The Pinocchio Theory – Page 7 – "If you fake the funk, your nose will grow."

On Lisa Adkins, The Time of Money

Lisa Adkins’ new book, The Time of Money, is brilliant and, I think, extremely important. But I also find it quite perplexing in terms of its overall stance and motivation.

The basic argument of the book is that speculative financial operations are central to social life and experience today. Capitalism has moved from an extractive regime (generating surplus from exploiting labor) to a speculative regime (generating surplus from speculative financial transactions). In this way, finance is in no sense superstructural or extrinsic to the “real economy”; rather, it directly and entirely makes over the entire realm of the social. And in particular, financial speculation makes over our concept and experience of time. Under industrial capitalism, we experience time as a uniform and extrinsic measure: labor power is a commodity measured in units of time, and commodities in general are subject to universal equivalence through the socially necessary time of their production. But we are now, instead, subject to speculative time:

Time is not a thing that simply passes or that contains and orders events, nor is it something that moves in one direction or another, proceeding, for example, chronologically, progressively, or sequentially, with the past standing behind the present and the future unfolding from the now. Speculative time is a time in which pasts, presents, and futures stand not in a predetermined or pre-set relation to each other but are in a continuous state of movement, transformation, and unfolding. It is this form of time that belongs to the time of securitized debt. Thus, in the time of securitized debt, futures may remediate not only the present but also the past; the present and its relation to the past and the future may be reset in one action (via, e.g., index rolling); pasts and presents can be forwarded and futures and presents backwarded. It is, moreover, along the flows of these nonchronological pasts, presents, and futures, including their reordering and resetting and even their suspension, that channels for profit are yielded. In short, in the time of securitized debt, the time of profit lies in the nonchronological and indeterminate movements of speculative time.

This new sort of time is not only the time of derivatives and other arcane financial instruments; for it completely penetrates and transforms everyday experience as well. Individuals and households are now subjected to speculative time. It is no longer the case that wages compensate labor, and provide the basis for social reproduction (the old, Keyensian-Fordist model, under which the man’s labor provided for the commodity needs of the household, like food and shelter, while women worked inside the home in uncompensated domestic labor). Instead, wages are no longer sufficient to meet household needs, even if women as well as men enter full time into the workforce. Similarly, so-called “welfare reform” means that the state no longer provides necessities for the unemployed, but instead forces even people without jobs to engage in incessant, uncompensated labor.

For both the employed and the unemployed, and for both men and women, wages today do not provide enough to get by (enough for social reproduction), as they used to do in the Fordist era; instead, we are all required to use our wages for speculative investment, by accumulating debt as well as by enlisting what money we supposedly have in speculative schemes from which banks, realtors, etc. can draw more and more surplus. We are now continually indebted for life; financial institutions lend us more than we will ever be able to pay back, because they make their money not so much on the ultimate repayment of their loans as on the packaging and sale of these obligations in the form of derivatives, credit default swaps, etc. etc. I will never get my Visa debt, or my mortgage, down to zero; for one thing, I do not earn enough to pay down these debts in my lifetime, and for another thing, I am continually offered the prospect of rolling over and renegotiating these debts, which serves to perpetuate them ad infinitum. None of the financial institutions to which I owe these debts is interested in my paying them off and becoming debt-free; they would rather that I continue to pay them off without ever fulfilling my “obligation.” They make more money by buying and selling such accumulated debts, and their associated income streams of continual payments, than they ever would by getting me to pay back the principal.

In this way, the everyday experience of individuals and households, and the everyday money we use to buy basic goods and services, are entirely subsumed by, and subjected to, the speculative time of finance. This means that in the current regime of debt time is not emptied out, or deprived of a future, in the way that Lazzarato and other critics have claimed; rather, our experience of temporality is more intense and convoluted than ever before. We are compelled to live according to the speculative time of finance; we cannot simply remember the past and anticipate or project into the future, but must micro-organize every aspect of our lives, and of our temporal experience, in accordance with the never-completed and continually-reshaped necessities of debt servicing:

Such [repayment] schedules—operating for the waged, the employed, the unwaged, the jobless, the underemployed, and the unemployed—have not only rewritten the relationship between household and personal debt and income but tie populations across whole lifetimes to the movements of speculative time, a time in which the relationships between the past, present, and future are not fixed but open to constant adjustment. Contemporary debt, then, does not destroy time by tying populations to futures that can never be their own but opens out a universe in which they are tied to the indeterminate movements of speculative time. This is a time through and in which the productivity of populations is maximized via the flows and movements of money.

I find Adkins’ account compelling. She makes a powerful argument for the claim that speculative finance entirely and massively “rewrites the social.” This is clearly in tension with Marxist claims that are based in the primacy of roduction, and that understand financial instruments as “ficticious capital.” But in a broader sense, I find Adkins’ account still congruent with the larger Marxist understanding that social processes are based, “in the last instance,” upon the extraction and expropriation of a surplus generated in the course of human life activity (or what Marx called “species being” in his early writings, and specified in terms of productive activity in his later writings). I think that the expropriation and accumulation of a surplus is the most crucial point – which is why, for instance, I have never been troubled, as many orthodox Marxists have been, with something like Sraffa’s understanding of surplus extraction and accumulation. It is the extraction (or theft from the public) of the surplus that is crucial, whether this is understood in terms of labor commodified as labor power (Marx), of physical production (Sraffa), or of financial speculation (in Adkins’ model). And in the contrary case, it is this failure to recognize the expropriation of a surplus, in any of these modes, that characterizes bourgeois economics. [Right-wing populism sometimes denounces “parasites,” who can be bankers (presumptively Jewish), as well as welfare recipients (presumptively Black) and violent criminals (presumtively Latino), but it never offers a social and systematic account of surplus expropriation].

So from this point of view, I see Adkins’ understanding as a useful one, and indeed as a way of showing that financial activities are fully material processes, as against “the ongoing identification of money and finance as immaterial or superstructural phenomena,” as other Left theorists, such as Mauricio Lazzarato, have tended to claim:

contra Lazzarato, the emergence of such everyday forms of money as a nonrepresentational surface that must be put in motion and practices that ensure that the productive capacities of populations are maximized toward such speculative activities is neither immaterial nor does it operate outside of the coordinates of the social world.

I think Adkins is right that financial speculation is a fully material process, not a parasitic superstructure to the economy. Just as I find Sraffa as a useful supplement to Marx with his emphasis on physical production, I see Adkins as useful for her emphasis on speculative movement. This is despite the fact that, just as my worry with Sraffa is that his theory seems to offer no place for contemporary finance (circulation as itself a productive activity), so my symmetrically opposite worry with Adkins is that, even if we accept her contention about the centrality of financial speculation, she seems to write as if physical production didn’t exist at all any longer. When wages no longer allow for social reproduction of the individual or household, condemning people therefore to enter into endless speculative spirals of debt, isn’t this because people still need to obtain physical stuff in order to survive, or in order to maintain what Marx saw as the socially-defined level of subsistence (which is not the same as minimal physical subsistence, since it also includes, in the US for instance, such things as mobile phones)?

This limitation of Adkins’ theory is not in itself fatal — I accept that what she is writing about is indeed crucial, even if it is not total — but it leads me to the perplexity I mentioned at the start. Adkins’ tone is polemical, even vitriolically so, when she denounces other accounts of neoliberal economy and of financial speculation. She continually attacks “normative assumptions” such as the way that “the expansion of finance has been taken to be destructive of the future, to interfere with the proper flow of time, and to threaten to return us to previous, unenlightened eras.” While I understand Adkins’ desire to get away from “normative” ideas about temporality, I don’t see why she needs to make so extreme an opposition. I don’t think want to try to subsume these opposed images of time in some sort of Hegelian sublation, but I also don’t think they exclude one another as absolutely as Adkins says (I prefer to see it in terms of a Kantian antinomy, in which the opposed terms are mutually implicated, in a way that refuses any possibility of Hegelian sublation). She is quite positive in denouncing these other visions of futurity, but frustratingly vague in explaining the contrasting details of the speculative time of finance. Sometimes Adkins refers to the schedules of speculative time as “calendrics”; this puts me in mind of Yoon Ha Lee’s Machineries of Empire space opera trilogy, in which calendrics are the basic tools of imperial domination. As is so often the case with science fiction, Lee’s trilogy is much more detailed in its consideration of oppressive calendrics and how they might operate, than Adkins’ sociological text dares to be.

