Category: Volume 32 – Number 2 – January 2022

Anthony Alessandrini teaches English at Kingsborough Community College and Middle Eastern Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. He is the author of Frantz Fanon and the Future of Cultural Politics; the editor of Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives; and the co-editor of “Resistance Everywhere”: The Gezi Protests and Dissident Visions of Turkey. His book Decolonize Multiculturalism is forthcoming.

Robert F. Carley is an Associate Professor of International Studies at Texas A&M University, College Station. He is the author of Cultural Studies Methodology and Political Strategy: Metaconjuncture (2021), Gramscian Critical Pedagogy (2021), Culture and Tactics: Gramsci, Race, and the Politics of Practice (2019), Autonomy, Refusal, and the Black Bloc (2019), and Collectivities (2016). His most recent article, “Intersecting Oppressions; Intersecting Struggles: Race, Class, and Subalternity” (2022) appears in the Journal of Class and Culture. He is a member of the Governing Board of the Cultural Studies Association and co-edits Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association.

Katherine Ford is Professor of Hispanic Studies and Chair of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at East Carolina University. She specializes in Modern Latin American literature, concentrating on theater and performance of the twentieth century. She is the author of essays on Latin American and Latinx theater and of the books Theater of Revisions in the Hispanic Caribbean (2017) and Politics and Violence in Cuba and Argentina (2010). She is currently looking at the connections between theater and film and the role of the humanities in community engagement.

Judith Goldman is the author of four books of poetry, most recently agon (Operating System 2017), and a number of articles on contemporary poetry and poetics; she has performed her work nationally and internationally. In 2019–2020, a collaborative, multi-media installation Open Waters [Northwest Passage + Open Polar Sea + Arctic Plastic] was exhibited at the Burchfield Penney Art Center in Buffalo, NY. Goldman is Associate Professor in the Department of English at SUNY, Buffalo, where she directs its Poetics Program. She is also the Poetry Features Editor for Postmodern Culture.

Geo Maher is a Philadelphia-based writer and organizer, and Visiting Associate Professor of Global Political Thought at Vassar College. He has taught at Drexel University, San Quentin State Prison, and the Venezuelan School of Planning in Caracas, and has held visiting positions at the College of William and Mary’s Decolonizing Humanities Project, NYU’s Hemispheric Institute, and the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). He his co-editor of the Duke University Press series Radical Américas and author of five books: We Created Chávez (Duke, 2013), Building the Commune (Verso, 2016), Decolonizing Dialectics (Duke, 2017), A World Without Police (Verso, 2021), and Anticolonial Eruptions (University of California, 2022).

Jose-Luis Moctezuma is a Xicano poet. He is the author of two poetry collections, Place-Discipline (Omnidawn, 2018) and Black Box Syndrome (forthcoming from Omnidawn, 2023). His poetry and criticism have appeared or are forthcoming in Fence, Jacket2, Chicago Review, Modernism/modernity, and elsewhere. He lives and teaches in Chicago.

Chantal Peñalosa (1987, Tecate, Mexico) studied fine arts at the Universidad Autónoma de Baja California and the University of São Paulo. She was awarded the acquisition prize in the XIV Bienal de Artes Visuales del Noroeste and was awarded FONCA fellowships in the Young Artists category (2013–2014 and 2015–2016). In 2014 she was also recipient of the Programa Bancomer-MACG in its 4th edition. Peñalosa’s research-based practice stems from small gestures and interventions in everyday life, which are meant to expound upon notions of labor, waiting, and delay. Repetition is a crucial element in her process, functioning as an allusion to the absurdity, weathering, and alienating effects of work. For Peñalosa repeating actions evoke latent states in which dialogue appears unilateral and time suspended. Her work has been shown in MUAC (2022), Museo Jumex (2021); Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil (2021); M HKA Museum, Belgium (2019); ESPAC, Mexico (2019); XII Bienal FEMSA, Mexico (2018); Museo Amparo, Mexico (2018); CCI Fabrika, Russia (2017); La Tallera, Mexico (2015); ZKM Center for Art and Media, Germany (2015); and MUAC, Mexico (2014), and elsewhere.

Matthew J. Rigilano is an Assistant Teaching Professor at Penn State Abington, where he teaches writing and English. His research ranges across 18th century British literature and culture, the theory of the novel, psychoanalysis, and philosophies of the subject.

Matthew Scully is Lecturer (Maître assistant) at the University of Lausanne, where he teaches American literature and culture from the 18th century to the present. His book project, “Democratic Anarchy: Figures of Equality in United States Literature and Politics,” engages the anxious intersections of politics and aesthetics to develop a new theory of democratic equality in twentieth- and twenty-first-century American literature and culture. Work from this project and related research have appeared in the Journal of Modern Literature, Diacritics, American Literature, and African American Review.

Erick Verran is an independent scholar and poet whose literary criticism and articles have appeared or are forthcoming in Virginia Woolf Miscellany, Contemporary Aesthetics, Georgia Review, and Journal of Sound and Music in Games. Obiter Dicta, a collection of short essays, was published by Punctum Books in 2021. His poetry last appeared in the Massachusetts Review. He lives in New York.

Ewa Płonowska Ziarek is Julian Park Professor of Comparative Literature at University at Buffalo and a Visiting Faculty in the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts, Maine. Most recently she co-authored with Rosalyn Diprose Arendt, Natality and Biopolitics: Towards Democratic Plurality and Reproductive Justice (2019), awarded a Book Prize by Symposium: Canadian Journal for Continental Philosophy. Her other books include Feminist Aesthetics and the Politics of Modernism (2012); An Ethics of Dissensus: Feminism, Postmodernity, and the Politics of Radical Democracy (2001); The Rhetoric of Failure: Deconstruction of Skepticism, Reinvention of Modernism (1995); and co-edited volumes, such as, Intermedialities: Philosophy, Art, Politics (2010), Time for the Humanities (2008), and Revolt, Affect, Collectivity: The Unstable Boundaries of Kristeva’s Polis (2005). Her interdisciplinary research interests include feminist political theory, modernism, critical race theory, and algorithmic culture.

Geo Maher (bio)

A review of Marriott, David. Whither Fanon? Studies in the Blackness of Being. Stanford UP, 2018.

“The time has come”—with these words, penned more than a decade ago, David Marriott opened the original essay that would later serve as keystone and namesake for this volume (“Whither Fanon?” 33). Such a frame seems only fitting for an examination of anticolonial revolutionary Frantz Fanon, for whom all human questions are necessarily “grounded in temporality” (Black Skin xvi). But what is the time that, according to Marriott, has come? Whither Fanon? was published in 2018, squarely between the rebellions in Ferguson and Minneapolis, but it has been in the works for far longer. The original essay appeared in 2011, before Tamir Rice and Trayvon Martin, long before Donald Trump’s presidency, and directly amid the disillusionment of Barack Obama’s first term. Marriott’s overarching concern in the original essay was to trouble the postracial mirage of the Obama moment, a quaint prelude to the storm and stress that have battered the world since. It’s worth asking whether Marriott’s project speaks to this moment or past it, or whether this is the wrong question entirely.

Some 25 years ago, the editors of Fanon: A Critical Reader spoke of “Five Stages of Fanon Studies,” the fourth of which referred to poststructural and postcolonial critiques of Fanonian liberation largely located in the western academy, while the fifth pointed toward a still-new stage comprising radical scholars and activists “doing work with and through Fanon” to confront the persistent white supremacy and coloniality of the present (Gordon et al. 7). Today, however, the theoretical frame has shifted dramatically in response to the heat radiating off the streets, albeit not uniformly for the better. On the one hand, this fifth stage exploded with the viral return of Fanon in the age of Black Lives Matter—no fewer than four books on Fanon appeared in 2015 and several more since.¹ On the other hand, however, this return of/to Fanon as revolutionary icon has also been accompanied by the emergence of Afropessimism. Particularly in the work of Frank B. Wilderson III, Afropessimism retains poststructuralism’s psychoanalytic bent and skepticism toward grand narratives of liberation, but, in a sort of anti-anticolonial turn, dispenses with Fanon’s internationalism in favor of a new ontology grounded in the pure negativity of antiblackness.

How should we locate Marriott’s book in relation to this new framework? The resonances seem clear, as when Marriott describes antiblackness as “the discourse through which a singular experience of the world is constituted” (Whither Fanon? x), seemingly echoing Afropessimism’s re-ontologization of the world. For Marriott, however, this is less about ontology than about what Fanon calls the ontological “flaw” (Black Skin 89), and he remains deeply skeptical of any new ontology. Moreover, the implied political subject of this ontology— jealously guarded by Afropessimism’s hostility to intercommunal solidarities—coexists with Marriott’s broader appeals to the “nonwhite subject” and the “dispossessed everywhere,” the former incompatible with and the latter anathema to Afropessimist commitments (Whither Fanon? xv–xvi). But more interesting than asking whether Marriott is an Afropessimist—his own response is a cryptic “perhaps” (213)—is tracking what he does on the way to answering this question. As we will see, Marriott walks right up to the brink of Afropessimism’s most radical (and troubling) contentions without leaping, leaving open the possibility of a very different kind of movement, one more dialectical than immanent.

Marriott sets out from what is arguably both Fanon’s most enigmatic and most troubling statement: that “there is but one destiny for the black man. And it is white” (Black Skin xiv). While many are unsure what to make of Fanon’s condemnation of blackness, Marriott embraces this uncertainty as inherent to its object: racial identity “confers no certitude in this world,” but instead “reveals a void” and little else (Whither Fanon? ix). For Marriott as for Fanon, we are thus not talking about either a black essentialism (what Marriott terms, too easily to my mind, “identity”) or the postracial denial of race’s social reality. Instead, only by tentatively stepping on the ground of racial identity do we discover just how unstable that ground is, just how quickly it gives way beneath our feet in an ontological landslide that famously condemns Fanon to both the “veritable hell” of the “zone of nonbeing” and to the difficult path forward (Black Skin xiv). Clearly, such vertiginous uncertainty is incompatible with romantic narratives of liberation or the untroubled revolutionary subject they presuppose. A central goal of Whither Fanon? is therefore to reincorporate Fanon’s clinical practice into his politics. In the wake of the monumental publication of Fanon’s Alienation and Freedom in 2018, such an approach might seem less than novel, but Marriott’s skill lies in mapping the consequences of Fanonian psychopolitics.

To read the political as strictly bound to the clinical may seem counterintuitive for a thinker who sought to draw a line between clinical psychiatry and revolutionary war in his famous 1956 resignation letter, which argues that any effort to reintegrate individuals into a pathological world is doomed. As Marriott rightly argues, however, this is more continuity than break. After all, Fanon’s concept of sociogeny (viewing social structures as generative of psychic afflictions) dates to his earliest work, and the need “to treat the institution itself in order to cure the patients” is a basic premise of Fanon’s socialthérapie (Marriott, Whither Fanon? 59). More importantly, the failures and reorientation of therapy in the context of the colonial war, the abyssal obliteration of the decolonial subject, force Fanon to embrace what Marriott terms a “poetics of dissolution,” with the clinic providing a space for both radical disarticulation and a potential future rearticulation (Whither Fanon? 37). While we might object that Fanon had long been exposed to poetic disarticulation, from surrealism to early Négritude, the point is that desire and dissolution become increasingly central to his politics over time, and that, particularly after 1958, “the cure becomes more aporetic” as the project of disalienation becomes both more indefinite and elusive (Marriott, Whither Fanon? 64).

Projected forward, the consequences for revolution, violence, and sovereignty are immense. Decolonization can no longer be viewed through the sort of romantic narrative that so many still, quite inexplicably, attribute to Fanon, but must instead be grasped “as itself a kind of hysteria” (Marriott, Whither Fanon? xiv). Violence, both explosive expression and later sharpened tool of that revolution, seeks to provide the individual and collective basis for confronting this hysteria, however imperfectly and unpredictably, to produce a tendentially free subject “able to look the enemy in the eye without trembling” (a sort of decolonized Hegelian Selbständigkeit) (xv). This freedom, finally, has “nothing to do with political sovereignty” (xv) but with a “non-sovereign form of politics” (255) in which poetic rearticulation takes the form of “invention as tabula rasa” (254) whose future contours remain indeterminate. This open-ended politics of invention proceeds directly from the abyssal character of blackness itself, incarnate in those wretched unsovereigns in whose timeworn hands the future nevertheless lies.

While centrally concerned with what he calls the “pessimistic revelation” of Fanon’s thought (x), Marriott’s accent is as much on the latter as on the former, on what is disclosed in a revelatory moment that remains a mere moment in a broader dynamic. In what’s framed as a mediated conversation between Jared Sexton and Fred Moten, Marriott draws out what he views as the complicities uniting Afropessimism and black optimism, noting that “one reproduces the logic of the other at precisely those moments when either a pessimistic or optimistic reading of black social life is insufficient” (213). For Moten, blackness is constituted in the oscillation between its “fact” and “lived experience” (214)—two contending translations for the central chapter of Black Skin, White Masks. Too many dismissals of the former (Fanon’s included) tend to neglect the latter: the profound creativity of black life that escapes every fact in a radically fugitive manner. For Sexton, by contrast, Fanon’s goal is to diagnose “why blackness is unlivable in an anti-black world” (213), but he insists that since this unlivability is an architectural feature of that world, to diagnose it isn’t to dismiss the richness of black experience in that world.

Both approaches miss the mark, Marriott argues, in part because both seek to explain what blackness is rather than the ways that blackness is not. Where Moten’s optimism springs from a fugitive parallax between fact and experience, Marriott reads Fanon as exploding the very conditions of fugitivity—the cartography according to which such flight could even be mapped. Blackness is so fugitive, in other words, that it escapes even the concept that seeks to make sense of it. And as with fact/experience, Fanon pulls out the ontological rug from under the broader optimism/pessimism binary. “Fanonism begins,” Marriott writes, “at the point where both optimism and pessimism become impossible” (216). The question of sovereignty, moreover, gives us a glimpse into what Marriott’s distance from Afropessimism means concretely. Afropessimist critiques of Indigenous theory and struggles, for example, leverage the erroneous idea that sovereignty is reducible to its modern/western form. But as Fanonian scholars are quick to recognize that violence is qualitatively transformed in the hands of the colonized, so too sovereignty, which is not a singular thing, impervious to quality, content, or context. This is why Fanon himself continues to use the word, but also to resignify it as synonymous with the practical dignity of the oppressed (Wretched 139). While Marriott seems to perpetuate this view, we’re concerned less with the word than the thing, and his pivot from disarticulation to rearticulation, from abyss to invention, makes clear that we’re not operating on the terrain of pessimism.

Navigating the turbulent straits between optimism and pessimism, Marriott concludes that “blackness can only find its ontological fulfillment by no longer being black—or by entering its own abyssal significance” (Whither Fanon? x). But this “self-oblivion” should not be understood as ceding to the parameters of the antiblack world, since blackness cannot simply melt into whiteness without revealing that the white world stands on feet of clay, utterly reliant on (anti)blackness for its meaning. This is what Fredric Jameson would call the “secret conceptual and even dialectical weakness” of all racial, and more broadly Manichaean, orders, the hidden strength of their apparently weak term (19). To obliterate blackness is to touch off an unpredictable chain reaction that, while not anchored in a solid thing, is always more than pure negativity as well—this is an abyss that remains “penetrated by dark potentialities” (Marriott, Whither Fanon? xix). By refusing the optimism/pessimism binary, and by walking the fine line between the negative and the positive, the abyss and black identity, Marriott thus leaves the reader with a far more dynamic picture than the irretrievably antiblack world of Afropessimism’s ontological straitjacket.

All of this points toward a crucial question that remains outstanding, one I also have for Gavin Arnall’s Subterranean Fanon, reviewed in this issue. Why not understand the explosive dynamism of this chain reaction in dialectical terms, as Fanon himself so explicitly does? Marriott positions his conversation against those dialectical accounts that foreground the moment of resolution, insisting that if Fanonism is indeed best understood as a poetics, then “it cannot be underwritten by dialectics, or by the current state of things as understood or known” (Whither Fanon? 36). It’s unclear whether this “or” is to be understood serially or as an equivalence, but the latter seems likely since the tabula rasa of decolonization—its “agenda for total disorder” (Fanon, Wretched 2)—evokes nothing if not “perpetual dissolution” (Marriott, Whither Fanon? 37). But there is a dialectics, or better, there are dialectical approaches for which resolution is not the primary concern, and in which the “current state of things” is subjected to just such a ruthless dissolution. It seems strange that such a reductive view of dialectics persists amid an otherwise complex and nuanced reading, and Marriott is not unaware of this. Indeed, his turn to rearticulation as invention sets the stage directly for a thoughtful engagement with C. L. R. James’s Notes on Dialectics, in which dialectical motion is synonymous not with closure but with the leap into the unknown. Of course, James differs from Fanon in some key ways. In particular, James is undeniably less attentive to racial hatred, and therefore to the experience of antiblackness, in part because he claims (somewhat implausibly) that he experienced very little racism while living in the colonial metropole (England) (66). This was of course not true of Fanon’s traumatically formative experience in France, but these differences, while grounded in experience, should not be overstated.

Marriott goes to great lengths to put the dissolutive power of James’s dialectics back into Pandora’s box, and to do so with Fanon’s more explosive dialectics is more difficult still. For Marriott, the figure of the wretched as impossibility incarnate forecloses on dialectics, but this is not how Fanon sees things, and for good reason. Just as Fanon subjects phenomenology, existentialism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, and even sovereignty itself to the transformative weight of antiblackness, so too dialectics.² By anchoring dialectical motion in abyssal negativity, Fanon understands that—pessimism be damned—it is precisely from the desolation of the zone of nonbeing that “a genuine new departure can emerge” (Black Skin xii), and on the basis of this insight he formulates a one-sided and open-ended dialectics stripped of all reciprocity and determinism whose only motor is the irrepressible cunning of the wretched.³ With no guarantee of victory, this is neither an optimistic nor a pessimistic dialectics, since “the war goes on” regardless (Fanon, Wretched 181).

In the end, both optimism and pessimism rely on a certitude that the “resolutely anti-foundationalist” Fanon simply cannot provide (Marriott, Whither Fanon? 3), and Marriott— faithful to his spirit—holds every category (blackness, sovereignty, dialectics, and especially freedom itself) in a sort of suspension “as a difficult question that cannot be resolved” (36). “[A]t the crossroads between Nothingness and Infinity,” Fanon famously writes, racked by his own lived experience of this vertiginous uncertainty, “I began to weep” (Black Skin 119). His tears, however, were but a prelude to something far more explosively generative, the unpredictable emergence of a tabula rasa for the self-writing of existence.

Geo Maher is a Philadelphia-based writer and organizer, and Visiting Associate Professor of Global Political Thought at Vassar College. He has taught at Drexel University, San Quentin State Prison, and the Venezuelan School of Planning in Caracas, and has held visiting positions at the College of William and Mary’s Decolonizing Humanities Project, NYU’s Hemispheric Institute, and the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). He his co-editor of the Duke University Press series Radical Américas and author of five books: We Created Chávez (Duke, 2013), Building the Commune (Verso, 2016), Decolonizing Dialectics (Duke, 2017), A World Without Police (Verso, 2021), and Anticolonial Eruptions (University of California, 2022).

Footnotes

1. In March 2015, Lewis Gordon, What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction to his Life and Thought (Fordham University Press, 2015); in August, Peter Hudis, Frantz Fanon: Philosopher of the Barricades (Pluto Press, 2015); and in November, both Christopher Lee, Frantz Fanon: Toward a Revolutionary Humanism (Ohio University Press, 2015) and Leo Zeilig, Frantz Fanon: The Militant Philosopher of Third World Revolution (I.B. Tauris, 2015).

2. This was the fundamental point of my Decolonizing Dialectics (Duke UP, 2017), which was similarly a reaction to Obama’s postracial moment, trapped somewhere between Black Skin and Wretched.

3. This is a central argument of my recent book, Anticolonial Eruptions: Racial Hubris and the Cunning of Resistance (U of California P, 2022).

Works Cited

• Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Grove Press, 2008.
• ———. The Wretched of the Earth. Grove Press, 2004.
• Gordon, Lewis R., et al., editors. Fanon: A Critical Reader. Blackwell, 1996.
• James, C. L. R. “Lectures on The Black Jacobins.” Small Axe, no. 8, Sep. 2000, pp. 65–112.
• Jameson, Fredric. Valences of the Dialectic. Verso, 2009.
• Marriott, David. Whither Fanon? Studies in the Blackness of Being. Stanford UP, 2018.
• ———. “Whither Fanon?” Textual Practice, vol. 25, no. 1, 2011, pp. 33–69.

Katherine Ford (bio)

A review of White, Bretton. Staging Discomfort: Performance and Queerness in Contemporary Cuba. U of Florida P, 2020.

Given the country’s unique history and connections with the United States, especially since 1959, Cuba and its theater hold a singular interest for Western scholars, particularly those in the United States. Within Cuban studies, queerness and identities that challenge traditional definitions have occupied more and more space in the arts produced and analyzed on the island and beyond, although these spaces have been contested within official discourse. Bretton White’s Staging Discomfort: Performance and Queerness in Contemporary Cuba situates itself at these crossroads, adding to art and scholarship that seeks to understand the role and portrayal of the body and queer theory in Cuban theater at a particularly difficult historical moment: the Special Period in Times of Peace, an extended and extensive economic crisis beginning in 1991 as a direct result of glasnost and perestroika in the Soviet Union. The Special Period restricted financial aid to the island nation, and was perhaps the most serious challenge to the Revolution. For the theater that White examines, the body—in particular, reproducing the physical discomfort and difficulties associated with life in Cuba at that time— takes center stage in order to highlight what defines and distinguishes Cuba during the Special Period, often posing direct challenges to official definitions from the state. While there are other studies of the arts in the Special Period and of Cuban theater since the Revolution, White’s Staging Discomfort is a welcome and necessary addition given its attention to queer studies within performance. These two areas need further scholarly exploration and will benefit Cuban studies and theater studies alike.

Physical discomfort is central to the theater White analyzes. White focuses on five theatrical works that foreground the bodies of actors and even spectators: Carlos Díaz’s 2007 production of the German play Las relaciones de Clara (Dea Loher, Klaras Verhältnisse, 2002); Baños públicos, S. A., by Esther Suárez Durán (written in 1994, published in 1996, awarded the UNEAC prize in 1998, and staged in 1999); El Ciervo Encantado’s production of Pájaros de la playa (2004); Chamaco, by Abel González Melo (read in 2005, published in 2006, and staged in Havana in 2006); and Perros que jamás ladraron (2012), written and directed by Rogelio Orizondo. Attention to the body is important in these plays because physical discomfort was a central, quotidian reality of the Special Period. Given the scarcity of food, clothing, and other goods, the body and its needs occupy much if not all thought of the Cuban people during this time. This reality is conveyed in the performance of these plays through the portrayal of sex workers who exchange sexual favors for gifts or food, for example, or is experienced by the audience in the lack of air-conditioning in the theater in which the play is staged. White’s analysis focuses on challenges to dominant definitions of identity and sexuality from the Revolution, showing that the body is central to these challenges. Her emphasis on same-sex intimacies reveals what she calls “an aesthetics of differentiation rather than assimilation” (21).

Staging Discomfort considers the role that queerness plays in theater performance in Cuba’s Special Period. As White underlines, theater, unlike other aspects of the Cuban art world, “is art by Cubans and for Cubans” (213). Theater is not a genre in Cuba for tourists or passers-through. This can be limiting for the theater community because engaging with the international art world can offer economic opportunity. On the other hand, an examination of Cuban theater allows scholars to see an art world created by and for Cubans. Scholars approaching this work from outside Cuban studies will thus benefit from the comprehensive contextualization that White presents to help understand and situate these works. Staging Discomfort positions the role of theater within the Cuban Revolution of 1959 and after, underlining the official incorporation of the arts into the definition and consolidation of the Revolution. Theater, or course, was one of the genres that contributed to defining the Revolution for the public, though it has its own history. As was the case with the other arts produced during the Revolution, theater was subjected to restriction and censorship, particularly at the end of the 1960s and through much of the 1970s. Following the presentation of this historical context, White turns to the Special Period in Times of Peace; the performances she analyzes were staged in the waning years of the Special Period (though, as White rightly points out, the Special Period does not have a definitive end). The Special Period was widely defined by want and lack—economic and otherwise. There was a profound shortage of everything: food, clothes, and paper, among other essential and nonessential goods. Restrictions resulting from both economic shortages and state censorship became pronounced in Cuban theater during the Special Period due to the financial cost of staging a play (starting with the need for a physical space to rehearse and produce a play) and intensified by limited international exposure, and therefore revenue and investment, for Cuban theater.

Staging Discomfort complements this historical contextualization with the analysis of the plays using theories deriving from queer studies. The book is divided into five chapters, each focusing on a different play and its performance in Havana between 1999 and 2012, after the harshest years of the Special Period had ended (even as the Special Period itself carried on without end). The five plays White analyzes explore the body, sexuality, and definitions of identity in ways that challenge traditional norms, each with its own theoretical and temporal framing. In these thematic explorations, the body figures centrally, reflecting the community’s corporeal discomfort due to the very real scarcities of the time. As noted, this bodily discomfort is not limited to the actors’ bodies but also includes those of the audience members. These performances are not escapist theater; instead, the focus on the body in the plays accentuates discomfort and manipulation and mimics what was happening outside the theater walls. These plays, White writes, have “the effect of bringing the city—and the city’s problems—into the theater” (2). The city and the body—both strongly situated in the Havana of the Special Period-—are intertwined within the space of discomfort: “This book concentrates on how theatrical spaces connect bodies of actors and spectators while focusing on how spectator proximities can counteract pressures for imposed similarity” (2). While the role of the Cuban Revolution was to promote a universal identity, the Special Period—and the theater analyzed in Staging Discomfort—revealed that there was not one Cuban identity but many, and that these identities occupied a space of discomfort and fissure, proposing an alternate view of sexuality and the body. White’s exploration of Havana theater finds and highlights the cracks and dissimilarities in definitions of identity to promote otherness through theatrical expression. Staging Discomfort correctly highlights Cuban theater’s role in understanding the role of the body and of otherness in definitions of identity and sexuality. As White points out, theater in Cuba uses the body and discomfort to make connections through difference rather than assimilation—a direct challenge to the role of the Revolution since the very beginning.

In Carlos Díaz’s production of the German play Las relaciones de Clara, the body is both the problem and the solution, mimicking the early years of the Special Period when selling bodies, especially sexually, offered many Cubans a way to survive. Staging the play in various rooms throughout an old colonial house with no or limited air-conditioning, and making the spectators move to follow action that is often uncomfortably close, created a production where everyone on both sides of the fourth wall were very aware of their bodies and the physical discomfort that they could experience. Baños públicos, S. A., by Esther Suárez Durán, highlights access to and the use of public bathrooms in Cuba, connecting concepts of urination and gay sex as well as private enterprise and loyalty with revolutionary ideas. White’s third chapter on El Ciervo Encantado’s production of Pájaros de la playa (2004), based on the novel by Severo Sarduy, remembers the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 90s and the corporeal suffering and alienation that resulted. El Ciervo Encantado’s rendition for theater evokes rather than narrates, moving beyond language and centering on the body. This is done through auditory overload—the actors’ dialogue is often garbled, shouted, and without meaning. El Ciervo Encantado does not want to tell the spectator what is happening, and instead creates a corporeal sensation that implies the story recounted in the performance. Chamaco, by Abel González Melo, recounts the gritty side of Havana and is one of the more successful plays analyzed. In González Melo’s opinion, it is a story about greed during the Special Period, though White also highlights the way it talks about homosexuality at that time—recounting and making visible the invisible. Finally, Perros que jamás ladraron, written and directed by Rogelio Orizondo, is composed of monologues about life during the Special Period, though the silliness of the production contrasts with the seriousness of the material presented. White observes that “Perros takes these tensions . . . beyond mere juxtaposition in order to contemplate how we fail at both seeing or experiencing what is represented, or documented on stage” (186). Though most visible perhaps in this chapter, the juxtaposition of the visible and invisible is a central issue throughout Staging Discomfort.

