nomination may come and interrupt signification” (15). Take for example Trakl’s verse: “It is a light, which the wind has blown out” (15). But if the wind has blown out the light, then the light does not appear—or appears only poetically. “The poetic diagonal declares that a faithful thought, thus capable of truth, makes a hole in whatever knowledge is concentrated in significations. It cuts the threads, for another circulation of the current of thought” (16). This involves an endeavor of deobjectification, insofar as the object is “what disposes the multiple of being in relation to meaning or signification” (16). And it also involves a “disorientation in thought” (18), because the sum of those operations “put[s] under erasure the presumption of a sense that gives meaning and orientation to History” (18).

We have, then, as preliminary conditions of the fourth relation, pure presentiality and a leap into the incalculable, the thinking of the abolition of thinking within the poem, the prohibition of the image, the affirmation of an irreconcilable and inconsistent multiplicity, the active production of holes in signification, and the abjuration of a sense of history. Through its operations, the poetry of the age of the poets dismantles the pretensions of both the scientific and the political sutures of philosophy. And it “bequeaths to us, in order to liberate philosophy, the imperative of a clarification without totality, a thinking of what is at once dispersed and unseparated, an inhospitable and cold reason, for want of either object or orientation” (20). Badiou’s question is whether philosophy can be faithful to that legacy, and his claim is that Heidegger fails to be so, instead engaging in a faux resacralization that betrays the philosophical mission that the Greek first beginning had already determined to be the task of philosophy proper. In the final analysis, it amounts to positing that not just poetry in general but the very poetry of the age of the poets must be subjected to a desacralizing operation in order to liberate both poetry to itself and philosophy to its multiple conditions. Poetry is not the end goal of philosophical reflection—no more than politics or love or indeed scientific knowledge. A liberation of philosophy onto itself is therefore to be understood as the interruption of any one suture of philosophy to any one of its conditions—in our case, the interruption of the resacralizing suture of philosophy to poetry. To the extent that the poetry of the age of the poets had already renounced the work of sacralization, the announcement of the end of the age of the poets is really the revealing of Heidegger’s operation of faux resacralization, conditioned by a disavowed ontology of the one. It is also the liberation of poetry from what we have to consider a Heideggerian sequestering of it.

Plato’s Restitution

Before going on to the other two essays in the series, I want to dwell for a moment on a difficulty that the reader may already have sensed: the poetic truth that Badiou’s extraordinary analysis unveils is established by the constellation of poets that configure the age of the poets. Badiou’s claim is that poetic truth conditions philosophical reflection, which must be commensurate to the rigor of poetic discovery. Even if poetry is only one of its conditions, philosophy cannot be oblivious to it, but must let itself be determined by poetic saying. In other words, the fourth relation constrains philosophy, which must find its freedom not in a refusal to meet the truths of its conditions (poetic or otherwise, once they are analytically determined), but rather in what can only be understood as a consistency with them. The fourth relation establishes a rule of consistency for philosophical reflection. This is nothing less than a paradox, because at the core of the poetic analysis we find “an irreconcilable and inconsistent multiplicity” (Badiou, “Question” 45). The paradox is compounded, to my mind, by the proposition that the poetic truth of the age of the poets issues a rule of consistency to philosophy in the fourth relation, which can only be thought of as the relation that obtains at the end or after the end of the age of the poets, when the suture of philosophy to poetry has been arguably dissolved. I will come back to this. Let me now annotate the second essay in the English-language compilation, which is the first in the French volume, titled “What Does the Poem Think?”

Faithful to the poetic truth of Alberto Caeiro’s work, and in fact to the other truths he has delimited in the constellation of the age of the poets, Badiou insists that the poem is a form of thought and not of knowledge:

Not only does the poem have no object, but a large part of its operation aims precisely to deny the object, to ensure that thought no longer stands in a relation to the object. The poem aims for thought to declare what there is by deposing every supposed object. Such is the core of the poetic experience as an experience of thought: to give access to an affirmation of being that is not arranged as the apprehension of an object. (“What” 28–9)

Through “subtraction” and “dissemination” (29) the poem “disconcerts” traditional philosophy because “at the farthest remove from knowledge, the poem is exemplarily a thought that is obtained in the retreat, or the defection, of everything that supports the faculty to know” (31). This is why the poem—or rather, the poem that is consistent with the inconsistent multiplicity of an affirmation of being that radically subtracts from knowledge—is “haunted by a central silence” (24), and from the point of that void in the situation, it prepares its leap into the incalculable:

A pure silence, devoid of anything sacred, it interrupts the general racket. It lodges silence in the central framework of language and, from there, skews it towards an unprecedented affirmation. This silence is an operation. And the poem, in this sense, says the opposite of Wittgenstein. It says: I create silence in order to say that which is impossible to say in the shared language of consensus, to separate it from the world so that it may be said, and always re-said for the first time. (24–5)

It is a silence with a bite: it ruins discursivity. It is radically antiphilosophical. It ignores dianoia (discursive thinking) and every kind of philosophical argumentation. It is “incalculable thought” (33). If dianoia is philosophical procedure, and if it is to be understood as “the thought that passes through, the thought that is the traversing of the thinkable” (33), the poem targets the insufficiency of dianoia, which is also philosophy’s insufficiency. At the end of dianoia, epekeina tes ousias (beyond substance), beyond every possible knowledge of the entity, Badiou says, “the poem is a thought in its very act, which therefore has no need to be also the thought of thought” (34). This is what makes the ancient dispute that Plato evoked between philosophy and poetry necessary: “palaia tis diaphora philosophia te kai poiètikè (‘ancient is the discord between philosophy and poetry’)” (qtd. in Badiou 32). This is the ancient discord that the suture of philosophy and poetry dreams of suspending or reconciling. We can perhaps now better understand the implications of Badiou’s definition of the poetry of the age of the poets in the first essay I examined: “the poems of the age of the poets are those in which the poetic saying not only constitutes a form of thought and instructs a truth, but also finds itself constrained to think this thought” (“Age” 5). The intrusion into poetry of the thought of thought echoes the intrusion into philosophy of the strange and inconspicuous and de-objectified “light, which the wind has blown out”: the ancient dark light of withdrawing being. We have come back to the unheard-of meditation of Alberto Caeiro, according to which “[b]eing does not give itself in the thought of being, for all thinking of being is in reality only the thinking of a thought” (“Age” 8).¹⁷

It is now possible to understand that the posited rupture of the poetico-philosophical suture is far from an abjuration of poetry, and that there was no need for Lacoue-Labarthe to worry. Poetic truth persists at the end of dianoia without being claimed by it. And yet dianoia must not ban it. But Plato did. The core of the fourth essay I wish to examine concerns the insufficiency of the Platonic gesture of violence against the poets in The Republic for the configuration of philosophy in our present. The fourth relation determines thought’s freedom not through the abjuration of poetic truth but rather through the opening of thought to the determinations of poetic truth in the age of the poets. The consistency of philosophy must thus be understood as an acceptance of the radical inconsistency of objectless being. Heidegger is said to have recoiled in the face of it, towards the sacred of the first regime of the link between poetry and philosophy. Badiou persists in philosophical desacralization while remaining faithful to poetic operations. This is, I believe, the extent of the difference Badiou claims from Heidegger, which still retains Badiou in the Heideggerian wake and enables us to understand why the end of the age of the poets is a limited or restrained end, itself a philosophical operation through which philosophy opens itself again to its political and scientific and erotic conditions. The fourth essay in the series, “Philosophy and Poetry from the Vantage Point of the Unnameable,” points out the stakes for the futures of philosophy after the Heideggerian suture.

The Incalculable Wager

Let me recapitulate Badiou’s list of poetic truths in the age of the poets, a list that forms a nontotalizing but epochal account of poetic destiny after the twentieth century: pure objectless presentiality and a leap into the incalculable; the thought of the abolition of thinking within the poem for the sake of a liberation of exteriority; the prohibition of the image, which always hides more than it reveals; the affirmation of an irreconcilable and inconsistent multiplicity as unnameable being; the active production of holes in signification, which amounts to a liberation of language from the constraints of inscription; and the surrender of a sense of oriented history. If reflection on what is imperative about those truths determines philosophy, the ensuing philosophical reflection will be opposed to any kind of archeo-teleo-onto-theology. It will be an an-archic philosophy without principles; it will suspend any positing of ends; it will understand being as the very void of ground; and it will not submit to any paternal sacredness or indeed to sacredness of any kind. Beyond that, it will only affirm thought’s freedom to proceed to an order of singular, contingent, existential nomination. Is that Badiou’s philosophy? I believe it is, in spite of everything.