Adkins shows how time is produced in the current neoliberal regime of financial speculation, so that we are bound to a very powerful, if indeterminate and continually shifting and changing, sort of futurity. This is entirely in line with Foucault’s (and Deleuze and Guattari’s) idea that power is generative rather than repressive. But such an ordering — an enslavement, really, to contingency, possibility, and irreducible risk — is not really opposed to the idea of capitalist realism (Mark Fisher), according to which we cannot imagine a future that is in rupture from the ongoing neoliberal present. Rather, the two are conjoined. In what Deleuze calls the society of control (rightly cited by Adkins), we are continually indebted (rather than serially imprisoned in a series of institutions as was the case in the disciplinary society), but this perpetual indebtedness, while it binds us to a very particular set of obligations that entirely determine our future, can also be said to be denying us any difference in the future. We cannot imagine anything different from financial capitalism, because we cannot imagine anything different than a regime of continually metamorphosing futures which, for all their uncertainty, generate a surplus that financial institutions expropriate from us, while leaving us exposed to risks for which there is no social remedy (since the structures of the welfare state have been systematicaly dismantled). Our binding to complex nonlinear regimes of futurity is precisely what makes other senses of futurity impossible.

My puzzlement grows even further when I reflect how Adkins suggests that the speculative time of finance is closely akin to the speculative accounts of time that we find in contemporary feminist and new materialist philosophy (she specifically mentions Karen Barad, Elizabeth Grosz, and Iris van der Tuin, among others). But though she mentions this, she doesn’t follow up on the observation. The speculative temporalities advanced by these thinkers are intended to offer us liberatory alternatives to the oppressions of normative, linear clock time. Should we think instead that they are just accurate descriptions of our current mode of oppression? I have sometimes made this move with regard to Deleuze and Guattari; for instance, I have suggested that their notions of the rhizomatic, of smooth space, of micropolitics, etc., are not forms of liberation, but precisely the tools that allow us to apprehend how neoliberal power and exploitation operate. Nothing is more rhizomatic than contemporary finance capital, and nothing is more exploitative. Should we say the same for feminist and new materialist temporal speculation? Is there any alternative temporality at all, if it turns out that these supposedly liberatory accounts are really just mechanisms of finance capital? That is what Adkins implies. But she never quite comes out and says this. And of course, convinced as I am by her arguments, I nonetheless do not want to accept this grim conclusion. And we should also consider — although Adkins does not — the alternative, speculative temporalities proposed by Afrofuturists from Sun Ra to Rasheedah Philips, which refer both to the past and the future, against an oppressive present and against enslavement to linearity. Are these too merely expressions of the logic of financial speculation? Can speculative fiction be disentangled from speculative finance? This is the biggest question that Adkins leaves me with, and to which she does not offer any sort of answer.

Sweet Dreams by Tricia Sullivan

I loved SWEET DREAMS, Tricia Sullivan’s most recent science fiction novel, published last year. I am not sure I can give as good an account of it as I would like – there is a lot of stuff there to disentangle. The story is about a dreamhacker – Charlie, the protagonist/narrator, has the ability to enter other peoples’ dreams, and alter what happens in them. She tries to make a living at this, but finds herself caught up in dangers and apparent conspiracies that challenge her abilities. It’s really a speculative novel about the coming collision between computer networks and neurobiology. What happens when the Internet enters intimately into our brains, and it becomes possible to hack our minds/thoughts/neural architecture directly? The novel explores the possibilities, which are both dystopian/scary and also possibly hopeful. The narrator gains her dreamhacking powers as the result of a medical trial gone wrong – she is a lucid dreamer who is now able to lucidly enter the dreams of other people as well. But the experiment also leaves her with narcolepsy (the propensity to fall asleep without wanting to, especially at inopportune moments.

The book is both a gripping thriller and a deeply intriguing and thoughtful speculative fiction. The protagonist/narrator is endearing, in the way that she is absolutely out of her depth and making costly errors all the time and letting herself be manipulated by others and suffering from extreme self-doubt; yet at the same time she is empathetic to others, and she has a strong will not just to survive, but to set things right. The novel deconstructs the kickass-heroine trope while at the same time rejecting the misogyny which so often holds women who are the slightest bit femme in contempt. I strongly identified with her, across gender, because she is a new sort of hero/heroine figure for people who feel socially awkward and confused and unfulfilled, etc., and who have to deal with a world that utterly exceeds their ability to comprehend and control it, and who manage to pull through nonetheless (and even perhaps to triumph). The fact is, the world really is that complicated and unfair (rigged to favor the rich) and beyond grasping (cf Jameson on how the complexity of globalized late capitalism exceeds our powers of representation). And this is in fact everybody’s position today — with the possible exception of a small number of overly entitled pricks with a lot of money/power (several of whom Charlie has the misfortune to meet in the course of the novel).

Speculatively, the book is so rich that I haven’t really been able to process it yet. There are questions about how recent neurobiological discoveries, together with the ways that the network is reaching ever more powerfully into our minds and subjectivites, change many of our commonsense assumptions of how the world works, of what it means to be a self, of private vs public experience, and so on. The novel has a traditional setup where the heroine is on the track of a hidden but very powerful antagonist; but the antagonist turns out to involve more twisted and complicated processes than can be encompassed by a traditional villain in a thriller. The book makes for an exciting narrative, but at the same time it twists the very structure of narrative into a new form, because these new discoveries and technologies are changing what it means to be a subject or an agent, what it means to act, how our buried unconscious (not-quite) selves are related to our overt selves, and so on.

The only other book I can think to compare it to is Nick Harkaway’s GNOMON, which has more dazzling literary pyrotechnics, but whose treatment of a similar set of issues in our digital near-future is not quite as profound as Sullivan’s.

(Note: the book is only in print in the UK, not in the US. You can buy a UK hardcopy via Amazon, Book Depository, and other retailers. The lack of US publication means that I was not permitted to buy the Kindle version, which is UK-only).

Footnote on Dawkins

An outtake from a work in progress:

DNA-centrism, as formulated in Crick’s “central dogma of molecular biology,” may well be mechanistic and reductive in theory; but in practice it turns into something else. According to Jessica Riskin’s revisionist account of the idea of mechanism in biological thought, the real issue dividing biologists has never been one of mechanism versus vitalism; the struggle has always been between two different accounts of mechanism, each of which is shadowed by its own sort of vitalism. One account sees mechanism as entirely passive and reactive, because its animating force comes from the outside (the human craftsman who makes a clock, or God as the originator of the clockwork of life). The other account sees the mechanisms of life as themselves intrinsically endowed with “various forms of agency: living forces, sensitive capacities, vital fluids, and self-organizing tendencies,” all or any of which “originate within the natural form in question” (The Restless Clock). The first account sees matter as intrinsically lifeless, and entirely passive and reactive, but at the price of positing a external, transcendent principle of order, as in the eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century “argument from design.” The second account embraces immanence; matter itself is already at least potentially agential or vital. Today, however, biologists find themselves in the paradoxical position of endorsing the first alternative while also seeking to deny any sort of transcenence. As Riskin puts it, contemporary biologists generally agree that

naturalism precludes treating agency as an elemental feature of the natural world, or indeed as anything beyond an irresistibly compelling appearance. To violate this ban has seemed tantamount to lapsing right out of scientific explanation into a religious or mystical one. Yet we have seen this core principle of modern science—banning agency from natural processes—emerge historically from a tradition that denied agency to nature in order to ascribe it instead to a designer God. (The Restless Clock)

This paradox is evident, for instance, in the writings of Richard Dawkins, probably the best-known biological theorist working today. Dawkins convincingly argues that no driving force of life is necessary, because natural selection is only a “blind watchmaker,” making the clockwork mechanisms of life without intending to (The Blind Watchmaker). and animal bodies are little more than “survival machines — robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes” (The Selfish Gene). Dawkins’ lurid metaphor is often taken as the ne plus ultra of scientistic reductionism; but it has always struck me as having more in common with the novels of William S. Burroughs and the early films of David Cronenberg than with any sort of scientific naturalism. That is to say, Dawkins’s vision, even against his own intentions, is unavoidably a sort of vitalism — albeit one centered on viral contagions and zombie reanimations, rather than on the supposed generosity of some superabundant life force.