After detailing the ways in which these five plays challenge the hegemonic cultural identity that the Revolution had been solidifying for decades, White’s conclusion narrates Cuba’s current political balancing act, where official discourse attempts to respond to the criticism that its definitions of identity are hegemonic with a new tolerance for difference. Her conclusion points to the advances in social freedoms that Mariela Castro has introduced while also acknowledging that, in Cuba, the state control of cultural production means that there is very limited freedom of expression, a reality felt even more acutely among the LGBTQ+ community and after the unrest in the summer of 2021.

In her conclusion, White underlines that the theater she analyzes—indeed Cuban theater more generally—is theater on the fringe. This is art that endeavors to look at and understand the Cuban experience from within, and for a domestic audience. For a readership not familiar with the contemporary, everyday realities of Cuba, this can make for a challenging presentation—and even reviewing this presentation poses its challenges. How can an author convey a reality that resonates with many and reminds readers of other historical and social contexts, but that remains singular and unique? How can an author portray the simultaneous lack, restriction, and opportunity of the Cuban theater world? In Staging Discomfort, White succeeds in addressing these questions by detailing the historical and social contexts that contribute to the everyday world of the playwrights, directors, theater groups, and audiences. She conveys the political past and the contemporary cultural reality that inform the works her book examines. Staging Discomfort: Performance and Queerness in Contemporary Cuba does important and necessary work that allows us to understand and appreciate more about Cuban theater and culture, and about queer theory and culture in contexts outside of the United States. The monograph will serve many different audiences and widen our understanding of the fields it brings together.

Katherine Ford is Professor of Hispanic Studies and Chair of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at East Carolina University. She specializes in Modern Latin American literature, concentrating on theater and performance of the twentieth century. She is the author of essays on Latin American and Latinx theater and of the books Theater of Revisions in the Hispanic Caribbean (2017) and Politics and Violence in Cuba and Argentina (2010). She is currently looking at the connections between theater and film and the role of the humanities in community engagement.

Robert F. Carley (bio)

A review of Dardot, Pierre, and Christian Laval. Common: On Revolution in the 21st Century. Translated by Matthew MacLellan, Bloomsbury, 2019.

In the “Introduction” to Common: On Revolution in the 21^st Century, Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval set up an opposition-in-relation between neoliberalism and its challengers. The challenge constitutes a feint of sorts; the opposition is between neoliberal capital and the lack of any concerted public or societal response, whether from political parties in the state, from citizen groups, through organized labor, or from the styles of mobilization favored by social movements in democratic contexts. The evacuation of social or political counter-forces seated in or facilitated by the state (including past instances of revolutionary posture toward states and valorizations of them)—especially as it concerns states’ degraded effectiveness as a lever against poverty, inequality, and environmental catastrophe—is included in Dardot and Laval’s account alongside the scant possibilities for sustained non- and sub-state collective action.

Across Dardot and Laval’s book, the common develops as more than a mere opposition to neoliberalism. At the theoretical level, the common turns out to be utterly overwhelming, absorbing and transforming extant conceptions of common spaces, goods, and properties through potential instituent practices emerging from the necessary differentiation of different struggles and the importance of those struggles on different fronts (to paraphrase Stuart Hall). Dardot and Laval’s point that there seems to be no viable alternative to neoliberalism is reminiscent of Marcuse’s frame-up of “the Great Refusal” in One-Dimensional Man (66), evoking what Common has in common with earlier theories and political projects. Though unlike One-Dimensional Man in many respects, Common also resembles it. One-Dimensional Man (like most of Marcuse’s subsequent work) addresses the problems of affluence as a social totality that stakes its “democratic” and consumerist exceptionalisms on global conflict and imperial power. Marcuse traces a broad, global range of exclusions produced by a narrow and measured U.S. affluence, theorizing both liminality and exteriority as potentially productive of novel (albeit narrow) expressions of social protest: not a common but a “great” refusal common to those cast out (the exploited and exploitable) and to outcasts (e.g., hippies). Marcuse’s text precedes the broad and varied eruptions of social protest across Europe and in the North Atlantic in the late 1960s. In One-Dimensional Man, he seeks to consolidate what had seemed like riotous, sub-state instances of revolt into an idea, a possible political horizon. Other contemporary texts, issuing largely from the Autonomisti and Operaisti in Italy, similarly recast ideas and reorient political horizons by critiquing and inverting Marxist political economy. The Operaisti, for instance, consolidate a new political subject constituted by the mass migration of Southern industrial workers northward, a new mass of workers outside of both labor and party discipline who, while participating in the postwar industrial boom, developed a repertoire of strategies and fierce tactics that shook and altered the foundations of the Italian “planner state.”

What each of these texts shares with Common is the identification of elements liminal to social totalities and the thinking of revolution otherwise: Who (other than the proletariat) makes revolution, how, and under what conditions? Marcuse, the Autonomisti, and the Operaisti wonder how and through what organizational means these revolutionary ferments can be sustained. Their responses give rise to alternative assessments of practices, subjects, and organizations. What these texts share “in common” are novel ways to reconceive revolutionary praxis in the context of interregna. Dardot and Laval’s perspective on the present-day configuration of state and civil society relations is consistent with their earlier book, The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society (2014), in which they define neoliberalism as the rational framework through which both markets and states operate, negating the possibilities of a “double movement” (to the state) and a “triple movement” (to “progressive” expressions of either political or market forces in civil society, an expression made popular by Nancy Fraser and Stephanie Malin). Dardot and Laval invoke Arendt’s concept of “desolation” to amplify classical sociological conceptions of consumerism, alienation, and anomie, and to emphasize that theorizing the common becomes an urgent and necessarily revolutionary act in the face of this triumvirate of anti-societal forces. These initial descriptive aspects of neoliberalism specify the roles, actors, agents, and the breadth and depth of forces that come into focus in Dardot and Laval’s theoretical framework, which is vast and populated with intellectual histories, theories, and concepts. They also specify the revolutionary dynamics that can both structure and animate the pathways towards the horizon where the common sits.

Dardot and Laval’s approach across the three sections of the book is archaeological and philologically expansive, for example when reviewing the classical renderings of the concept of the common, both prior to and after its ancient, various, and somewhat cumulative juridical codifications and institutional articulations. The archaeological approach and philological investigations of instituted, juridical, and praxiological aspects of commons make the book, in part, an interdisciplinary field statement. The purpose of these inquiries into the common, however, is to show that it was and remains co-extensive with the social imaginaries that consolidate around developments of nascent and fragile proto-states, and limited and qualified fragments of civil society. Theories and concepts resist and enjoin one another and are directed toward further elaborations of commons. Dardot and Laval draw on classical sociological theory, political philosophy (across various periods), and historical sources. Source materials are not introduced into the text so as to arrest the archeology; rather, this well-sourced and annotated text is relentless in its focus on the development of the concept of common, following it into cul-desacs and leaping across historical gaps from antiquity and into the nineteenth century. The first section of Common effectively traces these various projects as affines to the common that ultimately failed to produce an unfettered triumph of the common.

At one point, Dardot and Laval define common as a political principle that guides the practice of building, maintaining, and sustaining the commons (28). This unity of principle and practice, forged in the interest of describing a revolutionary opposition to our current post-neoliberal trajectory, finds a corollary in Wolfgang Fritz Haug’s concept of “societalization,” an intersubjective, conscious, and collective process of reproducing social relations and structures both apart from and in conflict with capitalist institutions, relations, and practices (Haug 91). Haug’s concept emerges from his work on ideology critique and shows how ideology can be understood in different organizations and political practices. Dardot and Laval’s rendering of an appositive revolutionary political principle and practice differs from Haug’s work, however, insofar as they insist on a requisite break from any and all aspects of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Marxist political projects and on the non-conflictual posture of commoning.

Common is divided into three sections. In the first part Dardot and Laval describe the historical emergence of the commons in the nineteenth century. Dardot and Laval express some hope that contemporary post-statist struggles under the aegis of commons might produce connections in place of the instrumentalization of political organizations by the state as well as fractionalizations internal to organizations engaged in these struggles. These connections, which are made through collective practices, recall Donna Haraway’s use of the term “affinity groups” to describe common struggles that are social-issue based, but more directly resemble the late-nineteenth-century Iberian-anarcho “tradition” of affinity groups (155). Marcuse is less sanguine about the possibility of affine-based struggles. In the last essay he wrote, “The Reification of the Proletariat,” he sees them as non-sustaining, voluntarist, and performative, always-already reified on the surfaces of affluent societies. Marcuse’s essay was published just prior to the neoliberal conjuncture; Haraway’s was published in the midst of Reagan’s presidency and so well into the neoliberal conjuncture.

Dardot and Laval begin their third chapter by noting that commons and variations on the term inaugurate anti-capitalist struggles after state communism. Several pages later, they acknowledge that struggles around varied significations of the commons are less pronounced in US-based alter-globalization struggles and that, though it is more strongly linked to struggles across central and south America, the common is not what Mayer Zald would describe as an ideological catchphrase. They argue instead that “a retroactive reading nevertheless reveals the presence of the category in these movements; the category can be symptomatically detected in the emergence of new organizations and movements” (68). By the end of the chapter, Dardot and Laval point out that in both scope and depth the theoretical and political projects of the commons entail a defense of a non-market exteriority to capital in the hopes that it will take root. Against market society on a global register, they point out that the historically, socially, and culturally constituted fungibility of the common (what they call its goods and contents) is prescribed.

In the second part of the book, “Law and Institution of the Common,” Dardot and Laval focus on the generative practices of commons, asking how these have been and can be durably instituted. The section culminates in their chapter on “Instituent Praxis” (277), a form of praxis that is at once materialized, made conscious, and realized through use. This chapter anchors their earlier definition of common and develops the political program of Common: the nine propositions that Dardot and Laval offer in the last section of the book. Through repetition, instituent praxis gives rise to rules that, through time and use, become customs. Customs are produced through a collective and praxiological orientation towards emancipation or against the common as fungible and appropriable. Instituent praxis fixes the common and establishes its durability over time; it is, at the same time, an organizational form that can further institute creative practices, thereby introducing novelty within a social totality. Dardot and Laval excavate the category of instituent praxis from the work of Émile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, Paul Fauconnet, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Cornelius Castoriadis. The “ready-made” notion of the instituent as already established or instituted—or, rather, the conflation of activities that institute or produce things and fix or ossify them into a bureaucratic form—emerges in early-twentieth-century French social sciences. In this regard, Dardot and Laval’s argument positions itself against Mauss, Fauconnet, and Durkheim, who take their object of investigation to be the already instituted, supra-individualist social facts that organize the production of all activities (where the instituent is indistinct from what it produces: the institution—that is, the bureaucratic form).

Dardot and Laval see in Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason an antidote to these sociological traditions’ rendering of instituent practice. Sartre identifies the contradiction inherent in notions of instituent emergence, where instituent work is praxis and, at the same time, signifies a practice both apart from and inaugural to social institutions. Inaugural instituent acts represent the effort of singularized but common actors oriented towards a social or political goal. In other words, Sartre stresses that the instituent—always oriented towards instituted ends— becomes superordinate, and both homogenizes and domesticates the wills of others, specifying a particular form of reification. For Sartre, instituent forms of praxis give rise to institutionalization and bureaucratization. However, Dardot and Laval note that Sartre’s understanding of instituent practices also necessarily refers to a prior, creative form of practice held in common.

The work of Castoriadis provides the most important and fully developed contribution to Dardot and Laval’s discussion of pre-institutional instituent forms of praxis. Castoriadis stresses instituent production as radically new forms of praxis that emerge throughout history. For Castoriadis, instituent production makes history while also shaping and engendering what is already instituted. Whereas Sartre begins from the point of view of the instituted and sees instituent production as the foundation of and as phenomenally indistinct (though analytically distinct) from what is instituted, Castoriadis’s thought is framed by the genesis of the instituted as an always instituent act. Instituent production for Castoriadis is rooted in the imaginary that, though it consists of already instituted meanings, is also the font of images, things, and representations embedded in our capacities to see things as they are not, or as other than they are. These concepts can be made concrete and, in turn, can become instituted. The imaginary—which consists of the novel, pre-reflexive, and not-yet symbolized as well as instituted meanings, images, and things—inaugurates instituent activity. Castoriadis’s concept of praxis models instituent activity as emerging from the imaginary but raised to the level of consciousness and rendered as collective and generative activity. However, as Dardot and Laval note, the exercise of instituent praxis as power (or as politics) negotiates its position within societal and political forces and so bears the weight of its embeddedness within an historical trajectory. On the one hand, Castoriadis’s discussion of the generative and novel historical nature of instituent praxis— and its foundations within the imaginary—lightens the weight of any historical load. On the other hand, for Dardot and Laval instituent praxis is a conscious act that is conditioned within collectives or groups and that, as strategically or wittingly as possible, opposes the remnants of instituted forms of praxis that would undo the common. Dardot and Laval see the common arise from the conscious activity of instituent praxis where relations produced through collective work are not separate from its ends, and its ends need not be absorbed by extant institutions. The ends of instituent practice (via the imaginary that shapes it) is the production of the common that is persistently creative and not instituted. Dardot and Laval’s instituent praxis is, at every turn, an emancipatory praxis.

The third part of the book makes nine proposals that rise out of Dardot and Laval’s concept of instituent praxis. Praxis makes its way from a common use (“Use Rights Must Challenge Property”) to the globally-instituted (“We Must Institute a Federation of the Commons”). Castoriadis returns in the last pages to anchor the revolution of the commons as the reinstitution of society from within its neoliberal midst. They explain that, like the ancien régime, neoliberalism represents a rationality concretely anchored in a social totality that cannot merely be contested by an alternative political force. The expanded scope of instituent praxis (through Dardot and Laval’s nine proposals) and the novelty of its instituting, creative, and generative powers render already common spaces, goods, and properties inappropriable. Instituent praxis regulates (or commons) through use, and remakes what neoliberal reason designates common—space, property, and goods, among other things—as the common.

Although each section of the book has an explicit focus, the transition between the second and third sections sees the intensive discussion of praxis recede into the background as the proposals for a federated commons take center stage. It takes some effort to recall, for instance, the micro-practices within recuperated Argentinian factories that differentiate each of the examples and demonstrate the conceptual complexity and practicable variabilities of instituent praxis. Regardless, case of recuperated Argentinian factories illustrate the tensions associated with the emancipatory features of instituent praxis. They show an extraordinary collective inventiveness and collaborative organizational framework develop in the face of the legal development of new rules. The Argentinian case represents one of many substantive examples that allows Dardot and Laval to developed their concept of praxis. These examples furnish their nine proposals. However, I remain unclear as to how instituent praxis, rules, and customs necessarily develop into federations. The obscurity of that development is a weakness in the book that recalls Sartre’s leap from inaugural instituent praxiological acts to their bureaucratization inside institutions and political organizations. The principles of the common are framed as injunctions, so even if commons overwhelm, infest, and convert a neoliberal social totality—like an interminable and viral “war of position”—will this necessarily result in a federation? Although it’s clear that the concept of praxis mediates socio-organizational practices of commons and Dardot and Laval’s proposals, the mediations between praxis and principles remain unclear. Who will federate and how? Non the less, Common: On Revolution in the 21^st Century advances common studies as a field and political program and specifies the dynamics that will bring the common to fruition. Much as Marcuse, the Autonomisti, and Operaisti did in the interregnum between Keynesianism and neoliberalism, Dardot and Laval specify a common revolutionary ground for movements of the present.

Robert F. Carley is an Associate Professor of International Studies at Texas A&M University, College Station. He is the author of Cultural Studies Methodology and Political Strategy: Metaconjuncture (2021), Gramscian Critical Pedagogy (2021), Culture and Tactics: Gramsci, Race, and the Politics of Practice (2019), Autonomy, Refusal, and the Black Bloc (2019), and Collectivities (2016). His most recent article, “Intersecting Oppressions; Intersecting Struggles: Race, Class, and Subalternity” (2022) appears in the Journal of Class and Culture. He is a member of the Governing Board of the Cultural Studies Association and co-edits Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association.

Works Cited

• Haraway, Donna J. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, Routledge, 1991, pp. 149–81.
• Haug, Wolfgang Fritz. Commodity Aesthetics, Ideology, and Culture. International General, 1987.
• Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. 2nd ed., Routledge, 1991.

Anthony C. Alessandrini (bio)

A review of Arnall, Gavin. Subterranean Fanon: An Underground Theory of Radical Change. Columbia UP, 2020.

Given the tragically short time Frantz Fanon was given to live and to write, it is remarkable that we can now regard him as one of the most important political and intellectual figures of the second half of the twentieth century. Equally remarkable is the fact that there is a field that can rightly be called “Fanon studies”—and that it continues to boom sixty years after his death.¹ In part this is because, despite his short and eventful life, Fanon was shockingly prolific. In addition to writing three books in less than ten years, he also wrote dozens of articles, many of them while serving as an editor of El Moudjahid (the newspaper of the Front de libération nationale), as well as speeches for some of the major political gatherings of his time, including the First and Second World Congress of Black Writers and Artists, the All-African People’s Congress, and the Afro-Asiatic Solidarity Conference.

And this is not even to mention Fanon’s day job. For most of his adult life, he worked as a psychiatrist, including serving as director of the Blida-Joinville Hospital in Algeria from 1953 to 1956. Over the course of his medical career, Fanon co-authored an astonishing number of articles for journals in his field, documenting in particular his interest in alternative methods for treating psychiatric disorders. Add to this the literary efforts of his youth—while still a student, he founded a short-lived literary journal, Tam-Tam, and wrote three plays (not performed or published during his life) before the age of 25—and we are left with the staggering legacy of a figure who burned his mark into an often hostile world.²

But if Fanon’s writing has produced a rich and varied response from readers since his untimely death, this is not so much because of the sheer amount of writing he was able to produce but rather because of the complex, sometimes opaque, and occasionally outright contradictory nature of his thought, and the remarkable amount of territory he managed to cover as a writer in just one decade. This has inspired a wide and disparate range of responses, which is one reason why the field of Fanon studies has often been a contentious place indeed.

This contentiousness manifests itself most clearly in the distinction drawn by many commentators between the so-called “early” and “late” Fanon, which, in practice, means the distinction between Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth.³ Some who focus primarily on the first book—including those who, following Homi Bhabha’s powerful but controversial reading, see Black Skin, White Masks as an example of poststructuralism avant la lettre—consider The Wretched of the Earth to be a retreat to more conventional Marxist analysis. Other critics have tended to argue that The Wretched of the Earth should be understood as the culmination of Fanon’s mature political thought, while Black Skin, White Masks by and large fails to “slough off its petit-bourgeois stink,” as Cedric Robinson famously declared (82). I’m only marking out a few coordinates of the field, of course, and plenty of readings fall between these two extremes. Nevertheless, the early/late binary continues to haunt the field.

Given these different emphases and the stakes involved, Fanon studies has occasionally taken the form of meta-commentary among critics more concerned with squaring off against other Fanonists than engaging with Fanon’s texts. This in turn leads some critics to stake a claim to the “true” Fanon. The title of Lewis R. Gordon’s 2015 book, What Fanon Said, sums up this tendency. Gordon has been an important and deeply perceptive reader of Fanon for more than two decades—his 1995 book Fanon and the Crisis of European Man remains one of the finest English-language readings of Fanon’s body of work—and in What Fanon Said, he insists that his goal is less to present an authoritative, conversation-ending interpretation than to provide an introduction to Fanon’s work via close readings. But the book’s title reveals something important about the nature of Fanon studies: more often than not, the subtext is a claim to deliver to the reader what Fanon really said.

This is one of many reasons why Gavin Arnall’s brilliant book, Subterranean Fanon: An Underground Theory of Radical Change, is such a welcome arrival to the field. Although he is a close and careful reader, Arnall makes no claims about revealing to us what Fanon “really” said. Instead, he presents us with a Fanon who, in pursuing his tortured attempts to analyze, as a step towards destroying, the workings of racism and colonialism, was in a constant state of disagreement with himself. Subterranean Fanon persuasively traces a constant preoccupation with change throughout Fanon’s disparate body of work, asking “what constitutes an instance of change, what role the past and the present play in effecting or obstructing change, how something new comes into existence, and how the new relates to what precedes it” (11). Arnall thus follows the lead of Achille Mbembe in characterizing Fanon’s project as one of “metamorphic thought.” In Mbembe’s memorable words, Fanon’s language functions “like an artillery shell aimed at smashing, puncturing, and transforming the mineral and rocky wall and interosseous membrane of colonialism” (Mbembe Critique 162, qtd. in Arnall 10–11). Arnall also cites the influence of contemporary activists’ appropriations of Fanon’s work to attest to his continued relevance to those struggling in the name of revolutionary change. Given Fanon’s active role in the struggle for decolonization, Arnall rightly concludes that change—specifically, change in the form of true decolonization—is “not only the object of Fanon’s thinking but also its primary objective” (11).

Indeed, Arnall argues that Fanon’s engagement with the question of change is so intense that it splits his metamorphic thought in two. On the one hand, he follows many readers in identifying Fanon’s primary mode of analysis as dialectical. For “the dominant Fanon,” as Arnall refers to this strand of his thought, “change entails a dialectical process set in motion through contradiction” (12). It is a mark of Arnall’s care that he doesn’t merely leave it at that, but takes the time to describe precisely what Fanon’s dialectical approach entails—especially in those moments when he explicitly declares the need to “stretch” Marxist analysis to suit the colonial context (for example, in the first chapter of The Wretched of the Earth). For the dominant Fanon who works in this particular dialectical mode, Arnall writes, “to theorize is to translate, to dialectically convert any inherited doctrine into a new version of itself so as to place it in the service of the struggle for liberation” (13). This approach allows Arnall to acknowledge Fanon’s engagement with many different forms of analysis—from Marxism to existentialism to psychoanalysis to phenomenology—without pinning him down to one at the expense of another.

But alongside this “dominant Fanon” who works in a recognizably dialectical mode, there exists what Arnall calls “the subterranean Fanon.” This underground current breaks through sporadically but insistently throughout Fanon’s whole body of work, exhorting us towards a very different kind of thinking about how change comes to be. For the dominant Fanon, contradiction and its overcoming constitute the basis of dialectical change. But the subterranean Fanon has very different ideas: “If contradiction is the sine qua non of dialectical thinking,” Arnall argues, then “the subterranean Fanon thinks about other kinds of opposition: oppositions without interpenetration or unity, oppositions that do not follow a both-and logic, oppositions between incommensurable or radically heterogeneous phenomena” (16). “For the subterranean Fanon,” Arnall concludes, “such nondialectical oppositions are not static but rather generate a different, nondialectical kind of change” (17). This is the Fanon for whom decolonization represents not a stage in an ongoing dialectic but rather a tabula rasa that wipes clean all that came before: “decolonization is quite simply the substitution of one ‘species’ of mankind by another. The substitution is unconditional, absolute, total, and seamless” (Fanon, Wretched 1).

The most famous of these nondialectical oppositions can be found in the opening pages of The Wretched of the Earth, where Fanon presents us with a Manichaean vision of the colonized territory as “a world divided in two.” Describing the “sectors” inhabited by the colonizer and the colonized respectively, Fanon declares that “the two confront each other, but not in the service of a higher unity. Governed by a purely Aristotelian logic, they follow the dictates of mutual exclusion. There is no conciliation possible, one of the terms is superfluous” (Wretched 4). What this means in terms of the practice of decolonization is quite radically different from what would be implied by a dialectical approach, which is why, for Arnall’s subterranean Fanon, “instead of canceling and preserving the old to make the new, the old is to be cleared away, completely destroyed, irreversibly annihilated so that something new can emerge as the result of sheer invention” (16–17). Put differently: if for the dominant Fanon to theorize is to translate, for the subterranean Fanon “to theorize is to invent, to bring into existence an entirely new way of thinking corresponding to an entirely new society” (Arnall 17).

Arnall is certainly not the first reader to detect either of these strands—the first often referred to the Hegelian/Marxist, and the second to the Nietzschean, traditions—in Fanon’s work. What makes Subterranean Fanon such an important departure is his refusal to resolve the tension in either direction and thereby force Fanon’s multivocal work into line with either school or political ideology. While Arnall is a generous reader of previous work in Fanon studies, he patiently but insistently refuses any attempt to close down the agonistic debate that Fanon’s two voices carry out. As he puts it at the end of his reading of Black Skin, White Masks, in one of the few moments when he shifts into a slightly more polemical mode: “I have focused on the text’s distinct approaches to the problem of change instead of offering yet another commentary that willfully ignores or acrobatically resolves every conflictual statement and unexpected image in an anxious, anti-Fanonian impulse to no longer question” (65).

But if we accept Arnall’s argument for two distinct currents that run through Fanon’s work, what’s the relationship between them? His answer seems to be: it depends. That’s in part because he proposes not simply isolated moments of contradiction between a dialectical and nondialectical approach, but rather a dynamic in which the latter acts as a subterranean mode of thought, one that never overtakes the dominant dialectical approach but is always present just beneath the surface. More specifically, he proposes three forms of contact between the dominant and the subterranean Fanon. On some occasions, they are juxtaposed without conflict; on others, they arise as visible contradictions, indicating the extent to which Fanon’s thought is internally split; and then, most interestingly, there are moments when “the underground current of thought in Fanon’s oeuvre manifests itself in a more ambiguous manner” via slips in language, the introduction of terms or images that diverge from an ongoing argument, or other slippages that reveal Fanon’s continual multivocality (18). By the end of the book, Arnall employs Fanon’s own term “scissiparity” (the literal division of cells via fission) to describe this split within Fanon’s work, asking whether it might ultimately be understood as “a direct consequence of the colonial undertaking” (131–32). Arnall never quite answers this question, and one wishes that the book’s conclusion, which raises interesting questions but is frustratingly short, had focused a bit more clearly on how readers might best encompass this split between the dominant and subterranean Fanon.

What is most important about this framing of Fanon’s work in terms of dominant and subterranean is that it allows Arnall to perform a virtuosic set of readings. He is a close and careful reader, sensitive to literary devices like Fanon’s tendency to repeat the same term with slight variations, and curious enough to follow Fanon’s wordplay wherever it takes him. Indeed, his renderings of Fanon into English often catch on to subtleties lost by Fanon’s official translators. Arnall’s close attention to the twists and turns of Fanon’s texts encourages a similar sort of ethic in his readers: indeed, the phrase “careful readers of Fanon may have already noticed…” is sprinkled throughout the book. His thesis about the split within Fanon’s thought means he does not have to corral his readings into an argument about which aspect of Fanon’s thought is “correct,” or offer pledges of loyalty to one school of thought in Fanon studies; instead, he is free to follow where Fanon leads. Arnall’s reading of The Wretched of the Earth, carried out over the course of two chapters, is exemplary in this regard, moving carefully and brilliantly through that complicated and tortured text.

Subterranean Fanon is also one of the first critical works in English to engage closely with a range of Fanon’s clinical writings and psychiatric papers, as well as with his early unpublished play Parallel Hands. These texts have now been collected in the anthology Alienation and Freedom, but Arnall had already gone to the source to read them in the archives of the Institut Mémories de l’édition contemporaine, located in a small village near Caen, France, where Fanon’s papers are held. Indeed, Arnall tells us that the main focus and argument of his book developed around this work in the archives. As a result of these beautiful close readings and his ability to range over the whole of Fanon’s body of work, Subterranean Fanon is the book I would hand to any novice reader of Fanon looking for an introduction or critical guide to his work. Arnall provides a thorough overview at once deeper and wider than many of the books that explicitly set out to introduce Fanon’s work.

