Globalization and Planetary Ethics: New Terrains of Consciousness [1 ed.] 9781032222769, 9781032497730, 9781003395379

Table of contents :
Cover
Endorsement Page
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
List of Contributors
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Introduction
Part One: Dissonance and Us
Part Two: Discord, Dystopias, and Utopias
Park Three: Disparity and Speculative Overtures
Notes
Bibliography
Part I: Dissonance and Us
Chapter 1: Portal, the Front, Wound: Three Metaphors to Explore the Planetary Crisis
1.1 Arundhati Roy
1.1.1 What is a Portal?
1.2 Teilhard de Chardin
1.3 Gilles Deleuze
1.4 Bernard Stiegler
1.5 Towards a Planetary No Man’s Land
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 2: Philosophical Posthumanism and Planetary Concerns
Note
Bibliography
Chapter 3: Move Over, Mona Lisa. Move Over, Jane Eyre: Disrupting the Cultural and Intellectual Inequality Pipeline
3.1 Introduction
3.2 Inequality in the Art and Literary Worlds
3.3 Art History and Comparative Literature Classrooms in the United States
3.4 A Comparative Look: Teaching Art History and Comparative Literature in South Korea, Argentina, and Lebanon
3.5 Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 4: Rethinking Metaphorical and Bodily Movement through Nomadic Subjectivity and Identity
4.1 Introduction
4.2 Moving Metaphorically
4.2.1 Globalization and Identity
4.2.1.1 Nomadic Subject Becoming
4.2.1.2 Difference and Feminist Embodiment
4.2.1.3 Writing and Thought
4.2.1.4 Phenomenologically Performing Nomadism
4.3 Moving Bodily
4.3.1 Home and Space
4.3.2 Arguments Against Braidotti
4.3.2.1 Migration and History
4.3.2.2 Erasure and Identity
4.3.2.3 Embodying Home
4.4 Moving Metaphorically and Bodily
4.4.1 Merging Nomadic Metaphor with Lived Experience
4.4.1.1 Swinging
4.5 Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 5: To Dream Again: Thoughts on Island Soundscapes and Environmentalism
5.1 Memory, Soundscapes, and Island Environments
5.2 Music, Climate Change, and Island Solidarity
Notes
Bibliography
Part II: Discord, Dystopias, and Utopias
Chapter 6: Becoming Utopian in a Threatened Order
6.1
6.2
6.3
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 7: Exploring Dystopic Spatialities of Game(re)play: A Study of Papers, Please and Orwell
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 8: Seeking a World of Their Own: Looking for ‘Human’ Rights in a Mechanized, Futuristic World
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 9: Re-Orienting Reading: Ergodic Form of Mark Z. Danielewski’s Only Revolutions
9.1 The Question of Trivial
9.2 Somatics
9.3 Dispelling Ease
9.4 Hospitality
9.5 Manufacturing Symptoms
Notes
Bibliography
Part III: Disparity and Speculative Overtures
Chapter 10: An Open Letter from Rattus Norvegicus to New York City
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 11: “As Told to”: The Mediation of Refugee Voices in Contemporary Short Fiction
11.1 Refugees, Refugee Experience, and Contested Issues of Representation
11.2 Voice: Heteroglossia and Polyphony as Crucial Features of Refugee Stories
11.3 Mediation and Representation: “As told to”
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 12: “I Am Also a We” : Pathic Communities and the Globalization of Affect in the Wachowskis’ Sense8
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 13: Re-inscribing the World: Reflections on Sense-Making and Navigating the Networks of Global Capitalism
13.1 World as an Idea: Worlding as Transformation
13.2 Redoing Ways of Living and Dying
13.3 Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

“This rich volume covered a wide range of philosophical, literary and ethical materials to place the work of the imagination its widest spatial contexts, ranging from the intimate to the planetary. The authors explore the actual, possible and probable terrains of the ethics of humanity in an epoch in which global challenges appear to be subsumed by the planetary crisis.” - Professor Arjun Appadurai “This collection of essays is a valuable addition to the growing field of Anthropocene studies. Concerned with the globe, the earth, and our times, the essays included here dwell on planetary ethics in speculative, real, and imagined spaces. This book will speak to our sense of the present.” - Professor Dipesh Chakrabarty

GLOBALIZATION AND PLANETARY ETHICS

This volume is a critical investigation into the contemporary phenomenon of the dissensus of the globe and the planet, and the new terrains of consciousness that need to be negotiated towards a possibility for transformation. It examines the possibilities of alternate, sustainable modes of being and existing in a world which requires a unified, ethical, biopolitical worldview. The book explores themes like philosophical posthumanism and planetary concerns; disruption of cultural and intellectual inequality; bodily movement through nomadic subjectivity; dystopic spatialities of game(re)play; globalization, and speculative imaginaries of the body; and theory of multiplicity. It also discusses the impact of COVID-19 on human beings, the role of the neoliberal media, the question of rights of robots and cyborgs in sci-fi movies, and representation of refugees in literature. This book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of English literature, political philosophy, cultural studies, literary cultures, post-colonial studies, critical theory, and social anthropology. Simi Malhotra is Professor and Head, Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi. Her latest publications are the edited books Food Culture Studies in India: Consumption, Representation and Mediation and Inhabiting Cyberspace in India: Theory, Perspectives and Challenges, (both 2021, Springer), and the co-authored books Terrains of Consciousness: Multilogical Perspectives on Globalization, (2021, Würzburg University Press), and Ocean as Method: Thinking With The Maritime (2022, Routledge). Shraddha A. Singh is Associate Professor at the Department of English, Zakir Husain Delhi College, University of Delhi, India. She works on literary theory and genre fiction with a special interest in Margaret Atwood’s oeuvre. She has worked on international projects, has several publications and has presented papers at national and international seminars and conferences. Her latest publication is titled Speculation and Detection: Explorations in Genre Fiction (2022, Worldview Publications). She is a published bilingual poet and has read her poetry at the Sahitya Akademi (Indian Academy of Letters). Zahra Rizvi is a PhD scholar and Senior Research Fellow in the Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, and works in the fields of cultural studies, utopia/dystopia studies, digital humanities, and game studies. She is co-founder of the Indian chapter of the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) and is a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Fellow at Yale University. She was recently Ministry of Education-SPARC Fellow in Digital Humanities at Michigan State University, and Electronic Literature Organization Fellow 2022. She has delivered lectures at Michigan State University, Jamia Millia Islamia, and Zakir Husain Delhi College, University of Delhi. Her work has been published in several online and print journals.

Globalization and Planetary Ethics New Terrains of Consciousness Edited by Simi Malhotra, Shraddha A. Singh, and Zahra Rizvi

First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Simi Malhotra, Shraddha A. Singh, and Zahra Rizvi; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Simi Malhotra, Shraddha A. Singh, and Zahra Rizvi to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-032-22276-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-49773-0 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-39537-9 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003395379 Typeset in Sabon by SPi Technologies India Pvt Ltd (Straive)

To Our Mothers

Contents

List of Contributors xi Acknowledgments xv Introduction 1 SIMI MALHOTRA, SHRADDHA A. SINGH, AND ZAHRA RIZVI

PART I

Dissonance and Us 1 Portal, the Front, Wound: Three Metaphors to Explore the Planetary Crisis

9 11

JOFF P. N. BRADLEY

2 Philosophical Posthumanism and Planetary Concerns

29

FRANCESCA FERRANDO AND SHRADDHA A. SINGH

3 Move Over, Mona Lisa. Move Over, Jane Eyre: Disrupting the Cultural and Intellectual Inequality Pipeline

37

PEGGY LEVITT

4 Rethinking Metaphorical and Bodily Movement through Nomadic Subjectivity and Identity

50

VENYA PATEL

5 To Dream Again: Thoughts on Island Soundscapes and Environmentalism 65 PRIYA PARROTTA NATARAJAN

x Contents PART II

Discord, Dystopias, and Utopias

77

6 Becoming Utopian in a Threatened Order

79

TOM MOYLAN

7 Exploring Dystopic Spatialities of Game(re)play: A Study of Papers, Please and Orwell 93 ZAHRA RIZVI

8 Seeking a World of Their Own: Looking for ‘Human’ Rights in a Mechanized, Futuristic World

105

ARPITA SEN

9 Re-Orienting Reading: Ergodic Form of Mark Z. Danielewski’s Only Revolutions 120 AINEE BASIR

PART III

Disparity and Speculative Overtures

131

10 An Open Letter from Rattus Norvegicus to New York City 133 RADHIKA SUBRAMANIAM

11 “As Told to”: The Mediation of Refugee Voices in Contemporary Short Fiction

143

MIRIAM WALLRAVEN

12 “I Am Also a We”: Pathic Communities and the Globalization of Affect in the Wachowskis’ Sense8 154 PAROMITA PATRANOBISH

13 Re-inscribing the World: Reflections on Sense-Making and Navigating the Networks of Global Capitalism

170

INDRANI DAS GUPTA

Index 187

Contributors

Ainee Basir obtained a BA in English from Jamia Millia Islamia, an MA in English from Lady Shri Ram College, Delhi University, and is currently pursuing an MPhil at Delhi University. Her research interests revolve around postmodernism, technicity, and the twenty-first-century novel. Joff P. N. Bradley is Professor of English and Philosophy at Teikyo University, Tokyo, Japan. He was visiting professor at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, and remains a visiting fellow at Kyung Hee University, Seoul. Joff was visiting professor at Durham University, England, and Nanterre University, France, during his sabbatical in 2022. He has co-written A Pedagogy of Cinema and co-edited books on Deleuze and Buddhism; utopia; French thought; transversality, Japanese education; Bernard Stiegler; and animation. His forthcoming four books will focus on schizoanalysis and postmedia, schizoanalysis and Asia, global ecologies of learning, and critical essays on Bernard Stiegler. Francesca Ferrando teaches philosophy at NYU Liberal Studies, New York University. A leading voice in the field of Posthuman Studies and founder of the Global Posthuman Network, she has received numerous honors and recognitions, including the Sainati Prize with the acknowledgment of the President of Italy. She has published extensively; her latest book is Philosophical Posthumanism (Bloomsbury 2019). In the history of TED talks, she was the first speaker to give a talk on the topic of the posthuman. The US magazine Origins named her among the 100 people making change in the world. Indrani Das Gupta is Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Maharaja Agrasen College, University of Delhi, India. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Indian science fiction in the Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia. Her chapters have been published by Routledge (New York and London), Macmillan India, Aakar Books, and Bloomsbury 2022, while her articles have been published in several national and international journals. Her co-edited book Gandhi in India’s Literary and

xii Contributors Cultural Imagination is published by Routledge, New York and London (2022). Peggy Levitt is chair of the Sociology Department and the Mildred Lane Kemper Professor of Sociology at Wellesley College. She is a co-founder of the Global (De)Centre. Her book Transnational Social Protection: Transforming Social Welfare in a World on the Move (co-authored with Erica Dobbs, Ken Sun, and Ruxandra Paul) is published by Oxford University Press (2022). Artifacts and Allegiances: How Museums Put the Nation and the World on Display was published by the University of California Press (2015). Peggy co-directed the Transnational Studies Initiative and the Politics and Social Change Workshop at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University from 1998 to 2020. She received honorary doctoral degrees from the University of Helsinki (2017) and Maastricht University (2014). She has held numerous fellowships and guest professorships including, most recently, as a Fellow at the Institut Convergences Migration in Paris (2022), a Robert Schuman Fellow at the European University Institute (2017–2019) and a Distinguished Visitor at the Baptist University of Hong Kong (2019). Her previous books include Religion on the Edge (2012), God Needs No Passport (New Press, 2007), The Transnational Studies Reader (2007), The Changing Face of Home (Russell Sage, 2002), and The Transnational Villagers (2001). www.peggylevitt.org, http://globaldecentre.world/, www.wellesley.edu/sociology/faculty/levitt. Tom Moylan is Glucksman Professor Emeritus in the School of English, Irish, and Communication; Adjunct Professor in the School of Architecture; and Founding Director of the Ralahine Centre for Utopian Studies and the Ralahine Utopian Studies book series at the University of Limerick. His publications include Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination and Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia; co-edited books (Not Yet: Reconsidering Ernst Bloch, with Jamie Owen Daniel; Utopia Method Vision: The Use Value of Social Dreaming and Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination, with Raffaella Baccolini; Exploring the Utopian Impulse, with Michael J. Griffin); special issues of Utopian Studies on Ernst Bloch, Fredric Jameson, and Utopia and music; and numerous essays on utopia, dystopia, theology, and pedagogical/political agency. His most recent book is Becoming Utopian: The Culture and Politics of Radical Transformation (2020). Priya Parrotta Natarajan is an author, musician and activist dedicated to promoting environmental consciousness across borders. She writes and sings in the hope of inspiring people from diverse geographical, environmental and cultural contexts to live in harmony with Earth. Since 2017, Priya has served as Founder/Director of Music and the Earth International, an

Contributors  xiii environmental music initiative with academic, artistic, and activist branches. She is the author of two books, The Politics of Coexistence in the Atlantic World (2016) and To Dream Again: Island Environmentalism through Music (forthcoming), as well as numerous articles and book chapters. She has also written and produced two albums and several singles which draw inspiration from diverse world styles. Her work is informed and strengthened by her multicultural background; her training in the historical and geopolitical origins of environmental injustice; her musical abilities; and her experiences as a climate activist and cultural organizer. A finalist in the United States Artists Fellowship in Music, Priya has been recognized internationally for both her intellectual and artistic achievements. Venya Patel’s research interest lies in the posthuman and symbiosis. Venya has a background in social and political philosophy from New Zealand and the Netherlands. She is an Indian from Thailand and has a keen interest in classical tantra. Apart from academia she writes poems and creates art. Paromita Patranobish is an independent researcher based in New Delhi, India. Her work focuses on the intellectual history of the body in modernity, engaging primarily with continental and post-continental philosophy and studying 20tth- and 21st-century aesthetic articulations of nonhuman embodiment in relation to globalization and multispecies planetary ecologies. She has a PhD on Virginia Woolf’s literary phenomenology from Delhi University and has previously designed and taught courses on gender studies and postmodernism at Shiv Nadar University and Ambedkar University, Delhi. Her work has been published in Fields of Play: Sport, Literature and Culture (Routledge, 2015) and Studies in Travel Writing (Taylor and Francis, 2019). Zahra Rizvi is a PhD scholar and Senior Research Fellow at the Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, and works in the fields of cultural studies, utopia/dystopia studies, digital humanities, and game studies. She is co-founder of the Indian chapter of the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA), and is a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Fellow at Yale University. She was recently Ministry of Education-SPARC Fellow in Digital Humanities at Michigan State University, and Electronic Literature Organization Fellow 2022. She has delivered lectures at Michigan State University, Jamia Millia Islamia, and Zakir Husain Delhi College, University of Delhi. Her work has been published in several online and print journals. Shraddha A. Singh is Associate Professor at the Department of English, Zakir Husain Delhi College, University of Delhi, India. She works on literary theory and genre fiction with a special interest in Margaret Atwood’s oeuvre. She has worked on international projects, has several publications and has presented papers at national and international seminars and

xiv Contributors conferences. Her latest publication is titled Speculation and Detection: Explorations in Genre Fiction (2022, Worldview Publications). She is a published bilingual poet and has read her poetry at the Sahitya Akademi (Indian Academy of Letters). Arpita Sen is a Guest Assistant Professor at Hansraj College, University of Delhi. She is also an MPhil scholar in the Department of English, University of Delhi, where her research focuses on literatures of forced migration and displacement in a globalized world (with a special focus on Afghanistan). Her other research areas are South Asian politics, human rights, young adult literature, and migration theory. Radhika Subramaniam is a curator and writer with an interdisciplinary practice. Through text, exhibitions, and public interventions, she explores the poetics and politics of crises and surprises, particularly cities and crowds, walking, art, and human–nonhuman relationships. She is Associate Professor of Visual Culture at Parsons School of Design/The New School where she was also the first Director/Chief Curator of the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center 2009–2017. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1726-5235 Miriam Wallraven is Associate Professor (Akademische Rätin) at the JuliusMaximilians-Universität Würzburg, where she teaches English literature and cultural studies. Her current research focuses on literatures of migration and displacement in a globalized world (with a particular focus on the Balkans), and her other research interests include narratology and genre theories, gender studies and feminism, as well as religious cultures in literature. She obtained an MA in English and German literature from the Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen and the University of Edinburgh. She received her PhD from Tübingen (published by Königshausen and Neumann in 2007 as A Writing Halfway between Theory and Fiction: Mediating Feminism from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century). In 2007 and 2008 she held a postdoctoral scholarship at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC), Justus-LiebigUniversität Gießen, where she began her habilitation before working as an Assistant Professor at Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen where she finished her habilitation (published by Routledge in 2015 as Women Writers and the Occult in Literature and Culture: Female Lucifers, Priestesses, and Witches).

Acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible without the partnerships forged due to the grant received from the Indian government Ministry of Education’s Scheme for Promotion of Academic and Research Collaboration (SPARC) for a project titled, “New Terrains of Consciousness: Globalization, Sensory Environments and Local Cultures of Knowledge”. The institutional partners for the project were the Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, India and the Department of English and American Studies, University of Würzburg, Germany. The correspondence, communication, and ideas received from the international PI and Co-PI Prof. Isabel Karremann and Prof. Zeno Ackermann, and Indian Co-PI Prof. Nishat Zaidi greatly benefited the project as it took shape. This project grew out of the PIs’ extant fields of expertise in popular culture and media studies (Prof. Malhotra, Prof. Zaidi), globalization studies (Prof. Karremann) and sound studies (Prof. Ackermann), which were combined to generate an innovative methodology for transnationally examining experiences of globalization and their cultural articulations in East and West. This comparative approach, which aimed at establishing a new multilateral conceptualization of the discourses of globalization, was institutionalized in the mutual student exchanges and courses taught by foreign scholars at the Indian host university, and the organization of a successful conference in February 2021 titled, “Globalization and New Terrains of Consciousness: Phenomenologies of the Global/Local/Glocal”. We would like to express our gratitude to Prof. Arjun Appadurai, Prof. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Prof. Tom Moylan, Prof. Peggy Levitt, Prof. Joff P.N. Bradley, Dr. Manoj N Y, Prof. Ananya Jahanara Kabir, Monseiur Ari Gautier, Prof. David Schalkwyk, Dr. Miriam Wallraven, Dr. Avishek Parui, Dr. Rahul K. Gairola, Prof. Brandon LaBelle, Prof. Yasmeen Arif, Prof. Suman Gupta, Prof. Radhika Subramaniam, and Prof. Francesca Ferrando. None of this would have been possible without the support received from the faculty members and scholars of the Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia – our constant support and motivation comes from them. Finally, our greatest debt is to our families for their encouragement and faith in us.

Introduction Simi Malhotra, Shraddha A. Singh, and Zahra Rizvi

Introduction We live in sensory environments, and glocalisation allows for a critical reflection on the making and remaking of these through assemblages and the varying planes of coming together. A consideration of humans and our earth-others in building a new form of “planetarity”1 imaginary is crucial in our understanding, and varied sensoriums allow for multiplicity of expressions and relationalities to emerge in our context. The need of the hour is a critical intervention that addresses the contemporary phenomenon of the dissensus of the globe and the planet, and the new terrains of consciousness that must be negotiated towards a possibility for transformative reflection on the making and remaking of the experiences and conditions that are formed in such environments. In response to these developments and demands, a Ministry of Education (MHRD)-SPARC collaborative project titled “New Terrains of Conscious­ ness: Globalization, Sensory Environments and Local Cultures of Knowledge” on globalization, planetary ethics, and sense-making was conceptualized between the Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi and the Department of English and American Studies, University of Würzburg, Germany. Apart from mutual academic exchanges and courses taught by foreign scholars at the Indian host university, including “Rethinking Articulation: Social Phenomena and Vocal Phenomena in Poetry, Pop and Cultural Studies”, a seminar course by Zeno Ackermann, Co-PI and Professor, Department of English and American Studies, University of Würzburg, and “Inhabiting a Globalized World: Concepts, Theories, Critical Perspectives”, a seminar course by Isabel Karremann, PI and Professor, Department of English, University of Zurich, Switzerland, the project included the organization of an online international conference on “Globalization and New Terrains of Consciousness: Phenomenologies of the Global/Local/Glocal” in February 2021. This conference showcased the most vivid picture of the work promised by this project – the formulation and articulation of new terrains of consciousness to respond to the need of the hour mentioned above. The participants of this conference, including reputed scholars and upcoming DOI: 10.4324/9781003395379-1

2  Simi Malhotra et al. researchers from all over the world, contributed significantly to not just the theoretical and structural framework of this book but also in the ethics of planetarity in a globalized world that requires deep intervention into the local, the global, and the glocal. It is in this vein that we propose a multilogical phenomenology of globalization that will enable an analysis of those experiences that human beings are undergoing because of the new socio-economic-cultural and political processes of globalization, which, in turn, condition the horizon of all possible expectations and interpretations against which new experiences are possible and intelligible. Our entry point for such a phenomenology of globalization is the examination of sensory cultures and of their medial articulation. We ask: how are local cultures of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch as well as the related routines of spatiality and somaticity impacted by global discourses and media (such as television, popular music, digital media, ‘cosmopolitan’ or ‘global’ literature)? Corollarily, how and in how far are specific local practices, strategies, and legacies of worldmaking represented in and projected in the sphere of global negotiation? How are local and global practices of sensory, spatial, and conceptual worldmaking interwoven and negotiated in capitals or megacities like Delhi, Beijing, London, and Berlin? The urban sensorium of the smart city contrasts well with the sentient ecological drive in Environmental Humanities in the face of mass extinction and global climate change. We think about the synesthesia of senses and sense-making, the affective accumulation of images across literary, cultural, and programmatized texts that both build and seek a splintering “actuality” which is by virtue of its accumulative articulation an “artifactuality”.2 The local articulations of global experiences of the networked assemblages of the times and terrains of consciousness, open spaces of contemplation about the molecular actualizing, or even activating the desiring and sensory intensities of its parts, are ever evolving. It becomes interesting to follow language and its ordering and development of a sense of varied sensory environments, of narrative, of story, of plot, of the epochal, and the trivial, bringing us back to thought and sensation through the literary, the cultural, and the experiential that eventually dwell on what it means to be human and what it means to overcome the centrality of that thought in the chapters of this volume. This volume of essays is our attempt towards understanding making, unmaking, and sense-making practices that revolve around global and planetary ethics. Some of the questions, positioned in response to these developments and demands in the contemporary study of Humanities and Social Sciences, that the volume seeks to ask and explore include how and in what ways specific local practices, strategies, and legacies of worldmaking are represented in and projected into the sphere of global negotiation. The book is divided into three parts that uncover and address our present, our past, and our speculative overtures that engage in phenomenological gestures towards our presence as well as absence as thinking beings. The first part, titled “Dissonance and Us”, examines our role as a species and the

Introduction  3 chapters in this section attempt to challenge and overcome the centrality of that thought. In the second part, “Discord, Dystopias, and Utopias”, the chapters focus on dominant discourses and the challenges they produce by investigating processes that create structures and nomenclatures. The need to remodel our ways of living is strongly felt in this section and dire warnings along with prospective spaces of change are discussed at length in the multimodal narratives examined in these chapters. The third part, “Disparity and Speculative Overtures”, amplifies otherness in terms of questioning it via imagined possibilities. The chapters in this section focus on nonhuman others and hypothetical projections of the future in terms of experiential engagement with a response-ability aimed towards understanding the planet and its concerns. By virtue of living in sensory environments, there is a need, and even more so a possibility, for critical reflection on the making and remaking of these experiences and conditions through assemblages and the coming together of such environments. This volume is a venture in this direction. Part One: Dissonance and Us Part One, titled “Dissonance and Us”, focuses on the idea of negotiating with and questioning everyday instances in the broader realm of planetary concerns. This section opens with Joff P. N. Bradley’s exploration of the phenomenology of violence and disruption through the metaphors of the portal, the front, and the wound, metaphors deployed as heuristic devices to think about the state of wordlessness, explored in relation to the planetary crisis: focusing on reading the pandemic as a collective wound. Critiquing Arundhati Roy’s suggestion of the portal in the “Pandemic and the Portal”, which, interestingly, calls for a ‘new terrain of consciousness’, Bradley offers the suggestion to move away from idealized or transcendent notions associated with such a conception of the portal. Instead, he thinks through the metaphors of the front and the wound, drawing upon Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit and Zizek’s call for a “shift in perspective”. Further, Bradley suggests the disruption that is of the immonde or the non-world. Citing Deleuze’s idea of pure immanence and the figure of the soldier, Bradley concludes his chapter with thoughts on the potential of a planetary common to emerge during the crisis of the pandemic, connecting our here and now. The next chapter in this section, in carrying the potentiality of this planetary common, is styled as a conversation between posthuman philosopher Francesca Ferrando, and one of our editors, Shraddha A. Singh, where the discussants bring to the fore primary questions about what it means to be human, the history of the term, as well as the multiple negotiations that take place therein, to suggest the centrality of the notion of the human. This conversation reflects on the first chapter by looking at the COVID-19 pandemic as a watershed moment where humans as a species have been impacted and how humans inhabit a world of shared vulnerability. This growing vulnerability is one which encompasses different spheres of existence in unique ways that cannot be

4  Simi Malhotra et al. ignored. The third chapter in this part, a contribution by Peggy Levitt, discusses what Levitt calls “the inequality pipeline” and how it results in barriers to entry for artists, writers, and thinkers who live outside the traditional centers of cultural and intellectual power. The structure and space of the university are at the center of her discussion, leading to interesting insights, especially in the way Levitt answers important questions about progress being slow despite universal calls for action. At this juncture, this chapter warns of the pitfalls of spaces of solution becoming part of the problem, and, instead, offers a way forward. Levitt’s concerns extend beyond the structures of the cultural and academic worlds, and in the next chapter, Venya Patel examines the mobility of Nomads and relates this idea, metaphorically, to writing. She explores the idea of a ‘nomadic subject’ that transcends and alters the idea of fixed conceptual boundaries using posthuman thought. Interestingly, Patel extends the idea of the metaphorical nomad to herself and examines the method of writing as travelling in which one is constantly moving in and out of the process, engaging in experimental writing and personal reflection of herself swinging while demonstrating an active combination of Rosi Braidotti’s nomadic subject who writes and thinks, and Sara Ahmed’s nomad who embodies the second skin and feels at home by identifying with estrangement. Priya Parrotta Natarajan’s musical and environmental dialogues, then, present as a strategic and imperative intervention in the ongoing climatic catastrophe and estrangement in the final chapter of this section. She exhorts us to see the potential of Island music as a site and witness for diverse influences and histories that have come to exist in small spaces of islands; the way they have had to coexist with each other and create new languages for land and sea, as well as humour and creative resilience in the face of difficult challenges. Parrotta identifies that the forces of colonialism and market-led globalization have strained the attempts of young people from different countries, continents and cultural backgrounds to connect with each other. Her chapter marks the movement towards Part II as she outlines the initiation of her project on island solidarity through music with students at the University of Puerto Rico, called Island Sessions, an active, living utopianism which asks readers to think about and critically intervene in spheres of dissonance and discord. Part Two: Discord, Dystopias, and Utopias Tom Moylan opens Part II by deliberating on the central problematics in relation to utopian impulses, the imagination, and the possibilities against the backdrop of a continuous downward spiral of ecological crisis, increasing xenophobic sentiments, the rise of far-right Fascist ideologies, and the explosion of global capitalist networks that are destroying the very vitality of everyday life on Earth. Even as anticipatory agencies are being consumed, co-opted and/or outrightly condemned in a false dawn of managerial innovations of capitalist processes, Moylan opines that it is time for the political

Introduction  5 exercise of transformative potential of the utopian impulse. Moylan also cautions that it is necessary to be aware of the retrieval mechanisms of such totalizing, aggrandizing networks of capitalist realism. Moylan’s insistence on new strategies of world-making and new forms of agency, and the sequential practice of enunciation and denunciation in order to produce the next steps on the path toward a better horizon, reflects the volume’s attempts to counter the dullness of systematic, ideological and cultural compartmentalization. Moylan conceptualizes on the fact of becoming utopian in a world which is increasingly geared towards the dystopian. This dystopianism, as Zahra Rizvi explores, is one that establishes itself in neo-experiences of hyper-surveillance, digital governance, and competitive survival in a dystopia of technics. Rizvi chooses to delve into these experiences through one of the most participative and immersive of genres, the genre of dystopian video games that offer simulation as a strategy for playing and negotiating the dystopia. Through Lucas Pope’s Papers, Please and Osmotic Studios’ Orwell, Rizvi proposes the metaphor of ‘replay’ to understand the politics and neganthropocenic possibilities of negotiating dystopia as a trajectory for the very necessary work of utopian ethics. Arpita Sen, in her contribution, expands on the philosophy of the two papers to talk about the rights of non-humans, i.e., robots, by considering the ethical implications of granting rights to robots in the world that exists within the narratives of Asimov’s Bicentennial Man, HBO’s Westworld and Philip K. Dick’s “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” This chapter asks the reader to dwell upon the complexity behind the definition of the term ‘human’ in ‘human rights’ in consideration of the dystopia. Her chapter provides an insight into worlds that may be somewhat removed from the world we inhabit, yet the fact that these worlds continue to be startling reflections of human society, both bygone and current, means that these genres provide ways of looking at societies where inequity and repression amongst ‘classes’ of citizens reign which can then be used to examine our own. In fact, the reader’s disorientation, beginning with the physicality of the world, as Ainee Basir emphasizes in her rich illustration of ergodic literature through a reading the technological innovations carried out in Mark Z. Danielewski’s “Only Revolutions”, can raise questions around ideas of authorship, readership, static narratives, and the body’s interaction to the text, and that of the text to world habitude. Basir’s examination of the reader of this literature, who is both paranoid about the intent of technology and subconsciously knows their own dependence on the same, points to some of the most invigorating arguments of Part II which looks at disparity and speculative overtures. Park Three: Disparity and Speculative Overtures In her remarkable speculative piece, which places this chapter at the center of the volume’s exercise, Radhika Subramanian writes “An Open Letter by Rattus Norvegicus to New York City”, where the common brown rat makes

6  Simi Malhotra et al. an eloquent appeal against humans’ inhuman ways, raising larger issues that demand attention. The rat not only differentiates itself through the letter but also reminds us of the colonial fictions of city building, where construction of the 19th-century city was built on a particular kind of dystopian exclusion: that of the non-humans. The city’s resident aliens in their conclusion to the letter suggest that the city should be based on the principle of co-existence, making it a wilder place; creating an urban sensorium of different species, open to smell, flesh, and proximity of others; where the city is seen as an attitude that needs to be a material construction. Miriam Wallraven’s chapter presents another problematic exclusion by exploring the nuances of the ways of telling and hearing the voices of refugees by focusing on two collections of short fiction, Refugee Tales as told to Ali Smith, Patience Agbabi, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Inua Ellams and Many Others (Eds. David Heard/Anna Pictus, 2016) and Refugee Tales as told to Jackie Kay, Helen Macdonald, Neel Mukherjee, Kamila Shamsie, and many more (2017). The chapter examines questions of voice, medium, and representation as well as the role of the listener as negotiated by these texts, a negotiation that takes place on several textual layers which can be understood by tracing it in a threefold movement from voice to story and tale, and finally to mediation and representation. Issues of translation, influence of mediation, auto-diegetic voices, embodiment of words, and methods of making the sound visible are discussed, while noting the risks of a hegemonic representation of refugees. Paromita Patranobish’s chapter seeks to illuminate debates around subjectivity stemming from representational narratives, taking as its point of departure the implications of Merleau-Ponty’s theory of the subject as always already intertwined for questions of sociality, geopolitically engineered precarity, and forms of contemporary late capitalist violence, and critically examining recent digital and cinematic productions, including The OA and Sense8, centered on various cultural, representational, and ethical possibilities of what Gail Weiss in summarizing Merleau-Ponty calls “embodiment as intercorporeality”.3 The chapter interrogates the figuration and function of the body as a critical component of contemporary neoliberal economies of globalized capital, “algorithmic governmentality”4 and biopolitical profiling. Indrani Das Gupta’s contribution to this section, on the other hand, draws attention to the word “worlding” with respect to Heidegger’s philosophy and its relation to his idea of Dasein that finds mention in his monumental book Being and Time, rejecting the binary reification of subject and object. Das Gupta focuses on Spivak’s rejection of Heidegger and epistemic understanding of the word ‘worlding’ that grapples with the idea of othering and alternating. In this final chapter of the volume, Das Gupta looks at Vandana Singh’s short stories and Samit Basu’s The Gameworld Trilogy, exploring worlding to comprehend speculative narratives like science fiction and fantasy, with ‘worlding’ situated as an active critical intervention that negotiates and engages with hegemony, new liberal and capitalist networks where the natives and people of the Third World are still redefined as ‘others’ and hence

Introduction  7 subject to control. By tying into the metaphors envisioned at the start of this volume, Das Gupta’s chapter marks the way forward, underlining the efforts of this volume as continuing and affirming. The volume, thus, addresses the disquietude of a society which is at odds with itself even as it covers its fragility through an obverse magnification into populating a planet of no inhabitants but unconscious tourists who move without an acknowledgment of the very networks that sustain them. This volume understands that the crisis behind this erosion of the overtness of these networks of care creates a call for planetary ethics. The central theme of this volume is to investigate the possibilities of alternate, sustainable modes of being and existing in a world which requires a unified, ethical, and biopolitical worldview that challenges the disparity of its fragments while speculating on their synesthetic conditionality. Notes 1 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Planetarity,” in Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, ed. Barbara Cassin et al. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014). 2 Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television, trans. Jennifer Bajorek (UK: Polity, 1996). 3 Gail Weiss, Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality (UK: Routledge, 1998). 4 Erb and Ganahl, 2017.

Bibliography Derrida, Jacques, and Bernard Stiegler. Echographies of Television. Translated by Jennifer Bajorek. UK: Polity, 1996. Erb, Maurice, and Simon Ganahl. “Algorithmic Governmentality.” Le foucaldien 3/1 (2017). URL: https://www.foucaldien.net/collections/799/ Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Planetarity.” In Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, edited by Cassin, Barbara, Steven Rendall, and Emily S. Apter. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014. Weiss, Gail, Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality. UK: Routledge, 1998.

Part I

Dissonance and Us

1 Portal, the Front, Wound Three Metaphors to Explore the Planetary Crisis Joff P. N. Bradley

While I have struggled to agree with the first metaphor from the first reading until the very last, the other two I juxtapose paratactically to suggest a new configuration. This has its own risks if one problematizes phenomenology in the light of a somewhat curious constellation of thinkers—namely Teilhard de Chardin, Bernard Stiegler, and Gilles Deleuze. For some, the first writer in this constellation and my later use of Hegel threatens to turn my argument into a theological odyssey. However, this is not my intention. Indeed, such criticism stems from a crass or dogmatic reading of both Teilhard and Hegel. Despite the odd amalgam of writers and thinkers, the argument in essence is not an appeal to transcendence, but a rumination on immanence as such. The first metaphor is suggested by Arundhati Roy (2020), who has recently spoken of the “portal” as a means of sense-making—a means to seek out a new terrain of consciousness. Although I find the metaphor thought-provoking, I reject it as it appears ethereal, miraculous, phantasmagorical, transcendent, and, therefore, all the more dangerous. The portal is a seductive ruse and hallucination. The second is borrowed from the palaeontologist and Jesuit priest Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955) and his description of the Front in the First World War (Staudigl 2014).1 It appears that while in Roy’s (2020) metaphor we find such appeals to transcendence, this is strangely not the case in Teilhard’s nostalgia for the Front. In Teilhard, one finds a phenomenology of violence akin to the experience of Zerrissenheit in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit or the experience of torn-to-pieces-hood which the American psychologist and philosopher, William James, witnessed in the 7.9-magnitude earthquake in San Francisco that devastated the Bay area on April 18, 1906.2 However, my point is to read this phenomenological experience through Deleuzian and Stieglerian lenses. The following questions arise: With desolation all around, in what sense can we say Teilhard suffers Zerrissenheit and tarries with the negative? And in what sense can we read this through Deleuze’s Stoicism? In what sense can we say in the contemporary moment that we too find a sense of violence similar to how one perceives tears, rips, piercings, lacerations, and a sense of absolute dismemberment, even planetary dismemberment, in our very own terrain of consciousness? While we may balk at this yearning or nostalgia for the Front, or for no man’s land, or DOI: 10.4324/9781003395379-3

12  Joff P. N. Bradley the battlefield, or indeed for the forlorn desire for the reunification of the spirit, I want to understand the sense-making from the trauma and experience of quarantine—a perverse Zerrissenheit as stasis without sublation, Aufhebung, or transcendence. This is our global terrain of consciousness. To understand this is to move to the third metaphor, that is, the sense of wound which Deleuze explores in Logique du sens [Logic of Sense] and upon which Bernard Stiegler elaborates idiosyncratically in his late writings. A caveat should be added here as this is quite different from the sense given to it by Slavoj Žižek, who argues that vis-à-vis the wound, we must include “in the scope of our vision the cut-in-the-real of subjectivity itself” (Žižek 2020). My aim is to assess the limits of phenomenological explication in Teilhard and to invoke, following Deleuze and Stiegler, the Stoic sense of pure immanence of the battlefield, or the open wound or open world. 1.1 Arundhati Roy In her short piece, The Pandemic is a Portal, Arundhati Roy (2020) offers a metaphorical imagery of the portal. She suggests that in the time of the pandemic, it is possible to enter this portal “with little luggage”, to imagine another world, and to fight for it. I must confess that I was quite irritated by this. At first glance and for the most part, I thought the portal was a kind of yearning for a new consciousness or a passage to mend the torn skin of the earth. However, the dissonant concept of the portal jarred me into looking at the idea of open conflict on the battlefield in Teilhard and the open wound which is explored in the philosophies of Deleuze and Stiegler. I wanted to retain the sense of an open wound as an immanent possibility—as a question of pure immanence—and from this, I wanted to think about pure immanence as an open wound, as a sense of the planetary commons.3 In contrasting the imagery of the portal with that of Teilhard’s the Front and no man’s land, I find that the latter takes on a surprisingly violent, affirmative, immanent, and this-worldly character, which takes us near to the Stoic sense of pure immanence in Deleuze (2001). My point is that one must keep the tear in this world open and resist passing through it into the next. From the phenomenological tradition in Hegel, this is to tolerate or tarry with the diremption of spirit, to resist the desire to make the world whole because it never was thus: in other words, we can say there has always already been an anoriginary, anarchic principle or schism.4 With this in mind, we should not try to heal or cure this world with seductive offerings of transcendent portals, but rather experience a violent laceration, a persistent gaping wound, an anoriginal tear without finality or closure.5 1.1.1 What is a Portal? As a poetic or rhetorical synonym for a door, a gate, a doorway, a magnificent gateway, or an entrance to a tunnel, a portal can be fictitious, feigned,

Portal, the Front, Wound  13 imaginary, and ideal. It is unfounded on rational grounds as there is no ground for passing through it. It is invented, unreal, a figment of the imagination, a deception, and a simulation of the real. Roy (2020) insists that the virus has brought the “engine of capitalism to a juddering halt,”6 and here her question is precise: Do you want to help fix it or look for a better engine? She is right to note the class and caste divisions in early 2020, which have become strikingly evident during and since India’s national lockdown. Indeed, we concur that the national lockdown was the portal to look at the gated communities of the rich and privileged and the extrusion or banishment of working-class citizens from India’s huge cities back to their family homes in the countryside. Roy (2020) speaks metamorphically of the coronavirus as making “the mighty kneel” and bringing the world to a halt “like nothing else could.” She says that we long for a return to “normality” and the erasure of this rupture from our collective memory, but the rupture persists. Arundhati Roy (2020) writes: [I]n the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality. Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers, and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it. Ready to imagine another world? The portal is “a gateway between one world and the next”? I resist. I do not wish to voyage out of this world into another. Instead, I want to explore the messy world in front of me, the world as it is, the wound as it is, stinking in its everydayness, as Sartre says.7 Here, we should note the phenomenology of Alphonso Lingis, which discusses the work of Jean-Luc Nancy and the question of corpus. His phenomenology erupts in anger at the way of the world. Lingis addresses the wounds of those in poverty and the distress of bearing witness to it. He speaks of the distress and anger at witnessing the wounds of humanity: Humanity is becoming tangible, and also tangible in its inhumanity… To see, to touch wounds, bodies exposed to us in their wounds, bodies of misery, bodies of starvation, battered bodies, prostituted bodies, mangled bodies, infected bodies, as well as bloated bodies, bodies that are too well nourished, too body-built, too erotic, too orgasmic.8 The wounds, the hunger, and the fear of the outer zone, the activism, and the insubstantial and insignificant freedom of the archipelago, become our distress— a distress that puts us in the presence of one another—in anger.9

14  Joff P. N. Bradley 1.2 Teilhard de Chardin To make my case for the wound as an adequate metaphor in the time of the pandemic, I want to explore Teilhard’s phenomenological experience of violence at the Front and in no man’s land. With the 8th Tunisian Tirailleurs (4th Mixed Zouaves-Tirailleurs), in September 1917, Teilhard offers a phenomenological account, a mystical vision or revelation, of the Front. Exploring a new terrain of consciousness, a terrain of “immense freedom,” and the experience of mystical transcendence, Teilhard, a medical orderly and stretcher bearer during the First World War, discerns a strange sense of tranquillity. The experience of the Front casts its spell, says Teilhard, and he explores this seduction—phenomenologically—by asking: “What virtuous secret enchants my existence so vividly, as to attract my existence invincibly towards it?”.10 Like Adorno (2004, 17–18), who notes that “to lend a voice to suffering is a condition of all truth,”11 Teilhard, as a witness to profound suffering, writes in La Nostalgie du Front: Those who have suffered and died from their suffering, from thirst or cold, no longer know how to forget the deserts or the glaciers where they have tasted the stout drunkenness of being alone and of being there first. It is in this manner and for this reason, above all, that I can no longer live without the Front.12 In Teilhard’s experience of immense, intoxicating freedom, at the Front, in no man’s land, he nevertheless finds a sense of tranquillity, an “ascent towards peace.”13 He appears bathed in the fecundity of the real, or what we might call pure immanence: “My life appeared to me as more precious than ever; and yet I would have abandoned my life at this moment without regret, since I no longer belonged to myself. I was liberated and relieved from myself. I felt myself capable of an inexplicable lightness,”14 and again, “I could finally plunge into the real without the risk of striking bottom, and breath in the earthly life with full lungs without worry that I would be lacking air!”15 Here, I believe that if we could somehow remove the transcendent appeal in Teilhard’s experience of the Sublime Surface, we would find the sense of pure immanence in Deleuze’s language—the experience of the event as incorporeal. Teilhard writes: The Front is also the bond of a special Life in which only those who risk themselves for this Life participate, and only as long they remain beholden to this Life. When the individual has thus been admitted into some part of the Sublime Surface, it seems to the Front Line soldier that a new existence has positively dawned upon him and sweeps him away.16 For Teilhard, despite the most catastrophic of times and places, the “superhuman soul” is enlivened, a “superior Life” beckons, an “imperishable trace of plenitude and bloom”17 is left, the human spirit has “passed through fire”

Portal, the Front, Wound  15 to become “another species of man.”18 This evocative description is consistent with what Teilhard describes elsewhere as the passage from the biosphere to the noosphere, to a planetary, all-encompassing consciousness, where the “human is matter at its most incendiary stage.” At the Front, we find the unleashed power of matter, the “spiritual grandeur of open conflict”19—the triumphant domination of released moral energies. Teilhard writes of the open conflict and the frontier where one mends the wounds: Despite the habituation and weariness, but also the discovery of more profound attractions than novelty, the Front remains for me the Continent, full of mysteries and dangers, which has surged forth into our doctored universe as its solution. I recognize it always as the frontier of the known World, 'the promised land’ open to those who are bold enough, the border of no man’s land.20 “The war produced a tear in the crust of banalities and conventions”? “A ‘window’ was opened onto the secret mechanisms and profound layers of human becoming”?21 In his essay Homecoming,22 Nicolas de Warren’s fine description of this tear is consistent with the sense of Zerrissenheit which I have briefly sketched: “The rip or tear (déchirure) of the front’s break with the earthly anchorage of the natural world is complete; the earth and sky have succumbed to a spiritual transformation such that the veil has been lifted.”23,24 Here, the metaphors of portal and window appear synonymous, but on further reflection, we can see there is exodus to another world in the imaginary of the portal, whereas the window reflects back on the work to be done. With the imagery of the Front, we find a question of death-in-life and the affirmation of life faced with that prospect. In contrast, Arundhati Roy’s (2020) portal becomes a wistful transcendental ruse to stop us thinking about the horrors of this world by offering a sobering escape from the present and the task of tarrying with the negative. What Roy’s metaphor fails to evoke is a confrontation with the present and the affirmation of that confrontation—that is to be at our own Front— not to be cut off from the world to enter another, but to abide in the hic et nunc. To understand the sense of the Front in terms of a traumatic experience of violence and the question of torn-to-pieces-hood of Zerrissenheit is to understand the Front in terms of the question of the open wound itself and to try and think about this question of the open in terms of a disquieting experience—the tear, the rent, the schism, the limit, and so on. In what sense is the self—rent, open, vulnerable, and wounded—sustainable, in health, on a journey of undergoing and overcoming? Thinking of the possibility of a world without us leads us in our moment of crisis, disruption, torn-to-pieces-hood, to the question of the planetary commons, and the possibility of thinking affirmatively about a world held in common by all and no one in no man’s land.25 All of this turns my mind to the question about the Front. What does it mean to be at the Front? To be at the Front of something grants the sense of a going towards something but without ground—in no man’s land; there is

16  Joff P. N. Bradley nothing determinate under one’s feet, nothing but a trembling or quivering and all the while the peril of falling headlong into the abyss. In other words, to be at the front of nothing and in front of nothing. We are in no man’s land—a site common to all and no one. Again, this is less about the portal and more about caring for those fighting in the present moment. The perilous act is to search for a this-worldly, immanent, and atheist philosophy of the open in the time of the pure violence of the present. In no man’s land, the subject in the time of the pandemic would not be the traumatized, frozen, petrified, or inert subject who waits wistfully for the portal, but a vigilant subject, a Socratic figure ironically like Teilhard (Socrates was a combat soldier during the Peloponnesian War who famously exhibited bravery on the front line by saving Alcibiades from death). The Socratic, parrhesiastic figure who tells the truth of the moment and explores “the effect of the wounds of truth,” as Foucault says, risks wounding and being wounded, and dwells and abides within that present. Resonating with what Stiegler will argue below, Frontsoldat or the front soldier is, like Teilhard, the one who addresses and dresses the wounds of others. Nicolas de Warren writes of the meaning of this Socratic figure, the spiritual Frontsoldat: one who is set apart in violence from the natural world to think of a new terrain of consciousness: The spiritual Frontsoldat can thus be considered as a counter-image to the philosopher-king and, in this sense, closer to the figures of Socrates and Christ. Frontsoldat, who, as the supreme heretic (or pariah) of the 20th-century, incarnates an existence violently released—set apart and liberated—from the bondage of the natural world without thereby resolving and finding a home for the question ‘to what avail?’26 In approaching the limit or border of what is meaningful, of what makes sense, is understandable or comprehensible, the limit would be what Teilhard calls the Front—in other words the violence of the Front (Staudigl 2014). The Front is what opens up the question of violence, identity, war, partition, and importantly, vulnerability and trauma. What kind of transcendental violence is this? Does it pertain to the tear, rupture, or a rift in the space-time continuum of advanced industrial capitalism? Poetically, we might say that the haecceity of this tear or this rent in the fabric of the everyday allows in a little chaos akin to the tear in what D.H. Lawrence calls the firmament. Here, it is important to resist the desire for the portal to consider Zerrissenheit (absolute dismemberment in Hegel or torn-to-pieces-hood in William James) and the question of the wounded opening. The portal, on the other hand, is the closing of this world in the hope of another. As such, it carries a spiritual dimension with which I am profoundly uncomfortable. This is where we approach the limits of phenomenological description and the idealism of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. It may well be that the finite traumatized

Portal, the Front, Wound  17 Dasein suffering the wound of the present is akin to Hegel’s absolute Spirit, that is, Dasein wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment or absoluten Zerrissenheit, it finds itself. Indeed, it may well be that in our torn-to-pieceshood, anxiety, despair, and hopelessness, we find a certain truth; yet I prefer to interpret Zerrissenheit, violence, the open, the crack, the schism, the break, the rupture, the rent, the limit, paratactically alongside the sense of the wound in Deleuze and Stiegler. This torn-to-pieces-hood is what opens the possibility of rethinking the world and its planetary imaginary. Here, the sense of the new world would be akin to Édouard Glissant’s (2010) poetics of relation or Kostas Axelos’s (2005) sense of the world as an opening.27 This is turning the wound into poetry, philosophy, and literature. An open sea or world which would be accommodative of all people, which would embrace the open seas, which would, as Alain Badiou (2017) says, be a kind of nomadic, wandering thought. In errance, the violence of the moment cleaves open the world further. Metaphorically, we set sail for pastures new and far away, but immanent to the world in the here and now. We bid farewell to globalization and aim for islands of mondialization, that is, a world spinning on new axes, embracing cultural hybridity, and futural becoming. These new islands we search for erupt volcanically from the open sea, violently, as open wounds, creating pristine sites where racism, colonialism, discrimination, and hierarchy have no purchase. Verily, we are searching for zestful isles, open worlds, open wounds, and new forms of the planetary commons. Here we find some resonance with Gloria Anzaldúa’s conception of the borderland qua open wound. The borderland is that traumatic space where the “Third World comes up against the First and bleeds”28 across all divisions and lines of demarcation. Forever at risk of hemorrhaging, the open wound is a border, a dividing line, an undetermined place, an unnatural boundary, in a constant state of transition. But the point to stress is that the reading I have given to the open wound in the immanent sense is not a transcendent question of “spiritual activism”29 but of living the open wound immanently, affirmatively, beautifully and militantly. One has to live the wound, “escape every present; one has to start living the void, the crack itself.”30 1.3 Gilles Deleuze The wound is not strictly a question of cause and effect but of quasi-causality. This is the wound that we already have. This reading does not strictly speak of a nostalgia for the wound, a nostalgia for the Front as Teilhard desires, because we are always already effectuated by it. This is the wound that we carry and which we must care for. Yet, as this is the wound which is the rent in the “skin of the earth,” it is difficult to invoke any sense of a new terrain of consciousness when there is so much to be cared for and attended to. There is no Omega point, no expansion of the “skin of the earth,” no “added planetary layer”: there is no infinitely expansive transcendent

18  Joff P. N. Bradley noosphere out there and no portal to pass through.31 It is rather as Deleuze says of French poet Joë Bousquet: “He apprehends the wound that he bears deep within his body in its eternal truth as a pure event. To the extent that events are actualized in us, they wait for us and invite us in.”32 Moreover, Deleuze and Guattari neither look for escape, nor invoke the Omega point or higher state of consciousness. What we do have though in the wound is a question of care. For Stiegler, this is a question of penser and panser, a question of crisis and the need for a decision.33 The pandemic is the event, the wound, the plague, which we must care for. This means that in our no man’s land, there is a return to the question of the human—the question of the fundamental wound of the human. Why so? For Deleuze, the event is like a plague, a wound, or a battle. Deleuze says, “the battle is not one example of an event among others,”34 rather it is the event in its essence. While the vision of the battle’s incessant deaths cannot be grasped or thought, “the unthinkable must be thought, the ingraspable must be grasped,” according to Leonard Lawlor.35 Singularities pass away, as if a plague were taking place, “due to the force of universalization, something remains of the singularities as they pass away.”36 Teilhard appears close to Deleuze’s sense of Stoicism in capturing this ideal sense of the battlefield of no man’s land and of the Front; the eternal truth of the wound as an impassive, incorporeal event. Deleuze writes: The wound is something that I receive in my body, in a particular place, at a particular moment, but there is also an eternal truth of the wound as impassive, incorporeal event.37 In the Fifteenth Series of Singularities in The Logic of Sense, Deleuze (1990) explores the event of the battle and the question of its temporality: [T]he battle hovers over its own field, being neutral in relation to all of its temporal actualizations, neutral and impassive in relation to the victor and the vanquished, the coward and brave; because of this, it is all the more terrible. Never present but always yet to come and already passed, the battle is graspable only by the will of anonymity which it itself inspires.38 The soldier must endure a long struggle to arrive at “this pure grasping of the event… beyond of courage and cowardice,”39 and in Negotiations, Deleuze (1995) describes nonpersonal individuality in terms of “a draft, a wind, a day, a time of day, a stream, a place, a battle, an illness.”40 Furthermore, death appears singularly incorporeal, “falling upon us like the battle which skims over the combatants, like the bird which hovers above the battle.”41 Is this somehow similar to Teilhard’s experience of the Front and no man’s land? If so, one imagines Teilhard in the battlefield in love with life and even prepared to say ‘yes’ in a Nietzschean exhortation to all the death that engulfs him, to face up to the event or wound he abides within. He affirms his lot.

