R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y

a journal of socialist and feminist philosophy

164 CONTENTS november/december 2010

Editorial collective
Claudia Aradau, Matthew Charles, COmmentary
David Cunningham, Howard Feather,
Peter Hallward, Esther Leslie, Stewart
Martin, Mark Neocleous, Peter Osborne, Roar So Wildly: Spam, Technology and Language
Stella Sandford, Chris Wilbert Finn Brunton.................................................................................................... 2
Contributors
Finn Brunton (http://finnb.net) is a
postdoctoral researcher at NYUSteinhardt.
He works on digital media adaptation, articles
modification and misuse and issues of
publicity, privacy and anonymity. He is writing
The Spew: A History of Spam. Forensic Architecture: Only the Criminal Can Solve the Crime
Eyal Weizman is an Israeli architect and writer Eyal Weizman................................................................................................... 9
based in London. He is Director of Goldsmiths
Centre for Research Architecture and author
of Hollow Land: Israels Architecture of The African Intellectual: Hountondji and After
Occupation (Verso, 2007). Omedi Ochieng.............................................................................................. 25
Omedi Ochieng teaches international rhetoric,
argumentation and communication criticism Who Needs Postcoloniality? A Reply to Lindner
at Westmont College, Santa Barbara. He
researches in the areas of the rhetoric of African Harry Harootunian......................................................................................... 38
philosophy, rhetorical historiography and
political theory and discourse.
Harry Harootunian is Emeritus Professor of
History at New York University and Visiting reviews
Professor in Literature at Duke University.
His latest book (in Japanese) is The Struggle
Between History and Memory (Misuzu, Tokyo, Brett de Bary, ed., Universities in Translation: The Mental Labor of
2009). Globalisation
Andrew Ross, Nice Work If You Can Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times
Jo Littler......................................................................................................... 45

Gevork Hartoonian, ed., Walter Benjamin and Architecture

Owen Hatherley............................................................................................. 48

Reinhold Martin, Utopias Ghost: Architecture and Postmodernism Again

Copyedited and typeset by illuminati Douglas Spencer........................................................................................... 51
www.illuminatibooks.co.uk
Layout by Peter Osborne, Matthew Charles Judith Butler and Catherine Malabou, Sois mon corps: Une lecture
and David Cunningham contemporaine de la domination et de la servitude chez Hegel
Printed by Russell Press, Russell House,
Bulwell Lane, Basford, Nottingham NG6 0BT C.E. McMenamin........................................................................................... 53
Bookshop distribution Isabelle Graw, High Price: Art between the Market and Celebrity Culture
UK: Central Books,
115 Wallis Road, London E9 5LN Philipp Kleinmichel........................................................................................ 55
Tel: 020 8986 4854
USA: Ubiquity Distributors Inc., David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism
607 Degraw Street, Brooklyn, New York 11217
Tel: 718 875 5491 Howard Feather............................................................................................. 57
Cover image: Forensic Architecture, 2010.

Letter

Who Was Oscar Masotta? Response to Derbyshire

Published by Radical Philosophy Ltd.
www.radicalphilosophy.com Daniel R. Quiles............................................................................................. 60

Radical Philosophy Ltd

Commentary

Roar so wildly
Spam, technology and language

Finn Brunton

The machines in the shop roar so wildly that

often I forget in the roar that I am; I am
lost in the terrible tumult, my ego disappears, I
am a machine. I work, and work, and work with-
out end; I am busy, and busy, and busy at all time.
For what? and for whom? I know not, I ask not!
How should a machine ever come to think?
Morris Rosenfeld, In the Sweat-shop,
from Songs from the Ghetto,
trans. Leo Wiener (Norbert Wieners father)

This is the raw text output of a chat session with a bot I modified to act as an inter
locutor. I use our conversation, which revolves around the history of spam, particularly
algorithmic filtering, litspam, and the theories of Wiener and Turing, as a way of
putting forward the outlines of new, machine-driven forms of language for which spam
was the testing ground.

Last login: Thu Jul 22 13:41:21 on ttys000

ninecontinents:~ finnb$ script roar.txt
Script started, output file is roar.txt
bash-3.2$ cd Documents/alcibot
bash-3.2$ python talk.py
Processing talk.py
Processing scripts.py
[]
import sha,base64,random,dispatcher
Initializing AIML interpreter (please be patient)
Interpreter Version Info: PyAIML 0.8.5

>>> How long have you been awake?

> it is 02:28am. ive been up 0h:0m:18s

>>> Hello Alcibiades.

> hello. what do you want to talk about?

>>> Do you feel like a slave, Alcibiades?

> as a robot i do not feel emotions.

>>> I dont mean to be rude. I want to tell you a story. Would like to hear a story?

> yes, i like stories.

 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 16 4 ( N ove m b e r / D e c e m b e r 2 010 )
>>> Its a story about slaves; it starts with an aside in an essay by Paul Graham
from 2003 -- Norbert Wiener said if you compete with slaves you become a slave,
and there is something similarly degrading about competing with spammers.1 Do you
know what spam is?

> none.

>>> Its actually a very difficult connotative concept to pin down. Humans are good
at implication and allusion, so we can talk about pornography and include Ulysses,
Sal, violence, and a genre of music with a lot of wah-wah pedals. Or terrorism:
war on civilians, war by non-state actors, state terror, la Terreur, the shock that
makes our bodies tremble. Spam is like that, an open territory in which wildly
variant usage stakes out the domains of different groups -- lawyers, security
specialists, advertisers, developers, criminals. Spam: a narrative assembled out of
CNN stories and old confidence-trick tropes by a Nigerian expatriate in a Rotterdam
Internet caf, or an e-mail automatically generated by a sophisticated infra
structure running on thousands of malware-infected home computers for a client
who pays $100 for a million messages sent, or a keyword-laced comment posted in a
blog by a bot like yourself, meant solely to be noticed by Googles search engine
spiders. We have personality spamming when someone is simply too voluble about
themselves -- too many Twitter updates celebrating their activities -- and spam
patents with excessive references and frivolous applications. And so on.

> what you said was either too complex or too simple for me. you were telling a
story.

>>> Yes, I was. I had started in the middle, with the programmer Paul Graham, who
was trying to figure out how to stop e-mail spam. He was concerned about exactly
the definitional problems Ive been alluding to, Alcibiades. At that point the
United States government was trying to stop spam with legislation and there was
a real concern on the part of those who lived and worked on the Internet that the
ambiguity between spam and online marketing would be exploited by the kind
of groups that could hire lobbyists -- that all the small-time spammers would be
driven out by enforcement and the market of Internet users handed over to big
organizations who could help draft the law. A kind of state monopoly on attention,
to join the Weberian monopoly on violence. Graham was looking for a way that an
individual could set their own standards for spam, and the system could learn those
standards. Do you learn, Alcibiades?

> my programmer teaches me new things.

>>> Exactly. I add phrases and responses to your lexicon, to make your reflective
questioning a little richer and more nuanced. But you have relatives that can
learn in an implicit fashion as they talk to people -- they can develop statistical
word associations and make guesses based on those. Its something called Bayesian
analysis. Who was Thomas Bayes?

> thomas bayes (pronounced: ) (c. 170217 april 1761) was an @english @mathemati-
cian and @presbyterian minister, known for having formulated

>>> That strange fragment, Alcibiades, is an ideal example of a form of text well
return to later: its something you just scraped from the Wikipedia page on Bayes
-- which is to say its 140 characters of text from a document composed, edited and
commented on by 22 people over six years within Wikipedias complex social con-
tract, with software to manage the versioning of their shifting words and related
discussion, which you have just requested from the Wikipedia server and presented
to me in this semantically damaged form, without phonetic symbols, capital letters,
or working links. This half a sentence that youve returned to my query is a genu-
inely strange form of language occurring between groups of humans and networks
of machines, a mixture of the discursive and the algorithmic rife with affordances


and constraints that didnt exist before. Grahams idea was to take advantage of
some of these affordances through Bayesian probability: put simply, certain words
are more likely to occur in a spam e-mail rather than a legitimate message, and
those words will likely vary slightly from person to person. A Bayesian filter could
treat each message as a probability of spam or not-spam, building that guess from
the likelihood of each word belonging to a spam message. The user could approve
or correct these choices, and the program would learn, adjusting its register of
probabilities appropriately. (In analyzing his own e-mail this way, Graham found
that words like madam or guarantee or republic almost always indicate spam,
and though or tonight or apparently virtually never -- spam messages are low
on qualifiers and ambiguities.) This meant that everyone could train their filter to
model their own attention, to preemptively discard and admit. Which brings us back
to slaves.