As for how he pursues his argument about the dominant and subterranean currents in Fanon, it could be said that Arnall’s own analysis follows a similar sort of structure: basically dialectical with bursts of subterranean, anti-dialectical thinking. Rather than organizing the book thematically, he reads Fanon front to back, beginning with the early work collected in Alienation and Freedom, continuing through Black Skin, White Masks and Fanon’s writings on Algeria during the late 1950s (including A Dying Colonialism), and culminating in an extended reading of The Wretched of the Earth. In a funny sort of way, Subterranean Fanon reminded me of another book that might be its mirror image (or its dialectical opposite): Ato Sekyi-Otu’s Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience, published in 1996. Like Arnall, Sekyi-Otu is a close and careful reader of Fanon, and also treats Fanon’s body of work as an interconnected whole with recognizable patterns throughout. Both Arnall and Sekyi-Otu draw on the work of Antonio Gramsci to elucidate important aspects of Fanon’s thought. But whereas Arnall follows the nondialectical currents that move underground throughout Fanon’s work, interrupting and supplementing it, Sekyi-Otu’s project is the diametrical opposite: he proposes to “read Fanon’s texts as though they formed one dramatic dialectical narrative” (4). While he, like Arnall, understands Fanon to be engaged in a constant and complicated dialogue with himself, for Sekyi-Otu it is always in the interest of pursuing a larger dialectical narrative whose subject is “political experience.” If Arnall’s subterranean Fanon is in constant tension with the dominant dialectical flow, Sekyi-Otu’s Fanon introduces moments of rupture that are ultimately “reviewed, renounced, and replaced in the course of a movement of experience and language”—an explicitly dialectical movement, that is (Sekyi-Otu 5).

I have always found Sekyi-Otu to be among the most persuasive readers of Fanon. In particular, I have been deeply influenced by his reading of the Manichaean argument of “On Violence” (the opening chapter of The Wretched of the Earth) against critics like Hannah Arendt who accuse Fanon of confusing violence with politics. In fact, Sekyi-Otu insists, Fanon “is saying with the most classical of political philosophers that where there is no public space, there is no political relationship, only violence, ‘violence in a state of nature’” (87). In other words, Fanon presents us with a description of the colonial context in which no dialectical movement— indeed, no movement of any kind—is possible. However, the sticking point for me in Sekyi-Otu’s argument is his insistence on resolving any moment of discontinuity or rupture into a larger “dialectical narrative.” Arnall, who provides a generous but critical reading of Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience, makes a similar point, and I find his approach more persuasive. But of course the whole reason for having a field like Fanon studies is to allow such interconnected but ultimately disparate readings to proliferate, and Subterranean Fanon and Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience can best be read together, as part of this larger dialogue with Fanon and his work.

If there is a downside to Arnall’s reading, it results from his focus on what he calls “the continuity of Fanon’s internal division” throughout his body of work. It’s not that Arnall fails to mark the crucial historical shifts that influenced Fanon’s life and work, in particular his move to Algeria and subsequent commitment to the Algerian Revolution. Even in this transitional moment that led to his later work, Arnall rightly insists that

Fanon remained the deeply divided thinker who wrote Parallel Hands and Black Skin, White Masks, split between an explicitly declared and developed project of dialectical analysis and a more implicit, subterranean current of nondialectical and sometimes antidialectical thought.

Arnall’s reading is subtle enough not simply to mark this larger continuity but also to track “how it acquires new dimensions as [Fanon] directs his gaze toward a new set of historical circumstances” (66).

But in pursuing this continuity, Arnall at times effaces the wild shifts in Fanon’s work as he moves between genres, methodologies, and audiences. Indeed, Fanon often makes such shifts within the same text or even on the same page. One reason Fanon studies has been so generative is because Fanon’s work speaks to so many disciplines. At the same time, any attempt to claim him for a particular discipline breaks down or is forced to radically simplify his work. A book like Black Skin, White Masks is most often read in terms of its engagement with phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and Marxism, but at least two chapters of the book consist entirely of what a colleague once called “weird-ass literary criticism.” Similarly, Alienation and Freedom brings together highly technical clinical articles for specialized medical journals, Fanon’s early (and sometimes unfortunate) efforts at existential drama, and unapologetically polemical political writings that sought to rally support for the Algerian Revolution. It reflects the oeuvre of a writer with an insatiably restless mind who made a habit of doing many things at the same time.

Arnall’s chapter on several early texts from Alienation and Freedom does an admirable job of weaving together an argument from these disparate strands. He begins with Fanon’s clinical writings, in particular those Fanon produced with his mentor François Tosquelles, which outline a form of “annihilation therapy”; pauses to note parallels with “Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow,” a short essay influenced by Fanon’s reading of Nietzsche; and concludes with an extended reading of Parallel Hands, a play written while Fanon was still a medical student. Arnall finds in all of these texts an important continuity: glimpses of “another, subterranean Fanon bubbling volcanically beneath the dominant form of analysis and occasionally exploding to the surface” (43). It’s a deeply impressive reading. But as he draws our attention to this continuity, we sometimes lose the differences in genre, situation, and address that distinguish these disparate texts. In particular, it feels odd to describe the work being done by a play as “analysis.” Granted, Parallel Hands is, among its other faults, a fairly transparent political allegory. But the distinctions between Fanon’s dramaturgy and his clinical writing, between the deeply poetic passages of Black Skin, White Masks and the self-conscious propagandizing he did for El Moudjahid, between the moments of crystal clarity and those where by his own admission he seeks to induce in his readers a form of vertigo: surely these demand that any attempt to trace continuities must also grapple with Fanon’s disparate genres, voices, and methods. Arnall’s impressive work in tracing a dominant and subterranean Fanon through his body of work provides an important way to think about the problem of political change, in both Fanon’s time and in our own. But there are moments when Arnall’s reading threatens to turn Fanon into a writer who is solely a political theorist, even when he is writing plays or clinical notes or memoiristic essays. Fanon is unquestionably a political theorist. But he is also many other things.

It may be that I’m demanding the impossible, praising Arnall for tracing this continuity between the dominant and subterranean Fanon so brilliantly and doggedly while also demanding attention to the many other Fanons whose voices make themselves known in his work. But engaging the impossible is precisely what collective intellectual and political work is for. At its best, a field like Fanon studies can be precisely that: collective work towards liberation, inspired by a thinker for whom liberation was always at the center of all he wrote and did. Subterranean Fanon is a necessary book for this collective liberatory work, and readers of Fanon will be deeply grateful for it.

Anthony Alessandrini teaches English at Kingsborough Community College and Middle Eastern Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. He is the author of Frantz Fanon and the Future of Cultural Politics; the editor of Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives; and the co-editor of “Resistance Everywhere”: The Gezi Protests and Dissident Visions of Turkey. His book Decolonize Multiculturalism is forthcoming.

Footnotes

1. I refer specifically to the reception of Fanon’s work in English; the French reception of Fanon’s work has been quite different and, with some important exceptions, more belated. For an excellent overview of this reception, see Magali Bessone’s introduction to the 2011 edition of Fanon’s Oeuvres, “Frantz Fanon, en équilibre sur la color line” (23–43). I’m grateful to Professor Bessone for illuminating conversations about the French reception of Fanon’s work.

2. Much of Fanon’s writing—including his medical writings—remained widely dispersed until the publication of the invaluable collection Ecrits sur l’aliénation et la liberté (translated as Alienation and Freedom), edited by Jean Khalfa and Robert J. C. Young. Among their other important archival achievements, Khalfa and Young discovered and published typescripts of two plays Fanon had written in his twenties: The Drowning Eye and Parallel Hands.

3. It seems important to note that I’m not just an observer of the field of Fanon studies but a participant in it, so I have my own stakes here. In particular, I have tried to argue against this very division of Fanon’s work into “early” and “late”; see Alessandrini (75–100).

Works Cited

• Alessandrini, Anthony C. Frantz Fanon and the Future of Cultural Politics: Finding Something Different. Lexington Books, 2014.
• Bessone, Magali. “Frantz Fanon, en équilibre sur la color line.”
• Fanon, Oeuvres, pp. 23–43. Fanon, Frantz. Alienation and Freedom. Edited by Jean Khalifa and Robert J. C. Young, translated by Steven Corcoran, Bloomsbury, 2018.
• ———. Ecrits sur l’aliénation et la liberté. Edited by Jean Khalifa and Robert J. C. Young, Paris, La Découverte, 2015.
• ———. Oeuvres. Paris, La Découverte, 2011.
• ———. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Richard Philcox, Grove, 2004.
• Gordon, Lewis R. Fanon and the Crisis of European Man: An Essay on Philosophy and the Human Sciences. Routledge, 1995.
• ———. What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction to His Life and Thought. Fordham UP, 2015.
• Mbembe, Achille. Critique of Black Reason. Translated by Laurent Dubois, Duke UP, 2017.
• ———. “L’universalité de Frantz Fanon.” Fanon, Oeuvres, pp. 9–21. Robinson, Cedric. “The Appropriation of Frantz Fanon.” Race & Class, vol. 35, no.1, 1993, pp. 79–91.
• Sekyi-Otu, Ato. Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience. Harvard UP, 1996.

Video

JLM:

wearing a brown
unisex apron
the hands that pertain to the arm
and the arms that belong to the shoulders
and the shoulders that weave the delicate fabric
of nerves and arteries and musculature
what we call the mind or the self
or the voice that speaks to you
within this system of cloud-
drift and gesture

assembles
and then

polishes

a series of knives –
forks – spoons –
arranged on a
table

face concealed,
the light stores up
the color
and a wave-
crash of gray static
freezes every

thing ex-
cept a circum-
flex in aeternum

the angle of repose
for the eye
deranges a movement
where the hand
and the heart
hold the metal

invisible to
the camera’s
caduceus

& its repetitions
announce an un-
suturing of labor

from its place-
meant

CP:

19 de octubre del 2012
7:05 am
Viernes
Llego
Digo buenos días
Afuera la luz es nueva y la calle lleva el sonido de algunos carros
Adentro enciendo la luz del comedor y la atmósfera se vuelve más amarilla, contrasta con los
azules que veo desde la ventana.
También enciendo la radio, radiolatina es la estación que me dicen que ponga en las mañanas.
La cafetera ya está lista pero sé que tal vez nadie llegue hoy.
Afuera todo es movimiento, en los árboles, en los cables 
de luz y en una bolsa de Sabritas que pasa
rodando por la calle, son los vientos de Santa Ana que
hacen que todo cobre vida.

JLM:

“they believed that the worst punishment imaginable was a bullshit job”

a hillside does not have a job but what does it do?

the grass serenading the hillside does not have a job so what does it do?

the flies leaping in the shit-stained grass in the field do not have a job but what do they do?

the fingers dancing do not have a job so what do they do?

what is the role of a hand when the rest of the body is performing a job?

what does the body know of the hand when it falls asleep on the clock?

 

sisyphus does not have a job so what does he do? what did he do to deserve this?

I write letters to everyone I know:

a letter to my manager a letter to

my neighbor’s dog a letter to the

grate at the end of the door a letter

to my primos across the border

a letter to the myopic tecolotes

who patiently wait for the light-

house to burn down a letter to

the grasses in the earth’s mouth &

the mushrooms and the mosses

a letter to the rust that can’t sit

still in the chromatisms of a chair

that sits in the rain and sits still

a letter to the pentagon in the

heart of the inner country a letter

to ward off the nine eyes of google

a letter that represents the alchemy

of consonants but never the vowels

a letter that rewards long penitence

after much degradation and sweat

a letter to the bottles of salt carefully

positioned to mimic coastal erosion

a letter for the left hand who writes

to the right hand of what happens on

the other side of the screen that divides

the body from its cloud of wires & skin

CP:

Sobre la Avenida México hay una batalla
comienza a las 6 am
De un lado suena el himno nacional mexicano, del otro lado suena el himno nacional de Estados
Unidos.
El gobierno le regaló a la ciudad un reloj conmemorativo de la independencia.
a ciertas horas suena una canción
A las 6:00 am el himno nacional
A medio día suena la vikinga
A las 4 el cachanilla
Y a las 6 cielito lindo
La idea era que las canciones marcaran diariamente las horas de los habitantes.

Un mes después de que instalaran el reloj. Los de la border patrol comenzaron a poner el himno
nacional de Estados Unidos a la misma hora, a todo volumen desde la camioneta que se estaciona
todos los días en la cima de una loma para vigilar la frontera.
Las vecinas dicen que es la batalla de las 6:00 am sobre la Avenida México.

JLM:

the network is a series of cameras in a closed-circuit telepathy
the tele-vision in the mind erects a structure of feeling
the network is a series of empty gestures in a black box
the border is a series of plateaus in which we intensify and speak in tongues
the network is a refraction in the glass that slices the eye open
the camera is a room inside a stanza inside a poem inside a box inside a bottle
the network is a series of views of the end of the world

a view of Antwerp awash in its grime and mercury

a view of several large cranes and shipyards and maybe a crack pipe

a view of the Global City

a view of merchants and tradesmen and longue-durée economics and maybe a syringe

a view of a book written by Roberto Bolaño in 1980

a view of diamonds in the River Scheldt

a diamond sea (a view of)

a view of not one sea (the north sea) but many seas

a view of diamonds hence the Diamond Sutra

a view of World-Systems-Theory

a view of Subhuti respectfully asking the Buddha if he would like Dunkin Donuts

a view of diamonds being dunked into a pool of blood in slow motion for a music video

a view of the World Bank from the banks of Port-au-prince

a view of the Age of Explorations

a view of broken factory windows because they are always broken

a view of fork-tongued white men in armor bearing contracts

a view of contractual relations in the Antwerp of the 1600s

a view of someone lying completely utterly still in a cage

a view of several cages, emptied

a view of someone else in a cage who is looking at the camera

a view of the Ever Given terminally stuck in the evergreen waters of the Suez Canal from the satellites of Antwerp’s business district

a view of the Evergrande Liquidity Crisis from the living room of a sinjoren

a view of hands in vinyl gloves carefully fabricating time – one brushstroke at a time

CP:

Pasaban avionetas muy a lo lejos haciendo piruetas en los cielos de Tecate, y cada vez que la estela aparecía, escuchaba decir a la gente: son los americanos, ya están otra vez tirando hielo para que llueva.

There’s something about the weather of this place.

JLM:

the hand is no longer free
from the organs
and their conspiracy

my body
like a dandelion
grows

in the crevice
of someone else’s
vision

my tremulous
soul like a fly wavering
in its inertia

can find no signal
in the noise of the flesh
or the poisoned air

and yet I resume
my work – this aimless labor
at reconstructing time

I polish
the spoons and see
my face in them

one after
another one
after another
one
after

another –

“dear managers of
human arrangement:

I am writing to report
that
inside the onion
all the constructs of labor
rest concealed
like the blade sleeping
inside a knife
at vanishing point

inside the worker
a salt accrues
and builds up builds up
builds up until it spills
out at the moment
an onion is bladed open

inside time are all
the rudiments of labor:

a worker – a rustworn onion –
a knife-all-blade –
glass bottles pregnant with salt and tears
and the effort to keep from vanishing”

CP:

Lo habían encomendado a subir una roca hasta la cima de una montaña
Desde donde la piedra volvia a caer por su propio peso.
Habían pensado que no hay castigo más terrible que el trabajo inútil.
Lo unico que vemos es el esfuerzo de un cuerpo para levantar la piedra
Y subirla por una pendiente cien veces recorrida
El rostro crispado, la mejilla pegada a la piedra,
La tension de los brazos,
La seguridad enteramente humana de dos manos llenas de tierra.
Una vez arriba, la piedra desciende al pie de la montaña.
Desde donde habra de volver a subirla hasta la cima
Solo para verla bajar de nuevo a la llanura.
Todo su ser se dedica a no acabar nada.

Judith Goldman (bio)

Embedded in an unassuming point on the 1,952-mile Mexico-US border, the scene of counter-surveillance that ends “CCTV”—the collaborative video-poem by Mexican multimedia artist Chantal Peñalosa and Xicano poet José-Luis Moctezuma presented here—subverts through an aestheticized, albeit still uncanny surreality. Rising to the pro-voyeuristic height of the cop car on the hill, the rooftop sitter stages a standoff that, in this landscape, parodically echoes a Western shootout, but more so invokes a laser-like Magrittean absurdity, suggested even more strongly by the perpetual cloud panel of the dual-channel video.¹ The cross-border filmic perspective from the Mexican side meets the surreal with the surreal, drafting the border patrol into an Ionesco anti-play that exposes the police’s own theater of the absurd. The real abstraction of the border is taunted by what Moctezuma calls “system of cloud,” continually asserting its impertinent, blissful autonomy from nation states and their would-be compartmentalization. Elsewhere in the piece, Peñalosa verbally reports a cognate scene: blaring the US national anthem as a sonic duel, the US border patrol aggresses through a cacophonous miasma inversely made of nationalism. If the hourly musical interludes of the town clock help create a shared habitus and specifically Mexican identity for inhabitants, that acoustically grounded form of life is degraded by a trespassing neo-imperial counterblast.² Another of her prose passages registers yet further Yanqui climate control, weather modification through cloud-seeding: “son los americanos, ya están otra vez tirando hielo para que llueva.”³ At the end of this closing segment of inside-out domestic arrangements, a new shot captures a street sweeper raising dust, the dingy street, and the mere serviceability of the domicile: the aesthetic is desublimated, and we end by viewing its supports.

Such a focus on the revelatory “back-of-the-house” echoes the moments in the poem-video that feature service labor in a typical café, or rather the ritualized, compulsive doubles of such tasks. In this sousveillance video, Peñalosa works her actual day job as a subversive form of maintenance art, treading an infra-thin line between work and work-like tasks that points to the hollowness of alienated service labor through repetition, hypertrophied duration, and useless perfectionism (even if, in the case of polishing a spoon, it produces a version of Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror). If “la perruque,” as theorized by Michel de Certeau, is a form of time-theft as an employee does work for themself in the guise of work for an employer, surely by surreptitiously turning her wage labor at the café into sessions in an artist studio, Peñalosa engages in the practice; yet since her art, made on the boss’s clock, assumes the mode of an exaggeration of her work tasks, it also forces la perruque into a paradoxical form.⁴ Over against a perverse, excessive, messy, inefficient attention to saltshaker levels (Duchamp anyone?, and don’t the other workers [managers?] seem on the cusp of noticing?), Peñalosa’s miniature theater of hand and object nonetheless also possesses a certain tenderness. It seems to sacralize these mundane tasks and to make real and felt the time in which they are performed, as in the care with which the entire surface of a copy of Chihuahuan novelist Jesús Gardea’s novel Sóbol (1985) is painted with coffee grounds by gloved hands and then wiped clean— taking up almost a minute and a half of the ten-minute piece—an act of inoperative undoing saturated with intention.⁵ With her commentary on interior ambience and an external ambient, Peñalosa also keeps the atmospheric in focus.

José-Luis Moctezuma’s poetics of interaction with the video seek neither to frame nor to explicate the visual feed.⁶ The relation of his poetry to the video is further complicated by Peñalosa’s own verbal contributions to the piece, which consist of excerpts from her work diary. The ekphrastic mode of some of Moctezuma’s verse mimics and signifies on Peñalosa’s understated filmic style (in part due to much of the video’s status as workplace footage unobtrusively obtained) as well as on the performance of the labor being filmed. Akin to the iterations of hyphenated enjambment, “the hands that pertain to the arm / and the arms that belong to the shoulders” grammatically echo Peñalosa’s own explorations of labor’s dysintegral alienation, “an un-suturing of labor / / from its place- / meant,” its repression of “what we call the mind or the self” that is nonetheless also present. The poetry also collaborates with and extends the video’s attention to, for instance, the fly’s guest performance by imagining in a negative register the proletarianization of every element of these scenes. It responds to the beautifully whimsical, reflexively gratuitous video segments by repeating, as though in a children’s book, the question of the legibility of being outside capital’s labor regime: “the grass serenading the hillside does not have a job so what does it do?” The speaker’s later litany of epistolary addressees likewise personifies, using the quaint figure of the letter to establish such a meaningful counterworld. Yet a mournful mise-en-abyme characterizes his final lyric section written in the persona of the hapless worker, capturing the void in wage labor in a compressed sestina.

The impetus for “CCTV” was the Live Magazine Show performance event in 2021’s sixday Lit y Luz Festival (Chicago), a yearly translingual gathering bringing artists and writers from Mexico and the United States into conversation through cross-arts collaboration.⁷ Paired with Peñalosa without their being previously acquainted, Moctezuma urged her to send selections from existing work. Responding as well to the festival’s theme of “Structure,” “CCTV” recycles outtakes from a number of her videos, such as La rutina de un tenedor [Fork routine] and Amberes [Antwerp], made during her artist residency in Antwerp and later shown in an exhibition of artworks focusing on Roberto Bolaño’s eponymous 1981 novella (Moctezuma, “Conversation”).⁸ In part through Moctezuma’s poetic intervention, the resulting montage of self-citation becomes itself an integral work, drawing out commonalities of concern, approach, and aesthetics across her oeuvre. While in Peñalosa’s case the title “CCTV” alludes ironically to her act of turning the camera on her workplace, CCTV is also a trope in Moctezuma’s major first book of poems, Place-Discipline, much of which theorizes how the interpenetration of digital capitalism, algorithmic governance, and surveillance racializes the urban space of Chicago. Mid-poem here, Moctezuma concatenates the trope of CCTV with other figures of involuted closed circuits: border enclosure, black box, camera as la cámara (in Spanish also “chamber”), and poetic stanzas, perhaps a recessed allusion to Dante’s theory of stanza and the canzone structure in De vulgari eloquentia (the Italian word stanza means “room”).⁹ Meditating on the segment that features the port of Antwerp, Moctezuma reveals its history as a colonial entrepôt that continues into its present as a global nexus that exceeds its locale—a bravura iteration of a micro-genre germane to political economy in which a single point is dilated into the full fan of its capitalist capillarity.¹⁰

It’s perhaps not clear whether a set of fingers walking up and then down the switchbacks of a mountain path, through a trick of scale and perspective, is meant to emblematize Sisyphus. In “The Myth of Sisyphus,” Camus sees any act as capable of producing a friction of confrontation with meaninglessness that yields what he calls the “climate of the absurd” [“le climat de l’absurdité”], yet he also singles out artistic creation as particularly revelatory, a “dogged revolt against [the human] condition . . . All that ‘for nothing,’ in order to repeat and mark time” (85). Art should be anti-redemptive, a matter of disciplined, focused emulation of existential absurdity: “A little thought estranges from life whereas much thought reconciles to life. Incapable of refining the real, thought pauses to mimic it” (75). Art “adopts the experience of a life and assumes its shape” (84). Peñalosa’s practice might be considered conceptualist insofar as it often involves a verbatim annexation of “reality,” whether in video or in words, that Camus, with his focus on philosophy and the novel, would not recognize or imagine as potentially paradigmatic of the art he valorizes. The last passage from “CCTV” quotes from the final section of Camus’s essay, which offers his forcibly ironic, counterintuitive interpretation of the myth. Intriguingly, Peñalosa cites Camus’s description of Sisyphus’s embodied labor of perpetually pushing the rock, rather than the passage just following it, here:

The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd. . . . Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition . . . If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy. . . . One does not discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manual of happiness. . . . This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. (90–91)

One is struck, too, by the essay’s relation to Moctezuma’s responsive radical apostrophizing: “The absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols. In the universe suddenly restored to its silence, the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up” (Camus 91). In its too-close human tracings that open onto the inhuman, “CCTV” may not offer a manual of happiness. But it does model a bracingly lucid futility speaking our contemporary.

Judith Goldman is the author of four books of poetry, most recently agon (Operating System 2017), and a number of articles on contemporary poetry and poetics; she has performed her work nationally and internationally. In 2019–2020, a collaborative, multi-media installation Open Waters [Northwest Passage + Open Polar Sea + Arctic Plastic] was exhibited at the Burchfield Penney Art Center in Buffalo, NY. Goldman is Associate Professor in the Department of English at SUNY, Buffalo, where she directs its Poetics Program. She is also the Poetry Features Editor for Postmodern Culture.

Footnotes

1. Many paintings by René Magritte use a cloud motif (for instance, Le faux miroir [The False Mirror] (1929); La condition humaine [The Human Condition] (1933); La vengeance [Revenge] (c.1938–9). The constant presence of the cloud channel in the work was a collaborative decision of the artists, and connects with a photographic diptych by Peñalosa, in which a cloud formation is imaged from Tecate, California, USA and Tecate, Baja California, Mexico.

2. I adopt this thought from Corbin, Village Bells.

3. For a brilliant discussion of this issue, see Weizman and Sheikh, The Conflict Shoreline.

4. See De Certeau’s discussion of “la perruque” in The Practice of Everyday Life, 24–28.

5. Núria Vilanova discusses Gardea’s textualization of the border and literary aesthetics organized and motivated by the desert landscape over a number of novels in “Another Textual Frontier”; Sóbol is known for its sonic experimentation.

6. “Explicitation” is a term used by literary theorist Antoine Berman in “Translation and the Trials of the Foreign” (1985) to name a translator’s deformation of a text through the incorporation of explanatory language that destroys a work’s style, its intended opacity, reticence, or sense of mystery. I stretch this term here to cover how ekphrastic verse can overexplain its visual instigator.

7. Information about the Lit y Luz organization and festival schedules quoted from their website www.litluz.org.

8. For more on this exhibition, see the website at Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp: https://www.muhka.be/programme/detail/1316-amberes-.

9. See, for instance, the epigraph from the second book of De vulgari eloquentia that heads Giorgio Agamben’s Stanzas: “And here one must know that this term (stanza) has been chosen for technical reasons exclusively, so that what contains the entire art of the canzone should be called stanza, that is, a capacious dwelling or receptacle for the entire craft” (vii). A longer form of “CCTV” (still related to, but not choreographed with the video) written by Moctezuma plays extensively on sonic and conceptual puns around chamber, stanza, and a camera that films. Undoubtedly, many of my thoughts on the collaboration discussed here derive from reading Moctezuma’s longer work; many thanks to the author.

10. The port of Antwerp is still one of the largest in Europe. The city opened the first bourse in 1531 and remained a center of finance through much of the sixteenth century; it was the “sugar capital” of Europe, importing from Spanish and Portuguese plantations, and is still known for its diamond industry. See “Antwerp.”

Works Cited

• Agamben, Giorgio. Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture. Translated by Ronald L. Martinez, U of Minnesota P, 1993.
• “Antwerp.” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antwerp. Accessed 2 Mar. 2022.
• Berman, Antoine. “Translation and the Trials of the Foreign.” The Translation Studies Reader, edited and translated by Lawrence Venuti, 2^nd ed., Routledge, 2004, pp. 276–289.
• Camus, Albert. Le myth de Sisyphe. Paris, Éditions Gallimard, 1942. Faded Page, https://www.fadedpage.com/books/20160912/html.php. Accessed 3 Mar. 2022.
• ———. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. Translated by Justin O’Brien, Vintage, 1955.
• Corbin, Alain. Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the Nineteenth-Century French Countryside. Translated by Martin Thom, Columbia UP, 1998.
• De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall, U of California P, 1984.
• Moctezuma, José-Luis. Place-Discipline. Omnidawn, 2018.
• ———. Personal communication with author. 28 Jan 2022.
• Vilanova, Núria. “Another Textual Frontier: Contemporary Fiction on the Northern Mexican Border.” Bulletin of Latin American Research, vol. 21, no. 1, Jan. 2002, pp. 73–98.
• Weizman, Eyal and Fazal Sheikh. The Conflict Shoreline: Colonization as Climate Change in the Negev Desert. Göttingen, Steidl in association with Cabinet Books, 2015.

Matthew J. Rigilano (bio)

Abstract

This article assesses phatic communication now, when symbolic efficiency is in decline. As a result of neoliberal capitalism and industrialized social media, small talk is both obligatory and suffused with anxiety. Under disciplinary society, chitchat has been a threat to biopolitical control. Today, small talk is a form of surplus value that enters directly into the market. No longer a ritual of social facilitation, phatic communication takes on a pathological character. This article relies on psychoanalytic theory to complicate Paolo Virno’s take on the contemporary position of phatic language. In so doing, it asks: what does small talk become once the symbolic pact that ensured its efficacy has been broken?