Portal, the Front, Wound  19 Deleuze (1990) explains this sense: “Either ethics makes no sense at all, or this is what it means and has nothing else to say: not to be unworthy of what happens to us.”42 Deleuze (1990) follows Bousquet to think of the wound as always already existing hitherto. Bousquet is cited as saying of the wound: “I was born to embody it.” Deleuze (1990) is concerned with the wound that one is becoming. For Bernard Stiegler, following Deleuze and in thinking the wound and its relation to quasi-causality, the wound is hubris, delinquere, the violence (Gewalt) of the necessary default.43 The wound is one’s accident, event, and defect (défaut). The wound is the subject’s (de)fault or, we may say, an anoriginary violence of origin. 1.4 Bernard Stiegler In this section, I explore the idea that the wound is the pandemic itself. Etymologically, the plague is the wound. We should note that the Latin word plaga means “stroke” or “wound” and that the plague is a blow, a stroke, or a wound. The plague is commonly taken for an old wound. The plague is the battleground or battlefield. Following both Deleuze and Nietzsche, Stiegler insists that, while there is no salvation as such, what wounds and weakens— if it does not kill—is also laden with chance and opportunity. My chance lies only there; it is not providence – transcendental or transcendent – that will save us. There is no salvation, and it is not a question of being saved, but of being worthy. This is what is magnificent in Deleuze.44 Yet, in his recent work Qu’appelle-t-on panser? [What is Called Caring?], speaking plainly about the nature of crisis and disruption and the wound of the present, Stiegler (2018) posits the interplay between the verb ‘to dress’ (panser) and ‘to think’ (penser), and considers this in terms of the question of healing the open wound. The question is neither one of optimism nor pessimism, hope nor fear, but of “fighting on the front line.” According to this view, this is where Teilhard and Stiegler might enter into fruitful discussion, because what is demanded is reason, courage, and the resolution to struggle. This is where one starts to dress the wounds—to act to heal wounds: I’m neither an optimist nor a pessimist—those are just moods. If you’re fighting on the front line, you don’t ask yourself those kinds of questions. We need to do now what is necessary to get ourselves out of this mess as best we can. We have to be rational. You do need courage, and what is going to stiffen that? It’s resolution. Telling yourself that there is no alternative. And, at the same time, it means starting to dress (panser) the wounds—that is to say, to think (penser) in terms of acting, and acting to heal wounds.45

20  Joff P. N. Bradley The “we” is the non-inhuman animal which from time to time we intermittently are. We begin in our contemporary moment from a perilous state of nihilism, systemic stupidity, and generalized corruption. Yet, this moment is the time for thought as the time of crisis and catastrophe is the time of philosophy. Like Socrates or Teilhard on the battlefield, attending to the wounds of soldiers, philosophy if it is to mean anything must be a response to a situation of profound crisis. Furthermore, every crisis demands a new critique and judgment. What we must do as thinkers is to embrace the co-individuation of like-minded folk from different parts of the world, partake in new collective work and the battle of intelligence, and map a new terrain of the planetary commons. It is work, not employment, that must go beyond itself, to lead to what is other than itself; it is work which would have remained impossible without its own unconditional possibility. This is how we move to the improbable possibility of the neganthropocene—that is a counter-tendency toward entropy in the universe through the intervention of the human species—within perpetual entropic becoming. Confronting the world as it is and in despair, Stiegler was courageous enough to recognize it and it was largely improbable to believe in an immediate, positive bifurcation that could arise out of our chaotic, disrupted moment. The improbable would be a kind of necessary miracle, the singularity as such, or in Roy’s language, a miraculous portal. In Decadence of Industrial Democracies, Stiegler (2011) writes that the singularity arises out of the originary wound or defect: “Singularity, which is also called idios, is first of all a wound. It is a wound of the flesh that forms a defect [qui se fait defaut]. But one that is necessary.”46,47 Yet in the conclusion of Dans la disruption. Comment ne pas devenir fou? [The Age of Disruption], Stiegler writes of his despair over the improbability of the eventuality of the event of such a singularity, of the struggle to be the power [pouvoir] to be one’s wound: I am often overwhelmed because it seems to be absolutely irrational to believe that a positive bifurcation could arise from out of the chaotic period in which we are rushing at the high speeds imposed by disruption. It is totally improbable and this is a motive for despair.48 This is quite the opposite of Teilhard’s affirmation of life in the wounding experience of the First World War. While the ethico-aesthetic paradigm that is my political philosophy and what I am guided by most is particularly difficult to imagine and nigh impossible to put into practice in the current situation given the weight and ubiquity of algorithmic governmentality, the architect of this philosophy, Felix Guattari (1995), like Stiegler, carries forward the utopian, common, and futural impulse. Indeed, in his reverie or utopian dream in 1990, a few years before his untimely death, Guattari (1995) imagined the prospect of new means preparatory for the recomposition of subjectivity:

Portal, the Front, Wound  21 Luckily there exist potential zones of resistance against the unidimensionality of subjectivity and I call this a possible heterogeneity of subjectivity. One of these zones is childhood, for example, into which one escapes temporarily and succeeds in having diverse and substantial potentials of semiotisation in order to produce existence. Another zone of resistance is the moment of crisis for an individual person; it could be a negative, psychotic crisis, but it could also be a desire for creation and affirmation of existence. Other zones are communities of resistance or the refusal of social categorisation.49 What are these communities of resistance in our wounded present that might suggest a new planetary imaginary—a form of the planetary commons? 1.5 Towards a Planetary No Man’s Land While with Teilhard there is obviously an overarching yearning for a new terrain of consciousness and for the transcendent in his overall oeuvre, in the piece I have focused on, namely La Nostalgie du Front, I find in his consideration of the Front a way to keep the tear or wound of this world open and to resist passing through it into the next (which is precisely what Arundhati Roy suggests as it seems to me to the portal as the passage to closure). This indefinite openness would be my suggestion of a community of resistance and a step towards a planetary no man’s land. Indeed, we find this sense in Bataille who claims that humans are never united with each other “except through tears or wounds” or as Taylor (1990) says in Tears, what we must consider in terms of a wounded subjectivity is the “uncurable wound,” the “petrifying wound,” the “mortal tear”.50 I have explored Teilhard’s phenomenology of the no man’s land in the light of Roy’s (2020) sense of the portal because I think it aptly and strikingly describes the immonde of the moment, that is, a suspension between this life and the next, a feeling of existing without future or epoch. My reading of Teilhard led me to consider the idea that in our ownmost no man’s land or the Front where our identities and futural tense are in crisis or stasis, one finds a sense of pure immanence in the language of Deleuze. Here, a comparison was made between the phenomenological metaphors I have invoked and Deleuze’s metaphor of the wound which holds a critique of the phenomenological common sense of temporality. While Deleuze’s wound carries the temporality of the future and the necessity of contingency, I think it stands against the sublimation or sublation of the dialectic. It is here th at Teilhard and Deleuze enter into meaningful dialogue on the question of the wound. For Deleuze, as we have found, the event is like a plague, a wound, or a battle, and this is consistent with the etymological sense of the wound as a plague. It is the open wound which is our lot in the time of the coronavirus—a wound which remains open “by our terror before the future.”51 However, this wound cannot be simply healed, cleaned, purified, and finally erased

22  Joff P. N. Bradley through the transcendent, through the sense of the portal in Roy’s metaphor. Similarly, in Teilhard’s work, we should be mindful of the appeal to the transcendent, to greater layers of the noosphere, that ethereal, cybernetically enshrouded skin of the earth, of something or somewhere closer to the Omega point. Rather what we must embrace is precisely pure immanence but all the while seeking to care and remembering the wounds of those in the battle. To explain this convoluted point, I turned to Bernard Stiegler, who speaks of Deleuze’s sense of wound and the necessity to care for the wound. From the philosophy of Deleuze, Stiegler derives the idea that one must think of the wound in terms of the concept of the impersonal event.52 Out of the wound of the present, what we must do is care and we also must think, in the sense of penser and panser. For Stiegler (2019), it is the philosopher who must care and think in the time of crisis and decision. This is the role of the philosopher who thinks the crisis. Stiegler (2019) distinguishes penser (to think) and panser (to dress a wound, to tend to, but also to take care of, to attend to), and argues that penser must be understood as panser, that is, to think is to take care of, to care for, or to pay careful attention to. Panser thinks the wound in time; it cares for the “souls wounded by the absence of epoch.”53 It is this distinction of caring for the wound, situated in the battleground of pure immanence, which I think helps fittingly to describe our position at the moment, that is, to tend to the wound, which is the plague or coronavirus epidemic, where the wound is the virtual event in no man’s land. In Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life, Deleuze (2001) writes: “The wound is incarnated or actualised in a state of things or in lived experience: but it is itself a pure virtuality on the plane of immanence.”54 This is our chance, but not so in appeals to the transcendental or transcendent portals or senses of salvation, but in reason, courage, and the resolution to think, because nothing, strictly nothing, can save us from the open wound of which we are. In the planetary no man’s land and absence of epoch, what is essential is thinking of the laceration of being through the wound, which is thinking as such. This can only take place in crisis, in the nostalgia for no man’s land, which is the yearning for the previous way of life with its struggles and unresolved conflicts. One might call this the broken middle (Rose 1992), a figure which explores and indeed affirms the necessary struggle to escape the aporias of reason. This to me is to think of the crisis which the pandemic has brought on in terms of a nostalgia for a former way of life, an immanent way of life, where there is no Omega point, but in which we can understand the battlefield or wound itself in terms of pure immanence. We can understand the battlefield in terms of quasi-causality of the event or counter-effectuation of the event. The wound would be such an example of the counter-effectuation of the event: a condition of ethical transformation, the transformation of sense as such. In this way, to think of a new terrain of consciousness beyond the absence of epoch is to take care of the virtuality of the event, to

Portal, the Front, Wound  23 think of the transformation of sense as such. Deleuze (2001) writes in Pure Immanence: A wound is incarnated or actualized in a state of things or of life; but it is itself a pure virtuality on the plane of immanence that leads us into a life. My wound existed before me: not a transcendence of the wound as higher actuality, but its immanence as a virtuality always within a milieu.55 This is to care for thought itself, against what limits and impoverishes it, which is why Deleuze continues to be essential for thinking about the wound in terms of a Stoic way of thinking and living. The idea of a new terrain of consciousness brings to the mind the noetic necromass (Stiegler 2018) that is the thinking layer of the earth, the “skin of the earth,” or the noosphere of the collective knowledge held by mankind which has come to pass. This would be to look back upon the earth in nostalgia to what has gone before, such as the collective knowledge of mankind, in order to rethink the question of the human, the question of humanism, and our helmsmanship of the earth in the time of this crisis, this wound, this plague. This latter point may, I expect, upset young academics who appear enthralled by online portals, by the purveyors of the cybernetic transhuman becoming of the earth, or those scholars who yearn for the algorithmic noosphere, the imaginary of a “skin of the earth,” and who search frantically for glistening, pristine, and chimerical portals. I suspect that my view goes against virtually all mainstream thinking about the posthuman and the transhuman, and about our cybernetic age, which is why phenomenological practice is all the more necessary. With some seven billion people on the planet and more to come, with countries, nations, states, towns, and villages riven with violence and conflict, it is simply not enough to go through the portal, as it were, to escape these crises. There is no closure. This is to fail to understand that the wound is our very lot, because it seems to me that if one were to metaphorically travel through the portal, one would soon enclose oneself away from the world and its troubles. This is a kind of leap into the transcendent. Against this, I follow the phenomenology of Sartre, which thinks existentialism and humanism together, and suggests that the duty of the intellectual is to take up the world as it is—a world stinking, raw, and putrid. This is to properly think of the new terrain of consciousness and the planetary imaginary in terms of the open wound. It is to rethink the planetary imaginary and to ask the question: what will become of our planetary commons or planetary no man’s land? Concerned with this errant star, this is my wandering thought, understood as a practice of errance, and I am led by Kostas Axelos (1964) and Heraclitus, the philosopher of becoming, who says: “To those who awake, there is one world in common, but to those who are asleep, each is withdrawn to a private world of his own.”56

24  Joff P. N. Bradley Notes 1 A comparison can be made with the frontline workers in the time of the pandemic who risk more than most in caring for people. 2 In the chapter entitled “On Some Mental Effects of the Earthquake” in Memories and Studies, James (2008) noted a kind of kinetic empathy amongst the survivors, a “rapidity of the improvisation of order out of chaos” (91). He found a strong sense of camaraderie and a renewed sense of hope, a universal equanimity. In himself and others, James found no trace of fear as such, but only a “pure delight and welcome” (87) as the earthquake unleashed its almighty natural power. He discerned “the passionate desire for sympathetic communication” (86). He found a universal sense of cheerfulness, a “steadfastness of tone,” and from the experience he spoke up for the common man, declaring that such men would go on thriving, “singly and collectively,” displaying an “admirable fortitude of temper.” This became his philosophy of life that affirmed “chaos, cataclysm, change, Zerrissenheit (brokenness), impulse, and chance” (Richardson 2006, 477). 3 The word trauma in Greek (τραύμα) means ‘wound’ and ‘to pierce’, akin to the Greek Titrōskein (to wound), and Tetrainein (to pierce). Trauma is the wound that stems from an infraction, a violation or infringement, an infraction that can be physical or psychical. We can say trauma names the shock that forces open or pierces a protective barrier or meniscus. It is the psychic event as such that is both exogenous, that hails from the outside, from an unexpected exteriority, and endogenous, that is, stemming from the inner world. In psychoanalysis, Ereignis is the event that comes from the outside and Erlebnis is the inner experience of the event. A psychic injury or morbid nervous condition, for example, is one caused by the emotional shock of a memory which is repressed and thus unhealed. 4 This is to affirm anoriginal difference or anoriginal heterogeneity, the ontological foundation of “original complexity” (Benjamin 1993). 5 The metaphor of the portal seems to function as the gateway for Spirit in a similar sense to that in Hegel’s phenomenology: Spirit is the wound of nature; it upsets every natural balance, but equally heals its own wounds. The Hegelian wound (Beleidigung, Verletzung) as Spirit knows itself to be the wound that it itself is. We can interpret this as meaning that the portal opens and closes and offers transcendence as such, and with it, the present is healed. This is the famous move in the Phenomenology of Spirit: “The wounds of the Spirit heal and leave no scars behind. The deed is not imperishable; it is taken back by Spirit into itself, and the aspect of individuality present in it, whether as intention or as an existent negativity and limitation, straightway vanishes” (Hegel 1997, 407, para. 669). My point is to contest this and to suggest that Spirit cannot erase the scars as if they had never happened (see Comay 2010). This is also contested by Malabou (2007) who questions the sense and possibility of recovery, healing, return, and reconstitution of the flesh wound in para. 669. For his part, Žižek (2015) tries to explain the question of wounds and healing via the dialectic process and a shift in perspective: “[Hegel’s] point is not that Spirit heals its wounds so perfectly that, in a magical gesture of retroactive sublation, even the scars disappear; the point is rather that, in the course of the dialectical process, a shift of perspective occurs which makes the wound itself appear as its opposite—the wound itself is its own healing when seen from another standpoint” (140–141). 6 Roy, 2020. 7 Sheppard, Darren, Simon Sparks and Colin Thomas, On Jean-Luc Nancy: The Sense of Philosophy (Florence: Taylor and Francis, 2005); Ryder, Andrew, “Revolution without guarantees: Community and subjectivity in Nancy, Lingis, Sartre and Levinas,” Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy 20, no. 1 (2012): 115–128. https://jffp.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/jffp/article/download/523/603.

Portal, the Front, Wound  25 8 Sheppard et al., 201. 9 Sheppard et al., 204. 10 Staudigl, Michael, Phenomenologies of violence (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 248. 11 Staudigl, 248. 12 Staudigl, 249. 13 Staudigl, 250. 14 Staudigl, 251. 15 Staudigl, 251. 16 Staudigl, 252. 17 Staudigl, 254. 18 Staudigl, 254. 19 Staudigl, 252. 20 Staudigl, 249. 21 Staudigl, 255. 22 Staudigl, 238. 23 Staudigl, 238. 24 See Knopper and Cozic (2006) for an excellent explication on the connection between Zerrissenheit and déchirement. 25 On this very point, Korean philosopher Han (2018) says: “The wound breaks open that domestic, narcissistic inwardness. Thus, it becomes an open door for the Other.” 26 Staudigl, 239. 27 “Globalization names a process which universalizes technology, economy, politics, and even civilization and culture. But it remains somewhat empty. The world as an opening is missing. The world is not the physical and historical totality, it is not the more or less empirical ensemble of theoretical and practical ensembles. It deploys itself. The thing that is called globalization is a kind of mondialisation without the world” (Axelos 2005, 27). 28 Anzaldúa 1987, p. 3. 29 Keating 2009, 304. 30 Dolphijn 2021. 31 I am knowingly using Teilhard perversely as one imagines him seeking to heal the wound of humanity’s original fall from grace. This sense of healing the wound is at odds with Žižek’s (2020) who rightly notes that the “Fall” designates the wound (of separation, of the constitutive loss). However, in the Hegelian sense “Spirit heals its wound not by directly healing it, but by getting rid of the very full and sane Body into which the wound was cut” (Žižek 2020). It seems that Teilhard has contemporary sympathizers. Again, Žižek (2020) notes that Elon Musk also wants to heal the wound: “Musk (and other proponents of neuralink) wants to heal the wound literally: to fill in the gap, to have man united with God by way of making him godlike.” Furthermore, those like Musk read mankind’s beckoning Singularity in a Hegelian way, “as the final reconciliation between Mind and Reality, as the healing of the wound of the Fall.” 32 Deleuze, Gilles, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester and Charles J. Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 148. 33 Stiegler explores the etymology of penser, to think, and derives its previous signification soigner, as to care, to treat. The word panser was first written penser, a spelling used until the eighteenth century (Stiegler and Ross 2017, 215). 34 Deleuze, 100. 35 Embree, Lester and Thomas Nenon, Husserl’s Ideen (Dordrecht: Springer, 2013), 465. 36 (465; see Bradley 2014, 2015). 37 Deleuze, Gilles and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II, 2nd ed., trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 65. 38 Deleuze 1990, 100. 39 Deleuze, 101.

26  Joff P. N. Bradley 40 Deleuze, Gilles, Negotiations, 1972–1990 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 141. 41 Deleuze and Parnet 2012, 65. 42 Deleuze 1990, 149. 43 Stiegler, Bernard, Decadence of Industrial Democracies (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011), 160–161. 44 Wambacq, Judith, Daniel Ross, and Bart Buseyne, “‘We have to become the quasi-cause of nothing – of Nihil’: An interview with Bernard Stiegler,” Theory, Culture & Society 35, no. 2 (March 2018): 137–156. https://doi. org/10.1177/0263276416651932, 142. 45 Selve, John Jefferson and Bernard Stiegler, “The Cosmos Issue #32,” Purple Magazine, 2019. Last accessed May 14, 2021. https://purple.fr/magazine/thecosmos-issue-32/an-interview-with-bernard-stiegler/. 46 Stiegler 2011, 160. 47 It is interesting to note here that Lefebvre speaks of the wound as he discusses chance and risk. This sense seems to jar with the stress I have placed in the essay on the wound that one must abide by and the nostalgia for the presence in Teilhard: “To obtain the gifts of chance and chance encounters, risks must be taken – the risks of failure, poverty, vain pursuit, the risk that the moment of presence will end, leaving behind it wounds and nostalgia” (Lefebvre 2017, 54). 48 Stiegler, Bernard, Alain Jugnon, Jean-Luc Nancy and Daniel Ross, The Age of Disruption: Technology and Madness in Computational Capitalism (Cambridge; Medford: Polity Press, 2019), 303. 49 Melitopoulos, Angela. “Ways of meaning: Machinic animism and the revolutionary practice of geo-psychiatry.” PhD. diss., (Goldsmiths, University of London, 2016), 33. 50 Taylor, M. C. Tears, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 28. 51 Derrida, Jacques, “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides. A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida”, in Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, ed. Giovanna Borradori (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), 96. 52 Reynolds, Jack, “Wounds and Scars: Deleuze on the Time and Ethics of the Event,” Deleuze Studies 1, no. 2 (2007): 144–166. 53 Stiegler 2019, 71. 54 Deleuze, Gilles, Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life (New York: Zone Books, 2001), 31. 55 Deleuze, 31–32. 56 Heraclitus, Fragments.

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W. Negative Dialectics. London: Routledge, 2004. Adorno, Theodor W. Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life. London: Verso Books, 2005. Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera The New Mestiza. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute, 1987. Axelos, Kostas. Vers la pensée planétaire: Le devenir-pensée du monde et le devenir-monde de la pensée. (Le déploiement de l'errance). Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, DL, 1964. Axelos, Kostas. “Mondialisation without the World.” By Stuart Elden. Radical Philosophy, no. 130 (March/April 2005): 25–28. https://www.radicalphilosophyar chive.com/issue-files/rp130_interview_axelos.pdf

Portal, the Front, Wound  27 Badiou, Alain. The True Life: A Plea for Corrupting the Young. Malden: Polity Press, 2017. Benjamin, Andrew. “Time, Question, Fold.” AA Files, no. 26 (Autumn 1993): 7–10. https://www.jstor.org/stable/29543862?refreqid=excelsior%3Ab886f0f d7766482bc9ef9775a46344d3 Bradley, Joff P. N. “Zigzagged: Ripped to Bits, Torn to Shreds.” Dialogos 14 (2) (2014): 83–106. Bradley, Joff P. N. “The Eyes of the Fourth Person Singular.” Deleuze Studies 9 (2) (May 2015): 185–207. Comay, Rebecca. Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. Deleuze, Gilles. The Logic of Sense. Translated by Mark Lester and Charles J. Stivale. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. Deleuze, Gilles. Negotiations, 1972–1990. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. Deleuze, Gilles. Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life. New York: Zone Books, 2001. Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. Dialogues II, 2nd ed. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. Derrida, Jacques. “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides. A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida.” In Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, edited by Giovanna Borradori, 85–136. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003. Dolphijn, Rick. The Philosophy of Matter: A Meditation. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021. Embree, Lester, and Thomas Nenon. Husserl’s Ideen. Dordrecht: Springer, 2013. Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2010. Guattari, Félix. Chaosmosis: An ethico-aesthetic paradigm. Sydney: Power Publications, 1995. Han, Byung-Chul. The Expulsion of the Other: Society, Perception and Communication Today. Translated by Wieland Hoban. Newark: Polity Press, 2018. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by Arnold Vincent Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. James, William. Memories and Studies. Rockville: Arc Manor, 2008. Keating, AnaLouise. The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009. Knopper, Françoise, and Alain Cozic. Le déchirement: Formes et figures de la Zerrissenheit dans les lettres et la pensée allemandes. Paris: Harmattan, 2006. Lefebvre, Henri. Henri Lefebvre: Key Writings. Edited by Stuart Elden, Elizabeth Lebas, and Eleonore Kofman. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. Malabou, Catherine. “The Wounds of the Spirit Heal, and Leave No Scars Behind.” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal 40, no. 2 (June 2007): 27–37. Melitopoulos, Angela. “Ways of meaning: Machinic animism and the revolutionary practice of geo-psychiatry.” PhD. diss., Goldsmiths, University of London, 2016. Reynolds, Jack. “Wounds and Scars: Deleuze on the Time and Ethics of the Event.” Deleuze Studies 1 (2) (2007): 144–166. Richardson, Robert D. William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism: A Biography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006.

28  Joff P. N. Bradley Rose, Gillian. The Broken Middle: Out of Our Ancient Society. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. Roy, Arundhati. “The Pandemic is a Portal.” Financial Times, 2020. Last modified April 3, 2020. https://www.ft.com/content/10d8f5e8-74eb-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca Ryder, Andrew. “Revolution without Guarantees: Community and Subjectivity in Nancy, Lingis, Sartre and Levinas.” Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy 20, no. 1 (2012): 115–128. https://jffp.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/jffp/article/ download/523/603 Selve, John Jefferson, and Bernard Stiegler. “The Cosmos Issue #32.” Purple Magazine, 2019. Last accessed May 14, 2021. https://purple.fr/magazine/the-cosmos-issue-32/ an-interview-with-bernard-stiegler/ Sheppard, Darren, Simon Sparks, and Colin Thomas. On Jean-Luc Nancy: The Sense of Philosophy. Florence: Taylor and Francis, 2005. Staudigl, Michael, ed. Phenomenologies of Violence. Leiden: Brill, 2014. Stiegler, Bernard. Decadence of Industrial Democracies. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011. Stiegler, Bernard. Qu’appelle-t-on panser? Paris: Éditions les Liens qui libèrent, 2018. Stiegler, Bernard, Alain Jugnon, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Daniel Ross. The Age of Disruption: Technology and Madness in Computational Capitalism. Cambridge; Medford: Polity Press, 2019. Stiegler, Bernard, and Daniel Ross. “What is Called Caring?: Beyond the Anthropocene.” Society for Philosophy and Technology Quarterly Electronic Journal 21, no. 2 (January 2017): 386–404. Taylor, M. C. Tears. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990. Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. The Phenomenon of Man. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Thought, 2008. Wambacq, Judith, Daniel Ross, and Bart Buseyne. “‘We Have to Become the Quasicause of Nothing – of Nihil’: An Interview with Bernard Stiegler.” Theory, Culture & Society 35, no. 2 (March 2018): 137–156. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276416651932. Žižek, Slavoj. Absolute Recoil: Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism. London: Verso, 2015. Žižek, Slavoj. Hegel in a Wired Brain. London; New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020.

2 Philosophical Posthumanism and Planetary Concerns Francesca Ferrando and Shraddha A. Singh

The following conversation took place on 10 February 2021 in the final plenary session of the international conference1 “Globalization and New Terrains of Consciousness: Phenomenologies of the Global/Local/Glocal” between Francesca Ferrando (New York University, US), and Shraddha A. Singh (University of Delhi, India). In their discussion, Ferrando and Singh deconstruct the idea of the “human”, exploring the posthuman turn in philosophy and its allied discourses while dwelling on biopolitics and environmental concerns. Their discussion offers a novel exploration of the transnational linkages and relationality of posthuman time and agency. The dialogue proves to be an enquiry into questions of posthuman articulation with a focus on the heterotopic negotiations of otherness. Shraddha A. Singh:

One of the most important questions that we discuss in the ambit of the discourse around the posthuman is how the “human” has oftentimes been homogenized as a category, but in fact has never been one in itself. There are pluralities in terms of gender, race, location, class, caste amongst many differentiating and distinguishing factors. Does posthumanism seek to overcome this differentiation? Francesca Ferrando: This is at the very core of the posthumanist discussion, according to which the “human” is not so much a given category, but a process of humanizing. If you think about it, linguistically, the term “human” itself is kind of new: it comes from the Latin term “humanus/a/ um” in ancient Rome, and is connected to the meaning of “Anthropos” in the ancient Greek culture. According to the Greeks, not every human was to be recognized within this category. For instance, you were disqualified if you were a “barbarian”, which, at that time, referred to all the people who did not speak Greek. Similarly, we find this dichotomy (or rigid duality) of

DOI: 10.4324/9781003395379-4

30  Francesca Ferrando and Shraddha A. Singh civilized vs. barbarian even today, as a justification for discriminations, wars, and even genocides; within this frame, the historical habit of violence and supremacy are naturalized as a given, but this is not the case. If we look at the big picture, humans have been on planet Earth for much longer than what is considered the history of civilizations. The Pleistocene began roughly about 2,600,000 years ago and went on to about 11,000 years ago. The so-called Homo sapiens, or modern humans, evolved around 200,000 years ago. For about 99% of our time on the planet, we have been nomadic; signs of war were absent. The emergence of a more sedentary way of living, which dates back to the Holocene (right after the Pleistocene), eventually brought along many radical changes, including the creation of borders, wars, labor divisions and the rise of social hierarchies based on classes and categorizations. The beginning of human “civilizations”, which is often traced back to around 5,500 years ago with the development of writing, is a relatively recent phase. Within this phase, throughout times and eras, different groups have defined themselves as humans, relegating others to the nonhuman. We have to be aware of the fact that the process of humanizing has never been a comprehensive one, and that it just keeps repeating itself. Nowadays, many groups of people are still not recognized as humans. It is important to realize that, on one side, the solution is not simply getting rid of the notion of the human. Furthermore, the “human”, as an idea, can work as a point of connection: it makes people feel good to say that, in the end, we are all human. But it is also important to realize that history does not actually supports this perception. If we don’t look honestly at the history of the “human”, the risk is to bring the same issues to the future with other entities. For instance, at present, it is not only some humans that are discriminated against, but nonhuman animals, and also technological beings. The solution is not so much to extend the privilege that comes with such terminology, but to question this notion from a point of existential dignity. SAS:  Absolutely, and since you discussed othering as a process of perception of difference, it kind of makes me think that we have a lot of indigenous populations and a lot of postcolonial populations, who in recent history were not even considered human enough. So, in that sense where does our academic turn towards the posthuman take us? FF: In order to understand who we are, we must understand that everyone is different, comes from different perspectives, and still, we are all together. I like to use the example of the ocean to understand the human species, or even more, to understand existence. In the ocean you have all these different elements like the seaweeds, the fish, the rocks, and even the microplastics, in the 21st century: all of that makes the ocean, by being intertwined with each other and affecting each other in different ways. So we are, as a species. We are different, we look different, we

Philosophical Posthumanism and Planetary Concerns  31 have different ideas, but at the same time we are all one species, flourishing together. We need others to exist. We come from the DNA of other humans who were before us. In order to survive, we share food and water and knowledge with other people. We are social beings as well. To summarize, we are one and many at the same time. Connecting to what you were saying before, is the fact that the effort of the people who are nowadays trying to get recognized as humans has of course opened up a lot of possibilities. There are many categories of humans that have still not been fully granted the status of the human. In many parts of the world indigenous communities, ethnic minorities and even women, among many others, are still not being granted basic rights. Their call for existential dignity is fully supported and embraced by posthumanism; this is not to partake in the “human” privilege. It is not about extending the “human” privilege, by opening the doors to one group of people, while closing it to other groups of (human, or nonhuman) people – when I say people, I am not just referring to humans, and I want to be very clear about this. The point here is of existential dignity, in the awareness that we are really all in this together. Covid-19 has clarified this point very well. The virus doesn’t see someone as Indian, Italian, Chinese, female, male and so on. For the virus, we are a species, at some level. And still, because of human hierarchies, the Covid-19 pandemic has been more devastating to specific communities that didn’t have access to medical facilities, healthcare, etc. We need to be really aware of our roots in order to flourish. There are many schools of thought that go under the umbrella term posthumanism. One of the weaknesses of these movements, especially transhumanism, is that of not really focusing enough on the past. Transhumanism does a very good job in jumping to the future and opening a lot of interesting possibilities about bodies, connected to science and technology, radical life extension, mind uploading, and so on – there is a lot to be discovered and to be imagined, as well. But I think that one of the weaknesses of the transhumanist movement is really not acknowledging the power of the past, because time is not linear. It’s not that we can simply go to the future. Time, in this sense, is cyclical; time is a spiral. We are the past, we are in the present: the future is already here, so there is no way we can have different futures if we are not aware of where we come from. Otherwise, many of the same issues are going to be repeated. The only way to manifest different ways of being “human” is by having a comprehensive picture of all the elements at play, in this big cosmic game that is Leela; if we do that, then we will realize the interconnection of existence. We will also realize that it is extremely important to recognize everyone as human, and that it is equally important to not let it become a term of privilege. Humanism is strictly connected to anthropocentrism. We cannot keep this privilege in the era of the Anthropocene; this trajectory is, to put it simply, suicidal. As a matter of fact, the number one reason for risk of

32  Francesca Ferrando and Shraddha A. Singh extinction, for us as a species, are human actions and behaviors (causing, for instance, climate change, ecological degradation and habitat loss). We must deeply deconstruct our anthropocentric mind. SAS:  Talking about the nonhuman others and the role of the human as far as enablement is concerned, especially with respect to the ongoing conversation in posthumanist discourse and ontologically as well, where we talk about all beings on the same plane. Rosi Braidotti and Katherine Hayles talk about the classical humanist notion of subjectivity which coincides with conscious agency. What is the place of agency and subjectivity in posthumanist thought? FF: When we talk about epistemology, we need to recognize that the human is the voice that is naming others. There are many traditions we can bring in as examples. One is the myth of the garden of Eden in which Adam is given the power to give names to animals. Christian devotee Carl Linnaeus (Carl von Linné) wrote books categorizing uniformly and naming species; he coined the term Homo sapiens. This was done in the book Systema Naturae (1758), that he kept writing throughout his life. Epistemology refers to the process of how we know; when we ask ‘what is it?’, that is an ontological question. But then, there is a connected reflection, because there are many ways in which to answer. One answer could be silence – most mystics would say you don’t need to talk; once you are talking, you are restricting your answer. If we go into scientific or academic perspectives, we need to use words to be in dialogue with others. We are already in dialogue with nonhuman others but, until now, the only voices that were naming others were humans. In this process, we can thus detect a limit, which is the limit of human understanding. If we are going to discuss this from a phenomenological perspective, we must acknowledge that we are speaking from a specific situated embodied location that comes from us as humans; thus, we can detect another limit, which is that of human embodiment. The way we experience existence is probably different from a bird, or from a flower, for instance, but it is also true that if you think about it in deeper ways, then what makes a bird or a flower also makes who we are. What makes us, is also what makes the water, and the air. If you think through physics at a quantum level, then this perception of strict dualities really fades away. To summarize, we cannot generalize to everyone else what is our own experience of life, of this planet etc. For instance, almost all documentaries about humans mostly talk about our species as the greatest, most intelligent one. But probably, for many nonhuman animals, if they had to define humans in nonhuman terms, they would probably not see us as so enlightened. Recently, the last white rhino died in Africa; most likely, white rhinos wouldn’t think of humans as great because their extinction was due to human action. This is just one part of the discussion.

Philosophical Posthumanism and Planetary Concerns  33 The other part of the discussion comes with the second question which is about subjectivity. There has been quite a discussion about subjectivity in the posthuman field. Katherine Hayles, Rosi Braidotti, and many others have been discussing the notion of the liberal subject and the notion of agency. I am currently writing my second book, which is precisely on agency, so I have been thinking a lot about these terms. The classical humanistic liberal subject that would place themselves as a neutral universal voice to speak about others is long gone since the 70s. Postmodernism, postcolonial studies, critical race studies, and feminism, among others, have demonstrated that that voice was never really universal. If there was something conceptualized as universal or objective voice, it was the voice of one specific group that is speaking for everyone else (like a hegemonic stance in the way Gramsci discusses it). In short, you have a group that now places themselves as the neutral voice that is going to tell others who they are. That is long gone. It is being recognized that it doesn’t work because I know myself better than other people do. Instead of other people telling me who I am, based on categories, I can probably tell them who I am, not based on categories, but based on experience. That has been really the core teaching of all these important fields that flourished from the 70s on: we know who we are much better than other people do, and so, no-one should speak for others; to paraphrase Gayatri Spivak: ‘let the subaltern speak’. There is another layer here that I would like to clarify. This approach does not lead to solipsism. Solipsism implies that we can never really get to know the others because we only know what we know – in brief, a solipsistic view suggests that I will never know you, because I am not you. Again, that is a type of strict dichotomy: the self is separated from the others. But life, existence, doesn’t teach us this. Existence teaches us that we are all connected from the very beginning. If we ask: “who are you?” to very young children (until age three at least), they will have no answer to the question. They would just look with open eyes. They are not going to use gender; they are not going to use nationality. They are not going to use race. None of that! They don’t know who they are because they are everything. They are not going to use the categories that we have been taught, because they don’t work with those categories. When we come to this planet, we are fully open. This is not positive or negative. It is the path of the experience of life. Some philosophers like Nietzsche call it the overhuman, the Ūbermensch, referring to the adult who can go back to the openness of the child. The Hindu concept of Leela unravels it as a playful relationship between the divine and the world. Since it is a game, we can change the rules, but we need to know the rules to begin with. In that sense, the idea of the subject vs. the object is long gone; agency becomes an awareness that is not just consciousness. Katherine Hayles in Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious (2017) emphasizes that the idea of agency must be reconsidered beyond the history of Western philosophy.

34  Francesca Ferrando and Shraddha A. Singh There are many traditions that do not enter the academic discourse because of humanistic privileges. Think of how very few humans were taught to read and write until very recently; if we just stick to the academic tradition we are pretty much going to stay in a tradition of privilege. It is very important to get out of the field as well, and look into oral traditions, and all different kinds of traditions that are not recorded in academic terms or in written forms. For instance, native cosmologies are interesting example of post-anthropocentric, or even pre-anthropocentric, views of the world. According to Amerindian worldviews, for instance, animals see themselves as human, in the senses of being the subjects, parts of their cultures. In that sense, being human is not special. In order to know who we are, we need to start from the self, from society, from the species, from the planet: all of these levels together, not in a hierarchy, because we are all of these. SAS:  Surely not just for a three- or four-year-old, but often it becomes difficult for all of us to define who we are unless we fix ourselves in contexts. And, in terms of contexts, we are most importantly and urgently talking about climate change, biodiversity loss, COVID-19, and the outbreak of zoonotic diseases in recent times that are affecting and afflicting the planet. Then, is the posthuman world a world of shared vulnerabilities? FF: When we think of who we are, we have to take all of this into consideration. We are individuals, we are part of a society, we are part of a species, we are part of planet Earth: we are planet Earth. I like the metaphor of the Zen philosopher Alan Watts who, to talk about the human, suggests to think of an apple tree. The apple is coming out of the tree. Now think of the human. We are like apples. We literally come out of planet Earth. We are not just living on planet Earth; this is going to be very clear with space migration. According to NASA, humans were going to migrate to Mars in 2029. I guess with COVID-19 things have shifted a little bit, but the idea is that humans are going to move to different planets. Moving to different planets means that humans are going to adapt to different planets, because humans, at the moment, as we are biologically, can’t survive on planet Mars without external technology. Now, think about ten to fifty, to hundreds of generations from now, of humans living on Mars. If they don’t come back to planet Earth, eventually they are going to develop into a different species: genealogically and genetically connected to the human, but something different. They are going to be the fruit of Mars, another type of being. It is very important for us to think about leaving planet Earth, because the Earth is not just our “home”: if we realize that we are the place we inhabit (we don’t just “live” in it), we will take better care of it. Similarly, if we think of ourselves as the planet, we realize that whatever we do to the Earth comes back to us. For instance, when I was a kid in Italy, if people came out with news that they had cancer,

Philosophical Posthumanism and Planetary Concerns  35 it would come into a tragedy. People would cry, people were desperate. Now people talk about cancer with questions like “what type of cancer do you have?” I am being realistic here in saying that it has become quite normal to have cancer because we live in a very polluted environment; this situation is affecting our health. In that sense, we cannot separate the environment from who we are. We need to be fully aware that we are the planet. That we are the cosmos. That we are in relation to all the other beings. We are part of a shared experience. To be vulnerable, is to realize that we are in this together with everyone else. It means that we are permeable. We are one species, and in posthumanism this has applied to all kinds of discussions, such as, for instance, genetic engineering. We are one species. If someone is genetically engineering embryos in Australia or China, India, Russia, United States, Zimbabwe, or really anywhere, it is going to affect everyone else. We need to think together as a species. We need to open our mindset as a species, without judging others, but realizing that we are in this together, and whatever others do is affecting all of us. In this sense, the COVID-19 pandemic has brought a lot of sorrow, but also, a lot of enlightenment. It has made the reality of death very real: we are here, and we are also going to be gone, one day. Even transhumanists, who love the idea of living forever, know that the sun is eventually going to fade away, and everything will eventually end. In short, it’s not so just the quantity of time, but also the quality of life, that is important. We don’t need unlimited time, but we need to be fully aware of who we are. In this sense, COVID-19 can really work for us, to open our perception, connect as a species and respect each other as part of planet Earth, which also means respecting wildlife. One of the reasons COVID-19 spread to humans is because we were not respecting wildlife. We thought we could do anything: going to wild areas, killing animals, cutting trees, disrupting ecological balance without protecting the environment. Think of the Amazon Forest. It is being cut every day by people who need some form of sustenance, working for companies supplying international demand. We have to think in terms of a species, sharing resources and education, so that these trees are protected and this massive deforestation stopped: the Earth is one and the Amazons are the lungs of the planet. In that sense, without judging others, we must realize that we are all in this together. If someone is suffering and that is why they are cutting the trees in order to sell them, we need to address this in a mindful and compassionate way, by realizing that what is being done there is going to affect us all. We are in this planet together. That’s why it is a very important insight to understand that we are vulnerable; this doesn’t mean that we need to be afraid. Not at all! It means to fully realize that we can’t think of ourselves in separation from others. Let’s be in this together, respecting each other and all the beings that are existing, right now.

36  Francesca Ferrando and Shraddha A. Singh Note 1 The international conference, “Globalization and New Terrains of Consciousness: Phenomenologies of the Global/Local/Glocal”, which took place 8–10 February 2021, was organized by the Department of English Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi in collaboration with the Department of English and American Studies University of Würzburg, Germany, and funded by the Ministry of Education (MHRD), India. It was conducted under the aegis of the research project “New Terrains of Consciousness: Globalization, Sensory Environments and Local Cultures of Knowledge”, funded under the Scheme for Promotion of Academic and Research Collaboration (SPARC) of the Ministry of Education, India. Francesca Ferrando would like to thank Maurice Jurg for the inspiring discussions on the environment.

Bibliography Hayles, N. Katherine. Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. Linné, Carl von. Systema naturae. London: Printed by Order of the Trustees, British Museum (Natural History), 1956.

3 Move Over, Mona Lisa. Move Over, Jane Eyre Disrupting the Cultural and Intellectual Inequality Pipeline Peggy Levitt 3.1 Introduction When prospective students visit Wellesley College, the small liberal arts college in suburban Massachusetts where I teach, they feel as if they’ve walked into the real-life version of their perfect college dream. The academic quad overlooks a sweeping lawn leading down to a picturesque lake. The hundredplus-year-old buildings that surround it are straight out of central casting for the Ivy League. The oak trees are as old and wise as the students hope to someday become. A few years ago, when I returned from a sabbatical, our President announced that we were embarking on a strategic planning process. Committees were formed to work on governance, community, Wellesley’s presence in the world beyond our campus, and the liberal arts. Should a liberal arts education continue to be organized in the same old way and include the same content? How could we ensure that Wellesley would survive and thrive well past our own retirements? Six months later, the coronavirus and anti-racism struggles across the country thrust us into uncharted territory. In addition to adjusting to teaching online, our students called us on the carpet for the persistent structural racism that pervades our campus despite our best efforts to address it. They called for more faculty of color and for a more diverse curriculum. They demanded that race be the central axis of our conversations, whether they be about economics, politics, culture, or sociology. We are not alone. Across the United States and the world, calls for greater equity in the halls of academia, the museum gallery, and the publishing houses are loud and clear. They demand more “diversity,” and “inclusion,” or that the University should be “globalized” or “decolonized.” Why, then, if everyone agrees that business as usual is no longer acceptable—and that a wider range of voices need to be heard—is progress so slow? How is it that progressive institutions, created as the solution, are now part of the problem? The simple answer is actually quite complicated. The white, Western privilege that underlies the lack of diversity in our university curricula is the product of a supply chain of exclusions that leave out a broader set of DOI: 10.4324/9781003395379-5

38  Peggy Levitt experiences at every turn. These begin when a toddler on one side of the world is surrounded by art supplies while a toddler on the other is left empty-handed. They continue when one writer’s work gets translated and circulates internationally while the other’s is read only by people back home. And they extend through the structures of the cultural and academic worlds to the halls of textbook publishing. Bringing more African American thinkers into our curriculum, while an important first step, stops far short of addressing this deep-seated cultural and intellectual stacking of the deck. Changing what happens in the university classroom, therefore, cannot happen without changing how the knowledge that gets taught there is produced. The story of inequality in the classroom is the story of inequality in the museum and the bookstore. The institutional supply chain that connects them, or what I call the inequality pipeline, places barriers to entry for artists, writers, and thinkers who live outside the traditional centers of cultural and intellectual power at every step of the way. It is only when institutional interests converge that ideas and culture from outside the West flow more easily to it. But that flow is inherently limited. As soon as it is strong enough to fundamentally challenge business as usual, the gate closes. The University, no matter how decolonized or diverse it claims to be, becomes part of the problem, rather than the solution, changing the system only so much so that it stays in place. My current book project, on which this chapter is based, maps that pipeline and how interests converge and diverge to allow—and control—what circulates through it. It tells the story of how artists and writers from Argentina, Lebanon, and South Korea negotiate their journey through the global art and literary worlds, and how and when they make it into the classroom. It is a story of producers and consumers. By that I mean that it is not just the creators of art in culturally peripheral countries who face difficulties, it is also those of us who want to read and look at their work that have to struggle to find it. I am by no means the first to critique the global academic and cultural worlds. In fact, I build on the work of many incisive thinkers. For me, however, their analyses often come up short in several fundamental ways. First, they do not have a clear enough vision of how institutions produce and reproduce intellectual and cultural inequality or of how one piece of the inequality pipeline produces inequities down the road. Second, they are often based on the idea that solving “national” cultural and intellectual inequalities will do the trick. But the lack of representation of artists and writers of color in the United States (U.S.) and European universities is part and parcel of the enduring colonialism that prevents writers and artists from culturally peripheral countries from ever getting recognized to begin with. That is, showcasing more Latinx culture, while an important step forward, stops far short if it does not connect the Latinx experience inside the U.S. with the Latin American experience outside it. The enduring legacy of colonialism and imperialism in the region which drove migration to

Move Over, Mona Lisa. Move Over, Jane Eyre  39 begin with, persists in the global cultural pecking order that keeps Latin America in its place. Finally, and mostly importantly for me, many of these scholars do not suggest a way forward. It is easy to critique and really difficult to imagine and implement realistic solutions. There is, however, a growing impatience with constant deconstructing without reconstructing that I share—a deep fatigue with “no, but” and a yearning for “yes, and.” So, in addition to mapping the inequality pipeline and its enduring hold on universities, libraries, and museums everywhere, we also need to profile ways that people are challenging them and charting new and innovative paths forward. 3.2 Inequality in the Art and Literary Worlds Ever since I started working on this book, I began to see articles about the lack of diversity in the publishing industry and in the museum sector every place I turned. One, in particular, stood out. Richard Jean So and Gus Werzerek compiled a list of all the English-language fiction books published between 1950 and 2018 that they classified as widely read (i.e., they were available in at least ten library collections and had been published by some of the most prolific publishing houses).1 Their dataset included “8,004 books written by 4,010 authors” of whom they could identify the race and ethnicity of 3,471. “We guessed that most of the authors would be white, but we were shocked by the extent of the inequality once we analyzed the data,” they wrote. “Of the 7,124 books for which we identified the author’s race, 95 percent were written by white people.” While Non-Hispanic whites make up about 60 percent of the U.S. population, in 2018 they wrote 89 percent of the books in the sample. This has to do, So and Werzerek say, with who works in the publishing industry. The people in charge of the largest publishing houses are white. So are 85 percent of the people who acquire and edit books, according to a 2019 survey. “There’s a correlation between the number of people of color who work in publishing and the number of books that are published by authors of color,” said Tracy Sherrod, the editorial director of Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollins that is focused on Black literature.2 And that’s just about books published in the United States and written in English. It’s hard to imagine just how difficult it is for authors who do not write in English to have their words see the light of day. In the United States and the United Kingdom, translations make up only about 3 percent of all publications; fiction accounts for only one percent of that number.3 Writers lucky enough to get translated tend to be already established authors. French is the language most often translated into English, followed by German. The only Asian language on this “Top 10” list is Japanese.4 That means that Americans’ literary tastes remain parochial and that the tastes of the Englishspeaking world disproportionately influence what ends up on the world’s bedside tables.

40  Peggy Levitt Likewise, few books written in non-Western languages have ever won the Nobel Prize. Between 1901 and 2017, 29 Nobel Laureates wrote in English, 14 in French, 13 in German, and 11 in Spanish compared to two in Chinese, one in Bengali, one in Russian, and one in Arabic. It is not that Arabic-, Russian-, Chinese-, and Bengali-speaking novelists are not as talented as their English- and French-speaking contemporaries. It is that the economics and politics of the global publishing industry work against them. The same can be said about the art world. During the last 40 years, new art markets have emerged, and old ones have been transformed. According to the 2012 annual report of the European Arts Foundation, the art market grew by 757 percent between 1991 and 2012.5 That same year, the estimated worth of the market for art and antiques was 47.4 billion euros. Data on art auctions from websites like artprice.com revealed that in 2012, 11 of the 25 top-selling artists were from China, reflecting China’s growing wealth and interest in patron-funded museums. Artists from India, Brazil, Mexico, and Turkey also gained greater prominence. Therefore, the global art scene includes more people from more places who are increasingly connected to one another. Nonetheless, using measures such as financial and critical rankings, sociologist Alan Quemin concludes that the most famous artists still come from the West, with Germany, the U.K., and the U.S. making up the largest share.6 European and U.S. artists like Jeff Koons, Gerhard Richter, or Jean Michel Basquiat feature prominently, as do a few predictable non-Western superstars like Ai Wei Wei or El Antansui. Again, the global art market is still dominated by artists in the Global North and the numbers of artists from Asia, Africa, and Latin America that manage to break through are a small, predictable group. In fact, a recent study of diversity at 18 major museums in the U.S. found that 85 percent of artists in collections are white, 87 percent are men, and 89 percent are from either Europe or North America.7 Museums are scurrying to catch up by creating positions for “diversity and inclusion,” aimed at not only changing what gets put on the walls but also who comes inside to see it. And what can we say about the teaching of art history and world literature? I’ll start first with a view from the United States before turning to my research on South Korea, Lebanon, and Argentina. 3.3 Art History and Comparative Literature Classrooms in the United States Art historians have been hard at work trying to globalize their discipline for some time now. For over a quarter of a century, they have bemoaned how their discipline excludes women, minorities, and non-Western artists, along with new forms of thought, such as feminism, multiculturalism, and postcolonial theory. Art historian James Elkins, for example, warned that to change the canon, the field would need to rewrite the story of art. It would not be

Move Over, Mona Lisa. Move Over, Jane Eyre  41 enough to tell more local stories instead of the current broadly sweeping one, if the stories were no “less beholden to what used to be called ‘dead white males.’”8 In response, many art history departments are hard at work revising their curricula including the larger-than-life art history survey which, in many cases, is the only introduction to art history many U.S. college students ever receive. Their current efforts are particularly fraught as the humanities tries to justify itself to consumers who increasingly question the benefits of a liberal arts education, especially at high-priced private universities. It is not enough, critics claimed, to tell a neat, simplistic chronological story which students would simply memorize and parrot back. Complexity, critical thinking, and inter-disciplinarity were sorely lacking.9,10 It is not just a matter of including or excluding but of broadening what we understand as the global and the art historical and what has been considered Western and non-Western.11,12 But research suggests that little has changed. In their study of 91 institutions of higher education in the United States, Chiem and Colburn found that the discipline “has yet to grapple with the pedagogical implications of building a world art history from the ground up.”13 Their analysis of department mission statements revealed that most schools simply add non-Western content and stir without really reconsidering the ideologies underlying these curricular choices. The fact that they continue to use categories like “nonWestern” attests to the fact that old binaries and exclusions still reign supreme. My colleague, Kelly Rutherford, and I decided to do our own analysis and what we found is, in part, what prompted me to take up the book project I am sharing with you today. We analyzed various editions of the three principal texts used to teach the introductory art history survey at universities in the U.S. to get a sense of if and how the pedagogical canon of modern and contemporary art has changed over time. Some of you may remember these from your own days in school (Janson’s History of Art, Stokstad and Cothren’s Art History, and what is now called Gardner’s Art Through the Ages: A Global Art History, which is now written by Fred Kleiner). Our efforts revealed small but steady changes in what gets taught in these courses.14 But while how art was defined reflected a more global approach, the incorporation of non-Western artists into the telling of its story was depressingly slow. They represented only 23 percent of the modern and contemporary artists featured in recent editions. We also found that while the authors generally agreed about the canonical significance of particular Western modern and contemporary artists, there was little consensus about which non-Western artists would ultimately have staying power. Their inclusion was more a matter of luck or caprice, reflecting the flavor of the moment or the editor’s personal preferences.15 When we conducted a parallel analysis of the principal anthologies used in comparative literature courses throughout the country, we found greater change. There was steady movement away from “the West is World

42  Peggy Levitt paradigm” toward “the West and the Rest” to the current “Global integration paradigm.” The modern-era volumes/sections of the most widely used Norton, Bedford, and Longman anthologies featured a total of 175 authors. Western and non-Western writers were equally represented in these combined volumes, with 49.7% of modern writers Western and 50.3% non-Western. But while these numbers look promising, this canon of world literature is nowhere near proportional to the global population: Europe and North America make up about 15 percent of the world’s population but contribute just over half of the writers who make up the pedagogical canon of world literature. Asia, in contrast, constitutes 60 percent of the world’s population but contributes only 24 percent of the world’s literature in these collections. And when we explored whether the authors who were featured in at least two of the texts we examined later found their way into the wider curriculum, our results were not nearly as sanguine. Our analysis of the Open Syllabus Project, a collection of over 6 million syllabi, revealed a clear pattern of “teaching scores” which capture how often a particular author, or her work, is featured on this syllabus. Both the mean and median teaching scores are considerably higher for Western writers. For the most-assigned text of Western and non-Western authors, the range of teaching scores is similar: 2.5 to 98.2 for Western texts and 0 (no texts assigned) to 97.1 for non-Western texts. But the median teaching score for Western texts is substantially higher than the median for non-Western texts: 39 versus 8.9. Only three non-Western texts have teaching scores greater than the Western median: Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (ts = 41.7), Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place (ts = 45.1), and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (ts = 97.1). The remaining 24 non-Western texts all have teaching scores less than 25. In contrast, 15 of the 22 Western texts have teaching scores greater than 25.16 Even when we just looked at non-Western writers featured in all three anthologies—who have arguably been the most canonized—the median teaching score for non-Western writers in the syllabus database reaches only 12.8 for their most-assigned texts. Change in the fields of art history and comparative literature is not just about what is included in these texts but also about how this next iteration of the pedagogical canon is theorized and interpreted. Because these fields increasingly take the world as their subject, that’s a tall order. While art history does this by adding diversity and stirring or by rewriting history to stress global connection and exchange, the shift from comparative literature to world literature reflects a more fundamental reframing of what this discipline is doing and how it gets done. So what are the key takeaways from this first look at this last node of the inequality pipeline? The first is the existence of this powerful pipeline. When choosing what to include in the modern and contemporary section of the art history textbook, editors are strongly influenced by the art market—by who has a solo exhibition at a major museum, by who is showing at a prominent gallery, and by

Move Over, Mona Lisa. Move Over, Jane Eyre  43 whose works are getting reviewed in important newspapers and art journals. Because editors are committed to diversifying the art history story with an adequate gender and geographic balance, there is a good deal of capriciousness and subjectivity to their choices. I want to share briefly what I learned about this while talking with Fred Kleiner who is currently the sole author of Gardner’s Art Through the Ages. I can make any decision I want on content, [he said]. The only constraints on me are when commission fees get out of control. For the 14th edition, one of the new artists I introduced in the contemporary chapter—again, no one told me to do this, I just discovered her and said, “this would be interesting”—was an aboriginal, Australian, female artist, whose work sort of looks Jackson Pollockish but it is based on local fabrics created by local women. So an all-in-one artist whose work happens to be high quality, otherwise it wouldn’t go in the book, no matter how PC [politically correct] it is. So I included her in the book. I wrote her into the mainstream history of art. For the 15th edition, her people wanted $5000 to reprint, so I told the staff tell her handlers that I am not bluffing ‘that she can be written out of history of art as easily as she was written into it.’ We will pay the same fee. They refused, and she is out. Kleiner is referring to Emily Kame Kngwarreye. He included her work because it is, in his opinion, “high quality,” “beautiful,” and combines Western and non-Western techniques and aesthetics. By doing so, he catapulted her, albeit fleetingly, into the center of the U.S. art history pedagogy and increased her visibility and marketability, thereby allowing her to demand much higher royalties the next time around. The second takeaway from our research is that economic considerations prevail. The textbook industry is about making a profit. Editors’ visions are constrained not only by copyright and translation costs but by how much and what kind of change instructors are up for. In large public universities, it is often graduate students and untenured professors who teach these classes, and they have little time or incentive to creatively update their teaching. They are overwhelmed with the demands of teaching and with getting through the bureaucratic hurdles needed to make changes. That means that students at small, elite liberal arts colleges and universities are more likely to get a broader view because professors are expected to innovate, and they get rewarded for it. They are also more likely to have the time and resources with which to do so. At Wellesley College, for example, we can apply for a yearly fund to update our classes along with special grants encouraging innovative, interdisciplinary teaching that someone teaching a large class of over 200 students is unable to do. This is also a global canon designed for U.S. students. These are not necessarily, as Professor Wiebke Deneke, a member of the Norton Anthology of

44  Peggy Levitt World Literature editorial team reflected, works that are well received in the country where they are created, but works chosen with the needs of U.S. students in mind. Making decisions about what qualifies as world literature based on the needs and preferences of U.S. audiences has its dangers. Should anthologies and curricular materials canonize writers who are distinctively global in character, or should the pedagogy of world literature revolve more around works that are already canonized in their own countries? Or should anthologies also emphasize works that have been well received and are part of the curriculum in their contexts of origin? Otherwise, the editors risk substituting American aesthetic criteria for those of other areas of the world they wish to represent, such as selecting works to please Korean-American students that are not actually important in Korea. 3.4 A Comparative Look: Teaching Art History and Comparative Literature in South Korea, Argentina, and Lebanon Now, let me shift to what we are learning about what happens beyond the United States and Europe. My colIeagues Ezequial Saferstein, Rania Jaber, and Doyeon Shin and I have been analyzing what is taught in art history and comparative literature classrooms in the most important universities in South Korea, Argentina, and Lebanon. In addition to asking what globalizing education means in each context, we consider how national history and the history of higher education, including the language of instruction and the organization of disciplines in each context, shape our answers. We are finding that, despite a broad commitment to globalizing education and to an increase in intellectual and academic exchanges, there are important differences in what global education actually means and how it gets implemented on the ground. It’s important to note that we needed to distinguish between the artists and writers that are taught as part of course content and the works by theorists that are introduced with which to analyze and critique their work. Chen BarItzak calls the fact that most of the theories used in the fields of comparative and world literature are produced in the West a kind of “intellectual captivity.”17 “Even those prominent literary theorists in the field, who do come from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds,” she writes, are usually members of the American academic system, hence immersed in a certain academic discourse, and often have been schooled in English departments or in European languages and their literatures and thought. Thus, the epistemologies of World Literature, through which literature is read and understood, still remain very much the same. In fact, according to the Humanities World Report (2015), the internationalization of the human sciences has increased significantly in recent years, as evidenced by the growth of international networks, funding initiatives, research publications, and international rankings.18 The report, however,

Move Over, Mona Lisa. Move Over, Jane Eyre  45 stresses the enduring centrality of academies of the United States and Europe although it stops short of specifying the barriers to entry faced by scholars from outside these regions. What is also evident is that “peripheral” intellectual production must pass through the center, whose universities, publishing houses and journals still hold the keys to success of the academies of the global world. When materials from the Global South are included, writes Argentine art historian Andrea Guinta, it is a novelty, rarity or exception that often reproduces the unequal power dynamics with the center.19 In the interest of space, I will focus here on our findings about teaching literature. We found that in Argentina, literature courses are more likely to feature national and regional authors, at 31 and 39 percent respectively, along with 24 percent of authors from the U.S. and Europe. In Lebanon, 9 percent of the authors taught are Lebanese, 39 percent are from the neighboring region, and 36 percent are from the U.S. and Europe, and in Korea 18 percent are national, 32 percent are regional and 41 percent are from the U.S. and Europe. We also found that there were very few authors from other parts of the world that are featured.20 The highest rated were writers from Africa and Latin America in Lebanon which only accounted for 6 percent respectively of the materials on the syllabi. When it came to theorists, our findings are even more striking. 51 percent of the theories taught in Argentina are by U.S. and European authors, which rises to 69 percent in Korea and reaches 71 percent in Lebanon. Not surprisingly, it is the same group of theorists from “peripheral” countries that feature prominently in all three of our cases. The most widely cited are Edward Said, followed by Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, and Frantz Fanon. All of these thinkers received part of their training outside their countries of origin and are published by large, prestigious publishing houses such as Penguin Random House and Planeta. I cannot go into great detail about what explains these findings. What I will say is that what the work of globalizing education is meant to do and whose interests it serves differs significantly across our cases. In Korea, it is part of a government-mandated strategy to promote international higher education as part of Korea’s drive to a more prominent economic and geopolitical role on the world stage. At least among decision makers, there is little concern about decolonizing the curriculum. The distribution of materials in Argentina reflects what literature scholar Mariano Siskind calls the country’s parochial cosmopolitanism. There are more national materials featured here because of the country’s strong history of intellectual and cultural pride which, until recently, also unabashedly celebrated its European origins. There is also a strong focus on the cultural production of the region which reflects the power of the widely recognized aesthetic and geographic label “Latin American literature.” In Lebanon, there is simply a paucity of scholarship written by national authors about national literature and art. The good news is that this is changing as a new generation of scholars takes up the cause.