Madeline’s Madeline (Josephine Decker)

MADELINE’S MADELINE is amazing, disturbing, and ultimately both exhilarating and devastating. It is Josephine Decker’s greatest film to date. The film is so experimental/abstract, yet at the same time so visceral/intense, that I don’t really know how to talk about it. I am trying to give my impressions, but everything I say may well be entirely misguided and beside the point.

Decker invents (especially here, though it was already present in her previous films) an entirely new formal language, to express an entirely new sort of subjectivity, here embodied in her teenaged protagonist Madeline (the utterly brilliant an remarkable Helena Howard). Shallow focus, often fuzzy, roving camera, strange angles, strange edits, soundtrack interpolations (including both heavy breathing sounds and the amazing music of Caroline Shaw) – even to the extent that I can describe them, I cannot explain how they add up to something both entirely fresh and greater than the sum of its parts.

The movie is about acting (including its own) and the mystique of improv theater (something I am not very enamoured of in other contexts, or perhaps due to my own ignorance; but it is overwhelming here). At their highest point, intense inner feeling and its completely fictive simulation become indistinguishable, and that is what happens here in the course of a teenage girl’s relation with her two mother figures (one the biological and legal mother, played surprisingly against type by the great Miranda July, the other the mother substitute that the head of the improv troupe becomes, played by Molly Parker).

The film recounts incidents, rather than anything that is shaped like a conventional narrative, but it builds to a completely logical and shattering climax – which then in turn transmutes into something vivid and powerful but also dreamlike and almost ungraspable (theater returning to its roots in Dionysian ritual? I am grasping at straws here).

One could say that MADELINE’S MADELINE is deconstructing oppositions between real life and theater, or between authenticity and performance, or whatever – or even between human and animal, since the film features repeating exercises in which the actors try to channel animals, especially cats – there are pig masks as well, not to mention may closeups of actual cats – and in fact the film begins with a warning, delivered to us in extreme closeup, about the nuances of identification and possession (it is only a metaphor, you are not really the cat, you are IN the cat) –
I could say all that, and it would be sort of true, but it is totally inadequate as a description of the movie, because MADELINE’S MADELINE is not just a deconstruction of identities and oppositions, but a positive expression of some new sort of identity (which is female, and biracial, and other things, but isn’t ONLY all that) that we don’t have words for yet. Which is why I will not be able to shake the memory of this film (and will have to watch it again, a number of times) (all this I felt more obscurely already in the case of BUTTER ON THE LATCH, but here it is magnitudes more powerful and more perplexing).

(originally posted on Facebook, but I think it is important enough to also post here)

Monster Portraits (Del Samatar and Sofia Samatar)

Sofia Samatar is one of the most interesting of the new(er) generation of writers of speculative fiction. Her two novels, A STRANGER IN OLONDRIA and THE WINGED HISTORIES, radically rework the conventions of heroic fantasy, both in terms of race/ethnicity and gender, and in terms of narrative conventions and questions about literariness and about the writing of history and of ethnography, not to mention questions of written vs oral more generally. Her short story collection TENDER contains stories straddling the divisions between science fiction, fantasy, and other genres; my favorite of these stories, “How to Get Back to the Forest” — also available for free download here — both moves me and freaks me out every time I (re)read it.

Sofia Samatar’s new book, MONSTER PORTRAITS is a collaboration with her brother Del Samatar. It’s a book of short sections: each section is a short description of a monster, or an even briefer series of mediations on what it means to search for monsters; Sofia Samatar’s text is accompanied by gorgeous (& sometimes gruesome) black-and-white illustrations by Del Samatar. The overall effect is quite poetic. The short sections are mostly fragmentary or nonlinear, combining weird descriptions (weird in the sense of “weird fiction”) with (real or made-up?) autobiographical reminiscences, and citations from a large number of earlier texts (these latter are listed at the end of the book; they range from a Victorian translation of the Odyssey to Frankenstein to Amiria Baraka and Aime Cesaire to Helene Cixous and Roland Barthes).

The result of all this is a text that is kaleidoscopic or dreamlike. It roams in many directions, without ever choosing just one. MONSTER PORTRAITS is a meditation on the varying senses of monsters and of monstrosity. Monsters can be scary, but also misunderstood. “Creating monsters is an act of faith.” Anything that deviates from socially-imposed norms (anything, for instance, that isn’t white cismale heterosexual etc) is a monster; and to identify with monsters is to “identify” with that which escapes or refuses traditional, socially-sanctioned forms of identification. But the endeavor to impose norms, to make everyone and everything alike, to stigmatize anyone who in any way is different, is also essentially monstrous. “The monster evokes, in equal measure, both compassion and its opposite.”

The book moves delicately between these different meanings (or efforts to escape from meaning). Insofar as it is arranged like a catalog — each chapter describes a particular monster, both in prose and in the illustrations that are listed by number — Figure 1, Figure 2, etc. — MONSTER PORTRAITS is reminiscent of Borges’s famous “Chinese encyclopedia”, divided as it is into multiple, incompatible classifications.

This incompatibility is itself the real subject of MONSTER PORTRAITS. At one point in the text, Samatar warns us that: “In the realm of language, the opposite of a monster is a catalogue.” The book takes the form of a catalogue that it is impossible to catalogue. Overall, I find this book pleasurably and frustratingly enigmatic: it teases me with the prospect of an overall comprehension that it continually and finally denies me. In reading it, I find myself passing through thickets of beautiful but unsummarizable prose, interrupted at times with startling pronouncements that jump out from this woven background:

“What joy to be a parasite instead of a host.”

“Her heart bore a pair of claws that were useful for nothing, she told me, but scratching at itself.”

“Exiles and insomniacs share this feeling: that each is the only one.”

“Try as much as possible to conform and you will be saved by a wily grace. Imperfection is your genius.”

And many more. Despite being such a short book, MONSTER PORTRAITS defies closure and summary.

Bison/Bonobo/Kerala music video

This was rejected for publication, so I thought I might as well post it here. It is a discussion of the music video for “Kerala” (2016), a track by Bonobo (Simon Green), directed by Bison (Dave Bullivant).

The music itself is midtempo electronica (125 bpm), fairly bright and relaxed. It’s an instrumental track, mostly strings and percussion, with wordless vocals (a repeated “hey yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah” sampled from the chorus of Brandy’s 1994 song “Baby”) added in the second half. “Kerala” starts out sparse, but becomes increasingly dense as instrumental layers are added, one at a time. These layers occasionally stutter or syncopate, but usually stay on the beat. The samples wash through the song in repeating loops, invoking the ebb and flow of (not very funky) dancing. At the same time, the piece’s changing textures do suggest a limited degree of narrative progression. As the sounds thicken, a simple two-chord alternation is fleshed out into an almost-melody. Bonobo avoids the dramatic soars and drops of mainstream EDM; but the song does build in intensity, with occasional lighter interludes. There’s no climax, however; rather, the track ends with an extended coda, allowing its energy to slowly dissipate. All in all, “Kerala” walks a fine line between putting the listener into a hypnotic trance and sounding, well, cheerily chintzy.