Over the last few years, a steady stream of articles has appeared arguing that, contrary to what you might think, small talk is an important mode of social interaction.¹ The motives for such arguments are not wholly uniform, but many seek to encourage stronger social bonds in the workplace, which is virtually everywhere in our techno-neoliberal era. These articles are minor indications of a major shift in discursive norms. Whereas the factories of the industrial revolution discouraged small talk—“you don’t get paid to talk”—the offices and social media platforms of postindustrial capitalism actively solicit it, and not necessarily because managers or admins prefer a friendly or more mindful work/user environment. The compulsion to communicate is directly related to contemporary ways of generating profit (Berardi 78). For instance, as many office workers have remained remote since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the use of “team chat apps” like Microsoft Teams and Slack has grown massively. These platforms enable “team members” to stay in contact through messaging applications, video conferences, and so on. Donut, a popular app that integrates with Slack, promises to help workers “connect around the (virtual) watercooler” by staging introductions and conversations throughout the day (fig. 1).²

Fig. 1. Typical “watercooler” chitchat taken from a promotional video on Donut’s website.

In this example, the Donut chatbot initiates a conversation and those workers who have opted in can reply. The content of the discussion, of course, is not particularly important. What matters is the social connection that such small talk might build, which, in turn, can translate into greater efficiency and greater profits: chitchatting about hotdogs is not a way to avoid work, it is work. The data generated on the platform is also a vital source of profit. As Paolo Virno has been claiming for decades, it is not that worker-consumers must learn to play specific language games; rather, they must develop the capacity to communicate in general. Phatic communication, as a performative, low-content linguistic exchange, is no longer a phenomenon on the margins that happens in between more significant units of discourse, but an “immediate and quite considerable content of ordinary experience” (Virno, When 90).

The expansion of phatic communication is not just a byproduct of the turn to cognitive labor; the dominance of social media is a crucial factor. Small talk is thriving online.³ Roberto Simanowski claims that “communication on Facebook operates in the phatic mode; it flows past as the kind of pleasant, information-free white noise” (xiv–xv). Vincent Miller draws on “risk society” theories of modernity to explain the rise of phatic communication online (“New Media”): reliance on “phatic technologies,” he argues, is rooted in the social conditions of late modernity, where traditional forms of meaning, authority, and kinship have broken down, leading to an unprecedented growth in what Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim call “individualization.” Modern individuals are “disembedded” from traditional and immediate contexts—put at risk, that is—and thus seek to be socially “reembedded,” however superficially, through the phatic resources of virtual communication. In short, people use small talk online to create and maintain relationships in a world beset by contingency and instability. But if it is true that the demands of cognitive labor and the pressures of late modernity have produced a “hypertrophic development of the non-referential aspects of language” (Virno, Grammar 97), then why do those articles on the affordances of small talk continue to surface? Do they not presuppose a reluctance to communicate in this way? After all, while chitchat might constitute a large part of online interaction, face-to-face conversation—including small talk—is rapidly disappearing, as Sherry Turkle has argued. But how does this view account for the argument that we live in an increasingly data-driven society, one that has no use for social pleasantries, especially those defined by the absence of informational value (Han, Disappearance 60)?

The state of phatic communication in the twenty-first century is not at all clear, in part because the phatic, as a concept, ranges over several disciplines, from linguistics to sociology to philosophy. The purpose of this essay is to examine the role of small talk in postindustrial society from a primarily psychoanalytic viewpoint. Psychoanalytic theory often privileges the category of the speaking subject, and the social, political, and technological valances of contemporary phatic discourse could be best observed through the prism of the subject. My primary claim is that under neoliberal capitalism, phatic discourse is not just ubiquitous but obligatory, and this obligation puts an enormous psychic pressure on the subject, which in turn produces a range of symptomatic responses. Under disciplinary society, chitchat was seen as a threat, something that had to be submitted to biopolitical control. Today, small talk is understood as a form of surplus value that can be directly entered into the market. No longer marginal or exceptional, small talk has lost its apotropaic or therapeutic character, leaving the contemporary subject with fewer resources to navigate its increasingly turbulent social milieu and to ward off the threat of psychic destitution. Virno’s “hypertrophic development of the non-referential aspects of language” is not just a new social phenomenon but a new social pathology.

I

In 1924, Bronisław Malinowski coined the term “Phatic Communion” to describe behavior he observed amongst Trobriander islanders, namely the inclination to satisfy the “mere need of companionship” through low-information conversation:

Are words in Phatic Communion used primarily to convey meaning, the meaning which is Symbolically theirs? Certainly not! They fulfil a social function and that is their principal aim, but they are neither the result of intellectual reflection, nor do they necessary arouse reflection in the listener. Once again we may say that language does not function here as a means of transmission of thought. (315)

Malinowski recognizes immediately that this sort of activity is not unique to the peoples of Papua New Guinea but is a standard feature of linguistic activity. For Malinowski, “Phatic Communion” exemplifies a basic proposition: that all language is rooted in the “active modes of human behavior” (317). In this respect, it is on a continuum with ritual language and magical formulae, both instances where words are profoundly connected to the context of their use as opposed to supposedly reflecting matters of fact. Roman Jakobson understands the phatic as an essential linguistic function, that of “channel clearing” or verifying the communicative circuit, but he also recognized its ritual aspect (152–53).⁴ The phatic function can consist of monosyllabic greetings, and it can also “be displayed by a profuse exchange of ritualized formulas” (Jakobson 152).

Following Malinowski and Jakobson, Virno categorizes small talk as a species of performative language alongside ritual incantation, prayer, and other types of religious speech like glossolalia, and the external monologues of children (When 19–107). Performative language uses words to do things, not so much to mean things. In some traditional societies, for Virno, performative or ritual speech was invoked at times of crisis when cultural norms had broken down (When 60, 200–09). Performative speech like ritual incantation allows the subject to repeat the process of ontogenesis: the meaninglessness of the language first renders the individual indistinct, but foregrounding the function of the voice allows the self to renew the process of individuation, to reassert its visibility in the world, and thereby to re-establish the cultural grounds of existence. Virno does not dwell on the specificity of the phatic, but we can safely extrapolate to some degree. For one, chitchat has never had quite the apotropaic or therapeutic power of the language of sacred rites, but it is a form of ontological support. “Phatic Communion,” like other performatives, tends to manifest in two opposing but essentially linked valences. On the one hand, chitchat is often put to the service of social cohesion. In those situations, the cultural environment is uncertain or indeterminate, thereby requiring a repetition of anthropogenesis: the interlocutors reassert themselves as a community of speaking beings. On the other hand, we can understand chitchat as a type of inane chatter or even dissociative babbling. In those situations, the phatic provides relief from a symbolic universe that has become oppressive or rigidified. The first form of the phatic emphasizes cultural renewal, while the second emphasizes the pre-individual hiatus from discursive community. Both valences are only visible to the extent that they occur intermittently. Virno’s central insight is that the industrialization of communication media and the communicative imperative of global industry actively elicit the speech of the modern subject:

A certain number of standard utterances is not what is required of the worker; rather, an informal act of communication is required, one which is flexible. Capable of confronting the most diverse possibilities (along with a good dose of opportunism, however). Using terms from the philosophy of language, I would say it is not the parole but the langue which is mobilized, the very faculty of language, not any of its specific applications. (Grammar 91)

This demand for informal communication is not just a work requirement, of course, but a generalized demand in contemporary culture, especially given that consumption and labor are often integrated through online self-branding. If the performance of language is indeed ubiquitous, “we should recognize that the repetition of anthropogenesis is no longer an apotropaic resource to be used in times of crisis, but,” again, “an immediate and quite considerable content of ordinary experience” (Virno, When 90).

Small talk in the TV series Black Mirror compellingly captures the current situation. In the episode “Nosedive” (2016), everyday life is dominated by the logic of social media, such that one’s social rating goes up or down with every social interaction. The main character, Lacie (a 4.2 rating), enters the office elevator with a former work acquaintance, Bets (4.6). Using her ocular implant to surreptitiously scan Bets’s recent social media activity, which features a cat named Pancakes, Lacie brightens her smile and strikes up a conversation: “How’s Pancakes?” To which Bets replies, “He’s hilarious. Such a funny cat. Just the best” (00:05:30-37). Firstly, this bit of chitchat does not revolve around shared cultural experience such as the weather or a popular sporting event; it concerns a specific social media post, which already indicates something about the contemporary field of available symbolic references (about which I will say more). Secondly, while the setting (an elevator) might suggest that this conversation is just a way of passing the time, something liminal or exceptional, the rating system that serves as the transcendental horizon for all social interaction necessitates that this speech, like all speech, is directly linked to individual social capital, which, in the universe of the episode, can have immediate financial consequences. While Virno is perhaps the first to register this sort of phenomenon philosophically, he does not elaborate fully on its consequences, especially for those subjects experiencing these novel pressures. My premise is that this transformation corresponds to a major shift that defines the contemporary moment: the decline of Symbolic efficiency under what Jodi Dean calls communicative capitalism.

Communicative capitalism, according to Dean, “designates that form of late capitalism in which values heralded as central to democracy take material form in networked communications technologies” (“Circulation” 104). The mediation of democracy through industrialized communication has radically diminished the political agency of the networked subject. Fundamental to Dean’s theory is Slavoj Žižek’s argument concerning the “decline of Symbolic efficiency.”⁵ This decline refers to “the loss of shared symbols, of general ideas and norms, of a sense that we know what another means when they appeal to home, the common good, citizenship, the university, etc.” (Dean, “Revolutionary” 332). This condition, which some have designated postmodern, is much like that described by the theorists of the “risk society” with whom we began. But Žižek argues that these thinkers “underestimate the impact of the emerging new societal logic on the very fundamental status of subjectivity” (341). They correctly describe the disruptive features of our unstable, risky world, but they do not, for the most part, recognize how the subject experiencing these disruptions has also changed in fundamental ways. The postmodern subject that emerges as traditional figures of the big Other disappear—those figures that seem to give authority and consistency to a particular social structure: God, patriarchy, nationalism, etc.—is not simply free to experiment with multiple modes of reflexive self-fashioning and new techniques of re-embedding. Rather, the very force responsible for this loss of reference and disorientation of meaning—communicative capitalism—provides its own solutions in the form of incessant circulation or investment in the emergent figure of the social media Other. The algorithm and the platform have replaced the narratives and institutions that have become obsolete.

Digital circulation (of affects, memes, headlines, “content”) has the effect of diminishing the capacity of language to mediate and therefore sustain the desire necessary for the constitution of the subject. Endless engagement robs us of the time and attention to creatively singularize our experience. As Dean aptly puts it, “I enter; I click; I link; I poke. Drive circulates, round and round, producing satisfaction even as it misses its aim, even as it emerges in the plastic network of the decline of Symbolic efficiency” (“Real” 15). Without a stable Symbolic field capable of providing the foothold of selfhood, we are left oscillating between the Real (inattentive enjoyment of the drive) and the imaginary (a paranoid and profoundly fragile sense of self reflected in the “likes”). The other possibility for the subject, described powerfully by Matthew Flisfeder, concerns how social media users will the big Other into existence through their engagement. He argues that “it is the agency of the Other for whom we perform our Symbolic identities in social media, which is increasingly connected to the world offline. I tweet, therefore I exist; and the compulsion to (re)tweet is the symptom of our need to feel affective recognition from the Other” (86). In contrast to the canalizing and circulation of the drive observed by Dean, Flisfeder argues that desire can only be sustained by a validating agency—and we will perversely produce that agency if it is found lacking.

II

Before we return to the phatic to determine its function in relation to the decline or transformation of the big Other, we need to clarify the theoretical stakes of the problem. To begin, it is necessary to introduce an important psychoanalytic distinction between empty speech and full speech. Jacques Lacan employs these terms to designate different forms of speech encountered in the clinic (“Function”). Empty speech is language that sustains the narrative of the ego. Most of what the subject says aims to protect or bolster the ego and keep the unconscious at bay. The content of empty speech is secondary to the effect the speech has on the speaker. As Derek Hook puts it, summarizing Lacan’s position: “in sending a message the subject is typically more concerned with affirming an ideal image of its ego, with winning the gratifications of the recognition of others, than with what is being communicated per se” (54). Full speech, on the other hand, concerns language that has transformational Symbolic value, signifiers that produce a change in the subject by engaging the Symbolic fabric of language. While the two kinds of speech seem opposed, they are in fact intimately related. Empty speech, because it seems to wander aimlessly, is often the starting point for speech that has consequences for the unconscious. For the early Lacan, the “talking cure” involves the ambiguous movement from one mode of speech to the other. Hook makes the point nicely: “Just as the truth-potential of full speech is always at risk from the disruption of empty speech, so it is that in the midst of the babbling of empty speech a moment of full speech may erupt, a pulse from the Other might break through” (71).

At first blush, empty speech appears to be nothing other than phatic discourse. As a form of ego-led babbling, empty speech is very much like Kierkegaardian chatter or Heideggerian “idle talk”: talking for the sake of talking.⁶ Phatic discourse, like empty speech, seems to take place at the level of the Imaginary, where the ritual exchange of non-referential language is fundamentally about being seen by the other, seducing the other, performing for the other. The problem is that phatic communication also has much in common with full speech. Lacan insists that full speech often lacks in content or semiotic significance because it necessarily invokes the fact of Symbolic exchange, the pact that makes any particular meaning possible. As he puts it, “objects of Symbolic exchange . . . are destined to be useless” (“Function” 225). Speech, to the extent that it is transformative or full, operates (or acts) at the level of the Symbolic as a pact, as that shared but obscure backdrop of communication. When strangers engage in small talk, they leverage the pact: “we are speaking the same language.” Chitchat points to itself as language and thus announces the presence of a meta-social contract. In this scenario, the “I” is not primary. Rather, there is a focus on the potential for a “we,” those who share in the Symbolic universe. Phatic speech shares aspects of both empty and full speech, but it is not identical with either. It is not full because it rarely produces lasting social or subjective transformations. As a social ritual, it operates on the terrain of the Other, but, like empty speech, it frequently goes in circles. This is one way of understanding what Malinowski means when he connects phatic speech to ritual and magic speech on the basis of their shared connection to scenes of human action. We might think of small talk as a discourse that invokes ritual-as-pact but is only loosely tethered to any specific formulae. Phatic speech has been seen as a general linguistic phenomenon to which psychoanalytic discourses might be compared in various ways, but small talk today has a peculiarly pathological character, or is at least correlated to new forms of psychic suffering that emerge out of our hypermediated social world.

To identify the problem of pathological phaticity more precisely, it is necessary to interrogate Virno’s conceptual framework in relation to psychoanalytic theory. For Virno, everything hinges on the idea of the pre-individual, a concept he borrows from Gilbert Simondon. The pre-individual names those conditions that precede, enable, and limit the process of individuation. Natural-historical languages are pre-individual because they provide the conditions for linguistic significance that pre-exist the emergence of the speaker. When an individual declares “I speak,” they renew the process of ontogenesis by repeating the passage whereby the speaking self (engaging in generic, pure parole) emerges from the pre-individual language (or langue). The purpose of this renewal is to provide relief for the subject at a time of cultural or psychic instability. From a Lacanian perspective, the ability to appeal to the voice as a therapeutic or apotropaic instrument is complicated in several ways. To begin, the pre-individual natural-historical language is nothing other than the Symbolic, and the very fact of the psychoanalytic clinic attests to its intransigence. To accede to the Symbolic, the individual must give up certain desirous relations to the body and its capacities—thus the production of repressed part-objects, such as the gaze and voice. The voice is not something one can regain in a process of ontogenesis, because the bare voice (vocalization without meaning) is never really one’s own. Returning to the pre-individual voice would necessitate a passage through the unconscious.

We can also illustrate the rift between Virno’s philosophical anthropology and the Lacanian perspective by problematizing a particular metaphor Virno uses to describe pre-individual language: “amniotic fluid.” The process of individuation requires that the subject (the child) recognizes that the capacity to speak is independent of the natural-historical language, the “amniotic fluid,” in which they are immersed (Grammar 77). From a Lacanian perspective, things are quite the opposite: the child is first immersed in “lalangue maternelle,” that is, the sonic and bodily environment of the mother’s voice (Soler 110). The subject painfully emerges from this “amniotic fluid” through the process of castration, that is, the process of being alienated in the world of the signifier. As a result, the “pre-discursive voice” is saturated with jouissance and appears in the unmeaning signifiers of the body, or symptoms. Mladen Dolar refers to the idea that we can have access to the pre-individuated voice-as-such as a “structural illusion: the voice appears to be the locus of true expression, the place where what cannot be said can nevertheless be conveyed” (31). This distinction in conceptualizing the subject’s pre-individual or Symbolic conditions is crucial for our inquiry. According to Virno, the communicative function has been hijacked by the culture industry. We are no longer compelled to rehearse particular scripts, where our capacity to speak is silently assumed. Instead, that capacity is explicitly harnessed by the dictates of capital. This power over the potential of the body is biopolitical, though the object of the control is more the potential than the body itself (which is precisely the difference between disciplinary and neoliberal society). In psychoanalytic terms, we might say that the decline of the efficacy of the Symbolic corresponds to the direct capitalization of potential (Kordela 106). For Virno, this potential is a generic and shared human capacity, a form of “general intellect” that in the absence of biopolitical control could lead to the flourishing of communism. For Lacanians, this potential might be understood as objet a, the remainder of jouissance organized by fantasy. But as Heiko Feldner and Fabio Vighi make clear in their description of Lacan’s discourse of the capitalist, “the capitalist revolution proposes to valorise, produce and exchange this meaningless remainder, turning it into a universally achievable entity” (112). Even lalangue—the Real of speech subtracted from signification—is subject to this incessant process of seizure and exchange.⁷

The ability of the subject to recapture its potential is not just a political difficulty, however, but a psychic one: the speaking subject’s access to its own potential is already barred by the signifying chain that produces the split in the subject to begin with. Virno’s description of the subject’s return to the pre-individual in the course of executing various performative socio-linguistic operations is useful, but the dynamics of the Symbolic limit any direct return to the jouissance-laden “amniotic fluid” of one’s mother tongue. The decline or transformation of the big Other does not mean that the role of the signifier in the production of subjectivity is somehow diminished, but that the structural agency that organizes those signifiers is no longer hegemonic. The consequences of this condition are observable in contemporary phatic communication. In traditional communicative contexts, small talk functions at the intersection of the Symbolic and Imaginary, leveraging the power of the Other—the pact—to forge relations to others. Today, small talk functions at the intersection or conflation of the Imaginary and the Real, where the jouissance of de-ritualized speech takes shape as anxiety, shame, and despondency.

III

As both Malinowski and Virno suggest, small talk is linked to ritual. In the past, the “ritualized formulas” of small talk worked to ease social interactions, but what becomes of the phatic when the Other begins to fade? As Byung-Chul Han has argued, ritual activity is markedly diminished in our postdisciplinary society: “The culture of information has lost the magic that comes from the empty signifier” (Disappearance 62). To a large extent, this is because ritual appeals to nonegoic aspects of cultural life, the shared experience of the Other. Today, permissive, achievement-oriented society cannot tolerate ritual precisely because it conflicts with our narcissistic demand for transparency. Without the agency of the traditional Other, small talk falls into disrepute. The rituals for chitchatting with a stranger now seem antiquated and pointless. Instead of assuming that “we are speaking the same language, we share a pact,” today we acknowledge that “we are speaking the same language, but we don’t believe anything binds us together.” Without the big Other to censure or acknowledge the collectivity of individual others, cynicism prevails. People don’t want to chitchat. Instead, they want to know what you want from them. The discomfort with small talk is often a cynical response of the narcissist who knows that the pact of language does not match the transactional value associated with the maintenance of the ego.

Surveys have consistently suggested that young people today dread speaking on the phone (Meek), in part because of the prospect of making small talk. Some of this anxiety is undoubtedly linked to the narcissistic tendencies noted above, but I would argue that there is also another dimension of angoisse at work here. To speak on the phone is to encounter the voice in concentrated form. The mediated speaking voice can be tolerated if one can presuppose the existence of a stable Symbolic field into which it can be integrated. But without the authority of the Other, voices appear to be, on the one hand, omnipresent to the point of dullness (the white noise of our phatic technologies), and on the other, all too Real, too close for comfort. This includes the voice of the Other just as much one’s “own” voice, to which the uncanny experience of hearing one’s recorded voice attests. Indeed, for some, small talk is not just uncomfortable but the cause of extreme embarrassment or even shame. As Joan Copjec writes,

Shame is awakened . . . when one suddenly perceives a lack in the Other. At this moment the subject no longer experiences herself as a fulfillment of the Other’s desire, as the center of the world, which now shifts away from her slightly, causing a distance to open within the subject herself. (127)

As the agency of the Other declines, the rituals that once depended on its efficacy become the means of a painful exposure. The problem with small talk today is not that it lacks content— which has always been the case—but that it announces a compact that is no longer assured, thus exposing the subject as unstitched from the Symbolic fabric in which it is nevertheless enveloped.

We are often able to avoid the Real of the voice online, but social media small talk is fraught in its own way. The increase of phatic exchanges online corresponds to Dean’s concept of communicative capitalism, wherein the repetition of the drive is directly routinized by the algorithm. Here, chitchat is nothing other than the acephalous twittering of the machine. Without an Other to recognize one’s phatic announcement to another (“can you hear me?”) we speak simply because Jack from Twitter has asked us “What’s Happening?” It goes without saying that this sort of small talk does not have the performative value it might have in an earlier historical moment. The phatic no longer provides the basis for discursive or cultural binding, nor does it provide an outlet for those seeking community outside such binding. Put differently: we can neither heal minor rifts in the Other through gregarious small talk, nor can we subvert the authority of the Other through impudent chattering. Instead, the now-empty ritual of small talk becomes the means for even more effective—because meaningless—forms of repetition. To chatter is to simply circle the void.

And yet, returning to Flisfeder’s argument, perhaps our social media communication habits are, in fact, formed by the desire for an Other. Perhaps our only mode of sustaining desire is to post the Other into existence. Indeed, the decline of Symbolic efficiency does not always result in the subjective disposition illustrated above as social media users seem to succumb to the short-circuit of endless enjoyment. For some, social media has itself come to occupy the Symbolic space vacated by traditional incarnations of the Other. Where this mode of virtual experience prevails, it seems as if the consequences for the phatic would be minimal. After all, the Other has been made to return. Small talk, we can imagine, resumes its traditional role of facilitating social collaboration and so on. Yet social media as Other, while effective at producing new and rapidly transforming patterns of desire, nevertheless directly objectifies people by rendering every utterance into extractable value, as Flisfeder points out: “the subject of neoliberalism produces, but does not produce the subject as subject; instead, users further objectify the entirety of life as a condition of aggregate exploitation in neoliberal capitalism” (160). This is precisely what is at stake in “Nosedive” for Lacie, who, in aspiring to accrue subjective value through better ratings, ends up having her identity hollowed out as her ratings drop.⁸

The result of this situation is that small talk can never yield anything but a transient moment of sociality that is always suspect and suffused with anxiety. While the Other exists insofar as it is perversely propped up, it is only weakly attended by ritual, and so the laws that it sanctions are subject to instant modification. In postindustrial capitalism, norms don’t simply disappear, but as Virno puts it, we see “the inflation of fleeting but ironclad rules,” rules that multiply to account for the infinite indeterminacy of our labor (When 207). A coherent and robust cultural system would provide ritualized norms to which subjects may or may not adhere, but a worldless existence is rigidly determined by ever-shifting and single-use rules, often produced, according to Han, by moral zealots, as narcissistic moralism proliferates in the vacuum left by the disappearance of ritual (Disappearance 68). As a result, contemporary small talk, particularly online, sometimes appears rigid and stereotyped, sometimes incoherent and profligate. We chatter anxiously, and rarely move on from small talk to something more substantial, because the norms or “forms of closure” that would provide subjective consistency have been largely evacuated, and because we can no longer recognize what “substantial” communication might look like (Han, Burnout 40).

We can see a more concrete example of this sort of interaction through the lens of a contemporary novel about how the internet captures our attention, Patricia Lockwood’s No One is Talking About This (2021). In describing the general effects of being extremely online, Lockwood writes,

It was in this place where we were on the verge of losing our bodies that bodies became the most important, it was in this place of the great melting that it became important whether you called it pop or soda growing up, or whether your mother cooks with garlic salt or the real chopped cloves, or whether you had actual art on your walls or posed pictures of your family sitting on logs in front of fake backdrops, or whether you had that one Tupperware stained completely orange. You zoomed in on the grain, you were out in space, in was the brotherhood of man, and in some ways you had never been flung further from each other. (12–13)

Lockwood has a knack for identifying those ephemeral conversations that transpire mostly online, those taking up minor differences in regional dialect or the discovery of some new “relatable” phenomenon. These modes of chitchat burst into existence, promising a moment of recognition by the Other, the possibility of a social bond: “the brotherhood of man.” But of course the responses immediately become redundant and stale, and so the discourse marches swiftly on, and a new thing that previously no one was talking about will rise to the surface. In between, there is the brief sensation of a radical dislocation, the feeling that we have “never been flung further from each other” (Lockwood 13).

Finally, to engage in phatic communication online is simultaneously to promote one’s brand and to be the plug that will make whole the social media Other. These are not contradictory positions. As Feldner and Vighi argue, “The various displays of hyper-narcissistic exhibitionism flooding our everyday life are intrinsically perverse insofar as they betray the unconscious desire to surrender oneself to the gaze of the Other . . . (they look at me, therefore I exist)” (110). Is this relentless self-exposure not phatic in essence? That is, does it not have the structure of the “I am speaking, therefore I am recognized by the pact of the Other”? Moreover, the desire to satisfy the Other in the hope gaining a foothold for one’s own desire is extremely precarious. Where anxiety doesn’t prevail, depression often does. For example, there are 391 million Twitter users with no followers (Aslam). In registering an account, these users bring the social media Other into being, but their every tweet (“Can you hear me?”) remains without engagement. When one’s narcissistic phatic announcements fail to be recognized by the Other, the only alternative is to repeat the gesture desperately. According to Han, depression occurs not due to an excess of the negative, as in melancholia, but through the excess of positivity and the compulsion to achieve. The social media Other never prohibits or censures—no “we don’t pay you to talk!” Indeed, we pay, with our personal data, for the privilege to talk. And when we fail to be heard, it is no one’s fault but our own.

Consider, as a final example, the spectacle that transpired on October 4, 2021, when several major social media platforms, including Facebook, went dark for a few hours (Jiménez and Patel). Twitter, which was unaffected by the glitch, saw a massive uptick in activity. In response, the Twitter account posted this message: “hello literally everyone.” The post went viral immediately, with hundreds of major accounts, from Facebook to McDonald’s to Adele, taking the opportunity to reply or retweet in recognition of the joke (fig. 2). With this post, Twitter acknowledged the new traffic generated by users hungry for social media interaction in the absence of their preferred platforms. At 10/4/21, the post was the eighth most liked tweet ever, with 3.2 million likes and more than half a million retweets (“List”).

Fig. 2. Twitter’s initial post, followed by various replies, including Adele’s.

What is interesting, or perhaps typical, about this tweet is the fact that no information was transmitted, no meaningful dialogue initiated. Instead, we have a cheeky salutation delivered by a tech corporation, followed by further ironic banter from other corporate or celebrity brands. Of course, most of the likes and retweets were provided by regular users, whose accounts are followed by none or very few, who perhaps sought some recognition from the act, some sense of belonging to a community through the exchange of low-info language (fig. 3). Predictably, the whole affair simply revealed how easily these gestures ensnare users’ attention and turn it towards advertising in the guise of chitchat, demonstrating again how our quest for subjectivity is converted into further objectification.

Fig. 3. A selection of replies to Adele’s tweet, some registering their fandom by echoing Adele’s popular hit 2016 hit, “Hello.”