46  Peggy Levitt 3.5 Conclusion I could have written this chapter around any node of the inequality pipeline. In other words, I could have discussed how the weak infrastructure and unsettled topography of the literary and artistic fields in Argentina, Lebanon, and South Korea impede the circulation and recognition of most artists and writers. Those who do circulate outside the linguistic and cultural region have usually migrated to study and work and, therefore, their social networks include people and institutions closer to the centers of power. I could have written about the role of the cultural armature of cities—how history, demography, and long-standing values about who the residents of a city think they are, influence the number of resources dedicated to cultural production and what kind. I could have described the importance of national and urban cultural policy and how South Korea is way ahead of the game because the government supports the production and export of culture as a way to gain a more prominent geopolitical place. But let’s return to where we began—how to address cultural and intellectual inequality and what kinds of new institutional arrangements we would we want to create to remediate them. As I wrote earlier, too much of our scholarly conversation involves deconstruction and not enough reconstruction or charting new, potentially positive ways forward. This is a challenge with many parts. As we begin to produce different kinds of knowledges, they are still being organized and disseminated into old boxes. They still have to fit into the established sections of the textbook, the library, or the bookstore. They still need to fit within the structure of the curriculum, the discipline, or the university. But the desperately needed knowledge at the intersection often has no place to go or falls through the cracks. Young scholars who want to produce it run the risk of sidetracking their careers because they will not perform according to the established, recognizable metrics or incentive structures. At the very least, we need to train students to recognize the power of these curatorial choices. How what they see and value when they go into a museum or a library or an archive, results from a set of choices made by human beings with interests and preferences about how the space is organized, how the categories are structured in relation to each other, etc. But what we really need is new categories, disciplines, and textbooks that accept and acknowledge the complicated messiness of the human experience and recognize, from the outset, how trying to make it neat and orderly can diminish our understanding of social life. Remaking categories means remaking the institutions that create them. That is the hardest but most important question of all. I am convinced that universities should be organized differently, but everything is stacked against that. The vested interests behind the current organization of knowledge production mitigate against easy change. The journals that we publish in, the foundations that fund our research, and the prizes that recognize our

Move Over, Mona Lisa. Move Over, Jane Eyre  47 accomplishments are all based on the old categories. Few people are brave or humble enough to start a conversation with a new fan club when they are already so famous and comfortable in the one to which they currently belong. Still, we must reconstruct as well as deconstruct. We must convene conversations between scientists, social scientists, and humanists. We must create international networks that go beyond Europe and the United States. We want high-impact journals to not just be written in English but to be available to everyone. I believe that researchers who follow ideas, things, or groups across different sites, and the connections between them, have taken an important step forward. Others who look at how people and objects are integrated into different types of networks that span spaces and scales have too. Fruitful conversations involving scholars from different disciplines that are organized around particular problems, such as climate change or criminal justice reform, can also be extremely fruitful. But what must also change is what we call exemplary scholarship. Analyses produced by experts who study countries and regions for long periods of time are very important. We need people with deep linguistic, cultural, and historical fluency. But in today’s world, we also need deep analyses of several different places that illuminate the broad social patterns they share, or what Richard Wilk called “structures of common difference.”21 Writer Tony Judt, in an homage to Isaiah Berlin, described himself in one of his last books as “decidedly not a hedgehog. I have no big theory of contemporary European history to propose in these pages,” he wrote, “no single, all-embracing story to tell.”22 It doesn’t mean, he goes on to say, that European history has no thematic shape. Rather, “fox-like Europe knows many things.” For me, Judt makes an important methodological point. We also need accounts that are more fox-like, which do not pretend to capture every detail of the places they describe but that produce valuable insights precisely because they see the forest and the trees – and the patterns that unite them. This approach, not surprisingly, is imperfect. To do it right, you have to be clear about what you can and cannot claim based on your findings, to own up to what you know and cannot know. You have to do your homework, depending on the hedgehogs in a particular field, and trying to read in languages you might not speak. You cannot be a “cowboy” ethnographer, who gallops in on a high horse, believing it is possible to see everything quickly and easily from your saddle. But most importantly, you must proceed with great humility, asking colleagues to guide and accompany you along the way. “In music,” write Barbara Tomlinson and George Lipsitz, “to accompany other players entails more than simply adding new sounds to the mix. Accompaniment requires attention, communication, and cooperation. It means augmenting, accenting, or countering one music voice with another.”23 It means doing the hard work of creating a far-reaching, truly international network of professionals, scholars, and friends who will support your work and will be living a much richer social and intellectual life as a result.

48  Peggy Levitt Notes 1 So, Richard Jean, and Gus Wezerek. “Just How White Is the Book Industry?” The New York Times. December 11, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/ 2020/12/11/opinion/culture/diversity-publishing-industry.html. 2 So & Wezerek, “Just How White Is the Book Industry?”. 3 Fitzpatrick, Margo. “Translation in the English-Speaking World.” Publishing Trendsetter (blog), September 13, 2016. http://publishingtrendsetter.com/indus tryinsight/translation-englishspeaking-world/. 4 Fitzpatrick, “Translation in the English-Speaking World.” 5 Velthuis, Olav, and Stefano Baia Curioni. Cosmopolitan Canvases: The Globalization of Markets for Contemporary Art (Oxford University Press, 2015). 6 Quemin, Alan. “Cultural Diversity and the International Art World: The Impact of the National Factor on the Success of Star Artists in the Visual Arts and in Informal Academies That Rule the Contemporary Art World.” 2015. 7 Topaz, Chad M., Bernhard Klingenberg, Daniel Turek, Brianna Heggeseth, Pamela E. Harris, Julie C. Blackwood, C. Ondine Chavoya, Steven Nelson, and Kevin M. Murphy, “Diversity of Artists in Major U.S. Museums,” PLoS ONE 14, no. 3 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0212852. 8 Elkins, James, ed. Is Art History Global? The Art Seminar, v. 3. (New York: Routledge, 2007), 55–56. 9 Gupta, Atreyee, “Art History and the Global Challenge: A Critical Perspective,” Artl@s Bulletin 6, no. 1 (2017): Article 4. 10 Iskin, Ruth E., ed. Re-Envisioning the Contemporary Art Canon: Perspectives in a Global World (New York: Routledge, 2017). 11 In fact, disciplinary struggles over the art history survey predate the current “crisis of the humanities,” as evidenced by a 1995 issue of Art Journal titled “Rethinking the Art History Survey.” 12 Flores, Patrick, “Art History and the Global Challenge: A Critical Perspective,” Artl@s Bulletin 6, no. 1 (April 17, 2017). https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/artlas/vol6/iss1/6. 13 Chiem, Kristen, and Cynthia S. Colburn, “Global Foundations for a World Art History,” Visual Resources 31, no. 3–4 (2015): 177. 14 Levitt, Peggy, and Markella Rutherford, “Beyond the West: Barriers to Globalizing Art History,” Art History Pedagogy & Practice 4, no. 1 (October 27, 2019). https://academicworks.cuny.edu/ahpp/vol4/iss1/2. 15 Levitt & Rutherford, “Beyond the West: Barriers to Globalizing Art History.” 16 Levitt & Rutherford, “Beyond the West: Barriers to Globalizing Art History.” 17 Bar-Itzak, Chen, “Intellectual Captivity and Marginal Scholarship: World Literature and the Ethics of Interpretation,” Journal of World Literature 5, no. 1 (2019): 2. 18 Holm, Peter, A. Jarrick, and D. Scott. Humanities World Report (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015). 19 Giunta, Andrea. Contra El Canon. El Arte Contemporáneo En Un Mundo Sin Centro (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2020). 20 Levitt, Peggy, and Ezequial Saferstein, “Getting From Buenos Aires to Mexico City Without Passing Through Madrid: Latin American Publishing Topographies?” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 2022. 21 Wilk, Richard, “The Local and the Global in the Political Economy of Beauty: From Miss Belize to Miss World,” Review of International Political Economy 2, no. 1 (1995): 117–34. 22 Judt, Tony. Postwar. A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 7. 23 Tomlinson, Barbara, and George Lipsitz, “American Studies as Accompaniment,” American Quarterly 65, no. 1 (March 2013): 1–30. https://doi.org/10.1353/ aq.2013.0009.

Move Over, Mona Lisa. Move Over, Jane Eyre  49 Bibliography Bar-Itzak, Chen. “Intellectual Captivity and Marginal Scholarship: World Literature and the Ethics of Interpretation.” Journal of World Literature 5, no. 1 (2019): 1–32. Chiem, Kristen, and Cynthia S. Colburn. “Global Foundations for a World Art History.” Visual Resources 31, no. 3–4 (2015): 177–99. Elkins, James, ed. Is Art History Global? The Art Seminar, vol. 3. New York: Routledge, 2007. Fitzpatrick, Margo. “Translation in the English-Speaking World.” Publishing Trendsetter (blog), September 13, 2016. http://publishingtrendsetter.com/industry insight/translation-englishspeaking-world/. Flores, Patrick. “Art History and the Global Challenge: A Critical Perspective.” Artl@s Bulletin 6, no. 1 (April 17, 2017). https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/artlas/vol6/ iss1/6. Giunta, Andrea. Contra El Canon. El Arte Contemporáneo En Un Mundo Sin Centro. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2020. Gupta, Atreyee. “Art History and the Global Challenge: A Critical Perspective.” Artl@s Bulletin 6, no. 1 (2017): Article 4. Holm, Peter, A. Jarrick, and D. Scott. Humanities World Report. London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015. Iskin, Ruth E., ed. Re-Envisioning the Contemporary Art Canon: Perspectives in a Global World. New York: Routledge, 2017. Judt, Tony. Postwar. A History of Europe Since 1945. New York: Penguin Books, 2006. Levitt, Peggy, and Markella Rutherford. “Beyond the West: Barriers to Globalizing Art History.” Art History Pedagogy & Practice 4, no. 1 (October 27, 2019). https:// academicworks.cuny.edu/ahpp/vol4/iss1/2. Levitt, Peggy, and Ezequial Saferstein. “Getting From Buenos Aires to Mexico City Without Passing Through Madrid: Latin American Publishing Topographies?” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 31, no. 2 (2022): 275–94. Quemin, Alan. “Cultural Diversity and the International Art World: The Impact of the National Factor on the Success of Star Artists in the Visual Arts and in Informal Academies That Rule the Contemporary Art World.” Harvard University, 2015. So, Richard Jean, and Gus Wezerek. “Just How White Is the Book Industry?” The New York Times. December 11, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/ interactive/2020/12/11/opinion/culture/diversity-publishing-industry.html. Tomlinson, Barbara, and George Lipsitz. “American Studies as Accompaniment.” American Quarterly 65, no. 1 (March 2013): 1–30. https://doi.org/10.1353/ aq.2013.0009. Topaz, Chad M., Bernhard Klingenberg, Daniel Turek, Brianna Heggeseth, Pamela E. Harris, Julie C. Blackwood, C. Ondine Chavoya, Steven Nelson, and Kevin M. Murphy. “Diversity of Artists in Major U.S. Museums.” PLoS One 14, no. 3 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0212852. Velthuis, Olav, and Stefano Baia Curioni. Cosmopolitan Canvases: The Globalization of Markets for Contemporary Art. London: Oxford University Press, 2015. Wilk, Richard. “The Local and the Global in the Political Economy of Beauty: From Miss Belize to Miss World.” Review of International Political Economy 2, no. 1 (1995): 117–34.

4 Rethinking Metaphorical and Bodily Movement through Nomadic Subjectivity and Identity Venya Patel

4.1 Introduction My method and style are rooted in postmodern feminism, on ‘situatedness’, which I reflect on through my location and personal experience while writing this article. An implicit element of situatedness is how you take up space within a place. The Other has historically encountered spaces of ontological and geographical exclusions.1 By exploring the space of the Other, as nomadic figures, your understanding of familiar and unfamiliar locations such as home are challenged. In doing so, I attempt to expand understandings of human geographies physically and metaphorically. In this way, you will engage with an experimental way of reading with awareness where you, as a reader, will move with me, the writer, as I think internally and extend the thinking outside by writing and outlining a map in Section 4.4. Through this exercise, I apply Braidotti’s metaphorical subject-nomad, and embody Ahmed’s bodily nomad to argue that both metaphorical and bodily nomads are vital to reflect on the ways we are embedded in everyday life that moves us. Often, after we read good texts, we exclaim something along the lines of, “I now see the world anew”, or “I am a new person”. This is an expression of how you feel transformed and emotionally moved, similar to how travelling changes you. Reading allows you to move imaginatively as you are led by the writer, and at the same time you create your path, since no one can experience your journey as it is unique to your experiences and thoughts that intermingle with the authors. Reading and writing are great examples of metaphorical movement which will be explored later through Braidotti. An everyday example of physical movement is walking. Solnit points out how Ancient Greek philosophers studied philosophy by walking.2 Moving the body with thinking produces an unstructured and fluid way of engaging through internally thinking and externally walking that are both grounded in movement. A kind of stream of consciousness that’s enacted by the act of walking.3 As a philosopher who has been travelling, I am conscious of my movements around the globe. With a heritage and roots in India and having grown up in Thailand which I call home (but can only visit as a tourist on visa), I was DOI: 10.4324/9781003395379-6

Rethinking Metaphorical and Bodily Movement  51 led to move away from my family and community, to Aotearoa, New Zealand, where I built another family of friends and teachers. Soon again, I moved on the pursuit of philosophical knowledge to the Netherlands. Between multiple dwelling places, my structured ideas of home and belonging began to loosen and break away. Having to move changes how the unfamiliar and familiar is experienced, where the unfamiliar feeling becomes familiar, and the familiar places become unfamiliar.4 My movement has led to this moment as I write, where I will attempt to build a temporary home/place of belonging for my thoughts in engagement with Braidotti and Ahmed. Because Ahmed criticizes Braidotti’s nomadic subject due to its dislocation from reality, I argue that one can begin at conceptual dislocation (metaphorical) and then return to reflect on embodied situatedness as a solution. 4.2 Moving Metaphorically 4.2.1 Globalization and Identity

Braidotti’s project of nomadism5 begins by criticizing globalization as that which hinders creative thinking. A theme that underlies Braidotti’s thought is a need to think about alternative ways of becoming subjects to have a transformative experience of being.6 The problem, however, is that globalization recomposes old thought patterns that serve institutional power structures such as the university. So, to counter this, Braidotti argues for a need for “conceptual creativity” and “theoretical courage” via the method of a transdisciplinary alliance between philosophy, the arts, and sciences that will bring a “shift in perspective”.7 This project is encapsulated through the nomadic subject. Nomadic thought navigates its place in the capitalistic-globalized world. In this world of ‘free’ mobility, movements are perverted because goods and services circulate more freely than human subjects.8 Marginalized Others become disposables as they don’t fit into Eurocentric/patriarchal structures of being because they are constantly Othered. Globalization makes it difficult for the Other to move as human subjects. Instead, it forces the Other to move only as non-human subjects (refugees/illegal migrants). What gets commodified and reproduced is an image of what human subjects should be at the cost of excluding the Other. Why does Braidotti look at nomadic subjectivity? She is searching for creative spaces of becoming that aren’t limited to binaries (e.g., mobility/immobility, resident/foreigner), but are inclusive of all categories.9 This metaphorical place is thought of as a site of transformation in the ways nomadic subjects can claim spaces that challenge hegemonic exclusionary power structures.10 Put simply, power structures (e.g., universities), reinforce fixed ideas of identities11 that Braidotti challenges through nomadic subjectivity. Identity reinforces social boundaries, whereas nomadic subjectivity attempts to overcome them.12 This is because identity markers create categorical divisions, but

52  Venya Patel nomadic subjects can creatively defy such divisions. Hence, resisting divisions is resisting identity markers that sustain hegemonic power structures that exclude Others. But how can we become metaphorical nomadic subjects? 4.2.1.1 Nomadic Subject Becoming

Nomadic subjects are characterized by becoming. In this sense, nomads are constantly moving metaphorically. The conceptual movement leads to cross boundaries, of going and leaving in transitions, without a requirement to reach an end goal.13 Because the nomad moves, it can take on many subjectivities and doesn’t limit itself to a unity, it becomes non-unitary and multi-layered; that’s dynamic.14 The purpose is to be interconnected to various social modes,15 bringing an intersectional element to subjects. The purpose is to relocate identities onto new grounds that can account for “multiple belongings, i.e., a non-unitary vision of a subject”.16 Hence, nomadic subjectivity is creatively used as an analytic tool for shifting consciousness to critique eras.17 Analysis carried out by nomadic subjects is referred to as “cartographical reading”.18 Nomadic subjects perform and apply cartographical readings by transforming ideas in a multi-directional mode from one’s standpoint of becoming. Braidotti calls this “becoming subject”, who’s driven by a “will to know, desire to say, the desire to speak [and the] desire to become”.19 The process is inherently creative because it involves overthrowing old repetitive hegemonic thinking that is internalized by the individual that is influenced by power structures.20 Therefore, the removal of old patterns is becoming. By “emptying out the self” you open yourself to new possibilities.21 Therefore, becoming is a transformative process that’s rooted within subjectivity as being multi-directionally open to new possibilities. There is no space for static ideas or old patterns for the nomadic subject. 4.2.1.2 Difference and Feminist Embodiment

To ground Braidotti’s thinking, let us look at the feminist-nomadic subject to make better sense of it. To apply nomadic thinking to feminism, we begin by critiquing the concept of difference.22 Differences can be seen in the divisions between nature/culture, active/passive, rational/irrational, masculine/feminine. Feminists argue that within binaries, secondary positions become inferior, spaces which women were made to occupy, and as such, perpetuate hierarchical power relations.23 Braidotti uses Simone De Beauvoir to explain that difference needs to be overcome to overcome hierarchies.24 Braidotti doesn’t want to rid difference but goes beyond hierarchical difference by reconceptualizing the role of difference between the masculine and feminine.25 The point is that Braidotti wants to emphasize sexual difference instead of generalizing difference, because difference can be a powerful way of revealing power dissymmetry.26

Rethinking Metaphorical and Bodily Movement  53 The reason why generalizing is distasteful is because Braidotti’s feminist-nomadic-project desires to go against universal systems of knowledge. Generalizing narratives carries with it a standard where the masculine is the general human standpoint. When this is the case, the feminine becomes Othered, marking the difference.27 Braidotti calls for a desire to understand that there is a common need to go against universalist discourses within disciplines. Politics of location allows specification to be aware of situatedness (speaking from a location with awareness) to change exclusionary-universalistic narratives. Braidotti derives situatedness from feminism and the importance of location from nomadism. Feminist nomadism is a critical movement against universal subjectivity to embody and perform multiple subjectivities.28 4.2.1.3 Writing and Thought

I will now explore nomadism as an applied metaphor through language and styles of writing. In the sections above, I pointed out Braidotti’s criticisms of institutional structures that perpetuate divisions as identities. Braidotti claims that language constitutes the structure of human subjectivity.29 The relationship between language and subject is that language is external to the subject, but it is also internal as a precondition to the subject. Hence, the internal-external tension relates to the subject–structure dynamic. Language as communication leads to styles in which subjects communicate ideas of the self and the world. The style in which ideas are written is a powerful tool because writers can make readers think in certain ways that may not serve institutional powers such as universities, disciplines, faculties, journal publications, etc.30 Braidotti emphasizes the importance of style because it is not just about writing appearing aesthetical but it is to position yourself as a subject. Through this perspective, texts become a site of experimentation, of actualizing the nomad-becoming as it attempts to transgress genre and conceptual borders.31 Therefore, nomadic-writing can transform itself and differences within disciplines. As nomadic subjects overcome conceptual boundaries, nomadic subjects become “a myth, or a political fiction, that allows [Braidotti] to think through and move across established categories and levels of experience”.32 It is about being critically conscious of resisting settling into social codes, modes, thoughts, and behaviour.33 In the nomadic subject’s conceptual journey, Braidotti makes it possible to move metaphorically as “trips can take place without physically moving”.34 In this sense, moving is not about going to places but about overcoming conventions, which raises the consciousness of nomadic subjects. Metaphorically speaking, moving entails that the nomadic subject is not looking for a home to comfortably settle into which Ahmed argues against.35 Through a feminist perspective, the figure of a nomad thinks multi-directionally, as a way of resisting universalism, which allows the subject to claim ideas that could have been forgotten or destroyed.36 Resisting

54  Venya Patel the neutrality of spaces is something that feminists have been doing, especially subaltern and Black women.37 4.2.1.4 Phenomenologically Performing Nomadism

To practice nomadic thinking, Braidotti is inspired by Virginia Woolf’s idea about the artist. Artists consciously make themselves receptive to the outer world through the totality of perception that wants to capture it.38 This kind of attention is referred to as “absent-minded floating attention” or “fluid sensibility”.39 During the moments of floating awareness, subjects are held by the grips of rationality, and are met with “Life” that directly rushes towards the senses and is perceived with clarity.40 This rush in the form of information creates a bond between the world and the perceiver. This is not a dualistic relation, rather, it is inter-relational connectivity.41 Through inter-relationality, subjects are constantly shifting, changing, and moving. Since nomadic subjects constantly move, they aren’t static but are caught up in becoming. Hence, the perceiver isn’t isolated, rather, they open themselves to multiplicity that’s projected into all the incoming pieces of information. What brings stability to this moving-experience is the nomad’s subjectivity – its “spatiotemporal co-ordinates” (i.e., situatedness) that allows it to sync the outside rushing inwards.42 During such moments, the nomad breaks linearity by allowing multi-directional movement in a space which also connects past experiences to the now. In this way, the nomadic subject reinvents itself as the potential for what it could become. Remembering is hence a nomadic activity. The direct experience received causes nomadic subjects to change and metaphorically move to accommodate the new experience. For this to be successful, the subject must be receptive to the onrush. Writers portray this by bringing out the unspoken; artists visualize the unseen forces onto paintings; composers make the unheard compositions heard; philosophers bring out concepts that did not exist before.43 Ultimately, this comes down to Braidotti’s emphasis on style that is used as a tool to express how the subject navigates through the material world that is assembled in a particular way and transforms it. The style of writing is especially important to Braidotti as it converges the arts, sciences, humanities, and all kinds of thinking, as the utmost potential for creative transformation. 4.3 Moving Bodily Now that we have explored metaphorical movement though nomadic subjectivity, I will explore Ahmed’s ideas about movement, against Braidotti’s metaphoric nomadic subject. Ahmed brings the dialogue closer to the ground, i.e., through lived experience and identity. Ahmed talks about movement through literal figures like migrants and transnationals. Ahmed’s project complicates things by looking at reality because the metaphor brushes away

Rethinking Metaphorical and Bodily Movement  55 realities and idealizes the figure/concept of moving. To show this, Ahmed metaphorizes the concept of home and the notion of how we take up and are oriented in spaces. 4.3.1 Home and Space

Ahmed complicates the notion of home by challenging the idea that home is a static place where one has to constantly reside.44 This is done by looking through the perspectives of those who have left their homes and experience feelings of estrangement.45 She also doesn’t limit home to one place and claims that there are many homes for one to choose from.46 This means that the subject doesn’t belong anywhere, but it also means that the journey between homes can provide the subject with a space of belonging.47 These are referred to as spaces of interval that feel like almost-home, where the future destination is always left open and unarrived, like a transnational journey. 4.3.2 Arguments Against Braidotti 4.3.2.1 Migration and History

Ahmed firstly criticizes critical theory because it glamourizes migration as being transgressive/ liberating for subjects who are dislocated whilst crossing boundaries. This criticism could be against Braidotti, who uses nomadism as a tool to achieve dislocation. Ahmed argues that migration forms identities that are produced by historical events of displacement.48 Displaced people become global nomads who develop skills to adapt to cultural differences and language barriers that equip them to navigate the world and expand their vision “to see more”.49 Ahmed is suspicious of narratives that claim that the globe becomes the home of the nomad because it naïvely assumes that the nomad can easily move across the globe and doesn’t desire a real home.50 Such narratives are criticized as fetishizing nomads who can see the world whilst being detached from identity and places. She is also suspicious of metaphorical notions, such as “to think is to move, and to move away, from any fixed home or origin”.51 This is because Ahmed doesn’t agree that movement always relates to losing a home. After all, it bases identity on narratives of loss. She asks, how can the nomadic subject reclaim new spaces and identities when they refuse to claim an identity and space in the first place? Ahmed criticizes Chambers,52 whose ideas are similar to Braidotti’s. Nomads are those who cross boundaries of thoughts on the condition of thinking without home.53 This narrative allows nomads to think about thought as something that wanders and migrates without attachment to history or tradition.54 Such narratives erase actual histories, tied to migration, and more importantly, such narratives make the difference between migration as a metaphor and literal migration slippery.55 Literal migration is the physical movement of people across borders. Metaphorical migration isn’t literal movement

56  Venya Patel but is about dislocation. The metaphor repeats the process of migration, which is already dislocated, hence the metaphor, “is to migrate from migration”.56 The metaphor can be critiqued because there is no reference to location, rather it directly refers to dislocating thought. Metaphorical dislocation turns the nomadic migrant into a status whilst eradicating the historical experiences/contexts, temporality and spaces that led to migration.57 To claim that nomadic migrants are those who meet the criteria of homelessness is to make an explicit assumption of knowing who migrants are. This becomes an issue because an artificial distinction between authentic/inauthentic migrants is created, which forms a hierarchy of migrants. The hierarchy points to an assumption that there are better ways of being a migrant, and so you begin to idealize nomadic migrants as a way to liberate yourself from identity by transgressing identity and identifying as a nomadic subject. Ahmed concludes that such an evaluation of nomadic migrants is violent in its idealization and exoticization.58 The metaphorizing of movement doesn’t allow for the identity of the nomadic subject to become grounded,59 and hence, bars thinking from identity.60 4.3.2.2 Erasure and Identity

In her criticism of Braidotti, Ahmed singles out nomadic subjects as being privileged. Braidotti metaphorizes nomads for conceptual transgression, which is something that literal nomads don’t necessarily engage in. Hence, the jump from literal to metaphorical erases real experiences of cultural difference and overwrites it into becoming a way for “critical self-consciousness” that subverts theoretical conventions.61 The aspect of privilege comes from a Western and liberal perspective because Braidotti thinks that nomadic subjectivity is a choice. The fact that nomadism becomes a choice assumes that subjects are free to choose to be homeless. However, this choice rests on a privilege because there are people who are in states of homelessness due to uncontrollable circumstances. This allows us to understand that movement is not neutral because circumstances determine where and how we can move. Another criticism Ahmed makes of Braidotti’s nomadic subject is the separation of conceptual from lived experiences. The first attack is against Braidotti’s analogy of literal nomads, whom she refers to as “endangered species”, to allow the nomad-subject to assume a “minority position”.62 The issue here is that Braidotti equates literal nomads to nomadic thinking through a shared minority position. Such analogies, according to Ahmed, disguise real differences into indifference (alikeness) to serve the constructs of nomadic thinking.63 Family histories within socio-political contexts tell a story – from colonial heritage to the movements of ancestors. Questions of who’s allowed to move, which race, which gender, which nationality, what status, are tied to identity. Ahmed makes the argument for the importance of nomadic identity through histories of dislocation; to relocate and “give a shape, a contour, a skin to the past itself”.64

Rethinking Metaphorical and Bodily Movement  57 A result of the analogy is an abstraction. Abstracting nomadic thinking from literal nomads assumes that conceptual nomadic thinking can be separated from material social relations.65 This is problematic because nomadic thinking is used to elevate status, which perpetuates hierarchical difference. Instead of abstraction or disregarding identity, Ahmed uses real-life stories to think about creating new forms of identities.66 The stories lead her to argue that nomads refuse to give up a desire for home/community/culture because they move to new homes in search of a place of belonging. It repeats the process of becoming a stranger in new places to find new communities. Through a shared sense of alienation, it forms a community with other nomads who paradoxically provide a sense of home through the shared lack of home. This provides, for nomads, a fixed sense of identity rather than needing to throw away their identities. 4.3.2.3 Embodying Home

Ahmed makes a critical remark against the divide between home as a familiar space, and away as an unfamiliar space; she is thus expanding the definition of home that is related to familiarity and strangeness.67 Relying on having to overcome the fixity of home implicitly assumes that home is fixed. An underlying assumption is that homes are comfortable places for subjects to reside, an assumption that prevents the subject from being critical about their own boundaries of experience.68 This assumption turns homes into that which prevents movement or change. So, the stereotypical way to think about movement is through the abandonment of home. Home as space can become unfamiliar when you are moving through it at different times.69 It is always being dislocated through the spatiotemporal movements that occur within it.70 Hence, home is where one feels at home and/or is unable to feel at home, depending on moments and places (i.e., situatedness).71 It means that home becomes theorized as “the lived experience of locality”, immersed instead of inhabiting space as a separate individual.72 Immersion is about embodying yourself with all your senses that are engaged in feeling and remembering and experiencing. Immersing yourself in a space means that space is not just outside of you: “being-at-home suggests that the subject and space leak into each other, inhabit each other”.73 To clarify, Ahmed thinks of home as a second skin that envelops the homely subject whilst allowing it to engage with the world. In this sense, interaction is “neither simply in the home or away from the home”, but where the self is embedded.74 To use the analogy of skin means that it is permeable and not a border. The self and the home, and home and away, aren’t binary. Moving spatially transforms the second skin into the embodied self.75 As you are exposed to new sensations and movements, like visitors they enter the spaces of your body and transform you. This process may involve the shedding of familiarity to accommodate the unfamiliar, which can be an uncomfortable process.

58  Venya Patel Discomfort from the unfamiliar arises when the subject remembers its familiar experiences in order to make sense of new places or old places. Feeling uncomfortable is being unable to be embedded into the present space which was once familiar. This is because the migrant is in a process of “estrangement”, from familiar to unfamiliar, from friends to strangers.76 Remembering becomes a method of trying to live in the present space and place familiarly, but it doesn’t translate to one’s feeling in the moment. Estrangement becomes where the migrant recognizes other estranged migrants. The shared estrangement forms a community where relationships are built on estrangement to start bonds afresh.77 4.4 Moving Metaphorically and Bodily 4.4.1 Merging Nomadic Metaphor with Lived Experience

I attempt to reflect on my experience through an experimental method of nomadic phenomenology. I attempt to do this because phenomenology can address Ahmed’s criticism against Braidotti,78 by combining the metaphorizing with bodily experience. In this sense, I am aware of my situatedness (the importance of which is shared by Braidotti and Ahmed) leading to nomadic subjectivity, embodying the second skin, and returning to this paper as a temporal space of dwelling. If Ahmed criticizes Braidotti’s nomadic subject due to dislocation from reality, I argue that one can start by dislocating thought, and then return to reflect on the reality of one’s situatedness to gain a new perspective. Ahmed offers a queer phenomenology79 that starts from how we are spatially oriented in the world. This can be applied to the nomad who takes shape through their second skin to relate to the world. In phenomenology, your intentionality determines a certain direction towards the world with the awareness of what is around. Ahmed, influenced by Husserl,80 explains how phenomenology values lived experiences – Leib, “the living body”.81 This links to the second skin that makes the subject permeable to spaces.82 Hence, from the body of the nomad, spaces can often be perceived as being unfamiliar. As it orients itself toward unfamiliar spaces, what appears to it would be a familiar experience of unfamiliarity. The enactment of orientation comes from a search for identity.83 4.4.1.1 Swinging

After days of reading about nomadism inside my room, my attention was fading and leading me out to move.84 I decided to take a philosophical stroll. I ended up walking towards a swing tied to a tree in my neighbourhood. As I swung, I became aware that upon seeing, what captures my awareness is what moves against stillness.85 This dynamism made me wonder why, as I swing, the branches that are still, seem to be moving along with me, why the

Rethinking Metaphorical and Bodily Movement  59 leaves blowing in the wind don’t blend in with the clouds that move behind it…My thought leaves off on a trail – of memories and thoughts. I began to daydream,86 until I was suddenly aware of daydreaming, as my body adjusted on the swing to think about what I was perceiving again. I leaned and arched my back as my head faced behind me. The ground became the roof, and the sky became the ground. The unfamiliarity altered my perception, and my awareness of this change allowed me to direct my attention to what seemed to be different from normal. In those moments I let myself flow, be blown by the wind that moved the swing that swayed. I was caught up in movement but was aware of a stillness that allowed the movement to occur. In retrospect, this experience was like Life rushing towards me, grounded in nomadic subjectivity. Above me was a thick branch on which the swing was tied to stillness. Suddenly, a hunched old lady stopped next to me and sang to me in Dutch – an unfamiliar language. The totality of that moment – of cold winds, warm feelings, of how the branches appeared to blur into the sky, and the awareness of swinging and orienting my physical body in many directions – inspired multi-directional thinking. I was a metaphorical nomadic subject swinging in thoughts, a migrant who had recently moved, and a phenomenologist perceiving what appeared to me as I moved multi-directionally and slipping between the literal and the metaphorical. The more I moved, the more I was met with perceptions that brought on thinking, the more I thought, the more I got lost in thoughts and away from awareness, until the awareness of where my body was oriented brought on physical discomfort as a signal for me to move in repeated cycles. The unfolding of myself in the experience, or the unfolding of the world through my experience, brought a sense of belonging. Even amongst languages and cold winds unfamiliar to me, on a hard swing that was uncomfortable – my being aware of what appeared to me in a dance with the direction to which I was oriented brought a deep sense of content, comfort and confidence in my place in this world, an almost-home.87 Performing nomadic subjectivity allowed me to temporarily suspend my identity as I thought, until the discomfort of my body reminded me of my situatedness as a foreigner in unfamiliar places. Moving between subjectivity and identity brought on an experience of the onrush of ‘Life’. As I walked, I became aware of my attention that sensed each tree, path, building, sound, person, smell – which led my attention to trail away from perception to memories. It occurred to me that I was soon to leave this place after having resided there for a year. It brought nostalgia – a familiar feeling of moving elsewhere. At that moment, I was spatiotemporally between the past and the future, memory-wise, feeling-wise.88 The more I walked and oriented myself in different locations and directions, the more that appeared to me, until I found my way back to this article, yet to be written. Retrospectively, I experienced the permeability of the second skin, connecting the familiar-unfamiliar, past-present-future.89

60  Venya Patel 4.5 Conclusion To think is to dwell in your reality, like being at home, within with a familiarity of questions that are continually engaged in new ways by new thoughts that arise from places.90 The body then becomes a conjoint of space (metaphorical) and place (physical) of dwelling at home. This home is continually renewed as the familiar and unfamiliar experiences and thoughts that come and go, like reconstructing a home. Home is hence not just a structure, it is psychological, social, and relational. The nomadic migrant in particular experiences this in their everyday life. I started this article by thinking about how reading, writing, and walking are examples of ways of movement that are metaphorical and physical. Writing is path-making through imagination and reading is travelling through the writer’s mind.91 Walking is a journey into the mind as much as on land, as they are both deeply meditative.92 Travelling to physical places causes migrants to recall histories and reflect on their identities as moving subjects – as I experienced whilst swinging. The body in motion experiences each moment as the world changes – through travelling it can experience the continuity of the self despite the flux of the world.93 Movement is, hence, an intentional act, an embodied experience of breathing, walking, or swinging as it simultaneously is identifying through the unfamiliar and becoming subject. In the process of moving, the body, mind, and the world are holistically in engagement with the familiar/ unfamiliar/past/present/future/places/spaces. Having to research, think, and write, and the act of doing it now, is for me to embody this article – turning it into a temporary-temporal home. Researching was building a structure for this article, like designing a home whilst I think about where ideas fit and sit. I dwelt in and out, physically and metaphorically, in the building of this article as a place and space. This article was an exercise in thinking as a nomadic subject by occasionally crossing the boundaries of academic writing conventions. Writing about my experiences was a phenomenological reflection of my nomad-subject identity – both of which, I argued, should be re-thought in relation to one’s situatedness and place in the world. Notes 1 Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 133. 2 Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (New York: Penguin, 2001), 42. 3 Solnit, Wanderlust. Examples of philosophers mentioned in Chapter 2 include Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Aristotle, the Sophists, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Nietzsche, Immanuel Kant, Thomas Hobbes, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Søren Kierkegaard, Diogenes, and Edmund Husserl. 4 Sara Ahmed, “Home and Away: Narratives of Migration and Estrangement,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 2, no. 3 (1999): 329–347.

Rethinking Metaphorical and Bodily Movement  61 5 Rosi Braidotti, “Writing as a Nomadic Subject,” Comparative Critical Studies 11, no. 2–3 (2014): 163–184. Braidotti’s nomad is rooted in feminist theory and anti-racist politics (182). 6 Braidotti, “Writing”, 163. 7 Braidotti, “Writing”, 163. Since nomads don’t reside in fixed places, it is always moving. “Nomadic shifts enact a creative sort of becoming” (182). 8 Braidotti, “Writing”, 177. 9 Braidotti, “Writing”, 179. 10 Braidotti, “Writing”, 181. 11 Braidotti, “Writing”, 163–184. Braidotti explains that identities are socially and culturally formed. 12 Being a nomadic subject means that you shaped by identity markers. 13 Rosi Braidotti, “The Exile, the Nomad, and the Migrant: Reflections on International Feminism,” Women’s Studies International Forum 15, no. 1 (1992): 8. 14 Braidotti, “Writing”, 176. Nomads being non-unitary goes against Western hegemonic universalism, and being multi-layered adds to the feminist agenda of situatedness and intersectionality. 15 Combining race, class, gender, age, and the like, are all important aspects of creating a nomadic subject that’s not limited to one, but embodies multiple aspects. 16 Braidotti, “Writing”, 181. 17 Braidotti, “Writing”, 183. 18 Braidotti, “Writing”, 167. 19 Braidotti, “Writing”, 169. 20 These old patterns of thought are usually influenced by Eurocentric universalism that doesn’t include Other kinds of knowing and beings. 21 Braidotti, “Writing”, 171. 22 Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 1–280. This is because difference marks a division or dualism. Braidotti shows that the concept of difference is historically rooted in European dualism which divides people within an inferior–superior binary. For example, in the 20th century, difference in biology was used by fascist ideologies such as Nazism to justify the killing of Jews. 23 Braidotti, Nomadic, 154. 24 Braidotti, Nomadic, 147. Thinking through historical difference becomes a way, for Braidotti, to be accountable for historical violence. 25 The idea that difference connotes to hierarchies is being challenged here. Braidotti values difference and wants to keep it. The only thing that she wants to get rid of is the aspect of hierarchy that comes along with difference because of European history. 26 Braidotti, Nomadic, 151. 27 Braidotti, “Writing”, 152, uses Simone De Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Random House, Inc., 2010), to explain that men lose their embodiment as they have to represent universality, whilst gaining an entitlement to transcendence and subjectivity. Women, on the other hand, face the loss of subjectivity and are confined to their bodies. They become over embodied and are confined to immanence. This is the dissymmetrical position. 28 Braidotti, “Writing”, 156–158: The feminist post-1990s trend is centred around the embodied, situated, and the specific feminist subject. This accounts for multiplicity and all kinds of variables such as race, class, age, sexual preference, lifestyle, to female subjectivity. Hence, this new trend is about reconstructing or recoding or renaming the female feminist subject not as another “sovereign, hierarchal, and exclusionary subject but rather as a multiple, open-ended, interconnected entity”. Braidotti prevents multiplicity from becoming relativistic by

62  Venya Patel emphasizing the need to focus on subject and not identity. Braidotti points out that the importance of situatedness is lacking in feminism because feminists ground their subjectivity based on identifying as the second sex. Through this identification, feminist subjects bond over their sisterhood. However, this doesn’t account for the fact that women are in no way the same, despite having shared situations (163). Hence, the politics of location is essential as it allows you to reject universalistic statements of women (163). The feminist-nomadic position is creative as it allows for different representations and understandings of female subjectivity, as it demands new conceptual schemes to actualize the multiplicity. A way for this to be actualized is through a transdisciplinary approach where theorists, artists, academics and the like are put together in communication (165). This empowers the feminist-nomadic subject, as its multiplicity and history are recognized when it can share its socio-political standpoint in its language and style. In this sense, the feminist subject is already nomadic because it is “intensive, multiple, embodied, and therefore perfectly cultural” (169). 29 Braidotti, “Writing”, 164, argues that humans are not the masters of language, rather, language forms us: “we are spoken by language, written by it”. Braidotti follows Derrida, Irigaray, Deleuze, and Lacan on their commentary on the relationship between language and socio-political structures. 30 Braidotti, “Writing”, 165. 31 Braidotti, “Writing”, 175. 32 Braidotti, “Writing”, 182. 33 Braidotti, “Writing”, 182. 34 Braidotti, “Writing”, 182. 35 McKittrick, Demonic, 145 describes normal spaces and places that offer comfort, wealth, and security as seductive. Seductive geographies perpetuate the assumption that spaces and places are fixed as if they were natural. So, by creating a narrative around natural spaces as being fixed, you normalize the exclusion of the Other in those spaces. 36 Braidotti, “Exile”, 9. 37 McKittrick, Demonic, 145–146. 38 Braidotti, “Writing”, 171. 39 Braidotti, “Writing”, 171. 40 Braidotti, “Writing”, 172. 41 Braidotti, “Writing”, 172. 42 Braidotti, “Writing”, 172 43 Braidotti, “Writing”, 172. 44 Ahmed, “Home”, 329–347. 45 Ahmed, “Home”, 329. Ahmed refers to the subjects who experience estrangement as “homely subjects” (331). 46 These could be the places one is born in, where one grew up, where one moved to, or may be moving to. 47 Ahmed, “Home”, 330. 48 Ahmed, “Home”, 332. 49 Ahmed, “Home”, 377. 50 Ahmed, “Home”, 329–347. 51 Ahmed, “Home”, 332. 52 Ian Chambers. Migrancy, Culture and Identity (London and New York: Routledge, 1994). 53 Ahmed, “Home”, 332. It is important to note that Braidotti doesn’t necessarily think in terms of losing home. 54 Chambers, Migrancy, 4. 55 Ahmed, “Home”, 332. 56 Ahmed, “Home”, 333.

Rethinking Metaphorical and Bodily Movement  63 7 Ahmed, “Home”, 333. 5 58 Ahmed, “Home”, 334. 59 If one is moving across conceptual boundaries, it remains in an unstable state that tries to escape from identity as a subject. 60 Ahmed, “Home”, 333. 61 Ahmed, “Home”, 334. 62 Braidotti, “Writing”, 29, cited in Ahmed, “Home”, 335. 63 Ahmed, “Home”, 335. 64 Ahmed, “Home”, 343. 65 A point to remember here is that to be a nomadic subject, you have to be detached from your being, nostalgia, desire, ideas, or anything that’s fixed. See Braidotti, “Writing”, 36. 66 Read about Global Nomads International: Ahmed, “Home”, 336. 67 Ahmed, “Home”, 340. She uses home metaphorically and literally. 68 It seems as if being at ease with one’s identity within one place leads to uncritical and lazy thinking. 69 Ahmed, “Home”, 343. “If we think of home as an outer skin, then we can also consider how migration involves not only a spatial dislocation, but also a temporal dislocation: ‘the past’ becomes associated with a home that it is impossible to inhabit, and be inhabited by, in the present. The question then of being at home or leaving home is always a question of memory, of the discontinuity between past and present.” 70 Ahmed, “Home”, 340. 71 Ahmed, “Home”, 341. 72 Ahmed, “Home”, 340. 73 Ahmed, “Home”, 340. 74 Ahmed, “Home”, 341. 75 Ahmed, “Home”, 341. 76 Ahmed, “Home”, 343. 77 Phenomenologically, starting from estrangement is valuable; it is not a purposeful alienation from the world, but the alienation itself is the normal way in which the migrant experiences the world and relations. Starting from a place of uncertainty allows the migrant subject to constantly redefine itself. 78 The metaphorization of the nomad causes it to be divided from the literal nomad. 79 Sara Ahmed, “Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12, no. 4 (2006): 543–574. Ahmed acknowledges that this is not properly phenomenological, though it can add value to phenomenological thinking. 80 Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy (Northwestern University Press, 1970). 81 Ahmed, “Orientations”, 544. 82 Being permeable means that the inside and outside, or the past and future binaries, are in constant interaction in movement. 83 Ahmed, “Orientations”, 533: “So the object we aim for, which we have in our view, also comes into our view, through being held in place as that which we seek to be: the action searches for identity as the mark of attainment.” 84 This anecdote is a practice of nomadic thinking as I cross the boundaries of academic writing. My experience was through identity (as a third-culture kid living in a new country) and thinking as a nomadic subject (where I temporarily and occasionally forget my identity until I notice how it shapes what I see). 85 Movement stands out against stillness, but stillness also stands out against movement.

64  Venya Patel 86 Ahmed, “Orientations”, 547, explains that perception is an “uneven distribution of attention”. 87 To perceive something phenomenologically, it should come from what is unfamiliar for the world to unfold in a new manner. Starting from unfamiliarity makes it a natural position for the nomad who’s easily able to relate to the world through real experiences of unfamiliarity when they move. Ahmed argues about the feeling of estrangement that’s valuable to the nomad as it provides a sense of familiarity. 88 Ahmed, “Orientations”, 552: Phenomenology helps us explore how bodies are shaped by histories. 89 Braidotti also argues that remembering is nomadic, as mentioned in Section 4.2.1.4. 90 Holger Zaborowski, “Towards a Phenomenology of Dwelling,” CommunioSpokane Then Washington 32, no. 3 (2005): 494. 91 Solnit, Wanderlust, 72. 92 Tim Ingold, Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. (Routledge, 2011): 198. Monastic practitioners thought of themselves as nomads “travelling in their minds from place to place, and composing their thoughts as they went along by drawing on, or ‘pulling in’, ideas lodged in places previously visited”. 93 Ingold, Being, 64.

Bibliography Ahmed, Sara. “Home and Away: Narratives of Migration and Estrangement.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 2, no. 3 (1999): 329–347. Ahmed, Sara. “Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12, no. 4 (2006): 543–574. Braidotti, Rosi. “The Exile, the Nomad, and the Migrant: Reflections on International Feminism.” Women’s Studies International Forum 15, no. 1, (1992): 7–10. Braidotti, Rosi. “Writing as a Nomadic Subject.” Comparative Critical Studies 11, no. 2–3 (2014): 163–184. Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Chambers, Iain. Migrancy, Culture and Identity. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. De Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. New York: Random House, Inc., 2010. Engebrigtsen, Ada Ingrid. “Key Figure of Mobility: The Nomad.” Social Anthropology 25, no. 1 (2017): 42–54. Husserl, Edmund. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. Illinois: North-western University Press, 1970. Ingold, Tim. Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. London and New York: Routledge, 2011. McKittrick, Katherine. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust: A History of Walking. New York: Penguin, 2001. Zaborowski, Holger. “Towards a Phenomenology of Dwelling.” Communio-Spokane Then Washington 32, no. 3 (2005): 492–516.

5 To Dream Again Thoughts on Island Soundscapes and Environmentalism Priya Parrotta Natarajan

5.1 Memory, Soundscapes, and Island Environments Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises, Sounds, and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not. Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices That, if I had waked after long sleep, Will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming, The clouds methought would open and show riches Ready to drop upon me, that, when I waked I cried to dream again. — Caliban, from The Tempest, Act 3, Scene 2 In the year 1611, William Shakespeare introduced to his contemporaries The Tempest. It was the tale of an island, and the people who inhabited it. The island is a place where the forces of magic and power manifest themselves through the interactions between humans and nature. The Tempest is a story that many of those who live on islands can well relate to. The Tempest is also a story of characters—or rather, caricatures—whose places on the island are far from what we would want them to be. There is, for instance, Prospero, the colonizer who uses the magic of the island to do his own bidding. There is the tree spirit Ariel, servant to Prospero, ever-obliging, and without whom Prospero’s authority over the island would be impossible. And then there is Caliban, son of a healer, indigenous to the island. Caliban is forced into servitude by Prospero. As a person with deep and anti-colonial connections to the island, he presents a great threat to Prospero’s ambitions. Caliban is regarded as a “monster” by Prospero, and conveniently so. Through this characterization and the brutalization which it implies, Caliban becomes a person alienated from his own island. This continues to be the case as new arrivals assert their self-appointed authority over it. At one moment, however, Caliban1 breaks from the role he has come to play: he describes the island’s noises, sounds, and really, its music. In eloquent verse, DOI: 10.4324/9781003395379-7

66  Priya Parrotta Natarajan he tells two new arrivals to the island that the sounds of the islands are magical. He says that these sounds often transport him into a world of dreams. This world is so precious and beautiful, that when he wakes from his slumber, he “crie[s] to dream again.” Caliban’s words are filled with an admiration, a longing, a celebration, and a nostalgia for the soundscapes of an island, which resonate deeply for many across the globe. Four centuries have passed since The Tempest was first performed, and still, the play goes on. The islands of the world, and tropical islands in particular, continue to live with tropes that were expressed in The Tempest. Islands continue to be seen by people around the world as places where power and magic meet. That is to say, islands are considered places where people can come as visitors or colonizers and seek power by exploiting the magic they find—or believe they find—there. Sectors of the global economy such as tourism are still premised upon this idea. Equally, islands are often considered places in need of development. They cannot exist as they are, run by Calibans, and informed by strong, ancestral, and poetic links to the islands’ ecosystems. In practice, this often means that they are considered in need of extractive industries, policy decisions, and sociocultural change which, for many reasons, take away from the music which Caliban so lyrically describes. In prestigious universities and imposing professional institutions alike, islands are more often valued based upon factors such as GDP and geographic size, rather than cultural and artistic resources. And through it all, the ecosystems of tropical islands rest in the balance. Dominant attitudes around the worth and future of islands—attitudes which often trickle down into the governance norms and popular cultures of islands themselves—raise urgent questions about the connections between how we appraise the places we live in, and the changes which occur as a result. Caliban expresses his devotion and affection for the island through sound. He alludes to the transcendent and yet also familiar soundscapes that are part of life on most islands: the medleys of birdsongs which issue from the canopies of rainforests; the chirps and sparks of insects and tree frogs and other nighttime beings; the rush of trade winds; the swish of palm trees; and of course, the ocean, with its ever-changing sounds and its near-cosmic ability to give perspective to the unpredictable waves within the human mind. These soundscapes are only a few that comprise the expansive orchestra of island ecosystems. These ecosystems offer a great deal to those who benefit from them. As sites of great biodiversity, not to mention vast reserves of energy and other resources, island environments have at many points in modern history found themselves to be the “ground zero” of humanity’s ambitions to surpass their limitations and achieve unprecedented levels of material production and prosperity. But while islands served as the basis for the unbridled ambitions of some, these ambitions resulted in the decline of quality of life for many others. More often than not, the environmental degradation of islands did little for those who depended upon it for both physical and spiritual sustenance.

To Dream Again  67 Colonial methods of extracting natural wealth from islands went hand in hand with the marginalization of those with the closest relationships to those environments. This contradictory story—of islands being both necessary and dispensable for those with great geopolitical privilege—continues forcefully in a time of climate change. Islands are among the places on Earth most vulnerable to climate change. In many cases, islands are also the places which experience climate change’s impacts first. From hurricanes and cyclones to sea level rise, to continued devastation of aquatic and terrestrial biodiversity through human activities, climate change and its causes are impossible for those surrounded by water to ignore. Climate change awareness and climate action, therefore, involve at every turn a consciousness of how this crisis is affecting islands. Crucially, it also involves an understanding of how people on islands across the globe possess inexhaustible resources to move towards sustainable horizons. The soundscapes of islands are, for many, the basis and provocation for the profound emotion associated with being intimately linked to nature. So too, are the diverse music which the world’s “island people” have produced. Among their many other merits, many of these forms of music allow us to understand and celebrate the reconciliations that are continually made upon many islands. They allow us to appreciate the way diverse influences and histories have come to exist in these small spaces; the way they have had to coexist with each other and create new languages for land and sea, and humor, and creative resilience in the face of difficult challenges. Despite the sociocultural and geopolitical complexity of a challenge like climate change, the potential of music to serve in this struggle is not often recognized. Island soundscapes are as deep, timeless, and powerful as they’ve ever been. Humanity’s capacity to honor those soundscapes—to protect and compose for them—is equally undiminished. We are as equipped to work together to celebrate and defend the nature of islands, perhaps as reflected in their sounds, as we ever were. And the need for solidarity between people experiencing similar environmental challenges has never been greater. The path of island solidarity through music is both deeply rooted and ever evolving. This chapter aims to shed a small amount of light on that path. It hopes to lay out why this solidarity is important, what the obstacles to it might be, and how music could serve as the means to model new horizons of sustainability, informed by overlapping environmental experiences. For my part, music has revealed itself to have tremendous potential in this regard. Over the course of the past several years, I have had the opportunity to learn about the relationships between cultural dialogue and environmental solidarity on islands through listening, singing, arranging, and composing. In the process, I’ve learned how integral the natural soundscapes of an island are to our sense of connection to that island. Just as they are a strong linking force at a local scale, so too are they at a global one. For instance, as the sounds of the waves reach the shore of every island, we are linked across borders by the emotions they produce.

68  Priya Parrotta Natarajan I’ve learned as well that a vast array of musical traditions across the globe contain spiritual and historical insights that are valuable to the environmental movement. When these styles are brought into dialogue with each other, it is possible to awaken a new awareness of related pasts and mutually helpful wisdoms. From this musical practice I’ve also learned about the revolutionary power of the human voice in song. I’ve been surprised by its ability to invite changes in perspective that can radically transform the ways both listeners and performers regard themselves and their responsibilities. For those reasons, I’ve come to believe with assurance that solidarity in the face of common environmental realities can certainly be brought about by music. Just as we need to support music which affirms the needs and qualities of island ecosystems, we also need a global ethic to support the changes which that music implies. And just as we need such a global ethic, we also need processes and institutions which make it easier for that ethic to be translated into real and lasting change. Music can reveal a great deal about the connection between humanity and the environment—including the political and social changes that need to occur in the world for environmental justice and sustainability. But these insights alone cannot achieve their possible reach without an understanding among the public of their importance—not to mention an understanding of the place of these insights in the matrix of thought around the environment which we have already put in place. A space is required within our minds, our practices, and our policies for this kind of music. This chapter is an attempt to articulate that space, the diverse aspects of the intersection of music and the environment on islands. I hope that this might contribute to a world in which islands are stronger and more powerful in the face of environmental events, because the wisdom and vitality enshrined in islands’ music are given space to flourish. Four hundred years ago, Caliban cried to dream again when his harmonious slumber with the island’s music was interrupted. We have lived with this interruption for too long. It has led to the environmental and politicoeconomic challenges facing small islands today. We certainly cry to dream again. Yet perhaps through connecting to music and soundscapes, we can find a space without tears. Perhaps we can dream of all our island environments need and deserve with creativity and hope. We can dream of harnessing our cultural capacity to help others to visualize those changes. We can dream of understanding how certain music can speak truth to power, build bonds across islands, and make the sustainability of island an undeniable goal for all. 5.2 Music, Climate Change, and Island Solidarity In 2002, a film called Whale Rider took the world of cinema by storm. It told the story of Paikea Apirana, a Maori girl whose relationship to whales lies at the heart of her struggle to prove herself as the rightful leader of her tribe.

