Etienne RP

Animation Studies and Cartoon Science

6 Mar 2022 Etienne RPLeave a comment

**A review of Animating Film Theory, edited by Karen Beckman, Duke University Press, 2014.**

I must confess I am averse to film theory. The little I have read in this field confirms me in my opinion: film theory is empirically useless, epistemologically weak, and aesthetically unappealing. Nothing of substance has been written about the topic since Plato’s Cave, the allegory that has people watch shadows projected on the wall from objects passing in front of a fire behind them and give names to these shadows. The books and articles that are collated to form the discipline’s canon are a mixed bag of philosophical references, journalistic musings, and academic jabber. In my opinion, Deleuze’s two-volume work on film, The Movement-Image and The Time-Image, are among his weakest books. They do not amount to a philosophy of cinema, or a theory of film: at best, they are reflections on time and space that take cinema as a pretext and Bergson as an interlocutor. In textbooks and introductory chapters, film theory is a collage of quotations by cultural critics, mostly from the early twentieth century, who have commented on the birth of cinema in the context of mass culture and reproduction technologies. Remarks written in passing by Walter Benjamin or Theodor Adorno are elevated to the rank of high theory and revered as sacred scriptures by a discipline desperately in need of founding fathers. The French contributors to the Cahiers du Cinéma dabbled in film critique as a hobby and did not think of themselves as serious thinkers: they were puzzled to see cinema studies emerge as an academic discipline, and they certainly would have disapproved the emergence of a canon of officially approved texts that includes their own. When film theory tries to build a firmer intellectual grounding, it mobilizes thinkers who have written outside the purview of cinema studies and have never commented on films: Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, Derrida, Lacan, or Baudrillard. Gilles Deleuze for the French domain and Stanley Cavell in America stand as the two exceptions: they have devoted whole books to cinema as part of a program of applied philosophy. My preference goes to Cavell over Deleuze.

Animated films and live-action movies

My biases against film theory were compounded by this volume on animation film theory. If a theory of films rests on shaky ground, what about a theory that takes animated movies as its object and proposes to build an autonomous discourse on this subset of film media? A discipline is not defined by its empirical topic, but by its methods and the way it builds a scientific object as a matter of scholarly investigation. The existence of animated movies and frame-by-frame films—which predate the birth of cinema—is in itself no justification to devote an academic discipline to their study and to engage them theoretically. I do not mean to say that animation movies should be forever marginalized and ignored by cinema specialists and cultural critics. They can provide food for thought for many disciplines and, in some instances, are valuable sources of theoretical engagement. But a discourse on animation does not a theory make. Building an animation theory has more to do with intellectual posturing and academic differentiation than with scientific rigor and sound scholarship. A caricature of the attitude that I have in mind is provided by Alan Cholodenko’s contribution to this volume. An American-Australian scholar who retired in 2001 from the University of Sidney, Cholodenko describes himself as the godfather of animation theory: “theorizing of and through animation has been my project for the last twenty-three years.” His claim of having come first to lay the “first principles” of the discipline doubles the proposition that “historically as well as theoretically, film is the ‘stepchild’ of animation, not the other way around.” Drawing inspiration from the work of Jacques Derrida and Jean Baudrillard, and postulating animation as the mother of all disciplines, his contribution to this volume amounts to little more than self-promotion and personal aggrandizement.

What came first, film or animation? And who can claim the privilege of having “invented” animation cinema, in theory and in practice? A central tenet of the fledgling discipline is that animation represents the past and the future of all cinema. Lev Manovich, an author of books on digital culture and new media, made that claim in 2001: “Born from animation, cinema pushed animation to its periphery, only in the end to become one particular case of animation.” The division of cinema into live action and animation has been recently blurred by the digital turn: through CGI and pixel-by-pixel editing, live-action movies are merging with animation in a way that makes them undistinguishable. The cartoonization of live-action movies is propelled by special effects and computer graphics that makes whatever the mind can conceive achievable on screen. Some actors, Jim Carrey for instance (but the same could have been said of Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton), have built a whole career acting like cartoon characters. Contributors to Animating Film Theory show that the dividing line between film and animation has never been clear-cut. Photographs and moving pictures have always been mixed with drawings and text editing, such as in Dziga Vertov’s Kino-Pravda (Film Truth) experimental newsreel series in 1922-25, or in cartoons in which drawings “come to life” or live scenes are inserted in graphic sketches, a common practice since the silent movies era down to Robert Zemeckis’ Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988). The incorporation of animated beings into real-world settings is only one example of the blurring of distinctions between animation and film. Whole movies, like Disney’s 2019 version of The Lion King, are photorealistic renderings of live action scenes in which each detail of character and scenery is animated step-by-step by computer graphics (the sole non-animated shot in the entire film is the sunrise in the opening scene.)

The French did it first

The history of animation intersects with movie history but they do not necessarily move at the same pace. The Lost World (1925) was the first feature-length film made in the United States, possibly the world, to feature model animation as the primary special effect, or stop motion animation in general. The Enchanted Drawing is a 1900 silent film best known for containing the first animated sequences recorded on standard picture film, which has led its director J. Stuart Blackton to be considered the father of American animation. As for the first animated cartoon, it is attributed (by the French) to Emile Cohl, who produced the short movie Fantasmagorie in 1908. Others point to the French inventor Charles-Emile Reynaud and his 1877 patent of the praxinoscope, an animation projection device that predated the invention of the cinématographe by Louis Lumière in 1895. Other optical toys from the nineteenth century or earlier go by the names of zoetrope, thaumatrope, phenakistoscope, and camera obscura. Likewise, animation film theory has many fathers and the competing quest for precursors, pioneers, and key figures oppose various nations, periods, and individuals. One (French) contributor to this volume casts a Frenchman named André Martin as “the inventor of animation cinema” and 1953 as the date when his invention was recorded. Another (Japan specialist) author exhibits another figure, Imamura Taihei, as the first critic to devote a whole book on animation, A Theory of Cartoon Film, first published in 1941. It turns out André Martin used the expression “cinéma d’animation” in the body of a Cahier du Cinéma article about the Cannes festival, thereby donning prestige and dignity to a genre situated at the intersection between “le septième art” (French jargon for movies) and “le neuvième art” (graphic novels and comic strips). As for Imamura Taihei, he confirms the fact that Japan stands as a key site for animation and for theory. His genealogy of cartoons and comic strips goes back to the twelfth century’s emaki picture scrolls, and also includes acting techniques found in the Nō theater and folding screen paintings from the Edo period.

To build a theory of animation, Karen Beckman, the editor of this volume, has mined systematically the writings of film theory specialists to search for references to animation. As she states in the opening chapter, “animation’s persistent yet elusive presence within film theory’s key writings make it both easy to overlook and essential to engage.” These key writings include texts by Norman McLaren, Peter Kubelka, Vachel Lindsay, Jean Epstein, Béla Balázs, Germaine Dulac, Miriam Hansen, and André Bazin, none of which I was familiar with. Throughout the book, the rare mentions of cartoons and animation movies in the writings of cultural critics and philosophers are treated as precious discoveries. Theorists of film and mass culture such as Sergei Eisenstein, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno repeatedly turned to Disney cartoons and Looney Tunes characters in articulating their reflections on aesthetics and politics. Eisenstein devised a category of “plasmaticness” that he evoked in order to stress the originary shape-shifting potential of the animated movie, the way an object or image can potentially adopt any form. For Benjamin, “Mickey Mouse proves that a creature can still survive even when it has thrown off all resemblance to a human being. He disrupts the entire hierarchy of creatures that is supposed to culminate in mankind.” Adorno and Horkheimer found nothing funny about cartoons and argued that Donald Duck actively participated in the violent oppression of the proletariat by the forces of capitalism. Writing later in the century, Stanley Cavell mulled over the “abrogation of gravity” in cartoons where Sylvester the Cat or Wil E. Coyote run over the edge of a cliff and continue their course in midair. This allows the author of the last chapter in the volume to enunciate the “first theorem of cartoon physics”: “Any body suspended in space will remain in space until made aware of its situation” (the second theorem states that “Any body passing through solid matter (usually at high velocity) will leave a perforation conforming to its perimeter”.)

Cartoon physics

Animation theory is not necessarily tied to film theory: indeed, many contributions to this volume do not start from the pantheon of film theory authors or the key concepts of the discipline. Animation can be engaged with and theorized from other perspectives: as a strand of critical thought that focuses on subaltern cultures, as in Japan, or within an epistemology of scientific objectivity and experimental representation, or from the point of view of graphic art history and media art. Several chapters focus on the link between scientific visualization practices and the history of animation. The scientific experiment plays a central role in the history of cinematography. Animation itself rests on a scientific fact: by presenting a sequence of still images in quick enough succession, the viewer interprets them as a continuous moving image. This persistence of retinal perception was exploited by the early devices of animation that used a series of drawn images portrayed in stages in motion to create a moving picture. One contributor even sees the origins of 3D animation in a 1860 invention by French entrepreneur François Willème. A glass dome, housing a perimeter ring of twenty-four cameras directed inward at a central subject, allowed camera shutters to open simultaneously to produce a “photosculpture” that was not unlike the bullet-time sequence in the film The Matrix. The experiment of film allows the viewer to experience the world in a novel way: animation, like the scientific experiment itself, becomes the way to think at the limit of understanding in an attempt to get past that limit. Scientific uses of animation include medical anatomy and health education, dimensional modeling in biology or in physics, mathematical abstraction, and all kinds of pedagogical materials. Animated images do not only illustrate: they are instrumental in the process of discovery. Climate science would be less potent without the time-lapse images of shrinking glaciers and melting polar ice caps.

Japan is in a league of its own when it comes to animation theory. As mentioned, a book on the theory of anime, Manga eiga-ron, was written as early as 1941, with subsequent editions in 1965 and in 2005. In Japanese, eiga-ron has a different meaning from “film theory”, and a different history as well. Contributions to Animating Film Theory show how animation needs to be thought in relation to media beyond film to account for the singular place of animated images in Japan. One author explores how experimental Japanese Xerox artists in the 1960s operated a crossover between animation and graphic design that sheds light on the specific context within which the issue of technological reproduction and duplication was discussed. The first translation in Japanese of Walter Benjamin’s essay “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction” was published and discussed in Graphication, Fuji Xerox’s corporate PR magazine that presented itself as a cutting-edge publication venue for graphic art and media criticism. More generally, the great divide between commercial and academic publications that marks the intellectual landscape in America does not exist in Japan, where the bulk of critical theories are translated, published and disseminated through non-academic journals as well as mass-market books and “mooks” (a magazine in book format.) Two of Japan’s main animation critics and public intellectuals, Otsuka Eiji and Azuma Hiroki, have organized part of their critical work outside the circuit of academia and write for a broad public readership consisting of hardcore fans of media subcultures. They invite a re-reading of the question of realism in animation: beyond photographic realism and a drawing style inherited from manga comics, anime films hint toward a new style of transmedia realism without any real-world referent. The vibrant worlds of Japanese anime, manga, and video games form the basis of an alternative sphere of expression that popular Japanese critics theorize from outside the realm of film studies.

Whither animation theory?

For Gilles Deleuze, the primary operation of philosophy is problematization, the cultivation of problems such that philosophy can then go about the task of fabricating concepts. What is the problem of animation that it requires a theory? What are the key concepts that may allow animation theory to make sense and generate meaning? Film studies, in their classical form, evolved from questions of ontology, to questions of reception, to questions of context. What is film and its relationship with reality? How does film have an effect on its viewers? What is the social and political context in which film is made and received? Starting from a different set of questions, animation theory must take its own course and develop its own methodological tools. Animating Film Theory only points toward that goal, and merely sketches out the challenges that theory-makers and philosophers of the moving image might have to grapple with. The first question, already pointed out by Sergei Eisenstein and Jean Epstein, has to do with the quality of “animism” that turns people into objects and objects into animate creatures: what makes a world animated and imbued with a life of its own? A second set of questions could coalesce around the issue of self-reflexivity: animation movies are aware of themselves as works of imaginary creation, and the hand of the drawer is never far from the drawn picture. What separates us from the world of fiction, and how can we inhabit it by breaking the fourth wall that separates screen characters from the audience? The third indication we might learn from animated movies is not to take life too seriously: as the last chapter on “cartoon physics” indicates, we will always enjoy a good Tom-and-Jerry cartoon and the hilarity that courses ending in midair and cat-shaped holes might provoke.

War Is Interested in You

2 Mar 2022 Etienne RPLeave a comment

**A review of An Empire of Indifference: American War and the Financial Logic of Risk Management, Randy Martin, Duke University Press, 2007.**

In An Empire of Indifference, Randy Martin makes the argument that a financial logic of risk management underwrites US foreign policy and domestic governance. Securitization, derivatives, hedging, arbitrage, risk, multiplier effect, leverage: these keywords of finance can be applied to the field of war-making and empire-building. The war on terror has created an empire of indifference that distances itself from any particular situation, just like the high finance of Wall Street is unconcerned about the travails of the real economy in Main Street. Finance can help us understand how foreign policy decisions are made, military interventions are planned, and scarce resources are allocated for maximum leverage. As a diplomat trained in economics, I find this angle very stimulating. However, the author approaches it from the perspective of the cultural critic, not as an economist or a political scientist. His book is written on the spur of the moment and oscillates between a denunciation of the war on terror and a conventional analysis of mounting risks in the financial sector. His logic is sloppy at best and his references to finance and economics are unsystematic and clumsy. Even his Marxism is of the literary type: he treats Marx as a shibboleth and a source of metaphors, not as an analytical toolbox or a conceptual guide. In the following lines, I would like to reclaim the impetus of mixing economics, war studies, and finance. But first, let me try to summarize Randy Martin’s argument.