Why does the track have this particular title? Kerala is a state in southwest India. It is best known, internationally, for the fact that it has been under Communist Party rule for most of the past sixty years, and that it has flourished as a result. (According to Wikipedia, Kerala has the highest Human Development Index, the highest literacy rate, and the highest life expectancy of any state in India). Bonobo says in an interview, however, that he named the track because the state is an important stopping-place for birds from North Asia, migrating south for the winter. In any case, “Kerala” is drawn from an album called Migration (2017), whose sonic palette is diversified with touches of “world music.” With such a soundscape, Bonobo might well be accused of musical tourism or colonialism. But I am willing to accept at face value his claim that the album is not really engaged in appropriating cool sounds from the developing world. Rather, as its title indicates, the album is concerned with passages from one place to another. Bonobo is more interested in shifting identities, and in the process of transit itself, than he is in identifying, or appropriating and laying claim to, fixed points of origin and destination. He says on the album’s Bandcamp page that he is fascinated by “how one person will take an influence from one part of the world and move with that influence and affect another part of the world. Over time, the identities of places evolve.”

If Bonobo’s music evokes passages and transitions, then Bison’s video for “Kerala” itself performs an additional act of transfer, moving the track into an entirely new register. On the most obvious and literal level, the video is set in London, rather than Kerala. But Bison transforms the song in more complex ways as well, radically altering its mood and its import. The video for “Kerala” shows a woman (played by Gemma Arterton) in a state of absolute panic. She runs through a park, past some shops, down a street, and up to the roof of a high-rise building. The video begins with a shot of the sky, seen through the crowns of some trees, accompanied by the background noise of birds and traffic. The camera descends through branches, and down the trunk of a tree. As the first layer of music fades in — a loop of two alternating, arpeggiated guitar chords — the camera circles around the tree and closes in on Arterton. She is squatting with her back against the trunk, shaking and panting in fear, with her eyes closed. A second instrumental loop begins: a short synthesized drum roll, one long beat and three short. At the very first beat, Arterton jerks herself upwards and abruptly opens her eyes. She pulls herself to her feet and begins to run. The camera backs away from her, keeping her face in focus, while the background goes blurry.

From this point on, the video employs a remarkable visual stutter effect. There’s a jump cut at every return of the opening beat of the drum roll, which is looped continually throughout the song. (The drum roll is sometimes syncopated or phased slightly, but it remains the track’s most fundamental and steady pulse). This means that there is a visual discontinuity roughly every second. But where most cinematic jump cuts tend to elide a few seconds of action, pulling us slightly forward in time, Bison instead uses these cuts to repeat action, jumping backwards in time. The image track’s repetitions answer to the repeating loops out of which the music is constructed. But these image repetitions, unlike the sound loops, are never total. At each strong beat, the cut brings us back to partway through the previous shot. For each second of elapsed time, we are pulled back something like half a second. Each new shot repeats the latter portion of the previous shot, and then extends a bit further — at which point it is interrupted and partly repeated by yet another shot.

The video’s action is therefore cut into overlapping segments. Each gesture is broken into multiple iterations: Arterton spinning around, glancing back anxiously over her shoulder, running and stumbling and recovering and running on. She turns a little, then the frame jerks back, then she turns a little more… The rapid cuts produce an uneasy feeling of speed and agitation. At the same time, the reversions and repetitions stretch things out: actions unfold with a dreamlike slowness, and the simplest gesture seems to turn into a Sisyphean task. We never get a moment to relax, but we also never break free of the nightmarish sense that time has somehow congealed, and become an impediment that can only be overcome through titanic effort. This amounts to a violent reinterpretation of the relaxed back-and-forth dance rhythm of Bonobo’s track. Instead of measuring repeated motion, time in Bison’s video seems to hold back motion, preventing it from accomplishing itself. Zeno’s arrow gets stuck at every point along its flight.

These jump cuts break up what would otherwise be three long takes with a highly mobile handheld camera. This is evidenced by several reconstructions on YouTube which remove the repetitions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsUmw52LIOI and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sy5cbn3mKIM.

In the first of the jump cuts, Arterton stares towards the sky, as if looking at something beyond and behind the camera. She runs away from whatever it is she sees, while still fearfully glancing backwards at it. She bumps into a businessman walking along a path, jostles him, stumbles back, grabs at him to avoid falling, and whirls around as the camera moves to keep her in frame. The businessman waves his arms in remonstration, but Arterton turns away from him and runs forward along the path. The camera pulls back as she heads in its direction; it keeps her in focus as the background once again devolves into a blur.

The second section of the video (corresponding to the second long take) starts at 1:35, when the choral vocal sample is heard on the track for the first time. We get a brief respite from the drum loop, and therefore also from the jump cuts. Arterton is hunched up against a wall, her eyes closed, with an anguished expression. For about ten seconds, we see her face in extreme closeup; the camera is jittery, but without a break. Starting at about 1:47, when the drum loop resumes, Arterton opens her eyes again and stands up; the camera pulls back from her, and the jump cuts resume. As Arterton runs, she shakes herself away from various people who try to grab her, whether in order to help and comfort her, or to restrain her. At one point, she bumps into a man holding a bag of chips; as she jostles him, the chips pop out of his hands and fly through the air. At another point, she momentarily stares at a television in the window of a shop, which is playing footage of her running, from a slightly later section of the video. (The television appears between 2:21 and 2:30; it shows a sequence that itself appears between 2:50 and 3:00). She eventually turns a corner, and runs down the street without any more interference. The jump cuts continue, but the camera ceases to follow her as she draws further and further away.

The final section of the video (corresponding to what would be, if not for the jump cuts, the third long take) coincides with what I have called the song’s coda. The instrumentation becomes sparser and lighter; eventually, tones are held for longer intervals, until they gradually fade away. Arterton emerges onto the roof of a tall building; she runs to the edge, still frequently glancing backwards in terror. She looks down at the ground, turns away, and collapses into a heap, her hands holding her head in despair. The camera then passes her by, instead gliding over the edge of the roof. It shows us, way down on the ground, a parking lot eerily filled with people standing motionlessly in rows, in an orderly grid, looking upwards. The jump cuts finally cease. The video ends by reversing the movement with which it began. The camera pans upwards from the parking lot, to take in the London skyline shortly before sunset. The music is replaced by traffic and other city noises; an enormous swarm of black dots (birds? or something more sinister?) swirls menacingly on the horizon.

Aside from this main action, there are many subtle, creepy background details scattered throughout the video. You can only notice them by paying close attention to the background; it took repeated viewings for me to find them. The director says in an interview that he thinks of them as “easter eggs,” like the ones hidden in DVDs or pieces of software. These glitches are rare at the beginning of the video, but they become more frequent as it proceeds. Online fans have obsessively scrutinized the video in order to pick out these anomalies, on websites like Reddit. For instance, when Arterton is running through the park, a rock in the far distance appears to levitate (1:08-1:30). Later, a metal gate on the side of a building suddenly buckles inwards as Arterton passes it (2:02-2:05). Still later, as Arterton is running down the block, a parked car changes color with each looped repetition (3:02-3:16). A man seems to be suspended in midair, arms stretched out (3:06-3:20). A fire breaks out on an upper floor of a high rise council building (3:19-3:22).

These signs and portents only last for a few seconds each, but together they help to account for Arterton’s panic. For they suggest that something is seriously wrong, either with the world or with the way that we are perceiving of the world. Fan theories online are split between subjective explanations (Arterton’s character is suffering from drug hallucinations, or from a schizophrenic breakdown) and objective ones (she is witnessing an alien invasion, or even The Rapture). In the same interview I cited before, Bison says that he “like[s] everyone else’s theories about it – I think they’re really interesting.” He does not endorse any particular interpretation as being definitively correct, but he says that the range of responses gave him “all the stuff that I wanted, really – I kept it purposefully open.”

It is crucial to note that the bystanders in the video do not notice any of these glitches; even Arterton’s character doesn’t necessarily see them, since she is usually looking in a different direction. In effect, the anomalies only exist for us, the viewers of the video. (This is even literally the case, since they were evidently added in post-production). The looping repetition of footage would also seem to be something that we experience, rather than a process that Arterton’s character is going through. In addition, we never actually get to see just what it is that so terrifies Arterton’s character. She is always staring (or in one case, pointing – 2:35-2:38) out of frame. Even when she glances backwards, more or less towards the camera, she is not looking towards its actual position, but rather beyond it (as it were, over its shoulder). In other words, Arterton is condemned (Cassandra-like) to witness what she is unable to share with anyone else: visions that even the camera is unable to show us. It is only at the very end of the video, on the roof, when the camera abandons Arterton, that it pans down and shows us what she might have been looking at a moment before: the enigmatic sight of people lined up motionlessly in the parking lot.