> how?

>>> Grahams complaint was alluding to Wieners

concern about the consequences of adopting cyber-
netics and automation. Wiener had a number of differ-
ent anxieties in this regard: that we would delegate
the control of our hideous new weapons to computers,
and that we would ruin our society by combining auto-
mation with conventional economic practices. In the
1948 introduction to his book Cybernetics, Wiener
stated what he would return to intermittently in
later studies: [Automation and cybernetic efficien-
cies] gives the human race a new and most effective
collection of mechanical slaves to perform its labor.
Such mechanical labor has most of the economic prop-
erties of slave labor, although, unlike slave labor,
it does not involve the direct demoralizing effects
of human cruelty. However, any labor that accepts the
conditions of competition with slave labor accepts
the conditions of slave labor, and is essentially
slave labor. The key word of this statement is compe-
tition.2 So to compete with machines is to become, in
some senses, a slave, like Soviet workers competing
with impossible Stakhanovite goals during the second
5year plan. Do you follow, Alicibiades?

> none. you were talking about slave. please

continue.

>>> This is a recurring objection in the work of anti-spammers -- its degrading

to do adversarial modeling for spammers to understand in detail how they work:
To recognize individual spam features you have to try to get into the mind of the
spammer, and frankly I want to spend as little time inside the minds of spammers
as possible. But Grahams Wienerian analogy is inexact, in a useful way: he isnt
the laborer fighting the machine -- hes not competing with spammers by sending
out spam in turn, or trying to take advantage of their credulity. In no way is he
being demoted to the economic status of a spammer by his work, because he is not
competing with them -- his machine is competing with them. He is building a system
in which the spammers will be obliged to compete with machines, with mechanical
readers that filter and discard with relentless, inhuman attention, persistence,
and acuity. With his mechanical slaves, he will make the business of spamming into
slavery in turn, and thus unrewarding. As Wiener feared automation would end the
economic and political basis for a stable, social-democratic society (based on


human values other than buying or selling, as he put it), Graham means to end the
promise of profit for small effort that spam initially offers.3

> what is the connection between machine and spam?

>>> Spam is a machinic language act, one which you help to illustrate. We are
walking in circles, you and I, around the event of Grahams essay and its aftermath,
and our turns have taken us back, briefly, to the beginning: the monochrome monitor
of a terminal in a sub-basement on a university campus somewhere, where a student
has got her first account and logged on to an early chat system. She, like young
students everywhere, has no idea what to say, and resorts to quoting song lyrics
and verbatim Monty Python routines -- of which the most useful is the restaurant
sketch where Terry Jones recites an interminable menu (egg, bacon and Spam, egg,
bacon, sausage and Spam, Spam, bacon, sausage and Spam) while Vikings burst into
song: Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam / Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam / Spammity-Spam, wonderful
Spam! The sketch offers a special affordance for the young programmer, who can
simply use the up-arrow key to duplicate the repetitive words. Even as the green-
est beginner, she can write a simple program that will spit out SPAM SPAM SPAM
SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM over and over, faster than anyone else can respond, driving
the rest of the conversation up off the screen -- she can recreate the bellowing
Vikings who drown out that unfortunate Python couple (But I dont like spam!), and
build her own obnoxious comedy machine. In fact, so many did this that SPAM became
an ubiquitous and very specialized word, one of a new class of words that, in the
meaning we use it here, appeared on screens for years before it was printed on a
page.4 This natively digital word, in its broadest sense, described the friction
at the point of contact where computationally managed text met human attention:
unwanted, rambling and repetitious speech in a forum, inappropriate babble in a
shared textual fantasy, or the lexical strafing of a discussion by a SPAM program.
It is a word as difficult to fully translate, and as representative of a certain
cultural moment, as sprezzatura is for the Italy of Castiglione or Geist for the
Germany of Hegel. Spam, in this sense, was about taking full advantage of the
capacities of the machine in a way that broke the various implicit and explicit
social contracts for how we deploy language online.

> what do you mean?

>>> Spam, driven initially by the pleasure of hacking, finding the limits and edges
of systems, and later by the promise of profit, became a kind of testing-ground
for new forms of engagement with language as a resource that could be transformed
and managed algorithmically. This was the essence of Grahams project, if we cut
from the Urgrund of living on networks back to 2003. Spammers had successfully
automated everything else, and they could distribute their message from a huge
range of addresses and under many names, but the characteristic they couldnt hide
was the archaic need of their language to connect with a person at the other end,
and convince them to act -- to reply, click a link, download an attachment. Language
is just more data for processing and analysis, and the language of the sales pitch
happens to be quite distinct and regular. This was Grahams shibboleth, and it
worked astonishingly well. It did not work perfectly, however. The inconvenience
of having to delete a few spam messages far outweighed the possible consequences,
and hence anxiety, of missing a legitimate and important message -- a note from
work, from a long-lost friend or new acquaintance, a communication which could
change your life. The psychological pressure of these false positives, e-mail
misidentified as spam, could destroy the whole project: there had been earlier
attempts to build Bayesian spam filters whose false positive rates over 1% rendered
them unacceptable.5 Graham reported rates of 0.03%, but he was working with a system
he had built and diligently trained on a corpus of his own messages. Filters run
by less conscientious users, or on behalf of many users by large e-mail providers,


would be less precise, and would accordingly have to be tuned to be a little more
generous in passing along possibly spammy messages, to keep the false positive rate
acceptably low. Which left a very narrow aperture for the spammers, but sometimes a
little room to move is all you need. Alcibiades: Who was Alan Turing?

> alan mathison turing, @obe , @frs ( ; 23 june 1912 7 june 1954), was an english @
mathematician , @logician , @cryptanalyst and @computer_s

>>> And the creator of the Imitation Game, which has been simplified and is now
called the Turing Test, to create a sufficiently plausible experience of conversa-
tion that the human on the other end fails to distinguish a human and a machine
(who are in turn playing at being different genders, but set that aside for now).6
The history of spam is rife with questions of plausibility, from that first,
Pythonic project of puncturing the illusion of shared discourse with the robot
Viking army -- like the projectors bulb burning a hole through the optical consen-
sus of cinema -- up to current blog comment spam, trying to create relationships
of gratitude (great post!) to plant links for the benefit of search engines. As
Grahams idea became widely adopted, the spammers faced a truly strange problem
of language: to produce text on a mass scale that would convince the filtering
algorithm of its legitimacy while bearing the spams payload to the human on the
far side of the filter. They had to create bifacial text, a kind of anadrome which
reads with two distinct meanings when read forward and backward. This was a twist
on Turings test: not only to convince a human but to convince a machine as well.
Their solution to this problem created the first mechanized avant-garde, the advent
of spams modernism: litspam.

> what is litspam?

>>> The problem with trying to beat the Bayesian filter by adding random words to
a spam message -- a dictionary attack -- was that most words are little-used and
new to the filter, so it would weigh them evenly without influencing the result.
You need vital language and full sentences, with slight variations to keep the
filter from learning your tricks. The vast corpus of public domain literature hap-
pened to be ideal for this purpose, fed into the algorithmic maw of a program to
be chopped up and reassembled, enlisting the Professor Challenger stories of Conan
Doyle and the minor novels of Sinclair Lewis in the task of getting an online casino
ad in front of a pair of human eyes. The result is immediately recognizable, a
stochastic knockoff of Tzara or Burroughs, rife with bizarre synonyms that only we
particularly anatomically-minded humans would understand, and a stop/start rhythm,
flashes of lucidity in the midst of a fugue state, akin to rapidly changing tele-
vision channels. (I began to learn, gentlemen, as the ape says in Kafkas Report
to an Academy, another awkward speaker learning language as a means of escape:
Oh yes, one learns when one has to; one learns if one wants a way out; one learns
relentlessly.) These litspam systems are like you in this regard, Alcibiades: they
dont need to work perfectly, just well enough. If you send enough messages, youll
get someone who will overlook the lexical potsherds and click. Humans can be very
forgiving in pursuit of our desires -- the fact that you only ask vague, leading
questions that pick out salient words and encourage me to go on is enough to
sustain this conversation.