Theories of imperialism

The link between the logic of capital and the expansion of Western power was first articulated in the theory of imperialism. For Marxists, imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism. Marx himself did not use the word “imperialism”, nor is there anything in his work that corresponds exactly to the concepts of imperialism advanced by later Marxist writers. He did, of course, have a theory of capitalism, and his work contains extensive, if rather scattered, coverage of the impact of capitalism on non-European societies. Unlike many of his successors, Marx saw the relative backwardness of the non-European world, and its subjection to European empires, as a transient stage in the formation of a capitalist world economy. The conceptualizing and theorizing of imperialism by Marxists has evolved over time in response to developments in the global capitalist economy and in international politics. For Rudolf Hilferding, finance capital is marked by the highest level of concentration of economic and political power. State power breeds international conflicts, while internal conflicts increase with the concentration of capital. Nikolai Bukharin transformed Hilferding’s analysis by setting it in the context of a world economy in which two tendencies were at work. The tendency to monopoly and the formation of groups of finance capital is one, and the other is an acceleration of the geographical spread of capitalism and its integration into a single world capitalist economy. Vladimir Illich Lenin also considered Hilferding’s thesis “a very valuable theoretical analysis” and complemented it with the view that rich capitalist nations were able to delay their final crisis by keeping the poorer nations underdeveloped and deep in debt, and dependent on them for manufactured goods, jobs, and financial resources. Rosa Luxemburg wrote the most comprehensive theory of imperialism, and her conclusion that the limits of the capitalist system drive it to imperialism and war led her to a lifetime of campaigning against militarism and colonialism.

Randy Martin only mentions these early contributions in passing. He devotes more time to contemporary critiques of imperialism articulated by Giovanni Arrighi, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, David Harvey, and others. Earlier Marxists saw the expansion of empires as the sign of capitalism’s imminent demise. By contrast, for their modern epigones, the empire is here to last. They analyze the constitution of global imperial formations as the extension of neoliberalism to all sectors of social life. Empire is the new logic and structure of rule that has emerged with the globalization of economic and financial exchanges. Although capital’s expansion inevitably involves proliferating economic and financial crises, these shocks to the system are not signs of imminent collapse but, instead, mechanisms of adaptation and adjustment. Under neoliberalism, war and empire-making are privatized and generate in response insurgencies and resistance of the multitudes from below. As Slavoz Zizek observed about the Iraq war, “there were too many reasons for the war”: the American decision to invade Iraq in March 2003 was overdetermined and justified by a long list of arguments, from bringing democracy to asserting hegemony and securing oil. President Eisenhower’s greatest fears about the expansion of the military-industrial complex have not only been realized, they have been surpassed due to the symbiotic relationship it has with the neoliberal agenda.

Asset-Backed Security

Works penned by critics of empire are usually reactive: they come after the facts and often react to geopolitical events such as the launch of a preemptive war by the US in response to the September 11 attacks, the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan and the extension of counter-insurgency, or the vilification of presidential power brought forth by Donald Trump. Randy Martin’s book was published in 2007, shortly before the start of the subprime crisis that ushered a sharp decline in economic activity known as the Great Recession. He achieves a certain degree of prescience by pointing out the imbalances building in the subprime loan market and the excessive leverage of government-sponsored enterprises such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. But his main contribution is to assess what the recent ascent of finance has meant for the conduct of military interventions and foreign policy. “Simply put, finance divides the world between those able to avail themselves of wealth opportunities through risk taking and those who are considered ‘at risk’.” Populations become the target of portfolio management at home and abroad. The logic of finance by which the United States manages its human assets and social liabilities now guides its foreign policy. The ability of an individual or a nation to sustain debt is portrayed as a sign of strength and rewarded with access to additional capital and good credit rating. Those citizens or countries deemed to being bad risks are cut short and left out to loan sharks and debt collectors.

Martin devoted one full book to The Financialization of Daily Life, analyzing the mechanisms by which finance permeates and orients the activities of markets and social life. An Empire of Indifference focuses on what finance does to foreign policy and war-making. War today takes on a financial logic in the way it is organized and prosecuted. America applies a utilitarian frame to war and peace, and seeks tradeoffs between security and risk. Security gives way to securitization, war-making follows the same rules as financial products such as options and derivatives, and Wall Street’s indifference to Main Street now extends to the empire’s carelessness about the lands and populations that become the target of foreign interventions. More specifically, the author sees a strong parallel between monetary policy and the Bush doctrine of preemptive strikes. Inflationary pressures have to be nipped in the bud before they affect the overall economy; likewise, enemies are to be defeated before they can make their antagonism manifest. By converting potential threats into actual conflicts, the war on terror transfers future uncertainty into present risk. Bridging the future into the present has been the guiding principle for monetary policy since the late 1970s. The same logic of rational expectations and backward induction now applies to military operations abroad and to homeland security: controlling risk necessitates constant interventions and is necessarily preemptive. For risks to be reliably calculable, the future must look like the present.

Security and securitization

Randy Martin sees other parallels between circuits of finance and the military. Both seek to leverage narrowly focused interventions and investments to more global effects. This is the logic of arbitrage, coupled with financial derivatives, that exploits small differences in market value and leverages it on a large scale. New battlefield tactics rely on concentrated, relatively small deployment of soldiers to achieve strategic results. Special Forces are meant to eliminate targets before a formal battle is joined; air strikes and armed drones use high-frequency information to maximize return. The intervention in Iraq was supposed to usher a new era of peace and democracy in the Middle East, solving the Palestinian question and giving lasting guarantees of security to Israel along the way. The outcome could have been predicted by pursuing the parallel with market forces and financial intermediation. The war on terror creates what it seeks to destroy; likewise, derivatives create the volatility they were meant to manage. Despite the rhetoric, preemptive wars and forward deployments do not necessarily attempt to deter enemy action, to ward off an undesirable future, but are as likely to prove provocative, to increase the likelihood of conflict, to precipitate that future. American imperium now oscillates between invasion and isolation and remains geared toward short-term gains and high risk, high rewards investments. In this new empire of indifference, people are left to manage the mess that the occupiers deposited before taking flight.

My main issue with Randy Martin’s Empire of Indifference is that the author is not an economist: he literally does not know what he is talking about. Finance is for him a play of words and a source of metaphors, not a rigorous method of allocating risk and maximizing return. Even his Marxism is literary and evocative as opposed to rational and analytical. The book is tied to a particular moment in recent history, associated with the doctrine of preemptive war and the marriage of convenience between neoliberalism and neoconservatism. Its chapters read more like newspaper columns or opinion essays meant to put the news in perspective and to influence public opinion toward desired goals. And yet, Martin’s proposition to look at imperial ambitions in the context of the powers of finance is highly relevant in our day and age. Since Keynes’ Economic Consequences of the Peace, economists have been brought to the negotiating table; it is now time to bring them to the war room as well. Finance is doubly performative: it impacts a nation’s ability to declare and sustain war, and it affects the way war is conducted. Financial markets are often seen as reacting to political events. They are the biggest consumers of country risk analysis and geopolitical futures, and they absorb information in real time. But finance also shapes our vision of possible futures and produces affects and expectations that impact the results of foreign engagements.

You may not be interested in war, but…

Maybe it is time for finance to become weaponized, and for corporate strategy and military tactics to cross-pollinate each other. The US military has a National Guard and Reserve component of more than 1.1 million members. I wonder how many of them work in the financial sector, or how many West Point graduates are employed by Wall Street firms. There has always been a revolving door between investment banking and the DoD. The generation that laid the ground of the post-WWII international order, known collectively as the Wise Men, all had military experience. Finance as an academic discipline grew out of war-financed research in decision science and optimization. Operation research and game theory were the brain children of the Cold War, and had military as well as economic applications. DARPA has pioneered the use of prediction markets and futures exchanges based on possible political developments in various countries and regions, including violent events such as assassinations or terror attacks. To paraphrase Leon Trotsky, economists and financial market operators may not be interested in war, but war is interested in them.

Gay Dykes on Acid-Free Paper

12 Feb 20229 Jun 2022 Etienne RPLeave a comment

**A review of Information Activism: A Queer History of Lesbian Media Technologies, Cait McKinney, Duke University Press, 2020.**

Lesbian feminists invented the Internet, and they did it without the help of a computer. This is the surprising finding that comes out of the book Information Activism: A Queer History of Lesbian Media Technologies, published by Duke University Press in 2020. As the author Cait McKinney immediately makes it clear, the Internet that lesbians built was not composed of URL, HTML, and IP servers: it was an assemblage of print newsletters, paper index cards, telephone hotlines, paper-based community archives, and early digital technologies such as electronic mailing lists and computer databases. What made these early media technologies “lesbian” is that they formed the information infrastructure of a social movement that Cait McKinney describes as “information activism” and that was oriented toward the needs and aspirations of lesbian women in North America during the 1980s and 1990s. And what makes Cait McKinney’s book a “queer history” is that she brings feminism and queer studies to bear on a media history of US lesbian-feminist information activism based on archival research, oral interviews, and participant observation through volunteering in the Lesbian Herstory Archives in New York. Information activism took many forms: sorting index cards, putting mailing labels on newsletters, answering the telephone every time it rings, converting old archives into digital format… All these activities may not sound glamorous, but they were part of the everyday politics of “being lesbian” and “doing feminism.”

The Internet that women built

Recently the role of women in the development of information technology and the Internet has attracted a great deal of attention. Thanks in part to the effort of popular author Walter Isaacson, the names of Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper, Jean Jennings, and Jennifer Doudna have become more familiar to modern readers, and their enduring legacy may have contributed to attract more young women into computer science. Even so, computing remains a heavily male-dominated field, and the industry’s openness to “the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes” (to quote from a famous Apple commercial) is mostly limited to the masculine part of mankind. It therefore bears reminding that the Internet revolution was brought forth by information activists of all stripes and colors, not just white cis males from California. The “misfits” lauded by Steve Jobs may also have included dykes, stone butches, high femmes, riot grrrls, and lavender women as well as trans and nonbinary subjects. Besides, as feminist critique has pointed out, the concept of the “Internet revolution” or the “information superhighway” are masculinist notions that need to be reexamined. There is a gender bias in popular accounts of technology development and innovation that tends to exclude the contribution of certain agents, especially queer subjects and women of color. Technologies are gendered, and they also exhibit heteronormative and white biases. To fix this problem, much more is needed than writing more inclusive histories of innovation and exposing occupational sexism in the technology industry.

The lesbian volunteers whose activities are chronicled in Information Activism did not really invent the Internet. They did something much more purposeful: they set out to create a world bearable and a life worth living for lesbian women in North America. They did this work within conditions of exclusion from access to reliable information about lesbian life and from the margins of social structures and even mainstream feminism. Confronted with discrimination, isolation, and invisibility, they decided to build an information infrastructure of their own, one connection at a time. Creating alternative communication channels responded to conditions in which many women lacked access to other lesbians and were desperate to find connection. Sometimes, the sole purpose of maintaining this information infrastructure was to show lesbian women that they were not alone. There was another person to talk to at the other end of the help line at the New York Lesbian Switchboard ; other researchers subscribing to the newsletter Matrices were doing stuff in a field marginalized within academic studies ; documents stored at the Lesbian Herstory Archives in New York City bore the testimony of queer lives whose memorialization was a source of inspiration for modern generations. In some cases, just knowing the information was “out there” was enough to go on living with a renewed purpose. In other instances, women engaged in long “rap sessions” discussing feminist politics over the phone, started collaborative research projects that led to the emergence of a full-fledge discipline of queer studies, or found companionship and accomplishment in their volunteering projects. Information makes promises and fulfills aspirations that are much greater than “finding things out.”

A Chatroom of One’s Own

Networks have been critical to the construction of feminist histories. Cait McKinney examines several cases of networked communication initiatives that predate the emergence of online media: the publication of the newsletter Matrices designed for sharing information and resources with anyone doing research related to lesbian feminism; the New York Lesbian Switchboard connecting callers to a source of information and advice; the Lesbian Herstory Archives’ collection of print documents and audio tapes; the patient collection of indexes and bibliographies that made lesbian feminist essays and periodicals searchable and actionable. The technologies used in these pre-digital enterprises now seem antique: typewriters, photocopiers, landline telephones, letter mail, stacks of papers, cardboards, index cards, and face-to-face interactions. But the results were far-reaching and futuristic. They laid the ground on which a lesbian-feminist movement could expand and self-organize. Information and communication networks allowed dispersed researchers to connect with each other, share information, and do lesbian research within unsupportive and sometimes openly hostile research environments. Women living in rural areas or isolated places were encouraged to become active nodes of the network by taking pictures, gathering newspaper clips, and audio-recording interviews to document events taking place in their geographic area. The Matrices newsletter facilitated historical research through the creation of a supportive information infrastructure ; it also allowed for the nationwide expansion of a social movement originally concentrated in New York; and it convinced dispersed readers that lesbian lives mattered and were worth documenting. Key initiatives grew out of the network, such as the volume Black Lesbians: An Annotated Bibliography compiled by JR Roberts to counter the invisibility of women of color in mainstream lesbian feminism. In the 1990s, many print newsletters lost relevance a web browsing developed and academic listservs became key networks for sharing information. Matrices stopped publishing in 1996, replaced ostensibly by commercial enterprises such as Google, Amazon, and digital publishing tools. But online communication does not present as much of a turning point as a continuation of networked modes of organization for feminist social movements.

Another example of continuity between analog and digital modes of communication is the lesbian telephone hotline staffed by volunteers in New York City that answered to every call with a listening ear and a range of helpful tips and advice. Like newsletters, telephone hotlines connected lesbians at a distance using information. For the historian, they are harder to document: volunteers were anonymous and cannot be traced back, and all that remains of the long nights spent answering the phone are the call logs recording every conversations with a few notes and doodles scribbled in the margin. The logs suggest that many callers expressed despair, loneliness, or confusion; but others called for help finding something fun to do that night, for precise information about support groups or community resources, or just to talk and “rap” about gender issues. Even before the appearance of mailing lists and online forums, the need to have a chatroom of one’s own was clearly felt and answered. McKinney also uses the log archives as entries to thinking about feminist research methods, multimedia practices, care provision, and affective labor involved in lesbian telephone hotlines. She reminds readers that feminist activism involved less acknowledged dynamics such as boredom, repetition, isolation, and burnout. What makes a telephone hotline “lesbian feminist” is the self-definition and principles under which the switchboard operated. Volunteers were recruited from within the lesbian community and bisexual women were tacitly kept out, while the policy toward trans women and gender nonconforming persons was left undefined, although their needs were also addressed on an ad hoc basis. These remarks remind us that terminology, such as the moniker “gay and lesbian” as opposed to the more contemporary “LGBTQI+”, are historical constructions that cast aside or rigidify some categories as much as they include or deconstruct others.