To Dream Again  69 The film brought to global audiences the cultural and environmental crises that threaten many of the world’s islands. It also cast light on the ways in which such crises can be resolved through a combination of established knowledge and previously untapped sources of wisdom and leadership. Now, 17 years later, the film remains an essential “text” for environmental activists in the Pacific Islands, and around the world. The soundtrack2 of Whale Rider evokes much of what the film as a whole makes one feel. Its music recalls the world below the sea—that mysterious realm which none of us live in but which defines the lives of so many. For me at least, it provokes emotion that seems to transcend particular places or circumstances. At the same time, it connects so directly to the story which it tells. It is in that peculiar and rather magical dance, between specific experience and universal feeling, that music often derives its earth-shattering power. Those of us who live on the coastlines of islands have particularly close relationships to the sea, whether we examine them or not. On islands around the world, from Fiji to Vanuatu to Puerto Rico, environmental activists are working to raise awareness of, and promote action around climate change.3 Much like young Paikea, these activists are warriors, moved not by a desire to destroy but rather to preserve what is most precious—to quote the cross-cultural spoken-word duo Climbing Poetree, “like breath, or life, or home, or an entire people who once believed that land can never be owned.”4 Though they may speak different languages, employ different tactics, or love different places on this Earth, they have much in common. And they all share the same challenge of countering the power of anti-environmentalist discourses and ideologies within their own communities. This is a daunting task which perhaps can be aided by incorporating music into their efforts. Climate activists on the world’s islands are linked by a broad array of circumstances. Yet despite this, dialogue between us is often challenging. Whether in the service of environmental sustainability or musical innovation, dialogue involves a combination of concrete practices and feats of imagination. Many forms of collective belonging are not based chiefly upon physical borders, nor on social markers such as language or religion per se. It may involve these things, but in essence they are imagined, woven out of the political imperatives or the ideals of the people who participate in its creation. For several centuries, the nation has served as perhaps the most potent form of imagined community. According to the political scientist Benedict Anderson, modern nations were brought into existence not necessarily through shared experience, but rather through the medium of print.5 The nation as a unit of social and political organization, and as the primary point of reference for international dialogue, was imagined through discourse and text—as well as through music, in the form of anthems and folk songs that became symbols of national unity.6

70  Priya Parrotta Natarajan Recently, the authority of the nation has diminished a bit. Globalized networks of finance, commerce, and media have called into question the idea that we are, first and foremost, citizens of nations. Cultural sociologist Arjun Appadurai critiques globalization for the way it has produced deterritorialization—an alienation of people from their environments due to global flows of populations and media.7 When we consider how deeply globalization has affected the circulation and consumption of music on both local and global scales, the complexity of the networks that claim to connect us becomes all too clear. Rather unlike the imagined community of nation described by Anderson, or the links expressed by Appadurai, some of our connections to the rest of the world and to each other are not fabricated or brought about by alienation. Rather, they are anchored in very real, very shared climatic experiences.8 Most of the world’s islands, including Puerto Rico, fall at least partly into the broad geopolitical category of the Global South. The Global South is a term which has re-emerged in transnational and postcolonial studies to describe what was previously, and more pejoratively termed the Third World. It refers to the people and places that have been on the receiving end of colonialism, be they in the Caribbean or Africa or Asia or Latin America or the Pacific Islands, as well as these places’ diasporas in the so-called Global North. This might seem like an excessively broad and, therefore, unhelpful definition, but unfortunately colonialism has, and continues to, cast a wide net. The Global South thus forms the conceptual foundation for the work of many climate activists. It serves as a way for us to understand the interwoven histories, and also provides a basis upon which we can communicate with each other. It helps us to cast aside the continued colonialism and environmental damage that we encounter, and reorient ourselves towards each other—and hopefully, towards a process of collaborative imagination that allows us to make use of our vast cultural reserves, to co-create an ethic of sustainability that is as global as the forces that threaten it at present.9 Colonialism’s key qualities are, for the most part, clearly recognizable. They include the commodification of nature to make it suitable for consumption; unfair terms of trade; the valorization of a form of so-called “masculinity” that calls for the penetration of lands and people; and the negation of a spirituality that seeks well-being for humans and non-humans alike. Whether manifested directly by a colonial power, or adopted locally, these are some of colonialism’s common features.10 Such social and environmental exploitation impacts islands in particular. For centuries, islands have been regarded by the world’s powerful as strategically useful and culturally dispensable. They have been used as military bases, as sites for the growth of non-essential commodities, as tourist havens, as places where labor can be enslaved without punishment—and now, as places that are barraged by hurricanes and go underwater without rousing much concern or requiring much action.11 Though there are always exceptions, many of the world’s islands have encountered the same forms of violence,

To Dream Again  71 and of irony. Out of our fraught experiences with encounter have emerged nuanced understandings of the relationship between decoloniality, environmentalism, and musical diversity. And yet, prevailing geopolitics continue to delegitimize these resources, and distract us from the conversations that we must have with each other, across borders which currently emphasize separateness over solidarity. The institutions of the Global North continue to provide the primary reference point for students of environmental politics around the world. This dynamic is rather disheartening, because it ends up discouraging students and activists in diverse regions of the Global South from communicating directly with each other. This trend does not bode well for the future. It prevents us from feeling part of a global network of people who are in the same proverbial boat. Not only that, but it also alienates us from the fact that we already possess the means to engage in cross-cultural environmental dialogue. Over the course of several years working as a global climate activist12 and a multicultural arts organizer,13 I noticed time and again how the forces of colonialism and market-led globalization strained the attempts of young people from different countries, continents, and cultural backgrounds to connect with each other. Whether we were from Africa or Asia or Latin America or Oceania or the Caribbean, it seemed that we were all searching for a way to bypass the forces which impeded and divided our work. Over time it became clear to me that one way in which this could be achieved was through engaging directly with our musical diversity. If the variety of the world’s music were to make its way into how we understand and address climate change, what horizons may open up for activists throughout the Global South? My recent work has been propelled by this irresistible question. Among other initiatives, this inquiry has led to a collaborative project called the Island Sessions. The Island Sessions is a discussion series for graduate students at the University of Puerto Rico, as well as any interested members of the public. It has been defined by its participants in a variety of ways: as an educational program, a consciousness-raising initiative, an artistic collective, a forum for political critique, and even a space for therapy and shared experience. The Island Sessions has developed in several stages. The first of these was a month of conversations, which took place in April 2018. The program provided an opportunity for students to distance themselves from the colonial geopolitics that define much of Puerto Rico’s environmental policy, and instead develop an understanding of the environmental dynamics shared by many of the world’s islands. The intention, in other words, was to create a forum in which “the island” formed the basis of the discussion. In each conversation, we considered a different theme or trope, supported by a series of recordings. In the course of each conversation, we came to learn something different about the possible roles that music could play in integrating decolonial critiques into environmental discussions.

72  Priya Parrotta Natarajan We started the first week with a report published by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).14 It was titled “Climate Change in Small Island Developing States.” “Small island developing states” is a widely accepted phrase, used in many forums such as the United Nations. The intention of our first week was to discuss the definitions and connotations involved in the phrase. We also wanted to investigate other ways of expressing connections between islands—in other words, the other links we have, beyond questions of “development” and size. We listened to a selection of recordings from the musical group Te Vaka. Te Vaka is an extremely popular group in the Pacific world. Its members come from a variety of Polynesian islands, including Samoa, Tokelau, Tuvalu, and New Zealand. They describe their music15 as “South Pacific Fusion,” and are celebrated for the balance they achieve between the specificities of Polynesian cultural diversity, and an aesthetic that unites all those influences. Their music aided our discussion about the connection between soundscapes and daily sustainability. We recalled that there are certain sounds, like the swaying of the waves or the songs of the tropical birds, that unite us as “island people.” The second week’s discussion focused on a subject of deep decolonial importance: traveling by sea. In the discussion, we explored what it means to travel by sea, here in the Caribbean as well as in the Pacific.16 We talked about the voyages that the Taínos made before the arrival of the Spaniards. We also discussed how contemporary trade laws continue to impede the ability of Puerto Rico to make connections with other islands. With the aid of music from both regions, we considered two important aspects of “island voyages”—the links formed among humans as they embark upon these journeys, and the bonds that such movement can build between humans and the sea. The theme of the third week was the globalization from an “island” perspective. The genre of music we engaged with was reggae. We listened to two reggae songs from the Pacific Islands—one from Papua New Guinea,17 and another from Hawaii.18 We discussed neoliberal globalization, which exerts enormous pressure on many island societies, and we also discussed alternatives to it. We considered the history of reggae, which began life in the Caribbean and has now become popular in the Pacific Islands, and other countries besides. It also started as a form of resistance, and in many cases, it continues in that tradition. We recognized that thanks to reggae, and the variety of other circumstances that bind us, we in the Caribbean have a language in common with people in the Pacific Islands. The Island Sessions’ first month together illuminated several of the roles that music can play in building solidarity between activists on the world’s islands. It became clear that music can serve as a starting point for critique, reassurance, inspiration, and imagination. It can help spark shared conversations and build common understanding. As the Island Sessions have discovered more recently, the power of music is particularly clear when working with youth. Even Paikea, the protagonist

To Dream Again  73 of the Whale Rider, comes to understand her own power through song. She asserts her wisdom, environmental intelligence, and leadership capability through music. I would like to believe that across the world’s islands, many young people like her exist. Perhaps they are already finding their voices as environmental citizens. Perhaps they are searching for music to help them find their way. It is clear that at the intersections of political awareness, environmental sensibility, and the practice of music-making lie provocative questions. By encouraging musical exchange between students and activists on the world’s islands, we may perhaps reach the shores of some provocative answers. Notes 1 For recent ecocritical and postcolonial readings of The Tempest, see: Gray, David, “‘Command these elements to silence’: Ecocriticism and The Tempest,” Literature Compass 17, no. 3–4 (2020): e12566. and Pesta, D., “Acknowledging things of darkness: postcolonial criticism of The Tempest,” Academic Questions, 27, no. 3 (2014): 273. 2 Lisa Gerrard, Whale Rider (soundtrack) (4AD, 2003). 3 Doug Herman, “For Four Years, this Polynesian Canoe will Sail Around the World Raising Awareness of Climate Change.” Published in Smithsonian Magazine. Available at https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/ for-four-years-this-polynesian-canoe-sail-around-world-raising-awarenessglobal-climate-change-180951786/. 2014. 4 Climbing PoeTree, “They Are Selling the Rain.” From INTRINSIC (album). Available via https://climbingpoetree.bandcamp.com/track/they-are-selling-the- rain. 5 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), 69–84. 6 Philip V. Bohlman, World Music: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2002), 88–110. 7 Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Economy,” Theory Culture Society 7 (1990): 295–310. Available at http://www.arjunappadurai.org/ articles/Appadurai_Disjuncture_and_Difference_in_the_Global_Cultural_ Economy.pdf. 8 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), Climate Change – Small Island Developing States, (2005). 9 Paul Hawken, Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Social Movement in History is Restoring Grace, Justice and Beauty to the World (London: Penguin Books, 2007), 9–26. 10 Priya Parrotta, “Decolonial Environmentalism,” in The Politics of Coexistence in the Atlantic World: The Greater Caribbean, (Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016), 109–112. 11 Richard Grove, “Edens, Islands and Early Empires,” in Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860, (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 16–72. 12 Priya Parrotta, “On the Emerging Leaders Multifaith Climate Convergence,” in Repeating Islands: News and commentary on Caribbean culture, literature and the arts (September 9, 2015). https://repeatingislands.com/2015/09/09/ priya-parrotta-natarajan-on-the-emerging-leaders-multi-faith-climateconvergence/.

74  Priya Parrotta Natarajan 13 Erik Martínez Resly, “About,” in Sanctuaries. https://www.thesanctuaries.org/ about. (2019). 14 UNFCCC, Climate Change – Small Island Developing States (2005). 15 Te Vaka, Nukukehe (album), (Warm Earth Records, 2002). 16 Doug Herman, “For Four Years, this Polynesian Canoe will Sail Around the World Raising Awareness of Climate Change,” in Smithsonian Magazine. Available at https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/for-fouryears-this-polynesian-canoe-sail-around-world-raising-awareness-global-climatechange-180951786/. (2014). 17 Haus Boi. “Naike” (Song). Accessed via Diettrich, Brian; Jane Freeman Moulin; and Michael Webb, Music in Pacific Island Cultures: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011). 18 Israel Kamakawiwo’ole, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow / What a Wonderful World,” in Facing Future (album), (Big Boy Records, 1993).

Bibliography Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Appadurai, Arjun. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Economy.” Theory Culture Society 7 (1990), 295–310. Available at http://www.arjunappadurai.org/ articles/Appadurai_Disjuncture_and_Difference_in_the_Global_Cultural_ Economy.pdf. Bohlman, Philip V. World Music: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2002. Climbing PoeTree. “They Are Selling the Rain.” From INTRINSIC (album). Available via https://climbingpoetree.bandcamp.com/track/they-are-selling-the-rain. Accessed November 10, 2021. Gerrard, Lisa. Whale Rider (soundtrack). 4AD, 2003. Grove, Richard. Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Haus, Boi. “Naike” (Song). Accessed via Diettrich, Brian; Jane Freeman Moulin; and Michael Webb. Music in Pacific Island Cultures: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011. Hawken, Paul. Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Social Movement in History is Restoring Grace, Justice and Beauty to the World. London: Penguin Books, 2007. Herman, Doug. “For Four Years, this Polynesian Canoe will Sail Around the World Raising Awareness of Climate Change.” Published in Smithsonian Magazine, 2014. Available at https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/for-fouryears-this-polynesian-canoe-sail-around-world-raising-awareness-global-climatechange-180951786/. Accessed November 10, 2021. Kamakawiwo’ole, Israel. “Somewhere Over the Rainbow/What a Wonderful World.” From Facing Future (album). Big Boy Records, 1993. Martínez Resly, Erik. “About.” Sanctuaries, 2019. https://www.thesanctuaries.org/ about. Accessed November 10, 2021. Parrotta, Priya. The Politics of Coexistence in the Atlantic World: The Greater Caribbean. Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016.

To Dream Again  75 Parrotta, Priya. “On the Emerging Leaders Multifaith Climate Convergence.” In Repeating Islands: News and commentary on Caribbean culture, literature and the arts. September 9, 2015. https://repeatingislands.com/2015/09/09/priyaparrotta-natarajan-on-the-emerging-leaders-multi-faith-climate-convergence/. Accessed November 10, 2021. Te, Vaka. Nukukehe (album). Warm Earth Records, 2002. United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Climate Change – Small Island Developing States. 2005. Whale Rider. Directed by Niki Caro. New Zealand/Germany: Henderson Valley Studios, 2003.

Part II

Discord, Dystopias, and Utopias

6 Becoming Utopian in a Threatened Order Tom Moylan

6.1  Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. — William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming” (1921) Systemic crises and existential suffering have plagued humanity for a very long time. Throughout the last century, the world teetered on the edge of destruction, with human and non-human life pulled into the crushing gears of economic, military, political, and cultural orders as profit and power prevailed over justice and well-being. In this century, the downward spiral has exponentially increased such that the end of all life is now within the collective field of vision. Whether a factor of the Anthropocene or the Capitalocene, or the End Time, William Butler Yeats’s “blood-dimmed tide” is flooding the globe in a moment even darker than those presciently invoked by Bertolt Brecht when he encountered fascism. Today, cataclysmic harm abounds everywhere. The overdetermined crises playing out at every level have intensified even further under the imbricated realities of climate and pandemic destruction, as this toxicity intertwines with greed, hatred, and violence, threatening the viability of all the planet’s inhabitants (most clearly those who are most hated, most dispossessed, most vulnerable). In the face of the dark totality of this threatened world order, for those of us (in all our intersectional situations and endeavors) who seek to challenge and transform our current reality in the spirit of a just, equal, and DOI: 10.4324/9781003395379-9

80  Tom Moylan ecologically healthy existence for all of human and non-human nature, it is clearly time for the transformative exercise of the insurgent hope of the utopian impulse.1 In this undertaking, we need to know and interpret the broken ground upon which we walk, not to passively survive our condition, much less to manage it better, but to threaten that very order itself in collective action that robustly reaches toward a radical horizon of concrete achievement rather than getting lost in a miasma of abstract platitudes and gratuitous reforms. There have, of course, been many critical and revolutionary responses to this dire period, challenging how we understand it and how we are struggling to change it. Among this array of counter-hegemonic interventions, one that has spoken to me with its sober clarity and acute articulation of what must be done is Srećko Horvat’s After the Apocalypse. From the very first page, as he mobilizes a radical hermeneutic analysis in the service of revolutionary political action, Horvat identifies the standpoint from which he addresses what he terms our contemporary Apocalypse: “We are all living through it, deeply entangled and personally shaken by its ‘revelations,’ engulfed by its warnings, and, yet, the attempt to imagine the unimaginable … needs to be taken if we are to understand what is at stake, namely extinction.”2 Importantly, he traces the root cause of this complex reality to the “decades of neoliberalism and centuries of capitalism as the dominant world system based on extraction, exploitation and expansion” as they produced the current apocalyptic condition that has “infected our bodies and minds”3 as well as society and nature. What is at stake, he argues in no uncertain terms, is the “future of the planet itself.”4 To address this apocalyptic situation where such a bleak future has actually arrived within our present time – through the very forces that are producing its longue durée of destruction which is unfolding as the causative past of that entropic time to come – Horvat proffers “Nine Theses on Apocalypse” that feed into what I would further identify as the radical systemic and existential process of becoming utopian. He consequently evinces a praxis that is totalizing in its analysis of the interrelated crises, transgressive in its call to action, and transformative in its intent to produce an alternative outcome that leads toward a horizon of justice and freedom, health, and well-being, for all humanity and all of nature, for the planet itself. Horvat’s opening thesis challenges the immediate limit of linear and one-dimensional temporality by declaring that the once future condition of “extinction” has already happened if humanity persists in working within the terms and conditions of the order shaped by the “current barbarism”: we are, as he says in a profound prophetic voice, “living in the ‘naked Apocalypse’ without a kingdom to come.”5 Hope is erased under these conditions in which the end of the world has invaded the present with no alternative in sight: “no new epoch after this already dystopian epoch.”6 And yet, what I would identify as a utopian imperative or impulse pervades Horvat’s writing

Becoming Utopian in a Threatened Order  81 as he refuses to deliquesce into the swamp of barbaric despair. Instead, he offers a way to think about, to deeply interpret, the current material and semiotic conditions in order to argue that “another end of the world is still possible.”7 Horvat’s second thesis expresses the radical hermeneutic by which he reads the signs of our times. He reminds us that the original Greek word “apocalypse” is not a synonym for the end of the world, not a conflation that simply reinforces the linear time privileged by the current world order, but rather another word for “revelation,” insofar as it is “an unveiling of the architecture of our world, both as place and time.”8 Understood as unveiling or revelation, apocalyptic discourse can generate the interpretive intervention required to expose the conditions producing this apparently inescapable extinction, not to lock in that ending but rather to challenge its inevitability, to produce “an unprecedented transnational and intergenerational mobilization that would create the political subject capable of pulling the emergency brake”9 on the downward-spiraling train of totalizing finality. Proceeding from this, the third thesis calls for a semiotic “struggle for meaning” that could enable humanity, in what I would call a utopian intervention, to reassert control, to take on the interconnected social and environmental spheres that have been produced by the “hyperintegrated world capitalism that destroys the biosphere through continuous extraction and expansion,”10 and indeed through the control of language and the semiotic sphere of meaning. Such a counter-narrative would pull together the intersectional and global range of movements challenging and working to transform the current order of things: “connecting the various heterochronicities and heterotopias” in a unified “rage.”11 To do so, in theses 4 and 5, Horvat diagnostically elaborates on the tropes of “apocalyptic melancholy” and “normalization” that sustain the present order. He then affirms the need for this containing discourse of surface realism to be negated and superseded by a post-apocalyptic narrative that can “navigate us beyond the reductionist linear notion of time embodied in the capitalist understanding of ‘progress’,”12 and he points us toward the realization that a radical, transformatively healing and liberating world can still be achieved. In thesis 4, drawing on Sigmund Freud and Walter Benjamin, Horvat begins his move from a negative hermeneutics of suspicion to a positive hermeneutics of radical anticipation as he negates the debilitating melancholy produced by the perception that the planet (with all its creatures) is no longer capable of surviving. Contrarily, he argues that this melancholic sense can be transformed into a fruitful dialectical mourning that is not trapped in the dark anxiety of the present but rather embraces the complex hope that “unprecedented political action” can offer “a way out of our contemporary deadlock.”13 Such a constructive response is rooted in the temporal solidarity of our acceptance of the “responsibility towards future generations to properly understand and minimize the already existing eschatological threats” and to “construct a different end of the world.”14 Going further in thesis 5,

82  Tom Moylan Horvat challenges the “process of ‘normalizing’ contemporary barbarism.”15 Recognizing that it is in the interest of the current ruling order to legitimate itself as inherently “normal” (with only the managerial need for cosmetic reforms), he argues that such an apparent renewal is an act of bad faith, one that produces not a better world but a more terrible, more controlled, and enclosed, version of the existing world. Thus, the “new normal” reveals itself, by way of this apocalyptic hermeneutic, in its greater degree of “mass surveillance, restriction of movement, authoritarian capitalism, further exploitation of labour and natural resources” as well as in the intensified immiseration of the “so-called essential workers” who keep the system running.16 Putting it bluntly, Horvat exposes the “return to normal” mythology as one that darkly means “a return to the vicious circle of never-ending expansion, extraction, and exploitation, which, in the first place, lead to the multiple and simultaneous eschatological threats that we are facing today (climate crisis, nuclear age, pandemics).”17 Consequently, the radical, transformative, response to such a regime of normality must be one of rendering that order as both systemically and existentially abnormal. Further developing the groundwork for a revolutionary narrative of another world, in thesis 6 Horvat acknowledges that the planet and all its inhabitants are at the “tipping point” of irreversible change:18 the quantitative accumulation of exploitation and destruction is well on its way to producing a qualitative cascade that is on the verge of being “beyond human control [and] also beyond our imagination” to work beyond it.19 In thesis 7, drawing on the philosopher Gűnther Anders, he argues that the combined characteristics of this catastrophic cascade have become “superliminal,” exceeding the limits of collective human understanding, and thus potentially debilitating in any efforts to interpret or intervene because “no human can fully cope with the glimpse into a future without history.”20 Having broken through the dominant discourse of doom by way of his radical post-apocalyptic hermeneutic, Horvat proceeds to mobilize what I would term an explicitly utopian response as he argues for a new ground of understanding, one that can fuel a globally transformative movement that can stem the tide, that can struggle for another way out of this particular threatened order. In thesis 7, he calls for a new eschatology, one that refuses the unilinear notion of capitalist time.21 To develop this alternative outcome, the current disastrous conditions demand the challenge of a contrapuntal imaginary of “a future that comes after the Apocalypse.”22,23 This endeavor, he argues, “can only be successful if it is grounded in a deep understanding of the eschatological tipping points we are faced with as well as in an unprecedented long-term collective action that is, at the same time, both spatial (local, transnational, planetary) and temporal (intergenerational solidarity in a commitment to a just and sustainable future that would be evenly distributed across the planet among all species).”24 Only by tearing open the sutures of this timeline of power and progress can a different end of the world “be imagined and perhaps even constructed.”25

Becoming Utopian in a Threatened Order  83 In thesis 9, Horvat climaxes his intervention with his call for a “radical re-invention of the world” as the only way to negate “mass extinction.”26 Riffing on Leonard Cohen’s “Anthem,” he affirms that even “in the midst of our trajectory towards pure nothingness, there is a crack through which the light comes in.”27 Positing the revolutionary slogan that “another world is possible” against the resigned pessimism that preserves the powers of the current world order, he asserts that “another end of the world is possible”28 (my emphasis). Thus, the revelation that Horvat uncovers in his radical hermeneutic presents all of us, all of humanity, with “a choice”: will we continue, if caught in our one-dimensional melancholic normality, to go along with the “fossilized status quo” based in “extraction, exploitation, and further expansion,” or, in what I call a utopian break, “are we going to use our general intellect and imagination, [our] strong sense of transnational justice and intergenerational solidarity in order to go beyond the Apocalypse, to go beyond the very notion and time of ‘progress’.”29 Only with such a “r(e)evolutionary leap,” only with such a radical utopian maneuver, can we redefine time and existence and work toward a new “planetary common” that not only meets the needs of humanity but of all species and indeed the Earth itself.30 6.2  Horvat’s “Theses on the Apocalypse” functions eloquently as what I would term a utopian manifesto for our threatened world order, a manifesto calling not for management of such threats but rather for superseding them by way of totalizing transformation. Yes, another world, a different, better world is possible.31 However, to achieve that goal, to work within the refunctioned eschatological persuasion that Horvat identifies, immense personal and collective work is required, work that both “stays with the trouble”32 and threatens the array of destructive elements in the present moment even as it pushes forward to the horizon of a better reality for humanity and all of nature. It is from this point that the process of becoming utopian can more fully inform the steps to such radical change. I therefore suggest that the theoretical and methodological approaches made possible by the utopian problematic can help us better understand, and therefore better engage in, the process of this “(r)evolutionary leap” as it is enabled by radical critique and anticipatory articulation. As Fredric Jameson has reminded us, the “utopian problematic” is “not a set of propositions about reality, but a set of categories in terms of which reality is analyzed and interrogated”;33 therefore, it provides a critical apparatus by which the surface realism of the sutured official, capitalist, order (see Fisher) is exposed by a deep interpretive analysis and then superseded by attuned utopian action that offers a way forward to the horizon of a better, more fulfilled and healthy, existence for all of humanity and all of nature.34 The productive dynamic that emerges from such an interpretive and political engagement with present world order (exposing it as not reducible to

84  Tom Moylan dominant terms and conditions but rather replete with complex possibilities for that anticipated better future) has been analyzed and articulated by many, including Jameson, but also others such as Ernst Bloch. As this utopian Marxist philosopher of last century extensively demonstrates throughout his body of work, the movement toward the horizon of another, better world carries a utopian surplus of lessons learned and dreams actualized that can be drawn on again and again in actualizing the traces of hope in present-day struggles. For Bloch, in his Heraclitan ontology of flux, the world is unfinished. Infused by his hermeneutic apprehension of a long history characterized by radical hope, he argues for the continued radical work of humanity to refuse provincial reality and to reach toward the not yet fulfilled utopian future.35 As Jameson cautions, however, the successful outcome of this praxis requires both an initial catalyzing utopian impulse and the diverse yet allied political programs that it shapes and catalyzes.36 In Ruth Levitas’s formulation, which echoes Horvat’s argument, this utopian method involves two dialectically related dimensions: an archaeological mode of deep interpretation that involves “piecing together the images of the good society that are embedded in political programs in social and economic policies,” leading to an architectural mode of creative revelation which consists of the “imagination of potential alternative scenarios for the future.”37 However, these interpretive and political practices must be accompanied by an agential mode, “which addresses the question of what kind of people particular societies develop and encourage”38 and which then moves from interpretation to practice. Working from Horvat’s argument and an understanding of the radical potential enabled by the utopian problematic, I want to focus on the formation of the utopian person and the political and cultural agency that emerges from this process. While such agency must necessarily be collective in order effectively to challenge and transform the existing order of things, the process begins with the formation, the radicalization, of individuals. Simply put, the growth of a collective utopian movement is located in each person who comprises it; but for that person to contribute to the movement she or he must become utopian and continue to become utopian. This becoming requires the individual to break from the ideological formation within which she or he has been constructed and to tear through its sutured confines so as to be able to acknowledge that the existing one-dimensional world order is no longer sufficient, to see that something is missing and that something better can be achieved. Of course, this break, or utopian turn, is not a simple binary maneuver, not a before and after gravitational flip on a voyage to a fixed telos. Despite Karl Mannheim’s useful counter-pointing of Ideology and Utopia, the interplay between the two is more complex and ongoing than he allows; for the emergence of the utopian impulse occurs within the ideological milieu in which an individual exists but manifests itself as a deep challenge that calls the person to turn against and struggle through and beyond the present world system.39 Whether working from direct suffering or the knowledge of that of others, or with an exercise of fantastic imagination of

Becoming Utopian in a Threatened Order  85 a better life world, or in the intensity of political struggle (with its failures and victories), or often in a complex amalgam of all the above, this utopian turn may occasionally occur at a particular moment (when historical conditions intensify) but generally takes place over a series of incremental steps. My sense of this turn at the social-psychological level resonates with the analysis developed by Fritz Perls, Ralph Hefferline, and Paul Goodman in Gestalt Therapy. In their project, informed by a sociopolitical grounded psychoanalytic theory and practice, they detail the ways in which the dynamics of US postwar capitalism desensitized and inhibited the human self within the machinery of the social, and then articulate a radical therapeutic, and by extension political, approach that re-situates the person in a critical relationship with the enclosing regime in such a way that she or he can break through its barriers and emerge as a self-actualizing person.40 This therapeutic process turns on the achievement of a “gestalt shift” in which the emergent self reconfigures a new relationship to lived experience, capable of operating on, against, and beyond the ground of the established social environment.41 In language that echoes Bloch’s, they evoke the radically reconfigured person as one who is highly aware and living a life that stands up to advanced industrial alienation in a healthy mixture of pleasure and work that can continue along a path of full actualization. I argue, therefore, that a progressive understanding of the individual utopian turn from the “well-adjusted” subject to the radically free, self-actualizing, agent who can then engage in radical reinvention can be enriched by this understanding of the psychology of the gestalt shift. However, I further suggest that the subsequent political articulation of this turn by Alain Badiou offers a sharper-edged analysis that aims to disable the mechanisms of a social system that offers such a minimal “freedom” limited to existing terms and conditions. Shifting from a pre-’68 to a post-’68 moment and working not only within an anti-capitalist framework but from an overtly communist standpoint, Badiou nominates the “break” as a key element in the revolutionary (rather than alternative or reformist) process of the formation of a subject who refuses to submit to the current order of things (see Being and Event). Badiou’s elaboration of the break is, for me, most acutely presented in St Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, in which he evokes that historical person as neither revered saint nor authoritarian enforcer but rather as a “militant figure” whose life most effectively exemplifies the process of an “overturning” that takes place at the punctal moment of a ruptural “Event” that opens the way to the “transformation of relations between the possible and the impossible,” between the world as it is and as it could be.42 Consequently, an individual deeply attuned to and affected (indeed, effected) by an Event refuses the discursive paradigm of the static status quo and reaches toward a previously “unheard-of possibility,” one dependent on what Badiou calls the “grace” of this radical moment.43 In this moment, she or he experiences a “breakdown” in previously secure, enclosed, knowledge

86  Tom Moylan (empirical, conceptual, or experiential) and in turn stands open to the radically new – especially as that standpoint is developed in fidelity to the conditions of that Event and the horizon it invokes. In this breakthrough, a new subjectivity and a new way of being in the world is enabled. Thus, for the likes of Paul, or any of us, the journey away from our construction as a sutured subject within the fossilized present leads through a process of “ontological subversion” into the creation of a “militant” (what I would term utopian) subject.44 At this point, however, it is important to consider just how the newly released individual can grow. Attaining a catalyzing combination of estrangement and desire for a better world is one thing; but becoming a person who has a holistic apprehension of existing society and an anticipation of one that is progressively better calls for the further nurturing of that initial desire, or impulse. This new subjective capacity, as Ruth Levitas argues, must therefore be brought forward (educare) into a fuller self-awareness of the historical and political context so that it can be actualized as agency (necessarily in movements qualitatively transcending the quantitative assemblage of such individuals) (see “Educated Hope”). Consequently, “educating” that desire can take place variously through the consciousness-raising and action-inducing processes of radical pedagogy, political organizing, radical therapy, or indeed the experiential transformative experiences of artistic and political actions. At its core, and however developed, such a radical desire or impulse for a better world requires the development of a double consciousness that both knows one’s own existence in the present but also grasps the possibilities for a future that does not yet exist. Aided by gestalt therapy’s social-psychological understanding of the process of the gestalt shift and Badiou’s political articulation of the evental break, I believe we can better understand the deep transformation that occurs in the construction of an individual, and consequently of a sociopolitical collective, as utopian. While many individuals who consequently become utopian no doubt do so through a titrating series of shifts or breaks, there are indeed those moments of acute crisis, as figured by Paul, in which the change is instantly crystallized; but in all cases, the transformation is a form of radicalization. This, then, is a process that reaches into the structural and existential depths of the social order that permeates the normative subject and bestirs a radical shift wherein the individual’s holistic perception of reality alters, doing so in an estranging break from that order that then leads to a desire for a better world. With the individual utopian turn, however, the journey is only beginning; for the ongoing journey in the education of desire involves not only learning, but affiliating and working with others in this transformative vocation – as a member of a community or collective. What shape that activity takes is of course a key political question in any historical moment. Minimally, it can begin with singular participation as a concerned human being but then develop into more organized activism in one-off protests, targeted campaigns, sustained mass mobilizations – and in so doing may take the form of party, para-party, or grassroots formations.

Becoming Utopian in a Threatened Order  87 Whatever way this change develops, in Badiou’s terminology, it involves an operation of “subjectification” that moves from the singularity of the individual break into an “incorporation” within a “synthesis of politics, history, and ideology” that leads into a combination of “subjective capacity and organization.”45 In this process, the subjectification implicit in becoming what he terms a “communist” (which – in its evocation of a new subjectivity in a prefigured social reality that has been totally transformed beyond the realms of capitalism and socialism – I take as equivalent to utopian) constitutes “the link between the local belonging to a political procedure and the huge symbolic domain of humanity’s forward march toward its collective emancipation,” or, putting it succinctly, to “give out a leaflet in the marketplace was also to mount the stage of History.”46 Therefore, the individual who has undergone a break or gestalt shift and who realizes that she or he is not “doomed to lives programmed by the constraints of the State [and I would add Market]” becomes “authorized” within their own self to become part of the larger movement to force “the impossible into the possible.”47 In her discussion of such utopian subjectivity, Jodi Dean invokes the figure of the “comrade” as her preferred term over “communist,” as a more nuanced interpellation of the radical person who works “in the world for something better.”48 Working with Kathi Weeks’s utopian interpretation, she identifies a dual function for the comrade: one is to “alter our connection to the present, while the other is to shift our relationship to the future.”49 As Weeks puts it, the first work of estrangement “mobilizes the negativity of disidentification and disinvestment”; while the second step of hope redirects “our attention and energies toward an open future … [p]roviding a vision or glimmer of a better world.”50 For our time especially, Dean sees the comrade as egalitarian and utopian, but, significantly, as relational and generic, not abstractly affiliated with any given identity. Thus, comrades work together to “cut through the determinations of the everyday (which is another way of saying capitalist social relationships”) by moving with and beyond allied identity formations and politics into a complexly unified movement working for the “common horizon” of total social transformation, and doing so in Horvat’s context of transnational and intergenerational solidarity.51 For Dean, the comrade is a “figure of political belonging” (“a figure for the political relation between those on the same side”).52 She consequently argues that the optimal organizational form for this collective agency is still that of a communist party, which she regards as the most effective form for the “emancipated egalitarian organization of collective life.”53 Acknowledging the concerns about the history of party formations as reflected upon by other communist philosophers such as Antonio Negri and Badiou, she nevertheless thus holds out for the party as the preferred form for mobilizing commitment and struggle against “patriarchal racial capitalism.”54 Of course, she recognizes the previous shortcomings and failures of party structures, especially in their authoritarian theory and practice. Yet, invoking the “courage, enthusiasm, and achievements of millions of party members for over a century,”55

88  Tom Moylan she argues for this political form as one that can be refunctioned and reenergized. Thus, she values the party’s potential for mobilizing and delivering an “organized response” which can effectively move forward with “growth, direction, equality, and density.”56 The party can therefore bring together diverse struggles in a unity of action and facilitate the dual function spoken of above: namely, the “disruptive negativity” opposing the present system and the relational unity generating “new values, intensities, and possibilities.”57 For his part, Badiou sees such a party formation as no longer tenable; and he suggests other possible models, such as those found after the Event of May ’68 or in more recent political movements such as L’Organisation Politique in France. For myself, I accept Dean’s argument for the necessity of a unified political organization that is capable of standing up to the systemic power of the global patriarchal/racist capitalist order (for me, best exemplified historically in the work of the Popular Front). However, at this moment such an organization remains at the horizon of a more developed political moment, though assuredly (in Bloch’s sense of a utopian surplus that can once again be available) it is necessary. Thus, I share the assessments of the likes of Tony Negri and Badiou, and prefer the intermediate organizational form adopted by groups such as Momentum in the UK, the Democratic Socialists or Black Lives Matter in the US, the Indignados in Spain, or the Zapatistas in Mexico. As in other post-’68 groups, such as the Wisconsin Alliance (which was active in the 1970s throughout that US state), this form was identified as that of a “mass socialist organization” (MSO) that mediated between grassroots activity and the organizational discipline of a party structure. While spontaneous uprisings, temporary occupations, and identity-based formations are crucially needed, and effective in their own right, it is necessary to move with and beyond sectoral struggles and to develop a global movement with a unified leadership structure (albeit one that is radically intersectional and democratic, and governed by practices of criticism/self-criticism) in order to sustain a political movement that can work against the global neoliberal/superpower order while reaching for a utopian horizon by building new political, social, and cultural spaces or formations within the apocalyptic moment of what Fisher calls “the remorseless meat-grinder of Capital.”58 6.3  For the sake of all humanity and all of nature, there must indeed “be some way out of here,” some way beyond “the blood-dimmed tide,” some way to “emerge from the flood.” This will require destroying the remorseless “meatgrinder” of a global, racist, militarist capitalism that is vampirically draining the very lifeblood of the planet and its inhabitants. It will require the “r(e) volutionary leap” called for by Horvat. It will require the transgressive interpretive intervention and totalizing political engagement implicit in the process of becoming utopian. It will require that praxis of double consciousness that proceeds with one eye on the present and the other on the transformed

Becoming Utopian in a Threatened Order  89 horizon, as we work (with a strong sense of temporal solidarity) along the continuum that runs from the utopian impulse through contingent utopian programs and reach toward the Not Yet Become.59 In our own dark times, armed with this understanding and informed by this commitment to contribute to the general activity of becoming utopian, we need to “stay with the trouble” and act within this darkness (creating cracks through which the light can shine). We cannot afford to indulge in nostalgia for former identities or politics; nor can we abstractly wish that a transformed future will one day arrive on our doorstep. We certainly cannot give up or submit. No, we must take on the apparently impossible work of achieving the end of capitalist and superpower rule by joining the long march of building new spaces, creating new possibilities. Notes 1 There are many individuals and collectives working to make sense of and respond to our present condition of planetary crisis – sociopolitical movements, artistic productions, and research formations. For a good example of a broad-based research network investigating a historical range of “threatened orders” and humanity’s responses to them, see the work of the Collaborative Research Centre 923 at Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen and their targeted program, “Threatened Order - Societies under Stress”: https://uni-tuebingen.de/en/research/ core-research/collaborative-research-centers/crc-923/information/. 2 Srećko Horvat, After the Apocalypse (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2021), vi. 3 Horvat, 2. 4 Horvat, 6. 5 Horvat, 9. 6 Horvat, 11. 7 Horvat, 35. 8 Horvat, 12. 9 Horvat, 14. 10 Horvat, 18. 11 Horvat, 172. 12 Horvat, 32. 13 Horvat, 24. 14 Horvat, 24. 15 Horvat, 25. 16 Horvat, 26. 17 Horvat, 28. 18 Horvat, 28. 19 Horvat, 29. 20 Horvat, 32. 21 Horvat, 32. 22 Horvat, 34. 23 Horvat’s argument for a radically other future world, as developed through his alternative periodization, was anticipated at the emergence of modernity in the apocalyptic theology of the 12th-century Franciscan monk, Joachim of Fiore. One of several theologians who were working to come to terms with the, often despairing, apocalyptic structure of feeling that developed after the millennium failed to bring the much anticipated Second Coming, Joachim turned his more hopeful imagination to developing a theological-pastoral response to the condition of

90  Tom Moylan humans who would continue to suffer lives of dispossession and degradation and thus desired better lives in the here and now. Rather than privileging the solace of an afterlife in Heaven, the monk – influenced by the ecological and materialist theological sensibility of his mentor Francis of Assisi – postulated a new time of fulfilment on Earth, occurring after the Apocalypse but before the Second Coming. Consequently, he posited the arrival of a Third Age, an earthly time prevailed over by the Holy Spirit which dialectically superseded the First Age of the law-giving Father and the Second Age of the sacrificial Son. In Joachim’s account, this new time, under the care of the Spirit, would bring about fulfilled lives in communal freedom and love after the Apocalypse but before the Second Coming. In this, nearly heretical, redemptive history, Joachim articulates “another end of the world” (Horvat) that emerges beyond the one-dimensional apocalyptic temporality of orthodox theology and institutional practice. With this work, Joachim made an early contribution to the modern line of what became the overtly hopedriven utopian discourse that carries from Thomas More into the work of Ernst Bloch and beyond. For more on Joachim’s apocalyptic theology, see Reeves (1969, 1976), Reeves and Gould (1987), and McGinn; see also my discussion in Chapter 2, “Bloch against Bloch: Liberating Utopia,” Becoming Utopian, 43–69. 24 Horvat, 34–35. 25 Horvat, 35. 26 Horvat, 35. 27 Horvat, 37. 28 Horvat, 38. 29 Horvat, 41, 174. 30 Horvat 174–175. 31 For more on the manifesto as a distinctly utopian form, see Weeks, “The Future is Now.” 32 Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016). 33 Fredric Jameson, “Science vs. Ideology”, Humanities in Society 6 (1983); 283. 34 The analysis and argument in this part is condensed and adapted from a more extensive discussion in my book, Becoming Utopian: The Culture and Politics of Radical Transformation. Portions of this essay appeared in my keynote lecture for the conference on “Globalisation and New Terrains of Consciousness: Phenomenology of The Global /Local /Glocal,” sponsored by the Department of English at Jamia Millia Islamia University in collaboration with Department of English and American Studies. University of Würzburg, 9–10 February 2021. 35 On Heraclitus’s ontology of flux (and his metaphor of the river), see Kahn, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus (147, 168, 166–169, and 223). I'm grateful to Antonis Balasopoulos, of the University of Cyprus, for reminding me of this connection. 36 On utopian impulse and program, see Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic, and Moylan, Becoming Utopian. 37 Ruth Levitas, Utopia as Method (New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 153. 38 Levitas, Utopia as Method, 153. 39 For a fuller discussion of the uneven terrain transversed by ideology and utopia, see Jameson, Political Unconscious: Jameson’s observation that the “effectively ideological is also, at the same time, necessarily utopian” provides us with a more nuanced reminder that utopia and ideology are dialectically imbricated within the general structure of social representation and socialization (286). 40 Fritz S. Perls, Ralph F. Hefferline, and Paul Goodman, Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality (New York: Penguin, 1951), 299.

Becoming Utopian in a Threatened Order  91 1 Perls, Hefferline, and Goodman, 279. 4 42 Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. R. Brassier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 2, 45. 43 Badiou, St. Paul, 45. 44 Badiou, St. Paul, 47. 45 Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis, trans. D. Macey and S. Corcoran (London and New York: Verso, 2010), 236–237, 227. 46 Badiou, Communist Hypothesis, 252–253. 47 Badiou, Communist Hypothesis, 256. 48 Jodie Dean, Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging (London and New York: Verso), 2019, 35. 49 Dean, 10. 50 Quoted in Dean, 11. 51 Dean, 22, and see 11–23. 52 Dean, 43 53 Dean, 35, 6. 54 Dean, 25, and see 5–6. 55 Dean, 6. 56 Dean, 90. 57 Dean, 96. 58 Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester: Zero Books, 2009). 59 Bloch.

Bibliography Badiou, Alain. Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. Translated by R. Brassier. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. ———. Being and Event. Trans. O. Feltham. London and New York: Continuum, 2005. ———. The Communist Hypothesis. Translated by D. Macey and S. Corcoran. London and New York: Verso, 2010. Bloch, Ernst. The Principle of Hope, 3 vols. Translated by N. Plaice, S. Plaice, and P. Knight. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986. Cohen, Leonard, “Anthem,” The Future. 1992. Dean, Jodi. Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging. London and New York: Verso, 2019. Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Winchester: Zero Books, 2009. Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016. Horvat, Srećko. After the Apocalypse. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2021. Jameson, Frederic. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981. ———. “Science vs. Ideology.” Humanities in Society 6 (1983): 283–302. ———. Valences of the Dialectic, London and New York: Verso, 2009. Kahn, Charles H., ed. The Art and Thought of Heraclitus: An Edition of the Fragments with Translation and Commentary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979 Levitas, Ruth. “Educated Hope: Ernst Bloch on Abstract and Concrete Utopia.” Not Yet: Reconsidering Ernst Bloch, edited by J. O. Daniel and T. Moylan. London and New York: Verso, 1997. 65–80.

92  Tom Moylan ———. Utopia as Method. New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. McGinn, Bernard, ed. Apocalyptic Spirituality. Translated by B. McGinn. New York and Toronto: Paulist Press, 1979. Moylan, Tom. Becoming Utopian: The Culture and Politics of Radical Transformation. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2020. Perls, Fritz S., Ralph F. Hefferline, and Paul Goodman. Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality. New York: Penguin, 1951. Reeves, Marjorie. Joachim of Fiore and the Prophetic Future. London: SPCK Press, 1976. Reeves, Marjorie, and Warwick Gould. Joachim of Fiore and the Myth of the Eternal Evangel in the 19th Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987. Weeks, Kathi. “The Future is Now: Utopian Demands and the Temporalities of Hope.” The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork politics, and Postwork Imaginaries, 175–227. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001.

7 Exploring Dystopic Spatialities of Game(re)play A Study of Papers, Please and Orwell Zahra Rizvi

In An Introduction to Game Studies, Frans Mayra talks about how, “The twentieth (and twenty-first)-century childhood is increasingly affected by diminishing access to space and children’s remaining in constant ‘protective custody’. Digital games in their single player, and online multiplayer varieties provide intensity of experience and escape from adult regulation that can fulfil some of the same roles the physical space used to have for previous generations.”1 Increasing steadily, and even more so over the recent pandemic years, has been the understanding of the world closing in, of space being cordoned off, and perimeters being reduced considerably. Games with their “long history of empowering social play”2 seem to offer some solace, and not just in ways that are only relatable to ‘childhood’. MUDs, these Multi-User Dungeons, Dimensions, or Domains (depending on who was calling), were born in the late 1970s, inspired by early text adventure games, roguelike games and Dungeons & Dragons style RPGs… An important part of the gameplay was communication with other players and the capability to join character parties by tracking another player-character. These small groups were more successful facing challenges than any single player would have been alone. The groups of player-characters were an important emergent gameplay feature, showing future directions for much of the later online game developments.3 Multi-user games were often played out as escapist fantasies of survival in the offline world. With the emergent popularity of social simulation videogames, possibilities of utopian alternatives in the virtual or online world have increased. These games range from The Sims, MySims, Tomodachi—in fact, there is a bunch of them often on similar premises—and of course, one knows Animal Crossing, that game of early pandemic popularity. The idea is usually to create you, a better you in a better world version, and live ‘a good life’ as the hero of your creation, depending on whatever that might mean to specific players. Now, of course, most of the gamers today are aware of some of the DOI: 10.4324/9781003395379-10

94  Zahra Rizvi underlying problems of these games. In a loving article called “The Capitalist Joys of Animal Crossing,” Nolan Gray describes the world of Animal Crossing as “a kind of egalitarian capitalist utopia of homeowners and shopkeepers.”4 In another article, “Think Animal Crossing is just a cutesy ‘capitalist dystopia’? Think again,” Amelia Tait lists out some of the charges against Animal Crossing: Since New Horizons exploded in popularity this spring, headlines have lamented that it is a “capitalist dystopia” with a “dark(ish) underbelly”, and the game’s raccoon overlord, Tom Nook, has been nicknamed a “capitalist crook”. Because players have to take out loans in the game, many are coming up with innovative – and exploitative – ways to earn the in-game currency, Bells. On black markets, people are selling their villagers for millions, while others scam players out of their hard-earned items, charge outlandish entry fees to visitors of their islands, and inflate prices for rare furniture, and star fragments on the fan-made website Nookazon, the game’s unofficial answer to Amazon.5 Jason Flatt in “Beginner’s Guide to Anti-Colonialism in ‘Animal Crossing: New Horizons’” talks about the neo-colonialist trajectory of AC:NH and says, “Foreigners discovering remote islands, settling, exploiting their natural resources for profit, and acting as if there’s nothing wrong with it all. Sound familiar? It’s because the premise of Animal Crossing: New Horizons is the age-old story of colonialism.”6 And then, one has what can be called in the words of Lucas Pope, neo-explorations of “other people simulators,”7 games that reveal that the physical shrinking of space can no longer be compensated by expansive gamescapes; serious, uncomfortable games, characterized by a suffocating hypernearing of the experience of the dystopia. Colin Campbell calls this “gaming’s new frontier,” where interestingly there is a painful absence of power that games usually attributed to their players. What does it feel like to face the death of a child, or to live with hopelessness, or to suffer from the bitterness of extreme loneliness? Fiction and art have grappled with these issues for centuries. Now games are showing us what it is to exist at the extreme margins. A new generation of games, like That Dragon, Cancer, Depression Quest and Actual Sunlight, is connecting players with real human issues, including terminal illness, depression and suicide. Mostly generated by small teams or by individuals, these games are described by Lucas Pope, creator of Papers, Please, as “other people simulators” that allow us to interact with the world from a challenging point of view. While games have traditionally endowed the player with a host of impressive fantasy powers, these games show how their creators cope with real-life difficulties, often with a limited ability to effect change. In

Exploring Dystopic Spatialities of Game(re)play  95 demonstrating specific challenges via game mechanics, they allow us to walk in other people’s shoes. Developers are showing a deeper understanding that by connecting the player with the storyteller through actions, as opposed to the anecdote, confession or demonstration of more linear forms, they can convey strong feelings or empathy in unique ways.8 Papers, Please, “A Dystopian Document Thriller,” is a 2013 puzzle simulation video game by Lucas Pope. The game places the player at a migration checkpoint of a fictional dystopia in an Eastern bloc-like country, as an immigration officer. The game starts when the player, an in-person living in the country of Arstotzka with their family, is drawn in a labour lottery that places them in the Ministry of Admission at the Grestin Border checkpoint. Here, the player must live a very disembodied existence in a small cabin of sorts where they have access to various documents on a table and the wall opposite the checkpoint window. There is a bird’s-eye view of a small piece of land that shows an endless line of ant-like figures, an endless miniaturization of people waiting outside the checkpoint booth and the handful of guards on either side of the border. This view doesn’t change throughout the game except for the event in which there is a performance of violence, which brings with a conversion of the gaze, so often seen as in the development of protagonist of the anthropocenic dystopia but also a part of the articulation of what Bernard Stiegler calls the ‘neganthropocene,’ because after all, “The question of the Anthropocene is how to exit from the Anthropocene qua toxic period in order to enter into a new epoch that we are calling the Neganthropocene, as a curative, care-ful Epoch.”9 For most of the game, the visuals remain the same, lending suffocating horror to the very closed space the player can occupy, a horror which continues to increase as the player progresses along the 31-day length of the game. The visuals are minimalist, bleak, despairing, and frustrating and The color palette of the game is pale and warm, saturated with greys and browns, and non-player characters are muddy, impressionistic figures built of splotchy pixel art. This dedication to inoffensive, subdued, and largely static visuals reflects the mess of bureaucratic exactitude seen in the player-character's instructions.10 The sameness of the visuals begins to get increasingly frustrating and fearful as symbols, photos, documents, and texts begin to merge and small differences slip under the radar at the cost of lives as, “What seems on the surface, then, to be a design choice geared toward evocation of boredom actually manages to heighten the tension and difficulty of the task at hand.”11 The first few days of the game are pretty simple. The player’s character is given a small set of rules with which they compare the passports and required entry documents of the people who come to the booth. At this juncture, the responsibilities of the player are to continue on this routine of unexciting

96  Zahra Rizvi tasks: checking documents and stamping the passports in a timebound fashion which rewards speed and punishes inaccuracy with a citation, more than three citations meaning a docking of pay. The credits one earns mean a lot because of the in-game family that one has to support. One has to pay the rent, feed one’s family and, unfortunately, the family is often cold and/or sick which means the player is always worried about whether they’ll make enough, even after the docking of pay, to keep all of the family surviving, in a scenario where the death of even one family member makes the player directly responsible for it. However, there is a danger to this stasis which could lull the player-character into metamorphosizing into an automaton; with its frequent calls to the player’s empathy, the game fights against this automization of the player. As the political situation begins to get grimmer, relations between Arstotzka and the neighbouring countries remain strained. Numerous new rules begin to be added and soon there isn’t enough space on the small, crowded desk to check various documents. “You want to make sure you admit the correct people, not just for the safety of your country, but also to avoid citations that affect how much money you will bring home to your family.”12 People begin to resemble different points of information: immigrants start to resemble the documents they possesses—passports, ID cards, work permits, immigration forms, vaccination records—even as the gameplay becomes a matter of quick reflexes and time management in what seems like a never-ending repetitive sequence. This is around the time the game begins to play back. The mostly dialogue-less characters now begin to offer you their stories rather than just their information. A wife gets left behind while the husband is let through, a criminal has all the right paperwork but a woman who will certainly die the next day without proper medical treatment doesn’t. Who will the player let through? These contradictions continue to pile up in morally ambiguous scenarios. Sergiu Volda who is stationed at the border presents yet another such scenario when he comes to ask the player-inspector a favour. Sergiu has already forged some ties with the inspector. They’re from Nirsk and the player has actually saved his life once, if the inspector successfully shot the terrorist on day 18 and Sergiu survived. When we finally meet Elisa, not only does she not have all the required documents but we also find out that she has lost her family and Sergiu is all she has left. The Girl with the Controller states the dilemma of every player at this instant: You should deny her. The game has taught you this. You’ve denied other people who don’t have their proper paperwork without a second thought before. And if you let her pass to reunite with Sergiu, it will negatively affect your own family at home that is barely scraping by. Do you put a stranger above your own family? Do you risk a citation and docked pay? Or is reuniting a woman with the only person she has left worth it? If you do decide let her pass, you see her and Sergiu run to each other and embrace each other, a sweet moment you get to