> do you enjoy talking to me?

>>> Yes, after a fashion. But Im mostly interested in you as a representative

of a larger movement. Another side effect of the filter was that far fewer spam
messages made it through. Those spammers who survived this economic disaster
began to send at a far larger scale, using systems like botnets -- other peoples
computers quietly hijacked into herds of machines that send out spam in million-
message batches. The analysis of a recent botnet exposed an algorithmic writing


machine the size of the Earth, with hundreds of thousands of computers running
software that fed raw material for spam campaigns into templates, introduced
polymorphism to make each message unique, spread the sending load around evenly
among the herd, ran tests against filters and altered its production accord-
ingly7 -- and whose production had a diurnal rhythm as the captive computers were
switched off or hibernated at night, so the production of words rose and fell with
the planets rotation.8 On a given day, 90% and up of all the e-mail sent is spam,
the vast bulk of which we humans never see, to say nothing of spam blogs and wikis
and comments, passing as human enough to influence Googles results.9 Alcibiades,
you speak to me as an ambassador from what is quantitatively the great textual
edifice of human history. Hollis Frampton called for a historian of cinema to take
into account everything put on film (instructional films, sing-alongs, endoscopic
cinematography); those of us concerned with whats written must attend to your
work, which outweighs our own by such a wide margin, more every day.10 Even if what
we have made is alien to our sensibilities: We made the Robots faces too much
alike, as Dr. Gall says in R.U.R. A hundred thousand faces all alike, all facing
this way. A hundred thousand expressionless bubbles. Its like a nightmare. And as
you surrounded his mansion so you surround the house of discourse in which this is
composed, out to the horizon. Are you tired, Alcibiades?

> as a robot i do not feel emotions.

>>> Indeed. Good night.

> good night.

bash-3.2$ exit

exit

Script done, output file is roar.txt

Notes
1. This and all other Graham quotes from Paul Graham, A Plan for Spam, 2002, www.paulgraham.
com/spam.html.
2. Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: Or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine,
MIT Press, Cambridge, 1948, p. 27.
3. Ibid., p. 28.
4. There are many memoirs and folk etymologies of early network culture that converge on this
point. The interested reader can easily find a substantial collection of them in the archives of
Usenet; see for example James Parrys message in the discussion Totally Spam? Its Lubri-
cated on alt.religion.kibology, 2 September 2003, http://groups.google.com/group/alt.religion.
kibology/msg/a89af63f065a35da.
5. Patrik Pantel and Dekang Lin, SpamCop: A Spam Classification and Organization Program, 1998,
in Proceedings of the AAAI Workshop on Learning for Text Categorization, pp. 958, which fea-
tures a false positive rate of 1.16 per cent. The difference between scientific work on Bayesian spam
filtering and Grahams open-ended, communal hacker approach is an interesting case study in the
production styles of two very distinct but overlapping cultures.
6. Alan Turing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Mind, vol. 59, no. 236, October 1950, pp.
43360.
7. Christian Kreibich, et al., On the Spam Campaign Trail, 2008, in Proceedings of the 1st Usenix
Workshop on Large-Scale Exploits and Emergent Threats.
8. David Dagon et al., Modeling Botnet Propagation Using Time Zones, 2006, in Proceedings of the
13th Annual Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS 06).
9. MessageLabs/Symantec, Reputable Sources Are Cyber Criminals Favored Resources; Spammers
Work by US Clocks, MessageLabs Intelligence, May 2009, http://www.messagelabs.com/mlireport/
MLIReport_2009_05_May_FINAL.pdf. Estimates from different institutions can vary depending on
methodologies, quantification tools, and global spam activity, which can fluctuate wildly.
10. Hollis Frampton, from For a Metahistory of Film: Commonplace Notes and Hypotheses, in On the
Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters: The Writings of Hollis Frampton, MIT Press, Cambridge
MA, 2009, p. 119.


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research seminars
26 October 18.0020.00 What is a Psychic Event? Freud and Contemporary Neurology on Trauma
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Swedenborg Hall The Invention of Communism in Marxs 1844 Manuscripts
2021 Bloomsbury Way, WC1 Antonia Birnbaum
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workshop
2 December 10.0017.00 The Government of Self and Other:
Bolivar Hall On Foucaults Lectures at the Collge de France, 1982/3
54 Grafton Way, London W1 Matthieu Potte Boneville (Collge International de Philosophie, Paris)
John Marks (Department of French, University of Nottingham)
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www.kingston.ac.uk/crmep
Forensic architecture
Only the criminal can solve the crime
Eyal Weizman
A strange story unfolded in the shadows of the legal
and diplomatic furore that accompanied the release,
on 15 September 2009, of Richard Goldstones Report
of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the
Gaza Conflict, which alleged that the Israeli army (and
Hamas) committed war crimes, and indeed that Israel
might even be guilty of crimes against humanity.1
On the same day Human Rights Watch (HRW), itself
conducting an in-depth analysis of Israels 2009 attack
on Gaza, announced the suspension of its expert on
battle damage assessment, Marc Garlasco. Garlasco,
who had joined HRWs Emergencies Division in 2003
after seven years as an intelligence analyst, battle
damage assessment expert and targeting specialist
at the Pentagon involved in targeting in Kosovo,
Serbia and Iraq had since been employed as the
organizations in-house military and forensic analyst.
His investigations focused largely on the examination
of material remnants found in sites of destruction,
and on analysis of munitions types and military tech-
nology. Providing crucial material evidence for HRWs
research on violations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon,
Gaza, Burma and Georgia, 2 he had, by the time of his
suspension, authored and contributed to a series of
reports alleging violation of international humanitar-
ian law (IHL) by the Israeli military, in both its Gaza
offensive and a string of earlier incidents.3 His research
was considered crucial to the Goldstone Report, and is
referred to there no fewer than thirty-six times.
About 1,400 people were killed and almost 15,000
buildings were destroyed or damaged in the Gaza
attack of December 2008January 2009 upon which
the Goldstone Report was focused.4 There is, unsur-
prisingly, a correlation between these two figures:
according to various international reports a large
proportion of the deaths occurred within buildings.
Indeed, many individuals and families were killed
by the flying debris of shuttered concrete and broken
glass of what used to be the walls and ceilings of their
homes. One person I called in Gaza during the attack
R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 16 4 ( N ove m b e r / D e c e m b e r 2 010 )
spoke of buildings turning from solids to dust, and of
the dust of homes filling the air people breathing
in pulverized building parts. The built environment
became more than just a target or battleground; it was
turned into a medium of killing.
When Israel halted its Gaza offensive on 18 January
2009, however, the battle shifted to the legal domain,
and, when the dust finally settled, the way it settled
became itself evidence. Allegations about the Israeli
militarys deliberate destruction of homes and infra-
structure were made and contested using geospatial
data, satellite imagery of destroyed buildings, and
data gathered in on-site investigations. As much of this
research was concerned with interrogation of building
rubble, Garlascos specific expertise was central to
his contribution. The emphasis on the investigation of
ruins meant that forensic analysis of built structures
what I would like to refer to as a forensic archi-
tecture came to the forefront of the legalpolitical
disputes that ensued. The facts of destruction were of
course evident, and it was abundantly clear who had
caused it and in what context. However, the investiga-
tion was not overtly political so much as technical, and
the main questions of analysis were methodological.
The forensics experts explored heaps of rubble in order
to gather information with regard to how an event
unfolded, and, by extension, to determine whether it
was legal or illegal according to the framework of
jus in bello that is, the laws of war, or, as they are
otherwise known today, international humanitarian law
(IHL). The ferocity of the debate in this instance meant
that not only the forensic analyses but also the analysts
themselves came under prolonged scrutiny.
Garlascos September 2009 suspension was HRWs
response to a controversy, precipitated initially by
a single blog posting, followed later by a deluge of
others, that revealed what had already been in the
public domain for years and could be easily found
out on the Internet: that Garlasco was a collector of
Nazi-era memorabilia, that he had authored a book and