A feminist mode of network thinking

Network thinking has been a feature of feminist activism and knowledge production since before the consumer Internet. “Improving (lesbian) lives with information” could be the motto of a behemoth social media company catering to a niche market; it was always the principle under which lesbian activists operated. The feminist movement produced original ideas about communication, access to information, capacity building, and the power of alternative structures for organizing people and ideas. Lesbian feminists also offered pre-digital feminist critiques of networks as egalitarian ideals that can conceal functional hierarchies and threaten the privacy of participants. Computer networks were dreamt and imagined before they were invented and built. The librarians and volunteers who collected the Lesbian Periodicals Index were imagining computer databases and electronic indexing while shuffling paper cards into shoeboxes ; the Lesbian Herstory Archives’ project leaders were figuring putting all their resources online before they had the equipment and manpower to convert documents into digital format. They were also early adopters of information technology, manifesting a can-do attitude and a hands-on sensibility familiar to feminist activism—and more generally to “women’s work.” McKinnon characterizes as “capable amateurism” a fearless approach to learning and implementing new media technologies; a gendered belief in the capacity of amateurs to work hard and acquire new skills; and a willingness to experiment, improvize, and figure things out on the fly. Lesbian feminism is also informed by values of non-hierarchy, direct participation by members, and an investment in decentralized processes.

Today these values are reflected in many internet communities. A good-enough approach (“rough consensus”), a culture of sharing (“copyleft”), and collectively organized work (“open source”) as well as political militancy (“Anonymous”) characterize segments of the computer industry as much as they are part of the lesbian-feminist heritage. One may even see in the Slow Web movement echoes of the politics of nonadoption and digital hesitancy that was developed by some activist groups surveyed by the author. Beyond lesbian history, these activists have much to teach all of us about why, when, and for whom information comes to matter. The lesbian feminist imagination allows us to envisage a world brought together by connection, care, and “sisterhood” that earlier feminist networks originally articulated and that worldwide Internet connectivity now makes potentially real. A lesbian-feminist approach also reminds us that networks make equalitarian promises that conceal the power structures, protocols, and control mechanisms they actually exert. Computer databases and search engines are not neutral; they determine what is thinkable and sayable through filtering access to information and indexing resources into categories and keywords. These are deeply political choices, and the way decision-making processes and governance bodies are structured matters a great deal. If we want to keep a free and open Internet and uphold the principle of net neutrality, perhaps we should learn from a history of information networks written through older forms of feminist print culture.

Lesbianism is so twentieth century

But does the lesbian past still talk to our queer age? As a self-described “masculine, nonbinary person,” Cait McKinney is ambivalent about the category of lesbianism. She originally assumed that “lesbian” as a specific term of self-identification was historically dated and situated in a period of late twentieth-century militancy, and she was surprised to learn that the term was still popular among a younger generation of queer-identified activists. Young volunteers at the Lesbian Herstory Archives articulate deep attachment to lesbian history and subcultures, and the snippets of information and pictures that the center posts on Instagram are instantly popular. Some business ventures exploit the revival in lesbian-feminist militancy heritage, selling T-shirts, collectable items, and other paraphernalia bearing slogans and pictures from the seventies and eighties. McKinney also thinks lesbianism, while providing a big tent for women with nonconforming gender identities, also had exclusionary effects as many lesbian-feminists were historically hostile to trans women and indifferent to women of color. As a matter of fact, lesbianism meant much more than women having sex with women. Likewise, the erotic exceeds what is commonly understood as sensuous, sexually appealing, and emotionally gratifying acts. Eroticism can be described as a communication practice, and information activism is definitely part of it. Reading archives against the grain (or along the archival grain, as Laura Stoller invites us to do) also refers to the grain of one’s skin, and the archival touch implies an embodied experience laden with sensory perceptions and affects. Libriarianship and archivism are professions that have been historically attractive to women, including persons attracted to same-sex relations, and they have often served as erotic projections of male—and sometimes female—desire. There is something queer about manipulating acid-free paper, and Information Activism consciously addresses how librarians and archivists cope with the affective and intimate impacts of accumulated print media.

From Hot Line to Help Line

22 Jan 20221 Feb 2022 Etienne RP2 Comments

**A review of Neutral Accent: How Language, Labor, and Life Become Global, A. Aneesh, Duke University Press, 2015.**

Neutral Accent At the turn of the twenty-first century, China became identified as the world’s factory and India as the world’s call center. Like China, India attracted the attention of journalists and pundits who heralded a new age of globalization and documented the rise of the world’s two emerging giants. Foremost among them, Thomas Friedman wrote several New York Times columns about call centers in Bangalore and devoted nearly half a book, The World is Flat, to reviewing personal conversations he had with Indian entrepreneurs working in the IT sector. He argued that outsourcing service jobs to Bangalore was, in the end, good for America—what goes around comes around in the form of American machine exports, service contracts, software licenses, and more US jobs. He further expanded his optimistic view to conjecture that two countries at both ends of a call center will never fight a war against each other. An intellectual tradition going back to Montesquieu posits that “sweet commerce” tends to civilize people, making them less likely to resort to violent or irrational behavior. According to this view, economic relations between states act as a powerful deterrent to military conflict. As during the Cold War, telecom lines can be used as a tool of conflict prevention: with the difference that the “hot line,” which used to connect the Kremlin to the White House, has been replaced by the “help line” which connects everyone in America to a call center in the developing world. The benefits of openness therefore extend to peace as well as prosperity. In a flat world, nations that open themselves up to the world prosper, while those that close their borders and turn inward fall behind.

Doing fieldwork in a call center

Anthropologists were also attracted to Asian factories and call center to conduct their fieldwork and write ethnographies of these peculiar workplaces. Spending time toiling along with fellow workers and writing about their participant observation would earn them a PhD and the launch of a career in an anthropology department in the United States. Doing fieldwork in a call center in Gurgaon near New Delhi came relatively easy to A. Aneesh. As a native Indian, he didn’t have much trouble adapting to the cultural context and fitting in his new work environment or gaining acceptance from his colleagues and informers. His access to the field came in the easiest way possible: he applied for a position in a call center, and after several rounds of recruitment sessions and interviews he landed a job as a telemarketing operator in a medium-sized company fictitiously designated as GoCom. He had already completed his PhD at that time and was an assistant professor at Stanford who took a one-year break to do fieldwork and publish research. He even benefited from the support of two research assistants while in New Delhi. There was no special treatment for him at the office floor, however. He started as a trainee alongside newly-hired college graduates, attending lectures and hands-on sessions to get the proper voice accent and marketing skills, then moved to the call center’s main facility to work as a telemarketer doing the night shift. He engaged in casual conversations with his peers, ate with them in the cafeteria where lunch was served after midnight, conducted formal interviews with some of them, and collected written documents such as training manuals and instruction memos.

What makes Aneesh’s Neutral Accent different from Friedman’s The World is Flat? How does an ethnographic account of daily work in an Indian call center compare with a columnist’s reportage on the frontiers of globalization? What conclusions can we infer from both texts about the forces and drivers that shape our global present? Is there added value in a scholarly work based on extended field research as compared with a journalistic essay based on select interviews and short field visits? And what is at stake in talking of call centres as evidence of a globalised world? As must be already clear, the methods used by the two authors to gather information couldn’t be more different. Aneesh’s informants were ordinary people designated by their first name—“Vikas, Tarun, Narayan, Mukul, and others”—who shared their attitudes toward their job, their experience and hardships, their dreams and aspirations. The employees with whom the author spent his working nights were recent college graduates, well-educated and ambitious, reflecting the aspirations and life values of the Indian middle-class. By contrast, Friedman associated with world-famous CEOs and founders of multi-million-dollar companies. They shared with him their worldview of a world brought together by the powerful forces of digitalization and convergence, and emphasized that globalization must have “two-way traffic.” To be true, Friedman also tells of his visits to a recruiting seminar where young Indians go to compete for the highly sought-after jobs, and to an “accent-neutralization” class where Indians learn how to make their accents sound more American. To distantiate himself from the arm-chair theorist of globalization, he emphasizes his contacts with “real” people from all walks of life. But he never pretends that his reportages amount to academic fieldwork or participant observation.

The view from below

The information collected through these methods of investigation is bound to be different. One can expect office workers to behave cautiously when addressed by a star reporter coming from the US, along with his camera crew, and introduced to the staff by top management for his reportage. The chit-chat, the informal tone, the casual conversations, and the mix of Hindi and English are bound to disappear from the scene, replaced by deference, neutral pronunciation, and silence. The views channeled by senior executives convey a different perspective from the ones expressed on the ground floor. As they confided themselves to Aneesh, employees at GoCom expressed a complete lack or pride about their job and loyalty for their company. They were in for the money, and suspected GoCom of cheating employees out of their incentive-based income. Their suspicion was not completely unfounded, and the author notices several cases of deception, if not outright cheating, regarding the computation of monthly salaries. Operators were also encouraged to mislead and cheat the customer through inflated promises or by papering over the small print in the contract. Turnover was high, and working in a call center was often viewed as a temporary position after college and before moving to other occupations. While Friedman is interested in abstract dichotomies, such as oppositions between tradition and modernity, global and local, rich and poor, Aneesh focuses on much more mundane and concrete issues: the compensation package, the commute from home, or working the night shift.

Indeed, night work is a factor that goes almost unnoticed in Friedman’s reportage, while it is a major issue in Neutral Accent. “Why is there a total absence, in thought and in practice, of any collective struggle against the graveyard shift worldwide?” asks the author, who explains this invisibility by corporate greed, union weakness, and the divergence between economic, social, and physiological well-being. He documents the deleterious effects of nocturnal labor on workers’ health, especially on women who suffer from irregular menstruation and breast cancer risk. He notices the large number of smokers around him, as well as people who complain about an array of anxieties without directing their complaints on night work per se. The frustration and discomfort of working at night is displaced to other issues: the impossibility to marry and start a family—although night work is also used by some to delay marriage or run away from family life—and the complaint about commute cabs not running on time. Indeed, what Thomas Friedman and other reporters see as a valuable perk of the job, the ability for young employees to travel safely to and from work thanks to the chauffeured car-pool services provided by the call centers, ends up as a source of frustration and anguish due to the delay and waiting time occasioned by the transport. Nocturnal labor affects men and women differently; Indian women in particular feel the brunt of social stigma as “night workers,” leading some of them to conceal their careers while looking for marriage partners, or alternatively, limiting their choice of partner to men in the same business. While the lifting of restrictions on women’s right to work at night was justified by gender neutrality, the idea of being neutral to differences carries with it disturbing elements that feminist critique has already pointed out.

Being neutral to differences

Neutrality, or indifference to difference, also characterizes the most-often noticed trait of Indian call centers: the neutralization of accent and the mimetic adoption of certain characteristics such as the Americanization of the first-names of employees who assume a different identity at work. Aneesh points out that neutral accent is not American English: during job interviews, he was asked to “stop rolling your R’s as Americans do,” and invited to speak “global English,” which is “neither American nor British.” As he notes, “such an accent does not allude to a preexisting reality; it produces it.” Accent neutralization is now an industry with its teaching methods, textbooks, and instructors. Call center employees learn to stress certain syllables in words, raise or lower their tone along the sentence, use colloquial terms with which they may not be familiar, and acquire standard pronunciation of difficult words such as “derogatory” or “disparaging,” which they ironically note in the Hindi script. Some employees are repeatedly told that they are “too polite” and that they should not use “sir” or “madam” in every sentence. For Aneesh, “neutralization allows, only to a degree, the unhinging of speech from its cultural moorings and links it with purposes of global business.” Mimesis, the second feature of transmutation, reconnects the individual to a cultural identity by selecting traits that help establish global communication, such as cheerfulness and empathy. Employees are told to keep a smiling face and use a friendly voice while talking with their overseas clients. But despite their best efforts, some cultural traits are beyond the comprehension of call center agents: “The moment they start talking about baseball, you have absolutely no idea what’s going on there” (the same could be said regarding Indian conversations about cricket.)

Aneesh uses neutralization and mimesis as a key to comprehending globalization itself. They only work one way: as the author notes, “there is no pressure, at least currently, on American or British cultures for communicative adaptation, as they are not required to simulate Indian cultural traits.” But Western consumers are also affected by processes at work in the outsourcing and offshoring of service activities. Individual identities and behaviors are increasingly monitored at the systemic level in numerous databases covering one’s credit score, buying habits, medical history, criminal record, and demographics such as age, gender, region, and education. Indeed, most outbound global calls at GoCom were not initiated by call center agents but by a software program that used algorithms to target specific profiles—demographic, economic, and cultural—in America and Great Britain. Artificial intelligence and predictive algorithms, only nascent at the time of the author’s fieldwork in 2004-2005, now drive the call center industry and standardize the process all agents use, leaving little room for human agency. Data profiles of customers can be bought and sold at a distance, forming “system identities” governed by algorithms and embedded in software platforms that structure possible forms of interaction. Identities are no longer fixed; they keep changing with each new data point, escaping our control and our right of ownership over them.