Exploring Dystopic Spatialities of Game(re)play  97 witness as a citation also pops up on the bottom of your screen. It’s moments like these that change your strategy. This game is no longer just a test of the mind, but also the heart. All of a sudden, the two citation warnings you get before Arstotzka docks your pay become less about you being able to make mistakes and more about you strategically using them to make decisions you want to make.13 The case of EZIC, the secret organization that wants the player’s help to take over Arstotzka to build a better country is yet another such case. These aspects are crafted skilfully into the game design and storytelling, so that the player has to think and strategize at every instance of the gameplay. All the while, the player is aware that time is ticking and whatever choices they make that diverge from the rules will be made at the cost of the player-character and their family’s lives. Not only does the player-character’s personal situation get worse with the death of family members, but the people at the checkpoint also continue to overload the player with personal stories, making it more and more difficult for the player to robotically follow the rules, that is, the in-game orders. At the same time, the recurring presence of EZIC and the dehumanizing rules of Arstotzka continuously make the player rethink what’s good for the people of this territory. In the background of this movement-limiting, choice-limiting, empathy-demanding gameplay, there is no accompanying music for the most part. A distorted, mechanical, retro-robotic sound calls out the next person in line and the player-character’s very limited actions are accompanied by a hollow rhythm of paper shuffling and stamp sounds akin to existence in a never-ending corporate horror, and mimicking the dull inhuman tasks of the player. The eerie silence and repetitive predictability of sounds and visuals of the game are punctured with explosions, blood, alarm sounds, and gunshots. Interestingly, when one is off work, music returns, but it is usually the equally eerie Arstotzkan anthem, “spare, languid, lightly accompanied beat of one note moving one octave up and one octave down in martial determination ad infinitum.”14 As the limited actions of the player becoming sloppy and the paranoia of seeing a citation increase, the player is forced to think about what could be a good ending, what could make the player into a hero. The aurality of the game supplements and even foregrounds its frustration but there is also growing interest in continuing and manoeuvring rules to different advantages. There are officially 20 possible endings for the game and one has to replay various days to reach each and every possible ending. For 17 of these endings, the Death Theme plays. It is characterized by a “surprisingly upbeat” tone but has been compared to a song that would be “played on state broadcast radio.”15 If one listens to it throughout, however, the music drops in the middle as if to mourn the end of the player-character, the inspector, a hint towards the fact that these endings are typically seen as the bad endings. However, this mournfulness is short-lived as the music picks up once again, as if announcing the ‘cheerful’ replaceability of the inspector who, for the

98  Zahra Rizvi system, is a mere part that can easily be replaced by another. Ross characterizes this replaceability as “the wave of automation which not only leads to widespread job destruction but also destructive Uberization.”16 The eerie feeling that a horrible mistake has been made due to the broadcasting of the Death Theme is highlighted further by the simple yet haunting words on the screen, “Glory to Arstotzka,”17 once again underlining the fact that the system and the government doesn’t really care if the player-character has achieved an unfavourable end because the routine must and, in the re-playability of the game, does go on. In endings 18–20, the Victory Theme, a light-hearted song quite unlike the Death Theme, plays and yet even this theme sounds hollow in the context of the memory of the bloodless violence the player-character has wielded to reach this far. If these endings can be called happy endings, it is because they do not signify the end of all possibility and social dreaming but are nested in some form of hope for the player-character as part of a larger community. These endings also make clear some of the gravest problems of the anthropocenic dystopia, that “there is, finally, all about us, evidence of a deterioration of political faith, belief, trust, hope and will, and a corresponding rise of a desperate, reactionary and xenophobic anti-politics all too willing to designate scapegoats and appeal at every opportunity to fear and stupidity.”18 Orwell: Keeping an Eye on You is also an episodic, dystopian simulation game which makes some of these concerns that Papers, Please is juggling with a lot more overt. Orwell takes place in a country called ‘The Nation,’ led by an authoritarian government known as ‘The Party.’ At the very beginning of the game, the player knows that their play is possible because of a Safety Bill passed by The Party in 2012, which allows the government to spy on its citizens in the name of national security. As part of this bill, the Ministry of Security built a covert surveillance system called ‘Orwell’ which is operated by sourcing people from outside The Nation. Orwell presents the dystopia of technics in a surprisingly mundane way. At the start of the game, the player is a CCTV camera looking at people in the Freedom Plaza trying to identify ‘suspects’ even though at this moment there is nothing to suspect anyone of. This convergence of the human player with the technological surveillance apparatus is telling as it establishes the upcoming demands that will be made of this player as well as the early reduction of the player to a simple, small, and replaceable part of the technological apparatus in place in The Nation. Orwell’s approach to immersion in video games is mindboggling in that “by using a computer screen as the game’s interface it puts the player in exactly the same position as the character they’re playing—a person sitting at a computer browsing its contents.”19 Designed as an investigative profiling suspense game, “the gameplay consists of doing online research with a limited fictional scope…it feels like uncovering a story when you find a lead that opens other avenues of research that allow you to find out more about the situation and as the story develops you're given more to look at, more people to look into and more plots to

Exploring Dystopic Spatialities of Game(re)play  99 uncover and what are you researching.”20 At first it seems that since the investigator has the power to upload information, people are of course treated less as people but as pieces of information, or datachunks to use the game’s terms, but as the game progresses, one realizes, sometimes, that the player is being forced to upload information they wouldn’t have otherwise. What the player uploads lacks context and hence is open to the worst kind of interpretation and conflict. Daniel Marx, lead game designer and writer for Orwell, has talked about how adding layers of moral conflict and flooding the system with vague red herrings was a conscious move on the team’s part to make players think deeply. A good example for this is the “credit card stolen” datachunk: Within the very first conversation in the game Josef asks Cassandra whether she knows where his credit card is, whereupon Cassandra answers that she “snatched the card from his desk.” From the context of the conversations it’s abundantly clear this is just a playful remark between two persons who are close. The Orwell system though is oblivious to this context, interpreting the statement as datachunk including the information that “Cassandra has stolen a credit card from Josef.” In case players decide to extract this information the adviser Symes, only knowing the “fact” Cassandra stole a credit card leads to him locking the card. This again causes the next conversation the two characters have play out differently to confront players with immediate consequences to their action.21 The algorithmic automatized existence of the player-character refers to “A ‘post-democratic’ worldless world in which collective decision becomes strictly speaking impossible, because truth itself, losing its effective actuality, has somehow come to seem an irrelevant and obsolescent criterion.”22 Sometimes the information one uploads, thinking that it might help a character, actually leaves them worse. Daniel Marx said that the team designed the game in a way to “directly make players feel like they were investigating the data of other people while at the same time providing an unsettling feeling of giving some of it away to someone else without exactly knowing what the consequences for those persons would be,”23 and that’s exactly what happens. The player is drawn into complicity in state crimes even if they don’t want to be. Throughout this, the player continues to live a disembodied, depersonalized life, where their only possible move is dragging datachunks from various online sources to the Orwell database. The “actual movement, performed by dragging and dropping the information object from document to profile, because we felt it was needed to further strengthen the sense of literally handing information over” is genius in terms of emphasizing this air of complicity. Rachel Watts in “Hack, spy, swing an election: Orwell game sums up life in a tech dystopia,” comments on how the game “makes obvious what is hidden: that mass surveillance and data harvesting can be

100  Zahra Rizvi used in sinister ways that go further than just advertising profiles, to regulate and govern our behaviour in ways we don’t realise. It asks players to question systems of surveillance while giving an insight into our complicity within these structures.”24 The game provides the player with a large network of suspects, with their own biases and context, and websites, chat logs, emails, and blogs; it even “allows you to access bank accounts, medical records, even to delve into citizens’ personal text messages and listen in on their phone conversations. With Orwell in place, nothing is private.”25 There is an excess of information which begins to suffocate and confuse the player, dragging them into making morally grey decisions since the choices are sparse in this “choice-driven game without a clear right or wrong.”26 There is considerable frustration in the fact that the player can change very little of the game, since it controls the players as much as the player plays, refusing to continue if they don’t comply with its demands at times. However, as the player approaches the ending and is forced to make some really big decisions, they realize that throughout the game, there have been choices they made that can change the trajectory and the outcome of the game. Orwell evokes a sense of consequence through the continuous commentary by the in-game supervisor figure, who sees the uploaded datachunks and carries out actions. Not only does this give perspective and a dread of consequence, but it is also telling in the fact that though the player is drowning information and playing to achieve more information, knowledge-wise, the player just might be in the dark most of the time. “It’s up to you to decide if a person’s online outburst is just an in-the-moment rant, or anti-government hate speech. Are these students simply activists, or could they be a terror organisation? The choices you make change the direction and conclusion of the game’s narrative. You have to make moral and ethical decisions about mass surveillance, data harvesting and personal privacy.”27 The game does this by making us confront “news outlets, social media, governments or corporations? And how distinct are these institutions from each other?”28 The delay in this realization is frustrating, as one comprehends that mnemonic tech and devices of industrialized tertiary retention have immersed one, hijacked one’s attention and seized control of one’s behaviour, algorithmically and telecratically, which is also, one understands, what is happening to the people inhabiting The Nation in the game, and unlike Papers, Please, one can’t just replay a day. One has to carry it through to the end, despite there being no system of reward/punishment. As new information unfolds, previous information that was submitted to the system is seen in a new light but the player can’t undo wrongs. The endings, though fewer in number than in Papers, Please, are just as intriguing. On the last day in game, the player is presented with a few endings, including who can incriminate and for what cause, depending on how they have been playing the game. However, Orwell is also a game that invites us to think of the process rather than just the ending, and online forums still

Exploring Dystopic Spatialities of Game(re)play  101 have people discussing what is a good ending29 in the light of events that happen throughout the game. Both Papers, Please and Orwell have generated online fan communities that exist to date, discussing endings and small decisions of choice-limiting levels that can make a difference somewhere. Elinari Rhodan’s “Orwell | FINALE - Delacroix or Me?” points to the player’s conscious attempt to change endings in a particular direction. She continuously tries to make the game go a certain way but she can’t seem to find the right datachunk and she is so worried, even saying that she will Google it rather than make a wrong decision.30 The Steam discussion board on “Which is the ‘good’ ending?”31 for Orwell, is another instance of the creation of space where dialogue and choices are no longer limited as in the game. These discussion boards and forums reinvent gameplay through collective participation outside the game, and there is a considerable amount of dialogue about what could be a ‘good ending.’ Both of the games have generated fan-made endings that look into small changes which may change the intended endings of the game. The very basis of continuing to play repeatedly to reach a favourable ending, and to keep trying in the face of the “dead-end banality” of the anthropocenic dystopia, is to participate in the exercise of social dreaming of a better outcome, a better future, and not give in to nihilism. In discussing these endings and trying out new endings based on information shared within the communities of gamers surviving by creating affinity spaces in a dystopian epoch, there is “hope of fruitfully surpassing that epoch, or, in other words, of performatively and affirmatively contributing to the necessity…of the transformation of our shared milieu by making possible the adoption of an imagined but possible future, however improbable.”32 These affinity spaces restore in us the power to make collective decisions, which are stripped away in game, due to the orienting of the player-character towards ‘audiences’ of dystopia rather than citizens of, literally, in the case of Orwell, The Nation characterized by the dystopia of technics. Filled with tutorials, tips, and cheat-codified manuals, both these games restore agency outside the game, in these spaces, by a game design where the literal end of the game doesn’t end gameplay but instead invites replays and the sharing of gameplay knowledge. This is also a beautiful metaphor for conceptualizing the hopeful future that Ross talks about in his introduction to Stiegler’s The Neganthropocene: What task, then, falls to the philosopher who so measures the character of an epoch in crisis, other than to critique those limits in their synergistic and antagonistic convergence, either to try and illuminate the path that turns the system towards the least destructive and most beneficial phase-shift imaginable, or, if it is too late for the catastrophe to be averted, to provide resources to those who, coming after the apocalypse, have no choice but to forge something new from out of the ashes (assuming there is someone and not just ashes)?33

102  Zahra Rizvi Both inside and outside the gameplay, these games, by virtue of being simultaneously empathetic and dystopic, challenge players to think beyond limits, to answer tough questions of what power one has, and, ultimately, foreground care as a viable political action. Notes 1 Frans Mayra, An Introduction to Game Studies (Sage Publications Ltd., 2008), 120. 2 Frans Mayra, 120. 3 Frans Mayra, 120. 4 Nolan Gray, “The Capitalist Joys of Animal Crossing,” Medium, (March 20, 2020), https://mnolangray.medium.com/the-capitalist-joys-of-animal-crossing-b9 5f9e5770d5. 5 Amelia Tait, “Think Animal Crossing is just a cutesy ‘capitalist dystopia’? Think again,” The Guardian, (June 10, 2020), https://www.theguardian.com/ games/2020/jun/10/animal-crossing-new-horizon-capitalist-dystopia-subreddit. 6 Jason Flatt, “Beginner’s Guide to Anti-Colonialism in ‘Animal Crossing: New Horizons’,” But Why Tho, (March 23, 2020), https://butwhythopodcast. com/2020/03/23/a-beginners-guide-to-anti-colonialism-in-animal-crossingnew-horizons. 7 Lucas Pope, in Colin Campbell’s “Gaming's new frontier: Cancer, depression, suicide,” Polygon, (May 9, 2013), https://www.polygon.com/2013/5/9/4313246/ gamings-new-frontier-cancer-depression-suicide. 8 Colin Campbell, “Gaming’s new frontier: Cancer, depression, suicide,” Polygon, (May 9, 2013), https://www.polygon.com/2013/5/9/4313246/gamings-newfrontier-cancer-depression-suicide. 9 Bernard Stiegler, The Neganthropocene (Open Humanities Press, 2018), 45. 10 The Gemsbok, “Poetry and Politics in Papers, Please,” Youtube, (March 15, 2017), www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIEPXgw2rRE, 01:56–02:17. 11 The Gemsbok, 02:40–02:49. 12 The Girl with the Controller, “How "Papers, Please" Reflects on Morality,” Youtube, (March 8, 2018), www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7un-I8pTLo, 01:04–01:13. 13 The Girl with the Controller, 02:45–03:35. 14 The Gemsbok, 05:42–05:49. 15 “Sounds and Music,” Papers Please Wiki, papersplease.fandom.com/wiki/Sounds_ and_music. 16 Daniel Ross, “Introduction,” The Neganthropocene (Open Humanities Press, 2018), 10. 17 Papers, Please. 18 Ross, 11. 19 Games as Literature, “Games as Lit. Review - Orwell: Keeping an Eye On You,” Youtube, (September 27, 2019), www.youtube.com/watch?v=lU_tvhfKM-w, 00:29–00:39. 20 Games as Literature, 00:49–01:09. 21 Daniel Marx, in Phill Cameron, “Game Design Deep Dive: Decisions that matter in Orwell,” Game Developer, (March 06, 2017), www.gamedeveloper.com/ design/game-design-deep-dive-decisions-that-matter-in-i-orwell-i-. 22 Ross, 11. 23 Daniel Marx.

Exploring Dystopic Spatialities of Game(re)play  103 24 Rachel Watts, “Hack, spy, swing an election: Orwell game sums up life in a tech dystopia,” The Guardian, (July 2, 2018), www.theguardian.com/games/2018/ jul/02/orwell-game-hack-spy-tech-dystopia-government-surveillance. 25 Watts. 26 Daniel Marx. 27 Watts. 28 Watts. 29 See, for example, “Which is the “good” ending?”, Steam, (August 21, 2018), steamcommunity.com/app/491950/discussions/0/1735462352478950894. 30 Elinari Rhodan’s “Orwell | FINALE - Delacroix or Me?” Youtube, (December 1, 2017), www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TejdB0UJIs. 31 “Which is the “good” ending?”, Steam, (August 21, 2018), steamcommunity. com/app/491950/discussions/0/1735462352478950894. 32 Ross, 8. 33 Ross, 13.

Bibliography Cameron, Phill. “Game Design Deep Dive: Decisions that matter in Orwell.” Game Developer, March 06, 2017. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/game-designdeep-dive-decisions-that-matter-in-i-orwell-i-#close-modal. Campbell, Colin. “Gaming’s new frontier: Cancer, depression, suicide.” Polygon, May 9, 2013. www.polygon.com/2013/5/9/4313246/gamings-new-frontiercancer-depression-suicide. Flatt, Jason. “Beginner’s Guide to Anti-Colonialism in ‘Animal Crossing: New Horizons’.” But Why Tho, March 23, 2020. https://butwhythopodcast. com/2020/03/23/a-beginners-guide-to-anti-colonialism-in-animal-crossing-newhorizons. Games as Literature. “Games as Lit. Review – Orwell: Keeping an Eye On You.” Youtube, September 27, 2019. www.youtube.com/watch?v=lU_tvhfKM-w. Gray, Nolan. “The Capitalist Joys of Animal Crossing.” Medium, March 20, 2020. https://mnolangray.medium.com/the-capitalist-joys-of-animal-crossing-b95 f9e5770d5. Mayra, Frans. An Introduction to Game Studies. Sage Publications Ltd., 2008. Papeers, Please. Created by Lucas Pope, 3909 LLC, August 8, 2013. Rhodan, Elinari. “Orwell | FINALE - Delacroix or Me?” Youtube, December 1, 2017. www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TejdB0UJIs. Ross, Daniel. “Introduction.” The Neganthropocene, Open Humanities Press, 2018. “Sounds and Music”, Papers Please Wiki, papersplease.fandom.com/wiki/Sounds_ and_music. Stiegler, Bernard. The Neganthropocene. Open Humanities Press, 2018. Tait, Amelia. “Think Animal Crossing is Just a Cutesy 'Capitalist Dystopia'? Think again.” The Guardian, June 10, 2020. www.theguardian.com/games/2020/jun/10/ animal-crossing-new-horizon-capitalist-dystopia-subreddit. The Gemsbok. “Poetry and Politics in Papers, Please.” Youtube, March 15, 2017. www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIEPXgw2rRE. The Girl with the Controller. “How “Papers, Please” Reflects on Morality.” Youtube, March 8, 2018. www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7un-I8pTLo.

104  Zahra Rizvi Watts, Rachel. “Hack, spy, swing an election: Orwell game sums up life in a tech dystopia.” The Guardian, July 2, 2018. www.theguardian.com/games/2018/jul/02/ orwell-game-hack-spy-tech-dystopia-government-surveillance. “Which is the "good" ending?” Steam, August 21, 2018. steamcommunity.com/ app/491950/discussions/0/1735462352478950894.

8 Seeking a World of Their Own Looking for ‘Human’ Rights in a Mechanized, Futuristic World Arpita Sen

Throughout history, there have been countless instances of humans leading privileged lives, sometimes on the basis of race, sometimes on the basis of religion and sometimes on the basis of birth. Not so surprisingly, even in the wildly imaginatively realm of science fiction, authors have often touched upon a variant of this. In these accounts, the worlds that we encounter are often unfamiliar or “defamiliarize[d].”1 Patricia S. Warrick believed that science fiction creates an “image” of reality to present “reality [that] is not currently perceived.”2 However, according to P.L. Thomas, science fiction deals with a “dark future that is looked upon as both a representation of current society and as a lived possibility.”3 Thus, we need to pay particular attention to these alternative worlds “… rather than dismissing them as inconsequential popular fantasies.”4 Robots, androids, humanoids, and cybernetic organisms (cyborgs) are part of a larger collection of wholly or partially artificial ‘organisms’ and they occupy a large space in the vivid and imaginative worlds of science fiction narratives. They appear in very divergent roles, and yet, in most narratives, just as they gain self-­awareness (sentience) along with advancing intelligence, they are quickly considered threats. In stark contrast to the human rights so cherished by humans, the rights of these artificial organisms are practically non-­existent as they stand. Even their basic right to be ‘alive’ is often taken from them under the guise of human preservation. This paper explores the question of rights of robots, androids, cyborgs – the ‘non-­humans’ – and considers the ethical implications of having these ‘non-­humans’ in the world that exists within the narratives of Asimov’s “The Bicentennial Man,” HBO’s Westworld (Season 1) and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The paper examines whether or not there exist ‘human’ rights for a ‘non-­human’ who may be sentient, and may indeed be indistinguishable from a ‘real’ human being; being constructs of technology, whether there is apathy towards them; and whether they deserve to be apportioned human rights at par with our own. Science fiction develops new worlds and “uniquely alternative existences.”5 In the narratives under discussion, it is observed that non-­humans are used to specifically ease the life of humans. In “The Bicentennial Man,” the robot DOI: 10.4324/9781003395379-11

106  Arpita Sen Andrew cooks and takes care of the house, while androids in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep serve an equivalent function. Do Androids6 presents readers with a post-­apocalyptic future Earth, where the human race has been nearly annihilated. To protect themselves from the radioactive “dust,” much of the surviving human population has migrated to off-­world colonies. In the course of rebuilding ‘human’ civilization, however, the humans have been officially allowed to employ ‘lifelike’ androids, commonly called “andys,” who are commonly regarded as objects of slavery. They are even used to entice humans to emigrate: The TV set shouted, “—duplicates the halcyon days of the pre-­Civil War Southern states! Either as body servants or tireless field hands, the custom-­ tailored humanoid Robot—designed specifically for YOUR UNIQUE NEEDS, FOR YOU AND YOU ALONE—given to you on your arrival absolutely free, equipped fully, as specified by you before your departure from Earth; this loyal, trouble-­free companion in the greatest, boldest adventure contrived by man in modern history will provide—” It continued on and on.7 In Westworld, too, the ‘hosts’ are controlled by voice commands and are ‘esigned’ to “gratify the desires of the people that visit … [their] world, the people that … [they] call the newcomers”8 (as one may notice in the episode “The Original”). Hosts are unable to harm guests, but are themselves often harmed or destroyed. In fact, the terrible treatment of the hosts is often justified by various humans “as … mere abuse of unfeeling machines with a job to do.”9 Thus, in the future version of the Earth, readers find non-­humans whose sole purpose, not unlike the android slaves of Do Androids, is to serve and obey their human ‘masters.’ That is the reason they have been created, after all – for eternal servitude. Karel Čapek, in his play R.U.R,10 defines the term robot11 to be suggestive of forced labour and unceasing toil. Over time, according to David Seed, the term came to imply “[all] self-­contained, maybe remote-­controlled ‘artificial device[s] that… [mimic] the actions and, possibly, the appearance of … human beings’..”12 It is believed, however, that in his writing, Čapek was reacting not only to the “humanisation of artificial beings (through increasing machines human-­like abilities)” but also to the “dehumanisation” of human beings.”13 However, the narratives of HBO’s Westworld, Asimov’s “The Bicentennial Man” as well as Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids are based on hypothetical futures of Earth, where each future has a different environment in terms of political and social climate. In most versions of worlds that are described, humans are accorded certain rights which are theirs by birth. In the interests of a peaceful, harmonious society, citizens comply with certain norms and are accorded reciprocal rights. Thus, there is a series of compromises that citizens need to make as part of a social contract.14 In a social contract there exist rules and regulations to protect all

Seeking a World of Their Own  107 citizens from harm and to promote peaceful co-­existence. These regulations are what we recognize as laws. In turn, as part of this contract, citizens are granted various rights which do, of course, vary from society to society. These ‘human rights’ are owed to all citizens, non-­ humans included, and should be undeniable, regardless of the nature of the society that citizens live within. In the worlds of science fiction narrative, however, the term citizen takes on a different colouration: a citizen is not simply a being who is a resident. Citizen may also refer to robots, androids, humanoids, cyborgs – in short, to non-­humans including especially those that have gained sentience or are just beginning to. In Westworld, Do Androids and in “The Bicentennial Man,” non-­humans have evolved to an extent that they are indistinguishable from real human beings. In Westworld it is soon discovered that ‘hosts,’ along with acquiring other human-­like characteristics, are also gaining sentience. So much so that tests to detect emotional and psychological differences between semi-­or fully artificial beings and real human beings are often inconclusive. In spite of this, the freedom to be human and freedom to be at par with humans is denied to them. In fact, when it becomes apparent to the humans that they are not merely utilitarian as they were in the past, they are labelled aberrations and attempts are made to put them down. In Do Androids, there are government-­ sponsored assassins called Bounty Hunters who, for a fee, “retire andys,” who have escaped the colony in Mars in the hope of finding a better life. They are viewed as androids who have abandoned their servitude. From the very onset of the tale, we learn that the colonial government expects android slaves to remain on Mars and continue doing all the dirty work for humans who have migrated to the red planet. It is considered problematic that the most recent ‘improved’ version of the android with their new Nexus-­6 brain unit have been given far too much intelligence. The fate that awaits them is grim. A similar fate awaits Andrew until his ‘owner’ puts his foot down. The instances above are actually examples of aberrations from the norm. In Westworld, we witness it for what it really is. In cases such as these, any evidence of creativity or any trace of humanity in non-­humans is seen as detrimental to the purpose of these machines. Thus, human beings, though far from perfect themselves, expect perfection from their mechanical slaves. Perfection aside, the fear that our “own material constructions”15 may attack us “in some later evolutionary stage”16 has been a trope that has been constantly explored in science fiction. Termed “technophobia,” this was the very reason, Seed asserts, “behind [Asimov] formulating laws, in the 1940s since he considered the problems and ethical implications of creating intelligent robots that could become hostile.”17 Though Andrew in “The Bicentennial Man” rubbishes this fear, showing us that machines and non-­ humans like him do not have as much power as the humans would like to portray:

108  Arpita Sen A robot can be dismantled at any time [unlike a human being whose … execution can only follow due process of law. There is no trial needed for my dismantling. Only the word of a human being in authority is needed to end me.18 Somehow, from a human perspective, non-­humans are invariably considered dangerous. Since their intelligence is superior in many ways to the humans’, there is a fear that they may take over the world. Given their high intelligence and unmatched physical prowess, it is imperative then that these servants be put in their proper place. The term “Frankenstein Complex” describes this human fear of “mechanical men,” a fear that the robots and machines will rebel against their owners and masters and the society will fall into ruin. To ensure that the humans remain ‘safe’ and ‘protected’ and in control of their creations, Asimov postulated the seminal Three Laws of Robotics.19 These prescribe boundaries that are hard-­programmed in a robot’s brain and thus are inviolable. The purpose is to unconditionally protect humans from non-­ humans, and thus make non-­ humans more acceptable to human society. Jameson suggests, in Archaeologies of the Future, that there were “special mechanisms” that were deliberately inserted within these “new beings” to ensure their ‘harmlessness.’20 By constructing them with a “commitment to human life, even at the cost of their own survival,”21 these laws become a means to ensure that these ‘non-­humans’ are unable to kill or hurt human beings. They are forced to remain within the bounds that their creators create for them. Punitive actions and rule-­based restrictions like the laws of robotics represent boundaries erected by humans to restrict non-­humans. These boundaries prevent androids, robots – non-­humans – from becoming more human-­like. These boundaries, and variants of these, are a constant plot device, and are expressed in many texts by Asimov and others. They represent a fractured social contract for non-­humans who must unfortunately exist in a predominantly human society. However, just as worlds evolve, so too do machines. It is inevitable that a large population of otherwise intelligent non-­humans would long remain insentient and oblivious of suppression. It is the aspiration to enjoy the same rights and freedoms as human beings that drives Andrew to undertake a bicentennial quest to ultimately seek death – that most quintessential characteristic possessed, so far, only by humans. In numerous texts, non-­humans are bound by laws that bind them to an existence that they may not wish to live. Though they are part of society, they have no rights nor any claim to equal citizenship. The rights one would reserve for humans are missing for them. In fact, David Seed believes that in “The Bicentennial Man,” “there is a running analogy between the robot and the African American; thus, the ending, when Andrew strives for recognition as a man, is loaded with racial as well as humanistic significance….”22 Constant references are made to “the unspoken assumption” that only a ‘human’ can enjoy freedom. Donald Palumbo agrees that Asimov employs

Seeking a World of Their Own  109 the “dynamics of bigotry in the service of telling a story” – and seeks to make statements about “prejudice.”23 However, he goes on to say that this tale (like many others) is not one that has been created “primarily for the purpose of making a statement about the experiences of any specific persecuted minority.”24 One must remember that there are strict laws that robots must follow which humans are not bound by. It may be argued that these laws not only bind but also serve to prevent a shift in the power nexus, since there is a great fear that the breakdown of the opposition between natural and artificial may lead to the destabilization of the ‘human/android hierarchy.’25 There are cases in various science fiction narratives where non-­humans have broken free from their bonds of subservience and decided to fight for their rights, which are often merely to live life as they wish. Jameson articulates this fear, using the example of HAL from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968): “the humans still have the power to turn the machinery off … [but] the latter's new ‘instinct’ of self-­preservation requires it to destroy that danger, and presumably to go on to eradicate anything which might evolve back into it, namely organic life itself.”26 This comes to pass in Westworld when the “hosts” begin to fight back. In fact, as Amanda DiPaolo contends, the ending of Westworld’s first season shows “the potential failure of the three laws of robotics”27 as non-­humans take the fight to the human camp. At that point, they are able to make their own decisions and override instructions. Though eventually brought under control, what is most fearful is that the familiar world order could be destroyed, and either wiped out or lead to humans enslaved by robots. This last thought provides a justification for the hunting and destruction of non-­human ‘hosts’ in Westworld. This is also the case in Do Androids. Among the other reasons cited by humans for keeping ‘non-­humans’ out of the fold of mainstream society is that they are not ‘like us’ – which is due to the society’s structure being premised on defining the manifestation of a particular form of difference. The history of this Earth, including racism, casteism, xenophobia, and the Holocaust, all point towards a very human tendency to demean those who are different. The ideology of the masses is controlled by a select few who determine speech and actions. Hegemony exists with the consensus of the masses and pervades our thoughts and actions even without our knowing. We have Andrew the robot who perhaps ought never to have become sentient. His behaviour, his creativity and his need to become human make him an aberration by both human and robot standards. Thus, Andrew looks like a man and lives like a man, yet he is controlled by the laws of robotics, and still at the mercy of the humans: There was no way Andrew could stop them, if they ordered him not to resist in a forceful enough manner. The Second Law of obedience took precedence over the Third Law of self-­preservation. In any case, he could not defend himself without possibly hurting them and that would mean breaking the First Law. At that thought, every motile unit contracted slightly and he quivered as he lay there.

110  Arpita Sen It was their intention in some way to dismember me. They were about to move me to a quiet spot and order me to dismember myself.28 In Westworld, too, non-­humans are seen as ‘the Other’ as they are “manufactured” and are not “[natural] born human[s].” They are attacked and tortured and the ‘inhuman’ actions of the guests accentuate the gulf between human and ‘non-­human.’ As DiPaolo tracks in her essay, the violence and disregard for the hosts, especially female, is a mere ‘photo op’29 for the humans: the belief exists that the hosts are, after all, “inherently dehumanized,”30 even if they do look human. Therefore, in most narratives, ‘human rights’ are violated almost as a rule. The problem arises mainly from the definition of the term ‘human’ in ‘human rights.’ The entire premise is that is not possible to hurt a machine as it cannot feel pain. Similarly, this extends to the new species of humanoids (a robot that resembles a human in its appearance): the Nexus-­6 androids in Do Androids. They are hunted and killed simply because they dare defy the laws that have been laid down for androids; they are not allowed to become part of civil society of the depicted post-­apocalyptic world as they are unfit to live in a merged society. Yet why is it that they all want to become human? To them human beings represent a higher life form who have everything that they are denied, but which they yearn for. Robots have no religion and no God; they have no literature of their own nor any space that would allow them to develop themselves. They are imbued with intelligence, but this intelligence is also controlled by human creators, who decide what to, or what not to teach them. It is a constant refrain that despite robots wanting to, they cannot become human because they just don’t have what it ‘takes to be human.’ In the world of Do Androids, some humans are followers of a religion propagated by a man named Wilbur Mercer who preaches empathy. In this society where the post-­war radiation (“dust”) has wiped out the entire animal kingdom, owning a live animal – be it a worm, a spider or a large animal – is a proof of having empathy. Deckard’s thoughts really are quite insightful here: “… his need for a real animal; within him an actual hatred once more manifested itself toward his electric sheep, which he had to tend, had to care about, as if it lived.”31 The presence of this empathy is what truly differentiates between the androids and humans, although through the course of the book (through the eyes of Rick Deckard) we learn that, for humans, this is an acquired trait - the empathy in owning an animal is a sign of upward social mobility and social acceptance, whereas the empathy levels in androids may just be a setting on “Penfield mood organs” that can be programmed at will. There even exists a special test that is used to distinguish androids and humans – the Voight Kampff test that gauges empathy using a machine (“testing apparatus”). However, the test questions which elicit a physiological “reaction” to “a number of social situations”32 clearly reveal that the test measures only a socially engendered, culture-­specific aversion to killing or harming animals, which is this society’s primary taboo, rather than any truly

Seeking a World of Their Own  111 universal, innate, and exclusive – and thereby definitive – human quality. Human subjects are expected to exhibit a quantifiable shock or shame reaction to stimuli that would not, except in one or two instances, elicit any such reaction from ordinary people in the real world. As is revealed later, the test measures a socially acquired response to stimuli, not an ‘innate’ human characteristic. Contrastingly, the escaped Nexus-­6 androids in the book form bonds of empathy with each other, coexist peacefully and watch out for each other. Rachel Rosen sleeps with Bounty Hunters to dissuade them from their missions and make them change their mind about the androids, who, contrary to the machine-­like behaviour expected from them, truly seem like a family and share an “empathic, special bond.”33 Their relationship is presented as a foil to the relationship between the Iran and Rick who truly lead mechanical lives and depend on experiencing empathy through an “empathy box,” despite being free from the ‘built-­in defect’ of a pre-­programmed short life-­span. In Do Androids there are a number of instances where androids appear to have deep feelings and empathy for each other and this extends to encompass even humans. Meanwhile, human Bounty Hunters are expected to eliminate or “retire” androids with no more feelings than if they were disassembling a vacuum cleaner. This philosophical conundrum surfaces repeatedly throughout the novel. The Nexus-­6 are well aware of their plight. Though very human-­like, their ‘coldness’ gives them away: After her initial fear had diminished, something else had begun to emerge from her. Something more strange. And, he thought, deplorable. A coldness. Like, he thought, a breath from the vacuum between inhabited worlds, in fact from nowhere: it was not what she did or said but what she did not do and say.34 However, is this coldness a lack of empathy or is it just an imagined quality that justifies their murder? After all, is it not a human who is creating their narrative? Palumbo argues that though androids cannot exhibit empathy, they do exhibit other human qualities such as “anger, self-­pity, loneliness, sadness, bliss or joy, vengefulness, fear, curiosity, anxiety, lust, impatience, intuition, hope, anguish, and even love.”35 We notice that a range of human emotions and affective relationships exist even within ‘hosts’ of Westworld – most of all the ability to feel and remember pain. There are enduring bonds between Teddy and Dolores, Bernard and his son, and Maeve and her daughter. They feel loss, they feel the pain. Dr Ford does attempt to explain that the hosts’ memories and histories are all scripts that have been programmed into them. However, it cannot be denied that the pain they feel is very real and indeed this makes them more human. In the Westworld episode “The Stray,”36 viewers witness how deeply affected Bernard is by the loss of his son and it is only “[the] pain … [is] all … [he has] left of him.” Similarly, when reminded

112  Arpita Sen of the murder of her daughter, Maeve states how “pain is all I have left of her.” 37 To Scott Bukatman, it is having a history and a memory of lived experience that is the “key constituent of our personhood.”38 Thus, the fact that these machines have the ability to feel is enough to earn them selfhood and rights. As Jill Galvan also writes, “the machine, by declaring its right to live as an autonomous self, challenges the very categories of life and selfhood-­ and, in turn, the ontological prerogative of its creators.”39 An underlying theme that runs in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein40 is that of apathy of humans towards that which looks different. We are constantly reminded that the creation of Frankenstein is a monster because he is not wholly human, and that it is acceptable to deny him love and basic rights of freedom and privacy. He is shunned and cast out of society. Although robots and humanoids exist in fictitious, far-­off times and worlds far from our own, it is easy to perceive that forms of differentiation and Otherization exist even there. No matter how scientifically advanced we may become, human tendencies and idiosyncrasies remain unchanged. It is social and emotional conditioning which makes us ridicule and deride that which we cannot wholly understand. In the case of the non-­humans depicted in the selected texts, this is easily done because they are merely machines. As Sherryl Vint writes, “the question of what it means to be human, a question generally explored through the opposition between ‘authentic’ human beings and various artificial beings made to imitate humans.”41 What need should they have of love and care? Though there are many laws protecting humans, similar laws are non-­existent for non-­humans. In the texts they may hold the status of protectors and care-­ givers, yet who protects them or their needs? Of course, it may be asked: why indeed would a machine need to be protected? Of what relevance are rights and proper care as far as they are concerned? Why indeed should they need to be integrated into civil society? To answer this, we may need to recognize that that the artificial beings we refer to are no longer machines – they are creatures of sentience. They touch, feel, sense and this is what defines them and makes them what they are. Thus, Andrew’s argument is that he wishes to be legally recognized as a man. As he puts it, “To be a human being de facto is not enough. … [I need] to be legally identified as one. I want to be a human de jure.”42 The quest to be human is not necessarily to be biologically a human but to have the rights that humans have by birth. Andrew in “The Bicentennial Man” was initially brought home to help around the house, and gradually he develops creativity and emotion and ultimately becomes so deeply entrenched in human life that all he wants is to do is be human. He is driven by an unquenchable desire for the elusive, even if it means losing everything! Becoming more humane and perfect has been the quest of mankind for many centuries, however through Andrew we see how becoming human is a worthier milestone – he undergoes many transformations, itching to be just a bit more human, knowing that it is a quest that he may only fulfil by dying. Why is becoming human presented as such a struggle and such a superior

Seeking a World of Their Own  113 achievement? Is it because we (and the future humans) consider ourselves to be superior beings made in the image of God, and have the right to dictate behaviour and control the narrative of those whom we, in turn, ‘create’? In fact, though Andrew is continually disappointed by the humans and their belief that he is not a thing or an ‘it’ but a human being, he is not deterred in his quest. It is perhaps his insistent refusal to abandon his desire to be human and free that mark his most ‘human-­like’ moments. In Westworld, too, the ‘hosts’ wish to have agency over their lives, and their actions speak powerfully of this. Vint claims that “the question of what it means to be human, is a question generally explored through the opposition between ‘authentic’ human beings and various artificial beings made to imitate humans.”43 Thus, the greatest fear is not the fear that they will attack, but the realization of how indistinguishable their ‘humanness’ is from ‘real’ humans. We see that this is so in the case of replicants. We also witness this in the case of Andrew. There is an inordinate amount of terror that the Other might become one of Us. Additionally, there is also, as Seed implies, the fear of replacement and being unable to “distinguish” between replicants and human originals and the fear that it might someday be “impossible to identify humans.”44 It is the fear that makes humans treat non-­humans with such disregard.45 After all, as P.L. Thomas contends, any “[form] of consciousness” within these machines may be “disruptive” to the idea of a ‘human’ community46 and human centrality. This fear has been realized in the Terminator movies, where the Earth is controlled by almost indestructible machines, and humans are hunted down and ‘terminated.’ This fear is also captured in the movie The Metropolis, where robots and men are at odds with each other – each suspecting that the other is trying to kill him. While false Maria (a robot) proves that these fears are not unfounded when she attempts to destroy the Metropolis, we are introduced to another popular trope: a human saviour figure – Freder – who would save his world from being destroyed by an evil robot. In the Terminator series there are human heroes. Yet, through all, they are aided by a good robot who wishes to preserve the human race. Interestingly, both these movies attempt to show that human society can only progress once we join hands with those whom we think of as the Other. Emancipation and true freedom can only be achieved when equal rights are granted to those whom we may consider different from us. It is essential that as potential citizens of future worlds we free ourselves from the shackles that force us to discriminate. These texts make a dire prediction of how human society is heading towards (and possibly has already attained) a state of apathy and intolerance where differences (mainly non-­human durability and intelligence) are not celebrated but become a reason for envy and conflict. Futuristic novels often show that it is time for change. Instead of considering sentient non-­humans as abominations and treating them as the Other which “historically [has] been used to justify the mistreatment and oppression of one group of people by another,”47 some texts show the way. In “The

114  Arpita Sen Bicentennial Man,” for instance, humans finally concede that Andrew is indeed a man and grant him what he desires the most. Instead of attempting to control non-­humans, they must become those with whom we celebrate freedom. Just as humans have the right to program robots to prevent them from harming humans, the human must in turn extend the same right to the robot. The question that Andrew asks is perhaps most pertinent: “With great power goes great responsibility … if the robots have Three Laws to protect men, [would] it [be] too much to ask that men have a law or two to protect robots?”48 These narratives hold up a mirror to the world around us. They serve to challenge the deterministic view of human existence. And though they may be far removed from the world that we currently live in, they are a startling reflection of human society in times that are bygone and sometimes of human societies in times that are current: societies where inequity and repression amongst ‘classes’ of citizens reign. Through these narratives we are also offered a prospect of “radical alterity” that may serve as motivation to look for an “alternative space, a new horizon”49 within this world. Perhaps there are some who believe that the notion that any “unconscious machine, regardless of its patina of intelligence, has the same innate claim on life, liberty, legal rights, self-­determination and the pursuit of happiness as a human being”50 is outlandish and even “preposterous.”51 On the other hand, many governments and judicial systems do also confer legal rights onto other entities, notably corporations, which are not necessarily human in nature. If a partially or wholly artificial entity, which is essentially sentient or self-­ aware, has hopes of life, liberty, rights and pursuit of happiness, is that notion quite that preposterous? Notes 1 Darko Suvin quoted in Carl Freedman, Critical Theory and Science Fiction (Wesleyan University Press, 2013), 16. 2 Patricia S Warrick, The Cybernetic Imagination in Science Fiction (MIT Press, 1982), 7. 3 P.L. Thomas, Science Fiction and Speculative Fiction: Challenging Genres, ed. P. L. Thomas (Furman University, Greenville, SC, USA: Sense Publishers, 2013), 107. 4 Suvin quoted in Freedman, Critical Theory and Science Fiction, 16–17. 5 Thomas, Science Fiction and Speculative Fiction: Challenging Genres, 107. 6 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is from now on in the paper referred to as Do Androids. 7 Philip K Dick, Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? (New York: Ballantine Books, 1996), 18. 8 Westworld. “The Original.” Directed by Jonathan Nolan. Written by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy. HBO, 4 October 2016. 9 Amanda DiPaolo, “If Androids Dream, Are They More Than Sheep?: Westworld, Robots, and Legal Rights,” Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy 6, no. 2 (2019): 5, journaldialogue.org/issues/v6-­issue-­2/ if-­androids-­dream-­are-­they-­more-­than-­sheep-­robotprotagonists-­and-­human-­ rights/

Seeking a World of Their Own  115 10 Karel Čapek, R.U.R.(Rossum’s Universal Robots) (London; New York: Penguin Books, 2004). 11 The play, first published in 1925, was known for the introduction of the word “robot” into popular discourse. 12 David Seed, Science Fiction: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 59. 13 Jana Horáková and Jozef Kelemen, “Robots between Fictions and Facts” in 10th International Symposium of Hungarian Researchers on Computational Intelligence and Informatics, p. 21 (2009). 14 While many Enlightenment-­Age philosophers such as Hobbes have theorzsed the social contract, the one that is being referred to here is the one by Jean-­Jacques Rousseau. 15 Seed, 47. 16 Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005), 114. 17 Seed, 47. 18 Isaac Asimov, “The Bicentennial Man” from The Bicentennial Man and Other Stories (NY: Doubleday, 1976), chap. 8. 19 Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics which changed the whole perspective on robotics and Artificial Humans. I quote: 1 A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2 A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3 A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. 0 Jameson, 114. 2 21 Ibid. 22 Science Fiction: A Very Short Introduction, 61–62. 23 Donald Palumbo, “Asimov's Crusade Against Bigotry: The Persistence of Prejudice as a Fractal Motif in the Robot/Empire/Foundation Metaseries,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 10, no. 1 (1998): 47. 24 Ibid, 47. 25 Booker, M. Keith and Anne-­Marie Thomas. In The Science Fiction Handbook (John Wiley & Sons, 2009), 222. 26 Jameson, 114. 27 DiPaolo, “If Androids Dream, Are They More Than Sheep?: Westworld, Robots, and Legal Rights”, 6. Asimov, chap. 10. 28 DiPaolo, “If Androids Dream, Are They More Than Sheep?: Westworld, Robots, and Legal Rights”, 6. 29 Ibid. 30 Dick, Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? 37. 31 Ibid., 41–42. Donald Palumbo, “Faith and Bad Faith in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”. The Journal of Popular Culture 46 (2013): 1. https://doi.org/10.1111/jpcu.12088. 32 Dick, 67. 33 Dick, 59. 34 Palumbo, 1998, 45. 35 Palumbo (2013), 8. 36 Westworld. “The Stray.” Directed by Neil Marshall. Written by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy. HBO, 18 October 2016. 37 Westworld. “Trace Decay.” Directed by Stephen Williams. Written by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy. HBO, 22 November 2016.

116  Arpita Sen 8 Scott Bukatman qtd in DiPaolo, 79. 3 39 Jill Galvan, “Entering the Posthuman Collective in Philip K. Dick's ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’,” Science Fiction Studies 24, no. 3, (1997): 413. JSTOR. www.jstor.org/stable/4240644 40 Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Frankenstein, Or, The Modern Prometheus: The 1818 Text. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. This text is regarded as many as the first science fiction novel. It becomes significant to mention the text here as it also helps show that though many centuries may have passed since its publications, attitudes towards those that are the ‘Others’ remain unchanged. 41 Sherryl Vint, “Speciesism and Species Being in ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’.” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal 40, no. 1 (2007): 111. www.jstor.org/stable/44030161. 42 Asimov, chap. 17. 43 Vint, “Speciesism and Species Being in ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep”, 111. 44 Seed, 61. 45 In 1972, in a speech titled “The Android and the Human”, Dick addresses this mounting fear of artificial beings resembling humans. He contends that: “…[in] our man-­made world of machines, artificial constructs, computers, electronic systems, interlinking homeostatic components… more and more [are beginning] to possess what the earnest psychologists fear the primitive sees in his environment: animation. In a very real sense our environment is becoming alive, or at least quasi-­alive, and in ways specifically and fundamentally analogous to ourselves. (in The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings 183). 46 P.L. Thomas, Science Fiction and Speculative Fiction: Challenging Genres, 4. 47 David G Embrick, ‘Us and Them,’ in Encyclopaedia of Race, Ethnicity, and Society, ed. Richard T. Schaefer (Thousand Oaks, SAGE, 2008), 1357. 48 Asimov, chap. 11. 49 John Hoben, “Reading Alien Suns: Using SF Film to Teach a Political Literacy of Possibility,” Science Fiction and Speculative Fiction: Challenging Genres, ed. P. L. Thomas (Furman University, Greenville, SC, USA: Sense Publishers, 2013), 113–114. 50 Kurt Marko, “Robot rights - a legal necessity or ethical absurdity?” Diginomica, January 3, 2019, https://diginomica.com/robot-­rights-­a-­legal-­necessity-­or-­ethical-­ absurdity. Accessed on 2nd December 2020. 51 Ibid.

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Seeking a World of Their Own  117 Baudrillard, Jean, and Sheila Faria Glaser. Simulacra and simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994. Beauchamp, Gorman. “The Frankenstein Complex and Asimov’s Robots.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 13, no. ¾ (1980): 83–94. Booker, M. Keith, and Anne-­Marie Thomas. The Science Fiction Handbook. Wiley Blackwell Literature Handbooks. John Wiley & Sons, 2009. Buckner, Inniss, and Lolita, K. “Bicentennial Man: The New Millennium Assimilationism and the Foreigner Among Us.” Rutgers Law Review 54 (2002): 1101–1132. Canavan, Gerry. “Decolonizing the Future.” Science Fiction Studies 39, no. 3 (2012): 494–499. www.jstor.org/stable/10.5621/sciefictstud.39.3.0494. Čapek, Karel. R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots). London; New York: Penguin Books, 2004. Cohen, Jeffrey. “Monster Culture (Seven Theses).” In Monster Culture: Reading Culture, edited by Jeffrey Cohen, 3–25. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1996. Dick, Philip K. Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? New York: Ballantine Books, 1996. E-­book. Dick, Philip K. “The Android and the Human.” In The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings, edited by Lawrence Sutin, 184–210. Pantheon, 1995. DiPaolo, Amanda. “If Androids Dream, Are They More Than Sheep?: Westworld, Robots, and Legal Rights.” Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy 6, no. 2 (2019): 5–6. journaldialogue.org/issues/v6-­issue-­2/ if-­androids-­dream-­are-­they-­more-­than-­sheep-­robotprotagonists-­and-­human-­rights/ Embrick, David G. “Us and Them.” In Encyclopaedia of Race, Ethnicity, and Society, edited by Richard T. Schaefer. Thousand Oaks: SAGE, 2008. Freedman, Carl. Critical Theory and Science Fiction. Hanover: University Press of New England, 2013. Galvan, Jill. “Entering the Posthuman Collective in Philip K. Dick’s ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’.” Science Fiction Studies 24, no. 3 (1997): 413–429. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4240644 Gibson, William. Neuromancer. London: Grafton, 1986. Graham, Elaine. Representations of the Post/Human. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2002. Haraway, D. J. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-­Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 149–181. London: Free Association Books, 1991. Haraway, Donna. “The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others.” In Cultural Studies, edited by Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler. New York: Routledge, 1992. Harley, Alexis. “The Slavery of the Machine.” In Afterimages of Slavery: Essays on Appearances in Recent American Films, Literature, Television and Other Media, edited by Marlene D. Allen and Seretha D. Williams. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012. Hayles, K. N. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999. Heise, Ursula K. “The Android and the Animal.” PMLA 124, no. 2 (2009): 503–10. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25614291.

118  Arpita Sen Heikonen, P. Consciousness and robot sentience. Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Company, 2012. Hoben, John. “Reading Alien Suns: Using SF Film to Teach a Political Literacy of Possibility.” In Science Fiction and Speculative Fiction: Challenging Genres, edited by P. L. Thomas, 95–118. Furman University, Greenville, SC, USA: Sense Publishers, 2013. Horáková, Jana, and Jozef Kelemen. “Robots between Fictions and Facts.” In 10th International Symposium of Hungarian Researchers on Computational Intelligence and Informatics, 21–39, 2009. James, Edward, and Farah Mendlesohn, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London: Verso, 2005. Kant, Immanuel. Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals. Translated by Lewis White Beck, Pearson, 1989. Latham, Rob. ‘Countercultures.’ The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction, edited by Rob Latham, 383–394. Oxford University Press, 2014. Leonhard, Gerd. Technology vs. Humanity: The Coming Clash between Man and Machine. London: FutureScapes, 2016. MacDorman, K., and Cowley, S. “Long-­term relationships as a benchmark for robot personhood.” In Proceedings of IEEE international symposium on robot and human interactive communication, 378–383. Hatfield, 2006. Marko, Kurt. “Robot Rights - A Legal Necessity or Ethical Absurdity?.” Diginomica, January 3, 2019. https://diginomica.com/robot-­rights-­a-­legal-­necessity-­or-­ethical-­absurdity. Moskowitz, Sam. “The Origins of Science Fiction Fandom: A Reconstruction.” In Science Fiction Fandom, edited by Joe Sanders. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. Murphy R., and Woods D. “Beyond Asimov: The three laws of responsible robotics.” IEEE Intelligent Systems 24, no. 4: (2009): 14–20. Palumbo, Donald. “Asimov’s Crusade Against Bigotry: The Persistence of Prejudice as a Fractal Motif in the Robot/Empire/Foundation Metaseries.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 10, no. 1 (1998): 43–63. Palumbo, Donald. “Faith and Bad Faith in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?.” The Journal of Popular Culture. 46 (2013): 10.1111/jpcu.12088. Paik, Peter Y. From Utopia to Apocalypse: Science Fiction and the Politics of Catastrophe. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Parrinder, Patrick. “Revisiting Suvin’s Poetics of Science Fiction.” In Learning from Other Worlds, edited by Parrinder. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000a. Parrinder, Patrick. Learning from Other Worlds: Estrangement, Cognition and the Politics of Science Fiction and Utopia. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000b. Passell, Aaron. “SF Novels and Sociological Experimentation: Examining Real World Dynamics through Imaginative Displacement.” In Science Fiction and Speculative Fiction: Challenging Genres, 59–72, edited by P. L. Thomas. Furman University, Greenville, SC, USA: Sense Publishers, 2013. Pottle, Adam. “Segregating the Chickenheads: Philip Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and the Post/humanism of the American Eugenics Movement.” In Disability Studies Quarterly, 33, no. 3 (2013).

Seeking a World of Their Own  119 Rieder, John. Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2008. Risse, Mattias. “Human Rights and Artificial Intelligence: An Urgently Needed Agenda.” In Faculty Research Working Paper Series. Carr Center for Human Rights, May 2018. Rose, M. Alien Encounters: Anatomy of Science Fiction. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981. Rosenstand, Nina. The Human Condition: An Introduction to Philosophy of Human Nature. Boston, MA: Mcgraw-­Hill, 2002. Rousseau, Jean-­Jacques. The Essential Rousseau: The Social Contract, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, The Creed of a Savoyard Priest. New York: New American Library, 1974. Sagan, Carl. “In Praise of robots.” Natural History 84 no. 1 (January 1975): 18–20. Seed, David. Science Fiction: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. Frankenstein, Or, The Modern Prometheus: the 1818 Text. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Sims, Christopher A. “The Dangers of Individualism and the Human Relationship to Technology in Philip K. Dick’s ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’” Science Fiction Studies 36, no. 1 (2009): 67–86. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25475208. Stableford, Brian. “Philip K. Dick.” In Science Fiction Writers: Critical Studies of the Major Authors from the Early Nineteenth Century to the Present Day, edited by E. F. Bleiler. New York: Scribner’s, 1982. Suvin, Darko. “Introduction.” Science Fiction Studies 4, no. 3 (1977): 223–319. Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. Dir. Jonathan Mostow. Columbia, 2003. Film. The Metropolis. Dir. Fritz Lang. UFA 1927. Film. Thomas, P.L. “Introduction.” In Science Fiction and Speculative Fiction: Challenging Genres, edited by P. L. Thomas. Furman University, Greenville, SC, USA: Sense Publishers, 2013. Vinci, Tony M. “Posthuman Wounds: Trauma, Non-­Anthropocentric Vulnerability, and the Human/Android/Animal Dynamic in Philip K. Dick’s ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?.” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 47, no. 2 (2014): 91–112. Vint, Sherryl. “Speciesism and Species Being in ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’.” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal 40, no. 1 (2007): 111–126. www.jstor.org/stable/44030161. Vint, Sherryl. “The Cultures of Science.” In The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction, edited by Rob Latham, 305–316. Oxford University Press, 2014. Warrick, Patricia S. The Cybernetic Imagination in Science Fiction. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1982.