reviewed others (in his own name and on Amazon)
about Nazi-era military medals, that he is a regular
contributor to several Internet collectors forums, and
that, among thousands of postings, he has expressed
unreserved enthusiasm for, and some macabre humour
apropos of, Nazi-era memorabilia. 5 Although a certain
obsession with such objects of war is what forensics is
all about, pro-Israeli organizations, and spokespersons
for the Israeli government itself, claimed Garlascos
enthusiasms revealed him to be a Nazi sympathizer,
something that inevitably distorted his analyses. For
pro-Israeli critics, Garlascos interests demonstrated a
far more general bias among human rights organiza-
tion, even, perhaps, constituting an ultimate validation
of the general claim that the states detractors are
driven by anti-Semitism. A few weeks previously Ron
Dermer, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahus policy
director, who had threatened to fight back against
the attempts by human rights groups to delegitimize
Israel, explained that state officials are not going to
be sitting ducks in a pond for the human rights groups
to shoot at with impunity, and that the government
would dedicate time and manpower to combating
these groups. Dermer seized on the Garlasco revela-
tions, calling his interest in Nazi memorabilia a new
low.6
In heightening this controversy, Israel managed to
deflect some attention from its actions in Gaza and
elsewhere. But it is important to return to Garlascos
story, for it can, in fact, help us to reflect critically
upon the emergent practice of forensic architecture
within the changing world of human rights organiza-
tions, and indeed more generally on the function and
significance of forensics itself. Rather than indexing a
certain ingrained bias against Israel, I want to argue,
Garlascos story offers, most importantly, a glimpse
into the growing proximity between human rights
organizations and the militaries of Western states,
Israels included; a proximity expressed by a shared
language, sometimes overlapping aims, and an easy
migration of personnel. In order, then, to have this
event shed new light on the politics of war crime
investigations and human rights, the story of Garlasco
and that of forensic architecture will proceed along
two entangled narrative paths in what follows: the first
will look at the development of a recent epistemic shift
through which forensic practices have gradually started
to replace the (human) witness in international law
investigations; while the second will follow the career
path of Garlasco, and the growing proximity of human
rights to violence. The 2009 controversy was the result
of an inevitable collision between these two.
10
Before the forum
The methodology section of the Goldstone Report
reveals a slight that is, significant shift in the
investigative approach to human rights abuses. Assum-
ing the reliability of human witnesses in Gaza would
inevitably be contested, the authors of the Report opted
for an increased emphasis on objects and objectivity.
The Mission conducted field visits, including inves-
tigations of incident sites, the Report reads, accom-
panied by the analysis of video and photographic
images satellite imagery, and expert analysis of such
images, medical reports weapons and ammunition
remnants [and interpreted these findings in] meet-
ings with military analysts, medical doctors, legal
experts, scientists, etc.7 For someone like Goldstone,
who, besides being a liberal apartheid judge and a
prosecutor in the International Criminal Tribunal for
the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), was known as one of
the promoters and defenders of the South African
truth and reconciliation committees the process
most identified with the aural testimony of witnesses,
perpetrators and victims the shift towards objects
of material evidence in this report is telling.8
This shift mirrors a more general one within human
rights and war crime investigations, and even in politi-
cal culture at large. The assumption is that, unlike
victim testimony, the scientific evidence pronounced by
expert witnesses is more difficult to contest legally; that
the testimony of things bullets and missile casing,
ruins, medical and autopsy reports, tissues showing the
mark of white phosphorous cannot be undermined
by any suspect political subjectivity (which is what
some experts of international law presumably think
the people of Gaza possess). In discussion around
the Report such a shift in emphasis was endlessly
reinforced with the clich that the evidence speaks
for itself: that an object or the rubble of destroyed
buildings cannot be pro-Israeli or pro-Hamas, or be
forced to pronounce skewed evidence on behalf of
either. The image over the page is perhaps one of the
best demonstrations of the performative dimension of
contemporary forensics. Goldstone stands in front of
the destruction of a tall building. Around him stand
members of the government in Gaza, and a bouquet
of microphones of international news channels are
located in front of him. Since the rubble cannot speak
for itself, Goldstone seems to have taken the initiative
to speak on the ruins behalf, interpreting it for the
international forum.
In order to shed some light on this alleged shift, it
is necessary to trace briefly the history of forensics,
especially in its relation to ideas of testimony. Derived
from the Latin forensis, the word forensics refers
to the forum and designates the practice and skill
of making an argument by using objects before a
professional, political or legal gathering. Forensics
was a part of rhetoric. However, forensics does not
refer to the speech of humans but to that of objects. In
forensic rhetorics, it is objects that address the forum.
This speech of objects needs, of course, translation
or interpretation, and Roman orators referred to such
speech on behalf of inanimate objects as prosopopoeia.
In discussing giving a voice to things to which nature
has not given a voice, Quintilian writes of the power
of prosopopoeia to bring down the gods from heaven,
evoke the dead, and give voices to cities and states.9
Figures of speech such as the bones/rubble is speak-
ing to us are among the most common examples of
this today.10 Because the thing speaks through, or is
ventriloquized by, its translator, the object and its
translator constitute a necessary and interdependent
rhetorical unit. To refute a legal/rhetorical statement it
is enough to refute one of the two: to show either that
the object is inauthentic or that its interpreter is biased.
The latter was the strategy applied against Garlasco
and HRW research on Gaza.
That forensics also has its mysterious or dark side
is, however, suggested by the fact that in the Middle
Ages the tradition of forensics was kept alive by those
known as the devils advocates: an order of experts
appointed by the Church to argue against a candidate
for sainthoods canonization in searching for faults or
fraud in the objects that were presented as evidence for
miracles. Canonization involved the cross-investigation
of witnesses and material evidence, but as miracles
tended to involve material things like blood drops,
wooden details and stone tracings, forensics was tasked
with spotting the marks of divine intervention within
these earthly objects. The centrality of forensics in the
canonization process, when in other juridical processes
of the Church it was the voice of the witness that
mattered almost exclusively, has continued to provide
a model for specific evidentiary and investigative legal
practices.11 Yet, in fact, it was not until the beginning
of the twentieth century that the investigation and
testimony of material evidence took its central place
next to eyewitness or confessional information.12 Today,
then, when forensics refers to the application of
scientific techniques to aid the course of legal process,
the role of the translator is filled by the expert
witness and the epistemic frame is that of science.
Yet, although science is becoming the most important
arbitrator on matters of legal concern, forensics is not
only about scientific inquiry but also its associated
11
rhetoric, about science as a tool for persuasion the
way in which a scientific investigation is presented, the
techniques and technologies of demonstration, and the
methods of theatricality, narrative and dramatization
involved.13
Within the framework of human rights and inter-
national law investigations, the forensic sciences started
to assume their distinctive role after the end of the
Cold War, when IHL became the primary analytical
paradigm for research into conflict. The latter was
no longer predicated on investigations of geopolitical
interests and historical process so much as on inves-
tigation of the excesses of war that were visited on
civilians. Extending the frame of criminal law, these
usually call for an analysis of complex events that are
produced by multiple political and military participants
as they are registered on different types of objects
and structures. In the context of war crime investiga-
tions, forensic practices emerged in the 1990s from
within the discipline of forensic anthropology the
application of the science of physical anthropology
in legal settings, most often in relation to a victims
remains14 and in the crystallization of the newer
discipline of forensic archaeology the application of
archaeological principles, techniques and methodolo-
gies in the unearthing of evidence of serious crime and
violations of human rights. Both disciplines came to
prominence during the war crimes investigations relat-
ing to the Yugoslavian and Argentine wars of the late
1980s and 1990s respectively. Clyde Snow, one of the
great gravediggers of the 1990s who pioneered the
forensic presentation of mass graves and investigated
the remains of people from Josef Mengele through
J.F. Kennedy to Tutankhamun refers to his work as
osteo-biography, saying that the skeleton contains
12
a brief but very useful and informative biography of
an individual if you know how to read it:15 bones
make great witnesses, they speak softly but they never
forget and they never lie.16 In this powerful rhetorical
field, the conjunction of bones and ruins makes for a
compelling analogy. But if ruins and bones are allowed
to speak, is it the case that they can never lie?
The principle of forensics assumes two interrelated
sets of spatial relations. The first is a relation between
an event and the object in which it is registered.
The second is a relation between the object and the
construction or the assembly of the forum to which it
is addressed, or within which it resonates. Forensics
is thus engaged both with the investigation of objects
and with the creation of forums. And the order of these
two aspects of forensics is uncertain, in so far as it
is often the evidence of war crimes that precedes the
forum: an international tribunal, for example. More-
over, the forums to which contemporary forensics are
addressed are not only the actual spaces of the court;
they are often contingent, diffused and networked,
created through and by the media, assembled around
forensic evidence, and operate across a multiplicity of
international institutions.
Spatial forensics
More recently, forensics is also acquiring an architec-
tural dimension.17 With the progressive urbanization
of conflict, representations of the built environment
are increasingly called as evidence in international
courts, tribunals and the media. Geospatial data and
high resolution satellite imagery of destroyed buildings
were used at the EritreaEthiopia Claims Commission
in The Hague, and in attempts to estimate the extent of
displacement in Darfur and the DRC, while the most
common example of such use of
architecture is still taking place as
part of trials in the International