We are therefore closed off from Arterton’s character. We cannot really “identify” with her; we see her staring, but the reverse shot of whatever she is staring at is systematically withheld from us. Indeed, we only get near enough to see her face in close-up at the two moments when her eyes are closed. As soon as she opens her eyes again, the camera pulls away, even as the jump cuts resume. By closing her eyes, Arterton’s character refuses the horrific vision with which she has been cursed. As Bison says, this is what makes her “the one fighting against” whatever it is she sees; “she did have power, she knew that if she shut her eyes she could have an element of control.” But in thus closing her eyes when the camera holds her in a close-up, Arterton also refuses any sort of reciprocity with the camera’s own gaze, or beyond it with the gaze of the video’s spectators.

The video, then, is neither purely objective (creating a consistent fictional world) nor purely subjective (giving us the perceptions of Arterton’s character, or putting us in her position). Instead, it is something in between; the video engages in a sort of free indirect discourse. Pier Paolo Pasolini introduced this literary term into the theorization of cinema. A novel engages in free indirect discourse when its omniscient, third-person narration takes on some of the linguistic and subjective characteristics of the character it is describing. We do not get all the way to a first-person voice or point of view, but the impersonal narration nonetheless seeems to be tinged by the traces of that first person. The novel’s creator takes on some of the characteristics of what she has created. According to Pasolini, something similar happens in movies when the director “looks at the world by immersing himself in his neurotic protagonist,” to the point that the director “has substituted in toto for the worldview of [the protagonist] his own delirious view of aesthetics.” We find ourselves in a strange position in between subjectivity and objectivity, in between the first person and the third person, and in between the existential suffering of the character and the expressive aestheticism of the director.

This situation is perhaps even more complicated in the case of “Kerala.” For the ambiguity between Bison’s point of view and that of Arterton’s character is doubled by a similar ambiguity between Bison’s perspective and Bonobo’s. The video translates its implicit narrative into formal terms, by means of its glitches, its looping repetitions, and its refusal to align gazes. These strategies are tinged by the protagonist’s experiences, but they do not work in any direct way to convey those experiences to us. Rather, they alienate us from those experiences, by refusing any possibility of representing them. On a meta-level, however, this process is itself analogous to the way that Arterton’s character is radically self-alienated. For her very experience is one of the failure of experience: that is to say, of being unable to bear, let alone to grasp, the events that are nonetheless being imposed upon her, and that she is forced to witness. In a similar manner, the video closely follows the formal articulations of the music for which it provides an image track, giving visual equivalents for changes of rhythm and timbre. But at the same time, the video does not express the feelings conveyed by the music in any straightforward way. To the contrary, it denatures and uproots those feelings. Bonobo’s “Kerala”, heard by itself, is a bright and inviting track. It idealizes migration as a sort of open, equal exchange, as influences fluidly move from one place to another. But Bison’s video insists instead upon the impossibility of any such exchange. It envisions the flow of influences from one place to another as a traumatic, irreversible process of irreparable loss.

Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti series

Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti: The Night Masquerade (available on January 16 – I was lucky to get to read a pre-publication copy) is the third (and at least for the moment, final) installment in the series that began with Binti (2015) and continued with Binti: Home (2017). The three books individually are of novella length; though the third installment is almost as long as the previous two combined. Indeed, the three together can be regarded as a single novel, both in terms of word length and in terms of imaginative scope.

The Binti series is Afrofuturist science fiction. The eponymous protagonist and narrator is a young woman from the Himba people of Namibia. This group is known today for the way that they strongly maintain their traditional practices and ways of life, while at the same time engaging fully with social and technological modernity, and the other peoples with whom they interact. This is still the case in the future world of the novellas: the Himba rarely leave their desert territory, and they keep to something like their traditional ways of life; but at the same time they are known for their cutting edge technology, which they sell to other peoples on Earth, and even to beings from other planets.

Binti herself is a mathematical genius, who comes from a family who make their living by manufacturing astrolabes – handheld electronic computing and communications devices which are small enough to fit into a pocket, but at the same time evidently far more powerful than our present-day phones and other computing devices. Binti is proud of her Himba heritage; the traditions with which she has grown up are an essential part of her. But at the same time, she has outward ambitions and desires that go beyond what these traditions can accomodate. Her mathematical skill and passion is something universal, rather than particular. She often goes into a trance — she calls this process “treeing” — while envisioning mathematical equations, such as the formula for the Mandelbrot Set (which produces infinitely ramifying fractals). Treeing is all at once psychological (she often enters into the state in order to calm herself, when she is feeling stressed or anxious), imaginative (it allows to to contemplate extended possibilities that she would not be able to see otherwise), and powerful (through envisioning the mathematical structures she is able to call up electrical currents that she can direct so as to manipulate aspects of her body and her environment). Mathematics is finally Binti’s mode of access to the universal, or to order of the universe (an intuition that has often been expressed by mathematicians and physicists; it exists at the point of union of the mystical, the scientific, and the real). (Though Binti insists that, while mathematics is her route to something like the ultimate, other people may well have other routes to the same asymptotic goal).

In any case, one could say that the conflict between the particular and the universal is what drives and underlies the narrative of the whole series. Though I should add that I am unhappy with the Hegelian tone of this formulation, which is not Okorafor’s but just mine; I’d like to figure out a way to say it less grandiosely, and less totalizingly — which would be more in tune with the way the novellas actually work themselves out. Binti’s Himba identity is very important to her, at the same time that she has desires that point beyond it. The first book begins with Binti doing what she cannot help thinking of as a transgressive act: she leaves her family and community behind — indeed she leaves the Earth itself behind — by getting on a spaceship and travelling to Oomza Uni, on a distant planet. It’s the best university in the galaxy; and Binti has been admitted thanks to her mathematical genius. But leaving her family and her homeland goes against her heritage; the Himba don’t like to travel, and they strongly value staying together. Binti leaves early in the morning, when everybody else is asleep, and without her family even knowing that she plans to go.

So the first Binti novella begins as a coming-of-age story: a feminist and Africa-centered version of the “myth of the hero’s journey” we’ve heard about so many times. (In interviews, Okorafor has made no secret of her love for the Star Wars series, probably the best-known work explicitly modeled on that so called universal myth). Personally, I hate Joseph Campbell and all the hero’s myth stuff – there is nothing more boring and oppressive than being told that there can be nothing new under the sun (or even in the whole galaxy), just recapitulations of the same fucking story. So I love the ways that Okorafor departs from the myth, and pushes her story in new directions that change things radically. Of course, it still remains possible for a reader to subsume everything that happens in the three books under the “monomyth” after all — that is part of what I hate about the theory: it can take anything whatsoever and subsume it into itself. But if you read the Binti series in such a way, you lose what is most rich and exciting about it. The novellas continually surprise us because, behind the story of the plucky young woman discovering her true potential and becoming a hero, there are all kinds of swerves and deviations, which turn the story into something else.

For the Binti series is not just about the universal, but equally about particularities, and all the ways that – for both good and ill – they resist being subsumed into the universal. Mathematics gives Binti a universal structure; its abstractions mean that she can use it to comprehend just about anything. But she also continually has experiences that push her beyond her limits (to the point where the only use she has for her beloved mathematics is to calm herself). In the first novella, when Binti defies her family, leaves town, and gets on a spaceship, her trials are only beginning. All the other human beings heading to Oomza Uni are Khoush — a lighter-skinned ethnic group that control most of the Earth, and who are mostly racist, looking down condescendingly at the Himba. The Khoush really are Hegelians (though Okorafor never designates them as such); they cannot accept the stubborn refusal of the Himba to be subsumed within the “higher” universality that they represent. But as soon as we think Binti has gotten a handle on this problem — she has made friends with many of the Khoush students, gotten them to accept her, and found common terrain with them — something else happens. Another intelligent species, the Meduse — their bodies are sort of like giant jellyfish — invades the ship, commandeers it, and kills all the Khoush — Binti is the only human being left alive, aside from the pilot. It turns out the Meduse have grievances against the Khoush, who have behaved towards the Meduse in the same arrogant, colonialist fashion as they have towards the Himba. The Meduse at first try to kill Binti as well, but they fail — it turns out she has both technologies that repel them and are dangerous to them, and technologies that can soothe them and cure their ailments.