Poetry bothers and disconcerts philosophy not simply because philosophy, as a dianoetic process that believes in the transparency of the matheme and wants to get as close to it as possible, abhors “the metaphorical obscurity of the poem” (“Philosophy and Poetry” 48). In particular, the poetry of the time of the poetico-philosophical suture, as Badiou now repeats, “identifies itself as thought. It is not only the effectiveness of a form of thinking proffered in the flesh of words; it is also the set of operations by which this thinking thinks itself” (49). The poetry of the age of the poets has therefore usurped some of the functions of philosophy, because philosophy “has no other stakes but to think thinking, to identify thought as the thinking of thinking” (48). Double jeopardy: if poetry is also the thought of thought, then philosophy must include poetry in its purview, because philosophy is the thinking of thinking, therefore also the thinking of the thinking of thinking. Poetry is lodged deeply into philosophy in ways that are now more pervasive than they presumably were in Platonic times, and even in Heideggerian times. Philosophy has no choice but to deal with it, short of merely disavowing it as a condition of itself, thus betraying itself. Philosophy cannot not think poetry as a truth procedure.

But there is another problem: mathematics, the model science, the paradigm of philosophy’s dianoetic method, has evolved into an erratic situation, has been traversed, after Cantor, Gödel, and Cohen, by a principle of errancy “on which it cannot put a measure” (50). Mathematics and poetry have begun to move towards each other, very much against the Platonic injunction of radical distance. “At the same time that the poem arrives at the poetic thought of the thinking that it is,” Badiou writes, “the matheme organizes itself around a point of flight in which the real appears as the impasse of all formalization” (50). Both poetry and mathematics, as conditions of philosophy, find their contemporary abyssal ground, are de-grounded, by a point of unnameability that is at the same time their power and their powerlessness: “any truth stumbles upon the rock of its own singularity, and only there can it be announced, as powerlessness, that there is a truth” (54). This stumbling block is to be named as “the unnameable” (54), because truth can cannot force its nomination in either poetry or mathematics. The mathematical unnameable is consistency, just as the poetic unnameable is power. Both are simultaneously done and undone in unnameability as nomination. And this is Badiou’s move: “philosophy will place itself under the double condition of the poem and the matheme, both from the side of their power of veridiction and from the side of their powerlessness, or their unnameable” (57). Finally, against Plato and as the very condition of his exit from the age of the poets, Badiou must choose to “welcome the poem in our midst, because it keeps us from supposing that the singularity of a thought can be replaced by the thought of this thought” (58). If so, then the task of poetry from the perspective of philosophy is far from completed. This final appeal to the singularity, contingency, and inconsistency of thought, from which alone a word, in the form of a wager, can be issued towards the incalculable—for me, it means that philosophy has now become open to thought’s freedom, which is the rare freedom of existence.¹⁸

How to Live

The essay entitled “The Age of the Poets,” we read, “was first published in French as part of the seminar at the Collège International de Philosophie organized and subsequently edited by Jacques Rancière under the title La politique des poètes: Pourquoi des poètes en temps de dètresse? (Badiou, Age 206). The question in Rancière’s title quotes Hölderlin’s “Bread and Wine” elegy, and references a great and controversial lecture given on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of Rainer Maria Rilke’s death in 1946. Heidegger’s “Why Poets?” opens in immediate reference to Hölderlin’s elegy and quotes the missing words in the title’s question: “in a desolate time” (“Why Poets?” 200). Most of Heidegger’s lecture focuses on Rilke’s later poetry, from the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus to even later texts, and on some of his letters. But in order to move toward my conclusion, I concentrate on the first few paragraphs of the lecture that have to do not just with Hölderlin but also with the Heideggerian determination of the historical time between Hölderlin and himself as an age of poetry or an age of the poets.

Our “desolate” time is presented by Heidegger as the time of the death of God and of divinity:

In the default of God notice is given of something even worse. Not only have the gods and God fled, but the radiance of divinity is extinguished in world-history. The time of the world’s night is the desolate time because the desolation grows continually greater. The time has already become so desolate that it is no longer able to see the default of God as a default. (200)

The age of the world’s night is the age of the poets because “the abyss of the world must be experienced and must be endured. However, for this it is necessary that there are those who reach into the abyss” (201). When poets reach into the abyss they find “the tracks of the fugitive gods” (202). This has consequences: the “aether,” as it shelters the tracks of the fugitive gods, is “the sacred” (202). “Yet who is capable of tracing such tracks? Tracks are often inconspicuous, and they are always the legacy of instruction scarcely divined. This is why the poet, at the time of the world’s night, utters the sacred. This is the reason that the world’s night, in Hölderlin’s language, is the sacred night” (202). The world’s night is the time of desolation. At such a time “the condition and vocation of the poet have first become poetic questions for them. That is why ‘poets in a desolate time’ must specifically speak the essence of poetry in their poems” (203). The essence of poetry is to dwell in the sacred but empty night of the death of God. The death of God is the final accomplishment of the metaphysical destiny of Western humanity which, in Hölderlin, Heidegger tells us, manifests itself “more intimately than [in] any other poet of his time” (203). That means that Hölderlin’s poetry, which dwells in an essential “manifestness of being within the fulfillment of metaphysics” and at the same time dwells in and experiences “the extreme oblivion of being” (204), forces philosophy into a particular necessity: “by thinking soberly in what is said in his poetry, to experience what is unsaid. … If we enter upon this course, it brings thinking and poetry together in a dialogue engaged with the history of being” (204).