IV

This essay began by noting the high number of news stories dedicated to praising the value of small talk in workplace environments. As the COVID-19 pandemic started to wane in the US during the spring and summer of 2021, the cycle began again with renewed energy. Articles circulated that purported to help an isolated and quarantined population reengage socially with small talk.⁹ I suspect that readers are drawn to these pieces not because they want more chitchat, but because they want what the pact of small talk used to make visible: Symbolic efficiency. Be that as it may, in a world of declining rates of profit, of proliferating bullshit jobs, of stagnant wages, of mass depoliticization, of algorithmic dominance, and above all of compulsive communication, any call for more phatic exchange can only be understood as a desperate attempt to wring the last drop of jouissance from a depleted and depressed population. Today, small talk either works—weakly and fleetingly—to prop up the social media Other, or it doesn’t work, which is still a win, as the chatter feeds the algorithm regardless of what it means or fails to mean. Worse yet, it is unlikely that this chatter will open up the space for full speech. Like the analyst, the algorithm insists: “Away you go, say whatever, it will be marvelous” (Seminar 52). But where the analyst cuts short the analysand’s speech to make the signifier resonate, the algorithm, which knows everything and nothing, always asks for more.

Matthew J. Rigilano is an Assistant Teaching Professor at Penn State Abington, where he teaches writing and English. His research ranges across 18th century British literature and culture, the theory of the novel, psychoanalysis, and philosophies of the subject.

Footnotes

1. For a representative selection, see Wuench; Morris; and Mannering.

2. “Watercooler,” https://www.donut.com/watercooler. The example is taken from a promotional video on the Donut website, https://www.donut.com.

3. See Miller, “New Media,” and “Phatic”; Wang, et al.; and Kulkarni.

4. For an overview of the concept in the linguistic literature, see Coupland, et al.

5. Žižek works on this issue in many of his texts. For what might be his most extensive treatment, see The Ticklish Subject.

6. For a penetrating analysis of the links between Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Lacan on the question of everyday speech, see McCormick.

7. See Lewis for a consideration of lalangue as the late Lacan’s revision of full speech.

8. It is worth noting that when Lacie is arrested for dropping below a 1, she has a conversation with another prisoner that consists entirely of profane insults. Interestingly, both participants clearly enjoy the freedom of this exchange. It is as if small talk has been so degraded by the rating system that the only authentic form of social intercourse that remains is one marked by a kind of joyful hostility. The suggestion is that this shared sense of counting as nothing might be the foundation of renewed social life.

9. See Thorpe; Abad-Santos; and Sale.

Works Cited

• Abad-Santos, Alex. “The Pandemic Has Made Small Talk Even More Painful.” Vox, 1 Jul. 2021, https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22555596/pandemic-social-awkward-conversations.
• Aslam, Salman. “Twitter by the Numbers: Stats, Demographics & Fun Facts.” Omnicore, 3 Jan. 2021.
• Berardi, Franco. The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy. Translated by Francesca Cadel and Giuseppina Mecchia, Semiotext(e), 2009.
• Copjec, Joan. Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation. MIT P, 2002.
• Coupland, Justine, et al. “‘How Are You?’: Negotiating Phatic Communion.” Language in Society, vol. 21, no. 2, Jun. 1992, pp. 207–30. JSTOR.
• Dean, Jodi. “Communicative Capitalism and Revolutionary Form.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies, vol. 47, no. 3, 2019, pp. 326–40. Sage.
• ———. “Communicative Capitalism: Circulation and the Foreclosure of Politics.” Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times, edited by Megan Boler, MIT P, 2008, pp. 101–21.
• ———. “The Real Internet.” International Journal of Žižek Studies, vol. 4, no. 1, 2010, pp. 1–22.
• Dolar, Mladen. A Voice and Nothing More. MIT P, 2006.
• Feldner, Heiko, and Fabio Vighi. “Finitude of Capitalism and the Perverse Charm of Denial.” Berlin Journal of Critical Theory, vol. 2, no. 2, 2018, pp. 99–130.
• Flisfeder, Matthew. Algorithmic Desire: Toward a New Structuralist Theory of Social Media. Northwestern UP, 2021.
• Han, Byung-Chul. The Burnout Society. Stanford UP, 2015.
• ———. The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present. Polity, 2019.
• Hook, Derek. Six Moments in Lacan: Communication and Identification in Psychology and Psychoanalysis. Routledge, 2018.
• Jakobson, Roman. “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics.” Semiotics: An Introductory Anthology, edited by Robert E. Innis, Indiana UP, 1985.
• Jiménez, Jesus, and Vimal Patel, “Users Turn to Twitter after Facebook Outage. Jokes and Venting Ensue.” The New York Times, 4 Oct. 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/10/04/business/news-business-stock-market.
• Kordela, A. Kiarina. Being, Time, Bios: Capitalism and Ontology. SUNY P, 2013.
• Kulkarni, Dipti. “Exploring Jakobson’s ‘Phatic Function’ in Instant Messaging Interactions.” Discourse & Communications, vol. 8, no. 2, 2014, pp. 117–36. Sage.
• Lacan, Jacques. “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis.” Écrits, translated by Bruce Fink, W. W. Norton, 2007, pp. 206–20.
• ———. Seminar XVII, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by Russell Grigg, W. W. Norton, 2006.
• “List of Most-liked Tweets.” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-liked_tweets. Accessed 9 Jun. 2022.
• Lewis, Michael. Derrida and Lacan: Another Writing. Edinburgh UP, 2008.
• Lockwood, Patricia. No One Is Talking About This. Bloomsbury, 2021.
• Malinowski, Bronislaw. “The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages.” The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism, edited by C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards, Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc, 1923.
• Mannering, Lindsay. “The Awkward but Essential Art of Office Chitchat.” The New York Times, 22 Sept. 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/17/style/the-awkward-art-of-office-small-talk.html.
• McCormick, Samuel. The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk. U of Chicago P, 2020.
• Meek, Andy. “A Bunch of Millennials Explained in a Survey Why They Despise Phone Calls.” BGR, 9 Dec. 2018, https://bgr.com/tech/millennials-phone-calls-survey/.
• Miller, Vincent. “New Media, Networking and Phatic Culture.” Convergence, vol. 14, no. 4, Nov. 2008, pp. 387–400. Sage.
• ———. “Phatic Culture and the Status Quo: Reconsidering the Purpose of Social Media Activism,” Convergence, vol. 23, no. 3, Jun. 2017, pp. 251–69. Sage.
• Morris, Chris. “The Understated Importance of Office Small Talk.” Nasdaq, 26 Feb. 2021, https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/the-understated-importance-of-office-small-talk-2021-02-26.
• “Nosedive.” Black Mirror, created by Charlie Brooker, Netflix, 2016. “Phone Anxiety Affects Over Half of UK Office Workers.” Face For Business, 26 Apr. 2019, https://ffb.co.uk/blog/630-phone-anxiety-affects-over-half-of-uk-office-workers.
• Sale, Anna. “How To Make Your Small Talk Big.” The New York Times, 1 May 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/01/opinion/sunday/covid-lockdown-social-small-talk.
• Simanowski, Roberto. Facebook Society: Losing Ourselves in Sharing Ourselves. Translated by Susan H. Gillespie, Columbia UP, 2018.
• Soler, Colette. Lacanian Affects: The Function of Affect in Lacan’s Work. Translated by Bruce Fink, Routledge, 2016.
• Thorpe, J. R. “How To Make Small Talk When You Haven’t Seen Anyone In A Year.” Bustle, 23 Apr. 2021, https://www.bustle.com/wellness/small-talk-conversation-starters-post-pandemic-socializing.
• Turkle, Sherry. Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age. Penguin, 2015.
• Twitter. “Hello literally everyone.” Twitter, 4 Oct. 2021, https://twitter.com/twitter/status/1445078208190291973?lang=en.
• Virno, Paolo. A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life. Translated by Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito, and Andrea Casson, Semiotext(e), 2004.
• ———. When the Word Becomes Flesh: Language and Human Nature. Translated by Giuseppina Mecchia, Semiotext(e), 2015.
• Wang, Victoria, et al. “On Phatic Technologies for Creating and Maintaining Human Relationships.” Technology in Society, vol. 33, nos. 1–2, Feb.-May 2011, pp. 44–51. Science Direct.
• “Watercooler.” Donut, https://www.donut.com/watercooler. Accessed 26 Jul. 2022.
• Wuench, Julia. “Why Small Talk Is Anything But Small.” Forbes, 21 Jun. 2021, https://www.forbes.com/sites/juliawuench/2021/06/21/why-small-talk-is-anything-but-small/?sh=130855c578b0.
• Žižek, Slavoj. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Center of Political Ontology, Verso, 1999.

Ewa Płonowska Ziarek (bio)

“The best way to humanize AI is to tell our stories.”

— Elizabeth Adams

I. A New Referendum on Reality

In a February 2020 article in The Atlantic entitled “The Billion Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President,” McKay Coppins offers disturbing insights into the digital extraction of big data used to target political advertising and to modify voter behavior. Developed by Cambridge Analytica in 2016, the temporal and geopolitical implications of these techniques extend well beyond the 2020 US campaign and its aftermath.¹ Alarmed by the staggering amount of data collected on voters, Coppins argues that the damage that results from these massive and highly personalized political disinformation techniques includes not only a widely discussed political crisis of democracy in the digital age,² but also and primarily the loss of a shared reality. As he puts it, “Should it prevail in 2020, the election’s legacy will be clear – not a choice between parities or candidates or policy platforms, but a referendum on reality itself.” More and more frequently discussed by computer scientists, political theorists, and the wider public alike, the loss of reality has not only prevailed but intensified: As data and computer scientist Sinan Aral puts it briefly, we are approaching “the end of reality” (24–55).³

With the waning of techno-optimism and the ascendancy of techno-dystopianism, numerous diagnoses have been offered for this state of affairs, ranging from the widely discussed “post truth societies” and the blurring of reality and hyperreality (Floridi)⁴ to critiques of digital capitalism and the ideology of “computationalism.”⁵ However, as the formulation of a “referendum on reality” suggests, this political concern about the loss of the real also foregrounds the negative ontological effects of the digital regime of power – what I call digital worldlessness. With its global reach, the hegemony of the digital regime and artificial intelligence constitutes a new horizon not only for the economy, but also for politics and culture. Therefore, any analysis of this hegemonic framework calls for broad interdisciplinary thinking, in which humanists (and particularly political, cultural, and literary theorists) need to be centrally involved, in addition to scholars and philosophers working in technology studies.

To analyze the problem of the digital worldlessness of big data and its use in AI from the perspective of political theory, I draw on Hannah Arendt’s central claim that any loss of reality is the effect of historically specific assaults on human plurality. I develop the implications of this claim beyond the limitations of Arendt’s own work⁶ by engaging the growing interdisciplinary critiques of the harms of datafication and of the algorithmic mediation of social relations. Although best known for her work on totalitarianism, Arendt interrogates the destruction of human plurality through high and low technologies of domination, from imperialism, anti-Semitism, and racism to nuclear warfare, biopolitics, and even the influence of religious “otherworldly” communities.⁷ For a number of scholars, Arendt’s enduring legacy lies in contesting the resurgence of racism, right wing populism, and fascism in the twenty-first century;⁸ others, such as Zuboff and Weizenbaum, enlist her work to understand the unprecedented character of computational technologies of power.⁹ I propose that the ontological and political stakes of the current referendum on reality require a genealogical account of the ways in which historically specific threats to human plurality are automated and encoded anew in digital technologies of power. Writing before the digital age, Arendt offers such a genealogical account of the destruction of human plurality by anti-Semitism, imperialism, racism, and refugee crises, culminating in the emergence of the horrific novum of totalitarianism. Among interdisciplinary thinkers who directly confront the damages of digital technologies of power, contemporary critical race theorists (in particular Ruha Benjamin and Simone Browne) argue that the long history of anti-black racism both precedes and is encoded anew in the global regimes of big data and AI. Building on this interdisciplinary framework, I argue that the contemporary ontological loss of reality is augmented by the political harms of digital technologies of power to human plurality.

According to Arendt, the sense of the real emerges from three types of intertwined relations that can be separated only for heuristic purposes: the appearances of natural phenomena to human senses, the construction of the world through work and technology, and the web of interpersonal relations effected by acting and speaking together. This view helps to define digital worldlessness: subordinated to the aims of digital capital, digital technologies not only intensify economic exploitation,¹⁰ but also undermine phenomenological appearances of the world and human plurality. This is the case because relations with the world are mediated by economy, science, and technologies and are interlaced with “the web” of political interactions (Human 183–84). This web of human affairs holds human plurality together and sustains a sense of the common world (204). Arendt’s web metaphor is not accidental. Plurality for her is not a numerical multitude of isolated individuals, but rather a relational form of sociality characterized by the enabling tensions between equality and distinction, between being in common and the unrepeatable singularity of each person. Even if domination or violence restrict being in common to counter-communities of resistance, such commonness is intertwined with sharing “deeds and words,” which enables political actors to disclose their uniqueness to each other and to enact together a new beginning in political life. Whenever this worldly appearance of the equality, distinction, and uniqueness of people is under assault by political technologies of power or economic exploitation, the sense of reality is eroded as well. As Arendt puts it, without human plurality, the world itself becomes “as a heap of unrelated things” – no longer a common world fit for acting, understanding, or communicating (204).

Because realness is intertwined with human plurality, it cannot be guaranteed by factual knowledge or objectivity abstracted from human affairs: “Factual truth . . . is always related to other people: it concerns events and circumstances in which many are involved; it is established by witnesses and depends upon testimony; it exists only to the extent that it is spoken about . . . It is political by nature” (“Truth” 553).¹¹ Put differently, reality presupposes public trust in the common world. As is now more obvious than ever, even the authority of science and technology – not to mention politics – rests on public trust, or on what Arendt rehabilitates in her political writings as common sense. In her reinterpretation of Kant, Arendt argues that insofar as common sense reflects human plurality and trust in the world, it is one of the highest political virtues, which should not be automatically discarded as the unreflective public opinion of the ideologically manipulated masses. On the contrary, common sense, human plurality, and realness are inseparable because all of them depend on the interpersonal capacity to perceive one another as equal and distinct and to relate with others to the same objects in the world, or to the same matters of concern, despite our irreducible differences, political conflicts, and diverse cultural locations.¹² In other words, both the political and the ontological sense of the real emerge from sharing, acting, and arguing with others who are mutually regarded as equal and distinct: “common sense presupposes a common world into which we all fit” and vice versa (“Understanding” 318).

Another insight of Arendt’s that is relevant for the contemporary “referendum on reality” is that a Western political and scientific “solution” to the loss of reality has been the replacement of common sense by calculation. Arendt calls this politically-motivated substitution of calculation for common sense “logicality” in order to distinguish it from the uses of statistics and computation in other domains. As she argues in her reflection on the rise of statistics, calculation becomes both a symptom of and substitute for the lost reality because of its paradoxical double quality: on the one hand, the capacity for logic, like sensus communis, is common to all; on the other hand, its validity is utterly abstracted from the historical world, sensible phenomena, sociability, and ordinary language: “all self-evidence from which logical reasoning proceeds can claim a reliability altogether independent of the world and the existence of other people.” “Only under conditions where the common realm between men is destroyed and the only reliability left consists in the meaningless tautologies [of logic]” can people accept logicality – or in our historical moment, data – as the substitute for common understanding (“Understanding” 318).

Although a comprehensive understanding of digital harms to human plurality requires multiple methodological and disciplinary perspectives, I want to confront this threat by analyzing contradictions between two different social practices: the uses of big data in Artificial intelligence (AI) and its subset Machine learning (ML),¹³ and the role of narratives in political acts. I do so, first, to foreground the contradiction between the mathematical models of data abstracted from the phenomenal world and the ethical and political difficulties of understanding that emerge from human plurality. Second, I want to highlight the conflict between the relational agency enacted in narrative and political acts and the increasing automation of high-stakes decisions in public life, ranging from economy and management to education, criminal justice, healthcare, and immigration. This conflict is at stake in the resurgence of interdisciplinary interests in narrative in both critical data/algorithmic studies and in the new political movements that contest the hegemony of AI and big data. In literary studies, the primary investigations of data and computer programming are associated with the institutionalization of Digital Humanities and the changing cultures of reading,¹⁴ yet scholars in science and technology studies, critical data studies, and computer sciences¹⁵ deploy narrative to explain socio-historical mechanisms of power encoded in data-driven technologies. Researchers as diverse as Fiore-Garland and Neff, Schrock and Shaffer, and Andrejevic return to narrative to contest the separation of mathematical models of data from socio-historical practices. As Dourish and Gómez Cruz persuasively argue, unacknowledged “narrative practices in data science” (6) make data-driven technologies applicable to social contexts, even though this narrative dependence is disavowed in the process of legitimating big data.

Finally and most importantly, the contrast between the uses of data in AI and the uses of narratives in political struggles clarifies the antagonistic ontologies of these practices. For Arendt, the conjunction of narrative/political acts presupposes and reenacts the “web” of human plurality on which the ontology of the common world depends. By contrast, insofar as the use of big data in AI and ML is subordinated to the economic aims of digital capitalism and the automation of decision-making, its ontology corresponds to digital worldlessness. Such digital worldlessness reframes the harms of algorithmic governmentality, a term proposed by Rouvroy and Berns and which Rouvroy defines as a “regime of neutralisation” (100) that aims to disarm subjective capacities for action, for speech, and “for decision (of deciding on grounds of undecidability rather than obeying the results of calculation),” as well as for collective imaginations of political projects (101). The contrast between these ontologies could not be starker, and it reflects the “hybrid” and antagonistic character of the current referendum on reality.

Thinking through this onto-political antagonism¹⁶ as reflective of larger technologies of power, we can avoid what Ruha Benjamin calls reductive oppositions between techno-determinism and techno-utopianism, which promises to solve social inequalities (44–46). Although historical genealogies of these contradictions between data, AI, and narrative might evoke a familiar conflict in modernity between storytelling and information—addressed, for example, in Walter Benjamin’s famous essay “The Storyteller”—contemporary onto-political threats to human plurality are posed by a different type of information associated with the mathematical formalization of data, and purged from any reliance on the appearances of natural, social, and political phenomena.¹⁷ Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition can be reclaimed for its prescient critique of such formalization at stake in digital power. Already in 1979, he could foresee that incommensurable differences in the debates on justice, politics, and truth are subordinate to the computational optimization of efficiency, which “entails a certain level of terror, whether soft or hard: be operational (that is, commeasurable) or disappear” (xxiv). Although Lev Manovich proposes a diametrically opposed evaluation of the relation between narrative and big data in his influential 1999 essay “Database as Symbolic Form,” he too suggests that this antagonistic relation reflects a larger onto-political conflict. According to the ontology of computer programming, “the world appears to us as an endless and unstructured collection” of data points to be processed algorithmically (81).¹⁸ By contrast, narrative not only presupposes at its bare minimum actors, events, and narrators but also attempts to make sense of the world in terms of causality – a term that for me also includes causality of freedom and therefore cannot be reduced to mechanical causality – rather than algorithmically detected correlations in huge data sets. That is why, for Manovich, “database and narrative are natural ‘enemies’. Competing for the same territory of human culture, each claims an exclusive right to make meaning out of the world” (85).

Although I emphatically reject Manovich’s claim that “databases” are more open than narratives,¹⁹ his insight into the conflicting ontologies presupposed by data and narrative remains more relevant than ever. The contemporary antagonism between big data, narrative, and AI shapes new forms of political action, initiated by new political movements such as the Algorithmic Justice League or Data 4 Black Lives. For example, a new project launched by the AI Now Institute, entitled “AI Lexicon,” calls “for contributions to generate alternate narratives, positionalities, and understandings to the better known and widely circulated ways of talking about AI.”²⁰ This call for alternative narratives is all the more significant because it is an integral part of the mission of the Institute, which is dedicated to interdisciplinary research on the socio-political repercussions of artificial intelligence in order “to ensure a more equitable future” (AI Now Institute). As this example suggests, at stake in the competing political ontologies is not a resolution or a possible choice between big data and narrative. Rather the question is whether this conflict can be mobilized to reimagine different possibilities of acting and speaking in support of freedom and equity, or whether the big data revolution—often described metaphorically as a tsunami, explosion, or flood—will further exacerbate the sense of digital worldlessness.

II. Arendt’s Political Ontology of Narrative and Action

What is distinctive in Arendt’s highly idiosyncratic approach to narrative is her argument about the inextricable relation between narrative and political acts. As a number of feminist theorists such as Cavarero, Kristeva, Stone-Mediatore, and Diprose and Ziarek argue,²¹ Arendt’s onto-politics of narrative practice emerges from her political theories of action, political agency, and judgment. The key point of her approach is not formal analysis but rather a much-needed reflection on the connections between stories, understanding, and political action defined in the broadest sense as the struggle for freedom. For Arendt, this relation between stories and political acts, or words and deeds, provides a larger framework for the analysis and critique of more specific narrative forms in culture, literature, history, ethnography, and so forth. Let me stress from the outset that the relation between narrative and politics underscores the ambivalent and often conflicting role of narrative, which can range from hegemonic legitimations of colonial, racist, and economic domination to support for and commemorations of struggles for independence. Narrative is therefore both the object and the means of political contestation. At the same time, Arendt provides a criterion for parsing these contradictory functions, which boils down to the question whether specific narratives enable or suppress political activism and human plurality.

Because of her emphasis on relational political agency in struggles for freedom, Arendt herself focuses more on narrative modes of resistance and their ontological presuppositions. As she famously claims in The Human Condition, action “‘produces’ stories” in the way that other activities, such as work, produce objects (184). Yet what is at stake in this strange reversal of narrative agency from authorship to political acts? What does it mean to say that action produces stories rather than that stories represent real or fictional events? In the context of the predictive analytics driving digital capital, one of the most important implications of this idea is that stories produced by action retrospectively reveal the action’s meaning, which in turn depends on the contestable role of remembrance and interpretation. For feminist critics of Arendt, another crucial political implication of this claim is that narrative itself is a mode of acting in the world that presupposes human plurality.²² Deeply conditioned and yet not determined by cultural, political, and economic norms, actions, narratives, and their interpretations can safeguard the possibility of a new, unforeseeable beginning in history for Arendt. The event of a new beginning foregrounds the possibility of acting in unexpected ways and offers a new interpretation of historical events, as well as the very capacity to imagine and enact new possibilities of being in common. Because political action is impossible in isolation, another common feature of narrative and political acts is a disclosure of human plurality, which is antithetical to the increasingly automated quantification and classification of persons.

Arendt’s insistence on the interconnection between political acts and storytelling implies that both action and narrative share the same ontological conditions. As numerous interpreters argue, one of Arendt’s main contributions to political theory is her famous claim that action both depends on and discloses the ontological condition of natality. As she writes in The Human Condition, all human activities and initiatives, including labor, art, and work, are

rooted in natality . . . However, of the three, action has the closest connection with the human condition of natality; the new beginning inherent in birth can make itself felt in the world only because the newcomer possesses the capacity of beginning something anew, that is, of acting. . . . Moreover, since action is the political activity par excellence, natality, and not mortality, may be the central category of political . . . thought. (9)

For Arendt, the condition of natality carries three interrelated meanings. First, as a crucial but overlooked modality of finitude, natality emphasizes a relational inter-dependent notion of personhood: from birth, we appear first to others and then to ourselves, such that uniqueness and plurality are inseparable from each other. Second, because uniqueness and plurality can be brutally destroyed by political violence, natality refers to a political ontology. Third, natality stresses the fact that the appearance of newcomers and strangers in the historically-constituted world is the event of a new beginning. Already at work in the “first” order of birth, the possibility of such a new beginning occurs again whenever political agents act in concert with each other. To sum up, the ontology of natality is characterized by an inter-relational political agency, a new beginning in politics through acting with others, and the disclosure of agents’ uniqueness through words and deeds.

Although a full analysis of the ontological presuppositions of narrative modes of resistance is beyond the scope of this article, I want to focus on the three interrelated tasks that both narrative and action perform: the disclosure of uniqueness, the enactment of human plurality, and the communication of judgments. These aspects of sociality ensure a common sense of the world and at the same time are most endangered by the algorithmic processing of big data. As many of Arendt’s interpreters point out, unrepeatable singularity is not the same as having an individual identity in isolation from other people. On the contrary, it is a mode of appearance to and with others. Because uniqueness exceeds any general attributes of identity, it cannot be defined conceptually but merely implied in the form of an address to another: “who are you?” The irreducible paradox of uniqueness lies in the fact that, despite its opacity and resistance to general meaning, it is nonetheless communicated to others: “The manifestation of who the speaker and doer unexchangeably is . . . retains a curious intangibility that confounds all efforts toward unequivocal verbal expression” (181). Consequently, the politico-aesthetic mode of disclosure of uniqueness in action and narrative is characterized by an irreducible tension between exposure to others and opacity to ourselves, between singularity and the generality of norms. As Cavarero and Diprose and Ziarek argue, this irreducible intangibility and publicity of uniqueness presents not an obstacle to but the very possibility of narrative, which has to shelter this enigma.²³

Although narrative perspectives are partial and contingent, they constitute the “web” of human plurality because they are addressed to the multiple, equally partial, and often conflicting viewpoints of others. We could say of Arendt’s idea of narrative that, as Ruha Benjamin says of architecture, it “reminds us that public space is a permanent battleground for those who wish to reinforce or challenge hierarchies” (91). The disclosure of singularity through action and narrative foregrounds (whether implicitly or explicitly) the appeal to the judgment of others, and therefore enacts human plurality.²⁴ In her idiosyncratic reading of Kant, Arendt proposes an analogy between aesthetic, political, and historical judgments (Lectures 62–65). At stake in this analogy is the most tenuous type of public communication of unrepeatable particulars – this event, this person, this work of art – without treating them as illustrations of a general concept, empirical data, or mathematical abstraction. Consequently, in her reinterpretation of reflective judgment, Arendt finds a public mode of sharing with others what is in fact incommunicable: uniqueness refractory to general norms or expectation of transparency.

Arendt’s recovery of the communicability of uniqueness is even more urgent for contemporary debates regarding algorithmic secrecy and its opposite: reductive calls for technological transparency. Reflecting the convergence of digital capitalism and the automation of political decisions, the algorithmic processing of big data bypasses the communicability of judgments – conceptual and reflective – that holds human plurality together. All too often, even those technical and non-technical decisions encoded in data mining and the machine learning pipeline that could be communicated conceptually remain withdrawn from public judgment and contestation: for instance, the choice of the problem to be solved, its mathematical formalization, the type of algorithms used, the source and type of the available training data, and so on. As Andrejevic argues, these semi-“oracular” automated outcomes withdrawn from public opinion aim to replace even conceptual judgments, contestations, and political imagination of alternative possibilities (2). Consequently, the implementation of algorithmic decisions not only shifts the burden of explanation and argument to those who are injured by “automated inequality” (Eubanks), but also contributes to digital worldlessness and the pervasive loss of a common sense.

By contrast, for Arendt, the communication of uniqueness depends neither on transparent discourse nor on the optimization of algorithmic outcomes. Rather, it is based on the appeal to the judgment of others without any assurance that they will actually agree with us. As she argues, the communication of reflective judgments requires a so-called enlarged mentality, that is, the ability to take other points of view into account both when we proclaim our judgments to others and in the very process of judging itself. Considering other points of view in the process of judging amounts neither to an objective standpoint nor to the appropriation of those viewpoints, but instead to a critical reflection on our own judgments (Lectures 70–72). By reflecting critically on one’s own judgment from the actual and the potential perspectives of others, one might distance oneself from one’s own dogmatism, narcissism, cultural norms, and habitual, unreflective opinions, thus achieving some relative impartiality, or what Kant calls “disinterestedness” (73). In other words, as Rodolphe Gasché suggests, for Arendt (unlike for Kant), reflective judgment consists in taking into consideration others with whom we share the world and whose potential or real viewpoints are represented by imagination (112–14). That is why judging from others’ points of view presupposes and enacts human plurality. According to Cecilia Sjöholm, communication of judgments sustains both sensus communis and realness (82–85).