Global conversations

We cannot judge The World is Flat and Neutral Accent by the same criteria. The standard to evaluate a journalistic reportage is accuracy of fact, balanced analysis, human interest, and impact over readers. Using this yardstick, Friedman’s book was a great success and, like Fukuyama’s End of History, came to define the times and orient global conversations. The flattened world became a standard expression animated with a life of its own, and generated scores of essays explaining why the world was not really flat after all. Many Indians credited Friedman for writing positively about India and often echoed his views, claiming that the outsourcing business was doing wonders for the economy. Others critiqued the approach, saying the flat world was just another word for underpaying Indian workers and denying them the right to migrate and find work in the US. By contrast, Aneesh’s book was not geared to the general public and, apart from an enthusiastic endorsement by Saskia Sassen on the back cover and a few book reviews in scholarly journals, its publication did not elicit much debate in the academic world. In his own way, Aneesh paints a nuanced picture of globalization. Where most people see call centers as generating cultural integration and economic convergence, he insists on disjunctures, fault lines, and differentiation. The “help line” is not just a tool to connect and erase differences; it may also create frictions and dissonances of its own. A world economy neutral to day and night differences; a labor law that disregards gender disparity; work practices that erase cultural diversity; digital identities that exist beyond our control: neutralization is a force that affects call center agents and their distant customers much beyond the adoption of global English and neutral accent as a means of communication.

Science’s Big Picture

12 Jan 202213 Jan 2022 Etienne RPLeave a comment

**A review of Epigenetic Landscapes: Drawings as Metaphor, Susan Merrill Squier, Duke University Press, 2017.**

Epigenetic landscapes Susan M. Squier believes drawings, cartoons, and comic strips should play a role in science and in medicine. Not only in the waiting room of the medical doctor or during the pauses scientists take from work, but straight into the curriculum of science students and in the prescriptions given to ailing patients. She even has a word for it: graphic medicine, or the application of the cartoonist’s art to problems of health and disease. Her point is not only that laughing or smiling while reading a comic book may have beneficial effects on the patient’s morale and health. Works of graphic medicine can enable greater understanding of medical procedures, and can even generate new research questions and clinical approaches. Cartoons can help treat cancer; they might even contribute to cancer research. Pretending otherwise is to adhere to a reductionist view of science that excludes some people, especially women and the artistically inclined, from the laboratory. In order to make science more inclusive, scientists should espouse “explanatory pluralism” and remain open to nonverbal forms of communication, including drawings and pictures. Comics and cartoons are a legitimate source of knowledge production and information sharing, allowing for an embodied and personal experience to be made social. They are providing new ways to look at things, enabling new modes of intervention, and putting research content in visual form. In comics, body posture and gesture occupy a position of primacy over text, and graphic medicine therefore facilitates an encounter with the whole patient instead of focusing on abstract parameters such as illness or diagnosis. Studies are already suggesting that medical students taught to make their own comics become more empathetic caregivers as doctors. Health-care workers, patients, family members, and caregivers should be encouraged to create their own comics and to circulate them as a form of people-centered mode of knowledge creation.

Difficult words made easy

Epigenetic Landscapes is full of difficult words: DNA methylation, chromatin modification, homeorhesis, chreod, pluripotency, anastomosis (I will explain each and every one of them in this review). It also mobilizes several distinct disciplines: embryology, genetics, thermodynamics, architecture, science and technology studies, and art critique. But the reader needs not be a rocket scientist or a medical PhD to get the gist of the book. The author’s apologia of graphic medicine, or the call to apply graphic art to healthcare and to medical science, is part of a broader agenda: the rehabilitation of gender-based and art-sensitive forms of intellection that have been estranged from the life sciences. The entanglement of art and science that the author advocates is informed by feminist epistemology: in addition to the French philosopher Michel Serres, the feminist scholar Donna Haraway is presented as one of her main sources of inspiration. However Susan Squier doesn’t discuss theory in the abstract: in order to prove her larger point, she takes the life story and scientific achievement of one scientist, the biologist and embryologist C. H. Waddington (1905-1975), as well as one of the main concepts he introduced, the epigenetic landscape, a figure that has played a foundational role in the formation of epigenetics. Squier emphasizes Waddington’s claim that art and science are inextricably intertwined, and that one largely informs and provides exposure to the development of the other. While Waddington’s model, the epigenetic landscape, represented the determinative nature of development, demonstrating how canalization leads an individual to return to the normal development course even when disrupted, recently scientists are discovering that the developmental process is neither linear nor so determined. This echoes Squier’s mode of narration, which incorporates scholarship from various disciplines and exhibits nonlinearity and indeterminacy as a style of thought.

Epigenetics is a hot topic in contemporary science: it is one of the most often quoted words in biology articles, and dozens of textbooks or popular essays have been devoted to the field—some with catchy titles such as “Change Your Genes, Change Your Life,” or “Your Body is a Self-Healing Machine.” According to its scientific promoters, epigenetics can potentially revolutionize our understanding of the structure and behavior of biological life on Earth. It explains why mapping an organism’s genetic code is not enough to determine how it develops or acts, and shows how nurture combines with nature to engineer biological diversity. Some pundits draw the conclusion that “biology is no longer destiny” and that we can optimize our health outcomes by making lifestyle choices on what we eat and how we live, or by controlling the toxicity of our environment. Epigenetics is now a widely-used term, but there is still a lot of confusion surrounding what it actually is and does. Susan Squier does not add to the hype surrounding the field, but nor does she provide intellectual clarity about the potential and limitations of recent research. Moving away from contemporary debates, she focuses on the personality of C.H. Waddington and follows the cultural trail of the metaphor he helped create and that finds echoes in fields as diverse as graphic medicine, landscape architecture, and bio-art. The epigenetic landscape is all at once a model, a metaphor and a picture that appeared in three different iterations: “the river”, “the ball on the hill”, and “the view from underneath with guy wires.”

Three pictures of the epigenetic landscape

As a scientific model, the epigenetic landscape fell out of use in the late 1960s, returning only with the advent of big-data genomic research in the twenty-fist century. Yet as the epigenetic landscape has come back into widespread use, it has done so with a difference. Now the terms refers primarily to the specific mechanisms by which epigenetics works on a molecular level, particularly through DNA methylation and chromatin modification (the first inhibits gene expression in animal cells, the second makes the chromatin structure more condensed and as a result, transcription of the gene is repressed.) When Waddington conceptualized the epigenetic landscape and coined the words homeorhesis and chreods, he had a broader signification in mind. Homeorhesis, derived from the Greek for “similar flow”, is a concept encompassing dynamical systems which return to a trajectory, as opposed to systems which return to a particular state of equilibrium, which is termed homeostasis. Waddington presented the first version of his epigenetic landscape in 1940 as a river flowing in a deep valley, a visual metaphor for the role played by stable pathways (later to be called “chreodes”) in the process of biological development. This flow represents the progressive changes in size, shape, and function during the life of an organism by which its genetic potentials (genotype) are translated into functioning mature systems (phenotype). Waddington’s second landscape–an embryo, fertilized egg, or ball atop a contour-riven slope, also allows for further visual motion; while the river flows in a linear fashion, somewhat restricted by its blurred boundaries, the embryo has the possibility of rolling down any of the paths present on the hill. The third representation used by Waddington, with wires and nodes underneath the landscape, underscores the way gene expression can be pulled into different directions.

In Waddington’s vision, the role of the epigenetic landscape extended beyond the life sciences. The first representation of the model, published in his book Organizers and Genes (1940), was a drawing commissioned to the painter John Piper, who had been enrolled as a war artist to make paintings of buildings smashed by bombings. Waddington returned to the theme of collaboration between scientists and artists in his article “Art between the Wars”, where he praised the return to figurative painting under wartime conditions, and even more so in his book Behind Appearance: A study of the relations between Painting and the Natural Sciences in this Century, published in 1970. Both scientific knowledge and artistic creations, he argued, had turned “against old-fashioned common sense” and developed models, from quantum physics to abstract painting, that fundamentally challenged individual and collective representations. Behind Appearance emphasizes that both scientists and artists have come to acknowledge the extent to which they are implicated in their research. Drawing from Einstein’s remarks on the process of creation, Waddington asked whether words or images, symbols or myths, are the foundation of scientific thought. Two mythological figures were of particular importance for him: the world egg, the bland and round shape from which all things are born, and the Ouroboros, the snake that eats its tail. These figures can be found in many mythologies and they also help represent advances in modern science, from cosmological models of the Big Bang to the cybernetic notion of the feedback loop. As he grew older, Waddington was more willing to challenge the divide between science and the humanities in order to emphasize the unitary nature of knowledge.

Feminist epistemologies

He was also, or so argues Susan Squier, less constrained by gender boundaries and more willing to acknowledge women’s contribution to the advancement of science. When he was writing about art in conjunction to science, Waddington had in mind a broad readership that included many influential women, including his wife, fellow scientists, female artists, and women architects. By contrast, when he addressed his male peers at the Serbelloni Symposium in 1967 on a topic as large and open-ended as the refoundation of biological science, he was less inclined to challenge positivist orthodoxies and offer metaphysical musings. Women at this symposium were relegated to the role of the philosopher-of-science commenting on the proceedings from a detached perspective (not unlike Susan Squier’s own position), or the artist offering two poems to close the conference with a note of gendered artistry. For Susan Squier, a feminist epistemology encourages ambiguity and questioning. She conceives of her role as “poaching on academic territory in which I can claim at best amateur competence.” She notes how embryology makes pluripotent cells (stem cells that can develop into any kind of cell) and embryos visible by turning pregnant women into invisible bodies, and she redirects our attention from the embryo to the woman that is carrying it. For her, making the embryo visible is not just a matter of imaging technology: it is an act of mediation and remediation, in the sense that it mediates between the anatomical, the experimental, and the genetic; and that it offers remedy as it helps provide a treatment, an antidote or a cure. Using cartoons and comics as a mediating and remediating media, “graphic medicine” as she advocates it can help reintegrate the gendered experience exiled from formal medicine, by literally “making the womb talk.”

A feminist epistemology is not limited to the promotion of women in science. It studies the various influences of norms and conceptions of gender roles on the production and dissemination of knowledge. It avoids dubious claims about feminine cognitive differences, and balances an internal critique of mainstream research with an external perspective based on cultural studies and social critique. Squier’s analysis shows that Waddington’s epigenetic landscape was gendered as it represented the embryo cell without any reference to the female body. Her feminist critique of life sciences stresses plasticity rather than genetic determinism. She contests the dualism between science and the humanities, and argues that biology has been shaped all along by aesthetic and social concerns, just as the humanities and arts have engaged with life processes and vitalism. The scientific imagination is nurtured by myths and symbols, as Waddington himself acknowledged by conjuring the figures of the Ouroboros and the cosmic egg. The ability to think about biological development from different perspectives, visual as well as verbal, analytic as well as embodied, is understood to be a catalyst to creativity. Similarly, medicine as a healing process must include a narrative of the patient facing the disease, as well as representations—pictures or images—of illness and well-being. An evidence-only, process-oriented, and value-blind medicine has more difficulties curing patients. A doctor that takes the embodied, personal experience of the patient as a starting point is a better doctor.

Manga and anime

Epigenetic Landscapes provides us with a useful argument for rebalancing scientific and medical knowledge practices with sensorial and embodied experiences drawing from the humanities, the arts, and popular forms of expressions such as graphic novels and comic strips. But does this make the argument a feminist one, and does it apply to cultural contexts outside the Anglo-saxon world? In fact, I was surprised that no reference was made to Japan except a passing mention of Sesshū’s landscape ink painting from the fifteenth century. Japan has developed the art of explaining scientific concepts and medical training in graphic form. Anime and manga are part of any student’s formal and informal education, and famous scientists have published manga series popularizing their discipline under their names. The manga Black Jack and the TV series The Great White Tower, not to quote many others, have accompanied generations of medical students and are at the origin of many vocations into the profession. In Japan, graphic medicine doesn’t need advocacy, feminist or otherwise: it is part of the way things are done. My second remark is that the critique of phallogocentrism—to borrow a term from Derrida that Squier doesn’t use—will only bring you so far. Under this theory, abstract reasoning, which originates in the Greek logos and identifies with patriarchy, must give way to more embodied forms of knowledge practices that include the nonverbal, the intuitive, the sensorial. But we now live in an age where the image is everywhere, and where stimuli to our senses are ubiquitous. Our visual and aural cultures have received a boost with the diffusion of new media technologies. With computer graphics and artificial intelligence, anything that can be conceived can be pictured, animated, and made real in a virtual world that encroaches on our perceived environment. The written text isn not extinct however, and we can still figure things out without the help of animated images and virtual simulations. The non-representable, the purely abstract, and the ideational must remain part of the scientific imagination.

There Is No Us

23 Dec 202123 Dec 2021 Etienne RPLeave a comment

**A review of None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life, Stephen Best, Duke University Press, 2018.**

none-like-us This essay stands at the intersection of black studies, queer theory, and literary criticism and art critique. Its title, None Like Us, is taken from a sentence in David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, arguably the most radical of all anti-slavery documents written in the nineteenth century. The quotation, put on the book’s opening page, describes the wretched condition of coloured people in the United States as observed by the author. It ends with a prayer to God that “none like us ever may live again until time shall be no more.” Who is the “us” that the epigraph dooms to self-extinction and oblivion? Is there a collective subject when humans were treated as objects and disposed of as pieces of property? Can one write the history of people who did not exist, or whose existence is forever predicated on a negative relation to history? How does that “none like us” leave open the possibility for an “I,” the first singular person of the art critic, the historian, the queer subject? As Stephen Best writes, “None Like Us begins in the recognition that there is something impossible about blackness, that to be black is also to participate, of necessity, in a collective undoing.” Whatever blackness or black culture is, it cannot be indexed to a “we.” The condition of being black is rooted in a sense of unbelonging: “forms of negative sociability such as alienation, withdrawal, loneliness, broken intimacy, impossible connection, and failed affinity, situations of being unfit that it has been the great insight of queer theorists to recognize as a condition for living.”