The last sentence perhaps organizes for twentieth-century thought the (contested) age of the poets as the age of the poetico-philosophical suture: from that determination poetry thinks the task of thought. If philosophy takes poetry’s word for it, without critique, through a submission to a principle of poetic authority, the poetico-philosophical suture is consummated. This is essentially what Badiou means to undo. In Heidegger, philosophy does it not directly in the name of the sacred but of an active search for the traces of the sacred, which at the time of the consummation of metaphysics tracks the flight of the gods but also awaits “the advent of the fugitive gods,” that is, their possible return (202). In the context of such powerful imagery, it might seem superfluous to point out that the rest of the essay, which no longer glosses Hölderlin, is concerned with an analysis of Rilke’s poetry as still under the sway of metaphysics, concretely under the sway of a Nietzschean interpretation of being as will-to-power. But his conclusion reintroduces the theme of the return of the sacred. The translation in what follows is confusing, because “the whole” translates das Heile and “the unwhole” is heil-los, but here it is: “Because they experience unwholeness as such, poets of this kind who risk more are underway on the track of the holy. … The unwhole, as the unwhole, traces for us what is whole. What is whole beckons and calls to the holy [das Heilige]. The holy binds the divine. The divine brings God closer” (240). The poets “of what is whole” are “poets in a desolate time” of whom “Hölderlin is the forerunner” (240). The game is served. The poets of the age of the poets, who organize and even direct the dialogue between poetry and philosophy with the history of being, are poets of the holy, poets of the sacred, poets concerned with the flight and the return of the gods.

This is something that Badiou cannot bear, and it is the very motor of his position. It is no doubt why “The Philosophical Status of the Poem After Heidegger” is explicit in his denial. “Now philosophy cannot begin,” he writes, “except by a desacralization: it installs a discursive regime that is its own, purely earthly legitimation. Philosophy demands that the mysterious and sacred authority of proffered profundity be interrupted by the secularism of argumentation” (36). There is to be no dialogue between poetry and philosophy in the name or under the yoke of the sacred. Only a fusion regime, such as the Parmenidean one, would tolerate the contrary state of affairs. The development of a fourth relation in the link between poetry and philosophy, which establishes poetry as truth procedure as a condition of philosophy, at the same time subjects poetry to a philosophical and philosophically desacralizing critique. Let us remember the minimal definition of the fourth relation: poetry is “the presence of the present in the traversing of realities, and the name of the event in the leap outside of calculable interests.” The sacred appears as a “calculable interest.” This is the real rupture away from the age of the poets, which is not the end of the philosophical efficacy of poetry; it is simply a reorientation of purpose.

In the “Art and Poetry” chapter of Badiou: A Subject to Truth, Peter Hallward follows the latter’s Handbook of Inaesthetics, saying:

Whereas mathematics composes the truth of ‘the pure multiple as the primordial inconsistency of being as being,’ being evacuated of all material presence or sensual intensity, ‘poetry makes truth of the multiple as presence come to the limits of language. It is the song of language insofar as it presents the pure notion of there is in the very erasure of its empirical objectivity.’ (196–97)

This is consistent with the first part of the minimal definition of the fourth relation that organizes the post-sutural link of poetry and philosophy. Yet Hallward is resolute in declaring that

[d]uring the true age of poetry (roughly, from Rimbaud to Celan), poetry rightly took on some of the functions abandoned by a philosophy temporarily preoccupied with the sterile hypotheses of scientific positivism and historical materialism. This age, however, has now passed. The poem is simply incapable of a genuinely philosophical self-awareness. The poem declares the Idea, but not the truth of the Idea. The poem can aspire to condition philosophy, not to replace it. (200)

It is one thing to give up on the understanding of the relationship between poetry and philosophy as a relationship bound to the silence of the divine, but a poetry that no longer dwells “in the sacred night of the death of God” may still maintain, in Badiou’s concrete determination, “a genuinely philosophical self-awareness.” Hallward is wrong. Badiou has shown, and we have seen, that poetry cannot be reduced to its Heideggerian definition for the age of the poets. This is why Badiou’s declaration of the end of age of the poets is a liberation of poetry from philosophy as much as it is a liberation of philosophy from poetry. But it is the kind of liberation that makes a better encounter possible.