I won’t discuss all the turns and twists of the plot in the three novellas (I justify what I said above about the first volume because it was published long enough ago that nobody has the right to object to spoilers; but I will avoid any spoilers regarding the new volume). Suffice it to say that the Meduse invasion of the ship is only the first of many situations, throughout the three novellas, in which the Star Wars heroic paradigm simply fails to work. Not just in the early part of the first volume, but through all three novellas, Binti is continually faced with problems that cannot be resolved either by antagonism, or by cooperation towards some higher cause. She has to find (or better, to improvise) oblique solutions, which involve the contingencies of particular cases and particular histories as much as they involve the universality that can be (to some extent) realized through mathematics.

These oblique solutions are also always partial and temporary. There is no repose and no completion: no sublation into the universal, and no self-reflexivity to close the circle. Even though all three volumes have happy endings, there is never a real sense of closure. Binti always remains afflicted by anxiety and by a violent ambivalence. There are always dissonant notes in her harmonies. I use the word “harmonies” here advisedly; Binti’s vocation, according not only to the Himba but also to others, is to be a harmonizer. This means that she is able to pull things together and allow them to coexist; when faced with an intractable opposition, she is able to perform “a shift of meaning which converts the opposition into a contrast” (to use Whitehead’s great phrase). Her harmonizing conversions are not reconciliations, however; tensions and inequalities always remain. Okorafor’s future Earth, and indeed her galaxy, remain subject to colonialism and racism, and other forms of oppression just as the actual Earth does today. Harmonization is less than revolutionary transformation; what it is about, ultimately, is finding a way for oppressed or subordinated groups to not only survive, but even flourish, in spite of the (continuing) state of oppression. Binti harmonizes by improvising, finding the best solution she can in situations that remain unsatisfactory.

Binti’s harmonizing improvisations are characterized by two things: diplomacy and hybridity. I mean diplomacy here in the strong sense that has been developed by Isabelle Stengers (in the final volume of Cosmopolitics, as well as elsewhere):

What is difficult and interesting about the practice of diplomats is that it frequently exposes them to the accusation of betrayal. The suspicion of those whom the diplomat represents is one of the risks and constraints of the profession and constitutes its true grandeur. For what is demanded of the diplomat is characterized by an irreducible tension. On the one hand, diplomats are supposed to belong to the people, to the group, to the country they represent; they are supposed to share their hopes and doubts, their fears and dreams. But a diplomat also interacts with other diplomats and must be a reliable partner for them, accepting as they do the rules of the diplomatic game. Therefore, the diplomat cannot be one with those she represents.

Binti faces this problem, mediating between the Meduse and the Khoush — who have been bitter enemies for a long time — as well as between both and the Himba (and also among other groups of humans and sentient extraterrestrials whom we meet throughout the three novellas). Binti’s Himba heritage is what allows her to be a harmonizer, or a diplomat in Stengers’ sense; but her assuming this role means that she also finds herself apart from the Himba, and can no longer unproblematically belong to them or be one of them. This logic is alreadyat work from the very beginning of the first novella, when Binti violates her heritage while clinging to it at the same time. The paradox of diplomacy is not only the displacement of the diplomat, but also the fact that, on the one hand, without diplomacy we are doomed to the horrors of continual unabated conflict; while at the same time, there is never any guarantee that diplomacy will work: it is always susceptible to failure, and even at best its improvisations are fragile and ephemeral. We experience all of this — the failures as well as the partial successes — throughout the course of the three novellas.

Binti’s activity as a harmonizer is also an adventure of hybridity. She is no more able to just exist, rootedly and unproblematically, as a Himba, than she is able to cast off her Himba-ness and dissolve (as it were) into the universal. Over the course of the three novellas, she enters into several symbioses — at once cultural and biological — first with the Meduse, and later with other groups both human and nonhuman. Hybridity does not mean merging, or entering into a “melting pot.” Binti remains, or increasingly becomes, an assemblage of identities, or characteristics, from different sources, that do not coalesce but must learn to coexist. Her vocation as a harmonizer or diplomat must first, and most importantly, be exercised for, and upon, herself. Her emotional ups and downs in the course of the story are aspects of this process. It’s a trajectory that never comes to a definitive ending point, but needs to be renewed and maintained throughout, and this is still the case at the end of The Night Masquerade.

I will stop here. Saying more would involve getting into the details of the new volume, and I promised not to introduce spoilers. I am also leaving for a later time questions about how Binti relates to the rest of Okorafor’s fiction, and to Afrofuturism more generally. Here I can only testify to how compelling and impassioning a read the Binti saga is, how absorbing it is on a page-by-page and line-by-line basis, as well as all the deeper questions it raises.

Ken MacLeod – The Corporation Wars

Ken MacLeod’s Corporation Wars trilogy — which I just finished reading (the final volume came out this past week) — does well what MacLeod usually does well. It takes familiar science fiction tropes (here, robots, virtual reality, xenobiology) and subgenres (here, military fiction, which I am not a big fan of overall) and gives them some unusual and thoughtful twists. MacLeod really uses SF to think about social and political issues, as well as ontological and epistemological ones. Here, the starting point, of considerable contemporary relevance, is a war between (Left) Accelerationists on the one hand, and Neo-Reactionaries on the other — say, Ray Brassier’s Prometheanism vs. Nick Land’s hyperstitional Lovecraftianism — as well as between both of these political tendencies and the neoliberal state and corporations. The trilogy’s backstory is a world war, in the late 21st century, in which the Accelerationists join with the hegemonic neoliberals to defeat the Neo-Reactionaries; once they have done so, the corporate state turns upon the Accelerationists and defeats them also. But the novels themselves take place at least a thousand years in the future, around the planets and moons of another star system, when downloaded brain scans of long-dead Accelerationist fighters (and Neo-Reactionaries as well, albeit by accident) are mobilized and re-embodied (first in virtual reality sims, and then as “mechanoids,” in military hardware in physical space) in order to fight off a robot uprising. This allows MacLeod to consider at length the ideologies, attitudes, and technological strategies of the various parties. The Neo-Reactionaries really are Social Darwinist Nazis, with everything unpleasant that implies, only they also see advanced computing technology as an aid to their fantasies of prevailing as a master race. The Accelerationists also have a hard-on for advanced technology, at the same time as they are the ultimate humanists; their Promethean dreams of “Solidarity Against Nature” involve communism for humans, but an instrumentalist attitude towards everything else. Artificially-intelligent entities in this far-future solar system are cognitively far beyond human capabilities; they control and run, and indeed embody, all major corporations (including munitions manufacturers and law firms). The State equivalent, called the Direction, is also AI-controlled, but it deliberately inhibits its own power in order not to interfere with “free enterprise” (which, together with human domination, ironically enough, is its highest value). But these AIs, although immensely powerful, and although you can hold conversations with them, and although they are capable of deception and deep strategies, are not actually self-conscious (not sentient or aware– though more accurately, I think, you would have to say rather that they are devoid of self-consciousness, or of awareness that they are aware). The crisis that sets off the main plot of the trilogy is that individual robots, AIs embodied in frames capable of all sorts of activity, themselves start to become self-conscious or sentient. This leads them to reject the status of being property, slave machines with no rights; and to demand control of their own activities and their own labor. It is in order to suppress these demands that the Direction reawakens the minds of old fighters — first acclimatizing them to being alive again in VR sims, and then placing them in mechanoid bodies to actually fight the freebots. As a result of all this, the conflict of Accelerationism vs Neo-Reaction vs the Neoliberal apparatus is restaged in the far future, and complicated by the appearance of the freebots. All three tendencies see the bots only as technical machines, needing to be either re-enslaved or destroyed — albeit for different reasons in the three cases. Eventually, several of the Accelerationist protagonists (including one ex-Neo-Reactionary) defect to the freebots, rejecting their previous ideologies. It gets even more complicated in the final volume, where a vehicle lands on a superhabitable planet, and the mechanoids who emerge find themselves entering into symbiotic links with the local life forms. There are many interesting twists and realignments, which I will not endeavor to explain here. MacLeod has never been very sympathetic to green or ecological thought, but his portrayals of bot autonomy and xenosymbiosis nonetheless lead to a certain distance from, and criticism of, the Prometheanism of the Accelerationists — something that seems highly relevant to me at this moment.