A non-communitarian manifesto

None Like Us sometimes reads like a manifesto. The incipit: “a communitarian impulse runs deep within black studies,” sets the stage in almost Marxian fashion—one is reminded of the opening sentence of the Communist Manifesto. The specter of communism that is haunting Europe leaves way for the ghost of communitarianism that permeates African American scholarship. Also evocative of Marx and Lire Le Capital is the epistemological break that Stephen Best effectuates. He substitutes the “melancholic historicism” that characterizes black historiography with what he calls a “queer unhistoricism” that interrupts the connection between the past and the present. He breaks away from a century-long attempt to recover archival traces of black life under conditions of disavowal and silencing, to read the archive as a repository of lost traces and muted voices. Stephen Best also distances himself from all kinds of identity politics based on collective struggles and individual resistance. A politics of recognition cannot be predicated on a “we” that does not exist. Identities have to be radically deconstructed in order to assert freedom from constraining definitions of blackness and gender roles. A “gay black male” is an assemblage of three predicates, “gay,” black,” and “male,” that are equally problematic in assuming an essence that is only constituted through negation. As a non-communitarian manifesto, None Like Us is also an aesthetic treatise: the author engages in art critique and literary criticism, not to fly away from historical realities, but to induce us to “think like a work of art.”

A central tenet of African American studies rests on the thesis that black identity is uniquely grounded in plantation slavery and the Atlantic slave trade. The afterlife of slavery makes itself felt in the black political present and delineates a future in which reparation and redress are forever deferred. Recent historiography, to which Stephen Best contributed, has drawn our attention to the silenced voices that make themselves heard through the archive: the fugitive, the renegade, the maroon, the socially dead. Out of these enquiries emerged an obsession with “displacement, erasure, suppression, elision, overlooking, overwriting, omission, obscurantism, expunging, repudiation, exclusion, annihilation, and denial.” Like in Foucault’s essay “The Life of Infamous Men,” these figures emerge through the archive as “lowly lives reduced to ashes in the few sentences that struck them down” as if “they had appeared in language only on the condition of remaining absolutely unexpressed in it.” According to this melancholic view of history, “recovery from the slave past rests on a recovery of it.” To recover from past trauma, historians have to return to the scene of the crime, a crime imagined as the archive itself. Drawing from Freud’s definition of melancholia as an inarticulable loss that comes to inform the individual’s sense of his or her own subjectivity, Stephen Best writes: “Melancholy historicism provides for the view that history consists in the taking possession of such grievous experience and archival loss.”

The black radical tradition

Against this “traumatic model of black history” in which the present is merely the repetition of past humiliations, Stephen Best advocates a radical break with all attempts to recover a “we” out of the loss embodied in the archive. He borrows from what Cedric Robinson and others have called “the black radical tradition” in which violence is turned inward and rebellion leads to self-destruction. Examples mobilized by Robinson include the mass slaughter of cattle and destruction of crops ordered by the Xhosa prophetess Nongquawuse in 1856; the vanishing quilombo settlements of runaway slaves, mulattos, and outcasts on the Pernambuco coast of Brazil in the seventeenth century; and the 1915 uprising in Nyasaland (now Malawi) led by Baptist minister John Chilembwe who vowed to “strike a blow and die.” Exploring suicide and rumor in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century archives of slavery, Stephen Best offers his own selection of vignettes and anecdotes. A “suicide bombing” occurred in 1659 when a besieged African chief blew up himself and his Dutch assailers by setting fire to a keg of powder. Archives of the Middle Passage tell tales of slaves hanging themselves, or starving themselves, or drowning themselves to end their living apocalypse, or holding their breath or swallowing their tongue in attempts at self-strangulation. People who consciously suppressed themselves in acts of self-immolation cannot be enrolled as subjects of history: theirs is “a history of people with whom we fail to identify, who appear stuck in the past beyond the reach of our historical categories.”

When it comes to black identity and the politics of race, the slave past was not always thought to explain the present. Stephen Best singles out the year 1988 and the publication of Toni Morrison’s Beloved as the moment when slavery emerged as the constituent object of African American studies. Beloved, which won the Pulitzer Prize that year, was not a unique occurrence: Alex Haley’s novel and TV series Roots had prepared the ground for a reappraisal of the slave past in popular culture, and in the late eighties and early nineties several history books anchored African American identity in “a continued proximity to the unspeakable terrors of the slave experience.” But the rise of Beloved moved the entire field of literary studies to a central place within African American studies, and this move redressed the “trade deficit” that cultural critics had accumulated with the discipline of history. Toni Morrison spoke of the slave past as a “carnage,” a “devastation” that will always be with us: “this is not a story to pass on.” But Toni Morrison’s more recent novel A Mercy (2008) opens the door for another appreciation of the slave past as it falls away and collapses into its own undoing. A Mercy is not an easy read: the chapters oscillate, confusingly at first, between a first-person narration and a third-person omniscience, reinventing the epistolary novel with dead letters whose failure to arrive comes from having never been sent. It is anchored in a world in which racial distinctions have not yet formed and much is up for grabs: the racial scripts and beliefs that are said today to make up slavery’s legacy have yet to settle into a lexicon. As the critic notes, “If Beloved incites melancholy, A Mercy incites mourning”: in Freud’s terms, melancholia is doomed to endless repetition, whereas mourning ends with a kind of forbearance.

Queer is the New Black

None Like Us is listed on the back cover as an intervention in “African American Studies” and “Queer Theory.” Stephen Best sees a high degree of complementarity between the two: “It startles how easily queerness percolates out of the condition of blackness.” Queer and slave historiography appear to be on the same page: the queer acknowledgement of non-relationality between the past and the present, what literary theorist Leo Bersani calls an “anti-communal mode of connectedness,” echoes the epistemological rupture that Best advocates. A queer orientation toward the past may preserve cultural critics from the melancholic turn that characterizes recent historiography. Black life and queer life are also intimately related through the experience of estrangement, alienation, and disaffiliation that Elizabeth Povinelli sees at the root of all progressive politics. None Like Us begins with a discussion of the different ways that both Best and James Baldwin found themselves, as young men, estranged from their fathers. Although their estrangement stems from opposite sources—Baldwin’s father’s disdain for his son, the pride of Best’s father at his son’s graduation ceremony—, there is a shared orientation toward a selfhood that occurs in disaffiliation rather than in solidarity. Part of this queerness comes from the experience of coming out of the closet as gay. As the author remembers from his tormented youth, “If I come out as gay, I will die in the eyes of my father, but I realize that a part of me is already gay and that he cannot not see that, too there must be a part of me that is already dead.” This skeleton in the closet precludes the possibility of a “we,” whether queer or black.

The chapter that opens the book’s part “On Thinking Like a Work of Art” begins with an address to the reader: “You” is the person who is put in front of the artwork and who experiences a kind of epiphany as one physical substance transmutes into another. In the Ghanaian artist El Anatsui’s richly woven tapestries, what initially presents itself as precious metal appears upon inspection to be throwaway-aluminum constructions of bottle caps and copper wire: “What was gold now reveals to be mere thrash.” In the layered paper canvases of the Los Angeles artist Mark Bradford, fragments of cardboard advertisements and printed materials are soaked into water and mixed with trash objects to generate relief within the surface itself: “What was originally ‘print’ finds itself transformed into ‘paint’.” Gwendolyn Brooks’s free-verse poems generate another kind of commentary that also mobilizes the tropes of conjuration, transmutation, and alchemy. Here the office of art is to afford a repetition of the artist’s gesture that “repairs inherently damaged or valueless experience.” And the curator, who mobilizes a rich array of sources and commentary listed in the endnotes, puts the “you” of the viewer in direct contact with the materiality of the artwork. Absent from the commentary are all the mediations that constitute art as an object of aesthetic value. Between the “I” of the critic and the “you” of the viewer, there is no “we” that would allow for the emergence of a community of value. When Foucault stated that “we have to create ourselves as a work of art,” or when Best proposes that “we must begin to think like artworks,” what they mean by “we” is mostly themselves.

Uncharted territory

Or so it seems to me. I could not relate to the book’s emphasis on art as embodied thinking or concepts brought into matter, and discussions on contemporary art brought me to uncharted territory. I had no prior knowledge of the visual artists that are commented in the book (I missed the El Anatsui’s retrospective at La Conciergerie in Paris as part of the Saison Africa2020), and I have not read a Toni Morrison novel since Tar Baby. Nor am I versed in recent historiography of the slave trade, and in the most recent discussions about black identity in the United States. I was more familiar with some of the literary criticism the author mobilizes, especially since literary criticism in the United States seems to be identified with France and French studies. Roland Barthes, Gérard Genette, Michel de Certeau, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida—all listed in the index—are household names in academic circles on both sides of the Atlantic, and they point toward a common horizon that I was happy to share with the author. Also familiar was Stephen Best’s evocation of Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, that famous passage in which Benjamin gazes upon Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus and imagines that the Angel of History is looking toward the past and bears witness to history’s “piling wreckage upon wreckage.” This mix of familiar and unfamiliar shaped my reading of None Like Us, which I am happy to share with others.

Social Studies of Space Science

24 Jul 20216 Feb 2024 Etienne RPLeave a comment

**A review of Placing Outer Space: An Earthly Ethnography of Other Worlds, Lisa Messeri, Duke University Press, 2016.**

Placing Outer Space When I heard Lisa Messeri had written an ethnography about space research, my first reaction was: what’s an anthropologist like her doing in a place like this? How can one study outer space with the tools and methods of social science? What is the distinct contribution of the anthropologist in a field dominated by rocket scientists and big bang theoreticians? What can the cosmos teach us about ourselves that is not grounded in hard science and space observatory data? To be sure, there is no anthropos to study in outer space, and other worlds are beyond the grasp of the ethnographer. The sociology of other planets remains a big question mark. So far, you cannot make participatory observation in space stations or conduct fieldwork on Mars. We may hire anthropologists, linguists, semioticians, and indeed all the help we can get when we encounter extraterrestrial civilizations and extraplanetary forms of life; but so far these close encounters of the third type remain the stuff of science-fiction novels and blockbuster movies. But on second thought, an anthropologist in outer space is not completely out of place. Anthropologists have always accompanied explorers and discoverers to the frontiers of human knowledge. They helped us understand alien cultures and foreign civilizations to make them less distant, and drew lessons from their immersion into other worlds for our own society. Anthropologists make the strange and the alien look familiar, and the “view from afar” that they advocate also makes our own planet look alien and unfamiliar. They also help us make sense of science’s results and methods, and have been a trusted if somewhat critical companion of scientific research and laboratory life. Science and technology studies (STS in the jargon) have taught us that natural scientists—contrary to a common prejudice—are never simply depicting or describing reality out there “just as it is”: their research is always characterized by a specific style and colored by the “scientific imagination.”

Bringing space down to Earth

An “anthropology off the Earth” therefore seems like the obvious next step for the discipline when humanity has entered the space age. And indeed, outer space is no longer the exclusive domain of what is usually designated as “hard” science. Today supposedly “messier” or “softer” sciences play an increasing role, exerting significant influence on how the extraterrestrial is portrayed and understood. A growing number of researchers in the social sciences and the humanities have begun to focus on the wider universe and how it is apprehended by modern cosmology. Call it the “four S”: social studies of space science. What unites these efforts is that the many surprises you may encounter “out there” also tell us something about ourselves, here on this planet. Space science gives us access to something that surpasses humanity and yet simultaneously contains it. Astronomy doesn’t stand apart from more earthly pursuits. The quest for an Earth-like planet not only promises a better understanding of places elsewhere in our galaxy but also provides a mirror for examining terrestrial relations from a different perspective. Anthropology can contribute to bringing space science down to Earth by its firm grounding in participant observation, its twin process of familiarization and alienation, and its attention to dimensions that are not spontaneously considered by space scientists: inequalities of gender, class, and ethnicity; legacies of colonial and imperial approaches; and terrestrial understandings of nation and nationalism. In a time of post-colonialism, gender equality, and trans-border flows, we must resist the language of “colonization,” “manned” missions, and “frontiers.”

I first used Placing Outer Space as a primer in space and planetary science. Before completing her PhD in MIT’s program in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society, Lisa Messeri took a Bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering, and is deeply familiar with the environment in which she immersed herself for her fieldwork. Focusing on planetary scientists as the main target of her ethnographic study, she describes the practices and techniques that allow them to transform planets from abstract objects into places full of meanings and considered from the point of view of potential habitability. Her knowledge of planetary science vastly exceeds the few nuggets I retained from junior high school and teenage readings. I was reminded that there used to be water on Mars, and that the Moon and the Earth were once one and the same. I knew about gravitational pull and orbiting ellipses that make planets dance around the Sun in a well-designed choreography. I had to update some basic facts such as the list of planets in the solar system: apparently, Pluto is no longer a planet (says who?, asks Messeri in a 2010 article.) I had vaguely heard of the existence of planets outside the solar system, but I was surprised to learn that the first detection of an extrasolar planet orbiting a Sun-like star only happened in 1995. Before that, exoplanets were a conjecture deduced from statistical reasoning: considering the almost infinite number of stars in the universe, it is only logical that some may have planets orbiting them. By the same token, scientist also deduce the existence of Earth-like planets, and conjecture that a fraction of these planets can also support life. Some physicists speculate on the number of inhabited planets in the universe, and make a probabilistic argument about the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations that may be able to communicate with us (this is called the Drake equation and was first proposed in 1961.)

Finding exoplanets

These dreams and speculations, what Messeri calls the “planetary imagination,” have always animated space research. What is new with modern planetary science is that now these theoretical musings can be backed by hard numbers and observations. Scientist have embarked on a quest to find Earth-like worlds and environments that may be conducive to life on other planets. This is an almost impossible task: Lisa Messeri compares it to spotting a firefly with a searchlight when you are in the East Coast and the searchlight is in California. And yet, since the detection of the first exoplanet in 1995, more than a thousand exoplanets have been confirmed at the time of Messeri’s writing. A more recent estimate indicates that more than 4,000 exoplanets have been discovered and are considered “confirmed.” However, there are thousands of other “candidate” exoplanet detections that require further observations in order to say for sure whether or not the exoplanet is real. Messeri explains us how this detection and confirmation process works. Telescopes collect starlight and measure how the flux or energy output of a star changes over time. Applying several filters, and separating signal from noise, astronomers are able to detect a U-shaped dip in the light curve: this is the signature of an exoplanet, the sign that a planet has passed in front of a star and has blocked a minuscule fraction of the star’s light. Further tinkering with the data allows the researcher to estimate the distance of the planet from the star and its approximate mass and density. These measures will tell you whether this planet is “habitable,” whether it is made from solid rock and able to sustain water. Based on spectrum data, you can even speculate about the existence of an atmosphere and its temperature. But for the moment, finding and describing an exoplanet is as much a work of science as an art of persuasion: you have to convince colleagues that the squiggle in the data that you detect is indeed the signature of a celestial body. Young scientists-in-training have to learn how to see a stream of data as a planet, as a world. It is the ability to conjure worlds that reinforces the community of exoplanet astronomers. Their faith unites them in the pursuit of the holy grail: the discovery of a planet just like our own orbiting a star like the Sun.