We may now come back to Badiou’s “Metaphysics and the Critique of Metaphysics,” and to his definition of philosophy. Badiou says:

Not only, and contrary to what Hamlet declares, is there nothing in the world which exceeds our philosophical capacity, but there is nothing in our philosophical capacity which could not come to be in the reality of the world. It is this coextensivity in actu of conceptual invention and of a reality-effect that is called the absolute, and it is this that is the sole stake of philosophy. (189)

Philosophy thinks the absolute because it thinks and is able to think not only poetic truth in the guise of the invention of presence (reality-effect) at the limit of language, but also because it is prepared to offer to name the event in the leap outside of calculable interests, which is the only possible name of conceptual invention. At the end of Logics of Worlds, in the conclusion titled “What Is It to Live?” Badiou says:

I am sometimes told that I see in philosophy only a means to reestablish, against the contemporary apologia of the futile and the everyday, the rights of heroism. Why not? Having said that, ancient heroism claimed to justify life through sacrifice. My wish is to make heroism exist through the affirmative joy which is universally generated by following consequences through. We could say that the epic heroism of the one who gives his life is supplanted by the mathematical heroism of the one who creates life, point by point. (514)

But then there is also a poetic heroism that takes poetic truth beyond the minimal conditions of the fourth relation and expands them to include a liberation of exteriority, the active production of holes in signification, which amounts to a liberation of language from the constraints of inscription and the surrender of a sense of oriented history. Does this not lead to a certain derangement of old metaphysical presuppositions while still holding well back from any archimetaphysical projection (which is Badiou’s objection to Heidegger)? Insisting on it, on the derangement as such, would be the inconsistent consistency of the poet.

There is no end to the age of the poets except as an end concerning the poeticophilosophical suture at the service of a resacralization of existence. Only the poets may continue to instruct in what is still essential: that the end of the metaphysical epoch in its ontotheological configuration imposes a displacement from the meaningfulness that was the privilege of metaphysical humanity; that the breakdown of expectations in the wake of the ontological event of the end of metaphysics brings about the destruction of hermeneutics to such an extent that the entry into any sort of fidelity to that event must be thought of as an appropriation into truth (in its full play of concealment and revelation) and not into meaning. In Contributions to Philosophy, Heidegger says that a certain “restraint” (Verhältnis) is the appropriate mood and style for existing at the end of metaphysical humanity.¹⁹ I could rephrase this by saying that restraint, perhaps in the wake of the Mallarméan notion of “restricted action,” is the faithful and guarded relation to the errant truth of our times, which becomes eternal truth in our “subjective fidelity.” And memory, the poetic memory of our future implied in any commitment to the philosophical Idea, can only be a memory of disruption, the memory of a fundamental unknowability to be paired with Badiou’s conceptual invention of the absolute. The immemorial is the breakdown of signification and the radical point of non-measure that organizes the mutual need, the mutual use, of being and thinking—of thinking by being and of being by thinking. This is learning how to live poetically, and this is how I read Badiou on how to live poetically, which philosophy only thinks about. It might be too Heideggerian for Badiou; he may not like it. But I think he might like it even less if I were to call him, at the end of the day, the prince of the left Heideggerians.²⁰

Alberto Moreiras is Professor of Hispanic Studies and Latinx and Mexican American Studies at Texas A&M. He has taught at University of Wisconsin-Madison, Duke University, and the University of Aberdeen, and has held visiting positions at numerous institutions (Emory, Johns Hopkins, Minas Gerais, Chile, Buffalo). He is the author of Interpretación y diferencia (1991), Tercer espacio: literatura y duelo en América Latina (1999), The Exhaustion of difference: The Politics of Latin American Cultural Studies (2002), Línea de sombra. El no sujeto de lo político (2008), Marranismo e inscripción, o el abandono de la conciencia desdichada (2016), Infrapolítica. La diferencia absoluta de la que ningún experto puede hablar (2019), Sosiego siniestro (2020) and Infrapolítica: Instrucciones de uso (2020). He is a coeditor of Política común, and of the “Border Hispanisms” Series at University of Texas Press.