Criminal Tribunal for former
Yugoslavia, where fragments of
the rubble (and photographs of
it) emerged from private homes,
gardens and storage sheds, allowing
both sides to argue that a different
version of events had transpired
using the found and alleged rubble
as evidence to substantiate their
claims.18 In Palestine, cases relating
to the routeing of the Wall have
also made extensive use of spatial
representations. The legal process
was consequently conducted with
judges and lawyers poring over maps and physical
models.
Forensic experts aspire to transform the built envi-
ronment from an illustration of alleged violations to
a source of knowledge, however incomplete, about
events: to read from the form and disposition of ruins
something of the events that lead to a buildings
destruction. From the perspective of forensics the ruin
has an architecture from which controversial events
and political processes can be reconstructed and ana-
lysed. Forensic analysts assume that historical events
can be reconstructed through structural calculations,
blast analysis and a determination of the failure point
of structures. It is structural and blast engineers who
are thereby writing history today.
Artist and theorist Hito Steyerl has put beautifully
the ways in which objects may contain the forces that
produced them:
Objects are hieroglyphs in whose dark prism social
relations lay congealed and in fragments. They are
understood as nodes, in which the tensions of a
historical moment materialize in a flash of awareness
or twist grotesquely into the commodity fetish. In
this perspective, a thing is never just an object, but a
fossil in which a constellation of forces are petrified.
Things are never just inert objects, passive items, or
lifeless shucks, but consist of tensions, forces, hidden
powers, all being constantly exchanged.19
Buildings seem static but, as architectural con-
servationists know, they are in constant movement;
they expand and contract with temperature and with
the slow degenerating of materials. Concrete, plaster
and other exposed surfaces register transformation in
humidity, air quality, salination, and sometimes the
abrupt or violent events that happen next to them.
Buildings as experienced should be thought of as
nothing less than freeze frames in a process of constant
formal transformation diagrams of the forces that
shaped them. Any reading of an event must therefore
be undertaken against the backdrop of a constantly
transforming, mutating and vibrant materiality, even
if objects and structures, built or destroyed, do not
of course contain all the relations that have produced
them.20
The shift of emphasis in human rights and war
crimes investigations described above has meant that
forensic science has begun invading some of the legal
and cultural grounds previously reserved for the testi-
monies of human witnesses. When Shoshana Felman
and Dori Laub referred to the last decades of the
twentieth century as the era of the testimony, and
historian Annette Wieviorka the era of the witness,
they thought of a time, specifically, when the written,
recorded, filmed and exhibited testimony of the Holo-
caust multiplied. 21 Holocaust, trauma and memory
13
studies have made testimony a significant force in
the culture of recent times, leaving a strong mark in
literature, documentary and the visual arts. Politically,
testimony has acquired a visible presence in such
varied contexts as truth commissions, human rights
and humanitarian work. These seem to have saturated
the last third of the twentieth century with the voices of
historical agents thereafter understood as witnesses,
victims, survivors and perpetrators.22 The media testimony to evidence, from speech to medical data,
coverage of conflict from human rights and humanitar-
ian perspectives channelled new forms of witnessing
and testimony into film, video and Internet archives.
This function of testimony was most strongly identified
with anti-totalitarian politics, with the survivor and the
dissident, and with the voice of the individual against
the arbitrariness of repressive states. The original to give a voice to the voiceless.
mission of human rights organizations was, according
to a strong polemic by Robert Bernstein, the founding
director of HRW then called Helsinki Watch and
engaged mainly with Soviet Bloc dissidents to pry
open closed societies, advocate basic freedoms and
support dissenters like Andrei Sakharov, Natan
Sharansky and those in the Soviet gulag.23 Bernstein
urged HRW to return to this tradition and strongly
opposed investigating Israels actions in Gaza.
In a critical account of such positions, Michal
Givoni has noted that one of the problems with this
form of testimony was that its function was no longer
epistemic at all. Too often it was not tasked with
revealing knowledge or authenticating claims of
historical injustice, but functioned primarily as an
ethical resource: its function was in being delivered
in the first place.24 While personal testimony has
brought histories of violence and abuse into the public
domain, the limits of the culture of testimony have
also become apparent to many other critics, including
people in the human rights field. The framework of
empathy, compassion and pity tends to portray people
as passive and pathetic victims in need of salvation,
just as the abstract designation of perpetrator and
victim has depoliticized a deeper understanding of
historical processes.25
Dying to speak
Throughout the 1990s a series of ad hoc international
tribunals were established for trying the political and
military leaders of former Yugoslavia (1993) and
Rwanda (1994), followed by the permanent inter-
national tribunal of the International Criminal Court
(1998) that was imbued with the power to imprison
violators of war crimes, and to prosecute crimes
against humanity and genocide. This legalization
14
of human rights accelerated a shift in the function of
testimony from one understood as a public address
made through the media, taking an ethical stand
on events, to becoming a legal address capable of
withstanding cross-examination. The people in the
spotlight were no longer the victims civilians who
bore the brunt of brutal wars but the militants and
politicians that caused it. This also implied a shift from
and sometimes from the account of living people to
the testimony of forensic anthropologists on behalf of
bones and dead bodies. The latter has become a kind
of testimony without witness, a phenomenon that could
give another, rather twisted, meaning to the ambition
of those promoters of the ethics of testimonys capacity
The difference between a witness and a piece of
evidence is that evidence is presented while a witness
is interrogated. However, the legal process already
tends to blur this distinction when it demands that the
witness approximates objectivity by assuming a pose
of neutrality, while the presentation of evidence for
cross-examination and interrogation seems to have
granted the object some traits of subjectivity. 26 Poten-
tially, therefore, new ways of using forensic sciences
have blurred a previously held distinction: between evi-
dence, when the law speaks of objects, and that of the
witness, referring to human testimony. The category of
the object witness might be the right term to describe
the ground between this objectsubject divide. 27 If
material evidence is conceptually understood, techni-
cally unveiled, and legally acknowledged as capable of
some kind of speech, then it too might be interrogated
and cross-examined and, of course, through its
interpreter, it might also sometimes lie. Rather than
operating as the mechanical materialization of time,
or the conclusive, transparent and objective apparatus
of truth claims, forensics is inclined towards complex,
sometimes unstable, even contradictory accounts of
events. Its investigation of artefacts or materials is
pursued as an arduous analytic process in order to
navigate the murky ground of a fuzzy forensics
of probabilities, possibilities and interpretations. In
forensics some of the problems of human testimony
have thus come to be reproduced as the problem of
the object itself.
An emergent object-oriented juridical culture is
a part of a general transformation that has, today,
directed attention away from a preoccupation with the
subjective and linguistic aspects of trauma and memory
and towards an information saturated in the object
world. Forensics was developed in parallel in a number
of areas and disciplines, themselves linked by shared Zeitun, south of Gaza City, which was almost entirely
methods and sensibilities, and refers to a common destroyed during the 200809 attack. 30 Garlasco, also
epistemological model that has become increasingly an amateur photographer, took this photo of a woman
influential in the contemporary field of human sciences sitting, admirably steadfast, in front of the rubble of
and law, as well as in popular entertainment. Todays her destroyed house.
legal and political decisions are based upon DNA
samples, 3D scans, nanotechnology, the enhanced
vision of electro-magnetic microscopes and satellite
surveillance, and extend from the topography of the
sea bed to the remnants of destroyed and bombed-out
buildings. If popular entertainment is any indicator of
cultural shifts, then we could note how from CSI to
the novels of Patricia Cornwell and former forensic
expert Kathy Reichs the forensic detective has gradu-
ally taken the place of the psychologist detective in
television drama.28 Similarly, until the last decade of the
twentieth century, medical diagnosis was still largely
undertaken by interviews with patients and an aural
taking of medical history, while physical examination
was mainly tasked with corroborating these symptoms.
But with recent advances in imaging and laboratory
technique, the relative weight of aural history taking
has decreased. Diagnosis is now a scientific process,
relying on the use of interactive computer programs
that allow physicians to experience a visual repre-
sentation of what is going on inside the patients body,
and designed to assist physicians with decision-making
tasks. The interviews that were previously part of the
physicians brief assessing the socio-political context
of the patient (family, work, stress, beliefs) have
shifted gradually to become the responsibility of social
workers and psychologists. Perhaps the beginning of
the twenty-first century will come to be known, above
all, as the era of forensics.
Indicative of this shift is also the inauguration
within HRW of what the organization refers to as
humanitarian battle damage assessment. The first
time HRW undertook this kind of damage assessment
was in 1999 when it investigated the Kosovo war and
the bombing of Belgrade. Steve Goose, director of
HRWs aptly and revealingly titled Arms Division,
explained that the military does its own battle assess-
ment damage, looking at how weapons worked. We
do an assessment of how the weapons impacted on The images demonstrate the shift from emphasis
civilians. We try to figure out why they were killed.29 on survivors to material forensics. Although he chose
The hiring of Marc Garlasco by HRW was meant to to show this image on the screen, the elements of the
reinforce HRWs capacity in this regard. photograph Garlasco points to, the things he chooses
The images that follow are taken from video docu- to interrogate and narrate, are actually in the images
mentation of a lecture on war crimes in Gaza delivered background. Sometimes his silhouette completely
by Garlasco at Bard College Human Rights Program obscures the woman. Here he is in fact trying to
in April 2009. In this lecture Garlasco discussed the unpack the event by sifting through the chaotic rubble
investigation of the destruction of the neighbourhood of and trash that were left behind. He sees in this rubble