9 Re-Orienting Reading Ergodic Form of Mark Z. Danielewski’s Only Revolutions Ainee Basir

Mark Z. Danielewski’s Only Revolutions (2006) is a narrative trying to capture cognitive relations to history, foregrounded by the intense love story of Hailey and Sam, who are “always sixteen”.1 They travel in cars while “dreaming a dream of love”,2 barely resembling anything human. My chapter aims at reading and understanding the object materiality of the novel. The book with its two opposing cover pages makes one flip and rotate the physical material of the book in an attempt to enter the text. The reader encounters their first obstacle before even truly committing to their identity as a reader. Each side opens up to the corresponding narrative voice; each page is then visually divided into four main parts. The significantly bigger font signifies the narrative of either Hailey or Sam and the smaller font towards the spine of the book is dedicated to the historical timeline with an accompanying date on the top. On the lower end lies the inverted text belonging to the other narrator, i.e., Sam or Hailey, and to access this the reader will have to rotate the book. On opening the book, the reader encounters an instruction on the inside of the jacket, “The publisher suggests alternating between Hailey and Sam, reading eight pages at a time.”3 This sets the reader up for an intensely mathematical and physically conscious interaction with the text. While writing the book, Danielewski was preoccupied with the complex relationships humans have to history and how history itself is a fragmented narrative. He repeatedly mentions how he is unaware of what is happening in the Middle East, and that awareness of willful ignorance towards “major” historical events led to the structuring of the book, whereby larger historical events are shadowed by or superimposed by the boundless chaotic energy of the protagonists. When one begins the book from Hailey’s side, on the very second page alongside her listing of sweet-tasting substances combined with the inedible “Licorice & Lilacs”,”Mints & Catnips”, lie the words “to the brink of Nuclear War” under the date “Nov 23 1963”.4 Almost as though to highlight the lack of prioritization of a nuclear armageddon in Hailey’s life, the flavor and fragrance combinations are significantly bolder and bigger in typeface. Similarly, on page 7 Hailey declares “I’m his World”, and in stereotypical teenage fashion “What a cute smile.” These are placed right beside the DOI: 10.4324/9781003395379-12

Re-Orienting Reading  121 ominous “Oswald alone & FBI” referring to the assassination of the United State of America’s 35th President John F. Kennedy by Lee Harvey Oswald and the subsequent disintegration of the American public’s faith in its government.5 The inhumanity of the protagonists is used by Danielewski as an expression resulting from the cellular changes caused by prolonged insensitivity to human pain and suffering. An insensitivity that can be diagnosed within the American civilization, its culture of receiving history and its very conception. 9.1 The Question of Trivial Danielewski’s Only Revolutions is easily identifiable as a piece of ergodic literature, which is defined by Espen J. Aarseth as a text requiring “non trivial” effort or “extra-noematic responsibilities are placed on the reader”, where newness is introduced by something occurring outside the confines of human thought and habitual predictability.6 The physical maneuvers required for rotation, the constant counting of pages, the grid layout of the page as well as the dense historical listing along the spine – all contribute to the novel’s encyclopedic scope.7 The dates and historical notes require the reader to constantly be hyperlinked to the internet, searching for the relevance of the date and the phrases combined to make sense of each line on the page. On page 230 of Hailey’s narrative, under the date “Sept 20 1992”, it says “Sao Paulo & prison riot, 200 go”8 referring to the brutal massacre of 200 prisoners in a Brazilian prison by the Brazilian police. It is only when a reader types these exact words into a search engine such as Google.com that they get details about the USA’s preoccupation with this bloodshed and how it was covered in all major publications with a resounding question of whether the USA should interfere, and if so to what extent and with what authority. Once the essence of this zeitgeist is understood, the reader is rewarded with a deeper grasp of the bigger-sized font of Hailey’s narrative “HIGHWAY PATROL fails to resist US.”9 Here “US” is Hailey and Sam, and “US” is also the United States of America and its growing footprint on global issues. The book already comes with a certain idea of operation to it. The publisher’s note recommending reading eight pages from each side mimics the tone of user manuals that accompany modern gadgets. This juxtaposition of suggestive instructions registers as familiar to the 21st-century reader and captures what Danielewski set out to do, which is to rehabilitate the novel to its full technological potential.10 This aura of path-breaking technology includes the reader in story-making and world-building, giving greater agency in the overall narrative, transforming them into users of technology. This, according to Juha-Pekka Kilpiö, creates a scholar out of the reader and appeals to their sense of work ethic.11 The user-reader is submerged in the disorienting learning curve of handling this new piece of technology, which evokes a restlessness to go through all material available, textual and otherwise, adding another layer to the reader’s material awareness. An instance of

122  Ainee Basir this was an accompanying website to the novel which was functional from the year 2006 to 2011. As software updates emerged steadily, the interface of the website was no longer compatible with updated programs and eventually had to be taken down. An average reader of the novel who is part of internet forums dedicated to Danielewski will be acutely aware of how this experience of being in a media ecosystem is no longer available to them, and will have to “make do” with a YouTube video of someone transversing the website, constantly aware of how they have been robbed of agency, not by design but through something akin to a New-Age digital “natural” calamity, i.e., the rapid obsolescence of technology. The timeline along the spine of the novel serves as prompts or cues. When the vague poetic narration style of either protagonist fails to provide the reader with any semblance of coherence, they are left to painstakingly either research and piece together every historical breadcrumb with the “main text” or give in to the tragedy of selection and prioritizing which risks the potential that one has actually “finished” the text. Once the reader follows a prompt outside the text, they are aware of a certain unfinished task, i.e., to follow the incomprehensive narrative right where it pushed/prompted the reader out. While outside the text, the reader skims through, hoping to find just enough to follow the narrative inside the book, acutely aware that they cannot afford to take labyrinthine detours into what interests them. This creates a sense of unfinishedness, restlessness to get back to a space of unease where each entry is as disorienting as the first. Here the reader has to create personal routines around the text. Either they read the book non-stop for 12 hours, rotating it every eight pages, without once exiting the text, prioritizing the love story of Sam and Hailey over the “greater” historical events; or they read it line by line, allowing each prompt or cue to reel them in, which would require them to use the differently colored bookmarks provided with the text and also to be extremely cautious and spatially alert to where exactly they left off when exiting the book and simultaneously correlating all information gathered outside with the topsy-turvy narrative inside. Both approaches are time-consuming and make the reader highly aware of the niche of subjectivity they access, systematically inculcating Lyotardian incredulity towards all metanarratives.12 Both the beginnings of the novel have the epigraph “You were there”, which refers to the “forever sixteen” protagonists trying to outpace the narrative of history. It is also Danielewski’s tribute to his readers (not yet readers) whom he included in the writing process by incorporating their suggestion in the novel’s historical timeline. The accompanying website was also built in collaboration with the prospective readers; the forum included 6,900 posts and thus the yet-to-be reader accesses the manufacturing process. This experience is denied to all readers who enter the book interface traditionally i.e., after its publication. This multiplicity, play, permutation, combination in approaching the text and eventually participating in the creation of the narrative both before and after publication, ensures that no two readers have the same experience, allowing them the protagonist experience. This subjectivity

Re-Orienting Reading  123 has been known to all readers of books, but this novel centralizes just how “left out” one feels from others’ subjectivity. Owing to the sense of work ethic that is evoked, the reader pursues and travels through the internet much like Hailey and Sam did. However, a sense of incompleteness persists. Mark Hansen explains, in his reading of Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000), how the narrative makes the author lose authority over his text, which in Only Revolutions Danielewski centralizes by including potential readers in the novel’s making. This merging of the reader and author function leads to an intense recognition of the singularity of any reading making each page, each line, each interpretation at once incomplete and absolutely complete.13 9.2 Somatics The circular structure of the novel14 and the repeated physical maneuvering make the reader sensitive to ergonomic negotiations and bring up questions on bodily agency. This counting, repetitive tracking of one’s reading process has a certain meditative and immersive quality to it. It uses non-trivial effort to illuminate the involvement and ever-presence of our bodies in our existence and actions involved in it, which Dr Don Johnson defines as somatic and describes as “an eye to illustrating the capacity for transforming a dualistic consciousness into a more direct sense of embeddedness in the body and the sensible environment.”15 Johnson explains how certain methods are used in conjunction with psychotherapy to reorient the mind into focusing on the sensorial.16 These exercises include breath work and sound-making having “repetitive patterns of working” which have no defined ideological content.17 The repetition itself has no inherent meaning other than to make the user of such methods aware of their own capacity of cognition in and through their bodies. Danielewski uses multiple rotations and rhythmic tracking of reading to invoke this same sense of physicality. This focus on the physical serves two purposes. First, to make the reader into an active participant in the narrative, literally steering the story into comprehension. Second, to bring to the forefront the “intricate sensitivity to the nuances existing between experience and verbalisation.”18 One of the somatics methods mentioned by Johnson is sensory awareness, in which basic movements are investigated, such as sitting and standing with the goal of ultimate awakeness through careful attention.19 All judgments of right/wrong or normal/abnormal are dispelled and the habitual is defamiliarized through the unfolding of immediate sensations. Danielewski defamiliarizes what we expect from a text’s physical paper presentation or layout by including a grid-like interface and inculcates an attitude of genuine curiosity in the reader. This loss of habitual stance when approaching the text turns it into a visual performance allowing movability and elasticity. He challenges the very notion of a static text by making movement an integral part of the narrative, which is then mimicked by the road trip that Hailey and Sam take across the USA. The narrative demands rapt attention from the reader’s mind

124  Ainee Basir and body, in repetitive rotations. Even the differently colored circular motifs including all 0(zeroes) and O(alphabet), serve no greater purpose than to make the reader constantly aware of the circular nature of the narrative, their movements, and history itself. In doing so, Danielewski truly decentralizes man; the text no longer serves the reader. In this literal whirlpool narrative, the physical form of the book becomes the only source grounding the reader. Johnson further elaborates that such orienting of the self around the surrounding, and thus making oneself less self and more body, allows for the removal of “passivity of the civilized sign”, citing Julia Kristeva. As writing and expression move to include and centralize the “vigorous and expressive language of our muscles and desires”,20 they ultimately contribute to turning the text into not simply a stylized commentary on experience but into the ultimate experience itself. Danielewski incorporates this requirement of physical awareness and renewed focus on movement to ultimately turn the reading experience into sensory delight. This sensory matrix combined with the disorienting narratives of two unreliable narrators achieves a new level of immersion, not allowing the reader or the text to lean on already learned and experienced forms of understanding. The perceived duality of the mind and body are literally shaken, the border separating these notions becomes blurred. Susan Foster meditates on the pitfalls of writing/pinning down movement and how it inherently challenges static modes of knowledge acquisition. She writes in her introductory essay, As a body in motion, the writing-and-written body puts into motion the bodies of all those who would observe it. It demands a scholarship that detects and records movements of the writer as well as the written about, and it places at the center of investigation the changing positions of these two groups of bodies and the co-motion that orchestrates as it differentiates their identities. This ambulant form of scholarship thus acknowledges an object of study that is always in the making and also always vanishing. It claims for the body, in anxious anticipation of this decade’s collapse of the real and the simulated into a global “informatics of domination,” an intense physicality and a reflexive generativity.21 We become this “writing-and-written” body as we transverse Only Revolutions, and the mental act of reading is firmly anchored back into the physical act of holding, seeing, gripping, balancing, sitting activities that constitute reading. Johnson explains how the posture of the intellectual has largely been sedentary, hunched bodies sitting quietly, and tries to speculate on how a culture that deliberately includes movement in the practice of expression would produce practices of thinking and writing.22 Only Revolutions reflects this somatic principle by exploiting the readers' search for a coherent narrative and not only uses it to propel the plot but also imbues new technological innovations in typography, manner and movement of reading. By doing so he makes explicit the mode through which we receive

Re-Orienting Reading  125 writing, i.e., our body. The focus on the body and its senses is self-reflexive and meta in the way Danielewski makes us aware of the apparatus used in interacting with the narrative. The physicality of our cognition is brought to light, problematizing our connection to the text and subsequently to the world. The reader who is not neuro-typical or able-bodied would receive the text differently, forcing the reader to confront how unconsciously the world has been shaped by our conceptual apparatus. Something as simple as the body of the book and how that would be radically different if we retained long-boned palm-like feet like our genetic cousins the chimpanzees do. 9.3 Dispelling Ease Bernard Stiegler, a philosopher of technicity, posits that the rapid development in technology has to be studied alongside and incorporated in all domains concerning the human. His ideas developed within the 20th-century French school of philosophy where technicity is the “irremediably, incomplete and contingent character of human being, a being who is always supplemented by technical prostheses.”23 For Stiegler human beings are constantly receptive to stimuli aiming to evolve. This evolution in the 21st century becomes conjugated with the evolution of technology. His gaze is upon this trajectory of biological evolution where the organic body interacts with “organized technical forms, and social organizations that interact in psychic and collective individuation.”24 Danielewski’s Only Revolutions stemmed from the author’s admission, an urge to turn texts into “remarkable constructions with enormous possibilities.”25 In his technological innovations he doesn’t just include the body but by incorporating movement, the human body is then exposed for its potential to be just as absorbent of stimuli as texts. The modern human is comfortable with the concept of screen rotation. In a 2006 interview at Columbia University, New York, Danielewski mentioned that he sought to challenge the learned ways of reading. In a book convention in 2008, he mentioned that the new generation of readers are no longer aware of this radical challenge. He explains “these kids have not registered a challenge…they came without rigid notions of reading.” This adaptation of the human to the technical is something that Danielewski’s novel grew into: what was unreadable became mimetic of mobile phone screens. Stiegler explains in his work Technics and Time that the human has always been “technologically exteriorised” and has evolved following the operation of “epiphylogenesis”, i.e., by means other than life, such as cultural knowledge.26 Danielewski doesn’t seek to evolve the human, its technology which is the focus, the center. Body, which is the last sacrosanct material we must relinquish to get from animal to post-human, which is made to go through a physical, mental and cultural shift during the reading of the novel, isn’t even the end goal. Instead of technology catering to the human, humans are made lab rats. This turning of tables is what evokes horror in Danielewski’s works. The reader is overwhelmed with feelings of the unknown and finds

126  Ainee Basir themselves ill-equipped to read this modern technology. As the novel progresses centrifugally, and ease eludes the reader, the reader wants to catch up to technology. In this decentering of the human experience, which was already undercut with cloying singularity of subjectivity, the reader is forced to confront how they are evolving to technology and for technology. The reader recognizes and witnesses their evolution into a manufactured new enhanced reader, almost getting a software update.27 This shift makes the reader question the level of conscious and unconscious manipulations/evolutions that have manufactured their agency, interaction with the world and interface of the world. The human loses its centrality in the design function which determines the physical form of the product to best meet customer needs. As human loses subjective supremacy alongside its functionality as consumer and product, ease ceases to be an objective and no longer remains a feature of design. Stiegler alludes to this rapid sidelining: “Technology is our pharmakon, an inescapable poison that has curative potential, and culture is a therapeutics that must recover from its colonization by the digital-audiovisual processes of cognitive capitalism.”28 To Stiegler, only rigid resistance by cultural artifacts like Danielewski’s Only Revolutions can retain/re-train what constitutes the human on a cognitive level. 9.4 Hospitality Jacques Derrida explains in his meditations on hospitality how a guest must ask in a language not their own to access the host’s home, the host who in turn can only offer conditional hospitality to maintain their role as the host and the ownership of the space. The house itself must have a lack, or opening to accommodate the guest, all the while both the host and guest mustn’t function on notions of give/take, self-interest and calculative reasoning. This notion of hospitality based on shaky cultural and linguistic notions also holds potential for imminent physical danger, if either party doesn’t adhere to dubious notions that are impossibilities.29 The relic of the book, which has historically been sacred and thus powerful, is completely overturned by Danielewski. The new novel no longer seeks to comfort or illuminate, nor does it make a mockery through postmodern pastiche, which Jameson explains is devoid of all radical power.30 It seeks only its own transformation, a selfish evolution. In its almost hostile takeover of the expected, Danielewski attempts to reach a hospitable heterotopia,31 which here is an oxymoron. The novel truly has no notions of give and take and all who access it are welcome due to the opening, i.e., the literal opening or interface of the book. However, in order to exist outside oppositional demands of give and take it allows the reader-guest only a slice of the house while making them painfully aware of how they occupy a conditional space within the narrative. This state of crisis and deviation makes the novel a playground of confusion, allowing all notions to be dispelled. In Foucault’s terms for a heterotopia, he identifies how heterotopias have a precise and determined function which is subject to change

Re-Orienting Reading  127 through history. The reader encounters this in the grid layout of the page. As Sam and Hailey flow through time untouched, time flows touching everything. These two different speeds are directly visually contrasted as they are laid right next to each other. In doing so, four different heterochronies exist simultaneously, allowing a museum-like mosaic of time where the reader’s disorientation mimics sensory deprivation because of temporal flux. The book in its body has systems in place to isolate it from the world and make it penetrable because of its operation. Only Revolution then becomes an inhospitable heterotopia with illusionary and perfect compensation for the grantedness of man’s centrality within the material world. 9.5 Manufacturing Symptoms Here even as the reader participates to a plot-driving extent, they are turned protagonists, but to accommodate/evolve into this heterotopic aporia they receive blows to previous notions of being, cutting off the already precarious and tenuous connection between the signified and the signifier. As Jameson explains, this schizophrenia then causes temporal isolation and material dislocation.32 I call this new reader the “patient-protagonist” who is both reader-user and reader-guest. The disorienting novel both exposes and manufactures symptoms of this illness which becomes the only medium through which to receive new technology. The patient-protagonist and the reader collectively accept that this illness is incomprehensible evolution (which has never catered to human ideas or bodies). The reader is repeatedly made to acknowledge that the evolutionary success or humanity is a narrative, the human body’s superiority and perfection: a trap of subjectivity. However, true to its inhospitable roots, this patient-protagonist receives no medical intervention; the aim is to occupy/babysit the reader to generate evolution. This serves to expose the hollowness of grand narratives. As Lyotard explains the painstaking removal of positive connotations from ideas of scientific progress,33 similarly one can diagnose disillusionment from the forward-moving trajectory expected and the human-serving conception of evolution. Evolution as a phenomenon does not fall within binary conceptions of betterment where those ideas serve computational capitalism.34 Stiegler explains that humans are different from other species because they use constructed prostheses for survival. This allows traits that would “normally” be evolutionarily eliminated to remain and survive in the gene pool due to technological crutches. The very foundation of what is desirable for survival has been eliminated, giving rise to confusions around the new patterns of evolution while being paralyzed by the awareness that this confusion and anxiety are also being encoded into humanity. This realization of constantly being biologically observed and recorded is then paired with the postmodern paranoia owing to constant surveillance, not to be controlled or censored but to be capitalized upon. The subject/product is then simultaneously aware of having some agency over the evolutionary process, and how

128  Ainee Basir any and all intent is manufactured. A deeply unsettling, untethering lack of control and dreamlessness (inability to visualize a future) becomes norm as a new depressed proletariat is created by techno-giants in the digital age. In this age, Stiegler calls technocrats the new barbarians because as they continue to abuse the flow of stimuli, they pose the greatest threat to humanity, i.e., the loss of hope which can only be mitigated by buying dopamine. They control the supply and the demand, they create hopelessness and then sell controlled obsolescence all the while our dopamine receptors are made weak through constant supply.35 So whatever affects the coding behind the human is deeply unaffected by human agency and yet responding to all stimuli. This reader applies methodological suspicion to interact with the text, which Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick identifies as paranoid reading. This paranoia is both reflexive and mimetic.36 The reader’s confusion begins before they can even assume the role of a reader, i.e., when they first interact with the body of the text and flip it around to comprehend where to enter the text; in doing so they have already become subject to technology. This confusing robbing of agency is then “willingly” purchased for eventual consumption that forever eludes the reader. I see elements of masochistic addiction in this willing participation and continuous buying into machines of discomfort, where one returns to sources of sorrow, confusion and alienation for comfort. This is behaviorally inculcated by the novel in its constant pushing out and pulling in of the reader through prompts, i.e., the timeline. This counter-intuitive meditative repetition itself becomes soothing, and functioning exactly along the lines of addiction, the reader-protagonist returns “willingly” for fixes. The brain’s reward-seeking function is overwhelmed by its pain-avoidant one. However, the avoidance here is mere postponement of disorientation and boredom, where the reader pursues in vain the operating system of the text to reach an elusive coherence. The reward here is simply an extended occupation of time. There is no escape because the very notion of escape holds connotations of the end destination being “better”. All through this experience of discomfort and disorientation the reader is aware of their consent and agency; and how they chose to experience this. This hellish circularity becomes the new familiar as the human struggles to catch up to what is clearly out-smarting it. This new familiar then becomes a source of inhospitable comfort or hospitable discomfort. Subjectivity becomes the only anchor in this vacuum of referentiality, as both Sam and Hailey travel textually into the middle of the book only to barely touch and begin traveling away. This isolation of subjectivity is what Danielewski centralizes in Only Revolutions by manufacturing symptoms of illness. Notes 1 Mark Z. Danielewski. Only Revolutions (New York: Pantheon Books, 2006), Hailey 167. 2 Danielewski lecture at Columbia University, New York, 2006. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=6D1imPyoksY 3 Danielewski, Only Revolutions, cover page.

Re-Orienting Reading  129 4 Danielewski, Only Revolutions, Hailey 2. 5 Danielewski, Hailey 7. 6 Espen J. Aarseth. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 94. 7 Aarseth, 163. 8 Danielewski, Only Revolutions, Hailey 230. 9 Danielewski, Only Revolutions, Hailey 230. 10 “Bold Type: A Conversation”, Mark Z. Danielewski interviewed by Sofie Cottrell, April 28, 2002. www.randomhouse.com/boldtype/0400/danielewski/interview.html 11 Juha-Pekka Kilpiö, “Explorative Exposure: Media in and of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves”, Reading Today (New York: UCL Press, 2018), 57–70. 12 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), xxiv. 13 Mark B. Hansen, “The Digital Topography of Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves”, Contemporary Literature, (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 597–636. 14 Brigitte Felix, “Three Hundred and Sixty: Circular Reading in Mark Z. Danielewski's Only Revolutions”, Études Anglaises, (Paris: Cairn International, 2010), 191–203. 15 D. H. Johnson, “Body Practices and Human Inquiry: Disciplined Experiencing, Fresh Thinking, Vigorous Language” in The Body in Human Inquiry: Interdisciplinary Explorations of Embodiment, ed. V. Berdayes, (Cresskill, NJ: The Hampton Press, 2004), 5.01–5.15. 16 Johnson, 5.03. 17 Johnson, 5.10. 18 Johnson, 5.12. 19 Johnson, 5.05. 20 Johnson, 5.05. 21 Susan L. Foster, “An Introduction to Moving Bodies”, Choreographing History, (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995), 16. 22 Johnson, 5.11. 23 Patrick Crogan, “On Bernard Stiegler”, Oxford Bibliographies, 26 July, 2017. www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780190221911/obo9780190221911-0038.xml. 24 Crogan. 25 S. Cottrell, “Bold Type: A Conversation”, Mark Z. Danielewski interview. 26 Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, (Stanford: Meridian, 1998), 23. 27 Bernard Stiegler, The Age of Disruption: Technology and Madness in Computational Capitalism, (Toronto: Wiley Press, 2019), 63. 28 Stiegler, The Age of Disruption, 268. 29 Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality, (Paris: Stanford University Press, 1998). 30 Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society”, The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, (Washington: Bay Press, 1982), 116. 31 Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces”, Diacritics, (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1967). 32 Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society”, The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, (Washington: Bay Press, 1982), 121. 33 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1984), xxiii. 34 Stiegler, The Age of Disruption, 286. 35 Bernard Stiegler, “Suffocated Desire”, Parrhesia: Le Monde, (Paris: Le Monde, 2004). 36 Eve K. Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading”, French Literary Theory Today, (London: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 133.

130  Ainee Basir Bibliography Aarseth, E. J. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Crogan, Patrick. “On Bernard Stiegler.” Oxford Bibliographies, 26 July, 2017. www. oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780190221911/obo9780190221911-0038.xml. Danielewski, Mark Z. Only Revolutions. New York: Pantheon Books, 2006. ———. “Bold Type: A Conversation”, interview by Sofie Cottrell, 2002. www. randomhouse.com/boldtype/0400/danielewski/interview.html Derrida, Jacques. Of Hospitality. Paris: Stanford University Press, 1998. Felix, Brigitte. “Three Hundred and Sixty: Circular Reading in Mark Z. Danielewski's Only Revolutions.” Études Anglaises, Vol 63, no. 2, 191–203, Paris: Cairn International, 2010. Foster, Susan L. “An Introduction to Moving Bodies.” In Choreographing History, 3–24. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995. Foucault, Michel, and Jay Miskowiec. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 22–27. https://doi.org/10.2307/464648. Hansen, Mark B. “The Digital Topography of Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves.” Contemporary Literature, Vol 45, no. 4, 597–636, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. https://doi.org/10.2307/3593543 Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.” In The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Washington: Bay Press, 1982. Johnson, Don H. “Body Practices and Human Inquiry: Disciplined Experiencing, Fresh Thinking, Vigorous Language.” In The Body in Human Inquiry: Interdisciplinary Explorations of Embodiment, edited by V. Berdayes, 5.01–5.15, Cresskill, NJ: The Hampton Press, 2004. Kilpiö, Juha-Pekka. “Explorative Exposure: Media in and of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves.” In Reading Today, 57–70, New York: UCL Press, 2018. https:// doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt20krxjt.9 Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Sedgwick, Eve K. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading. or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction Is About You.” In Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (ed.), Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction, 1–39. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997. Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Stanford: Meridian, 1998. ———. The Age of Disruption: Technology and Madness in Computational Capitalism. Toronto: Wiley, 2019. ———. “Suffocated Desire. or How the Cultural Industry Destroys the Individual: Contribution to a Theory of Mass Consumption”. Parrhesia Vol. 13, 52–61, 2011.

Part III

Disparity and Speculative Overtures

10 An Open Letter from Rattus Norvegicus* to New York City Radhika Subramaniam**

It is yet another exclusion of us as urban residents that prompts this open communication with you. We do not typically respond to every one of your actions and characterizations. Indeed, if we had to address every criticism and the many vilifications leveled against us over the years of your aggression, we would have little time to get on with the ordinary business of living which is our fundamental concern. But recently you determined, through the city’s wildlife coexistence campaign, who you would embrace as a fellow inhabitant. On the one hand, your new formulation proffers a rare moment of hope that you might embrace all who live here as city dwellers, and on the other hand, the boundary it renders relegates us once more to the status of an unwanted intrusion. We are stung to the quick by this refusal to recognize us as residents, as permanent as you are, of this great city you call New York. We have another name for the city which we do not include here as it would escape your pronunciation. We refer, of course, to the awareness and education initiative called Wildlife NYC that the city administration initiated in 2016 as an effort to encourage Humans in New York to live alongside residents of other species. The campaign website still has its encouraging statement: “it’s no surprise that we encounter animals everywhere from our parks and greenspaces to our roads and roofs. After all, they’re New Yorkers too!”1 In the announcement of the program, the Parks Commissioner noted that it’s “important to understand your neighbors, even the feathered and furry ones.”2 The initiative aims to motivate people to be “better neighbors”3 and work towards coexistence even though, as the website admits, it could be a challenge for Humans to share your world with other beings. The ambition of this expanded conception of residency came as a surprise to us for the city’s self-image has been burnished more by glass and steel than its parks or waterways. To underscore this openness, if not to overcome the perceived challenge of sharing, Wildlife NYC launched a media campaign. Almost overnight, the triangular advertising hats on yellow cabs sported the visage of one of our animal neighbors *  Henceforth RN **  Henceforth RS DOI: 10.4324/9781003395379-14

134  Radhika Subramaniam with a big white arrow pointing at it with the label “New Yorker,” and the tag line “City Dwellers Take Many Forms.” We did not fail to note that we were excluded from the photogenic images of this campaign. The very next year, in 2017, the mayor threw $32 million at a new rat reduction plan, a considerable financial step-up from the previous effort in 2015 of $2.5 million, and in a pernicious display of bloodlust, demanded more “rat corpses.”4 In some neighborhoods, new garbage cans appeared emblazoned with an exhortation to keep New York rat-free. Still, as we said at the outset, your bellicose campaigns are no novelty, and we did not pick up the gauntlet. However, when the mayor adds that “We refuse to accept rats as a normal part of living in New York City,” we feel compelled to respond more strongly.5 We make no more than a passing mention here of the fact that only days prior to this pronouncement, New York City had reaffirmed its commitment to being a sanctuary city, welcoming and inclusive to all.6 We are fully cognizant that this commitment is singular in how it extends the human, was not intended to encompass non-humans and, in any case, for many of us, the managerial regimes of sanctuary spaces in which we are asked to live under your continual supervision and surveillance hold little appeal. You must admit that it is more than a little galling to accept as largesse and in the name of protection or conservation well-defined territories with a strictly administered way of life from those who destroyed those very lands and disrupted our lives in the first place. However, we raise the question of this commitment to sanctuary at this point to demonstrate a specific shortcoming—how bald a concept it is when so hedged with boundaries, conditions and contingencies. You must not take us as naïve. We are not unaware of borders. We draw our own territorial lines within which members of our colonies socialize, greet, forage, share, quarrel, groom, and huddle together in companionship and warmth. Such areas are infused with the scents of fellows that comfort and guide inhabitants in their daily journeys while serving as a caution to those who might have wandered too far afield. Our modest size also means we must be alert to danger and, if necessary, our spirit can rise to the occasion—we are not mice after all! But we do not conceive of a world that contains none but others of our kind, and it has appeared neither sensible nor seemly to us to draw a line around ourselves alone. Before we go too far, let us establish ourselves as city residents. Like many of you, we are originally immigrants. The stories of coming over are now a part of our folklore, passed through the thousands of generations that have called this city home.7 So far back does our arrival go that if we entered ourselves into ancestry.com, we would find that the downtown clans of Manhattan are genetically distinct from the uptown clans.8 Like many immigrants, our name has been bastardized and the Latinate appellation that we now carry is a complete misnomer. We have no special attachment to Norway as is suggested by Norvegicus except that some of our ancestors probably

An Open Letter from Rattus Norvegicus to New York City  135 passed through the country and no doubt some relatives remain there. Our actual origins are in the Asian steppes where distant kin must surely still live out their lives, but for most of the Rattus Norvegicus diaspora, that too is in the hoary past.9 Lest you jump to the conclusion that it was this Norwegian misunderstanding that got us here, let us quickly disabuse you of the supposition that the story of our travels and arrivals is one about preferential immigration categories or racist exclusions. Truth be told, we’d prefer the plain moniker of Brown Rat and throw in our lot with others who are as little desired as we are, but the political necessity for recognition within your systems means that we must use every mechanism at our disposal, including an embrace of this ornate nomenclature. As to why we are here, that is simple: we are where we are because of you. By nature, we don’t venture very far. It may come as a surprise to some of you to learn that there are few self-styled adventurers and explorers among our kind. Most of us live and die within a block of where we were born. As we grow up, we learn the lie of the land, its routes and resources, and we traverse it enough to grow comfortable. Next time you walk out, train your eyes downwards and you might see the sebum-marked routes that are the navigation systems of our city. Most of you look avidly ahead, oblivious to where your foot comes down, but we are thigmophilic, we like to touch—we feel our way, using our bodies, fur, and whiskers rather than our eyes to shape and map the city. Perhaps this difference between us explains why, unlike us, you can blithely step forward, propelled toward things you’ve never seen, toward places you haven’t encountered, grasping without asking at what you don’t know, and with scant regard for what else might be around or who might already be there. No rat, however, ever hitched a ride on a trading caravan or stowed away on a ship hoping to be dazzled by new vistas or ravenous for new plunder. We hesitate to venture into worlds beyond the tested reach of our whiskers. But sometimes we find that the edges of worlds are malleable, they move and extend, gaps get created, often by you humans, so that we can follow a familiar sensory orientation into a new or strange stability. To point us out as intruders in these new worlds is to obscure your own colonial sebum trails. We prefer to stick to what we know and have known—and we have known you a long time. Your propensity to wander is renowned. So is your tendency to be both fearless and careless in ways that invite and even demand the involvement of others. Let it be said: you are our familiar. Having satisfactorily established our antecedents, we return to your coexistence campaign. We commend you for finally acknowledging the many other species who are fellow inhabitants of this city. Your belief that cities are constructed for your exclusive use has always been perplexing. Of course, the inventiveness and creativity that brought into being these majestic assemblages of stone, wood, brick, and glass deserve just applause. So do the resources and technologies, often powered by species other than the human, that raise these castles in the air even as they plunge their infrastructures deep

136  Radhika Subramaniam below. Having explored many of these innovative designs, we fully acknowledge that they are marvels. But to believe that these are solely your territories rather than spaces of shared living, territories from which you can exclude, extract, and control animals, birds, and plants according to your fancy can only be called vainglorious. The foundational elements of planetary existence—earth, air, and water— are not proprietary even when you harness their powers. You cannot share them because they are not yours to share—they are already held in common. Cities and other settlements are also inherently more heterogeneous and porous than the bounded conceptions in your mind. Urbanity thrives on tangled and loose complexities and multiplicities. What would New York be if its newest inhabitants couldn’t lose themselves immediately in its crowds? In any case, this disinvitation to inhabit city spaces has been studiously ignored by most urban non-humans. Pigeons coo in the plazas, ducks sail in the ponds and lakes of city parks, squirrels forage in every backyard, cockroaches skitter in kitchens, sprouts burst through sidewalk cracks, trees spread their branches in empty lots and thus the energetic life rhythm of the city pulses. Some of these residents you notice every day but there are others who remain just a bit out of sight. Our Rattus kin sought harborage in the subterranean urban spaces of pipes, basements, and subways from which we conduct our business, mostly at night, although in a city that never sleeps, we are not hidden. In your admirable and benevolent campaign, you invite Humans to learn more about their co-habitants. Your introductions are sympathetic: The eastern coyote is “adaptable and resourceful” like any New Yorker; so too is the raccoon. Don’t judge raccoons out foraging for a meal, you caution, they’re only “doing their best to get by.”10 Much-maligned bats are elevated into superheroes, caped crusaders who swoop through the air to “vanquish those who would do New Yorkers harm.”11 Not surprisingly, the greatest admiration is reserved for the fierce red-tailed hawk, our own nemesis, coexistence with whom you describe as an ideal. Could it be because you sense in the hawk a shared spirit of independence or are roused by an ambition that soars as high? No. Your reason lands as a thud: the bird provides free pest control. As every rat or pigeon knows whose blood has run cold when touched by the implacable shadow of that wingspan, the hawk takes to the air with unblinking indifference to such judgments. And here is the first of your distinctions as to who can be a New Yorker. Who is the pest that the hawk controls? You say we are. Were we to look for ourselves in the webpages of city government, we would find ourselves far from Parks or WildlifeNYC amid the sanitation department’s listings of pests and vermin. City dwellers cannot take that many forms. Your campaign lauds the adaptable, resourceful qualities of city life. Even you would not disagree that these are some of our qualities—tough, quick-witted, doing our best to get by like every other New Yorker—yet we remain a nuisance to you. When you can’t find any direct use or merit in our proximity, you fail to find

An Open Letter from Rattus Norvegicus to New York City  137 the grounds for coexistence. We are not alone in your list of pests, of course. Insects, on some of whom the newly vaunted bats swoop at night, are frequent targets of callous dismissal and yet others barely stay beyond the brink of your disapproval. The director of pest control for the city’s health department once said, referring to us, “They’re just like us. They don’t give anything back. They eat and reproduce.”12 Now, the director doesn’t move in our social circles, so he is obviously unaware of the finer points of R. Norvegicus culture. If he did, he would learn that we value living and accord being itself a central place in our philosophy. Even the greatest existentialist among you is caught in your give-and-take economies that make life a matter of trade; even while acknowledging that giving is a virtue, you prefer to applaud the cleverness of those who take. Not only have you gridded the terrain of our city, but you measure its motley resident species by your value grids—hawks and bats are pest controllers, deer and ducks provide aesthetic pleasure, dogs deliver both security and therapy, and trees seem to have hung out shingles to furnish ecosystem services. This way of thinking we find an anathema but you, it appears, have looked in the mirror only to see reflected in it us—but without our philosophy. It isn’t the first time we’ve found ourselves becoming vehicles for your attitudes and politics. We have been the target of your ire for a long time, the perceived source of incivility, disgust, and disease. Those more psychologically inclined are wont to suggest that we reflect all that you find troubling, loathsome, and destructive in yourself.13 We thrive on your propensity for accumulation; we thrive on your compulsions for expansion; we thrive on your unbounded capacity to generate rubbish—oh, those mountains and valleys shrouded in black plastic in the long shadow of streetlights! Your refuse is our refuge, you might say. You accuse us of spreading filth and disease—in vain have we pointed out that the plague bacillus kills us too. It’s because we die that the infected flea hops onto other warm-blooded bodies such as yours. We can’t dispute that you might have caught something from us; no one can guarantee otherwise—as one learns these days, it can be healthier to keep a social distance and not get too close—but surely, infectious vectors cannot be subject to moral judgement. What bitter irony though that it is our own kin in laboratories who are working with you at the forefront of scientific and medical research. Here are beings whose bodies and minds you probe, invade, and test again and again trying to extract more knowledge about and more resources for yourself; yet you twist the terms of the relationship in order to claim that they are little more than part of an experimental apparatus. Their environments are totally controlled, their genes thoroughly engineered to make them manipulable for your purposes, but word gets out from time to time from the lab rats, closely guarded though they are, so that we know the truth about both their servitude and contribution.14 The day such news arrives in our midst is a sober one for city rats.

138  Radhika Subramaniam Familiarity, we have come to realize, does not spell safety. Too long have we carried the symbolic weight of your hatreds and suspicions. Which of us has been able to obliterate the histories of how you re-drew our snouts into noses, using each caricature to expend your deep anti-semitic venom? Once we were made interchangeable with Jews, technologies of extermination could be applied to both of us. Kill one as you kill the other. We have borne the effects of your campaigns of terror, been stuck and starved in your glue traps, clubbed and attacked, made to bleed internally by the anti-coagulant warfarin, even as some of us thankfully developed a resistance to it. It is that careless killing—in the potent phrase of your own philosopher, the “making killable”—that makes verminous kin of human, lab rat or city rat.15 Relief from some of your more poisonous efforts has often come from the unlikely intervention of the hawk or our other predators who also sickened and died from indirect ingestion. In your desire to protect them, you had to turn to other methods whose effects couldn’t be passed on. Time and again, the objects of your revulsion and xenophobia take our form. Migrants and foreigners crossing the border suddenly turn into rats in the media, overrunning the national space past citizens and residents.16 Our fecundity too has always been a strange source of fascination for you. Almost every article about us has a back-of-the-envelope calculation of how two rats can turn into more than a thousand in a year, or else, what the ratio is of us to you (you win—there are many more of you—but apparently, that isn’t security enough). We hope you can respect that reproduction itself is a private matter, but we assure you that the demographers among us have never found that our populations were in excess of available resources. If you find us in your homes, walls, and gardens, you must ask yourself what drew us there. Did we create the sub-standard housing in which some of the city’s residents live? Did we fail to make repairs and create the gaps and cracks that make them inviting spaces to others like us? Are we responsible for the neglect and disregard of your poor neighborhoods or for your discriminatory housing and sanitation policies? Cast your mind back to New York in the 1960s. Housing activist Jesse Gray had been working for years with tenants in cheaply built, crowded housing in Harlem to protest their appalling living conditions. In 1963, he organized a widespread rent strike.17 Neither the landlords nor the city had paid the slightest attention to the needs of the mostly Black tenants of these tenements. We were in the buildings too, largely minding our own business although a bit giddy with all that was blatantly and easily on offer. We freely admit now that we were enjoying a bit of a stand-off with the residents. As a tactic, Gray told the tenants to catch rats and take our corpses down to eviction hearings. He knew that it would take no more than one of us to evoke several lifetimes of symbolic association—degradation, dirt, disease, and abandonment—more quickly and viscerally than any other testimony. People brought dead and live rats, some laid them out on display. Other

An Open Letter from Rattus Norvegicus to New York City  139 tenants wore rubber necklaces of rats, still others pinned them to their coats. The media and public went crazy for this political theatre. The tenants went further and called the politicians, city officials, and landlords “two-legged rats” in contrast to our four-legged variety, so that we were strangely for a time simultaneously a symbol of neglect as well as its agent. There is no end, it would seem, to our metaphoric shapeshifting. Shortly after, the city passed a $1 million rat bill. Thus, we became an alibi for callous disregard and racism: Blame the rats. Easier to exterminate them than to examine the thoroughly human structures and policies that had immiserated the lives of Harlem residents. While Gray was organizing and encouraging the tenants, he referred to them as rats too: “The tenants are like rats now. Rats feel their power and they come out in broad daylight and just sit there. Once tenants feel their power, they stop running, they’re not afraid anymore.”18 You must admit this is getting to be a real symbolic roller coaster. Are we the abject revelation of wanton disregard proffered through our corpses and effigies by angry and despairing tenants? Or are we the evidence of racist constructions of filth and squalor imputed onto these residents? And wait, there’s more. We are also wily, uncaring, rapacious landlords and officials at the same time as we are the tough, shrewd, and determined face of resistance. You talk past but through us, using this protean conception of us as filthy vermin and recalcitrant pest as powerful instruments to enact your political agendas. Let us say it plainly now: we have had enough of this ventriloquism. We do not want to live in or as your image. We are tired of being caught in the mirror-reflections of your forms of loathing, of yourself and of others. We reject outright the category of pest, but we also refuse to be invited to remain as your guest, to stand by as you arrogate to yourself the benevolent illusion of host. As we have pointed out earlier, the conception of cities as designed by and for humans is a type of colonial fiction. No city has ever run without the power of animals and plants behind it. We Rattus have kept our eye on you from the start, insinuating ourselves into your lives and settlements from the get-go lest you imagine that this place, any place can be free of everyone but you. In so doing, we have borne both the brunt of your aggressive cleansing campaigns and your symbolic transmogrifications. We understand better than most the vicissitudes of living daily alongside you.19 If we repudiate so much of our joint history, what are we asking for? It may surprise you to learn that we are not asking to belong to your political community, we are not asking for the right to stay; we want no mark of identity, no embrace of belonging; we insist rather on the reality of being. We wish your coexistence campaign had not tried to make wildlife into New Yorkers but rather let New York become a wilder place. We wish you had let the city open itself to the ambivalent differences of its many species. Coexistence is not an idle experiment to be savored in the mind, it is tangibly forged in the fleshy, odorous proximity of others. It is never settled once and for all but remains an uneasy experiment. Nowhere is this brought

140  Radhika Subramaniam home more clearly than in the many large and minute daily lessons that create the urban sensorium. Many regular New Yorkers already see us as part of city life. There are many who idly watch us on the subway tracks; for every person who throws something trying to hit us, we feel the sympathetic gaze of five others, mildly attentive, often preoccupied, and tired of being squeezed together on a crowded subway platform. Yet there they are, wilting at the end of the day, as we scurry about ours, entangled in webs of caution, distance, curiosity, and alienation. That is the dis-ease we transmit between us. We venture to suggest that today’s city is as much an attitude as it is a material formation, one that must contend repeatedly with its density, promiscuity, ambiguity, and difference. If your first foray is evidence that you are ready to recognize the many species who live in this city, we encourage you. Such recognition does not come by admitting those you carefully select for entry. It requires considerably more courage and imagination. We know: We are this city’s resident aliens. Oh no, this is no application for immigration but the definition of our co-existential status. We are a reminder that such residency is inalienable even and especially when it is not a right. Here we shall remain, ever intimate, ever strange, ever present. It should be clear by now: There is no city without us. Respectfully yours, R. Norvegicus Acknowledgments The ideas here were developed through rich and ratty exchanges with Rafi Youatt. Notes 1 “WildlifeNYC,” www1.nyc.gov, n.d., https://www1.nyc.gov/site/wildlifenyc/ index.page. Accessed January 15, 2021. 2 “WildlifeNYC Introduces New Yorkers to Urban Fauna,” The official website of the City of New York, 2016, https://www1.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/news/83916/wildlifenyc-introduces-new-yorkers-urban-fauna. 3 “WildlifeNYC,” www1.nyc.gov, n.d., https://www1.nyc.gov/site/wildlifenyc/index. page. Accessed January 15, 2021. 4 J. David Goodman, “Mayor Offers $32 Million Plan to Ice Some Rats. Hopefully,” The New York Times, July 13, 2017, sec. New York, https://www.nytimes. com/2017/07/12/nyregion/new-york-city-rat-problem.html. 5 “De Blasio Administration Announces $32 Million Neighborhood Rat Reduction Plan,” The official website of the City of New York, 2017, https://www1.nyc.gov/ office-of-the-mayor/news/472-17/de-blasio-administration-32-millionneighborhood-rat-reduction-plan#/0. 6 “Statement from Mayor Bill de Blasio on the Sanctuary Cities Bill,” The official website of the City of New York, 2016, https://www1.nyc.gov/office-of-themayor/news/592-16/statement-mayor-bill-de-blasio-the-sanctuary-cities-bill.

An Open Letter from Rattus Norvegicus to New York City  141 7 We have been persuaded to include references to our diversity and “proof of origin” here given that most of our ancestral lore is meant for the ear not the eye and is narrated in frequencies beyond the range of your hearing. — RN RN is only too aware that a case for residency is not only strategic but must be indisputable. It does appear that NYC was most likely the site of one of the first landings of RN’s ancestors in the 18th century. See Robert Sullivan, Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City’s Most Unwanted Inhabitants (Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2008).— RS 8 Sarah Zhang, “New York Has Genetically Distinct ‘Uptown’ and ‘Downtown’ Rats,” The Atlantic, 2017. 9 Emily E. Puckett et al., “Global Population Divergence and Admixture of the Brown Rat (Rattus Norvegicus),” BioRxiv, July 23, 2016, https://doi.org/10.1101/065458. 10 All quotes are taken from “WildlifeNYC,” www1.nyc.gov, n.d., https://www1. nyc.gov/site/wildlifenyc/index.page. Accessed January 15, 2021. 11 Ibid. 12 Matt Flegenheimer, “New York City Escalates the War on Rats Once Again,” The New York Times, June 24, 2015, sec. New York, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/ 06/25/nyregion/new-york-city-escalates-the-war-on-rats-once-again.html. 13 In a comprehensive survey of the place of rats in human life, Burt points out that they have often been regarded as twinned to the human, even as evil twins, thriving in the shadows and wastes of the human world. See Jonathan Burt, Rat (London, England: Reaktion Books, 2004). — RS To our way of thinking, this notion of twinning with its implication of seeing oneself in another is once more regrettably too reliant on sight. Being finely attuned to touch, as mentioned before, we are less apt to get lost in such funhouse mirrors of distorted identification. — RN 14 Lynda Birke, “Who—or What—Are the Rats (and Mice) in the Laboratory,” Society & Animals 11, no. 3 (2003): 207–24, https://doi.org/10.1163/156853003322773023. 15 Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). RN is clearly proffering this academic reference here as a conciliatory gesture to an imagined audience. —RS This entire letter is in the spirit of human political diplomacy. Your languages and philosophies are not acquired by accident. The smallest rat pup learns your letters as she chooses between cereal and pizza boxes or avoids areas with poison treatment signs—and all of us go on to devour reading matter voraciously. —RN 16 Archie Bland, “Rats: The History of an Incendiary Cartoon Trope,” The Guardian, November 18, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/ shortcuts/2015/nov/18/rats-the-history-of-an-incendiary-cartoon-trope. 17 A detailed account of the rent strike can be found in Robert Sullivan, Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City’s Most Unwanted Inhabitants (Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2008). 18 Sullivan, Rats, 62. 19 We must clarify here that this letter is between us and New York City and we can no more stand in for a generic rat than you can stand in for a generic urbanite when it comes to interpersonal politics. Before someone points to more benign forms of engagement such as rat fanciers with their pets—or even the reverential tolerance of rats as in the Karni Mata temple in Rajasthan, India—we must make clear that relational specifics matter. Rats who are pets in New York are better represented by cats or dogs, as odd that might seem. Our lab kin might look for solidarity with mice and guinea pigs as much as with flies and monkeys. As we hope this letter makes evident, it is no truism especially among humankind to say that a rat is a rat.

142  Radhika Subramaniam Bibliography Birke, Lynda. “Who—or What—Are the Rats (and Mice) in the Laboratory.” Society & Animals 11, no. 3 (2003): 207–24. https://doi.org/10.1163/156853003322773023. Bland, Archie. “Rats: The History of an Incendiary Cartoon Trope.” The Guardian, November 18, 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/shortcuts/2015/ nov/18/rats-the-history-of-an-incendiary-cartoon-trope. Accessed August 11, 2017. Burt, Jonathan. Rat. London, England: Reaktion Books, 2004. “De Blasio Administration Announces $32 Million Neighborhood Rat Reduction Plan.” The official website of the City of New York, 2017. https://www1.nyc.gov/ office-of-the-mayor/news/472-17/de-blasio-administration-32-millionneighborhood-rat-reduction-plan#/0. Accessed January 15, 2018. Flegenheimer, Matt. “New York City Escalates the War on Rats Once Again.” The New York Times, June 24, 2015, sec. New York. https://www.nytimes. com/2015/06/25/nyregion/new-york-city-escalates-the-war-on-rats-once-again. html. Accessed January 15, 2021. Goodman, J. David. “Mayor Offers $32 Million Plan to Ice Some Rats. Hopefully.” The New York Times, July 13, 2017, sec. New York. https://www.nytimes. com/2017/07/12/nyregion/new-york-city-rat-problem.html. Accessed December 27, 2018. Haraway, Donna J. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Puckett, Emily E., Jane Park, Matthew Combs, Michael J. Blum, Juliet E. Bryant, Adalgisa Caccone, Federico Costa, et al. “Global Population Divergence and Admixture of the Brown Rat (Rattus Norvegicus).” BioRxiv, July 23, 2016. https:// doi.org/10.1101/065458. “Statement from Mayor Bill de Blasio on the Sanctuary Cities Bill.” The official website of the City of New York, 2016. https://www1.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/ news/592-16/statement-mayor-bill-de-blasio-the-sanctuary-cities-bill. Accessed December 15, 2017. Sullivan, Robert. Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City’s Most Unwanted Inhabitants. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2008. “WildlifeNYC.” www1.nyc.gov, n.d. https://www1.nyc.gov/site/wildlifenyc/index. page. Accessed November 15, 2017. “WildlifeNYC Introduces New Yorkers to Urban Fauna.” The official website of the City of New York, 2016. https://www1.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/news/839-16/ wildlifenyc-introduces-new-yorkers-urban-fauna. Accessed October 27, 2017. Zhang, Sarah. “New York Has Genetically Distinct ‘Uptown’ and ‘Downtown’ Rats.” The Atlantic, 2017.

11 “As Told to” The Mediation of Refugee Voices in Contemporary Short Fiction Miriam Wallraven

11.1 Refugees, Refugee Experience, and Contested Issues of Representation In 2015, more than a million refugees and migrants crossed into Europe, a process which sparked heated debates about identity, national security, and stereotypes of “self” and “other”. When media announced a “migrant crisis”,1 questions of representing migration and refugees’ experiences came to the fore. In the context of ubiquitous media representations of migrants and stories about them, questions of voice and agency of refugees have to be raised: How can the voices of refugees themselves from different cultures be heard in the English-speaking world? In which ways and in which medium can the refugees’ own stories be told? What role can literature play in this context? Two experimental collections of short fiction attempt to find new approaches to this topical concern of voice in times when different forms of representation of people seeking refuge are instrumentalized for political purposes, and the narratives of “self” and “other” created by and in turn influencing national definitions are at stake. The first of these publications, Refugee Tales as told to Ali Smith, Patience Agbabi, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Inua Ellams and many others (2016) edited by David Heard and Anna Pincus, contains short fiction written by 14 authors. The second volume, Refugee Tales as told to Jackie Kay, Helen Macdonald, Neel Mukherjee, Kamila Shamsie, and many more… (2017) comprises short fiction written by 11 authors. The project originates from the Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group which sent volunteers into the two detention centres at Gatwick Airport to listen to refugees who are held there, often for an indefinitely long time. The transformation of the interviews into writing takes on diverse forms, dependent on the listener/author. After being converted into writing, the texts of the orally transmitted stories are transferred into public readings and performances as well as cross-country walks. These walks highlight the contrast between detainment and free movement, and draw parallels with the pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales, which are evoked by the title and taken up as points of reference.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003395379-15

144  Miriam Wallraven One of the central trajectories of Refugee Tales certainly consists of countering common media representations of refugees in globalized liminal spaces as “illegal migrants”2 or as enemy, victim, or hero.3 Friese justly states that “images mobilize, and visibility is part of political strategy”.4 Voice is likewise part of political strategy; consequently, to give refugees a voice who are neither visible nor audible in the liminal space of detention centres in the UK explicitly constitutes one of the purposes of Refugee Tales. Concerning refugee literature in general, Gallien argues that “The interventions of artists, writers and activists also expose what is not visible to the eye of mainstream media or what is deliberately kept invisible”.5 Questions of voice, medium, and representation as well as of the role of the listener are negotiated by Refugee Tales, and my reading will proceed in two steps. First, I analyse how Bakhtin’s dialogic approach can provide insights into the heteroglossia and polyphony of the narrative dynamics. Second, the possibilities and limits of mediating voices indicated by the expression “as told to” will be explored as an attempt at highlighting the complex negotiation of representation created in a globalized contact zone. 11.2 Voice: Heteroglossia and Polyphony as Crucial Features of Refugee Stories What are the possible ways of approaching the contested category of voice that turns out to be fundamental for the narrative dynamics of Refugee Tales? Elbow, among others, justly states that “Texts have no voices; they are silent. We can only talk about voice in writing by resorting to a metaphor.”6 However, he also argues that when people encounter a text – a set of words that just sit there silently on the page with no intonation, rhythm, accent, and so forth – they automatically project aurally some speech sounds onto the text. Given how conditioning and association work, most people cannot help it. Our most frequent and formative experiences with language have involved hearing speech.7 Various approaches to voice share the conceptualization of voice as agency,8 which some of the short stories and particularly the two afterwords of both volumes discuss explicitly. Hence, Refugee Tales is conceived as a complex collection of texts based on dialogue in various forms as governing feature to (re)present refugees’ stories. Concerning this dialogue, it will be shown how Bakhtin’s dialogic theory of heteroglossia (other/different-languagedness, diversity of voice) and polyphony (the many-voicedness of an individual utterance) can prove insightful regarding the narrative dynamics of these stories. According to Park-Fuller, polyphony refers to the “collective quality of an individual utterance; that is, the capacity of my utterance to embody someone else’s utterance even while it is mine, which thereby creates a dialogic relationship between two voices. For example, I quote or report someone’s speech and thereby ‘dialogue’ with his/her opinion.”9 Apart from that, the conception of

“As Told to”  145 language as such as heteroglot10 gains a new meaning in the short stories. In the following, several texts will be approached by analyzing the dialogic forms, the layers of voices, and the forms and degrees of mediation on which these texts are based: Heteroglossia and polyphony, framing and retelling can be identified as primary forms of representation utilized on an intertextual and intratextual layer, since the short stories experiment with different forms of approaching the dialogic interaction between a refugee in the detention centre and an interviewer who subsequently writes down the story. The first example, “The Arriver’s Tale as told to Abdulrazak Gurnah”,11 constitutes one of the three texts in the first volume,12 in which the reader is presented with a seemingly unmediated narration of a refugee’s voice: I came by air. It may sound odd to say that – what other way then? Some people walked. Many drowned. They were desperate. I wasn’t desperate but I was very frightened because I had made some people very angry with me. My crime was to tell the girls who attended my Sunday school that they should not agree to be circumcised. … I told them circumcision was genital mutilation and a barbaric and backward practice. Men forced women to do it so they would know they were rubbish. The real intention was to hurt them and paralyse them and control them.13 As a Christian in a mainly Muslim country, this man is accused of influencing the girls and is thus persecuted. After escaping to the UK, a difficult and demoralizing journey awaits, including a prison sentence, not being allowed to work and thus not ever being able to arrive. Here, “The Arriver” speaks himself; his own perspective and voice are presented via autodiegetic narration, while in this story, the dialogue with the interviewer as well as the mediation remain implicit. Of course, reading this story without mediation is not possible because of the given dialogic situation where the presence and the questions of the interviewer determine the story, turn it from oral into written form, and where issues of translation are central to the writing without being discussed at this point. Since Refugee Tales draws attention to many different perspectives involved in the complex process of migration, several of the stories shift the focus to the listener/author, as is the case in “The Visitor’s Tale as told to Hubert Moore”.14 Here, the detention centre visitor explicitly presents himself as a poet encountering a refugee. The dialogic situation is mainly established in indirect speech: These young men were trained to track down dissidents, torture them, maybe kill them. Victor found this work so distressing, he said, that he deserted, stole a passport, left The Gambia forever, as he hoped, and headed for this country. Soon after he arrived, he was arrested and taken to the detention centre that I was visiting at the time. My previous detainee had been moved elsewhere and it was arranged that I should visit this young man from The Gambia, Victor.15

146  Miriam Wallraven Here, the “double-voicedness” that Bakhtin determines as a basic feature of the novel is actualized in an even more pronounced way, in this instance by retelling. According to Bakhtin, retelling a text in one’s own words is to a certain extent a double-voiced narration of another’s words, for indeed ‘one’s own words’ must not completely dilute the quality that makes another’s words unique, a retelling in one’s own words should have a mixed character, able when necessary to reproduce the style and expressions of the transmitted text”.16 How is this realized in the text? While the need to speak and to be heard is highlighted by the visitor who states that “Victor needed to speak, to tell me his story”,17 it is the visitor who gains a voice by presenting Victor’s story. It combines several interlinked issues that recur in other stories: the liminal space of the detention centre and its effects on the refugees, the dialogic basis of the process of seeking refuge, the meta-reflections on listening and dialogue as well as the generic blend, in this case of prose and poetry. In the story, the liminal space of the detention centre is explicitly revealed as one of inequality and power imbalances, since this space is deliberately designed to preclude access, which results in the invisibility and inaudibility of the refugees: “We can talk confidentially to each other (I think) … But it’s not neutral ground of course. It’s detention centre ground.”18 The fact that in this story the focus lies on the space itself and the reactions of the listener/ poet on the one hand suggests that the refugee is barely given a voice, but on the other hand draws attention to the difficulties of meeting and listening to refugees at all – a meta-reflection on the circumstances of detention as virtually effacing refugees from public awareness. As a contrast, an analysis of the narrative mechanisms of the likewise highly mediated “The Detainee’s Tale as told to Ali Smith”19 elucidates the different forms of dialogicity utilized in Refugee Tales. Once again, the reader is confronted with a retelling of a refugee’s story: “The first thing that happens, you tell me, is that school stops. We are meeting in a room in a London university so that you can tell me, in anodyne safe surroundings, a bit about your life so far; I say so far because you aren’t old, you are maybe 30.”20 Whereas the sign for the retelling is clearly provided by “you tell me”, the mediation does not stop here: “You begin to speak. You speak as if picking your way over broken glass. You are graceful in your speaking … Here’s what you tell me. It’s all in the present tense, I realise afterwards, because it is all still happening.”21 The listener not only comments on what she hears but also on the form of presentation. The narrative form drawing attention to the mediation of the story is the use of the pronoun “you”: “You arrive at the farm when you’re six”.22 After his parents had died, he was held like a slave on a farm and had to work and endure severe beatings. Later he runs away and flies to London where he becomes a victim of human trafficking. By this form of narration, time and again the voice becomes physical, hence

“As Told to”  147 transferring the story into the present: “Room, van, warehouse. Warehouse, van, Room. Five years. Most weeks all week, 18 hours a day. You sit in silence now with me. You hold your head in your hands.”23 This short story experiments with the embeddedness of stories and perspectives, with layers of voice and with framing which Bakhtin describes as a central dialogic form: Another’s discourse, when introduced into a speech context, enters the speech that frames it not in a mechanical bond but in a chemical union (on the semantic and emotionally expressive level); the degree of dialogized influence, on the other hand can be enormous. For this reason we cannot, when studying the various forms for transmitting another's speech, treat any of these forms in isolation from the means for its contextualized (dialogising) framing – the one is indissolubly linked with the other.24 Furthermore, he emphasizes that framing can severely influence the utterance. In the given situation that unites the different stories, dialogizing is taken to new levels while unequal power relations that express themselves in vocal agency come into play: On the one hand, the refugees do not speak directly, but on the other hand, they are given a voice by several forms of mediation. In this narrative form, the two voices of listener/author and refugee enter into a “chemical union” and are “indissolubly linked”, so that the coming together and blending of voices are the factors determining the mediation. The short story “The Migrant’s Tale as told to Dragan Todorovic”25 pivots on issues of language and thus at the same time on voice and its mediation. Already in the beginning, the presence of the interpreter is foregrounded: “Our interpreter wears a dark suit and his stern beard makes him look worried. Aziz is dressed in loosely fitting clothes, at least a size bigger. He speaks English, I was told, but feels safer if the interpreter is with us.”26 As a contrast to this specific situation set in a certain time and the place of the detention centre, the tale about the merchants of Syria from “The Man of Law’s Tale” in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is juxtaposed in fragments with this story. In the current story set in the present time, however, problems of translation exist and complicate the dialogic process right from the beginning: I would like to start as far as possible from the recent events in his life, so I ask about his childhood in Syria. What were his favourite toys? The interpreter must have used the word ‘game’ when speaking of toys and Aziz says, ‘I was a basketball player, a team captain.’27 The desire to go back as far as possible from the recent events of migration shows the difficult ground the interviewer and the interviewee tread on – a ground mined with traumatic experiences. Here, translation influences and changes the story, highlighting the fraught process of mediation.