Footnotes

1. See for instance Tom Eyers or Christian Doumet; both have written failed essays in my opinion, informative as they are in their own ways, to the extent that they get lost in inessential considerations and neglect to focus on what is determinant for the philosophy/poetry relation in Badiou. Justin Clemens’s “Eternity is Coming” also fails to focus on the most relevant philosophical contribution of the book it reviews. Apters and Bosteels’s introduction to The Age of the Poets suffers from the same problem even though their knowledge of Badiou is not in question. There is a tendency in some of these critics, particularly in Eyers and Apter and Bosteels, to concentrate their remarks on the second half of the book, which really concerns early attempts by Badiou to come to terms with Althusserian Marxism’s notions of the relative autonomy of art, bypassing what is for me new and crucial in Badiou’s theses on the end of the age of the poets and the legacies of the latter for contemporary thought. Let me however take this opportunity to praise Tom Betteridge’s enlightening essay. This essay does not mention The Age of the Poets; it takes most of what he wants to comment on from Badiou’s The Century. But it is an excellent introduction to the different ways in which Heidegger and Badiou relate to the notion of “homecoming” in reference to Hölderlin and Celan respectively. Celan is of course one of the major references in Badiou’s “age of the poets.”

2. Badiou’s critique of the critique of metaphysics is not limited to Heidegger’s hermeneutics, but extends to Kant’s critical philosophy and to Comtian positivism. All three of them would revert, in Badiou’s determination, to a disavowed metaphysics in the form of an “archi-metaphysics.” He says:

critique, positivism, and hermeneutics, even if we were to grant them that they diagnose metaphysics correctly, merely replace it with what we shall call an archi-metaphysics, that is, with the suspension of sense to an undetermined that is purely and simply left to the historical determination of its coming. Archi-metaphysics is the replacement of a necessary undetermined with a contingent one, or: the established power of an unknown master is opposed by the poetics and the prophetics of the to-come. This is the case with the mystical element in Wittgenstein, as with the metaphorical God in Heidegger or the positivist church in Comte. (“Metaphysics” 181)

3. See Badiou’s Being and Event, The Century, Conditions, and Handbook of Inaesthetics.

4. The question of antiphilosophy is a ticklish issue in Heidegger, for instance; it would be concerned with Heidegger’s thought on “the other beginning” and the cryptic writings he developed starting with Contributions to Philosophy and through the mid-1940s, and which he never wanted to publish while he was alive. Those volumes are still coming out in the Gesamtausgabe and most are as yet untranslated, in addition to Contributions to Philosophy, Mindfulness, History of Being, Metaphysik und Nihilismus and Die Stege des Anfangs (the latter still unpublished). Badiou never discusses them explicitly, but the thought of a possible antiphilosophy in Heidegger is in the background of his Heidegger seminar, and later in the antiphilosophy project in contemporary thought, that is, after Friedrich Nietzsche. See Badiou’s Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy; Nietzsche; and Lacan.

5. See Judith Balso, especially pp. 54–61.

6. See 191–96 on the poems of Alberto Caeiro.

7. See Badiou’s “Metaphysics.” The essay is also significant in terms of establishing Badiou’s antipathy for any kind of hermeneutical approach to truth, including but not limited to the Heideggerian one. It is hard to find fault with Badiou’s critique as far as it goes, although I would like to say that it is or would have been quite possible, perhaps also desirable, to take a more generous approach to Heidegger’s notion of a destruction of metaphysics without necessarily reducing him to the condition of an “archimetaphysical” thinker.

8. Badiou posits, following Hegel and for reasons that have to do with his endorsement of dialectics, that the identification of thinking and being is an axiomatic point of departure for philosophy: a “preliminary thesis,” he calls it. It is axiomatic obviously because it is also highly debatable—and the axiom takes care of the debate, preempting it. This is the key passage:

Dogmatic metaphysics defends the rights of indeterminacy only within the bounds of a preliminary thesis which affirms that thought and the thinkable are homogeneous to each other. As Hegel writes in the introduction to the Science of Logic: “Ancient metaphysics had in this respect a higher conception of thinking than is common today … This metaphysics believed that thinking (and its determinations) is not anything alien to the object, but rather is its essential nature … and that thinking in its immanent determinations and the true nature of things form one and the same content.”(“Metaphysics” 182)

9. See Heidegger, “‘Only a God.’” The interview was done by Der Spiegel on September 23, 1966, but Heidegger requested that it be published only after his death. Der Spiegel published it on May 31, 1976. These are the more relevant passages:

Spiegel:
Now the question naturally arises: Can the individual man in any way still influence this web of fateful circumstance? Or, indeed, can philosophy influence it? Or can both together influence it, insofar as philosophy guides the individual, or several individuals, to a determined action?