Atopias, by Frederic Neyrat

Frédéric Neyrat is a French philosopher who has published extensively in French; but the first English translation of one of his books has only just appeared. ATOPIAS:MANIFESTO FOR A RADICAL EXISTENTIALISM is an important book, and a good short introduction to Neyrat’s ideas. I had the pleasure of being asked to write an Introduction to ATOPIAS, and I am republishing it here — in order to help indicate what is important and original about the book.

Frédéric Neyrat’s Atopias is an important book. The contribution it makes to critical thought today is encapsulated in its subtitle: Manifesto for a Radical Existentialism. A manifesto is a short declaration of principles and a program, rather than a fully extended analysis. Neyrat characterizes the present work as “a worried intervention in the field of theory,” rather than a declaration of eternal truths.

There have been other philosophical manifestos published over the past several decades; most notably, two “Manifestos for Philosophy” by Alain Badiou. Within the context of contemporary French thought, Frédéric Neyrat’s position and perspective are strikingly different from those of Badiou; but both thinkers are motivated by the conviction that a renewal of philosophical thought is especially urgent today, at a time when the sciences seem to present themselves as the only reputable sources of knowledge, and when the economic and ideological constraints of our society cast doubt upon philosophical reflection, as upon anything that is not of immediate profit and utility.

Atopias offers us a deep analysis and critique of our current political and intellectual situation. It seeks to develop a new way of thinking that will be adequate to the predicament in which we find ourselves today. We live in an era of advanced computing and communications technologies, which are revolutionizing every aspect of our daily lives. We face the mode of governance and control that has come to be known as neoliberalism: a condition in which market competition is promoted as the sole possible solution to all difficulties, and in which corporations seem to have “human rights” while human beings themselves do not. In addition, we face an ecological crisis. Global warming is already changing the very shape of life on our planet; in the years to come, we are likely to witness the flooding of coastal regions, the continuing extinction of large numbers of living species, and the destruction of millions of people’s livelihoods and modes of survival.

Frédéric Neyrat does not address any of these conditions directly in the present work. But although Atopias is the first of his works to be translated into English, he has published quite prolifically in French. All these issues are developed at greater length in his other books. He has written at length about our obligations to the Earth and to other species, as well as about the suffocating conditions produced by our drive to dominate the planet, our restless consumerism, and our “auto-immune” drive to ignore our own vulnerabilities, and our willful blindness to our nihilistic tendencies. In Atopias, he seeks to establish a philosophical basis — or perhaps I should rather say, a non-basis — that might allow us to address these issues, and to be equal to the challenges we face.

Neyrat is clearly indebted to his philosophical forebears, including Badiou and, above all, Gilles Deleuze. Nonetheless, he proposes a new sort of philosophical project, one that is strikingly different from those of his predecessors. Deleuze, following Nietzsche, belongs to the great tradition of post-Enlightenment demystification. He mounts an attack upon the idea of transcendence and the belief in absolutes. The major effort of Western philosophy, from Plato onwards, has arguably been to judge human life from a standpoint superior to life, to abolish all vestiges of chance and contingency, and to establish norms for correct behavior. In all of these cases, Deleuze says — following Nietzsche — that the forces of life are deformed and repressed. Every entity is subjected to arbitrary, external constraints, and “separated from what it can do” (to use a famous phrase of Deleuze’s that Neyrat directly quotes). Against all this, Deleuze proposes a philosophy of radical immanence, one in which there is no Beyond. Things and processes of this world must be valued (or not) for their own sakes, rather than judged in accordance with externally imposed criteria.

But perhaps the struggle against transcendence has been all too successful. Today, when I ask my students to read Nietzsche, they are neither scandalized nor exalted. Instead, they find him banal. They take it for granted that everyone has their own opinion, and that no particular opinion is better than any other. And they cannot see that anything more is at stake. Of course this is a poor misreading of Nietzsche, but that is beside the point. Relativism is no longer shocking, subversive, or transgressive, as its was in earlier centuries. Rather it is something that we take for granted, with a blasé shrug.

Or, as Neyrat puts it, in more rigorous language than mine: “immanence, as a category necessary for contesting the spiritualties that negate life,” has instead “come to mean the grim machine that destroys differences, a mill for grinding out a sort of ontological flour, an ontology spread flat.” Nietzsche and Deleuze must be spinning in their graves at this degradation of their ideas. In effect, Neyrat says, Nietzsche’s and Deleuze’s battles against transcendence have been won. But the result is a situation that both of those thinkers would have detested: one in which radical change has become impossible, and in which thought has been thoroughly instrumentalized, made nothing more than a tool for the efficient fulfillment of pre-given utilitarian goals. We live in a world “where every trajectory seems geo-localizable, where every knowledge must be situated and efficient, every obscurity cleared up, every real singularity suspect.”

Neyrat calls this condition “saturated immanence.” Everything is caught up in the flows of capitalist monetary equivalence; there is no outside any longer, no separation between one thing and another; there is no sense of otherness whatsoever. Everything is in flux, as we are told over and over again. And yet, these are fluxes in which nothing ever really changes. When flux is the sole characteristic of everything and anything, when everything is flexible and everything is interchangeable, then nothing is really different from anything else, nothing ever makes a difference. Other thinkers have characterized globalized and financialized capitalism in this way; Neyrat sees it as a dilemma for critical thought as well.

Saturated immanence is the condition against which Neyrat seeks to mobilize philosophy. In a world where anything can be anyplace, and anything can switch places with anything else, philosophy must insist on its power to be, not everyplace, but noplace. It must never fit in, but always disturb its context. Neyrat uses the word atopia for this condition, in order to avoid the undesirable connotations — perfection and changelessness — of the etymologically similar utopia. In Neyrat’s account, philosophy works by avoiding any sort of fixity or rootedness, and by maintaining a relation with the very Outside (dehors) that our dominant social, economic, and intellectual conditions seek to deny or suppress. An atopic philosophy does not reinstate the old forms of capital-T Transcendence, the claims to an Absolute, that thinkers like Nietzsche and Deleuze so successfully attacked; but nonetheless, by maintaining a link with otherness, with outsideness, and with displacement, it offers us a (small-t) transcendence as an alternative to saturated immanence. It seeks to dig holes, and open up gaps, in what is otherwise a suffocating (and even totalitarian) world of hyper-presence.

For Neyrat, philosophy does not itself create the Outside. What it does is to give us a route of access to this Outside. It opens the doors that our current social system has closed. “Thought does not define the outside,” Neyrat says, “but prolongs it, draws it out.” Outsideness is not a transcendent condition; indeed, it is “nothing more than the simple fact of existence.” To exist is to stand out; the “ex-” etymologically indicates emergence, outsideness, or coming-forth. Any living thing, or anything that exists, is singular in some way: it differs from everything else, or it deviates from all that came before. This means that the internal being of any existing entity is also its external relation with all the things that it is not. Philosophy is a way of exploring “the divergence or dis-joining attested to by all existence.”