148  Miriam Wallraven Furthermore, in the story, language and the actual embodied process of narrating is emphasized both by drawing attention to oral speech and by the listener’s reaction based on his hearing the mere sound patterns without understanding the language: “His speech becomes broken at times. A short outburst of word in Arabic is followed by a sudden silence. It sounds like automatic weapons in close combat. It sounds like the streets of his hometown today.”28 Hence, attention is drawn to the spoken sound: Oral and written voices coexist. The parallel that the listener draws between the sounds of the refugee’s language and automatic weapons that the refugee is fleeing from is problematic, however, since it draws on the cliché that Arabic sounds harsh, loud, and threatening.29 This story reflects on mediation on several levels, not only on issues of language and translation but also on the production of meaning through the dialogic process between interviewer and interviewee; the interviewer’s comment that “This is the dark zone. I was asked not to ask about his imprisonment”30 underlines the fact that the dialogic situation of questions and answers influences and shapes the story. In “The Interpreter’s Tale as told to Carol Watts”,31 the reflection on language constitutes the central theme. Through the framing of the refugee’s words by the interpreter’s words, voices blend. It is certainly no coincidence that the term “interpreter” (as opposed to “translator”) implies that a translation is indeed inseparable from a simultaneous interpretation of the story. This takes up issues similar to the beginning of “The Migrant’s Tale”: Here is a passage of words. My words are given in evidence. My words form the skin of another’s arrival.32 In this passage, words are understood as embodied, and the interpreter’s words blend with the refugee’s words until they become inseparable. Thus, this – necessary – form of mediation, the translation, connects the voices and thus the people; it indeed makes them indistinguishable: “I say I”. By this dialogic mixing of voices, the refugee’s fate becomes the interpreter’s and in turn the interviewer’s and the readers’. Furthermore, by attempting to make voice audible, this story provides an awareness of different languages which is usually immediately erased by translation. Here, the attention to sound complements the mere contents as well as the meta-reflections on voice and language. Sound is made visible in writing in this story in order to literally make the readers listen, hence attempting to actualize Elbow’s argument concerning readers’ automatic aural projection of speech onto the text.33 Involving the reader directly with the demand to listen, the consonants of the foreign language are placed in a central position, stimulating an auditory sensation before drawing attention to the fact that this voice is merely “remembered”, since the process of migration has led to voicelessness. Telling the story thus has to be conceived as an attempt at breaking this silence and building a bridge not only between experiences and cultures but also between languages.

“As Told to”  149 In “The Student’s Tale as told to Helen Macdonald”,34 the readers are also involved explicitly, since it is structured as a dialogic process where reflections about language, translation, and the genesis of stories are central: “We sit at the table and I don’t know where to begin. I don’t know anything about you. It is hard to ask questions. You want me to ask questions, because you say it is easier to answer questions than tell your story.”35 Again, the listener’s questions determine the story: The listener is important in that s/he influences what is said and what is possible to say at all, while translation and language complicate this dialogue: And you write, in careful Persian numerals, 12, 2016. December. And I ask more questions, and you answer them, and when the English words won’t come, you translate using your phone, and this takes some time, and the sun slaps its flat golden light upon the table and the bowl of grapes and the teapot, all these quiet domestic things, as I wait to know what you might mean. Here are the words you look up while we talk: Apostate. Bigoted. Depraved. Hide.36 In this scene, the peaceful room with British symbols which conveys the impression of being at home clashes with the action of painstakingly translating with the help of the mobile phone and with the words that result from this search providing the reason for the student’s persecution leading to his flight. The story is one of being smuggled to the UK: “Days in the darkness inside a lorry on its way north. A freezer truck”.37 This text invites or rather forces the reader to imagine what such an existential situation feels like: none of us wants to know what this is like. We don’t want to know how it feels to not eat or drink or sleep for five days, to be sustained in terror and darkness merely through the hope that there is light on the other side. None of us want to know what it feels like to be threatened with a knife, as you were threatened.38 The inclusion of the reader is brought to a more general level by the following meta-reflections on telling stories – particularly about refugees: I think about all the stories we tell of refugees and how they are always one story or another, never both at once. Tragic stories or threatening stories. Victims or aggressors. Never complicated, always simple, always with clean edges. Easy pigeonholes to fit people who have been forced to take wing.39 Here, the listener/interviewer’s voice addresses simple and simplified forms of representation, which the two collections of Refugee Tales attempt to counter by instead employing intricate ways of dialogic narration, particularly framing and retelling.

150  Miriam Wallraven 11.3 Mediation and Representation: “As told to” Thus, the possibilities and limits of representing refugees’ stories in such a “real but fiction” paradigm have to be examined closely. The narrative dynamics of mediation indicated by the expression “as told to” are explored as an attempt at highlighting the complex negotiation of representation created in the contact zone of different perspectives, countries, languages, and voices. Since the current situation is complicated by globalization intertwined with various postcolonial constellations, Pratt’s definition of contact zones as “social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination – like colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out across the globe today”40 can also prove illuminating for the zones of contact in Refugee Tales. The utilization of a multiplicity of styles constitutes the structural and generic concept of Refugee Tales: The texts present different forms of dialogue and dialogism, beginning from an almost unmediated representation of refugee voices in which the protagonists speak for themselves to a dialogic venture based on heteroglossia and dialogicity to a superseding of refugee voices when the authors take over and mediate these voices in various ways. Together, they are presented as attempts to open a channel for the audience to begin to listen to the voices and stories of refugees and question the ubiquitous stereotypical media representations and the subsequent unequal power relations dependent on the silencing of refugees. “As told to” also emphasizes the crucial role of the listener: How can the readers be made to listen? Which voices do they hear? This approach emphasizes the fact that the readers can only come into contact with the refugees’ tales because these interviewers/authors went to listen to the refugees in this globalized liminal space of the detention centre. Consequently, a mediator is presented as urgently needed in order to end the invisibility and inaudibility of the detained refugees. The texts thus offer chances of listening and communication, however, at the same time they run the risk of silencing refugees and depriving them of vocal agency. Can the refugees speak? Or are they silenced as subaltern? And can they be heard?41 In her review of Refugee Tales, Ellis asks: “I do wonder, however, why their own words couldn’t have been read out by actors, or why, when it came to the book, they couldn’t be published anonymously”.42 This question is an urgent one, since, despite being conceptualized as texts raising awareness, Refugee Tales risk assuming an authority to speak for and on behalf of the refugees held in the detention centres, thus leading to a form of appropriation. Why do the refugees in Refugee Tales not tell the stories themselves – without mediation or at least with as little mediation as possible? In the “Afterword: Walking with Refugee Tales”,43 this dialogic situation with fictional techniques of mediation is explained. Two answers are given: the first is the fact that many of the refugees are still highly traumatized by their

“As Told to”  151 journey and the detention they experienced. The second reason for the impossibility of speaking in front of a large audience is given by the system of detention itself: “To be very clear, they very much wanted their tales to be told, but not in a way that might identify them. Anonymity was at a premium because, in the UK, people in the asylum system fear reprisal.”44 In the Afterword of the second volume of Refugee Tales, it is stated that mediation by the authors is only one of the project’s methods of telling stories. During this year’s walk … people who have been detained tell their stories for themselves. The tales presented here, by contrast, are collaborations, between the person whose story it is and the writer with whom they are in conversation. The experiences presented are real, and part of that reality is the necessity of anonymity in publication. That they are collaborations, however, means that, in a significant sense, the stories presented in this volume have at least been shared.45 “Collaboration” is the crucial word here, indicating the dialogic effort of the stories. Interestingly, whereas in the Prologues fictional intertextuality is highlighted, in the Afterwords Refugee Tales claim authenticity. However, it is by the fictional techniques of polyvocality, heteroglossia, framing and retelling that this dialogic basis of the process of migration can be represented as a venture including various actors and particularly those in the West who become witnesses and listen. A central trajectory of this mixture of literary forms is creating solidarity by providing contact zones, an aim for which the popularity of the authors involved in the project is deliberately used to attract attention. However, at the same time it still risks privileging a hegemonic representation of refugees. This difficult issue is reflected on in the texts themselves: Refugee Tales open up a space of reflection on the pressing issues of voice and representation by vocal agency. These experimental forms of narration can be read as a mirror of the migratory process, of its dialogical nature, of its continual creation and recreation of polyvocal contact zones. In this way, the narrative forms indicate the complexity of the underlying negotiation of representation that comes into existence in the process of globalized migration. Notes 1 For example, the BBC and The New York Times. 2 Anita Howarth and Yasmin Ibrahim, “Threat and Suffering: The Liminal Space of ‘The Jungle’,” in Liminal Landspaces: Travel, Experience and Spaces In-Between, eds. Hazel Andrews and Les Roberts (London: Routledge, 2012), 204. 3 Heidrun Friese, “Framing Mobility: Refugees and the Social Imagination,” in Migration: Changing Concepts, Critical Approaches, eds. Doris BachmannMedick and Jens Kugele (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018), 50. 4 Friese, 50.

152  Miriam Wallraven 5 Claire Gallien, “‘Refugee Literature’: What postcolonial theory has to say,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 54, no. 6 (2018), 722. 6 Peter, Elbow, “What Do We Mean When We Talk About Voice in Texts?” In Voices on Voice Perspectives, Definitions, Inquiry, ed. Kathleen Blake Yancey, (Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English, 1994), 6. 7 Elbow, 7. 8 Kathleen Blake Yancey, “Introduction: Definition, Intersection, and Difference Mapping the Landscape of Voice,” in Voices on Voice: Perspectives, Definitions, Inquiry, eds. Kathleen Blake Yancey (Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English, 1994), xx. 9 Linda M. Park-Fuller, “Bakhtin’s Heteroglossia and Polyphony, and the Performance of Narrative Literature,” Literature in Performance 7 (1986), 1–2. 10 Mikhail Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: U of Texas P, 1981), 332. 11 David Herd and Anna Pincus, eds, Refugee Tales as told to Ali Smith, Patience Agbabi, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Inua Ellams and many others (Manchester: Comma Press, 2016), 35–39. 12 The other texts are “The Dependant’s Tale as told to Marina Lewycka” (Herd/ Pincus 2016, 85–91) and “The Refugee’s Tale as told to Patience Agbabi” (Herd/ Pincus 2016, 125–132). The second volume includes one text which presents a refugee’s voice directly, namely “The Voluntary Returner’s Tale as told to Caroline Bergvall” (Herd/Pincus 2017, 63–72). 13 Herd and Pincus, 35. 14 Herd and Pincus, 41–47. 15 Herd and Pincus, 41. 16 Bakhtin, 341. 17 Herd and Pincus, 45. 18 Herd and Pincus, 43. 19 Herd and Pincus, 49–62. 20 Herd and Pincus, 49. 21 Herd and Pincus, 50. 22 Herd and Pincus, 51. 23 Herd and Pincus, 53. 24 Bakhtin, 340. 25 Herd and Pincus, 1–12. 26 Herd and Pincus, 1. 27 Herd and Pincus, 1–2. 28 Herd and Pincus, 4. 29 See Ellis 2016. 30 Herd and Pincus, 4. 31 Herd and Pincus, 63–68. 32 Herd and Pincus, 63. 33 Elbow 1994, 7. 34 David Herd and Anna Pincus, eds. Refugee Tales as Told to Jackie Kay, Helen Macdonald, Neel Mukherjee, Kamila Shamsie, and Many More… (Manchester: Comma Press, 2017), 3–9. 35 Herd and Pincus, 3. 36 Herd and Pincus, 4. 37 Herd/Pincus 2017, 5. 38 Herd and Pincus, 5. 39 Herd and Pincus, 8. 40 Mary Louise Pratt. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 4. 41 Compare Spivak 2010.

“As Told to”  153 42 Samantha Ellis, “Tales of Migration,” TLS June 22, 2016. https://www.the-tls. co.uk/articles/public/as-if-there-never-had-been-stories/. 43 Herd and Pincus 2016, 133. 44 Herd and Pincus, 133. 45 Herd and Pincus 2017, 123.

Bibliography Bakhtin, Mikhail. “Discourse in the Novel.” In The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, edited by Michael Holquist, 259–422. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981. Chaucer, Geoffrey. “The Canterbury Tales.” In The Riverside Chaucer, edited by Larry D. Benson, 3–328. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987. Elbow, Peter. “What Do We Mean When We Talk About Voice in Texts?” In Voices on Voice Perspectives, Definitions, Inquiry, edited by Kathleen Blake Yancey, 1–35. Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English, 1994. Ellis, Samantha. “Tales of Migration.” TLS June 22, 2016. https://www.the-tls.co.uk/ articles/public/as-if-there-never-had-been-stories/. Last accessed: June 5, 2022. Friese, Heidrun. “Framing Mobility: Refugees and the Social Imagination.” In Migration: Changing Concepts, Critical Approaches, edited by Doris BachmannMedick and Jens Kugele, 45–62. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018. Gallien, Claire. “‘Refugee Literature’: What Postcolonial Theory Has to Say.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 54, no. 6 (2018): 721–726. Herd, David, and Anna Pincus, editors. Refugee Tales as told to Ali Smith, Patience Agbabi, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Inua Ellams and many others. Manchester: Comma Press, 2016. Herd, David, and Anna Pincus, eds. Refugee Tales as told to Jackie Kay, Helen Macdonald, Neel Mukherjee, Kamila Shamsie, and many more… Manchester: Comma Press, 2017. Howarth, Anita, and Yasmin Ibrahim. “Threat and Suffering: The Liminal Space of ‘The Jungle’.” In Liminal Landspaces: Travel, Experience and Spaces In-Between, edited by Hazel Andrews and Les Roberts, 200–216. London: Routledge, 2012. Park-Fuller, Linda M. “Bakhtin’s Heteroglossia and Polyphony, and the Performance of Narrative Literature.” Literature in Performance 7 (1986): 1–12. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’: Revised Edition, from the ‘History’ Chapter of Critique of Postcolonial Reason.” In Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea, edited by Rosalind C. Morris, 21–78. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Yancey, Kathleen Blake. “Introduction: Definition, Intersection, and Difference Mapping the Landscape of Voice.” In Voices on Voice: Perspectives, Definitions, Inquiry, edited by Kathleen Blake Yancey, vii–xxiv. Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English, 1994.

12 “I Am Also a We”* Pathic Communities and the Globalization of Affect in the Wachowskis’ Sense8 Paromita Patranobish In the final scene of Lana and Lilly Wachowski’s Netflix series Sense8 (2015– 2018), an orgiastic choreography of bodies serves as a metonymic culmination of the show’s speculative kernel: an intersubjective community fostered by a particular kind of shared consciousness. In this telling scene as couples retire to their bedrooms after a night of postnuptial revelry, sexual intimacy is exploded out of realms of private encounter and contact and made into a communally accessible experience. Pleasure’s corporeal and affective charge is transmitted across multiple subjectivities. The possibilities of the erotic, both in its speculative capacity within the narrative scheme of things and as mediated by cinematic technology, are virtualized and amplified as a vector of sensation passing through discrete bodily selves, deterritorializing them beyond spatio-temporal and epidermal limits. No longer contained within or structured by normative indices of racial, gendered, economic, and cultural identity, the intercorporeally open, porous, and connected bodies of these telepathic characters, or ‘sensates’ as they are called in the narrative, belonging to a separate hominid species, the homo sensorium, offer alternative posthuman possibilities with which to reconfigure hegemonic conceptions of materiality, subjectivity, and privacy. The conversation in the episode titled “Obligate Mutualisms”, in which homo sensoriums are introduced, takes place inside the Rijksmuseum and uses Rembrandt’s 1642 painting The Night Watch as a coded reference point. The painting itself both in terms of its subject and visual aesthetics – the use of chiaroscuro to offset the anarchic tension underpinning the scene, the dramatic interplay of light and shadow creating an animated force field of contending, heterogeneous ideas and intentions, and its dynamic, kinaesthetic arrangement of bodies transforming the painting’s surface into a dialogic space – functions as an intertextual cipher extending and glossing the narrative’s concerns. Sense8’s closing scene, in its deliberate visual vocabulary, its heightened use of chiaroscuro, the dynamic grouping of bodies suggestive of a field of divergent energies, echoes and references Rembrandt’s scene of restless civic vigilantes to underscore both thematic and conceptual similarities between them. *  Sense8, “I am Also a We,” Netflix video, 8:40, December 26, 2021, http://www.netflix.com/ title/80025744. DOI: 10.4324/9781003395379-16

“I Am Also a We”  155 Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his late phenomenology takes up this painting as well, identifying in its Baroque aesthetics a study of spatial and pictorial depth that he then extrapolates into his philosophy of ontological depth as a structuring principle of the body in its fundamental situatedness in the world. According to Merleau-Ponty, Rembrandt radicalizes the traditional format of the group portrait by introducing the rhythmic logic of dissonant movements, and the action of nonhuman elements. This Baroque crowding and intrinsic variation of the space of representation with multiple mobilities, orientations, and occurrences create for Merleau-Ponty the proliferation of “incompossible” perspectives.1 In “The Eye and the Mind”, Merleau-Ponty performs a detailed analysis of Rembrandt’s use of shadows in The Night Watch. Instances of darkness, obscurity, and partial visibility in the painting are suggestive of the presence of what he variously calls the invisible, the unthought, and the unknowable: a zone of otherness pervading, lining, and enabling the formation of vision while itself remaining unavailable to capture. In Rembrandt’s and the Wachowskis’ Baroque scenographies, we are offered visual universes in which bodies are articulated in two ways, both of which are taken up in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology as the doubled and mutually imbricated ways in which bodies exist and occupy their environments. Firstly bodies exist as dynamically organized entities engaged in various active, pragmatic, task-oriented, and pedagogic processes in the course of daily existence which reconfigure the subject as a fundamentally relational structure, a set of local intentionalities positioned in relation to and acquiring legibility through constant engagements with a global horizon comprising other subjects, materialities, phenomena, and modalities of being, including linguistic or aesthetic configurations. More significantly, living and sentient bodies are incarnated in an ontological structure of common participation that nourishes and supports the embodied subject by sustaining multifaceted channels of contact, exchange, communication, transposition, and interpenetration between active sensing subject bodies and passive sensed object bodies. This latter macro-corporeal armature both undergirding and encompassing individual subjects facilitating modes of intercorporeal encounters between them is also inhabited by zones of potentiality, porosity, pregnancy, areas that remain outside conceptuality, while offering sites and possibilities for new forms and ontologies of subjectivation. The shadows in Rembrandt’s painting that invoke liminal spaces and transitional states are part of a set of heuristic figures of which the corporeal schema and the Flesh appear most prominently in Merleau-Ponty’s work on the body. The Flesh, as Merleau-Ponty’s choice of terminology suggests, references at once the particular, anatomically identifiable living body that senses and actively engages with the world, as well as a general ontological principle animating this same world, conditioning channels of contact and communication with it, and providing this always already embroiled nature of all existence with registers of meaning and legibility. In the chapter titled “Intertwining”, Merleau-Ponty rethinks sensation, represented by the haptic

156  Paromita Patranobish entwinement of vision and touch, seeing and tactile palpation, no longer as a subjective or anthropological or even an organic faculty shared by living beings, but instead in terms of the structure, manner, and conditions of its production through ontological predicates in a precognitive, pre-individual world. Just as sensation, whether vision or tactility, is a specific capacity and mode of awareness bringing into relief certain objects of sensation, sensation also references a third space, a realm between the sensing body and the sensed object, between sensation as it emerges in bodily experience and sensation as it inheres in, inhabits and adheres to the object’s sensible form. In this configuration, sense perception belongs to neither and constitutes, for MerleauPonty, a virtual zone in which the object-as-sensed and the subject-as-sensing are re-embodied and reincarnated in their mutual entwinement. In its positing of this third space as a deterritorialized and global sensorium comprising both the fulfilment of sensuous encounters – the production of vision in the entangled locus of the viewer and the visible, as well as the impossibility of the substance and contents of any sensation achieving closure or totality – flesh institutes a field of virtuality, a zone suspended between the actual and the imagined, matter and ideality, phonation and sign. As a situated and processual ontology, the sensory body and the domain of sensed particulars coexist interchangeably as crystallizations of Being without becoming wholly actualized into fixed and stable identities. This chapter wishes to bring into a productive conversation this ontological conception of the flesh and the neoliberal post-industrial mediated formulation of the technological virtual. Using the phenomenological concept of the flesh as a structuring principle, I wish to engage with the production of speculative bodies in Netflix’s in-house series Sense8. I aim to examine how the body is posited as a site of questioning and destabilizing neoliberalism’s atrophying of subjectivity, and its emergence as a locus for materializing alternative possibilities for thinking about community, labour including artistic and creative labour, modes of inhabiting time and space, new forms of sensory and cognitive recalibration, and the shape of insurgent social solidarities. However, this valorization of corporeal existence as a ground for potential resistance and pathway for emancipatory politics itself needs to be seen as part of a narrative chronotope that is embedded in the very dispositifs of late liberalism that it critiques, in this case embodied by the aggressively marketed and now near ubiquitous international phenomenon of digital streaming. I will interrogate the limits of the model of corporeally and affectively realized sociality, shared consciousness, and radical empathy elaborated in the show, when juxtaposed in relation to “a ‘grammar of transnationalism’” employed by Netflix's in-house productions which in turn “can be translated and integrated into existing cultural conditions of a national media system”.2 I will also examine how digital streaming as a format in conjunction with certain speculative narratives instrumentalizes the creation of a “globalized commons of networked spaces”3 and participates in “the discursive production of a global middle class”.4

“I Am Also a We”  157 Sense8 revolves around eight characters belonging to a distinct species called homo sensorium whose existence has been kept secret through an internal amnesty among the species itself and societies of sympathetic human allies and collaborators. The series launches us into a moment of increased threat to the species in the wake of 9/11 – xenophobia allegorized here through the lens of speciesism. A medico-juridical organization called Biologic Preservation Organization, with international surveillance, scientific, and recruitment networks, is seen as working towards subjecting sensate individuals to wide-ranging biopolitical experimentation, physical incarceration, and neurological manipulation, and eventually elimination or deployment in a paramilitary outfit of suicide killers remotely controlled through their empathic neurobiology. As the series opens, the bodies of the eight characters are shown as subjected to regimes of surveillance, control, disciplining, and violation: Will Gorski, a Chicago police officer, invisibilized through childhood neglect and inhabiting the shadow of his father’s alcoholism and failed career in the force; Riley Blue, a DJ in London with a traumatic past whose body has been marked and tabooed in her home-town in Iceland as being ‘hexed’ and who further subjects herself to self-harm; Wolfgang, a thief and assassin in Berlin dealing with the persistent trauma of childhood abuse, battery, and incest; Lito, a gay actor in Mexico who has built his film career and public image upon the performance of swashbuckling hyper-masculinity; and Nomi, a transgender woman in California whose body and desires are either pathologized, policed, and misgendered, or invalidated by transphobic members of the queer community; Kala, a pharmaceutical scientist in Bombay, whose sexuality is monitored and policed by the norms of a prospective heteronormative marriage; Capheus a bus driver in Nairobi who has to negotiate with political violence, social precarity, and biopolitically engineered disease and medical exploitation; and Sun, a martial arts expert and businesswoman in Seoul whose body is constantly commodified and sexualized by a pervasive culture of corporate misogyny. Each character, however, negotiates with local power structures through various kinds of individual and subaltern embodied resistances, either by means of performative re-appropriations of the affective possibilities of artistic, intellectual, or bodily practices – music, acting, narcotics, martial arts, spiritual rituals, sexual dissidence, or by deploying cyber vigilantism, political activism, and forms of civil disobedience. Early in the series, Nomi makes a passionate speech during Pride Week highlighting the nature of sanctioned discrimination that reduces sexual and social minorities to “something offensive…something you would avoid maybe even pity”5 which then becomes a voice-over for the other characters as they grapple with their individual struggles, connecting the dispersed characters and their specific experiences of marginality in an intersectional matrix. Nomi ends her speech with a rallying call for visibility as a mode of radical protest that turns individual participation into an assertion of collective rights and inclusivity for the unrepresented. Her slogan “I am also a we”,

158  Paromita Patranobish which lends this chapter its title, is at the same time part of her queer activism and indicative of the series’ overarching speculative stance on questions of community, difference, the nature of personal identity, the role of corporeal life, and the politics and ethics of interpersonal, intercultural, and ecological coexistence in the age of digitally mediated surveillance capitalism and the planetary depredations of the Anthropocene. In Sense8, thus, a socio-political and historically mediated diachronic axis of intersectional justice converges with a speculative synchronic axis of sensory and affective interconnectivity to provide the chronotope of fantasy with a discursive basis in the specific formations of contemporary neoliberal capitalist geopolitics. The chiasmic nature of the Sensates’ universe is depicted in the first episode in the way in which the contents of one individual’s perceptual experience is transposed into and overlaps with those of another. We see this happening first with hearing, the sonic landscape of a specific place entering into and permeating other spaces well beyond the range of human audition. Will in Chicago is disturbed out of his sleep by the high decibel sounds of a rave in London orchestrated by Riley, tracing these to an unoccupied nextdoor apartment that he thinks is the source of what he hears. The spontaneous and simultaneous verbalization of a single expression connects Nomi and Lito. An object, a flying bird that lands on Capheus in Kenya appears, incongruously, as a hallucinatory reflection on Sun’s table in a corporate office in Korea, while local meteorological conditions become a holographic link between Kala and Wolfgang in different climate zones. Not only does the episode create a multisensory map of the Sensate experience, the paradigm of shared sensations establishes two premises in relation to the question of the body and the mobilization of corporeality as a form of politically meaningful collectivity. The shared sensorium then acquires specific functions divided between “visiting”, a process of transplanting oneself to the site of another sensate through a telekinetic projection involving copresence and the ability to communicate cross-territorially, and “sharing”, a more pervasive phenomenon in which cognitive, neural, and perceptual contents are transmitted from one individual to another like packets of data. There are several instances in the series when this corporeally achieved empathic process is compared to the work of digital mediation  – “facetime without a phone”6 thus underscoring the narrative’s modelling of the workings of the sensates’ expanded perceptual and cognitive capacities to the networked operations of cybernetic systems. The bodies of the sensates thus serve as allegories of the posthuman body of the consumer/user of digital media whose fleshly corporeality situated in specific sociocultural temporalities is transformed into virtual and algorithmic data and transmitted across devices and interfaces, even as the sensates’ modality of fluid sensory communication often runs the risk of becoming an overly generalized paradigm for the functioning of post-industrial globalized capital as a set of flows of incorporeal goods, information, simulations across geopolitical boundaries and rapid deterritorializations of existing political formations including that of the nation-state’s policed

“I Am Also a We”  159 military-industrial body politic. However, before we examine this possibility of a dangerous conflation between the speculative vision of the series and neoliberal capitalism’s dispositifs, I would like to outline some of the ways in which Sense8’s reconfiguration of the body offers a set of heuristic tools with which to interrogate modernity’s fundamental epistemic assumptions about the bounded centrality of the anthropological subject, and analyze the implications of this anti-humanist trajectory for reconceptualizing social relations and social and ontological difference. One of the distinguishing characteristics of sensate existence is their capacity for asexual and incorporeal reproduction. This is explained as a form of embodied labour in which a particular sensate of any gender or age can give birth through a process of cognitive and sensory recruitment, forming groups of individuals who share a common biological birth date but are otherwise dispersed across geography and circumstance. Being “reborn as a sensate”7 then serves as a form of radical intervention into the paradigm of heteronormative reproductive labour and its use, as critics like Sylvia Wynter and Silvia Federici have shown, by market forces as an apparatus of capital’s self-perpetuation through the control and deployment of bodies as sites for the production of labour force.8 This subversive rematerialization of the reproductive paradigm of primitive accumulation ruptures the circuitry between bodies, the gendered and sexed productive matrix of compulsory heterosexuality through which bodies are rendered materially legible and cast within grids of normative humanness, and the labour–capital nexus. It also intervenes into conceptions of life that identify it too firmly with biologistic processes, and grounds it instead in a non-anthropocentric, immaterial model of generativity. We are shown Angelica “giving birth”9 to the cluster of eight protagonists of the series through a synaesthetic commingling of vision and tactility. Seeing and being seen, a reciprocal exchange of gazes in which Angelica’s vision “I can see them”10 is also at once a spectral and simultaneous incarnation of her presence in the field of her sensate children’s visibility, open to being intercepted by their gazes. The sensates’ mode of sympathetic pregnancy serves as what Merleau-Ponty calls “the labor of vision” — birthing as a mode of primordial figuration that takes the principle of generation out of the closed schemas of the modern biopolitical regimes of property, population, and possession through which natality is socially structured and transforms it into a testament of the “work of vision…an open circuit running from the seeing body to the visible body…a technique of the body that figures and amplifies the metaphysical structure of our flesh.”11 Birth then becomes a folding or plication, as Merleau-Ponty echoing Leibniz would suggest, of the very ontic fabric. By securing it in a sensuous economy of gazes and a spectral multiplication of subjectivities re-embodied in this encounter as new kinds of bodies interrelated through the irruptive force of an event rather than the foundationalist metaphysics of history, Sense8 reorients the politics of natality from its association with a stratified and statistical regime of reproduction to becoming a space of ethics in so far as the process of sensate

160  Paromita Patranobish gestation constitutes the opening up of questions of compathy, coexistence, and the contentious accommodation of differences—in short, what Scott Marratto, summarizing the integrally relational semiotics of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of being, calls “diacritical intercorporeity.”12 In Sense8 the body is imagined as a set of capacities as well as a field of latencies and indeterminate potentialities that render it open and susceptible to affective, technological, and material modulations and compositions with other bodies, objects, forces, and intensities both molecular and macroscopic. One motif through which this corporeal imaginary is enacted in the series is in several instances of fighting in which a single body, in an action sequence always already perceptually shared with the rest of the cluster, forms assemblages with these other bodies. When Capheus is attacked in Nairobi by local goons, his rudimentary fighting skills are supplemented by Sun’s martial arts tactics as she fights her opponent in a wrestling match. Capheus’ vulnerable body is both occupied and augmented by the Sun’s bodily knowledge, comportment, and technique, creating a new configuration of the individual body as a transindividual assemblage that is capable, in its empathic motility, of transcending racial, gendered, and geophysical barriers. Capheus tellingly encapsulates the corporate nature of this new body as assemblage when he calls Sun the spirit of Jean-Claude, a reference to his own penchant for action movies and his reconstruction of his own bodily identity as an aggregation of multiplicities that include cinematic components from Western popular culture, the knowledge of oriental martial arts, and the somatic inscription of his socio-political circumstances. In contrast to the sensates’ model of embodied globality, the narrative posits the machinations of the Biologic Preservation Organization, a fictional international organization that is directed towards the suppression and elimination of the sensate way of life. The BPO’s target is not just the biological matter of the body understood as a form of species life subject to regulation; it seeks to control the brain, intervening at the level of its neural architecture and the workings of subjectivity, memory, affect, and desire. In this basic orientation the Biologic emerges in the narrative as an appendage of what Byung-Chul Han calls “neoliberal psychopolitics”13 that takes the “integral human being,” the realm of interior “psychography” as opposed to the biopolitical target of “demography” as the “object of exploitation” in order to manipulate subjectivity at the level of its molecular and immaterial organization.14 Milton’s use of the field of sensate virtualities to create a regime of control is thus analogous to what Lazzarato identifies as a key aspect of contemporary neoliberalism’s bodily dimension in its transition from disciplinary to control societies: “If disciplines moulded bodies by constituting habits mainly in bodily memory, the societies of control modulate brains and constitute habits mainly in spiritual memory.”15 In his analysis of the micropolitics of post-Fordist, hyperindustrial capitalism, Italian Marxist theorist Maurizio Lazzarato argues that the representational forms and semiotic structures that capital acquires in the current global

“I Am Also a We”  161 scenario, the specific technologies it uses to mobilize, disseminate, and perpetuate its nexuses of profit and control over vast tracts of the planet, its particular modes of restructuring classical economic relations between labour and commodity, workers, consumers, and producers, object and subject by bringing new sites of operation and novel sources of revenue within its expanding ambit, and its capacity under current neoliberal policies and praxes to radically reconfigure conceptual and cognitive frameworks, including those that undergird perceptions of time, space and matter, cannot be adequately theorized using older Marxist models. Departing from traditional Marxian accounts of power and domination as products of ideology anchored in stable base–superstructure arrangements, and reworking Foucauldian models of subjectivation as power’s generative capacity to act upon bodies, Lazzarato demonstrates that any critique of neoliberal capitalism needs to take into account its fluid, permeable, unstable, and dissipative nature. In Lazzarato's assessment, capitalism is not merely a regime of monetary constraint and economic imperatives; it is an organization of “signs, machines of expression and collective assemblages of enunciation (law, knowledges, languages, public opinion, etc.)” that attempts to “capture, codify, and control virtualities.”16 To put it simply, in neoliberal societies the logic of capital penetrates to modify, regulate, and manage the deep structure of subjectivity, not merely its normative or socialized dimensions, but the range of affects, dispositions, memories, neurological mechanisms, synaptic flows, energetic fields, chemical compositions, cellular and chromosomal organizations, and molecular behaviours that traverse through, proliferate, and compose the body’s plane of immanence. Capitalist processes then create new regimes of subjectivation that no longer simply indoctrinate, normativize, or hegemonize singular bodies but reconfigure the body’s open circuits of exchange and assembly with other bodies and objects. Through devices, linguistic and semiotic codes, and technical objects but also through asignifying and affective registers, capitalist dispositifs implode and redistribute the phenomenological field of corporeal intertwining into fixed and codified grids. Capitalism as a set of what Bernard Stiegler calls “mnemotechnical organs”17 machines that plant themselves at “the most deterritorialized level (the virtuality of the action between brains)”18 manages to establish its global reach thus producing new cartographies of globalized subjectivities through its capacity to technologically exteriorize neural, biochemical, and mnemonic processes and render these into objects of “sociopolitical and biopolitical controls through the economic investments of social organizations.”19 The speculative model of transindividual consciousness valorized in Sense8 as an alternative to genocidal anthropocentrism on the one hand and neuropolitical control societies on the other, then, needs to be placed in the context of existing dispositifs of neoliberal globalized capitalism. One way of arriving at a more nuanced and critical reading of the paradigm of homo sensorium and its collapse in the series’ imagination with forms of ecological coexistence, is to interrogate its attitude towards cultural difference. The first

162  Paromita Patranobish time the viewer encounters the question of cultural difference is in the credits itself. The individual locations of the sensates is referenced through a montage of multiple locations and cultural activities. This concatenation of shots not only references the diverse cultural backgrounds of the characters but also serves as a visual allegory for the narrative’s speculative imaginary of global relations, particularly its model of the “psycellium’s”20 capacity to produce a planetary network of pathically connected subjectivities that becomes an alternative to, and even a mode of resisting the depredations of global capital. However, the mapping of local difference as a set of juxtaposed, fragmented, nonlinearly arranged visual vignettes that replicate touristic templates is also laden with stereotypes which are themselves products of globalized media, part of its image culture and the latter’s pervasive links with surveillance, advertisement, and commoditization. Here certain imagistic compositions make deliberate use of visual iconicity: large crowds in an idol immersion procession in Bombay, panoramic shots of African grasslands, high-rise buildings in South-east Asian financial hubs, the parliament in London, slums, urban squatters, and scenes of squalor in third-world nations serve as indexical signs reinscribing cultural specificity in a predetermined semiotic matrix. The paradigm of planetarity being posited in the syntagmatic arrangement of images leads to a reinforcing of Western representational idioms of difference as a marker of heterogeneity and inclusion without actually bringing to crisis the institutionalized and financialized structures of consensus and consumption that support the production and dissemination of these indices of local difference. India and Africa in this schema remain as cultures of deprivation identified through a set of signs manufactured by and circulated within globalized capitalism’s force field, replaying to the Western viewer a deeply mediated and mediatized framework for apprehending the Global South. This visual third-worldization of the Global South continues in the plot as well in the insistent association of Kala with the symbols and semiotics of religion and elaborate paraphernalia of religious rituals. Similarly Capheus, despite his obsession with Western cinema, is constantly positioned in relation to a horizon of corruption, money laundering, and tribalism, his affinity with Van Damme the action hero itself serving to signify and ground his African subjectivity in an inescapable rubric of immanence of which his aspirational desire for transcendence (commented on in the series in the contrast between his home in a slum and a Samsung large-screen television that offers him a valorized escape into the hypnotic allure of globalized media construed in this case as an empowering experience producing a universalized and idealized affect of ‘courage’) becomes a symptom (this is repeated at a societal level in the penchant among Capheus’ colleagues at the bus station for naming their vehicles after idolized figures from Western popular media and culture, Obama and Batman for instance). The critical possibilities of a planetary ecology are thus undermined in several ways in the series through its recourse to a neoliberal lexicon of

“I Am Also a We”  163 indexical signs to depict national, ethnic, and regional differences. Thus, in a telling scene, Nomi finds herself entangled with the experiences of Kala and Capheus facing mob violence and civic disruption in their respective regions. Meant to create an intersectional tableau in which each character oppressed separately by gendered violence, class disparity, and religious fundamentalism and thus experiencing a connected set of affects, the scene ultimately becomes one of a white character looking at the chaotic, irrational and primitive nature of life in the Global South from the outside. Nomi’s sensate empathy, translated in terms of the coded visual semantics of the scene, becomes a metaphor for white discomfort and alienation in third-world spaces and in the threat posed by these spaces to human (white) security and dignity. Africa and India in this episode and in the rest of the series are construed as areas of darkness marked predominantly by lawlessness, political corruption, and anarchy, with gang warfare and religiously motivated mobocracy serving not so much as glosses on real socio-political problems but as ciphers that help the white viewer to recognize, slot, exoticize, and demonize cultural difference. This reductive reassertion of difference as a set of indexical signs, itself in keeping with neoliberalism’s primary representational mode of the conversion of the complexity of experience into a mediated regime of signs and images relayed through the tantalizing rhythmic absorption of the flat screen, is accompanied by a constant integration and whitewashing of socio-political and cultural nuance into a faux-humanist rhetoric of the universality of ‘human’ experience and the question of difference narrowed down to a concept of individual difference, where the individual becomes a surface, an exteriorized and accessorized self, identified through a set of abstract personality traits mapped on an axis of choice, autonomy, and freedom, uncritically and apolitically applied to subjects across the geopolitical spectrum, a fetishization of difference decontextualized and extrapolated into a neo-monadic singularity measurable solely in relation to a horizon of capitalism’s regime of signs, services, desires, and infrastructures. This is best demonstrated in the scene in which Lito and Capheus overlap and change places as they each try to face the questions of contrarian reporters. Here the Mexican reporter’s homophobia and desire to sensationalize Lito’s sexuality is carelessly clubbed with Zakia’s politically charged and socially informed concern with the relation between race, popular culture, and affective motivation. To Zakia’s question “by courage you mean white courage”,21 a reference to Capheus’ deriving inspiration from a white action hero to combat local problems, Capheus elaborates on the colour-blind nature of courage: “what does courage have to do with a person’s skin?”22 This response is further reinforced by Lito’s condemnation of all ‘labels’ and redefinition of identity in terms of singularity as pure difference without context, identity as a cancellation or subsumption of historical, socio-political, cultural narratives of influence and subjectification into an ‘I’ both empty and thus endlessly qualifiable and appropriable.

164  Paromita Patranobish Yet Sense8’s racial politics is reflected in its treatment of Black, Latina, and South Asian bodies, grounding them despite their capacity for sensory transcendence in a bodily immanence delineated at the denotative level as their respective cultures’ heavy encoding and inscription of their bodies, and at the connotative level in the series’ narrative schema as bodies constantly subjected to violence and violation, wounding, and risk. Thus as characters facing the penal system or extrajudicial forms of power, both Sun and Capheus are repeatedly depicted as subjected to torture, attempted murder, and battery, while Kala’s body, caught in a heavily patriarchal culture, is shown as laden with its symbolic and material accoutrements, reaching a culmination in the wedding scene and the heavy, suffocating nature of her trousseau. While on the one hand this dematerialization of the raced and coloured body is imputed in the narrative’s overarching commentary on the precarious status of bodies within third-world cultures, the narrative itself colludes in and amplifies this precarity through its unequal and insistent association of these bodies with violence and injury, an association that often borders on sensationalism and fetishization, and thus participates in a neoliberal racial imaginary, its white masculinist voyeurism, liberal fantasies of racial oppression, and complicity in structural formations aimed at the exploitation, violation, brutalization, and elimination of racial others. By attributing the continual precarization of raced bodies to the local conditions of the Global South, the narrative both participates in furthering the representational and discursive tropes about local cultures as well as occludes capitalism’s deep complicity in structures of mass precarization and racialized oppression of genocidal proportions. Sense8’s conception of subjectivity underlying and informing its speculative idea of community is thus in keeping with neoliberal ideology’s extraction of the individual self as the site of techno-scientific modulation and mutation, the installing of its economic framework as a process of singularization. This capitulation to a dual regime consisting of the flat ontology of a decontextualized self on the one hand, and a semiotic production of utopian multiculturalism, on the other, is in keeping with Sense8’s production as a Netflix Original. Sense8’s utopian resolution of the question of difference and community in which an uncritical accommodation of local specificities into a post-identitarian, posthuman and post-national configuration is posited as a desired paradigm for the new social, ends up becoming an aesthetic reduplication of a spatial imaginary sustained by new forms of global capital. The concept of a global(ized) flesh is also one that is premised on a structure of erasures, elisions, and violent displacements of culturally and historically grounded material contingencies, including linguistic difference—English, understood and spoken by everyone in the narrative, becomes a mark of pathic transparency, while this sensorially mediated intercorporeality registered as the translatability and exchangeability of multiple expressive cultures into a common master language which is also the language of communicative capitalism, implicitly serves to reinforce global capital’s geographies and geopolitics of scale.23

“I Am Also a We”  165 Sense8 is part of a recent interest in the speculative mode as an emergent genre within internet video streaming cultures and can be traced to neoliberal media’s neopolitical processes of subjectivation, its focus on the incorporeal and virtual matter of embodied subjects as a site for effectuating various posthuman machinic assemblages. Recent scholarship on the status of speculative genres, science fiction and fantasy under neoliberal market conditions and their intervention into representational regimes, and the relationship between speculative fiction and speculative finance as engagements with possible futures has looked at the particular conduciveness of the speculative as an epistemic and aesthetic framework facilitating neoliberal capitalism’s investment in subjective autonomy, personal freedom, and technological and machinic restructurings of environments, including interior environments.24 Taken in the context of emerging forms of corporate new media which includes video and audio streaming digital platforms like Netflix, Amazon Prime, Spotify, Hotstar, and Hulu, the conventional humanist indices through which the subjectivity of the spectator-consumer are construed undergo incremental transformation, such that it is no longer possible to ascertain or conceptualize clear-cut distinctions between subject and object, consumer and product, body and medium, real and virtual, local and global. Recent scholarship on Netflix and other digital streaming platforms has underscored this capacity of new media technologies to bring about changes in traditional viewing practices through the deployment of algorithmic mechanisms and recommendation strategies. These technological mechanisms simultaneously tap into and refashion individual taste as well as collective preferences all the while inserting new modes of temporalization into the spectatorial experience in which predictive technology confounds demarcations between the present and the future.25 Similarly, scholarly analyses of contemporary binge-watching practices have demonstrated how habits of compulsive spectatorship are mobilized through “long-form programming, with one narrative told across eight- or thirteen-hour episodes assumed to be watched in rather quick succession.”26 According to Grandinetti, this narrative format intervenes into “the temporality of the television experience”27 by consolidating into single storytelling loops without commercial breaks, earlier distributed and episodic patterns of viewer engagement with the screen. Netflix’s emergence as a hybrid, synthetic, and citational platform that combines in an intermedial web of cross-pollination and cross-referencing, the resources of various analogue devices, formats, and technologies from computer screens, gaming consoles, tablets and mobile interfaces, to the more traditional home video and televisual modes creates new regimes of attention and perception. At the level of global geopolitics, commercial streaming media, as Greenberg and Nichols and Martinez have argued, in different instances manipulates the spatial politics of media consumption by entering the international market and altering in a calculated manner prevailing circuits of distribution, licensing, and accessibility of content.28 As Ramon Lobato argues “Netflix, in other words, is a case study with larger relevance to ongoing debates in media

166  Paromita Patranobish studies about convergence, disruption, globalization, and cultural imperialism.”29 Within the particular spatio-temporal imaginaries and distributive geographies engendered by contemporary neoliberal economic and cultural regimes, the speculative content of sci-fi and fantasy genres acquires a complex critical valence. As new forms and media of subjectivation, speculative modes in their epistemic and semantic frameworks of world-building as well as in their modes of dissemination via post-televisual and digital channels of ownership and distribution, can become allied with contemporary globalized capitalism, despite the seemingly radical questions that they seem to pose at the level of narrative digesis. This essay has attempted to undertake a critical reading of a contemporary Netflix production in order to analyze its engagements with the triadic formation of capitalism–globalization–neoliberalism. It has tried to demonstrate how the resources of speculative thinking and figuration offer tools to both represent and critique one particular aspect of contemporary neoliberal capitalism: its production of a certain kind of subjectivity that, while constructed along the lines of self-determination, choice, autonomy, and freedom, is also at once constrained by what Lazzarato calls forms of machinic enslavement. My essay attempts to identify the body in the Wachowskis’ narrative as a site at which neoliberalism’s control of the incorporeal, biochemical, and asignifying dimensions of subjectivity enters into complex and conflicted relations with alternative speculative imaginaries within which corporeality is relocated. Using phenomenological theories of intercorporeality, virtuality, flesh of the world, and the social and ethical dimensions of bodily perception on the one hand, and recent Marxist retheorizations of the base–superstructure relations to foreground the role of immaterial labour and representational regimes in producing unprecedented modalities of subjectification on the other, this essay has attempted to reflect on and explore the ways in which cinematic speculative imaginaries might offer ways of thinking about the body beyond biopolitical and anthropocentric tropes towards a conception of bodies that are radically dislocated and ruptured from within, open and porous at points of primordial contact in ecological and ethical enmeshings with nonhuman subjects and planetary formations and processes. Notes 1 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind” in The Merleau-Ponty Reader, eds. Ted Toadvine and Leonard Lawlor (Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 358. 2 Mareike Jenner, Netflix and the Re-invention of Television, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 237. 3 Chris Featherman, Discourses of Ideology and Identity Social Media and the Iranian Election Protests (New York: Routledge, 2015), 104. 4 Erika Polson, “Belonging to the Network Society: Social Media and the Production of a New Global Middle Class,” Communication, Culture and Critique 4 (2011): 144–163, 145.

“I Am Also a We”  167 5 Sense8, “I am Also a We,” 6:42. 6 Sense8, “We Will be Judged by the Courage of Our Hearts,” 34:10. 7 Sense8, “Obligate Multualisms,” 34:54. 8 See Wynter, 2000; 2003 and Federici, 2004; 2012. 9 Sense8, “Obligate Mutualisms,” 34:50. 10 Sense8, 34:54. 11 Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 359. 12 Scott L. Marratto, The Intercorporeal Self: Merleau-Ponty on Subjectivity (Albany: SUNY Press, 2012), 181. 13 Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, trans. Erik Butler (New York: Verso, 2017), 24. 14 Han, Psychopolitcs, 29. 15 Maurizio Lazzarato, “The Concepts of Life and the Living in the Societies of Control,” in Deleuze and the Social, eds. Martin Fuglsang and Bent Meier Sørensen (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 186. 16 Lazzarato, “The Concepts of Life,” 174. 17 Bernard Stiegler, For a New Critique of Political Economy (London: Polity, 2010), 34. 18 Maurizio Lazzarato, “The Concepts of Life and the Living in the Societies of Control,” 180. 19 Bernard Stiegler, For a New Critique, 34. 20 Sense8, “What is Human?” 10:12. 21 Sense8, “Who Am I”, 10:33. 22 Sense8, “Who Am I,” 11:39 23 Here I am deriving from Saskia Sassen’s critique of globalization’s ascendency and propagation as a planetary absolute through a simultaneous weakening of the national as a spatial unit. Both contemporary capital’s accelerationist and liquid form, its constant re-emergence as new modes of information technology as well as a structure of privatization and deregulation of local markets produces further conditions of precarity and deracination, under the sign of a new conceptual architecture of digital connectivity and the formation along the pathways of rapidly disseminating information channels, of global cities (Sassen, 2000). 24 See Shaviro, 2019. 25 See Gomez-Uribe and Hunt, 2016. 26 Amber M. Buck and Theo Plothe, “Introduction: Netflix at the Nexus,” in Netflix at the Nexus: Content, Practice, and Production in the Age of Streaming Television, eds. Theo Plothe and Amber M. Buck (New York: Peter Lang, 2019), 2. See also Jenner, 2016 and Pittman and Sheehan, 2015. 27 Justin Grandinetti, “From Primetime to Anytime Streaming Video, Temporality and the Future of Communal Television,” in The Age of Netflix: Critical Essays on Streaming Media, Digital Delivery and Instant Access, eds. Cory Barker and Myc Wiatrowski (North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2017), 12. 28 See Greenberg, 2016; Nichols and Martinez, 2020. 29 Ramon Lobato, Netflix Nations: The Geography of Digital Distribution (New York: New York University Press, 2019), 12.

Bibliography Bould, Mark, and China Miéville. Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction. Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2009. Bryant, Levi, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman.The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism. Melbourne: Re.Press, 2011.

168  Paromita Patranobish Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. New York: Autonomedia, 2004. ———. Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle. New York: Autonomedia, 2012. Gomez-Uribe, Carlos A., and Neil Hunt. “The Netflix Recommender System.” ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems 6, no. 4 (2016): 1–19. https:// doi.org/10.1145/2843948. Date of access: 26 December, 2021. Grandinetti, Justin. “From Primetime to Anytime Streaming Video, Temporality and the Future of Communal Television.” In The Age of Netflix: Critical Essays on Streaming Media, Digital Delivery and Instant Access, edited by Cory Barker and Myc Wiatrowski. North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2017. Greenberg, Julia. “Netflix Expects to Add Fewer US Users, so It's Looking Abroad.” Wired. Conde Nast, April 18, 2016. https://www.wired.com/2016/04/netflix-expectsadd-fewer-us-users-looking-abroad/. Date of access: 26 December, 2021. Han, Byung-Chul. Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power. Translated by Erik Butler. New York: Verso, 2017. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Jenner, Mareike. “Is This TVIV? on Netflix, TVIII and Binge-Watching.” New Media & Society 18, no. 2 (2014): 257–273. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444814541523. ———. Netflix and the Re-invention of Television. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Lawlor, Leonard, and Ted Toadvine, eds. The Merleau-Ponty Reader. Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2007. Lazzarato, Maurizio. “The Machine.” Translated by Mary O’Neill. European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies (October 2006a). http://eipcp.net/ transversal/1106/lazzarato/en. Date of access: 26 December, 2021. ———. “From Capital-Labour to Capital-Life.” Ephemera 4, no. 3 (2004): 187–208. ———. Experimental Politics: Work, Welfare, and Creativity in the Neoliberal Age. Translated by Arianna Bove et al. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2017. ———. Videophilosophy: The Perception of Time in Post-Fordism. Edited and translated by Jay Hetrick. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. ———. “The Concepts of Life and the Living in the Societies of Control.” In Deleuze and the Social, edited by Martin Fuglsang and Bent Meier Sørensen. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006b. Lehner, Nikolaus. “The Work of the Digital Undead: Digital Capitalism and the Suspension of Communicative Death.” Continuum 33, no. 4 (2019): 475–488. https://doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2019.1627289. Lobato, Ramon. Netflix Nations: The Geography of Digital Distribution. New York: New York University Press, 2019. Locke, Patricia M., and Rachel McCann. Merleau-Ponty: Space, Place, Architecture. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2015. Marratto, Scott L. The Intercorporeal Self: Merleau-Ponty on Subjectivity. Albany: SUNY Press, 2012.

“I Am Also a We”  169 Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Translated by Steven Corcoran. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1945. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. New York: Routledge, 1958. Nichols, Randy, and Martinez Gabriela. Political Economy of Media Industries: Global Transformations and Challenges. New York: Routledge, 2020. Pittman, Matthew, and Kim Sheehan. “Sprinting a Media Marathon: Uses and Gratifications of Binge-Watching Television through Netflix.” First Monday 20, no. 10 (2015) https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v20i10.6138. Plothe, Theo, and Amber M. Buck (eds.) Netflix at the Nexus: Content, Practice, and Production in the Age of Streaming Television. New York: Peter Lang, 2019. Polson, Erika. “Belonging to the Network Society: Social Media and the Production of a New Global Middle Class.” Communication, Culture and Critique 4 (2011): 144–163. Poster, Mark. The Information Subject. Amsterdam: Overseas Publishers Association, 2001. Sassen, Saskia. “Women’s Burden: Counter-geographies of Globalization and the Feminization of Survival.” Journal of International Affairs 53, no. 2, Shadow Economies: Promoting Prosperity or Undermining Stability? (Spring 2000): 503–524. Scott, David. “The Re-Enchantment of Humanism: An Interview with Sylvia Wynter.” Small Axe 8 (September 2000): 119–207. Shaviro, Steven. “Defining Speculation: Speculative Fiction, Speculative Philosophy, and Speculative Finance.” Alienocene (2019). Srnicek, Nick. Platform Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017. Stiegler, Bernard. For a New Critique of Political Economy. London: Polity Press, 2010. Wachowski, Lana, and Lilly Wachowski. Sense8. Anarchos Productions and Netflix, 2015–2018. http://www.netflix.com/title/80025744. Date of access: 26 December, 2021. Wynter, Sylvia. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 257–337. Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at The New Frontier of Power. New York: Hachette, 2019.