Heidegger:
If I may answer briefly, and perhaps clumsily, but after long reflection: philosophy will be unable to effect any immediate change in the current state of the world. This is true not only of philosophy but of all purely human reflection and endeavor. Only a god can save us. The only possibility available to us is that by thinking and poetizing we prepare a readiness for the appearance of a god, or for the absence of a god in [our] decline, insofar as in view of the absent god we are in a state of decline.

Spiegel:
Is there a correlation between your thinking and the emergence of this god? Is there here in your view a causal connection? Do you feel that we can bring a god forth by our thinking?

Heidegger:
We cannot bring him forth by our thinking. At best we can awaken a readiness to wait [for him].”

(“Only a God” 57).

It is obvious that Heidegger’s emphasis has to do with his assumption that no human action by itself can determine a change in historical conditions, and thought can only prepare a possible change of epoch. An emphasis on the arrival of the future and salvific god is perhaps legible in these words, but I tend to read them in quite the opposite way: if there is any possibility of retrieval of a non-destitute future for humanity, it will have to come from elsewhere. We are impotent concerning it. One can definitely think this is a bad or even untenable political position but I do not see it as a particularly religious one. The “waiting” regarding an absence that may or may not find a solution is to be thought of as a posture of thought that preempts nihilistic fatalism rather than a manner of prayer.

10. Heidegger refers to the verses in Hölderlin’s “Patmos” elegy in connection with the destiny of the world in the 1946 lecture “Why Poets?” As this connects with the previous note and with Badiou’s insistence on Heidegger as a thinker of religious salvation, let me quote the extended paragraph:

The essence of technology is dawning only slowly. This day is the world’s night made over as the purely technological day. It raises the threat of a single endless winter. Man now forgoes not only defense, but the unbroken entirety of beings remains in darkness. What is whole withdraws. The world is being emptied of what is whole and heals. As a result, not only does the holy remain hidden as the track to the godhead, but even what is whole, the track to the holy, appears to be extinguished. Unless there are still mortals capable of seeing what is unwhole and unhealing threaten as unwhole and unhealing. They would have to discern which is the danger that assails man. The danger consists in the menace that bears on the essence of man in his relationship to being itself, but not in accidental perils. The danger is the danger. It conceals itself in the abyss in its relation to all beings. In order to see and to expose the danger, there must be such who first reach into the abyss.

But where the danger lies, there also grows

that which saves. (Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, vol. IV, p. 190) (“Why Poets?” 221–22)

What saves is therefore not the godhead but poetic truth. Those who are able to discern the danger are, as the essay will make clear, “the poets in a desolate time” (240). The 1955 lecture “The Question Concerning Technology” presents Hölderlin’s verses along similar lines, talking about Ancient Greece:

What, then, was art—perhaps only for that brief but magnificent time? Why did art bear the modest name techne? Because it was a revealing that brought forth and hither, and therefore belonged within poiesis. It was finally that revealing which holds complete sway in all the fine arts, in poetry, and in everything poetical that obtained poiesis as its proper name. The same poet from whom we heard the words “But where danger is, grows the saving power also’ says to us: ‘poetically dwells man upon this earth.” (34)

The saving power is the art of poetic revealing, or poetic truth. It does not seem to me Heidegger says anything else, particularly not anything “theological.”

11. In his 1985–1986 seminar on Heidegger, Badiou actually links them to the conclusions Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels reach in The Communist Manifesto. The November 18, 1986 session refers to the same passages from Introduction to Metaphysics (1935), and immediately associates them with the famous passages on the melting away of everything solid at the hands of the bourgeoisie in The Communist Manifesto. Badiou then says:

La vigueur de ce texte est absolument intacte, ce qu’il décrit continue à se derouler sous nos yeux, et, dans sa substance, c’est bien ce que Heidegger décrit sous le nom de nihilism. Comment penser cette difference entre la predication nihiliste et ce qui est décrit ici comme les effets inéluctables de la generalization du capital? Tout est dans l’accent, l’orientation de la pensée, et non dans les termes.

[The vigor of this text is absolutely intact, that which it describes continues to deploy itself under our eyes, and it is what Heidegger names nihilism. How to think this difference between nihilist predication and what is described here as the ineluctable effects of the generalization of capital? Everything hinges on the accent, the orientation of the thought, not on the terms.] (Heidegger 60; my trans.)