Because of rapid advances in detection and computing technologies, almost all data are digital in observational astronomy nowadays. As a result, its practitioners have become more akin to number crunchers than skywatchers. As Messeri notes, “inspiration might strike while gazing up at the night sky, but the real work happens in front of a computer, and discourse is dominated by methods of data processing and analysis.” In daily conversations, the feeling of excitement comes not from speculating about habitable planets but from marveling over how “clean” the dataset looks. Exoplanet astronomy increasingly relies on space-based telescopes that beam large streams of big data back to Earth. But despite this transition to a remote model of observation, researchers still find it useful to travel regularly to observatories built on mountaintops in exotic locations. Messeri accompanies an exoplanet researcher and her PhD student to the Cerro-Tolol Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in central Chile. Habiting a mountain observatory, even on a temporary basis, is justified on several grounds. It anchors astronomers into the history of their discipline, as old observatories in lower altitudes are often turned into space museums. It is a rite of passage into the profession for aspiring researchers, and generates social interactions and face-to-face collaboration between members of the same epistemic community. It allows astronomers to tinker with the equipment and to interact with technicians. And as Messeri notes, “being at the observatory affords one of the few chances to remember and reconnect with the awesomeness of a dark sky.” Going to faraway places on top of mountains reminds astronomers that the ultimate goal of their quest is to inhabit another world. It is also, in a way, a voyage of conquest and annexation. In conversation with Peter Redfield’s Space in the Tropics, an ethnography on the French space program in French Guiana, the author explores how observatories are “situated in a landscape with multiple histories and ties to the local, even if there are actions (intentional or not) that seek to exclude the local.”

Earth-centrism and post-colonialism

Other aspects links exoplanetary science to a post-colonial enterprise. Finding an exoplanet is by definition an Earth-centered enterprise: an habitable planet is defined as a planet that offers an acceptable environment for human beings. The “habitable zone” circling a certain category of star is defined as a region in which a planet would receive neither too little nor too much heat, and where liquid water and an oxygen atmosphere could be sustained. Due to Earth-centrism and other speciesism bias, we cannot conceive of a place conducive to life that would be devoid of these elements. The vision of Mars as a terrain for exploration and discovery also remains clouded by an Earth-centric bias. In two chapters, Messeri describes how Mars scientists transform the Earth into a Martian kind of place by simulating habitat into extreme desert environments, and how they help to bring Mars down to Earth by mapping its rugged terrain with the help of satellites images and the pictures taken by the Rover missions. By stating that “humanity’s new frontier can only be on Mars,” the Mars Society, which funds the Mars Desert Research Station in the Utah desert, is reinvigorating the rhetoric of exploration, the frontier, and colonization that reminds us of “how the West was won” and populations subjected to the logic of empires. In an age in which a proliferation of new space ventures look set to explore and exploit outer space in the interests of those who are capable of sponsoring such efforts, Messeri warns us about “the inherent hierarchies and exclusions that come with place-making practices.” But she also notes that space exploration, including commercial space flight and space tourism, is in a large part “orthogonal to profit,” and underscores that “the aim of this book is not to unpack the white, American, imperial subtext of invocations of exploration.” Taking the discourse of planetary scientist at face value, she prefers to insist on the moral element that comes with the perception of our place in the cosmos.

As noted earlier, anthropology, with its habit of making the unfamiliar familiar and of looking at our earthly condition from afar, is a welcome companion to space science and the quest for habitable planets. By positioning the Earth as one planet among many on which humans might be capable of living, social studies of outer space can help us to make sense of what it means to be on Earth. The planetary imagination is sustained by the effort to envisage what it is to be like in other worlds. The Mars mission in the Utah desert prepares astronauts to the condition humans could face in a Martian colony. Earth is being transformed into a laboratory of sorts, where scientists experiment with life on other planets. In the process, astronomy is becoming a fieldwork-based science, not unlike anthropology itself. Fieldwork is grounded in a notion that “being there” is a valuable and telling experience, and scientists trained in geology can pierce up a narrative about Mars based on the shapes of dried-up rivers, the tumbling of craters, and the presence of rock concretions. The 3D-mapping of Mars shows the Red Planet on a human scale and allows the user to “see like a rover” by navigating the landscape in an immersive experience similar to the one offered by Google Maps. These open-source maps and user-friendly interfaces assume and thus disseminate an inherent worthwhileness in studying other planets, and act as a recruiting and advocacy tool for NASA. Turning Mars into a place on Earth, and preparing to make an earthly place out of Mars, also helps us to understand our own planet in unfamiliar terms. Earth is literally made alien when seen from outer space, as in the famous Blue Marble image made from the Voyager-1 spacecraft that ushered a new ecological consciousness about the finite resources of our planet. As Messeri notes, “the most prominent legacies of the space age are not prolonged human presence in space and exploration of nearby planets but a new way to observe and study our own planet.” Similarly, the quest for an Earth-like planet is not driven by the hubris to conquer other worlds, but by the belief that humans will finally feel less cosmically alone.

Place-making and being out of place

Lisa Messeri’s distinct contribution in Placing Outer Space lies in her analysis of the role of place in planetary science and astronomy. Drawing from insights ranging from critical geography’s conceptualization of space as a social, historical, and political phenomenon, to Heidegger’s Heimatlosigkeit, she finds that place-making is central to the work of outer space scientists who transform infinite space into a definite place to be. As she argues, place “is not just a passive canvas on which action occurs but an active way of knowing worlds. Even when place is not self-evident, as perhaps with invisible exoplanets, it is nonetheless invoked and created in order to generate scientific knowledge.” Place transforms the geographically alien into the familiar, and helps us to imagine other planets as habitable worlds. Place is more than a given category; it is a way of knowing and of making sense. It involves the four processes of narrating, mapping, visualizing, and inhabiting that are used by scientists to imagine themselves in other worlds. The author sees an irony in the tension between the urge to see planets as places and the increasing sense of placelessness that we experience on Earth. Astronauts and space scientists increasingly spend time away from office or from home, turning a seat and a laptop in a conference venue or in an observatory into a working environment. The need to inhabit a physical space is declining just as the desire to detect a habitable planet is on the rise. With remote access to the Internet and data stocked in clouds, our mode of being seems increasingly disconnected from place. And yet, place is where we long to be, the destination that invites us to make ourselves at home, on Earth as it is in heaven.

Set, Set, Set, Set, Set, Set

15 Jul 2021 Etienne RPLeave a comment

**A review of Garbage Citizenship: Vital Infrastructures of Labor in Dakar, Senegal, Rosalind Fredericks, Duke University Press, 2018.**

In 1990, Youssou N’Dour, Senegal’s most famous musician, released an album titled Set. The main song had the following line: Set, set oy. Ni set, set ci sa xel lo, ni set ci sa jëff oy… I had no idea what it meant, but in her book Garbage Citizenship, Rosalind Fredericks provides translation and context: Cleanliness, oh cleanliness. Be clean, pure in your spirit, clean in your acts… The injunction to be clean and to make clean (set setal in wolof), repeated in the song’s chorus, echoes the rallying cry of a grassroot movement in which young men and women set out to clean the city of Dakar from its accumulating garbage, substituting a failing urban waste infrastructure and denouncing the corruption of a polluted political sphere. Labelled as an exemplary case of participatory citizenship and youth mobilization, the movement was captured by political clientelism and made to serve the neoliberal objectives of labor force flexibility and public sector cutbacks. At the height of the movement in 1989, Dakar’s mayor made a shrewd political calculus to recruit youth activists into a citywide participatory trash-collection system. Their incorporation into the trash sector was facilitated by a discourse of responsibility through active participation in the cleanliness of the city. They became the backbone of the municipal waste management system and remain included in the sector’s labor force to this day. The history of the Set/Setal movement is only one of the case studies that Rosalind Fredericks develops in her book. The author finds the same activists who spontaneously took to the streets to clean up Dakar in 1988-89 having moved into low-pay positions as trash workers in a reorganized infrastructure that used derelict garbage trucks and often delayed payment of salaries. Together with their labor union leaders, they staged another kind of public protest in 2005-07: the garbage strike, supported by Dakar inhabitants who brought their household dumpings to the main arteries of the capital and piled them for all politicians to see. Other cases studied by the author include a NGO-led, community-based trash collection project in a peripheral neighborhood mobilizing voluntary women’s labor and horse-drawn carts, and the functioning of a trash workers’ union movement affirming the dignity of labor through discourses of Islamic piety.

Governing through disposability

Garbage Citizenship is a book with high theoretical ambitions. It purports to make “theory from the South” by detailing the transformation of trash labor in contemporary Dakar. The book challenges the notion that African cities represent exceptions to urban theories, and reveals the complex mix of clientary politics, social mobilization, material things, and religious affects unleashed by neoliberal reform. It makes a novel contribution to urban studies by emphasizing the human component of infrastructure, the material aspects of municipal work, and the cultural embeddedness of human labor. Gender, ethnicity, age group, and religious affiliation come to the fore as particularly consequential shapers of sociopolitical community and citizenship practices. Inspired by new currents in critical theory loosely defined as “new materialisms,” Fredericks treats trash infrastructure as vibrant, political matter and emphasizes its material, social, and affective elements. She complements the political economy of neoliberal reforms and urban management in Dakar with a moral economy of filth and cleanliness through which social relations and political belongings are reordered. Although it is by definition dirty, trash work can be seen simultaneously as a process of cleaning and purification. The Islamic faith as it is practiced in Senegal offers an alternative discourse to the technocratic vision of good governance and efficient management that is imposed by development agencies upon Dakar’s municipal services. To sum up the book’s contribution, Garbage Citizenship develops a three-pronged critique of neoliberalism, of participatory development, and of the “materialist turn” in social science scholarship. Let me expand on these three points.

First, Garbage Citizenship offers a critique of neoliberalism grounded in social science theory and ethnographic observation. Such critique has become standard in the anthropology literature, where the logic of structural adjustment imposed by multilateral institutions and global capital is described as wreaking havoc on local livelihoods and state-supported social services. Privatization, the shrinking of public budgets, the retreat of the state, and flexibilization of labor have unleashed intense volatility in the management of urban public services and, more specifically, in the garbage collection sector in Dakar. As one of the first African countries to undergo structural adjustment, Senegal was a test case for experimenting with various formulas of public-private partnership, labor de-unionization, technological downscaling, and participatory development. The chronology of neoliberal reforms shows that structural adjustment is unmoored from political forces: the “neoliberal” president Abdoulaye Wade operated a renationalization of the waste management sector facing mounting debts and collection crises, while Dakar’s Socialist mayor Mamadou Diop orchestrated the retreat of municipal services through flexibilization of the formal labor force and the mobilization of community-based efforts for collection. What makes Garbage Citizenship’s critique different from other denunciations of neoliberalism is its empirical focus on the way that state power is materialized in everyday infrastructure, and on how life under neoliberalism is experienced daily by municipal workers and citizens alike. Garbage often stands in as the quintessential symbol of what’s wrong in African cities. The challenge of managing trash, in other words, acts as a potent metaphor for the African “crisis” writ large. Garbage Citizenship raises questions about the material and symbolic “trashing” of the continent by grounding them in the everyday politics of trash labor and governing-through-disposability. Through garbage strikes and illegal dumping of waste, Dakar’s residents mobilize the power of waste as both a symbol of state crisis and an important terrain on which to battle for control of the city.

Treating people as infrastructure

Another basic recommendation of neoliberalism, indeed of standard economics, is that labor be substituted to capital in countries with an abundant labor force and limited access to financial resources and technology. Fredericks describes how this substitution of labor to capital operates in concrete terms: through the devolution of the burdens of infrastructure onto precarious laboring bodies—those of ordinary neighborhood women and the formal trash workers themselves. The analysis illuminates how urban infrastructures are composed of human as much as technical elements and how these living elements can help make infrastructures into a vital means of political action and a tool for the formation of collective identities. The greatest burden of municipal trash systems was devolved onto labor: workers were furnished with little equipment for collection, if any at all, and existing materials were allowed to degrade. Municipal employees engaged in constant tinkering and bricolage work to keep the garbage collection trucks running. Some parts of Dakar, such as the posh central districts of Plateau and Médina, were well served by state-of-the-art French equipment operated by international companies selected through opaque bidding processes. The poorer and more populous parts of the city had to rely on second-hand garbage trucks that often broke down or were left completely off the collection grid, with ruinous effects for people’s health and the environment. Waste collection is hazardous work, and workers in the garbage sector bear the brunt of labor’s deleterious effects in the form of endangered lives and damaged health. Governing-through-disposability makes laboring bodies dispendable and orders urban space along a logic of making clean and letting dirty. By substituting labor to equipment and treating people as infrastructure, the neoliberal state treats people as trash.