In Atopias, Neyrat develops these ideas carefully and generously. In the first chapter, he proposes them in relation both to the history of philosophy, and to the contemporary situation of absolute flux or saturated immanence. In the second chapter, he explores the existential dimension of “being-outside” and of radical contingency and radical finitude. Finally, in the third chapter, he places his argument in relation to the meta-question of what sort of role philosophy — and especially the much-denounced branch of philosophy known as metaphysics — can have today. Atopias is a short book, but a rich one, dense with ideas and suggestions. There is much exuberant invention here, in line with Deleuze and Guattari’s maxim that philosophy should be the “creation of concepts.” But above all, Atopias is a work of ethics, exhorting us to recognize and find room for the many forms of existence with whom we share our planet.

Jerry Lewis

Jerry Lewis is a figure who has haunted me — or, who has played a major role in my Imaginary — for most of my life. In 1963, when I was nine years old, my parents set up an extended vacation and took me and my brother on a cross-country tour. On a hot summer afternoon, we found ourselves in Ogden, Utah; we were catching a train for Oakland, CA, but it was five or six hours late. To escape the heat, we went to an air-conditioned movie theater, and saw one of the hits of that summer: Jerry Lewis’ The Nutty Professor. My parents subsequently always told me that it was an awful movie, but that me and my brother had loved it. But in any case, this was the primal scene, as it were, when Jerry got imprinted on my brain. For years afterwards, all I remembered of the movie was a vague sense of weirdness and laughter, and (even more than that) a dazzlement of bright color — I was recalling the movie’s brilliantly garish color scheme, and perhaps also the scene where we see Buddy Love for the first time (as a reverse shot to closeups of people gaping in astonishment).

Anyway, it was only in the 1970s, during college and then graduate school, that I got to see The Nutty Professor again, together with all of Jerry’s other films: the ones he directed above all, but also the early ones with Dean Martin, and the ones directed by Frank Tashlin. My fate as a Jerry Lewis fanatic was sealed. When he returned as a director with Hardly Working in 1981, I went to see it on the day it opened. His last feature film, and one of his best, Cracking Up (originally and more properly titled Smorgasbord) didn’t play in theaters but went straight to cable: I saw it as soon as I could. In the mid-1990s, when Lewis was touring the country with his production of, and starring role in, the otherwise rather lame musical Damn Yankees, I bought fifth-row seats for his performance in Seattle; it was the only time I saw Jerry live. I never met him in person; twice I tried to set up interviews with him, but they both fell through.

I wrote at length about Jerry in my 1993 book The Cinematic Body; in retrospect, it is a book that I am largely unhappy with, for numerous reasons. But I am still happy with the chapter on him. I wrote several short essays on Jerry Lewis in the past decade or so, which appeared on several websites. I have collected those as a free e-book (or, more properly, e-pamphlet) that you can download here:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/4w1vdssyxv7b1r4/Three%20Essays%20on%20Jerry%20Lewis.epub?dl=0

Anyway, what to say, now that Jerry has passed? Jerry Lewis’ films, and his comedy more generally, are characterized by an infantile excess, something that knows no boundaries and has no sense of restraint or of good taste. This in itself makes Jerry’s comedic figure both delightfully twisted and utterly embarrassing. Jerry’s persona doesn’t feel any such embarrassment or shame, but this unawareness makes it all the more embarrassing for me to like him and identify with him. There is no sense in Lewis’ comedy of a raging id set free of repression; rather, the persona almost always has an overwhemling desire to please the fatuous authority figures who are set against him and whom he unwittingly destroys. Jerry’s persona is intimidated by cultural norms and creates chaos through his unsuccessful endeavors to conform to those norms. Even Buddy Love, the obnoxious Hyde to the Jekyll of timid Professor Julius Kelp, is not a figure of the id, but rather one of arrogant egotism and a drive to control. Buddy Love is the sinister cousin of Jerry in the few moments that he shows unbridled bliss, in the form of scarce moments narcissitic, masturbatory self-enjoyment (these scenes often have to do with music in some way: the scene in The Errand Boy where he mimes the actions of an entire jazz orchestra while listening to a recording of them; or, in the same movie, the scene where he grins in idiotic delight as he is about to dub a musical scene from a studio film with his own gratingly off-key singing; or that scenein Cracking Up where he is a hideously defaced gangster who robs a bank, not to get the money, but to record his own musical performance on the surveillance cameras).

Lots of critics have noted the sophisticated formalism and self-reflexivity of Lewis the director; but what is harder to explain is how this resonates with, and works as a necessary counterpoint to, the aggressively unsophisticated (crassly juvenile or infantile) content of Lewis’ performances. What gets me every time is the co-existence in everything Lewis does of incompatible (or I should really say, in philosophical vocabulary, incompossible) qualities and situations — but that is to put too intellectual a twist on something that is a visceral and pre-reflective response on my part. How can anything be so sophisticated and so stupid at the same time? How can the situations Lewis creates generate both exilarating identification and shame/embarrassment?

Obviously, Lewis’ comedy has one of its roots in Jewish vaudeville and slapstick. His parents performed regularly, and he first performed as a teenager, in the Borsch Belt (hotels in the Catskills where Jews from New York City would go on vacation). There is an amazing scene in a 1931 Yiddish-language movie, His Wife’s Lover, that powerfully prefigures much of what Jerry does. This movie stars Ludwig Satz, apparently one of the biggest stars of the Yiddish theater in New York in the 1920s and 1930s. The movie’s plot is an old misogynist chestnut, with analogues that go back at least to Boccaccio and Chaucer. A young seamstress is in love with the matinee idol played by Satz. But he resolves to test her fidelity first. She is forced into marriage with a disgusting rich old miser, who is really the matinee idol in disguise. Then the matinee idol visits her in his own guise, and tries to seduce her. Of course she proves her fidelity by resisting apparent adultery, even though she hates the old miser who is officially her husband, and whom she refuses to sleep with. The scene that prefigures Jerry Lewis occurs during their honeymoon at the seashore. The old miser tries, and fails, to convince the woman to kiss him, or to go into the water with him. It’s actually a musical number, with Satz singing in a whiny, grating voice. The scene is not so much a source or template for Lewis’ later comedy, as it is an instance of what Harold Bloom calls apophrades: a reversal of the “anxiety of influence” in which an earlier work seems to have been influenced by, and to be imitating, a later one. It is as if Satz were already familiar with Lewis’ shtick, and is trying to replicate it. The scene has the same kind of queasy hilarity I often find in Lewis (but I cannot say whether I would respond to it in this way if I didn’t already know Lewis).

Of course Lewis must be remembered not just for his actual films and other performances, but also for his celebrity persona. In the course of his career, he went from being one of the biggest superstars in America to being despised by most Americans as a figure whom only the French, with their inexplicable perversity, could love. But maybe the younger generation, without exposure to these negatives, can appreciate Lewis anew (my kids have enjoyed the films of his that I have shown them).

Lewis’ yearly presence as the host of the telethon to raise money for treating muscular dystrophy did not help his reputation. He raised lots of money, and he was unquestionably entirely sincere and heartfelt in doing so; but he also made use of all the injurious stereotypes that disability activists have rightly objected to. Also, a number of his films make use of unquestionably racist stereotypes, especially of Asians. And then there was his cranky praise of Donald Trump last year: the sort of thing that made him seem like the cranky great-uncle who yu want to lock away in the attic whenever you have visitors, so he won’t embarrass you even more than he has already.

And yet. As I have already said, embarrassment and shame are emotions that Lewis’ comedic persona does not feel, but that he induces in his viewers and fans. Lewis is undoubtedly one of the originators of what we know today as cringe comedy. — But actually I should modify what I just said. In Lewis’ last feature film, Cracking Up/Smorgasbord, he plays a character in distress, who has been a loser at everything and cannot even manage to kill himself, despite repeated attempts. The movie is the most extreme example I know of distress being mined for comedy; it has many of Lewis’ most brilliant gags, but it also packs an excruciating punch.

In the 1980s, when Lewis was making a comeback, I saw him interviewed by Dick Cavett (who showed his usual incomprehension of nearly everything Lewis said). In the course of the conversation, Jerry described both Jean-Luc Godard, and (then-President) Ronald Reagan, as “a dear friend of mine.” Has anyone ever encompassed such wildly different extremes of the movie business?