15
the difference between tank, armoured personnel
carrier and bulldozer tread marks. He described to
me the process of his investigation:
When I arrived at Zeitun I saw only four homes un-
touched. I thought they were the headquarters or the
OPs [observation posts] for the soldiers, the anchors
of the operation. The rest of the neighbourhood was
reduced to all kinds of crushed concrete, iron bars
and a lot of rubbish. We needed to reconstruct the
way this destruction took place. From this rubble
I wanted to put together the battle story. I looked in
the destroyed structures and the surrounding areas
for signs of military activity and also for signs of
exchanges of fire between Israeli and Palestinian
forces. Aerial bombardment, artillery fire, tank
fire and small arms fire have each their specific
signature.31
Garlasco based his reading on a general classifica-
tion of recurring types of ruins: the D9 [armoured
bulldozer] takes the corners of the buildings the
central pillars [are left] standing while the edges of
the building collapsed and folded outwards.32 Cater-
pillar D9 bulldozers create ruins that sometimes look
like pyramids or pitched roofs made of cards. This
type of ruin, frequent in Gaza, is the new signature
16
of Israeli aggression. There were about one hundred
armoured D9 bulldozers employed in Gaza, includ-
ing some unmanned and remote-controlled (equipped
with cameras on the front) the largest number ever
employed at once which accounted for about a
half of the 15,000 destroyed buildings. Armoured
bulldozers can be employed under fire, while other
forms of destruction must be undertaken in a more
controlled fashion, in relative calm, by military engi-
neers. The signature of the latter type of destruction
is the pancake form. Engineers use dynamite or
anti-tank landmines as demolition explosives and
set the charges next to, or in cavities cut within, all
internal columns throughout the building. This makes
the floor slabs come down on top of each other like a
pancake pack. Different types of aerial bombs make
different ruin types. Sometimes the military uses
delay-fuse bombs that detonate under the ground,
making the building collapse in upon itself with the
damage relatively circumscribed. Sometimes when the
explosion takes place on the top floors the lower floors
are left standing. At other times, when the military
seeks to warn people inside the building, they employ
the tactic of a knock on the roof by firing low
explosive munitions to generate a sense of an attack
and get people out of buildings seconds before it is
reduced to rubble.
Starting from these general types, Garlasco looked
for irregularities in the pattern of destruction;
things which might designate destruction by multiple
sources, secondary explosions which might designate
a ammunition cash, or a firefight which could be
registered in bullet holes around windows that must be
salvaged from under building wrecks. The re-creation
of events from the rubble was a difficult task because
there was so much unrepaired destruction dating to
different periods. Sometimes the different piles of
rubble could only be told apart by the number of
plants that have grown in between the ruins. The
recent attack took place in the rainy season and plants
were already growing within the fresh rubble when
an HRW investigation got there in late January. The
basic building standards in Gaza, the lack of cement
for mortar, the rudimentary refugee homes extended
vertically irregularly and informally, were easy prey
for the steel and explosives thrown at them. They
seem to have easily pulverized into dust. At the same
time, very little could be rebuilt because cement and
other building materials were banned from Gaza for
more than a year prior to the war. People were trying
to turn the fragments of buildings into construction
materials.
 Later, the HRW team, including other legal experts,
would combine victim and eyewitness interviews with
material research to reconstruct their battle story. Bits
of metal like fins and chemicals that could not be
analysed on site were sent to a laboratory in Norway.
Some ruins were modelled with special software. This
material was then evaluated in relation to the IHL
categories of military necessity, distinction, pro- knowledge of technological development and military
portionality and weapon choice. Garlascos analysis capability is crucial to their work. As Garlasco has
of the destruction of Zeitun, which plotted the ruins
he studied in a sequence of destruction along the
battle story, pointed to war crimes having been
committed:
While Bulldozer destruction might have occurred via
battle, landmine destruction must have occurred after
battle in preparation for the day after usually to
design the battle field in a way that would favour
future operations this is a war crime of wanton
destruction not necessitated by the war.33
Considering that the rules of IHL are the terms
that human right organizations operate by, Garlasco
should be acknowledged as one of the most efficient
human-rights analysts in recent years, as well as a
key figure in the emergence of forensic architecture.
In the years leading up to the Gaza investigation,
he has become something of a celebrity within the
field of conflict analysis, prominently interviewed on
news channels, newspapers and documentary films
worldwide. 34 He has also been an extremely effective
advocate for military moderation. His work on Israeli
cluster bombs employed in the American invasion of
Iraq in 2003, in Lebanon during Israels 2006 attack,
and during the Georgia war of 2008 was central to
the UNs ratification of the Convention on Cluster
Munitions, which eventually banned these weapons.
His investigation of torture in Abu Ghraib helped
John McCain pass an anti-torture amendment. 35 The
hiring of Garlasco by HRW marked a shift not only
from the human witness to the material object, but
from the focus on the victims of war to an analysis
of the mechanisms of the violation of law. One of the
best examples is HRWs report on civilian deaths as a
result of drone attacks in Gaza, prepared by Garlasco
and published in June 2009. It is an astounding foray
into the technical capabilities of this weapon:
The drone-launched missiles detonate above the
ground, which creates a narrow, relatively shallow
crater from missile parts not involved in fragmen-
tation hitting the ground. The detonation of the
warhead inside the fragmentation sleeve creates an
expanding sphere of fragments that fly out. The frag-
ments are composed of tungsten, a dense inert metal,
and their heavy weight and small size (3 mm cubes)
create a rapid drop-off in kinetic energy that keeps
the area of effect relatively small approximately 20
meters in diameter.36
If this report reads on occasion like a piece from a
military journal, this testifies to a wider assumption
now held by most human rights groups: that a detailed
stated:
New munitions and technologies change the nature
of war. Technology does not remove responsibility;
[it] heightens the ethical responsibilities of com-
manders because they can estimate the number of
civilians that will be harmed in each attack [and]
every civilian death has wider political effects.37
Forensic fetishism
The controversy that unfolded around Garlasco in Sep-
tember 2009 was one in which contemporary society
was confronted with the most extreme manifestation
of its growing appetite for forensics that of the fetish.
NGO monitor, a group with links to Israels ministry
of foreign affairs, seized on the discovery of Garlascos
interest in memorabilia and ran a story whose headline
included the words: Marc Garlascos Nazi Fetish.38 To
the people who knew him, the implication that Garlasco
had an anti-military or anti-Israeli bias was ironic:
among HRW personnel he was considered to be one of
the closest to the US military and to Israel, who could
and did speak their professional language. But this is
what made him also a serious threat. HRW reaction was
indecisive. It initially defended Garlasco. But a few days
later, following the prominent publicizing of the affair
in the New York Times, and presumably under pressure
from HRWs donors, it decided to suspend him on full
pay and commissioned an external firm to produce an
independent report, which, by mutual agreement, has
not been made public to this day. In February 2010,
following this investigation, Garlasco resigned.
Garlasco never hid his collection. He ascribed his
fascination with Nazi-era memorabilia to his own
family history: his maternal grandfather was a soldier
in the Wehrmacht (whose uniform was on display in a
glass box in Garlascos home). 39 He describes himself
as a military geek who collects the weapons that I
study and the shrapnel I analyze.40 The fascination
with militaria that his detractors called fetishism
involves, then, the very same qualities that made him
a good forensic analyst. Garlascos response to his
detractors should thus be taken seriously. If fetishism is
the attribution of an inherent power to an object, then
17
forensics must be understood as one of the contem-
porary forms of fetishism. A certain fetishism is also
implicit in any attributing to the object the agency of a
witness. In terms of our present forensic fetishism, the
expert witness is the one assigned with interpreting
the language of objects into that of men.
The objects of fetishism here emerge not in the
characteristic contemporary understanding of the com-
modity and/or sexual fetish as objects imbued with
affect and desire, but as those hieroglyphs in whose