Second, Garbage Citizenship provides a critique of developmentalism, a theory that is sometimes presented as a gentler substitute to neoliberalism. Developmentalism emphasizes the human aspects of development. It asserts that state bureaucrats become separated from politicians, which allows for the independent and successful redevelopments of leadership structures and administrative and bureaucratic procedures. It promotes community-driven development as a solution to the disconnect between the population and public service providers. Critics often point out that developmentalism is linked to depolitization: it treats development as an anti-politics machine, and rests on the assumption that technocratic fixes can alleviate austerity measures in the face of widespread unrest and social dislocation. For Fredericks, garbage is a highly political matter. Dakar’s garbage saga is inseparable from the evolution of national politics, with the decline of the Socialist Party under Abdou Diouf from 1988 to 2000, Abdoulaye Wade’s alternance and his failed dream of an African renaissance from 2000 to 2012, and the consolidation of state power under president Macky Sall. It is also emmeshed in municipal politics. Dakar’s Socialist mayor Mamadou Diop used the Set/Setal movement to reward and recruit new Party members from the ranks of the youth. Creating new jobs was explicitly based around a political calculus that traded patronage with enrolment into municipal work. The community-based trash system was touted as an important demonstration of the mayor’s commitment to youth and to an ideal of participatory citizenship. Participants remember the “Journées de Propreté” (Days of Cleanliness) as overt Socialist Party political rallies. Under President Wade, the trash management system became the locus of a power struggle between the municipal government and state authorities. The sector saw eight major institutional shake-ups, and equipments constantly changed hands while workers received only temporary-contract benefits and day-labor pay rates. Upon taking office, Macky Sall announced his intention to dissolve Abdoulaye Wade’s new national trash management agency and relocate Dakar’s garbage management back into the hands of local government. The municipality found an agreement with the labor union, and workers won formal contracts and higher salaries.

The perils of community

Community participation and women’s empowerment are a key tenet of developmentalism and have been adopted by aid agencies as a new mantra conditioning their support. For Fredericks, we need to unpack these notions of community, participation, and empowerment. Often imagined as unproblematic sites of tradition and consensus, communities are produced through systems that harness the labor of specific members as participants and mobilize the “glue” of communal solidarity. Empowering some people often means disenfranchising others, and interferes with existing relations of power based on gender, ethnicity, and local politics. In the case under study, ENDA, a well-established NGO, partnered with leaders from the Lebou community in the neighborhood of Tonghor, on the road to Dakar’s airport, to establish an off-the-grid garbage collection system based on horse-drawn carts and the work of “animatrices” charged with educating neighborhood women on how to properly store, separate, and dispose of their garbage. The project resonated with a vision of community-driven development using low-tech, environment-friendly solutions that even poor people can afford and can control, and that can be replicated from community to community. But the analysis finds that the ENDA project produced an elitist, ethnicized image of community and that women were subjected to dirty-labor burdens as the vehicule of these development agendas. The “empowered” animatrices, drawn from the Lebou ethnic group, were not remunerated for their services and had no choice but to participate out of a sense of obligation to their communities, as enforced by the power and authority of community leaders. The village elders explicitly chose the animatrices using “social criteria” from respected but poor Lebou households, and used the project to their own ends in order to reinforce their autonomy from the Dakar municipality. The neighborhood women whose garbage practices were being monitored often came from a disenfranchized ethnic group and were stigmatized for their “unclean” habits and filthy condition. They were often the least willing and able to pay the user fee for garbage collection, and had to resort to the old practice of burying their waste or dumping it on the beach by night. In the end, the project was terminated when garbage began to accumulate in the collection station near the airport, attracting hundreds of circling birds and the attention of national authorities.

As a third contribution, Garbage Citizenship makes an intervention in the field of critical theory. The author notes the recent resurgence of materialist thinking in several disciplines, and intents to provide her own interpretation of the role of inanimate matter and nonhuman agencies in shaping social outcomes and policy decisions. Garbage grounds the practice of politics in the pungent, gritty material of the city. It forces politicians to make or postpone decisions, as when trash strikes and collection crises choke the capital’s main arteries with piles of accumulating dump. A toxic materiality is a central feature of trash politics: garbage’s toxicity manifests itself by its stench and rot that make whole neighborhoods repellent and attracts parasitic forms of life such as germs and rodents. To borrow an expression from Jane Bennett, trash is “vibrant matter” in the sense that it becomes imbued with a life of its own, straddling the separation between life and matter and making discarded things part of the living environment. Garbage also participates in the “toxic animacies” identified by Mel Chen who writes from the same perspective of vital materialism. This vitalist perspective emphasizes the relational nature of material and social worlds and the intersecting precarities they engender. Trash renders places and people impure through threats of contagion: as anthropologist Mary Douglas underscored in her book Purity and Danger, discourses about dirt as “matter out of place” produce social boundaries and thereby structure and spatialize social relations. According to Fredericks, governing-through-disposability is a particular modality of neoliberal governance, determining which spaces and people can be made toxic, degraded, and devalued. It makes visible, smelly and pungent the invisible part of society, the accursed share of human activity, the excessive and non-recuperable part of any economy which must be discarded and cast away. The Mbeubeuss municipal landfill, where waste accumulates in open air, is the monstrous shadow of Dakar, a grotesque double that reveals the obscene underbelly of taken-for-granted urban life. But it should be pointed out that Garbage Citizenship is not a work of critical theory: Fredericks is not interested in building theory for its own sake, and she uses vital materialism, toxic animacies, and symbolic structuralism as tools to show how the power of waste is harnessed to different ends in specific conjunctures.

Islam is the solution

What’s new in Frederick’s new materialism is that it doesn’t treat religion as an ideological smokescreen or as the opium of the people. The author underscores the particular importance ascribed to purity and cleanliness as an indispensable element of the Islamic faith. The Set/Setal movement, with its call of making clean and being clean, drew from a religious repertoire and strove to cleanse the city in a literal sense, in terms of sanitation and hygiene, but also morally in a fight against corruption, prostitution, and general delinquency. No longer waiting for permission or direction from their elders, young men and women took ownership of their neighborhoods and bypassed the power of marabouts and the Muslim brotherhoods who had traditionally channeled support toward local and national political authorities. Youth activists, some of them educated, had never imagined of working in garbage as their profession But the stigma attached to being a trash worker and doing dirty labor was overruled by the spiritual value attached to cleanliness and purity, which saw the task of cleaning the city as an act of faith, a calling even akin to a priesthood. A materialist reading of religion emphasizes religious work as bricolage. Fredericks describes the art of maintaining dignity and pride in an environment of impurity and filth as a piety of refusal. This conception of “material spirituality” includes religious faith in the social and affective components of infrastructure. The piety of refusal also offers a language through which management decisions can be contested and the value of decent work is reaffirmed. Waste workers in Dakar harness the power of discourses of purity and cleanliness as a primary weapon in the fight for better wages and respect. In Fredericks’s interpretation, Islam offers a potent language with which to critique Senegal’s neoliberal trajectory and assert rights for fair labor. This politics of piety emphasizes Islam as the solution, but not in the sense that the Muslim Brotherhood and proponents of political Islam understand it: the demands put forward by trash workers and their union leaders are articulated with a Muslim accent, but only to emphasize the dignity of life and the decency of labor. In the context of urban waste management and unionized mobilization, Islam may provide the language for constructively contesting neoliberal austerity.

The Brazilian Buttock Lift

9 Jun 202114 Sep 2021 Etienne RPLeave a comment

**A review of Pretty Modern: Beauty, Sex, and Plastic Surgery in Brazil, Alexander Edmonds, Duke University Press, 2010.**

Pretty Modern In Brazil, women claim the right to be beautiful. When nature and the passing of time don’t help, beauty can be achieved at the end of a scalpel. Plastic surgery or plástica is not only a status good or the preserve of socialites and celebrities: according to Ivo Pitanguy, the most famous Brazilian plastic surgeon and a celebrity himself, “The poor have the right to be beautiful too.” And they are banking on that right. Rio and São Paulo have some of the densest concentrations of plastic surgeons in the world, and financing plans have made plástica accessible to the lower middle class and even to favela residents. While in the United States, people may hide that they have had plastic surgery like it’s something shameful, in Brazil they flaunt it. The attitude is that having work done shows you care about yourself—it’s a status symbol as well as a statement of self-esteem. Cosmetic surgery’s popularity in Brazil raises a number of interesting questions. How did plastic surgery, a practice often associated with body hatred and alienation, take root in a country known for its glorious embrace of sensuality and pleasure? Is beauty a right which, like education or health care, should be realized with the help of public institutions and fiscal subsidies? Does beauty reinforce social hierarchies, or is attractiveness a “great equalizer” that neutralizes or attenuates the effects of class and gender? Does plástica operate on the body or on the mind, and is it a legitimate medical act or a frivolous and narcissistic pursuit? Does beauty work alienate women or is it a way to bring them into the public sphere?

Class, race, gender, and plástica

Alexander Edmonds, an American anthropologist, answers these questions by mobilizing the three key dimensions of his discipline: class, race, and gender. Brazil is a class society with one of the most unequal wealth distributions in the world. It is also a society organized along racial lines, even though a long history of miscegenation has blurred color lines and made racial democracy part of the national identity. Brazil continues to have large gender gaps within the workforce and government representation. The country’s supposedly large number of exotic, attractive and sexually available women makes it a masculinist fantasy worldwide, while Brazilian feminists face enduring challenges. All these issues relate in one way or another to the availability of cosmetic surgery, the quest for beauty and attractiveness, and the development of medicine into new terrains of well-being and self-esteem. Pretty Modern mixes several strands of literature. It is a travelogue into contemporary Brazil, a deep dive into its history and culture, a journalistic description of the cosmetic surgery industry, a philosophical treatise on beauty and appearances, a personal memoir about the impasses of erudite culture and the wisdom of ordinary people. It even contains samba lyrics and color pictures of scantily clad models.

The Brazilian constitution recognizes the human right to health. It doesn’t recognize the right to beauty, but cosmetic surgery is provided for free or at subsidized rates in public clinics such as the Santa Casa da Misericórdia in Rio. Surgeons perform charity surgeries for the poor to get practice in large residency programs before opening their private clinics. Some medical doctors come from afar to learn how to operate barrigas (bellies) or bundas (buttocks), techniques that come predominantly from Brazil. Ivo Pitanguy himself, the pioneer of plastic surgery in Brazil, learned the trade from Europe before bringing it back to Rio and taking it to a new level. His democratic ethos has been maintained by his disciples who share his vision of cosmetic surgery as psychotherapeutic intervention that should be accessible to all. Pitanguy famously defined the plastic surgeon as “a psychologist with a scalpel in his hand,” echoing the saying that “the psychoanalyst knows everything but changes nothing. The plastic surgeon knows nothing but changes everything.” Women see their operations as a form of psychological healing; given the choice, they prefer the surgeon’s scalpel than the couch of the psychoanalyst. Plástica has psychological effects for the poor as well as for the rich: surgery improves a woman’s auto-estima, self-esteem, and is considered as a necessity, not a vanity. Appearance is essential to mental well-being, economic competitiveness, and social and sexual competence. If we follow the WHO’s definition of health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being,” then beauty work represents the new frontier in the pursuit of happiness.

The right to beauty

Of course, the growth of cosmetic surgery has not been without controversy. A “right to beauty” seems to value a rather frivolous concern in a country with more pressing problems—from tropical diseases, like dengue, to the diseases of modernity, like diabetes. Brazil has a health system divided into a public and a private sector with different standards of care, and the poor often see their universal right to healthcare obstructed by long queues, squalid conditions, and substandard practice. Cosmetic surgery stretches medical practice into an ambiguous grey zone where the Hippocratic oath doesn’t always fully apply. The growth of plástica has also been accompanied by a rise in malpractice cases, insurance fraud, and media stories of horrific complications. Some Brazilian critics see the new fashion of breast enlargement as a form of cultural imperialism brought by Euro-American influence in a country that has long valued small boobies and big booties (the ever-popular butt implant raises fewer cultural concerns.) Beauty ideals peddled by women’s magazines are blamed for eating disorders and body alienation. Cultural elites from the West see the pursuit of the artificially enhanced body as vain, vulgar, and superficial, betraying a narcissistic concern with the self. But who is one to judge? asks Alexander Edmonds, who confesses he shared some of the misapprehensions of the distanced scholar before he was confronted with a candid remark by a favela dweller: “Only intellectuals like misery. The poor prefer luxury.” Even though it is not common for a scholar to glance through local versions of Playboy or watch telenovelas titled “Without Tits, There is no Paradise,” the anthropologist knows the heuristic value of suspending one’s judgment and immersing oneself into the life-world of cultural others through participant observation.

Race raises another set of issues. Here too, North Americans have been accused of exporting their cultural imperialism, with its bipolar racial categories and immutable color line, in a country that has long prided itself for its racial democracy and color fluidity. In fact, Brazilians are very race-conscious. But rather than grouping people into races defined by ancestry, the local taxonomy describes subtle variations in appearance along a continuum. The national census racially classifies the Brazilian population in five color types: branco (white), pardo (brown), preto (black), amarelo (yellow), and indigenous. But in everyday usage, more than 130 color types have been identified. Brazil’s famous “rainbow of color terms” intersects with class and gender. In Brazil moving up the social scale can be seen as a form of whitening. For example, a light-skinned multiracial person who held an important, well-paying position in society may be considered branco while someone else with the same ethnogenetic make-up who had darker skin or was of a lower class may be considered pardo or even preto. But unlike in many parts of the world where lightness of skin tone is fetishized, in Brazil brown is beautiful. Many women pride themselves of being morena, a term that can mean both brunette and brown-skinned. On the other hand, blackness is stigmatized, and European facial features and hair confer social advantages. No wonder that “correction of the Negroid nose” is a standard surgery operation that raises few eyebrows, while Brazil remains one of the biggest consumer market for blonde hair dye.