Badiou finds here what I believe is the kernel of his disagreement with Heidegger, which I would propose we understand as the generative site of everything Badiou says against Heidegger. Yes, it is a question of the orientation of thought within the general disorientation produced both by nihilism and the bourgeois revolution. This is the time of the age of the poets, as we will see. It is clear that Badiou prefers the Marxist position, according to which we are convoked to a “beginning that will not recommence anything, because there is nothing to recommence” (61). The general dissolution of the old social links are for Marx “the condition of a production of truth” (61) while for Heidegger they would be the site of “a nostalgia for a return of categories whose loss of sense is deplorable. He aspires to the re-sacralization of existence, to the reappropriation of the site” (60). For Marx, instead, the real question is different: “There where Heidegger convokes us to the return of the sacred, Marx says to us: Is it possible to continue the dissolution of the images through a means other than Capital” (61), can we move to a new production of truth not based on a return of the old? Ultimately, Heidegger’s “other beginning” probably has nothing to do with any return of the ancient sacred; it is also a new production of truth. But we must agree with Badiou that there are rhetorical configurations in Heidegger’s text that project a reactionary politicity Badiou finds abhorrent and thoroughly counterproductive.

12. See on this Jacques Derrida’s “Ousia and Gramme,” in particular 63–67. Talking about Heidegger’s “The Anaximander Fragment,” Derrida says that, on the one hand, Heidegger thinks or attempts to think of modalities of presence; on the other hand, he seeks to call all modalities of presence in general “the Greco-Western-philosophical closure” (65). Derrida states that all the arduous fundamental meditations by Heidegger on presence, including the text on Anaximander, are intra-metaphysical meditations, but he also says that Heidegger is aware of it and that in such an awareness he prepares another gesture, “the more difficult, more unheard-of, more questioning gesture, the one for which we are least prepared” (65). This would be a gesture that “only permits itself to be sketched, announcing itself in certain calculated fissures of the metaphysical text” (65).

13. See Schürmann. See also Alberto Moreiras, ed., “On Reiner Schürmann.”

14. See James K. Lyon for a careful and fairly complete account of the relationship between the poet and the philosopher. See also Charles Bambach. For Badiou’s considerations on the (mis)encounter see Badiou’s Manifesto 85–89.

15. Badiou makes much of the importance of Nietzsche’s relationship with Wagner to shape Nietzsche’s process of philosophical production and existential reflection. In fact, for Badiou the impossibility of saving the Wagner relation made Nietzsche’s antiphilosophical trip rather desperate and led to a particular kind of impasse. See Badiou, Nietzsche, particularly 233–311.

16. On the “mytheme” see Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger and the Politics of Poetry, in particular “Prologue: Heidegger’s Onto-Mythology,” 11, and “Poetry, Philosophy, Politics,” where Lacoue-Labarthe engages Badiou’s notion of the poetico-philosophical suture (18–37). Badiou also engages with the Parmenidean poem and with Plato’s Parmenides in a number of seminars, but let me refer in particular to the 1986–1987 seminar on Heidegger, Heidegger, where Badiou also discusses at length Heidegger’s relationship to poetry and rehearses his own notion of the poetico-philosophical suture. See in particular on Parmenidean issues and the exit from Parmenides’s apagogic reasoning, pp. 179–216. See also of course the 1985–1986 seminar on Parmenides, Parménide, now available in English as “Heidegger’s Parmenides.”

17. See on this the literary hoax or semi-hoax perpetrated by Yoandy Cabrera, Rodolfo Ortiz and myself, which nevertheless includes earnest reflection on Alberto Caeiro’s poetry and profile: Caeiro, Alberto and Timoteo Moreira. Infracendencia. Inéditos del entorno (¿póstumo?) de Fernando Pessoa, transcription and notes by Alberto Moreiras, with an Introduction by Rodolfo Ortiz, with a Postface and notes by Yoandy Cabrera. See for Caeiro, Fernando Pessoa.

18. I have tried to reflect on these issues in my book Infrapolítica. Instrucciones de uso.

19. “Restraint is the style of inceptual thinking only because it must become the style of future humanity grounded in Da-Sein, i.e., only because it bears this grounding and is its pervasive disposition. Restraint, as style: the self-certainty of the grounding measure and of the sustained wrath of Da-sein. It determines and disposes the style, because it is the basic disposition” (Heidegger, Contributions 28).

20. The 2015 foreword to Badiou’s 1992–1993 seminar on Nietzsche concludes with the following words: “On verra comment, gouverné par cette profonde sympathie, le commentant en detail et l’admirant sans avoir pour autant à lui concéder quoi que ce soit, j’ai pu décerner à Nietzsche, en mon seul nom, le titre suivant: prince pauvre et définitif de l’antiphilosophie” [We shall see how, governed by this profound sympathy, commenting on him in detail and admiring him without however having to concede anything, I have been able to discern in Nietzsche, in my name only, the following title: poor and decisive prince of antiphilosophy] (Nietzsche 11; my trans.).

Works Cited

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