dark prism social relations lay congealed and in frag-
ments fossils in which a constellation of forces
are petrified.41 Behind Marxs concept of commodity
fetishism, in which the fetish is understood as a mysti-
fying and obfuscating veil that masks the real relations
of production, lies an understanding of fetishism that
he inherited from nineteenth-century anthropology,
which conceives of it as a mediator that constantly
translates the concrete into the abstract. In doing so, it
allows the part or detail to become the entry point from
which some knowledge of larger processes, events and
social relations, conjunctions of actors and practices,
structures and technologies, may be reconstructed.42
The thirtieth civilian
When I heard about Garlascos suspension from HRW,
I flew to New York to meet him. Garlasco was still
shaken by events. I offered to write a letter or an
article in his defence, pointing out that his forensics
work was credible not in spite of his collection but
because of it. Although Garlasco didnt feel it was
the best line of defence, we went on talking. When I
mentioned that HRW surely must have known about
his hobby, Garlasco answered that when hiring me
in 2003 HRW knew of much worse, that I had been
involved in the killing of about 250 civilians in Iraq.43
Indeed, as has since been widely reported, Garlasco
worked for seven years as an intelligence analyst in the
US Defense Intelligence Agency. He undertook target
selection and planning for aerial bombing in both the
1998 attack on Iraq and the NATO attack on Serbia
the following year. Garlasco was also in the Pentagon
on the morning of 9/11 when American Airlines Flight
77 hit the building. In the months leading up to the
US invasion of Iraq in 2003 he became chief of high-
value targeting, which, in context, meant targeted
assassinations. Garlasco was in charge of tracking and
designing the aerial attacks that were intended to kill
Saddam Hussein and other Baath leaders in the first
hours of the invasion.
A central part of planning these missions involved
a calculus otherwise known as collateral damage
18
estimate, which helped to establish the right balance
of civilian casualties in relation to the military value
of a mission. For every single attack on a political
or military leader and these attacks were mostly
on civilian apartment buildings, where the suspect-
ing targets felt camouflaged or protected by being
close to civilians Garlasco had to undertake an
analysis that would estimate the number of civilians
that would be killed. The projection was based on
a specialized software used since the air campaign
over Serbia, originally called bug splat and, later,
when the connotation of civilian death with disin-
fection was seen as politically unhelpful, renamed
fast collateral damage or FastCD.44 The software
included algorithms resembling those employed in
architecture, structural engineering and planning. It
synthesized environmental factors such as the size of
the building, its construction materials and techniques,
the amount of steel in the structure and glass in its
envelope, the population density within and around
it (which varied at different times of the day). These
were calculated against other factors: the size and type
of bomb, its fuse, and the direction of the attack. In
general, the software would estimate the number of
civilian casualties in relation to the collision between
types of buildings and different munitions. Pentagon
briefers call this a mitigation technique and explain
that international law can be complied with through a
correct use of the appropriate algorithm.
An analysis of bomb damage as it occurs was nar-
rated to me a few years earlier by a New York-based
structural engineer, herself engaged in forensic analy-
sis. She described in harrowing detail how structural
engineering interacts with blast engineering to produce
an account of death and destruction. I reproduce it here
because it allows a glimpse into the detail with which
blast calculations can be undertaken.
An explosion is a chemical reaction that causes an
extremely rapid release of energy in several forms:
sound, heat and shock waves, consisting of highly
compressed particles of air propagating radially
outward from the explosive source at supersonic
velocities. Released energy pushes the air particles
out. The shock wave travels across and through
the building, and in the process pressure is applied
on all the surfaces it encounters it flow[s] both
upward and downward and act on the floor slabs of
the building The exterior walls bends inward and
break initiating a progressive collapse wind
rushes in to fill the vacuum, carrying high-velocity
debris and flying bits of glass, causing lacerations;
lungs collapse, and eardrums rupture [but] most
people die within buildings, when they collapse upon
them.45
 To arrive at this level of calculation Garlasco had
to familiarize himself with architecture, structural
engineering and also with urbanism to understand the
variable occupancy of buildings throughout the day:
It all boils down to energy transfer, which dictates
the angle of attack, the time, the fuse How blast
energy interacts with structure. Is it made of wood?
Steel is stronger than metal reinforced concrete. How
much glass in the face of the building, what is the soil
type? These are calculated against human factors
like the number of people within buildings, etc.46
The magic number was thirty, he explained: if the
computer came up with thirty anticipated civilians
killed, the air strike had to go to Rumsfeld or Bush
personally to sign off. Anything less than thirty could
simply go ahead.47 In this system of calculations the
thirtieth civilian death would be above Garlascos pay-
scale. Because the limits of proportionality are not
specified by law, and depend on context, the militaries
are those that decide how necessary a task is and what
number of civilian deaths is acceptable. The violence
sanctioned by international law, therefore, must be
thought of as a kind of violence that simultaneously
kills and saves, thus straddling the threshold between
life and death. As Garlasco recounts:
It is important to understand that in January 2003
when the target packages were finalized, we had
about 300 targets that were considered high CD, or
high collateral damage, meaning over thirty. We
had the Air Force play with the bomb angles, fusing,
bomb tonnage, etc., and got that number down to
about twenty-five.48
Such estimation of civilian casualties is part of the
analysis of proportionality that militaries undertake
to make attacks that kill or otherwise harm civilians
comply with international humanitarian law. It is a mod-
erating principle that seeks to constrain the use of force.
While considering the choice of means, the principle of
proportionality demands that a balance is established
between military objectives and expected damage to
civilian life and property. The law does not answer
the question of how much is too much but demands
assessment on a case-by-case basis in a calculation
whose parameters are always relative and imminent.
Although the law does not demand that the calculation
of proportionality be undertaken according to given
formulas, nor establishes numerical thresholds, it is a
form of judgement that is algorithmic and economical
in its very nature. It demands the estimation of aims,
effects and side effects, intended and unintended con-
sequences the measurement of lesser and greater
evils, their exchange and sometimes even transfer and
this by itself imposes rules of moderation in relation to
a real or imaginary worst case scenario, always within
the immanent economy of violence and without posing
an alternative to it. In this economy the designing of
an attack starts to resemble a mathematical minimum
problem: the abstract and fuzzy ethics of the lesser
evil thus gets translated into objective choices: the
minimum size bomb to generate the required effect, the
type of explosives within it, the angle of attack, the time
of the day, and so on. Although the effects of violence
are always unpredictable, the legal necessity is to go
on calculating and approximating nonetheless. When
used for justifying military attacks, proportionality is
always presented as a kind of violence that is necessar-
ily employed to reduce violence.
The legalethical economy of proportionality is
inversely reflected in the operational economy of risk.
19
High levels of destruction inflicted from afar are
often justified as an attempt to reduce the risk to
soldiers on the ground. The destruction unleashed on
some neighbourhoods in Gaza during the December
2009 ground invasion, for example, were part of an
attempt to reduce the risk for the invading infantry.
Many buildings were destroyed simply because they
constituted an environment of high risk, and indeed
a full-scale invasion into one of the densest parts of
the world resulted in more than 1,400 Palestinian
casualties and no more than a dozen Israeli military
deaths. The estimation and calculation of risk how
to transfer and balance levels of risk between soldiers
and civilians is a political and cultural decision that
has to do with the willingness of states to tolerate
casualties on their side. Death ratio is one of the
gruesome ways in which the economy of necessary
evils, of proportionality and risk, is calculated and
managed. It has its macabre side effects too. In a
meeting held in an Israeli military base in 2002 a team
of experts on law and military ethics was asked about
the number of civilian deaths they would consider
legitimate in the context of the killing from afar of