The anthropology of mestiçagem

More than any other nation, Brazil’s self-image and national identity has been shaped by anthropologists. The Amazon Indian is known solely from the reports of ethnographers in the field, perpetuating the heritage of Claude Lévi-Strauss. Gilberto Freyre, a student of Franz Boas in the early twentieth century, provocatively reversed the scientific discourse on “miscegenation” and its racist underpinnings by affirming the virtue of racial mixture and cultural syncretism. Freyre’s celebration of idealized and eroticized mestiçagem played a central role in defining Brazilian national identity. Sexuality—especially across racial lines—became a key symbol for the formation of a new, mixed population with positive traits, such as cordiality and physical beauty. But more recently sociologists have deconstructed the myth of racial democracy by documenting the persistent racial inequalities in wealth and income, access to education and social services, and representations in the media and in the political sphere. Governments introduced controversial quotas to promote racial diversity in higher education and in the public sector. There has been a shift in the representation of race in the past twenty years. More dark faces now appear in telenovelas, ad campaigns, and variety shows, and multinational companies have found a new niche market for black beauty products, fashion, and cosmetics. Afrodescendentes are adopting a black hairstyle and a negra identity as well as narratives of racial pride and militancy. It is too early to say whether affirmative action and identity politics will substitute to mestiçagem and the rainbow of colors, but the emergence of the black movement in Brazil also confirms the significance of the aesthetic dimension of modern subjectivities.

What does cosmetic surgery tell us about gender relations and women’s roles? Contrary to a popular perception, women do not engage in beauty work to comply to men’s expectations and submit themselves to the male gaze. They do it on their own terms, to follow their own desires or to respond to society’s “interpellation.” Motives may vary across social class, age category, and marital status. Some Brazilian women can be openly frank about it: “After having kids, I’ll have to do a recauchutagem [refurbishing, normally of a car]. After shutting down the factory, nê?” Plastic surgery is closely linked to a larger field that manages female reproduction and sexuality. It is not coincidental that Brazil has not only high rates of plastic surgery, but also Cesarean sections (70 percent of deliveries in some private hospitals), tubal ligations (sterilization accounts for half of all contraceptive use), and other surgeries for women. Some women see elective surgeries as part of a modern standard of care available to them throughout the female life cycle. Cosmetic surgery can mark key rites of passage: initiation into adulthood, marriage, motherhood, divorce, and menopause. The transformative events by far the most often mentioned in connection with plástica are pregnancy and breast-feeding. Tensions between motherhood and sexuality are analyzed in detail by Alexander Edmonds, who mentions that both are equally important for self-esteem. Drawing on a range of examples—from maids who aspire to acquire cosmetic surgeries, to favela residents who dream of entering the fashion world, to single mothers who embrace plastic surgery as a means of erotic body scuplting—he describes how sexual and class aspirations subtly mingle in beauty culture.

The right of the Brazilian morena

In his last book Modos de homem, modas de mulher, published shortly before his death in 1987, Gilberto Freyre warned against “yankee influence” and the impact of “north-Europeanization or albinization”: “one must recognize the right of the Brazilian brunette to rebuke northern-European fashions aimed at blonde, white women.” In Pretty Modern, Alexander Edmonds shows that the right of the Brazilian morena is not to be abolished. The tyranny of fashion applies more than elsewhere in a country where bodies are being refashioned to fit aesthetic and sexual mores. But Brazilian plástica does not follow an American or north-European blueprint. If anything, it leads the way that other emerging countries in Latin America or East Asia are also beginning to tread. There, the female body is invested with hopes of social mobility and self-accomplishment that demand long-term investment and management. In poor urban areas, beauty often has a similar importance for girls as soccer (or basketball) does for boys: it promises an almost magical attainment of recognition, wealth or power. For middle-class cariocas, the body is a source of distinction and success. For many consumers, a lean and fit body is essential to economic and sexual competition, social visibility, and mental well-being. Beauty culture interpellates women as autonomous sexual beings and as economic agents in markets where physical attractiveness can be exchanged with various kinds of cultural and economic resources. This anthropologic study shows that cosmetic surgery arises in unison with a central concern for Brazilian women: staying young, sexy, and beautiful.

Indigenous Peoples and the Anglo Settler World

5 Jun 2021 Etienne RPLeave a comment

**A review of Theft Is Property! Dispossession and Critical Theory, Robert Nichols, Duke University Press, 2020.**

Theft Is Property “Property is theft !” declared Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, denouncing the inanity of social institutions undergirding bourgeois society. He was criticized by Karl Marx, who judged the formula self-refuting, and by Marx Stirner, who wrote: “Is the concept ‘theft’ at all possible unless one allows validity to the concept ‘property’? How can one steal if property is not already extant?” Indigenous people face the same set of objections when they claim ownership of the land that has been stolen from them. Their traditional culture and enduring values often emphasize a special connection to land and place. They are the “children of the soil,” “sprung from the land itself” as the word “autochthonous” indicates in its Greek etymology. They can legitimately claim the right of first occupancy and document their collective memory of having been there first. The dispossession of their ancestral lands occurred under conditions that would today be judged unlawful or illegitimate, and that was condemned as such at the time it occurred. But on the other hand, the emphasis on possession and ownership contradicts the values of shared responsibility, stewardship, and common property that many Indigenous people, indeed many persons, associate with land and natural assets. How can one argue that the earth is not to be thought of as property at all, and that it has been stolen from its rightful owners? What does it mean, then, to be dispossessed of something that you never really “had” in the first place, and to reclaim something that was never really “yours” to begin with? Can we make the legitimate claims of Indigenous people compatible with political visions that do not advocate property and ownership at their point of departure?

Anglo settler colonialism

For Robert Nichols, these questions cannot be addressed in the abstract. They have to be situated in the historical context of “Anglo settler colonialism,” the process by which the modern nations of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States were formed. As its subtitle indicates, this book is intended as a contribution to “critical theory,” and there are many theoretical development that may rebuke more empirically-inclined readers. But putting the concept of dispossession in dialogue with the plight of Indigenous peoples facing settler colonialism allows the author to ground social theory in historical processes it is meant to explain and criticize. Critical theory is mostly indebted to Karl Marx, and the author of Das Kapital is indeed the main theoretical reference in Robert Nichols’ book, with two chapters out of four at least partially devoted to discussing his writings. But other authors from the classical tradition, from Locke to Rousseau and from Tocqueville to Mill, are also brought into the debate, as well as contemporary writers belonging to various strands of critical theory: analytical Marxism, new feminisms, critical race theory, radical Black critique, critical geography, Indigenous peoples’ scholarship, and postcolonialism. Indeed, for me one of the main attraction of Theft Is Property! was its openness to critical voices that do not usually feature into the intellectual mainstream, but that nonetheless formulate valid claims and propositions. I was not familiar with most of the contemporary authors quoted or discussed by Nichols, but their voices provide a useful contribution to contemporary debates about race, rights, and property.

Nor was I familiar with the detailed history of settler colonialism in the Anglo-saxon world. Nichols reminds us that “over the course of the nineteenth century alone, Anglo settler peoples managed to acquire an estimated 9.89 million square miles of land, that is, approximately 6 percent of the total land on the surface of Earth in about one hundred years.” It was the single largest and most significant land grab in human history. This great appropriation, or transformation of land into property, was also a great dispossession. As a result of settler colonialism, Indigenous peoples have been divested of their lands, that is, the territorial foundation of their societies, and deprived of their most basic rights. This is the context that we must keep in mind when we discuss the history of settler societies and the development of capitalism. We must understand more precisely how landed property came to function as a tool of colonial domination in such a way as to generate a unique “dilemma of dispossession.” Robert Nichols presents this dilemma as follows: “We can say that dispossession is a process in which novel proprietary relations are generated but under structural conditions that demand their simultaneous negation.” In effect, the dispossessed come to “have” something they cannot use, except by alienating it to another. New proprietary relations are generated but under structural conditions that demand their simultaneous negation. The United States and its settler elite accorded Indigenous peoples truncated property rights in an unequal exchange that “took away their title to their land and gave them the right only to sell.” Indigenous people are figured as the “original owners of the land,” but only retroactively. Contrary to Max Stirner’s assertion, what belongs to no one can in fact be stolen.

Karl Marx and dispossession

To understand the genealogy of dispossession, Robert Nichols turns to Karl Marx and his analysis of the transformation of land tenure within Europe during the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Marx borrows from the anarchist tradition the claim that modern European nation-states were the emanations of acts of massive theft. But he considered the anarchist slogan “Property is theft!” as self-refuting, since the concept of theft presupposes the existence of property. He therefore turned to the notion of dispossession, or expropriation, to refer to the initial alienation process that separated “immediate producers” from direct access to the means of production. For Marx, dispossession was linked to processes of proletarianization, market formation, and industrialization. Through a process of primitive accumulation, the feudal commons were subjected to various rounds of “enclosures.” Land were partitioned and closed off to peasants who had for hundreds of years enjoyed rights of access and use. Without direct access to the common lands that once had sustained their communities, peasants were forced to contract themselves into waged employment in the new manufactures that arose in urban centers. The enclosure of the English commons and transformation of the rural peasantry into an industrial workforce serves as the primary empirical reference from which Marx derives his conceptual tools. The concepts of primitive accumulation, exploitation, and alienation are thought through the experience of England and its historical trajectory that Marx and Engels studied closely. Other historical references, such as the privatization of public lands and criminalization of poverty (the “theft of wood”) in Rhineland or the rural commune (Mir) as the fulcrum of social regeneration in Russia, are only brought in tangentially, and the territorial expansion of European societies into non-European lands is not analyzed in detail.

As Marx famously put it, the history of primitive accumulation is written “in letters of blood and fire.” But primitive accumulation should not be relegated to a primitive past or a historical stage, from which we have hopefully escaped. Critics have raised objections not only with the historical accuracy of Marx’s description but also with the very idea that the overt, extra-economic violence required by capitalism is surpassed and transformed into a period of “silent compulsion” through exploitation. For these critics—Peter Kropotkin, Rosa Luxembourg, postcolonial authors—, political violence is a constitutive feature of capitalism’s expansion and takes the form of repression at home and colonial expansion abroad. Imperialism, according to Lenin, is the highest stage of capitalism. Colonies and formally independent countries in the South become peripheral zones because they specialize in the low-tech and labor-intensive activities, including the supply of raw materials and cheap labor to core zone areas, and thus become “underdeveloped” through unequal exchange mechanisms consequent to colonization and/or imperialism. To this violence against nature and violence against labor that sustains capitalism’s expansion, feminist author Silvia Federici adds that violence against women is congenital to the reproduction of labor and the formation of capital. But this expansion of primitive accumulation and constitutive violence into the present should not obscure the fact that colonial settler societies were born out of a massive act of land grabbing and dispossession. Viewed from this perspective, primitive accumulation acquires a new meaning that cannot be reduced to its past and present forms in capitalist societies.

How the land was won

More generally, critical thinkers who forget to account for the original dispossession of Indigenous peoples in their explanation of capitalist development perform an erasure of history. They treat the clearance and dispersion of people in settler colonies as a necessity, “just as trees and brushwood are cleared from the wastes of America or Australia” (Marx). But land, understood as an intermediary concept between nature and labor, can only be separated from its early occupiers through a violent process of dispossession and appropriation. Indigenous peoples bear the memory of this injustice and of their resistance to it. Their claim for collective atonement and redress is constitutive of their identities and subjectivities. Indigenous peoples have always resisted dispossession, but they have not always done so as Indigenous peoples. Instead, the very idea of indigeneity was, in part, forged in and through this mode of resistance. Dispossession is structural in the same sense that racism can be said to be structural: it generates long-standing patterns of vulnerability and marginalization, and creates subject positions through disciplinary power and repression. Anglo settlers obtained new territories through a variety of ways, some of them requiring violence, coercion and fraud, others based on legal terms and based in norms of reciprocity and consent. But the effects were always and everywhere the same: as Theodore Rossevelt expressed it, “Whether the whites won the land by treaty, by armed conquest, or by a mixture of both, mattered relatively little as long as the land was won.” Or as a Seneca chief put it in 1811, “The white people buy and sell false rights to our lands. They have no right to buy and sell false rights to our lands.”

There is a tradition of resistance and critical thinking among Native Americans that lingers to these days. Parallel to the Great Awakening of Protestant faith that impacted the English colonies in America in the eighteenth century, there was an “Indian Great Awakening” that fused distinct religious, cultural, and political traditions into a pan-Indigenous movement with broad appeal among the Native population. In the nineteenth century, opposition to the Euro-American predation on Native lands came from three distinct perspectives: accommodationist, traditionalist, and syncretist, each articulating a political critique that converged in the denunciation of dispossession and the claim of a distinct Indigenous identity. The twentieth century has seen a remarkable revival of Indigenous syncretism and political militancy that now mobilizes against extractive development projects such as the Dakota Access Pipeline. By claiming that “there can never really be justice on stolen land,” they join forces with other social movements that advocate transnational solidarity and global justice. Robert Nichols also analyses rituals of dispossession in light of Black feminist theorists who have reflected on bodily dispossession and what it means to claim one’s body as one’s own. Self-ownership does not necessarily reinforce proprietary and commodified models of human personhood, especially in the context of enslavement, oppression, and sexual violence that Black women have been subjected to.

Native Lives Matter

On April 23, 2021, former Senator Rick Santorum caused an uproar when he declared: “There isn’t much Native American culture in American culture.” He elaborated: “We came here and created a blank slate. We birthed a nation from nothing. I mean, there was nothing here.” His remark was inspired by ignorance, bigotry, and white suprematism, and was rightly denounced as such. But in a sad way he was right. The reason there isn’t much Native cultural heritage in American culture is that most of it was destroyed or written out of the history books, by people just like Rick Santorum. The origins of American exceptionalism are mired in blood and plunder. Native American cultures have always been erased from the national narrative, as First Nations were forbidden to exhibit their culture, to carry it on and to express it in their native languages. Even now, Native Americans suffer from a disproportionate share of social ills and experience police brutality and cultural repression in their daily lives. Along with the Black Lives Matter movement, the Native Lives Matter campaign draws attention to social issues such as violence from law enforcement, high rates of incarceration, drug addiction, and mental health problems into a national dialogue calling for social justice reform. Thanksgiving, that quintessential American celebration, is commemorated as a National Day of Mourning by many Native Americans as a reminder of the genocide of millions of their people, the theft of their lands, and the relentless assault on their cultures. It is a day of remembrance and spiritual connection as well as a protest of the racism and oppression which Native Americans continue to experience. Penance and atonement, as well as thanksgiving and praising God, are part of the American tradition.