Expanding Stone-Mediatore’s interpretation of Arendt’s storytelling as “a feminist practice and a knowledge of resistance” (1–3, 125–60), I argue that relational agency performed by activism and counter-narratives contests racist, gendered domination and reenacts human plurality. As we have seen, Arendt’s web of political interactions, performed through words and deeds, is a precondition of the appearance of the world. Although mediated by economy, science, and technology, the sense of the world and its realness also depends on sociality characterized by equality and distinction. The question remains whether such realness, dependent as it is on human plurality, can be performed anew by narratives and actions against automated inequality. Although narratives cannot oppose these technologies directly, they can challenge their tacit narrative legitimations and mobilize new political actions oriented towards justice and human plurality. As Ruha Benjamin powerfully argues, narratives enable

a justice-oriented, emancipatory approach to data protection, analysis, and public engagement. . . . It is vital that people engaged in tech development partner with those who do important sociocultural work honing narrative tools through the arts, humanities, and social justice organizing. (192–93).

By underscoring interactions with others based on justice rather than on efficiency, such emancipatory narratives can mobilize new political struggles against the most destructive harms of these technologies, which range from “engineered inequality” (188) to digital worldlessness.

III. Datafication, AI, and the Political Ontology of Digital Worldlessness

In the previous section I argue that for Arendt, “stories produced” by emancipatory actions are one of the key cultural/political practices that can enact human plurality, expand resistance, and shelter the onto-political sense of realness. Following Arendt, I claim that realness consists in the intertwining of appearances of natural phenomena to human senses and the “web” of inter-personal relations enacted by acting and speaking together. Now I want to examine the political and ontological consequences of the mathematical models of big data used in AI and ML that work in tandem with capital. The digital worldlessness of this hegemonic formation of power/knowledge emerges first of all from the abstraction of mathematical models of data from natural and human phenomena as well as from ordinary language. Second, the loss of realness is a consequence of the new threats to human plurality posed by ubiquitous surveillance, algorithmic secrecy (so-called black boxing), and the replacement of judgments by automated algorithmic decisions. By automating historical genealogies of domination, the algorithmic processing of mathematical models of big data (working in tandem with capital on a global scale) represents an unprecedented phenomenon, which proponents of AI do not hesitate to call a new techno-political and social “revolution.”²⁵ Yet, as scholars working in science and technology studies, black studies, legal studies, and economics argue, the significance of this “revolution” is contestable when we examine the imbrication of the old and new technologies of power/knowledge in oppression, racialization, coloniality, and capital. In particular, Ruha Benjamin’s notion of “double coding” offers a key methodological perspective for analyzing the dependence of high-tech operations of power on the long histories of oppression. As the growing vocabulary of new critical terms such as “new Jim Code,” “surveillance capitalism,” “algorithmic governmentality,” “societies of control,” “algorithmic redlining,” “surrogate humanity,” and “digital poorhouse” suggests, these new technologies both encode structures of domination and facilitate the emergence of unprecedented forms of power/knowledge. What are the main features of this formation of power and knowledge in the computational age, and how do they contribute to digital worldlessness?

Perhaps ironically, the most insightful responses to these questions emerge from techno-revolutionary narrative legitimations of big data, offered for example by Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier’s 2014 New York Times bestseller, Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think. This familiar grand narrative of technological progress and scientific objectivity justifies the deployment of data-driven AI in almost every domain of our lives, from governance, policing, management, and economy to healthcare, education, and culture. At the same time, it both reveals and depoliticizes the most contested elements of the digital regime of power. Recently supplemented by moral narratives of “AI for public good” or of “trustworthy AI” in response to growing public concern about the social harm of digital technologies, the techno-revolutionary legitimation of big data technologies remains one of the most ideologically charged “data fictions,” to use Dourish and Gómez Cruz’s apt formulation.²⁶ Expanding on feminist and critical data studies, I argue that digital worldlessness corresponds to the well-known “4 Vs” characteristic of big data: volume, variety, velocity (the dynamism of data, continuously updated and tracked in real time), and veracity. While acknowledging the darker side of data, Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier stress the quasi-sublime volume of big data – or what Gaymon Bennet calls, in a different context, “the digital sublime” – and its epistemic aspiration to include the totality of empirical knowledge: because the plethora of data approaches n=all, traditional statistical sampling might no longer be required (6–31). However, the exponential volume and velocity of data are facilitated not only by the advancement of computational technologies but also by ubiquitous digital surveillance and data extraction, as feminist data scholars including D’Ignazio and Klein point out (21–47).²⁷ Since the scale of big data extracted through surveillance exceeds human comprehension and communication, this overload of information has to be processed by algorithms that are often proprietary, which in turn introduce a new form of techno-political secrecy. In addition to scale and speed, the most contestable ideological assertion of big data lies in the claim of its veracity: big data appears to “speak for itself” and to reveal a new form of objectivity, which, as Berns and Rouvroy point out, seems to emerge immanently from life itself. This “veracity” depends first on the shift of scientific perspective away from explanations (historical genealogies, and all forms of causality, including the causality of power and freedom) to the discovery of “what is the case” that is based on correlations in mathematical models found by machine learning algorithms. Because the algorithmic discovery of correlations, patterns, or anomalies in huge data sets requires neither explanation nor prior scientific hypothesis testing, big data infamously announces the “end of theory” in the sciences (and not merely in the humanities) (Anderson).²⁸ For D’Ignazio and Klein, such an epistemology once again replicates the “mythical, imaginary, impossible standpoint” so frequently criticized by feminist epistemologies (73–96). Furthermore, this departure from explanation, reasons, and interpretations of social relations abdicates any accountability for the history of oppression and inequality.

Numerous interdisciplinary scholars – including computer and feminist data scientists (Abebe, et al. 256), the majority of whom are women and women of color, such as Safiya Umoja Noble, Cathy O’Neil, Simone Browne, Virginia Eubanks, Shoshana Zuboff, as well as Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein²⁹ – have considered the dependence of mathematical veracity on historical domination. The initial justification that the mathematical neutrality of big data and ML could counter socio-political prejudices and inequalities, even if it were possible, is problematic because it repeats the hyper-rationalist dream of transcending human conflicts, desires, limitations, and embeddedness in the world. Yet, as the ground-breaking work of O’Neil, Noble, Ruha Benjamin, Eubanks, Pasquale, and Rouvroy and Berns demonstrates all too well, big data and AI reproduce harms and discriminations and make it more difficult to contest them. Numerous causes have been identified for this state of affairs: a) technologies are never neutral tools but economic and sociopolitical operations of power; b) social data used for machine training is shaped by the long-standing history of systemic racial, economic, and gender injustices (what Ruha Benjamin calls “double encoding”); and c) the emergence of new hierarchies of power/knowledge between those who have the economic, political, and intellectual capital to extract data and design models, and communities subjected to unregulated algorithmic decisions.

Quantification of the heterogeneity of the world further contributes to digital worldlessness. “Speaking” in abstraction from the phenomenal and historical world, the velocity (speed) and efficiency of digital technologies depend on the rejection of facticity and the ambiguity of both ordinary and scientific languages for the sake of the mathematical formalization of empirical facts and their translation into machine computability. As Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier admit, the revolution of big data is ultimately not about size but about making quantification synonymous with understanding (79–97). That is why they propose to replace the word “data” with the more precise and now widely-used neologism “datafication.” By purging the term “data” from its lingering etymological reference to Latin datum, datafication conveys the agency of computerized data mining, which converts the irreducible heterogeneity of natural, political, and historical phenomena into quantifiable “variety” that can be measured, stored, and retrieved (using digital processors and storage) (78). Evocative of colonial and racist conquests, the violent rhetoric of the “datafication” of the whole world emphasizes the technological ability and the political desire to “capture quantifiable information” (78).

The ontopolitics of digital worldlessness is most explicit in the shift from a notion of the world regarded “as a string of happenings that we explain as natural social or phenomena” to “a universe comprised essentially of information” (96). Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier refer to a mathematical theory of information, defined in the Oxford English Dictionary in terms of “the statistical probabilities of occurrence of the symbol or the elements of the message.” Introduced in 1948 by Shannon (among others), this mathematical statistical approach to information “must not be confused with its ordinary usage . . . In fact, two messages, one of which is heavily loaded with meaning and the other of which is pure nonsense, can be exactly equivalent, from the present viewpoint, as regards information” (Shannon and Weaver 99). Only in a universe consisting of information can we have endless debates about whether the brain is an information-processing computer or vice versa. Abstracted from irreducible heterogeneity, a universe reduced to mathematical information processed by computers is one of the best definitions of “digital worldlessness.” Often conveyed by metaphors of natural disasters like floods or tsunamis, the destructive character of such ontopolitics is perhaps most dramatically (if inadvertently) conveyed by the words of computer scientist Chris Re, who underscores the voracious character of data mining and machine learning: “Software has been ‘eating the world’ for the last 10 years. In the last few years, a new phenomenon has started to emerge: machine learning is eating software.”

If the abstraction of data from both natural/historical phenomena and ordinary language constitutes one side of digital worldlessness, the qualification of human plurality by the rapidly increasing datafication of social relations constitutes the other. As Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier candidly admit, big data analytics transforms all human interactions and activities – values, moods, friendships, actions, stories, and interpretations – into calculable quantities (91–94).³⁰ Once datified, social media platforms “don’t simply offer us a way to find and stay in touch with friends and colleagues,” but transform everyday interactions into the lucrative currency of data, which can be sold, treated as signals for investments, used for profiling, and turned into predictions about our future (91). Such voracious, profit-driven datafication is indeed what renders the meaning of the common world semantically “poor” and by extension constitutes the “poverty” of data science, to paraphrase Marx’s famous indictment of “the poverty of philosophy.”

The two most prevalent mechanisms of datafication that undermine human plurality are digital surveillance and algorithmic secrecy. Big data and machine learning technologies cannot function without pervasive digital surveillance, which enables the continuous extraction of data from human and nonhuman occurrences and phenomena. The scale of data extraction automates racist, disciplinary, or authoritarian apparatuses of surveillance, which have been disproportionately targeting racialized minorities, political dissidents, immigrants, refugees, and whole populations subjected to biopolitical normalization. To draw upon Frank Pasquale’s influential formulation, digital surveillance deployed by international corporations and governmental institutions alike fractures human plurality into multiple “black box societies.” One of the most familiar metaphors in discussions of big data and machine learning algorithms, “the black box” is usually shorthand for a lack of algorithmic transparency. Pasquale instead uses the term “black boxing” to describe a digital tool for social, political, and economic power. The term refers first to recording devices such as GPS, biometric sensors, software, and cameras used in cars, phones, the Internet of Things, border crossings, policing, workplaces, homes, and ubiquitous “smart” technologies that harvest data usually without users’ awareness or consent.³¹ Enabling the continuous tracking of things, people, and activities in real time, such pervasive extraction of data and monitoring constitute a dispersed network of power relations, which Kevin Haggerty and Richard Ericson call “surveillant assemblages” to distinguish them from top-down models like Orwell’s Big Brother or Foucault’s Panopticon.

The second aspect of black boxing that supports digital worldlessness is algorithmic secrecy, often misnamed as lack of transparency in machine learning algorithms.³² It undermines the relational character of human plurality and a shared sense of the world. By destabilizing public/private, political/economic distinctions, algorithmic secrecy prohibits access to the proprietary software mega-corporations use to analyze billions of socioeconomic data points. This proprietary aspect of secrecy is political in nature and can be challenged by legislation and political activism. Yet digital secrecy also refers not only to the wider public’s lack of technical expertise but also to the complexity/opacity of machine learning algorithms that exceed human understanding altogether, including that of experts themselves, as is the case with the neural networks used in controversial facial recognition technologies. Algorithmic secrecy is different therefore from familiar political technologies of secrecy associated with authoritarianism, secret societies, or the secret apparatus of the state. Based on algorithmic secrecy, technological opacity, and digital surveillance, the power of “black boxing” is “opaque, unverifiable, and unchallengeable” (Brevini and Pasquale 2),³³ especially by those who are discriminated against based on its results. Revising this analysis in the context of algorithmic encoding of racial inequalities, Ruha Benjamin renames black boxing as an “anti-Black box” (34–36) and points out that the power structure that relies on black boxing constitutes a new digital “Jim Code” regime of racialization (1–48).

Algorithmic secrecy and digital surveillance drive digital profiling, or the algorithmic classification and ranking of users, on a global scale. As Browne, Ruha Benjamin, D’Ignazio, and Klein demonstrate in different ways, the digital capture of human and nonhuman interactions automates the long history of the quantification of human beings in regimes of racialization and colonialism. What is new in this threat to human plurality is not only its scale, technological opacity, and proprietary secrecy, but also the predictive character of digital profiling generated by “a-signifying machines,” to use Berns and Rouvroy’s formulation (11). Capturing even the most fleeting interactions, algorithmically generated digital group profiles disregard sociality, whereas automated personalizations destroy unrepeatable uniqueness. As Rouvroy and Berns point out, algorithmic profiling and personalizations are indifferent to the singularity of persons and their substantive political engagements.³⁴ Although some profiles are based on professional, religious, and political affiliations, most digital profiling bypasses collective affiliations and constructs arbitrary assemblages based on correlations and patterns discovered in huge data sets by data mining algorithms. After the extraction of data (which reproduces historical inequalities) and its conversion into machine-friendly mathematical models, algorithms find correlations among multitudes of information, depending on the type and purpose of the profile (Otterlo 40–64). The subsequent algorithmic attribution of group profiles to individual users, regardless of whether or not their data was used to construct these profiles, constitutes so-called personalization. Digital personalization is most apparent in all kinds of automated recommendations of what one should watch, buy, “follow,” “like,” and least discernible in automated exclusions from social goods and life chances.

The extraction of billions of data points without users’ consent or awareness for the purposes of profiling creates multiple endlessly decomposable and recomposable “data doubles” (Haggerty and Ericson 613–614). Consequently, users are targeted by power as “dividuals,” in Deleuze’s phrase – that is, as decomposable aggregates of numerical footprints (3–7).³⁵ Its indifference to human uniqueness, plurality, and activism renders this new technology of domination efficient at generating profits, managing risk, and distributing benefits and punishments inequitably. Depending on the type or purpose of the profile, users are sorted, classified, and ranked according to consumer or political behavior, productivity rates, healthcare needs, financial, medical, or criminal risks, and perhaps most pernicious of all, psychometric traits inferred from online behavior. Ranging from academic analytics and citation indexing to credit and recidivism scores, this ubiquitous discrimination based on digital scoring processes digital traces of activities as “‘signals’ for rewards or penalties, benefits or burdens” (Pasquale 21). Furthermore, because of its predictive function, individual profile rankings refer not only to past performances but also to their probable future.³⁶

Another paradox of algorithmic power is that despite its indifference to human plurality, profiling nonetheless converts “data doubles” into “digital characters,” to use sociologist Tamara K. Nopper’s suggestive term,³⁷ at the very moment it targets individual users. As Rouvroy and Berns similarly point out, infra-subjective data is converted into “supra-individual” models attributed to individual users without asking them to identify themselves or others to describe them (10). We are encountering here another vicious circle of datafication: abstracted from all social relations and indifferent to human uniqueness, predictive profiling is translated back into digital characters who are evaluated according to psychological, emotional, and moral characteristics such as “credibility, reliability, industriousness, responsibility, morality, and relationship choices” (Nopper 176). According to Ruha Benjamin, the conversion of user profiling into digital characterization automates familiar technologies of racialization: “this is a key feature of racialization: we take arbitrary qualities (say, social score, or skin color), imbue them with cultural importance and then act as if they reflected natural qualities in people” (75). This is precisely what is at stake in the recent attempts to determine criminality using facial recognition technologies.

Digital threats to human plurality culminate in automating intersubjective political as well as economic decisions. The punitive and distributive power of the “datified” state increasingly depends on algorithmic outcomes that allocate socio-economic opportunities, access to jobs, social benefits (Eubanks 3), and public goods (including PhD fellowships). Perhaps most alarmingly, these algorithms also regulate predictive policing and the application of law by assisting judges in sentencing convicted defendants. Outsourcing these decisions to AI ushers in an entirely new mode of sharing social goods, merits, needs, or risks.³⁸ As Rouvroy powerfully argues, algorithmic governmentality transforms the idea of justice, which is no longer guided by “norms resulting from prior deliberative processes” (99) and their contestation, but are managed instead by automatic algorithmic procedures. By destroying what Arendt calls an enlarged mentality, outsourcing judgments to automated algorithmic outcomes further suppresses political agency and the possibility of a new beginning. The inequalities inscribed in the law, economic systems, hegemonic narratives, and in statistical normalizations, at least in principle, could be exposed and challenged by political protests. But, as Stiegler argues in reference to Rouvroy and Berns’s work, algorithmic governmentality “ultimately destroys social relations at lightning speed,” and so “becomes the global cause of a colossal social disintegration” (7).³⁹ Because such disintegration damages human plurality at scale, digital worldlessness makes struggles for emancipation much more difficult to conceive.

Although I agree with Zuboff’s, Stiegler’s, and Rouvroy and Berns’s different assertions about the unprecedented character of the power of big data technologies, I think their accounts are limited by the lack of a robust genealogical analysis of its emergence. In particular, I contest Stiegler’s argument that the advent of an automated society ushers in “absolute novelty” (7). Such an argument risks inverting a techno-revolutionary narrative into a dystopian narrative of the absolute break produced by techno-determinism. Both of these narratives are powerfully challenged by critical race and decolonial critics like Ruha Benjamin or Simone Browne, who argue that digital technologies of power are conditioned by long histories of racial profiling, discrimination, colonialism, eugenics, and economic exploitation. This raises far more difficult questions for political theory and political critique: How does algorithmic governmentality automate existing inequalities on the “enterprise scale” and expand them to groups so far protected by forms of privilege such as Whiteness, wealth, heteronormativity, and able-bodiedness? And in what sense does it produce new forms of power, no longer operating based on statistical normalizations or ideological justifications? Ruha Benjamin’s methodological perspective of “double coding” shows how historical genealogies of racialization assume unforeseen forms, which call for new modes of resistance. Similarly, my argument that the destruction of human plurality is tantamount to digital worldlessness emphasizes the task of reconstructing historical genealogies of the unprecedented, which can be accomplished only retrospectively.

By stressing the genealogical continuities and the unprecedented character of digital worldlessness, this double perspective avoids legitimate criticisms that blame discrimination on AI and big data yet ignores low-tech but equally pervasive social inequalities. Furthermore, it facilitates a more meaningful analysis of the shortcomings of a new narrative justification of these technologies, that is, AI for social good or trustworthy AI. Formulated in response to the widespread public demands for political regulation and oversight, these narratives frequently proclaim the principles of fairness, accountability, and transparency. These principles are important but insufficient to counter digital worldlessness because they are not part of a political contestation of the meaning and the use of these terms in the context of AI and ML. Furthermore, such agonistic politics is on a collision course with the outsourcing of judgments to automated algorithmic decisions. The same goes for transparency: even if in principle every citizen could acquire coding literacy, technical expertise is insufficient to challenge the algorithmic replacement of political judgments, which require justification, accountability, and dissent by the public affected by them. As we have seen, the principle of human plurality is irreducible to transparency because it consists in acting with others and taking their judgments into account in the process of deliberation or contestation of power. Consequently, the only way digital worldlessness can be challenged is by reimagining the deployment of big data and machine learning in support of action, equity, and freedom. Here too genealogical research is indispensable. As Ruha Benjamin demonstrates in the context of Black struggles against racism, “there is a long tradition of employing and challenging data for Black lives. But before the data there were, for Du Bois, Wells-Barnett, and many others, the political questions and commitments to Black freedom” (192). Drawing on such traditions would entail reasserting the priority of action, justice, and a possibility of a new beginning created by narrative and political acts.

IV. Conclusion

In this essay, I have interpreted digital harms to human plurality by focusing on the contradictions between two different social practices: the conjunction between big data and AI, and the interdependence of narratives and political acts. Characterizing our “hybrid” configuration of democracy, digital capital, and algorithmic governmentality, these contradictions have both political and ontological dimensions. On the basis of Arendt’s work, I have argued that the ontology of natality corresponds to the intersection between narrative and political activism. Natality stresses the fact that human beings are capable of disclosing their uniqueness, sharing the world, and acting in concert with others against discrimination and for freedom. Although the politics of big data and machine learning attracts more scrutiny from journalists and scholars, its ontological effects are also a matter of public concern, as evidenced by worries about the loss of a shared reality. I have called this onto-political crisis “digital worldlessness.” This sense of worldlessness is often tacitly or explicitly acknowledged, most notably in Rouvroy’s argument that the algorithmic processing of big data “presents itself as an immune system of numerical reality against any incalculable heterogeneity, against all thought of the unassimilable outside, irreducible, non-marketable, non-finalized. . . . that is to say, also, against the world” (100). As this insight suggests, digital technologies are not only antithetical to the ontology of human plurality, but in fact put it at risk.

However, rather than representing a possible choice, the antagonistic relations between narrative, action, and big data fracture these social practices from within and disclose their ambiguously hybrid character. On the one hand, the exponentially increasing datafication of the common world tacitly relies on numerous narratives of legitimation – such as the resurgence of grand narratives that equate technological progress with political freedom and public good – or their opposites, the dystopian visions of AI’s conquest over their creators. Less sensationally, the referentiality of data and the justification of its “outcomes” are likewise mediated by numerous “data fictions.” On the other hand, new forms of political activism, such as the Algorithmic Justice League or Data 4 Black Lives, appeal to emancipatory narratives as key elements in the political struggle over collective governance and the community-based use of data. As the manifesto for Data 4 Black Lives proclaims, the politics of data can be imagined and mobilized otherwise: “Data protest. Data as accountability. Data as collective action.” Similarly, the Algorithmic Justice League relies on “the intersection of art, ML research and storytelling” in its resistance to the harms of datafication. Often started by computer scientists and statisticians, and with an overwhelming majority by women and people of color,⁴⁰ such organizing reclaims collective action, judgments, and artistic practices in their struggles against digital harms. I would argue that these narrative and political acts also reenact human plurality in Arendt’s sense and in so doing provide an alternative to digital worldlessness.

Ewa Płonowska Ziarek is Julian Park Professor of Comparative Literature at University at Buffalo and a Visiting Faculty in the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts, Maine. Most recently she co-authored with Rosalyn Diprose Arendt, Natality and Biopolitics: Towards Democratic Plurality and Reproductive Justice (2019), awarded a Book Prize by Symposium: Canadian Journal for Continental Philosophy. Her other books include Feminist Aesthetics and the Politics of Modernism (2012); An Ethics of Dissensus: Feminism, Postmodernity, and the Politics of Radical Democracy (2001); The Rhetoric of Failure: Deconstruction of Skepticism, Reinvention of Modernism (1995); and co-edited volumes, such as, Intermedialities: Philosophy, Art, Politics (2010), Time for the Humanities (2008), and Revolt, Affect, Collectivity: The Unstable Boundaries of Kristeva’s Polis (2005). Her interdisciplinary research interests include feminist political theory, modernism, critical race theory, and algorithmic culture.

Footnotes

I would like to thank Cheryl Emerson for her comments and invaluable help in editing and compiling the Works Cited. Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Public Affairs, 2019.

10. In the context of AI, the relation between labor, work, and technology has to be analyzed in terms of global digital capitalism, but this topic is beyond the scope of this essay.

11. This political nature of truth and reality does not erode the difference between opinions and facts.

12. For an excellent discussion of the relation between Arendt’s interpretation of Kant’s sensus communis and her notion of realness, see Cecilia Sjöholm, Doing Aesthetics with Arendt, 82–85. For a phenomenological account of common sense in relation to worldliness, see, among others, Marieke Borren, “‘A Sense of the World’: Hannah Arendt’s Hermeneutic Phenomenology of Common Sense,” 225–55.

Works Cited

• Abebe, Rediet, et al. “Roles for computing in social change.” Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, Jan. 2020, pp. 252–260.

• Adams, Elizabeth. “Civic Tech: The Path to Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology in Minneapolis.” HAI Weekly Seminar Series, Stanford University, 14 Oct. 2020, https://hai.stanford.edu/events/hai-weekly-seminar-elizabeth-adams. Virtual lecture. Accessed 26 Aug. 2022.

• Agostinho, Daniela. “The Optical Unconscious of Big Data: Datafication of Vision and Care for Unknown Futures.” Big Data & Society, Jan. 2019.

• AI Now Institute. ainowinstitute.org. Accessed 26 Aug. 2022.

• Anderson, Chris. “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete.” Wired, 23 Jun. 2008, https://www.wired.com/2008/06/pb-theory/. Accessed 26 Aug. 2022.

• Andrejevic, Mark. “Shareable and Un-sharable Knowledge.” Big Data & Society, vol. 7, no. 1, Jun. 2020.

• Aral, Sinan. The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health — and How We Must Adapt. Currency, 2020.

• Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Introduction by Margaret Canovan, 2^nd ed., Chicago UP, 1998.

• ———. Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy. Edited by Ronald Beiner, Chicago UP, 1982.

• ———. “Truth and Politics.” The Portable Hannah Arendt, edited and introduction by Peter Baehr, Penguin Books, 2003, pp. 545–575.

• ———. “Understanding and Politics (The Difficulties of Understanding).” Essays in Understanding 1930–1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism, edited and introduction by Jerome Kohn, Schocken Books, 1994, pp. 307–327.

• Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. Translated by Phil Beitchman, et al., Semiotext(e), 1983.

• Benjamin, Ruha. Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Polity Press, 2019.

• Benjamin, Walter. “The Storyteller.” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn, Schocken Books, 1968, pp. 83–109.

• Bennett, Gaymon. “The Digital Sublime: Algorithmic Binds in a Living Foundry.” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, vol. 25, no. 3, May 2020, pp. 41–52.

• Berkowitz, Roger. “Why Arendt Matters: Revisiting ‘The Origins of Totalitarianism.’” Los Angeles Review of Books, 18 Mar. 2017, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/arendt-matters-revisiting-origins-totalitarianism/. Accessed 26 Aug. 2022.

• Berkowitz, Roger, et al., editors. Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics. Fordham UP, 2009.

• Bernholz, Lucy, et al., editors. Digital Technology and Democratic Theory. Chicago UP, 2021.

• Birmingham, Peg. Hannah Arendt and Human Rights: The Predicament of Common Responsibility. Indiana UP, 2006.

• Booth, Allison and Miriam Posner, editors. PMLA, Special Topic: Varieties of Digital Humanities, vol. 135, no. 1, Jan. 2020.

• Borgmann, Albert. Holding On to Reality: The Nature of Information at the Turn of the Millennium. Chicago UP, 1999.

• Borren, Marieke. “‘A Sense of the World’: Hannah Arendt’s Hermeneutic Phenomenology of Common Sense.” International Journal of Philosophical Studies, vol. 21, no. 2, Feb. 2013, pp. 225–255.

• Brevini, Benedetta and Frank Pasquale. “Revisiting the Black Box Society by Rethinking the Political Economy of Big Data.” Big Data & Society, Jan.-June 2020.

• Browne, Simone. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Duke UP, 2015.

• Butler, Judith. Giving an Account of Oneself. Fordham UP, 2005.

• Cavarero, Adriana. Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood. Translated and introduction by Paul A. Kottman, Routledge, 2000.

• Coppins, McKay. “The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President.” The Atlantic, Mar. 2020. Accessed 26 Aug. 2022.

• Data 4 Black Lives. https://d4bl.org/. Accessed 26 Aug. 2022.

• Davies, Todd. “Three Eras of the Internet.” Public Infrastructure: A Corporation for Public Software, Digital Public Infrastructure Series, Stanford UP, 27 Oct. 2020, https://www.slideshare.net/trbdavies/digital-public-infrastructure-a-corporation-for-public-software. Slides from a workshop. Accessed 26 Aug. 2022.

• Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October, vol. 59, 1992, pp. 3–7.

• D’Ignazio, Catherine and Lauren Klein. Data Feminism. MIT P, 2020.

• Diprose, Rosalyn and Ewa Płonowska Ziarek. Arendt, Natality and Biopolitics: Toward Democratic Plurality and Reproductive Justice. Edinburgh UP, 2018.

• Dourish, Paul and Edgar Gómez Cruz. “Datafication and Data Fiction: Narrative Data and Narrating with Data.” Big Data & Society, Jul.-Dec. 2018, pp.1–10.

• Erwig, Martin. Once Upon an Algorithm: How Stories Explain Computing. MIT P, 2017.

• Eubanks, Virginia. Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor. St. Martin’s Press, 2018.

• Fiore-Gartland, Brittany and Gina Neff. “Communication, Mediation, and Expectations of Data: Data Valences Across Health and Wellness Communities.” International Journal of Communication, vol. 9, 2015, pp. 1466–1484.

• Floridi, Luciano. The Fourth Revolution: How the Infosphere is Reshaping Human Reality. Oxford UP, 2014.

• Gasché, Rodolphe. “Is Determinant Judgment Really a Judgment?” Washington University Jurisprudence Review, vol. 6, no. 1, 2013, pp. 99–120.

• Gines, Kathryn T. Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question. Indiana UP, 2014.

• Golumbia, David. The Cultural Logic of Computation. Harvard UP, 2009.

• Haggerty, Kevin D. and Richard V. Ericson. “The Surveillant Assemblage.” The British Journal of Sociology, vol. 51, no. 4, 2000, pp. 605–622.

• Hay, Colin. “Political Ontology.” The Oxford Handbook of Political Science, edited by Robert E. Goodin and Charles Tilly, Oxford UP, 2006, pp. 460–478.

• Honig, Bonnie, editor. Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt. Penn State UP, 1995.

• “Information.” Oxford English Dictionary Online, Oxford UP, 2022. Accessed 26 Aug. 2022.

• Kitchin, Rob. “Big Data, New Epistemologies and Paradigm Shifts.” Big Data & Society, Apr.-Jun. 2014, pp. 1–12.

• Kristeva, Julia. Hannah Arendt. Translated by Ross Guberman, Columbia UP, 2001.

• Kuehn, Kathleen M. and Leon A. Salter. “Assessing Digital Threats to Democracy, and Workable Solutions: A Review of the Recent Literature.” International Journal of Communication, vol. 14, 2020, pp. 2589–2610.

• Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, U of Minnesota P, 1984.

• Manovich, Lev. “Database as Symbolic Form.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, vol. 5, no. 2, Jun. 1999, pp. 80–99.

• ———. “Trending: The Promises and the Challenges of Big Social Data.” Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Matthew K. Gold, U of Minnesota P, 2012, pp. 460–475.

• Mantello, Peter. “The Machine That Ate Bad People: The Ontopolitics of the Precrime Assemblage.” Big Data & Society, Jul-Dec. 2016, pp. 1–11.

• Mayer-Schönberger, Viktor and Kenneth Cukier. Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013.

• Noble, Safiya Umoja. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York UP, 2018.

• Nopper. Tamara K. “Digital Character in ‘The Scored Society’: FICO, Social Networks, and Competing Measurements of Creditworthiness.” Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life, edited by Ruha Benjamin, Duke UP, 2019, pp. 170–187.

• O’Byrne, Anne. Natality and Finitude. Indiana UP, 2010.

• O’Neil, Cathy. Weapons of Math Destruction. Crown Publishing, 2016.

• Ophir, Yotam, et al. “A Collaborative Way of Knowing: Bridging Computational

• Communication Research and Grounded Theory Ethnography.” Journal of Communication 70, vol. 70, no. 3, June 2020, pp. 447–472.

• Otterlo, Van Martin. “A Machine Learning View on Profiling.” Privacy, Due Process and the Computational Turn: The Philosophy of Law Meets the Philosophy of Technology, edited by Mireille Hildebrant and Katia de Vries, Routledge 2013, pp. 41–64.

• Pasquale, Frank. The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information. Harvard UP, 2015.

• Pasquinelli, Matteo. “Metadata Society.” Posthuman Glossary, edited by Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova, Bloomsbury, 2018, pp. 253–256.

• Prinsloo, Paul. “Fleeing from Frankenstein’s Monster and Meeting Kafka on the Way: Algorithmic Decision-Making in Higher Education.” E-Learning and Digital Media, vol. 14, no. 3, Oct. 2017, pp. 138–163.

• Re, Chris. “Software 2.0: Machine Learning Is Changing Software.” HAI Weekly Seminar Series, Stanford University, 27 Jan. 2021, https://hai.stanford.edu/events/hai-weekly-seminar-chris-re. Virtual lecture. Accessed 26 Aug. 2022.

• Rouvroy, Antoinette. “Governing without Norms: Algorithmic Governmentality.” Psychoanalytical Notebooks, no. 32, 2018, pp. 99–120, https://www.scribd.com/document/398573876/Antoinette-Rouvroy-Governing-without-norms-algorithmic-governmentality.

• Rouvroy, Antoinette and Thomas Berns. “Algorithmic Governmentality and Prospects of Emancipation: Disparateness as a Precondition for Individuation through Relationships?” Translated by Elizabeth Libbrecht, Réseaux vol. 177, no. 1, 2013, pp. 163–196.

• Ruppert, Evelyn, et al. “Data Politics.” Big Data & Society, Jul.-Dec. 2017, pp. 1–7.

• Schrock, Andrew and Gwen Shaffer. “Data Ideologies of an Interested Public: A Study of Grassroots Open Government Data Intermediaries.” Big Data & Society, Jan.-Jun., 2017, pp. 1–10.

• Shannon, Claude E. and Warren Weaver. The Mathematical Theory of Communication. U of Illinois P, 1949, 1998.

• Sjöholm, Cecilia. Doing Aesthetics with Arendt. Columbia UP, 2015.

• Stiegler, Bernard. The Age of Disruption: Technology and Madness in Computational Capitalism. Translated by Daniel Ross, Polity Press, 2019.

• Stone-Mediatore, Shari. Reading Across Borders: Storytelling and Knowledges of Resistance. Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

• Thornham, Helen and Edgar Gómez Cruz. “Hackathons, Data and Discourse: Convolutions of the Data (Logical).” Big Data & Society, July-Dec., 2016, pp. 1–11.

• Weizenbaum, Joseph. Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation. W. H. Freeman and Company, 1976.

• Zerilli, Linda M. G. A Democratic Theory of Judgment. Chicago UP, 2016.

• ———. Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom. Chicago UP, 2005.

• Ziewitz, Malte. “Governing Algorithms: Myth, Mess, and Methods.” Science, Technology, & Human Values, vol. 41, no. 1, Jan. 2016, pp. 3–16.

Erick Verran (bio)

Abstract

This article works out a logic for trash in videogames through its consideration of the ludic artifact. Defining videogame trash as that which graphically outlives the execution of its ludic function, the essay distinguishes trash from objects that signify as real-world refuse, like Mario Kart’s banana peels, and the merely decorative. It also addresses the correlation between technical capability and a graphic verisimilitude that generates trashscapes. Examining videogames from Super Mario Bros. to The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, this article’s philosophical, technical, and art-historical approach departs from narratology and garbage studies to offer a prolegomenon for further inquiry.

Introduction

Historically, the lack of trash in videogames has been a symptom of limited graphical horsepower, since it becomes computationally costly to render dropped weaponry, discarded refuse, or the corpses of defeated enemies indefinitely. Andrew Reinhard says as much in a discussion of World of Warcraft (Blizzard North, 2004), noting that the servers which host its many game-world instances “would be overwhelmed with data, remembering where to place every discarded item from every player within the world” (156). But design considerations dictate that an environment, however lugubrious or hostile in its outward affect, ought to be mechanically devoted to the player; that is, relatively tolerant of exploration and the confrontation of threats. If not merely constitutive of local color and atmosphere, the artifactual—that which is ontologically as well as strategically apart in a videogame and can be recognized as such—tends to take the form of obtainables or obstacles, monsters of course being a kind of hurdle varying in their degree of mobility.

Because my interest is videogames, I gladly leave to new-media scholars the discussion of excess within hypertext, file-management systems, and the emergent cross-pollination of digital culture with archeology and discard studies. Reinhard considers Garbology, inaugurated by William Rathje and Cullen Murphy’s Rubbish!: The Archaeology of Garbage, for its applicability to game studies in his seminal Archaeogaming: An Introduction to Archaeology in and of Video Games, while Daniel Vella’s Kant-centered approach in “No Mastery Without Mystery: Dark Souls and the Ludic Sublime” takes umbrage with any methodology that devotes itself exclusively to the presentational, or seemingly noumenal, aspect of videogames. Against the possibility of encountering digital things-in-themselves, Vella asks us to set aside critical space for an aesthetics-forward inquiry keyed to feelings, writing that other methodologies “obscure the phenomenological and hermeneutical processes by which the game becomes available to the player as an object of thought.” Despite having no knowledge of in-game trash from the Kantian point of view—some inaccessible Dinglichkeit of trash—I am fascinated by just what two- and three-dimensional videogame objects afford, as well as by the ontic facts of their immediate use and longer-term disuse, depending on the underlying mechanics.

Going ahead, I’d like to lash Reinhard and Vella’s insights, respectively the basic objectness of videogames and contextualization of those objects, or artifacts, within a virtual environment, to this discourse as scholarly ballast. In order to better understand objects that exist as discrete facts of a game’s programming—as opposed to those induced through extra-ludic shenanigans, for which category Pokémon’s (Game Freak, 1996) legendary MissingNo. might qualify—I also tease out the apparent relationship between the phenomenal and what might be thought of as merely constitutive of trash per se. Reinhard uses the portmanteau “gamifact” (150) to describe an instantly occurring glitch (or bug, its subset), frequently born of a non-player character’s faulty coding in conflict with the programmed demands of its environment, while the practice of abusing a videogame’s implicit and explicit rules in order to generate interesting errors “gamejacking” (154) in Reinhard’s somewhat eccentric jargon.¹ Controllers have their own uselessness, insofar as shoddy coupling between input and output can result in undesirable feedback. For most gamers this is temporary, a matter of the proverbial learning curve (Schmalzer). Gamepads invariably assume that the player is able-bodied in the normative sense; Madison Schmalzer, however, identifies a gray area between the human operator’s button mashes and their avatar’s response, referred to as “jank.” Schmalzer’s “Janky Controls and Embodied Play: Disrupting the Cybernetic Gameplay Circuit” dismantles the ideological belief that this interfacial equation stands for a perfectly noiseless affair. What follows, at least in terms of the hand-on-joystick aspect of manipulating images fixed in liquid crystal, is the unsettling fact that some irreducible haptic extra, “a glitch in the flow of information” (ibid.) has plagued videogames since their experimental birth. Is the lesson then to embrace what is insoluble about trash, to drag it into the open?

Toward an Ontology of Artifactual Trash

In “What Digital Trash Dumped in Games Tells Us about the Players,” Douglas Heaven quotes Franziska Lamprecht and Hajoe Moderegger, New York-based artists who bought a vacant lot in Second Life (Linden Lab, 2003) and asked their fellow lifers to jettison whatever they felt comfortable parting with:

Suddenly the dump took on a new light. “It was hard to see things disappear; it was like living with daily loss,” says Lamprecht. Some objects were intricate, things people had put care into making. Many were no more than a few months old. “When is a digital object ready to die?” she asks.

Heaven likewise notes that ARK: Survival Evolved (Studio Wildcard, 2017), “an online game in which players form tribes, build forts and ride dinosaurs” has struggled with garbage: “the clutter had become unbearable. The game’s world was filling up with structures that players had made and then abandoned. It took up territory that the remaining players wanted to use, and was also an eyesore.” Gone Home (The Fullbright Company, 2013), an early success for the story-based exploration subgenre of adventure games whose star rose sharply over the 2010s, is also discussed alongside Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture (The Chinese Room, 2015), which focuses Christian eschatology on the last human being in Oregon. In the latter, one is tasked with investigating the lives of community members by way of the personal effects they left behind en route to the hereafter. “But,” Heaven qualifies, “Lamprecht and Moderegger were interested in what players leave behind – not objects that have been planted by game developers.” I, too, am interested in what is lost to player activity, just not to the exclusion of design quirks and other aberrant miscellany. Reinhard latches onto the glitch as a videogame’s chief artifact, an often temporary anomaly that should be documented with care when found:

Everything else within the game is a deliberate creation of one or more game developers, which taken as a whole could be considered landscape archaeology as described above. But glitches are true intrusions into game-space, and as such they can be classed as “significant finds.”(152)

Reinhard’s identification of important artifacts with that which slips through developers’ fingers necessarily forecloses on player subjectivity, finely discriminant and primed as it is on a reflexive level to engage what seems useful and dismiss everything else; the idea of programmers as demiurgic teams patching holes in complicated ships is another matter. But this is merely a disciplinary shift, from a scientist’s archaeo-historic praxis to the domain of ontological aesthetics. In my attempt to work out a theory specific to videogame-situated trash, I would cast a wider net for those graphical dregs non-player characters couldn’t take with them, or what remains when the fun has gone out of a thing.

Jared Hansen’s “An Abundance of Fruit Trees: A Garbology of the Artifacts in Animal Crossing: New Leaf” (included in the Animal Crossing-themed special issue brought out by Loading in 2020) presents the first study analyzing a videogame through the garbological lens while carrying over archeology’s survey method for contextualizing a site. Hansen visited ten randomly selected towns in the (then) latest Animal Crossing (Nintendo, 2012) using the game’s transporting Dream Suite feature.² Sizing up players’ discardments, Hansen ultimately lumps these in-game objects into five categories: Fruit, Gyroid (vaguely humanoid figurines based on historic Japanese grave markers), Furniture, Clothing & Accessories, and Other, which includes six beehives and a ruby (28). Moreover, the author notes at the outset that said artifacts were “coded based upon their iconography (what their visual signifiers were) as well as their semiotic connotations (what they symbolized or represented)” (27), while for instance a fruit basket’s eligibility as trash is judged only according to location. While guessing at its history and microeconomic implications follows, shouldn’t every place be equally storage-appropriate if a player thought of themself as the omnipotent manager of their town? Leaving a veritable orchard of pears outside the train station (29) might represent some organizing function for the player, to the effect that they keep better track of items outdoors than shut in a house. Reinhard is doing the diligent anthropologist thing for ageless relics left in timeless spaces, as a paleoanthropologist might get forensic on bones unearthed in a mountain grotto, while by the conclusion of his oneiric tour Hansen has a number of inferences to share regarding three of the towns’ goings-on but less in the way of a philosophy.

My ambition, by contrast, is to sketch a prolegomenon of sorts by sampling a myriad of games anecdotally rather than cataloging a lot of garbage qua text. Intuitively, trash would seem exclusive to three-dimensional role-playing games; for example, in the Elder Scrolls franchise and massively multiplayer online games, where flora and free-roaming fauna have run riot in the last decade. At least initially, we’d be hard pressed to identify any play-based residua in a nineties platformer title like Sonic the Hedgehog (Sega, 1991), for that scattering of golden rings, released upon Sonic colliding against the steel spikes, ultimately proves ephemeral. But then ignoring the various upgrade monitors—sped past for a faster completion time, as a self-imposed handicap, or out of sheer neglect—might just count. A perhaps classic, early form of artifactual trash is found, if imperfectly so, in Super Mario World (Nintendo, 1990). Jumped-on Koopa Troopas leave behind their shells, which indeed perseverate in the world but then offer a certain amount of interactivity. The invalidating drawback here is that the Koopa shell is fully intended within the loop of Super Mario World’s gameplay to remain player-adjacent, being now available as a graspable projectile, however much an empty turtle’s shell signifies as sloughed off, like the chuckable banana peels of Mario Kart or Counter-Strike’s sprays, the (often irreverent) symbols and custom images with which players tag a map’s walls. Going forward, my attempt will be to reinforce this distinction between the readily useful and the uselessly present,³ to the extent that what a game’s developer intends to be investigated and put to some environment-directed use by player (recycled, almost) can foreground undesigned offshoots that result from this loop.

A Phenomenal State of Visual Excess

Here it is convenient, if no longer all that fashionable, to apply the concept of “hauntology”— developed by Jacques Derrida in Specters of Marx (1993) and later popularized by Mark Fisher—to any burgeoning theory that would have for its cynosure the ontology of trash in videogames. To adapt Colin Davis’s gloss, that which simultaneously adheres to the confines of a (digital) space and balks at its material laws “[replaces] the priority of being and presence with the figure of the ghost as that which is neither present nor absent, neither dead nor alive” (373). Once a treasure chest’s single ludic gimmick is triggered, a permanent rigor mortis sets in. From precisely that moment, the start of a familiar animation that tells us a plundered chest shall no longer engage with us, is it become trash, just as a raiding party holds out for the merest indication of a dungeon boss’s defeat before congratulating themselves rather than waiting around to see if the boss really has died. Like the difference in first-person shooters between a terrorist’s three-dimensional body and the invisible hit boxes, the “ludic capacity” of any monster or clickable object never matches its accompanying presentation exactly. A non-player character’s melodramatic collapse thus stands for the technical fact of its cessation in advance of the story.

Once collected and exhibited by the Smithsonian, a videogame per se—the physical cartridge containing its source code, gameplay rendered through sound and graphics, or combinations thereof—goes on to be understood in Raiford Guins’s terms as an object’s “afterlife” and is in turn recontextualized (A. R. Bailey, 11). Whether anticipated by the game’s programmers or not, artifactual trash is by contrast that which eventually becomes estranged to itself within the diegesis of the gameworld, either through its spatio-temporal perdurance or queasy abundance, the slain mob duplicated beyond some subjective threshold for graphical saturation. Indeed, much that may be thought of as categorically diffuse in a videogame is often only ever apparently so, the result of whipping in-game artifacts into a visual frenzy. A videogame may be unstable by design, with the line between gameplay and chaos paradoxically blurred. A bit of postgame content in Diablo II (Blizzard North, 2000), known colloquially as the “Secret Cow Level,” wherein hordes of upright cows descend upon the player with murderous fury, is a relatively famous example of a storyworld overawing itself; as the duplicate cows mass together, the discrete logic of that artifact is all but lost in a super-animation of mooing skirmish, despite retaining its interactivity. Conversely, “trashy” styles of play could describe a mode of enjoying a videogame against the grain of its coding, perhaps by attempting to hijack a scripted procedure (e.g., infinite duplication of a unique, single-use item), as in the viral case of dynamite exploding in Minecraft (Mojang, 2011) where the blast’s simulation crashes players’ computers.⁴

A game’s operator plays a crucial role in the propagation of trash-esque contingencies. In Rollercoaster Tycoon (Chris Sawyer Productions, 1999), for instance, incoming fairgoers might be funneled toward an unexitable square pit on purpose. Unable to die, this growing multitude of theme park visitors gradually solidifies into a buzzing black hole of redundant, overlapping activity. The purest trash, to risk an oxymoron, is that which resists absorption back into RAM’s ether. Released from whatever ludic function it had, trash lives on in a manner akin to undeath after having been iterated into meaningful, operant being. These neutralized artifacts, if we pause to notice them, hang around in the form of virtual blight jettisoned from a mimetic ecosystem. Abundant loose newspaper and inner-city tumbleweeds certainly give Grand Theft Auto V (Rockstar North, 2013) its true-to-California granularity. But I focus on polygonal garbage bearing the paradoxical quality of a specter, “an aberration in which at least two states of being can be observed simultaneously: what is, and what is supposed to be” (Reinhard, 153). With respect to an environment already unreal, these “ghosts” are inside-out, for the quaintly skeptical reason that it is other than natural in a videogame—supernatural, as it were—for the decommissioned to remain among the actively living, as though the Magic Kingdom’s engineers might leave a slumped-down animatronic alongside functioning ones. The useless is typically swept from view, nearly as often in life as in digital spaces.

Doubling back to Super Mario World, think how a player, while sending Koopa shells speeding away, sometimes traps one between a couple of green pipes or opposed blocks where the shell is then fated to ricochet endlessly. This is one possibility for trash: the in-game artifact—“that is, the game object as it is given in the player’s experience” (Vella, 2015)— propelled toward a phenomenal state of visual excess if not outright meaninglessness. What had been offered to the player as a tool, whether as a means of gaining experience points or beating the game, now appears unstuck from play, its ludic capacity exhausted. A booby trap in Thief that has discharged its sole spring-loaded shot and desublimated categorically back into its surroundings remains to be looked at, but it ceases to be associable with that higher class of the affective, having become a bit of operational decor going through its programmed motions.

New Durability and the Circulation of Loot

Consider the simplified thermodynamics behind the crafting of items that Bethesda introduced with The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011) and of cooking outdoors in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Nintendo, 2017), processes through which the necessary components are permanently consumed without ever leaving a fractional remainder. Thus a crafter’s recipe in World of Warcraft is absorbed via instantaneous learning as the catalyzing ingredient, much as The Matrix’s Neo downloads kung fu. Especially in online RPGs, quantification by an auction house, say the one located in Orgrimmar, the capital city of Warcraft’s orcs, often bears no more relation to its user-deposited holdings than informational strings coded by color. Bags of holding, too, despite their magically nonsensical internal volume, are usually each restricted to a slotted grid. At the other end of the spectrum, a druid’s sought-after leather goods might be lodged with their guild’s bank, just as a letter, flagged by an exclamation point as unread, might be ignored in one’s mailbox. The systole and diastole of fragile treasure coursing through a kingdom—it all belongs somewhere, from the far-flung corners of a recovery quest to Blathers’s filled museum. A modality of videogame trash yet to be considered is the readable in-game book, a feature associated with the Elder Scrolls universe, findable in dusty crypts or a wizard’s private library. Away from the dichotomy of unaffectable stationary artifacts and repetitious spectral phenomena, the artifact qua literature, however responsive to clicking and even directly impactful on one’s experience in Tamriel, is nonetheless ludically inexhaustible.

In The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (Nintendo, 1998), where a tumultuous fight could make the hardware sweat, Link’s slingshot as much as the fabled Master Sword are incapable of deterioration. Although Deku sticks and shields are highly flammable, and the Giant’s Knife breaks after eight uses or if the player strikes a wall, thereafter becoming the Broken Giant’s Knife, the former may be said to do so as a mechanical novelty (Deku sticks are used to burn away obstructive cobwebs inside the first dungeon), the latter as a comment on the inferior quality of Goron smithing. It might then strike us as either counterintuitive or entirely foreseeable that with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017) Nintendo chose to introduce durability alongside its new ubiquity of farmable kit. Maybe the Switch console’s increased technological brawn is felt to justify both material abundance and a significant degree of on-the-ground persistence, unless perishability is seen as a necessary check on this Cambrian explosion of stuff. Couldn’t a single Thunderspear if not Boko Club stay for the length of Link’s quest as a de facto reward keyed to the plot? Prior to this latest adventure, The Legend of Zelda tied locales to the player obtaining the Megaton Hammer or Fairy Bow, and this saw Link’s collection organized across a handful of dedicated menu pages. Although gear hardiness overall scales with one’s progression in Breath of the Wild, cheap disposability obviates the once-a-chapter upgrade of past Zelda titles and, with the further addition of a nonlinear plot, brings the franchise dangerously close to Elder Scrolls territory. Let us agree, provisionally, that the beginning of virtual garbage more or less correlates with the drive, spurred by consumers, for ever greater verisimilitude in games, even if the rates of everything are exaggerated, as if to match the shorter day/night cycle. From dimensional objects fully there in the game world to their smaller, inventoriable copies, like an icon tucked away inside Link’s knapsack becomes an apple cooked on a campfire.

Per the familiar storybook trope, with the royal family’s deposal, one vile of heart brings about literal Weltschmerz, which is meant to explain the stultifying darkness and proliferation of monsters unleashed upon the land of Hyrule. Outfitted in his signature tunic with sword and shield, Link encounters them deficient, present-at-hand: jowled hobgoblins and death’s-head arachnids, hooded wraiths toting lanterns, and skeletons decked in grass skirts. With the irritant’s removal, green life once again rushes over a benighted land, the suggestion being that tranquility is nature’s lowest energy state. If one could change how The Legend of Zelda handles its dead, such that these ghouls of Nintendo’s go from obtusely threatening to something less than zero, defeated but then not vanquished aesthetically, the moral character of Link should alter, too, from effectively a cutter of Gordian knots, as enemies come apart suddenly and are no more, to something decidedly macabre: a plundering marauder who leaves a trail of carnage. This does, however, resemble the hindsighted impression one can have of a temple’s many completed puzzles, when the whole is appreciated as something very much done, every gate lifted and the shoved-into-place cubes remaining on their pressure plates. Avatars gunned down in a battle royale (if their camouflaged bodies last the length of the match) and a lot of mottled boars⁵ in scattered heaps amount to visual records of the player-conqueror’s bloody score.⁶

Meanwhile, it is common for games to visualize an enemy’s demise in such a way as to appear diegetically legitimate, as when the titular Prince of Persia slashes through djinns and they collapse into sand. In “Screw the Grue: Mediality, Metalepsis, Recapture,” Terry Harpold delineates just this phenomenon, how developers struggle artistically as well as logically to fictively embrace—or “recapture”—the harsh outer limits of what they’ve wrought. Earlier top-down iterations of The Legend of Zelda segregated Hyrule into equally-sized parcels of land. A house surrounded by shrubs fits within a tile of navigable space, while a spooky forest might load across multiple discrete tiles, such that brushing against one drags the player there with a wipe. For Harpold, these laminations of narrative architecture with technical necessity represent “the moment where entanglement threatens to bring forward the game’s determinism by its definite technical situation[;] that determinism,” he writes, “is turned back into the gameworld, so as to seem to be another of its (arbitrary but consistent) rules” (93). Thus in The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening (Nintendo, 1993) the geography’s evenly subdivided layout displays an almost folk understanding of place, with the loading threshold disguised inside a hollow log or draped over a garden wall, an agreeably convenient method for allocating the Super Nintendo Entertainment System’s 128 kilobytes of memory.⁷ But in nailing down an equivalence for trash in videogames, we must also acknowledge what has been one of the medium’s greatest charms: its juggling of abundance and the strictly ludic. If not exactly trash for yet having a purpose, the former can still offer a clue as to the relationship game-players develop with a presentational form of entertainment based on taking advantage of that which is given.

Between artifacts constantly disappearing and others cropping up out of nowhere, we might imagine virtual entropy as well as something like its opposite, except that neither of these metaphorical ebbs and flows actually replenishes or draws from some finite numerical integrity making up the game world. The goblin’s worthless body doesn’t break down into virtual fertilizer but, like a hologram, is “unplugged” by the GPU. Diablo II’s mechanics dictate that loot dropped by killed mobs, including equipment and gold, despawns after a set number of minutes which varies according to the item’s rarity, while in Dragon Age: Inquisition (BioWare, 2014) obsolete iron greaves or an unwanted broadsword is consigned to binary oblivion if dropped from the player’s inventory (Reinhard 156); instantiated out of its data file, an apparently (to the player) unique graphical object is then flushed from the memory.⁸ The extent to which built-in deletion is to be thought computationally healthy, or the management of a roster of competing presences a sort of ecology, deserves elaboration. Videogames thoroughly dramatize the Enlightenment principle of instrumental reason with its twin emphases on counting and representation, such that a monster’s dwindling hit points are readable in the health bar above its head.