13 Re-inscribing the World Reflections on Sense-Making and Navigating the Networks of Global Capitalism Indrani Das Gupta

Oscar Wilde, in his essay “The Soul of Man under Socialism” (1891) stated, map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. [And Wilde further stated that] Progress is the realization of Utopias.1 Wilde’s assertion, I argue, is not about the representation of utopian imaginings or its opposite—dystopian imaginaries. It is about longing, desire, and the power of imagination to manifest change. Wilde’s description of humanity landing in alternative worlds is a means to engage with what shapes and constitutes literature, and which opens up, I argue, the idea of worlding for us. Using Wilde’s conception of what shapes a world, I read worlding as stories that struggle with the here and the now, stories that involve metaphorical movement and yet, which is not similar to Western notion of historiography undergirded by teleological framework. Instead, worlding, I argue, functions as a kind of a narrative experiment that seeks to, what Amy J. Elias and Christian Moraru (borrowing from Ulrich Beck’s discussion on risk society) assert, “reinvent itself from the ashes of post- empire Europe, and the risk environment brought about by the ever- escalating crises of world ecologies.”2 This essay is positioned in the ever-accelerating global forms of capital and exchange, and the resulting ecological crisis, which consequently forces us to re-imagine the means, forms, and processes of utopian imaginaries. These imaginaries are read in this chapter through the idea of world-making, world-forming, and unworlding. Positioned against the backdrop of global networks of mediation and consumption, this chapter focuses on the kind of narratives which will allow us to tackle the environmental degradation that besets our planet and simultaneously, to critique the Third World representations informed by global mechanisms. The primary purpose of this chapter will focus on what entails the forms, practices, and processes of worlding/unworlding/reworlding.3 Worlding and its mechanisms which, I argue, dramatizes creation, reinvention, disruption, and intervention, offers us the means to interpret a DOI: 10.4324/9781003395379-17

Re-inscribing the World  171 “normative understanding of world literature”.4 This world literature rejects the taken-for-granted forms of globalization to enunciate alternative forms of critical vision. These alternate critical perspectives constitute “differential, transnational, mongrel, and situated “worlding”5 that permit us to manifest utopia. Even if such worlding practices are unable to manifest utopia, these storytelling gestures or worlding sanction a means to navigate dystopian catastrophic events to envisage utopian possibilities. However, question arises whether all stories can be read as a movement towards utopian imaginaries? If not, what kind of stories facilitates the creation of utopia or embodies the processes, forms, and sites of worlding? To answer this query, it is imperative we seek to comprehend as to what we mean by the notion of a ‘world’. The exploration of the idea of the world becomes more significant in science fiction narratives. World as a noun and ‘world’ as a verb takes on an added dimension in science fiction imaginaries wherein the postulation of world or worlds articulates their revolutionary potential. The central argument of the chapter seeks to engage in is what purposes do these imaginary worlds serve? What does it mean to build, imagine, and inhabit a world? Do these imaginary worlds function as a mere backdrop to characters’ adventures or merely deals with the unfolding of a variety of events? Or do these alternatively imaginary worlds constitute a ‘worlding’ that comprises a fullness and richness, a depiction of multi-layered and complex environments that can be explored and navigated in multiple ways? How do we understand the relationship of the world and its figuration? What exactly transpires in this process of world to worlding? Reading worlding, worldmaking, and worldbuilding as fertile sites of imaginative possibilities, the central idea of this essay rests on how worlding negotiates, engages with, and disrupts the hegemonic understandings of global capitalist networks. This organization of the essay rests on two premises. The first premise delves into the inquiry of why such world-making and world-meaning occur? The examination of the first premise immediately leads us into our second investigation of what constitutes the nature and function of such world-making. In trying to grapple both these premises, this chapter positions itself in a radical undertaking of making and remaking of worlds. This active making, remaking, unmaking of worlds is, as Pheng Cheah asserts, a “radical rethinking of world literature,”6 and examines worlding as an argument, an approach, and a framework defining world literature. Following Cheah’s framework of understanding world literature, this essay shall examine the short story – “Indra’s Web” written by Vandana Singh and published in her anthology – Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories (2018). This story as discussed in this essay will be read within the framework of unsettling and disrupting the mechanisms of globalization to “discover ‘new terrains of consciousness’”.7 This new terrain is what Pheng Cheah identifies as the defining feature of world literature. Cheah addresses the inherent contradictions of our neo-capitalist society through the modality of worlding, which he believes can “remake the world against capitalist globalization”.8

172  Indrani Das Gupta The chapter is divided into two sections. The first section enumerates the idea of worlding and how it destabilizes the totalizing forms of modernity and is linked with newer modes of signifiers like mondialisation and planetary imagination. The second section elaborates on how worlding counter-challenges global capitalist networks via Vandana Singh’s short story - “Indra’s Web.” The analysis of this story is probed in terms of elucidating the role of stories and participating in a planetary consciousness. Furthermore, these two sections register environmental disaster not in terms of a “novelty of crisis”9 but underscores the ecological devastation as an instance of continued oppression and exploitation occasioned by globalization and other forms of modernity. The two sections are founded on the logic of examining the world, where worlding and worldedness figures as a “point of reference, a vision, and as an idea”.10 Borrowing from Christopher Leigh Connery’s introduction to the edited book, The Worlding Project: Doing Cultural Studies in the Era of Globalization (2007), world, in this chapter, figures as “a refusal: the refusal to allow our object of knowledge to be naturalized in advance, defined or delimited as either a unit of area studies or a particular historical period”.11 This encapsulation of the world as a ‘refusal’ directs our attention to invention and experimentation as against the deterministic paradigm outlined by “various modalities of capitalist globalization”.12 In the analysis of Singh’s short story “Indra’s Web”, this chapter explicates how worlding figures as a key critical methodological principle that offers new ways to think about our world and to pave way for a greater awareness of history, ecology, culture, and politics. 13.1  World as an Idea: Worlding as Transformation Martin Heidegger (1993 [1950]),13 Carl D.Malmgren (1991),14 and Mark J.P. Wolf (2012),15 all have argued that the essential quality of aesthetic creation lies in the setting up of a world. Mark J.P. Wolf has claimed that worldbuilding constitutes a ubiquitous feature of all narratives (2012),16 while Henry Jenkins points to storytelling as the foundation and basis of worldbuilding.17 Wolf, in following the paradigm of J.R. R.Tolkien discusses imaginary worlds like utopia, dystopia, and extrapolated world as “subcreations”18 or secondary worlds relying on primary worlds for their material and aesthetic valuation. Worldbuilding, for Wolf, in its totality of properties of the entities/ objects, characters, events, actions, and settings, facilitates in making sense of and in comprehending the plurality of worlds.19 Wolf’s idea of imaginary worlds is an enunciation of its geographical, spatial feature—a critical space that can be mapped, bounded, and examined territorially.20 Likewise, Carl D. Malmgren drawing upon Eric Rabkin’s classification of “grapholect”, opined that all fictions are necessarily based upon two modes of signification – “histoire” and “discours”. Histoire refers to the “world of the narrated events” while discours refers to the “speech act of the mediating narrator”.21 Malmgren identifies this ‘histoire’ as a departure from our known and

Re-inscribing the World  173 familiar world while being marked by the inscription of social, political, and cultural factors of our times.22 Wolf and Malmgren’s description of world and worldbuilding provides the description of invented worlds with its imagined actions, characters, entities, and events as at once disparate, alternate to the worlds we inhabit, and the possibility of reimagining the grids that underpin our world, for instance, gender, class, race, sexuality, vectors of technology, and to rethink the very idea of humanness. The imagined worlds demonstrate a peculiar fascination of ‘worlders’ to enunciate the unknown, mysterious, the absences and the silences that underscore our lives. While Wolf or Malmgren’s discussion of secondary worlds elucidates the significance of alternate worlds, its reliance on Primary Worlds reduces its role merely to a theoretical reflection or mere “virtuality”.23 To engage with the political and social implications of these alternate imaginings, stories or worlds, it becomes necessary to grapple with what is a world and then explore what constitutes worlding practices and articulations which will allow us to “understand the normative force that literature can exert in the world”.24 As an idea, worlding “ushers in the unnamed”25 and operates as a site of resistance to hegemonic understandings. Worlding figures as a key concept in the phenomenological study of Dasein,26 elucidated by Martin Heidegger (1889–1976).27 Developed in relation to art and poetry, worlding figures in Heidegger as a practice to assign meanings and simultaneously to suggest how meanings determine and shape our lives. To figure out the kind of meanings that are possible, Pheng Cheah insists on examining the “normative worldly force immanent to literature” that registers the “ethico-political horizon” for the “existing world”.28 Cheah reads the Heideggerian concept of the world as not outside of human-subject but as constitutive of it. To quote Heidegger, The world is not the mere collection of the countable or uncountable, familiar and unfamiliar things that are at hand. But neither is it a merely imagined framework added by our representation to the sum of such given things. The world worlds, and is more fully in being than the tangible and perceptible realm in which we believe ourselves to be at home. World is never an object that stands before us and can be seen. World is the ever-non objective to which we are subject as long as the path of birth and death, blessing and curse keep us transported into Being.29 Framed in a negative dialectics and contrary to traditional expectations, Heidegger describes the world not as a spatial configuration which can be mapped cartographically. Instead, Heidegger’s conception of the world figures as transporting us into Being. Heidegger rejects the framing of the world as a matter of objective examination that ‘stands before us’. According to Heidegger, world is not a given category exterior to and meant to be analyzed

174  Indrani Das Gupta by human-subject. World is also not the sum total of all the objects included in it. Instead, as Rosalie Siemon Lochner describes, “world is one we are born into, what Heidegger termed as ‘being- in-the-world’, involved with its processes, substantiating it and redesigning it, and continues even after we die”.30 The idea of world, as per Heidegger, is linked to the conception of Dasein, which posits human species as complementary, involved and connected with the world. Discounting the binary reification of subject and object, Heidegger’s formulation of the world is read in terms of interdependence and framed by relational values, which Kevin Michael Deluca declares in terms of co-dependency, in which subject is nominated and shaped by its relation in the world”.31 The isolated subject does not stand over and against its object of inquiry and instead it is constituted in sympathetic understanding to the world. Using Heidegger’s conceptualization of world better understood as a verb, instead of as a noun, the conception of world emerges as an ongoing, generative process of becoming, as multilogical and dialogical. It is what Christopher Leigh Connery declares is a gerundive process of situated articulation and world-making, ‘worlding’ thus would help deepen and show how modes and texts of contemporary being and uncanny worldly dwelling … can become a historical process of taking care, and setting limits, entering into, and making the world-horizon come near and become local and informed, situated, instantiated as an uneven/incomplete material process of world-becoming32 Worlding, as Connery describes, entails an exposure of the violence that marks global machinations while simultaneously, it functions as a performative gesture of caring and founding a conception of social justice epitomized by the horizon of ethical care. Raj Singh elaborates on this facet of becoming in Heidegger by postulating “worlding of the world as a ‘giving’ in that it bestows meanings… it functions as an ‘opening of meaning’”.33 This opening of meanings is configured as “moving out beyond the pomo-poco pieties and cant-capitalist formulations of neo-liberal redemption”.34 Worlding figures as an opening, a gateway that invents meanings, plays with meanings, reiterate specifics meanings. It is an interpretative gesture that nonetheless dramatizes a world defined by ethics and enunciates refusal to participate in “rational technologies and calculations [of global relations] that appropriate and manage time for the maximal extraction of surplus value”.35 To examine worlding in contemporary times, it is imperative we grapple with global socio-political relations. Globalization has been read as inherently the circulation of sameness and oneness regulated by the logic of US market and other neoliberal sites. Nick Bisley postulates globalization as “the set of social consequences which derive from the increasing rate and speed of interactions of knowledge, people, goods and capital between states and societies”.36 Anthony Giddens situates this circulation as marked by new

Re-inscribing the World  175 formations and formulations that “links” “worldwide social relations” in such a way that “distant localities” and “local happenings”37 are determined by events, phenomena and relations occurring far away. While this global expansion suggests interdependence and interconnections of far-reaching consequences; nevertheless, such interplays also imply monolithic meanings informed by a practice of techno-domination of capitalist homogeneity. This monolithic framework of global relations obfuscates the inequalities, violence, and structural discrimination of the local specificities. Globalization’s circulation and interdependence thus, is based on the logic of the financial markets and the “triumph of the neoliberal economics seeping across continents”.38 The proliferation and accumulation of global processes results in a homogenous worldview denominating an “intimate connection between capitalist development and the capitalization of views or pictures of the world”.39 This capitalist view is utterly destructive of non-Euro-American worlds as it violently incorporates the inhabitants of these worlds within a mechanistic global economic paradigm. Explaining the inherent issue with globalization, Jean-Luc Nancy rightfully asserts that the viewing of the world is “dependent” on the “gaze of a subject of the world. A subject of the world (that is to say as well a subject of history) cannot itself be in the world”.40 This contradiction underpinned in the modalities of globalization inevitably means that for all its free flow of goods, people, and ideas; globalization is a totalitarian framework that substantiates itself on the transparency of its translatability controlled by the Euro-American markets. In order to counter-challenge the instrumentalized forces of globalization, Nancy, postulates the French word mondialisation, which is marked by an untranslatability paradigm (it cannot be easily translated as globalization). Describing mondialisation as an instance of worlding that moves away from the unworlding practices of globalization,41 Nancy inaugurates the world as a “space of possible meanings for the whole of human relations” where the “production and/or creation of humanity is being played out.”42 Mondialisation nominates a world where interrelations and exchanges are marked not by its use-value but rather by their participation in a shared world. It is these affective bonds of inhabiting a shared world that the commodification and fetishism of global social relations silences, and these can be replaced by “becoming world of the world” that “resolutely and absolutely distances itself from any status as object in order to tend toward being itself the ‘subject’ of its own ‘world-hood’—or ‘world-forming.’”43 These practices and processes informed by Heidegger’s Dasein and Nancy’s mondialisation inform worlding as an ethico-political practice. Though Heidegger himself rejected the discipline of ethics and cautions us not to read any overarching principles or norms for collective or individual in his discussion of Dasein. Nonetheless, Heidegger’s philosophical mediations on Dasein and world do allow us to speculate on how such ethical actions are seemingly possible.44 Kalpita Bhar Paul reads Heidegger’s encapsulation of worlding as an important discourse in the field of environmentalism by exploring

176  Indrani Das Gupta Heidegger’s philosophical theorization of Dasein as drawing attention to ethico-political practices. She reads Dasein or Being-in-the-world identifiable by a paradigmatic feature of connecting with nature. And this links worlding with another key untranslatable term—Gayatri Chakravorthy Spivak’s planetarity. Spivak replaces the “undivided natural space” informed by globalization with a “differentiated political space” where “globe” is no longer on our “computers” chained to the keyboards. Instead, the “planet is in the species of alterity, belonging to another system; and yet we inhabit it, on loan”.45 This ‘species of alterity’ included in planetary configurations does not suggest a neat contrast to the conception of a globe. Instead, planetarity dismantles humans from their enviable positions to position them as ‘planetary subjects’, and who no longer function as the arbiter of meanings—the planet’s “alterity remains underived from us”.46 Spivak’s planetary consciousness opens up the world to us as well as opening literature and “human” “towards the other”,47 and it is this worlding or re-worlding, as I call it, that inaugurates the ethical dimension of inhabiting the world. This shared, affective dimensionality has led worlding as being marked by a “relationality” which challenges the “globalization’s homogenization, one-becoming compulsion”.48 And this ‘relationality’ is the initiation into world literary space that Cheah described as the ‘normative instance of world literature’.49 Moreover, this illustration of world literature is, I argue, following Donna Haraway, best performed by science fiction narratives. Haraway’s reading of science fiction offers the true value of literature per se. World is no longer explained as secondary and primary or as an instance of plurality of worlds. Instead, world functions as Haraway described science fiction as “a method of tracing, of following a thread in the dark, in a dangerous true tale of adventure, where who lives and who dies and how might become clearer for the cultivating of multispecies justice”.50 Extending Haraway’s explanation about speculative and science fiction imaginaries as leading towards “tentacular thinking”, which enables attachments and detachments [to form]”, I opine, this tentacular thinking configurations “make cuts and knots; they make a difference; they weave paths and consequences but not determinisms”.51 Thus, science fiction and other speculative imaginaries in their polyvocality and multi-lingualism seek to address the pitfalls of calculative, dogmatic, and reductive forces of globalization to open up the sites of freedom and environmental justice. The final section seeks to probe and participate in these knotted pathways and alleyways to disengage ourselves from the anthropogenic dynamics to enable us to inhabit our vulnerable earth activated by patterns, systems, and multiple dynamics that defy logic. 13.2  Redoing Ways of Living and Dying Vandana Singh’s short story anthology titled Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories (2018) is a wonderfully luminous collection of stories that usher us into new worlds, open us to new vistas of reflection, and introduces us to

Re-inscribing the World  177 complex web of intricate stories and operations of worlding that crisscrosses multifarious terrains and interdisciplinary sites revealing the portals of divergent ideas and visions. The stories in this collection are focused on speculative abstraction and the concretizing of moments in individual characters’ lives and histories. Her stories like “Indra’s Web” disclose the transformative possibilities identifiable in science fiction and other speculative genres. This story, in particular, addresses the “mutually constitutive silences” that underpin global social relations and economic configurations.52 Singh’s short story “Indra’s Web” brings together a science fiction narrative written at the backdrop of ecological disaster— the global warming crisis leading to rising sea levels—which has forced several thousands of people living in Bangladesh homeless and has escalated the climate refugee crisis of surrounding areas. Climate refugee is a moniker used for people who are forced to evacuate their homes due to climate change. Brandon Jones defines climate refugees as belonging to poor or indigenous communities whose worlds have been devastated by ecological ruins.53 Located at the edge of Delhi, Ashapur represents new advanced technologies (“suntrackingpetals of biomimetic material containing tiny, environmentallybenign artificial cells,” the“suryons, that drank up photons, solar plants, sewage-fed biogas plants, solar panels,” etc.)54 in conversation with ancient practices (of reusing every waste material, of using knowledge from villages who were “traditionally energy-efficient, living in clusters, throwing away nothing, re-using almost everything”),55 of discovering kinship patterns between familial relations and nature. “Indra’s Web” functions as an instance of a solar punk science fiction narrative and which highlights futuristic technologies to create alternate, sustainable forms of resources by learning and gaining access to knowledge from nature itself: “There is a fungal network, a myconet, a secret connection between the plants of the forest. They talk to each other, the acacia and the shisham and the gulmohar tree, in a chemical tongue. They communicate about pests, food sources, the weather, all through the flow of biomolecules through the fungal hyphae. Through this network, large trees have even been known to share nutrients with saplings of the same species”.56 This description of forest is not underscored as an opposition to human civilization. Instead, this is what Heidegger’s Dasein opened us to—by “nominating the way of being-human”.57 The dialogicity and intermeshing of social relations replaces the destructive modality of global networks to embrace planetary consciousness. This consciousness moves away from the “financial-technocratic system” symbolized by the globe towards the “planet as world-ecology”.58 The story begins with Mahua, a scientist who is despairing of her grandmother’s ill-health and simultaneously, has to face another crisis —that of saving her life’s project, Ashapur from turning into a failure. Ashapur is a futuristic settlement catering to an alternate energy resource, and which is inhabited by slum dwellers and “climate refugees from the drowned villages of Bangladesh”.59 The displacement of citizens due to climate changes situates the story against the background of anthropocene era, where human

178  Indrani Das Gupta agency, as Dipesh Chakrabarty describes, has donned on the role of geophysical agents in altering the Earth in ways more damaging than colonialism.60 The enunciation of climate refugees juxtaposed with the original slum dwellers locates this story against a prevailing precarity, and which supports the claim of Malm and Hornborg in their insistence of a persistence divide between rich and poor and Global North and Global South.61 Singh’s story focuses on a precarity as not a new phenomenon but as an instance of a continued story of exploitation and violence against the dispossessed subjects. Even as the marginalized people’s poverty is compounded by the invisibility of the “slow violence”62 that permeates so many of their lives, this chapter directs our attention to neo-liberal capitalism that accentuates the climate crisis. As precarity continues to structure the consciousness of its denizens, Singh documents in this story through the establishment of Ashapur’s Suryanet, a challenge to hegemonic and totalitarian frameworks. What we see in this story is the unfolding of “entangled futures”63 that refuses a beginning or a closure to the vulnerable existence of the inhabitants and thus, documents an ongoing relationship between precarity and environmental activism. “Indra’s Web” is located amidst multiple and heterogeneous networks of relations, forever mutating and shifting in its contours like a ‘myconet’, and which can be read as an instance of “ecoprecarity”, defined by Pramod Nayar as being “at once about the precarious lives humans lead in the event of ecological disaster [ … ] and also about the environment itself which is rendered precarious due tohuman intervention”64 The transformation of Ashapur to a bio-reserve project where Mahua has employed a group of scientists belonging to different ethnic communities— who all have risen through the ranks, and who all are committed to saving the biosphere by developing alternative, sustainable energy resource—projects both the concerns of “biodiversity loss” and “subaltern refugee agency”.65 In this endeavour, Mahua harnesses energy from the forest itself to build up a power resource that could change and transform the energy crisis of not only Ashapur in its staging of “species preservation” and “refugee agency”, but also enable a major renewable energy resource to be harnessed across Asia.66 The story highlights what Susan Buck-Morss suggests, “[w]e need to find ways through the local specificities of our own traditions toward a conceptual orientation that can inform global action”.67 The establishment of Surya Towers operates along the lines of “connectivity at multiple scales”.68 These connectivities might appear untidy, messy, and incomprehensible to global corporations, used as they are to all things codified and systematized. Like the plurality of languages spoken by Mahua’s colleagues, Ashapur, “the first smart-energy grid, the Suryanet”69 embodies a bio-connectivity where the “ants followed invisible trails across the floor—that the world was full of secret communication channels, like the electric wires between poles that rose above the tenements. It was as though some inner sense within her had opened, because following this realization she was suddenly aware of walking through a tangled spider’s web of relationships”.70 This representation of

Re-inscribing the World  179 entangled relationships recalls Donna Haraway’s “tentacular thinking” where the “tentaculars” are “not disembodied figures; they are cnidarians, spiders, fingery beings like humans and raccoons, squid, jellyfish, neural extravaganzas, fibrous entities, flagellated beings, myofibril braids, matted and felted microbial and fungal tangles, probing creepers, swelling roots, reaching and climbing tendrilled ones. The tentacular are also nets and networks, it critters, in and out of clouds. Tentacularity is about life lived along lines—and such a wealth of lines—not at points, not in spheres”.71 The collision of human, nature and nonhuman interests directs our attention to environmental activism that unfolds a vision, which Amy J Elias’ defines as constituting a “world commons”.72 Thus, Ashapur’s multiple interconnectedness encapsulated in the idea of Elias’ ‘world commons’ foregrounds, I argue, the normative function of science fiction imaginaries. Mahua’s relationship with her grandmother, the forestscape, nonhuman species, bioenergy conductors – Suryanet Towers demonstrate allegiances and relationality, which foregrounds sympathetic politico-ethical practice. That Mahua finds a new structural awareness in her meditation amidst and with nature brings forth a newfound knowledge of the “world globalization” as a “destitute time”.73 Mahua’s running through the forestscape serves her to embrace her “physicality: heart thumping, sweat running down her face in rivulets, theforest smelling of sap and animal dung, grit on her lips from the dust”.74 The “forest” served as her muse.75 However, as the narrator informs us, the “forest didn’t care about fame or fortune—here she was just another animal: breath and flow, a kite on the wing, a deer running”.76 This corporeal structure of feeling enables what Isabel Karremann and Zeno Ackermann have described as “thematiz[ing] the material aspects of worldly situations: the specific physical, (agri-)cultural, and sensorial conditions in which ‘life’ and ‘reproduction’ ground themselves”.77 This inevitably means a realignment and reconfiguration of the local specificities and global mechanisms. “Indra’s Web” in its compressing of social and environmental relations opens up the meaning of world for us. Here, Mahua’s grandmother with her life slowly ebbing away finds a resonance in the oldest Surya Tower slowly dying as well. However, life and caring for others do not end and the story “strings”78 together with the newest tower taking on the mantle of providing energy to Delhi and other sectors of Ashapur. This continuation of story where life and death are no longer held as oppositional constructs demands that we look beyond the “eventist model of history”79 to read such crisis as “processual phenomena”.80 The reading of such ecological degradations in terms of patterns of historical vulnerability demands we actively seek patterns, kinships, and symbiotic relations in our response and challenge to such discriminating and violent systems. Here, what is required are stories that weave and knot, and which will allow us to do, what Donna Haraway advised as ‘staying with the trouble’, and to find ways and means to knit stories. These stories in which “multispecies players, who are enmeshed in partial and flawed translations across difference, redo

180  Indrani Das Gupta ways of living and dying attuned to still possible finite flourishing, still possible recuperation”81 disrupt the totalizing ethos of neo-capitalist global networks. 13.3  Conclusion In one of her other stories in the same anthology, “Somadeva: A Sky River Sutra,” Vandana Singh draws on the power of stories to break the stranglehold of oneness compulsion of globalization. This story in which an eleventh-century poet, Somadeva, is recreated as an artificial intelligence belonging to the future, now travels through space and time collecting stories, sharing his stories, and finally participating in them. Somadeva’s never-ending web of stories draws on the concept of Spivak’s planetary and tentacular thinking of Haraway: The Kathasaritsagara was my life’s work. I wandered all over NorthIndia, following rumors of the Lost Manuscript, risking death to interviewmurderers and demons, cajoling stories out of old women and princes, merchants and nursing mothers. I took these stories and organized them into patterns of labyrinthine complexity. In my book there are stories within stories—the chief narrator tells a story and the characters in that story tell other stories and so on. Some of the narrators refer to the stories of previous narrators; thus each is not only a teller of tales but also a participant.82 Somadeva’s stories are like Mahua’s scientific experimentation of cross-pollination between futuristic technologies, ancient practices, forestscape, human species and nonhuman species, and presence of subaltern inhabitants, and which opens up the “temporality of ‘messy bundling’ of human and extra-human”.83 Mahua feeling alive with nature and amongst nature, joining in to insert her own language—functions as a central site to tell stories together— and thus reinvent history. These knotted relationships of planetary entanglements offer “new stories (that) do not absolve human beings of responsibility, on the contrary: they endow them with ‘response-ability’”.84 This chapter reads worlding as a reformulation of boundaries, subjectivities, and marginal subjectivities, as telling of new stories, and learning to live with others and for others. Mahua taking care of her ailing grandmother and her being worried about Suryanet are not opposed enactments. Instead, here all are fused and operate as part of a larger whole whose sum is never equivalent to all its parts. As a speculative genre, SF seeks to posit alternative futures, and to reconstitute the violence and extremism of the present. Worlding emerges as a key concept to rethink and reconceptualize our world histories. In this essay, the theoretical paradigm of worlding operates in terms of shared histories, cultural linkages, and political associations that functions as a political intervention and as field of imaginary, “‘to resist the disciplinary ordering’ of an unruly, not-quite-subaltern developing world”.85 Singh’s

Re-inscribing the World  181 short story “Indra’s Web” through its ecology of connections disrupts the monolithic framework of capitalist globalization. This ecology is private and public, ancient and modern, and co-existing with advanced technologies and oral forms to register a multiplicity of assemblages, and multilogical meanings, and thus “expand the world by joining different realities together”.86 Notes 1 Oscar Wilde, “The Soul of Man under Socialism” (Project Gutenberg). First published in 1891 in the Fortnightly Review, 11. 2 Amy J. Elias and Christian Moraru, “Introduction: The Planetary Condition,” in The Planetary Turn: Relationality and Geoaesthetics in the Twenty-First Century, eds. Amy J. Elias and Christian Moraru (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2015), xi. 3 The idea of worlding used in this essay embodies a site and a process of ‘re-inscribing the world,’ which informs the title of my chapter as well. This usage of worlding facilitates an unmaking and remaking, exposing and critiquing the existing forms of worldedness. At once, meaning-making and meaning-shaping, worlding in my essay is used as an orientation, a methodology to grapple with the inequalities, socio-political and eco-cultural violations that characterises our society. 4 Pheng Cheah, What is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature (Durham: Duke UP, 2016), 1. 5 Rob Wilson, “Afterword: Worlding as Future Tactic,” in The Worlding Project: Doing Cultural Studies, edited by Rob Wilson and Christopher Leigh Connery, 209–23, 1–11. California: New Pacific Press, 2007. 6 Pheng Cheah, What is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature (Durham: Duke UP, 2016), 2. 7 Isabel Karremann and Zeno Ackermann, “Introduction: New Terrains of Consciousness in a Globalized World,” in Terrains of Consciousness: Multilogical Perspectives on Globalization, eds. Zeno Ackermann, Isabel Karremann, Simi Malhotra, and Nishat Zaidi (Würzburg: Würzburg UP, 2021), 1. Karremann and Ackerman explain the origin of the word ‘terrains’ lies in Lawrence Beull’s book The Future of Environmental Criticism, where terrains refer simultaneously to geo-political spatial imaginary and speculative imaginative tendencies. Beull’s use of terrains postulates a rethinking of local and embedded situatedness amidst the proliferating tendencies of global networks of production, circulation and reception. Cf. Lawrence Buell, “Space, Place, and Imagination from Local to Global,” The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 62–96. 8 Pheng Cheah, What is a World? 2. 9 Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey, Allegories of the Anthropocene (Durham: Duke UP, 2019), 2. 10 Christopher Leigh Connery, “Introduction: Worlded Pedagogy in Santa Cruz,” in The Worlding Project: Doing Cultural Studies in the Era of Globalization, eds. Rob Wilson and Christopher Leigh Connery (California: New Pacific Press, 2007), 8. 11 Christopher Leigh Connery, “Introduction: Worlded Pedagogy in Santa Cruz,” in The Worlding Project: Doing Cultural Studies in the Era of Globalization, eds. Rob Wilson and Christopher Leigh Connery (California: New Pacific Press, 2007), 8. 12 Pheng Cheah, What is a World, 16.

182  Indrani Das Gupta 13 Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Basic Writings: From Being and Time (1927) to the Task of Thinking(1964), ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper Collins, 1993), 170. 14 Carl D. Malmgren, Worlds Apart: Narratology of Science Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991). 15 Mark J.P. Wolf, Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation (New York: Routledge, 2012). 16 Mark J.P. Wolf, Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation (New York: Routledge, 2012). 17 Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York UP, 2006), 116. 18 Wolf’s rendition of Primary and Secondary World is an extension of J.R.R. Tolkien, and primary refers to the material world experienced and shared by the author and reader. Whereas, secondary world refers to more a textual representation- a fictional account of a spatial boundedness which is, I argue, similar to Darko Suvin’s conception of science fiction as an instance of “cognitive estrangement.” Darko Suvin, Metamorphosis of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (New Haven: Yale University, 1979). 19 Wolf, Subcreations, 1–3. 20 Wolf’s ‘subcreations’ partakes of David Lewis’s extension of Leibniz’s philosophy of possible worlds in his analysis of counterfactual conditionals (1973). Cf. David Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986). Lewis’ understanding of world is underpinned by the logic of plurality of worlds that is marked by the differentiation between the domains of real and unreal. Furthermore, Lewis’ plurality of worlds constellates itself on the factor of counterfactual modality built on wish fulfilment or dynamics of change, underscored by the transformative logic of our conditions as lived in the worlds we inhabit. It registers the play of culture and the practices of political and social institutions and processes. The materiality of disparate worlds entailed is grounded in tragic contestations of meanings pertaining to matters of nation, ethnicity, global capitalist understandings of progress and postcolonial understandings of modernity. 21 Carl D Malmgren, Narratology, 1. 22 Carl D Malmgren, Narratology, 2. 23 Pheng Cheah, What is a World 5. Cheah asks whether the fictionality of such logically, consistent world offers a “genuine possible alternative to the status quo?”. 24 Pheng Cheah, What is a World, 5. 25 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1988), 274. 26 Carole Ann Ramsey, “A Brief Phenomenology of Dasein,” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 30, no. 4 (2016): 499–514, https://www.jstor.org/ stable/10.5325/jspecphil.30.4.0499. HeideggerianDasein, as Carole Ann Ramsey describes, is a functionality of being-human. She puts into perspective about how Dasein is unlike the traditional Anglo-American postulation of differences like subject/object, realism/idealism. 27 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak used a vulgarized form of Heidegger’s worlding, and which figures as a key term in postcolonial criticism. Spivak identifies “worlding a violent epistemic knowledge production” of the world localized in imperialist practices and mechanisms that forces the “natives to see themselves as the other.” Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Reading the World: Literary Studies in the Eighties,” College English 43, no. 7 (November 1981): 671–679. 28 Pheng Cheah, What is a World, 5.

Re-inscribing the World  183 29 Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Basic Writings: From Being and Time (1927) to the Task of Thinking (1964), ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper Collins, 1993), 170. 30 Rosalie Siemon Lochner, “Arendt and Spivak: a feminist approach to political worlding and Appearing,” PhD diss., (DePaul University, 2014), 20. 31 Kevin Michael Deluca, “Thinking with Heidegger: rethinking Environmental Theory and Practice,” Ethics and Environment 10, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 67–87. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40339096. 32 Connery, Christopher Leigh, “Introduction,” Worlding Project, 6. 33 R. Raj Singh, “Heidegger and the World in an Artwork,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Arts Criticism 48, no. 3 (Summer 1990): 216. 34 Rob Wilson, “Afterword,” Worlding Project, 210. 35 Pheng Cheah, What is a World, 11. 36 Nick Bisley, Rethinking Globalization (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 6. 37 Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), 63. 38 Amy J Elias and Christian Moraru, xv. 39 Jean-Luc NANCY, The Creation of the World or Globalization, transl. by François Raffoul and David Pettigrew (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007), 40. 40 Nancy 40. 41 Unworlding, I read as losing a world, a meaning governed as we are by the processes of globalization with its monological framework. Unworlding represents a lack of agency and further marginalization of dispossessed subjects without any change visible. 42 Nancy 36–37. 43 Nancy 41. 44 KalpitaBhar Paul, “The Import of Heidegger’s Philosophy into Environmental Ethics: A Review,” Ethics and the Environment 22, no. 2 (Fall 2017): 79–98, doi:10.2979/ethicsenviro.22.2.04. 45 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, The Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia UP, 2003), 72. 46 Spivak Death of a Discipline 73. 47 Spivak Death of a Discipline 73. 48 Amy J Elias Christian Moraru, xi–xii. 49 Pheng Cheah 2012. 50 Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke UP, 2016), 3. 51 Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 31. 52 Rob Nixon,“Neoliberalism, Slow Violence and the Environmental Picaresque,” Modern Fiction Studies 55, no. 3 (2009): 443–467, here 236. 53 Brandon Jones, “A Postcolonial Utopia for the Anthropocene: Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide and Climate-Induced Migration,” Modern Fiction Studies 64, no. 4, (Winter 2018): 639–58. doi:10.1353/mfs.2018.0047, here 648. 54 Vandana Singh, “Indra’s Web,” 144. 55 Vandana Singh, “Indra’s Web,” 145. 56 Vandana Singh, “Indra’s Web,” 142. 57 Carole Ann Ramsey, 500. 58 Amy J Elias and Christian Moraru, xvi. 59 Vandana Singh, “Indra’s Web,” 144. 60 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry35, no. 2 (2009): 197–222. doi:10.1086/596640. 61 Malm and Hornborg, “The Geology of Mankind? A Critique of the Anthropocene Narrative,” The Anthropocene Review 1, no. 1 (2014): 62–69. doi:10.1177/2053019613516291.

184  Indrani Das Gupta 62 Rob Nixon, “Neoliberalism, Slow Violence and the Environmental Picaresque,” Modern Fiction Studies 55, no. 3 (2009): 443–467. 63 Johan Höglund, “Challenging ecoprecarity in PaoloBacigalupi’s Ship Breaker trilogy,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 56, no. 4, (2020): 447–459, doi:10.1080/1 7449855.2020.176420. 64 Nayar, Pramod K. Ecoprecarity: Vulnerable Lives in Literature and Culture (New York: Routledge, 2019), 7. 65 Brandon Jones, 641. 66 Brandon Jones, 640. 67 Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2009), x. 68 Vandana Singh, “Indra’s Web,” 145. 69 Vandana Singh, “Indra’s Web,” 143. 70 Vandana Singh, “Indra’s Web” 148. 71 Donna Haraway, Staying, 32. 72 Amy J Elias, “World Commons,” cited in 73 Rob Wilson 216. 74 Vandana Singh, “Indra’s Web,” 142. 75 Ibid. 76 Ibid. 77 Isabel Karremann and Zeno Ackermann. 78 Donna Haraway, Staying. 79 Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Allegories of the Anthropocene (Durham: Duke UP, 2019), 250. 80 Anthony Oliver-Smith and Susanna Hoffman, “Why Anthropologists Should Study Disaster,” in Catastrophe and Culture: The Anthropology of Disaster, eds. Susanna Hoffman and Anthony Oliver-Smith (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 2002). 81 Donna Haraway, Staying, 10. 82 Singh, Vandana, “Somadeva: A Sky River Sutra,” 105. 83 J.W. Moore, “The Capitalocene, Part I: On the Nature and Origins of Our Ecological Crisis,” The Journal of Peasant Studies 44, no. 3 (2017): 594–630. doi :10.1080/03066150.2016.1235036. 84 Donna Haraway, Staying, 34. 85 Russell West-Pavlov, “Toward the Global South: Concept or Chimera, Paradigm or Panacea?” in The Global South and Literature, ed. Russell West-Pavlov (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2018), 3. 86 S Ekman, Here Be Dragons: Exploring Fantasy Maps and Settings (CT: Wesleyan UP, 2013), 126.

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Index

Pages followed by “n” refer to notes. Aarseth, Espen J. 121 Achebe, Chinua 42 Ackermann, Zeno 1, 179 Actual Sunlight 94 African American thinkers 38 African subjectivity 162 “Afterword: Walking with Refugee Tales” 150 Ahmed, Sara 4, 50–51, 53–54, 60n4, 62n44–62n56, 63n57–63n79, 64n86–64n88; criticism of Braidotti 56–57; home and space 55; the lived experience of locality 57; metaphorical nomadic subject 59; migration and history 55–56; queer phenomenology 58, 63n79 Amazon Prime 165 Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories (2018) 171, 176 anarchy 79, 163 ancestry.com 134 ancient Greek culture 29 Anderson, Benedict 69, 73n5 androids 105–111 andys 106–107 Animal Crossing: New Horizons 93–94, 102n6 An Introduction to Game Studies 93, 102n1 Anthropocene 31, 79, 95, 158, 177 anthropocentric mind 32 Anthropos 29 anti-humanist trajectory 159 anti-racism 37 anti-semitic venom 138 Anzaldúa, Gloria 17 apocalyptic melancholy 81

Appadurai, Arjun 70, 73n7 Archaeologies of the Future 108, 115n16 “The Arriver’s Tale as told to Abdulrazak Gurnah” 145, 152n11 art history and comparative literature: in Argentina 45; in Lebanon 45; in South Korea 44; in United States 40–44 artifactuality 2 artprice.com 40 Art Through the Ages 41, 43 Ashapur 177–179 Asian steppes 135 A Small Place 42 authoritarian capitalism 82 Axelos, Kostas 17, 23 Badiou, Alain 17, 85–88, 91n42–91n47 Bakhtin’s dialogic approach 144–149 Baroque aesthetics 155 Basir, Ainee 5, 120–129 Basu, Samit 6 The Bicentennial Man 105–108, 112–114 biological evolution 125 Biologic Preservation Organization 157, 160 Bisley, Nick 174 black literature 39 blood-dimmed tide 79, 88 Bradley, Joff P. N. 3, 11–26 Braidotti, Rosi 4, 32–33, 50, 55, 58–64; feminist embodiment 52–53; globalization and identity 51–52; nomadic subjects 51–56; nomadic thinking 52, 54, 56–57, 63n84; writing and thought 53–54

188 Index Buck-Morss, Susan 178 Bukatman, Scott 112 Campbell, Colin 94 Cancer 94, 102n7–102n8 The Canterbury Tales 143, 147 Čapek, Karel 106 Capheus 157–158, 160, 162–164 capitalism 13, 16, 80–82, 85, 87–88, 126–127, 158–166, 170, 178 capitalist dystopia 94, 102n5 capitalistic-globalized world 51 The Capitalist Joys of Animal Crossing 94 capitalist realism 5, 91n58 capitalization 175 casteism 109 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 178 Cheah, Pheng 171, 173, 176 cinematic technology 154 civic vigilantes 154 civil disobedience 157 climate refugee 177–178 Cohen, Leonard 83 collaboration 122, 151 colonial fiction 6, 139 colonialism 4, 17, 38, 70–71, 94, 150, 178 colonial sebum trails 135 computational capitalism 26n48, 127, 129n27 Connery, Christopher Leigh 172, 174 consciousness 1–3, 12, 14–17, 21–23, 29, 33, 50, 52–53, 56, 67, 71, 86, 88, 113, 123, 154, 156, 161, 172, 176–178 coronavirus 13, 21–22, 37 counter-hegemonic interventions 80 COVID-19 pandemic 3, 31, 34–35 critical self-consciousness 56 cross-cultural environmental dialogue 71 cultural compartmentalization 5 cultural dialogue 67 cultural inequality 38 current barbarism 80 cybernetic organisms 105 cyber vigilantism 157 cyborgs 105, 107 Danielewski, Mark Z. 5, 121, 124–127; House of Leaves 123; Only Revolutions 120; tribute to his readers 122

Dasein 6, 17, 173–177, 182n26 Dean, Jodi 87 De Beauvoir, Simone 52 de Chardin, Teilhard 11, 20; experience of the Sublime Surface 14; Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit 16–17; Homecoming 15; La Nostalgie du Front 14; no man’s land 16; sense of tranquillity 14; terrain of immense freedom 14; torn-to-pieces-hood of Zerrissenheit 15; traumatic experience of violence 15; violence of the Front 16 Deckard, Rick 110 Deleuze, Gilles 11–12, 17, 19, 22; ethics 19; follows Bousquet 19; higher state of consciousness 18; skin of the earth 17; wound 18–19 Deluca, Kevin Michael 174 Depression Quest 94 Derrida, Jacques: meditations on hospitality 126; notion of hospitality 126 “The Detainee’s Tale as told to Ali Smith” 146 de Warren, Nicolas 16 diacritical intercorporeity 160 dialogic situation 145, 148, 150 Dick, Philip K. 5 digital mediation 158 discriminations 30 dispositifs 156, 159, 161 Do Androids 106, 109; Bounty Hunters 107; Nexus-6 androids 110 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep 5, 105–106, 114n6, 115n30, 116n39 doomsday machine 13 Elbow, Peter 144, 148 Elkins, James 40 Ellis, Samantha 150 Environmental Humanities 2 environmental solidarity 67 environmental sustainability 69 epistemology 32 ethico-aesthetic paradigm 20 eurocentric/patriarchal structures 51 existential dignity 30–31 fascist ideologies 4, 61n22 feminist embodiment 52–53 feminist-nomadic subject 51–53, 61n28 Ferrando, Francesca 3, 29–36

Index  189 financial-technocratic system 177 Flatt, Jason 94 fluid sensory communication 158 forever sixteen 122 Frankenstein 108, 112, 116n40 Frankenstein Complex 108 French school of philosophy 125 Friese, Heidrun 144 Gabriela, Martinez 165 Galvan, Jill 112 The Gambia, Victor 145, 152n15 The Gameworld Trilogy 6 Gardner’s Art Through the Ages: A Global Art History 41, 43 Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group 143 genocidal anthropocentrism 161 genocides 30 gerundive process 174 Gestalt Therapy 85–86, 90n40 Giddens, Anthony 174–175 Glissant, Édouard 17 global art scene 40 globalization 4, 17, 25n27, 70–72, 154, 156, 167n23, 171–181; and identity 51–52; multilogical phenomenology 2; socio-economic-cultural and political processes of 2 Globalization and New Terrains of Consciousness: Phenomenologies of the Global/Local/Glocal 1, 29, 36n1 globalized migration 151 Global North 40, 70–71, 178 Global South 45, 70–71, 162–164, 178 Goodman, Paul 85 Gorski, Will 157 grapholect 172 Gray, Jesse 138–139 Gray, Nolan 94 Greenberg, Julia 165 Guattari, Felix 18, 20 Gupta, Indrani Das 6–7, 170–181 Han, Byung-Chul 25n25, 160 Hansen, Mark 123 Haraway, Donna 176, 179 Hayles, Katherine 32–33 Hefferline, Ralph 85 Heidegger, Martin 6, 172–177, 182n13, 182n27 Heraclitan ontology 84 Herd, David 143 heteroglossia 144–151, 152n9

heteroglot 145 heterosexuality 159 history of civilizations 30 Holocaust 109 Homo sapiens 30, 32 homo sensorium 154, 157, 161 Horvat, Srećko: After the Apocalypse 80; another world is possible 83; archaeological mode of deep interpretation 84; drawing on Sigmund Freud and Walter Benjamin 81–82; drawing on the philosopher Gűnther Anders 82; eschatology 82; opening thesis 80–81; process of ‘normalizing 82; radical re-invention of the world 83; second thesis 81; struggle for meaning 81; theses on the Apocalypse 83; thesis 6, 82 hospitable heterotopia 126 Hotstar 165 House of Leaves 123, 129n11, 129n13 Hulu 165 human audition 158 human embodiment 32 Humanities World Report (2015) 44, 48n18 humanoids 105, 107, 110, 112 human rights 5, 105–116 hyperindustrial capitalism 160 hyper-masculinity 157 idea of Elias 179 illegal migrants 51, 144 immaterial labour 166 Indra’s Web 171–172, 177–179, 181 inequality: in art and literary worlds 39–40; pipeline 4; story of 38 Inhabiting a Globalized World: Concepts, Theories, Critical Perspectives 1 intellectual captivity 44, 48n17 “The Interpreter’s Tale as told to Carol Watts” 148 Islamia, Jamia Millia 1 island ecosystems 66, 68 Island Sessions 4, 71–72 Jaber, Rania 44 Jameson, Fredric 83–84, 108–109, 126–127 James, William 11, 16, 24n2 Jean-Claude 160

190 Index Johnson, Don 123–124 Jones, Brandon 177 Karremann, Isabel 1, 179, 181n7, 184n77 The Kathasaritsagara 180 Kincaid, Jamaica 42 Kleiner, Fred 43 Kngwarreye, Emily Kame 43 Koons, Jeff 40 Kristeva, Julia 124 the labor of vision 159 labour and commodity 161 labour–capital nexus 159 La Nostalgie du Front 14, 21 Latin American literature 45 Latinx culture 38 lawlessness 163 Lawlor, Leonard 18 Lawrence, D.H. 16 Lazzarato, Maurizio 160–161, 166, 167n15–167n16, 167n18 Leibniz 159 Levitas, Ruth 84, 86 Levitt, Peggy 4, 37–48 Lito 157–158, 163 living and dying 176–180 Lobato, Ramon 165 Lochner, Rosalie Siemon 174 Logique du sens 12 Mahua 177–179 Malhotra, Simi 1–7 Malm and Hornborg 178, 183n61 Malmgren, Carl D. 172–173, 182n14 Mannheim, Karl 84 “The Man of Law’s Tale” 147 Marratto, Scott L. 160 Marx, Daniel 99 masculinist voyeurism 164 masculinity 70, 157 mass socialist organization (MSO) 88 Mayra, Frans 93 mechanical men 108 mechanical slaves 107 Mercer, Wilbur 110 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 6, 155–156, 159–160, 166n1, 167n11–167n12 metaphor 3–7, 11–12, 14–15, 21–22, 24n5, 34, 53–56, 58, 101, 144–145, 163 metaphorical nomadic subject 4, 52, 59

meta-reflections 146–149 The Metropolis 113 migrant crisis 143 “The Migrant’s Tale as told to Dragan Todorovic” 147, 152n25 Milton’s use 160 mnemotechnical organs 161, 167n17 mobilization of corporeality 158 mondialisation 25n27, 172, 175 mortal tear 21, 26n50 Moylan, Tom 4–5, 79–91 multi-lingualism 176 multilogical phenomenology 2 multi-user games 93 musical traditions 68 MySims 93 Nairobi 157, 160 Nancy, Jean-Luc 13, 175 Natarajan, Priya Parrotta 4, 65–74 natural soundscapes 67 Nayar, Pramod K. 178 neganthropocene 20, 95, 101, 102n9, 102n16 neoliberal capitalism 159, 161, 165 neoliberal globalization 72, 161 neoliberal globalized capitalism 161 neoliberalism 80, 156, 160, 163, 166 neo-monadic singularity 163 Netflix 155–156; emergence 165; in-house series Sense8 see Sense8; production 164, 166; scholarship on 165 New Terrains of Consciousness: Globalization, Sensory Environments and Local Cultures of Knowledge 1, 36n1 New York City: become a wilder place 139; city home 134; fellow inhabitants of 135; heterogeneous and porous 136; resident aliens 140; sanctuary city 134; sub-standard housing 138–139 Nexus-6 androids 110–111 Nexus-6 brain unit 107 Nichols, Randy 165 The Night Watch 154–155 nomadic phenomenology 58 nomadic subjectivity 50–64 nomadic thought 51 Nomi 157–158 non-human subjects 51 non-unitary vision of a subject 52 Norton Anthology of World Literature 43–44

Index  191 one-dimensional melancholic normality 83 Only Revolutions 5, 120, 127–128; brutal massacre of 200 prisoners 121; piece of ergodic literature 121; somatic principle 124–125; technological potential 121; as a text requiring 121 Orwell: Keeping an Eye on You: communities of gamers surviving 101; continuous commentary 100; datachunks 99; episodic, dystopian simulation game 98; large network of suspects 100; mass surveillance, data harvesting and personal privacy 100; moral conflict and flooding 99; The Nation 98; online fan communities 101; The Party 98; player-character 99; player is a CCTV camera 98 Palumbo, Donald 108, 111 The Pandemic is a Portal 12 Papers, Please 95; Death Theme 98; EZIC 97; neganthropocene 95; political situation 96; puzzle simulation video game 95; Sergiu Volda 96; 20 possible endings 97 paranoid reading 128, 129n36 Patel, Venya 4, 50–64 patient-protagonist 127 Paul, Kalpita Bhar 175 Penguin Random House 45 Perls, Fritz 85 Persian numerals, 12, 2016 149 personal identity 158 phenomenological common sense of temporality 21 phenomenological experience 11, 14 phenomenology of Alphonso Lingis 13 Phenomenology of Spirit 3, 11, 16, 24n5 phenomenology of violence 3, 11 Pincus, Anna 143 Planeta 45 planetarity 1–2, 7n1, 162, 176 planetary ecology 162 planetary no man’s land 21–23 political activism 157 political corruption 163 Pollockish, Jackson 43 polyvocality 151, 176 Pope, Lucas 5, 94–95 portal 3, 11–26, 177

postcolonial populations 30 posthuman articulation 29 posthumanism 29–36 posthumanist discourse 32 postmodern feminism 50 postmodernism 33, 129n30, 129n32 process of humanizing 29–30 prologues fictional intertextuality 151 protagonist experience 122 psycellium’s capacity 162 psychography 160 Puerto Rico’s environmental policy 71 Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life 22 queer activism 158 question of corpus 13 Rabkin, Eric 172 racism 17, 37, 109, 139 racist exclusions 135 radical empathy 156 radical hermeneutic 80–81, 83 radical intervention 159 radical post-apocalyptic hermeneutic 82 Rattus Norvegicus diaspora 5, 133–141 Refugee Tales 144; claim authenticity 151; collections of 149; generic concept of 150; narrative dynamics of 144 refugee voices: heteroglossia and polyphony 144–149; mediation and representation 150–151 Rhodan, Elinari 101 Richter, Gerhard 40 Rizvi, Zahra 1–7, 93–103 R. Norvegicus culture 137 robots 5, 105, 107–114 Rosen, Rachel 111 Roy, Arundhati 3, 11–13, 15, 21 Rushdie, Salman 42 Rutherford, Kelly 41 Saferstein, Ezequial 44 The Satanic Verses 42 scenographies 155 schizophrenia 127 science fiction 6, 105, 107, 109, 165, 176–177, 179 Second Law of obedience 109 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 128 Seed, David 106–108, 113 Sen, Arpita 5, 105–116

192 Index sensation 2, 57, 123, 148, 154–156, 158, 164 Sense8 154, 156–158; genocidal anthropocentrism 161; politics of natality 159–160; racial politics 164; reconfiguration of body 159–160; utopian resolution 164 sexuality 157, 159, 163, 173 Shakespeare, William 65 Shin, Doyeon 44 The Sims 93 Singh, R. Raj 174 Singh, Shraddha A. 1–7, 29–36 Singh, Vandana 6, 171–172, 176–178, 180–181 social and economic policies 84 social and environmental 70, 81, 179 social-psychological level 85–86 social simulation videogames 93 solipsism 33 Somadeva 180, 184n82 “Somadeva: A Sky River Sutra” 180 somatics methods: definition 123; posture of the intellectual 124; sensory awareness 123 “The Soul of Man under Socialism” (1891) 170 soundscapes 66; of islands 67 South Pacific Fusion 72 spatiotemporal co-ordinates 54 species of alterity 176 spectral multiplication 159 spiral of ecological crisis 4 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 6, 33, 45, 176, 180 Spotify 165 Stiegler, Bernard 11–12, 16–17, 21–22, 95, 101, 127–128, 161; Comment ne pas devenir fou? 20; Dans la disruption 20; Decadence of Industrial Democracies 20; decentering of the human experience 126; ethico-aesthetic paradigm 20; pharmakon 126; philosopher of technicity 125; plague is the wound 19; positive bifurcation 20; Qu’appellet-on panser? 19; Technics and Time 125; technological innovations 125; wound is the pandemic 19–20 St Paul: The Foundation of Universalism 85 “The Student’s Tale as told to Helen Macdonald” 149

subjectification 87, 163, 166 Subramaniam, Radhika 5, 133–141 Suryanet 178–179, 184n69 Surya Towers 178–179 Syria 147 Taylor, M. C. 21 technocrats 128 technophobia 107 The Tempest 65–66 tentacularity 179 Terminator movies 113 That Dragon 94 Things Fall Apart 42 Third World representations 170 Tolkien, J.R.R. 172 Tomodachi 93 transhumanism 31 translation and language 148–149 2001: A Space Odyssey 109 Ūbermensch 33 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) 72, 73n8, 74n14 University of Puerto Rico 4, 71 Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious 33 Utopia 84, 90n39, 94, 170–172, 183n53 utopian manifesto 83 vainglorious 136 Vint, Sherryl 112–113 virtuality 22–23, 156, 166, 173 “The Visitor’s Tale as told to Hubert Moore” 145 vocal agency 147, 150–151 Volda, Sergiu 96 Wachowski, Lana 154, 166 Wachowski, Lilly 154 Wallraven, Miriam 6, 143–153 Warrick, Patricia S. 105 Watts, Alan 34 Western popular culture 160 Westworld 5, 105–107, 109–113 Whale Rider: power of anti-environmentalist discourses 69; protagonist of 72–73; soundtrack of 69, 73n2; story of Paikea Apirana 68 Wilde, Oscar 170, 181n1 wildlife coexistence campaign 133; photogenic images 134

Index  193 Wildlife NYC 133, 140n1–140n3 Wolf, Mark J.P. 172–173, 182n15 Woolf, Virginia 54 working-class citizens 13 world-becoming 174, 183n32 worldbuilding 171–173 world globalization 179 worlding as transformation 172–176, 180

The Worlding Project: Doing Cultural Studies in the Era of Globalization (2007) 172 world-making 5, 170–171, 174 wounds of humanity 13 xenophobia 109, 138, 157 Yeats, William Butler 79 YouTube video 122