The Real World Must Be Edited

If our definition of artifactual trash is that which graphically outlives the execution of its ludic function, edificial trash might consequently be limited to a handful of unique scenarios, including hanging around after Bowser’s defeat to explore his lair, denuded now as a flown bird’s nest,⁹ and the habitation of out-of-bounds zones, a recreational (or extra-ludic) activity common in massively multiplayer online games that could remind one of alpine climbing. Wm. Ruffin Bailey offers us the important terminology of “fossilized content” for a nearly identical issue: unused code embedded within a game’s programming, say in the form of a map the developer ultimately decided against publishing or a character model that never made it into the story (82). These are not Easter eggs, which are intended to be found by clever scavengers if not stumbled upon. Content traditionally inaccessible to the player quite nicely forms the inverse to Guins’s object afterlife (A. R. Bailey), what we might deem the “beforelife” of a designed space. Like the obviated artifact that refuses to disappear, a space’s beforelife would refer to a limbo state of narrative sterility, both traversably present-at-hand and barred from that meaningful condition of interactive relevance. What’s provided is a clearing for goal-based gameplay, as opposed to exploration for exploration’s sake.¹⁰

The aesthetic rehabilitation of that which is consigned to societal degradation naturally includes ruined architecture, though its inclusion in a videogame can readily be thought of as more than a source of moody ambience. Popularly backdated to European romanticism and its feverish love of vine-covered abbeys with collapsed roofs, ruins were seized upon not only by the Lake Poets in the early nineteenth century but also by Dutch artists like Jacob van Ruisdael, who captured the rural industry and dilapidation of the Netherlands using earthy hues. In an essay discussing the tropes of game-world design, Mark J. P. Wolf notes that “ruins give a location a ‘before and after’ dual timeframe [cf. Reinhard’s ‘two states of being’]; a sad melancholy present, and a supposedly better past when everything was new and functional” (“Experience” 226). While a bucolic hut may be understood as an (immovable) object laid down by the developer and a mountain in the far distance just an unvisitable bit of scenery, game companies have not shied away from residuality as the setting itself, from Ico (Japan Studio and Team Ico, 2001), set in an abandoned castle, to Fallout, Bethesda’s post-apocalyptic moneymaker.

Aside from a sunny patch of grass here and there, Ico’s backdrop is altogether Spartan for want of affectable stuff, though ludic artifacts, such as the ladders and lengths of chain one can climb, are grafted onto it. Walt Disney’s pioneering animators made the same compromise. Compare the meticulous, static backgrounds of Eyvind Earle, drawn only once, with the less-detailed cels that dance across their surfaces. With the Pixar era’s dimensional jump to CGI the charming flatness of Sleeping Beauty was both hollowed out and inflated, like in a fun-house mirror, with the newly gained space populated by talking toys and zoo animals. On the gaming front, modular artifacts continue to press beyond the Heideggerian edges of Lichtungen, those bright clearings in which players fight and die. One provisional solution has been to constrain the area through which we (slowly) move, a hallmark of the Resident Evil and Dark Souls franchises, such that these stygian ordeals appear to be chock-full of undead enemies as well as semi-detached passive elements. Think how Metal Gear Solid began with the navigation of tight corridors before Hideo Kojima set the series in a relatively capacious forest and, finally, a sprawling desert canyon.

To give a very different example, reissues of Frogger (Konami, 1981) increasingly distend each of the game’s obstacles and platforms—the tractor trailers, floating logs, and red-shelled turtles—before finally pitching the axis of play backward. So Cimabue put a little meat on the Virgin Mary’s bones and later schools revamped her holy apartments, expanding the floor and maybe putting in a real window. The biologies of oil painting and videogames are curiously resemblant; time and again they’ve converged on homologous answers to the problems encountered in depicting a lushly figured-out world. The technique known as cangiante, for instance, which helped Michelangelo separate the interlaid fabrics of his great ceiling, stratifies Frogger into a busy freeway jutting between the safe harbors of land below and above.¹¹ Tripartite cutscenes in Tecmo’s original Ninja Gaiden, debuted on the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1988, use three shades of blue to indicate the atmosphere hanging between Ryu and the demon’s temple (fig. 1). Giotto’s fog becomes the turquoise gradations of Bruegel, and the eerie chartreuse mist of Titus Interactive’s critically loathed Superman: The New Superman Adventures, (Titus Interactive, 1999) at least set players outside in advance of Skyrim’s convincingly perspectival highlands.

Fig. 1. Ninja Gaiden. Nintendo Entertainment System version, Tecmo, 1988.

The Elder Scrolls Online. Windows PC version, ZeniMax Online Studios, 2014.

In an essay on Louise Glück, William Logan observes that art of modest scope finds reality too large a pill: “For a poetic world to be this narrow, the poet’s desires must be powerfully austere. The real world, in other words, is so overwhelming it must be edited” (205). While in Glück’s case holding back was a deliberate choice, offering less than everything is inherent to art. Harvest Moon, of the farm-simulation subgenre, and Euro Truck Simulator, a driving simulator, appeal to consumers by presenting ludic versions of fatiguing human chores such as spraying herbicide, adjusting bulky furniture, or hauling logs, which are likely to be avoided in life.¹² Beyond what might be called the partial automation of play via technology, the videogame apparatus as a whole can therefore be understood as the virtual distillation of play out of the living context in which we find it. Almost directly an effect of technological shortcomings, shearing a natural object to its iconographical core for the end of gameplay, a utopic process of semiotic clarification, results in lettuce heads at a sprinkle, a sofa light enough to lift, and automotive engines without all the grease. Martin Heidegger made a similar argument for the medium of painting:

As long as we only imagine a pair of shoes in general, or simply look at the empty, unused shoes as they merely stand there in the picture, we shall never discover what the equipmental being of the equipment in truth is. From Van Gogh’s painting we cannot even tell where these shoes stand. There is nothing surrounding this pair of peasant shoes in or to which they might belong—only an undefined space. There are not even clods of soil from the field or the field-path sticking to them, which would at least hint at their use. (159)

This process of hermeneutic as well as aesthetic depuration has been observed by sociologists like Erving Goffman as the fundamental urban desire for a clean manageability in daily life. He writes: “We tend to conceal from our audience all evidence of ‘dirty work,’ whether we do this work in private or allocate to a servant, to the impersonal market, to a legitimate specialist, or to an illegitimate one” (44). That clarification, with its distinction between figurative art and the human act of seeing and which we find so agreeable, remains evident in the most realistic of today’s games. In both cases it is inevitable as a material fact. Susan Stewart, in her wide-ranging cultural analysis On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, argues that atmospheric distortion and the artificial are often received pleasurably as enhancements, much as the moon’s rocky malformation translates across space into a flawless sphere: “Here again we see . . . that distance creates physical perfection and idealization. The fairies have the attraction of the animated doll, the cultural ideal unencumbered by the natural” (111–112). Videogames, which have no choice but to dilute the actual objects, psychology, and employments they draw upon, thus ingeniously trade on our generalized disgust for what is perceived to be visually or practically unnecessary as the excuse for limited representational and experiential capabilities. Much of the ire directed at gaming as mere escapism is flatly contradicted by big-budget endeavors to recreate the quotidian alongside epic realism and the fantastic in games like Red Dead Redemption and The Witcher. However grand the creative director’s ambitions might have been, translation of anything for the sake of a videogame inevitably leaves behind a tidy polygonal copy free of static.

A Quasi-Panoptical Universe

As laid out by the genre-defining Super Mario Bros. (Nintendo, 1985) on the Nintendo Entertainment System, videogames pare down ludic fulfillment to its barest semiotic necessities. Whether interactive, stationary, or decorative, the elements populating a Mario stage derive equally from natural formations and such visual-cultural receptacles as the question mark and blocks.¹³ Wolf explains that “another reason for making game elements representational are the default assumptions and diegetic structures that accompany them and make both the interface and gameplay more transparent and intuitive” (“Abstraction” 52). Game design can be understood to wed together the basest signifiers into robust anthropocentric objects so familiar they drop nearly beneath our apprehension, their substance forged in the very shape of players’ engagement (Harpold 91); for example, Magikoopas, basically turtles in a wizard’s robes, wield enchanted wands, or crystals fixed to the ends of gold cylinders If they’ve eschewed invisible forcefields, a level designer attempting to impede entrance into a functionally peripheral zone excluded from the story—what we might call “plot deserts”—will deposit a stationary obstacle like a boulder or rotted tree trunk. Meant only to steer the hero, these may be objects seen elsewhere and even of a height less than those granting the player passage. In this case, however, a binary switch has been flipped and the traveler’s movement is redirected. Where the player has greatest interactivity a landscape tends to be sensitive to the point of bursting, as with Super Mario’s dispersed acne of coin blocks. A crafted world is thoroughly ergonomic, anticipating the objective behind one’s every movement.

Charting a videogame’s landscape, such as the primordial, old-growth Colorado of Horizon: Zero Dawn (Guerrilla Games, 2017), we know its navigation is secretly efficient, that forests and elongate bluffs instantly vanish when players turn away from them. Strategic obfuscation gives equal advantage to a three-dimensional battleground as to the pages of an illuminated manuscript. Medieval scribes used gold leaf and colored solitaires as a kind of decorative opacity to brick up unintended vistas running off into the distance between the columns of a portico or through a sanctuary’s fenestella, which no one then understood how to depict accurately. About a millennium later, Iguana Entertainment, in search of a convenient way to hide South Park’s (1998) lackluster draw distance on the Nintendo 64, steeped the surrounding hills in impenetrable whiteness (fig. 2).

Fig. 2. Giotto di Bondone. St. Francis of Assisi Receiving the Stigmata. C. 1300, Upper Basilica of San Francesco d’Assisi.

South Park. Nintendo 64 version, Iguana Entertainment, 1998.

Another classic example of literally obscuring the Nintendo 64’s limited capacity for rendering distances are the misty junglescapes of Turok: Dinosaur Hunter (Nintendo, 1997), released the previous year. No doubt these studios grasped methodologically the illusioning of (virtual) space within a two-dimensional plane, how Masaccio went about it during the Italian quattrocento using taut string. The world was simply too much, thus one of the more practical reasons for the extremely tall horizon in Animal Crossing games has always been to show less.¹⁴

Isn’t this the excuse afforded medieval and post-pandemic videogames, like Assassin’s Creed Valhalla (Ubisoft, 2020) and the episodic Last of Us, where respectively the country’s population either has yet to explode in numbers or was decimated by a fungal pandemic?¹⁵ Otherwise, these environments would be awkwardly barren and at pains to account for the almost complete lack of on-screen bustle, a fact attributable to insufficiently powerful hardware that also accounts for visually uncluttered gameplay, zombie shoot-’em-ups notwithstanding. In the middle of San Andreas’s loud poverty is this energetic nucleus of a man, identifiable as the avatar as much for his geometric centrality as his physical isolation. Gaming’s current phenomenological dynamic realizes for the first time George Berkeley’s philosophy of subjective idealism, of which Bertrand Russell provides the following summary in his brilliantly diplomatic English:

To the objection that, in that case, a tree, for instance, would cease to exist if no one was looking at it, he replied that God always perceives everything; if there were no God, what we take to be material objects would have a jerky life, suddenly leaping into being when we look at them. (589)

From the essay in which Rem Koolhaas coins the term “junkspace” comes the description of the shopping mall as “a quasi-panoptical universe in which all contents rearrange themselves in split seconds around the dizzy eye of the beholder” (177). Impossibly, every shopper is catered to as though they were the center of everything. Our customer-obsessed age has been remaking itself for nearly two centuries in accordance with Emerson’s poetic declaration that mother nature orbits the human (40). But whether videogames, with their Ptolemaic focus on the player’s every move, are themselves an overwhelming influence on the market-driven gamification of life or corollary to it is an ongoing debate.

Postscript

Although independent titles continue to crop up on the Steam platform like mushrooms, for now it appears we’re stuck with the model of rereleasing content already vetted by a first wave of buyers, including high-caliber reboots like the Spyro (Toys for Bob, 2018) and Crash Bandicoot (Vicarious Visions, 2017) trilogies. Nostalgia sells, yet opting for vintage color palettes and banking on technologically outmoded forms of gameplay denotes an intellectual milestone for the medium, self-imposing austerity in a time of scientific plenty, the very feat of counterbalancing responsible for Van Gogh’s stylistic pivot between his early period (e.g., the chromatically muted Potato Eaters) and his tragic fourteen months in Arles.¹⁶ The shift is a typical one, in which an art form’s smarter practitioners eventually see the necessity of billeting philosophy, of undermining the old question of beauty’s use.

When Slavoj Žižek tells the director’s camera that “maybe the first thing to do is accept the waste, to accept that there are things out there that serve nothing. To break out of this eternal cycle of functioning” (Fiennes, 01:00:37–01:00:52), he echoes the hackneyed motto of Oscar Wilde by way of Walter Pater, in whose opinion the finest art is solely out for itself. The introspective think tank that is modern art has a great deal to teach game designers about aging gracefully, or turning the medium’s prodigious gifts toward that final frontier of artistic maturity. Rational tenderness and a brainier kind of gameplay than the industry’s supply chain has furnished thus far are needed to check raw, unfettered competence. Recall the twice-a-decade console wars flexing technical specifications like they’re biceps. Just as corporate television blunts our understanding of what should be considered avant-garde today, a larger, though not necessarily insidious, greenhouse effect may be driving videogames toward info saturation, reformulating gameplay in awfully familiar bottles. As Fisher writes, “at a certain point—a point that is usually only discernible retrospectively—cultures shunt off into the sidings, cease to renew themselves, ossify into Trad. They don’t die, they become undead, surviving on old energy, kept moving, like Baudrillard’s deceased cyclist, only by the weight of inertia” (356). With data-transfer rates guaranteed to outpace loading times, the osmotic videogame stage, once hermetically sealed off, is bounding headlong into total contiguity.¹⁷ Entertainment heat is accumulating inside our products per se, for fewer and fewer see any point in concluding. Even when the inner fruit is disposed of, we’re increasingly keeping the husks.¹⁸

Matthew Collings observes about Ghanaian refuse artist El Anatsui that “wealth’s mystique is removed . . . but we’re still getting the pleasure” (00:13:14–00:13:21). Amassed in the thousands, this sculptor’s ore is the flicked-away crowns of top-shelf liquor and champagnes; these bottle caps occupy a muddled zone as luxurious trash. Irish poet Derek Mahon writes in “A Garage in Co. Cork” to this effect:

The intact antiquities of the recent past,
Dropped from the retail catalogues, return
To the materials that gave rise to them
And shine with a late sacramental gleam. (151)

Most compelling about El Anatsui’s work is his investiture of detritus with a contemplative second, almost evangelical valuation, insofar as these stitched tapestries radiate precisely that metaphysical surplus responsible for the “aura” of expensive liqueurs. Caps detach at a loss of carbonation and commercial virginity. Empties gather like a kettle of gasping fish, while the bottles’ most extraneous element, their labels, become zombified as fine-art objects: born privileged, lowered to landfill caste, then posthumously revived for judgment at a higher level. In short, this is Michael Thompson’s “rubbish theory,” which describes how frangible matter passes through a state of decrepitude in order to achieve the nirvana of durability (4), the irony being that with the apotheosis of a thing it generally quits decaying altogether. For the cynical, this amounts to nothing more than collecting and reorienting the discarded so that it might be upcycled to artistic bliss. In a blatant alchemical reversal of the hierarchy, a tapestry of garbage woven with copper thread goes on to be highly sought after and destined to last in a climate-controlled vault. One might even say it achieves a more trash-like character—uselessness in extreme proportion to endurance, at the pinnacle of which sits plastic—than the junk relegated to bins.

The ugly first-world convenience of junkspace would seem to place it opposite Schmalzer’s jank, born of consumer frustration.¹⁹ Or there is now a certain bipolarity to industrialized culture, depending on ableness as much as disposable income and which, inundated with capital and vast electronic capability, may choose between further bombardment of our senses and meaningful engagement. If the videogame business is fast approaching a computational tipping point, the need of previous generations to constantly discard artifactual trash—not to mention trim environmental fat down to the camera’s (mercifully limited) field of view²⁰—shall in hindsight take the shape of a cleared technological hurdle. It is the question of whether the dungeon’s goblins are kept in sight together or brought out singly for destruction.

Erick Verran is an independent scholar and poet whose literary criticism and articles have appeared or are forthcoming in Virginia Woolf Miscellany, Contemporary Aesthetics, Georgia Review, and Journal of Sound and Music in Games. Obiter Dicta, a collection of short essays, was published by Punctum Books in 2021. His poetry last appeared in the Massachusetts Review. He lives in New York.

Notes

1. Rainforest Scully-Blaker helpfully identifies “two sets of rules that a player encounters in a game – implicit rules and explicit rules. Implicit rules are those which exist by virtue of Huizinga’s Magic Circle, by virtue of an assumption that the virtual world of a game is whole. Explicit rules are those which actually govern the game.”

2. “This game mechanic,” Hansen tells us, “allows for players—such as the author—to visit a wide variety of towns beyond their local limitations or their immediate friend group. A limitation of using the Dream Suite however comes with its design—since it is framed as a dream, and the player is not allowed to return with any items, they cannot enter shops. It proved to be a useful tool in analyzing random towns without intruding upon the privacy of players” (27).

3. I adapt these terms from Heidegger’s “ready-to-hand” (zuhanden) and “present-at-hand” (vorhanden).

4. That sort of fun chaos, available to players who use Minecraft in the alternative “creative mode” and which strips away the survival aspect, is central to videogames as divergent as Half-Life 2 (Valve, 2014) and the Super Smash Bros. franchise. Thanks to a revolutionary physics engine, Half-Life 2’s corroded barrels, toilets, and other debris clang about realistically with the gracelessness appropriate to the unimportant, as do the ragdoll bodies of enemies, their looseness of limb informing the player that an enemy Combine unit is deceased. In Super Smash Bros. a litter of rained-down items is quickly picked up and thrown without much regard for unique properties; one just hopes the baseball bat or turnip makes contact. Although Half-Life 2 is a first-person shooter and Super Smash Bros. a multiplayer king-of-the-hill brawler, both make trashy gameplay the backbone of players’ experience. Moreover, the simultaneity of all that on-screen stuff can incur a loss of framerate, negatively impacting the very gameplay the developers sought to provide.

5. One of many non-player characters referred to in World of Warcraft as a “trash mob” because it is easily defeated and featured monotonously in starting-zone quests.

6. See Dynasty Warriors, the hack-and-slash series of videogames set in feudal Japan, wherein the player cuts their way through an impressively dense mass of adversaries. In this case the heads-up display keeps a running tally while the latest corpse on the ground dematerializes.

7. Correspondingly, with the 2019 remake of Link’s Awakening for the Switch, Nintendo chose to blend the original’s screen-by-screen progression into one seamless overworld, a change that is also reflected in the now gridless in-game map.

8. Still, there’s the steady accumulation of useless loot over the course of a dungeon run; for instance, the procedural realms of Diablo and Torchlight (one of its lookalike descendants) end with unloading everything onto a vendor back at camp, from superfluous equipment valued at a few silver pieces to common drops good for a handful of copper. By contrast, in a first-person shooter like Bioshock one is eventually forced to scroll through uselessly many unlocked guns and abilities in a way that feels materially gratuitous.

9. As Gaston Bachelard comments, “Indeed, the nest we pluck from the hedge like a dead flower, is nothing but a ‘thing.’ I have the right to take it in my hands and pull it apart” (94). Thus, what of Captain Olimar’s multicolored army of Pikmin fetching the disjecta membra of his ship or Katamari Damacy (Namco, 2004), which stars a little prince directing a magically adhesive sphere with the goal of snowballing together everything in sight, from skyscrapers and bulbous trees to tape dispensers and people (all of which, incidentally, are roughly the same size)? Is its opposite Donut County (Ben Esposito, 2018), in which a growing player-controlled hole swallows up trucks, picnic tables, and farmers’ barns?

10. As for artifacts, their beforelives might include looking at the embedded models of items with asset-rendering software or even junk code, but not the affixed candelabra and beer kegs in a tavern. A door that ignored one’s repeated clicking or a glitched weapon that could not be picked up, for instance, would be problematic. This ludic artifact should neither be able to execute its function (unless it lacked one entirely due to a coding hiccup) nor to disappear. Only in the sense of bifurcating potential states is a glitch trash-like; adjacently speaking, these rogue things fall squarely between trash and decoration for their abortive irrepressibility and spectral nullity, respectively.

11. Note that, at least in regard to the original arcade format, Frogger’s color-coded mosaic extends neither behind nor ahead of Konami’s amphibious hero but beneath and above, while the connotation is exactly the opposite. In subsequent versions of the game, this semiotic mismatch is corrected with the introduction of the z-axis.

12. Untitled Goose Game (House House, 2019) comes to mind, especially the viral chore that has players endeavoring to furtively carry off every item to the goose’s den. See Ian Bogost.

13. While the point of Cory Arcangel’s hacked-cartridge-cum-artwork Super Mario Clouds (2002)—in which everything has been erased except Shigefumi Hino’s famous scrolling clouds—lies in drawing an interpretive circle around the decorative, I’m inclined to say that this “defacilitation” elevates it to something like trash status for the first time. Arguably this is videogaming’s Duchamp moment, the inoffensively familiar placed on an aesthetic pedestal.

14. In their article “Explaining the Horizon (and Planet) of Animal Crossing New Horizons,” Ashley Villar and Alex McCarthy describe that adorable home world as a “cylinder-planet” with an estimated radius of just 36.6 feet.

15. Wolf provides us with the equivalent rationale for found objects in such games when he points out that “the ruined state of a place justifies why relatively few things are usable or worth adding to a player’s inventory; the few good items are hidden amongst piles of junk and wreckage, making the things you can find and use seem even more valuable by contrast” (“Experience” 226).

16. On the point of gameplay and technological capability, for instance, Baba Is You (the puzzle game that won accolades in 2019) weighs in at two-hundred megabytes, about one per level.

17. I elaborate on this question of contiguity and the obsolescence of loading screens in my book, Obiter Dicta:

Invariably with today’s open-world games, a technical sleight front-loads the player’s journey into found lands, it being desirable to render a landscape gradually, in tandem with its approach. Or one recalls the sporadic buffering that plagued software of the aughts and the recurrence of brief elevator rides, a divertissement for when the console is loading the subsequent area as well as an attempt by developers to analogize what is a necessary hardware operation into the gameplay. Conveying that a three-dimensional environment is actually undivided, persistent across space and time, therefore entails staggering the revelation of that environment. (100)

18. Three-dimensional videogame artifacts are of course utterly hollow, even when it comes to the polygonal “membrane.”

19. Often that frustration—“the disconnect between expectations and actuality” in Schmalzer’s usage, or for Vella the unbridgeable gap “between [the player’s] experience of the game, her understanding of the game as system, and her awareness of an underlying implied game object”—is actually what’s desired by players (Juul, 2013).

20. Known as frustum culling and occlusion culling (Hurley).

Works Cited

• Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Translated by Maria Jolas, Beacon Press, 1994.
• Bailey, Andrew Remington. “The Museum and the Killing Jar: How Animal Crossing’s Insects Reveal Videogames’ Object Afterlife.” Loading, vol. 13, no. 22, 2020, pp. 7–22.
• Bailey, Wm. Ruffin. “Hacks, Mods, Easter Eggs, and Fossils: Intentionality and Digitalism in the Video Game.” Playing the Past: History and Nostalgia in Video Games, edited by Zach Whalen and Laurie N. Taylor, Vanderbilt UP, 2008, pp. 69–90.
• Bogost, Ian. “Video Games Are Better Without Gameplay.” The Atlantic, 22 Oct. 2019. Accessed 15 Jul. 2022.
• Collings, Matthew. The Rules of Abstraction, BBC Four, 8 Sept. 2014.
• Davis, Colin. “Hauntology, Spectres and Phantoms.” French Studies, vol. 59, no. 3, 2005, pp. 373–379. Oxford Academic.
• Di Bondone, Giotto. St. Francis of Assisi Receiving the Stigmata. C. 1300, Upper Basilica of San Francesco d’Assisi, Assisi, Italy. Web Gallery of Art, https://www.wga.hu/art/g/giotto/assisi/upper/legend/franc19.jpg. Accessed 5 May 2022.
• The Elder Scrolls Online. Windows PC version, ZeniMax Online Studios, 2014. Prima Games, https://s3.amazonaws.com/primagames-prod-assets/_resized/images/news/ESO_big2_1.jpg_1200x500_.jpg. Accessed 5 May 2022.
• Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Nature.” The Annotated Emerson, edited by David Mikics, Harvard UP, 2012, pp. 27–71.
• Fiennes, Sophie, director. The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology. Zeitgeist Films, 2012.
• Fisher, Mark. “Is Pop Undead?” K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher, edited by Darren Ambrose, Repeater Books, 2018.
• Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Anchor Books, 1959.
• Hansen, Jared. “An Abundance of Fruit Trees: A Garbology of the Artifacts in Animal Crossing: New Leaf.” Loading, vol. 13, no. 22, 2020, pp. 23–38.
• Harpold, Terry. “Screw the Grue: Mediality, Metalepsis, Recapture.” Playing the Past: History and Nostalgia in Video Games, edited by Zach Whalen and Laurie N. Taylor, Vanderbilt UP, pp. 91–108.
• Heaven, Douglas. “What Digital Trash Dumped in Games Tells Us About the Players.” New Scientist, 18 Nov. 2015, https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn28505-what-digital-trash-dumped-in-games-tells-us-about-the-players/.
• Heidegger, Martin. “The Origin of the Work of Art.” Basic Writings, edited by David Farrell Krell, HarperCollins, 2008, pp. 139–212.
• Hurley, Leon. “The Secret Technical Tricks Going on behind Your Favourite Games.” GamesRadar+, 18 May 2017, https://www.gamesradar.com/the-secret-technical-tricks-going-on-behind-your-favourite-games/.
• Juul, Jesper. The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games. MIT Press, 2013.
• Koolhaas, Rem. “Junkspace.” October, vol. 100, spring 2002, pp. 175–190.
• Logan, William. “The Village of Louise Glück.” Guilty Knowledge, Guilty Pleasure: The Dirty Art of Poetry, Columbia UP, 2014, pp. 203–207.
• Mahon, Derek. “A Garage in Co. Cork.” Selected Poems. Penguin Books, 1993.
• Ninja Gaiden. Nintendo Entertainment System version, Tecmo, 1988. Retro Gamer, https://www.retrogamer.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/ninjagaiden.png. Accessed 5 May 2022.
• Reinhard, Andrew. Archaeogaming: An Introduction to Archaeology in and of Video Games. Berghahn Books, 2018.
• Russell, Bertrand. A History of Western Philosophy. Routledge Classics, 2004.
• Schmalzer, M. D. “Janky Controls and Embodied Play: Disrupting the Cybernetic Gameplay Circuit.” Game Studies, vol. 20, no. 3, Sept. 2020.
• Scully-Blaker, Rainforest. “A Practiced Practice: Speedrunning through Space with de Certeau and Virilio.” Game Studies, vol. 14, no. 1, Aug. 2014, http://gamestudies.org.ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/1401/articles/scullyblaker.
• South Park. Nintendo 64 version, Iguana Entertainment, 1998. Retro Achievements, https://retroachievements.org/Images/011928.png. Accessed 5 May 2022.
• Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Duke UP, 1993.
• Thompson, Michael. Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value. Pluto Press, 2017.
• Vella, Daniel. “No Mastery Without Mystery: Dark Souls and the Ludic Sublime.” Game Studies, vol. 15, no. 1, July 2015.
• Verran, Erick. Obiter Dicta. Punctum Books, 2021.
• Villar, Ashley, and Alex McCarthy. “Explaining the Horizon (and Planet) of Animal Crossing New Horizons.” Medium, 10 May 2020, https://medium.com/@astrovav/explaining-the-horizon-and-planet-of-animal-crossing-new-horizons-d3762f2b341f.
• Wolf, Mark J. P. “Abstraction in the Video Game.” The Video Game Theory Reader, edited by Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard Perron, Routledge, 2003, pp. 47–65.
• ———. “The Experience and Exploration of Worlds in Single-Player Video Games.” Images, vol. 29, no. 38, 2021, pp. 223–30, https://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/i/article/download/29907/26476. PDF Download.