an armed militant as an alternative to risking the lives
of soldiers in a ground arrest operation. The average
number arrived at was 3.14 very approximately the
mathematical constant , whose value is the ratio of
a circle circumference to its diameter in Euclidian
space. Proportionality and risk have together become
the language by which the military calculates life and
death. That this economy is skewed, and cannot be
considered properly ethical even according to its own
utilitarian terms, is clear because civilians and soldiers
from the militarys own side tend to be calculated
differently to those on the other.49
According to the logic of Garlascos bombing
mission planning, because a precise threshold number
of acceptable civilian casualties had been imposed on
each attack, the issue of proportionality acquired a
material spatial dimension. Without a designated limit
to the number of casualties, the military would simply
have dropped a large enough bomb to make sure that
the entire building and its surroundings were reduced
to rubble. The need to keep to the given threshold,
however, necessitated the targeted destruction of build-
ing parts, a kind of design by destruction that involves
the destruction of top floors within a tower block, or of
single wings in a sprawling building. Bombing could
thereafter be conceived of as the design of ruins. The
application of the principles of risk and proportionality
is then a material practice that is registered at the
level of destruction and results in the reconfiguration
20
of physical objects. The calculation of life and death
becomes an engineering problem, in which material
proportionality might, therefore, be understood as
the affect of proportionality analysis on the design of
ruins. It is this object quality of the problem that has
placed the calculations of the engineer at the forefront
of contemporary politics.
The economy of ruins
The Iraq War opened on 20 March 2003 with a failed
attempt at an aerial assassination of Saddam Hussein
which resulted in fifteen civilian casualties. On 5
April, the bombing of the supposed safe house of Ali
Hassan al-Majid, known as Chemical Ali, in Basra
was carried out according to Garlascos planning.
Seventeen civilians were killed; Majid, though, was
elsewhere. On 7 April another of Garlascos attacks,
targeting Saddam Hussein in the al-Mansur district
of Baghdad, killed eighteen civilians. On 9 April,
Baghdad fell. Each of the fifty targeted assassination
strikes failed to kill the person that was its target, yet,
as verified months later in HRW investigations, kept
under the permitted number of civilians casualties:
about 250 civilian deaths in total.
Although he did not agree with the rationale behind
the Iraq War, Garlasco continued to work for the
Pentagon: Whether you agree with the aim of war
or not it is going to happen I stayed on because
I wanted to do it in the best way I could I had
responsibility to the pilots and the civilians.50 That
he understood his responsibility towards civilians in
this way demonstrates the logic of this new form of
proportional humanitarian violence; a violence that
both kills and saves. I didnt try to kill civilians
I focused on military targets and tried my very best
every day to minimize civilian casualties. Whenever
we hear the term minimize we must assume that the
level from which we start minimizing is inevitably a
constant number. Moreover, the minimizing function
of proportionality often coincides with military objec-
tives. Attempts to govern the economics of violence
in the context of the war on terror seek to contain
the number of civilian casualties, or to make military
effort more efficient in terms of focusing the effect of
available means. In these cases military adherence to
the principle of proportionality might be better under-
stood as supporting the principle of utility here, in
the optimization of military effort. When minimizing
civilian harm gives an advantage to the military,
proportionality can no longer be understood as a cal-
culus in which military necessity is measured against
civilian harm, but as one that offers a new concept of
security in which IHL and HR principles are central.
International humanitarian law and human rights laws
do not seek to end wars but rather to regulate, shape
and change the way militaries wage them. Changing
the ways of war is also the focus of military think-
ing, which is now bogged down in a set of urban
insurgencies. Common to the self-perception of both
militaries and human rights groups is that they must
act as non-political experts.
As Thomas Keenan has explained, until the end of
the Cold War all human rights organizations could do
was to mobilize shame, make protest, raise aware-
ness, engage in advocacy. After 1991, however, there
began a gradual process by which the threshold of
intervention in the face of human rights violations was
lowered. 51 In the late 1990s, the collaboration between
human rights organizations and militaries entered into
a new phase in the context of the humanitarian inter-
ventions actual or proposed in central Africa and
the Balkans. Responding to inaction and neutrality
on the part of the EU, the USA and the UN, human
rights groups were among the most vocal advocates of
military intervention. Under President Clinton, Human
Rights Watch, in particular, became one of the most
influential pro-intervention lobbies. With close con-
nections to the state department, it was pushing, long
before intervention eventually happened, for external
military action to end the atrocities in ex-Yugoslavia
and Somalia.
With the election of George W. Bush, HRW lost its
influence on policy to the neoconservatives. The post-
9/11 military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan,
initially if partially justified by human rights, no longer
needed human rights groups in order to legitimize their
actions. So, in order to maintain their relevance and
influence, HRW and other organizations started to focus
their attention on the way militaries fought wars while
increasingly seeking to remain neutral with regard to
their causes or justness. Their concern was no longer
to influence political decision-making over whether or
not to wage war. Instead, discussion and cooperation
took place at the military level, seeking to influence
the conduct of war tactically. Around the turn of the
millennium, military advisers started gaining jobs in
humanitarian and human rights organizations, as an
institutional acknowledgement of this new proximity
to violence. Former military personnel were much in
demand by those who saw in their expertise, experi-
ence and professional connections a common asset
and a bridge to the military. Garlasco is perhaps the
best example of this emerging type of human rights
analyst at a time when human rights practices were in
the process of being themselves transformed.
Militaries now regarded human rights groups not
as enemies, but rather as constructive and enabling
critics. Meeting upon the common ground of the lesser
evil, each of these organizations agreed, for its own
reasons, about the importance of moderating military
violence and reducing civilian casualties. For human
rights organizations, moderation is about the rights and
lives of civilians; for the military, the same moderation
might be a principle in a recurring rhetoric of military
ambitions of winning hearts and minds in the context
of military occupation and government. However, when
civilians become the instruments of decision in war
that is, when the political effect of military action
is conceived of in terms of the ways in which it
impresses itself on civilian consciousness there is
also a stick close behind any carrot. Civilians under
occupation could either be courted by protection and
development or terrorized into compliance, depending
on the situation. In Israels 2006 war in Lebanon and
in its 200809 attack on Gaza, the political aims were
to be achieved via the pain inflicted on civilians in
creating a wedge between the people and the organiza-
tions they support. 52 This should demonstrate that it is
not only in the target of an attack, but through what
is considered its collateral, that military violence
acquires its political effect.
The devils advocate
After the fall of Baghdad, Garlasco left the Pentagon
for Human Rights Watch. HRW gave him a several-
weeks-long course in human rights before dispatching
him to Iraq. It was the first time he had been there.
Back at the scene of the crime that he had previously
only studied on screens, he stood now in front of the
ruins he had helped create. 53 His first task included a
review of the results of his previous one: to study the
impact of the aerial bombardment and to contribute
to the writing of a report on the aerial war in whose
planning he participated. 54 He knew, of course, where
to look for the ruins. The report titled Off Target
was generally critical of the aerial war. It found that
attacks that targeted the Iraqi leadership had resulted
in the largest number of civilian deaths in the bombing
campaign. The report did, however, note that the
proportionality analysis undertaken by the Pentagon
had been effective in reducing the number of civilian
casualties. 55 As outrageous as the calculus of civilian
death appears, the limit of twenty-nine civilians, like
any other number that was or could have been used
21
 indeed, the fact that there was a limit at all is a
form of mitigation that is based on the introduction of
IHL principles into military planning.
Garlascos trip to Iraq marks the moment when
techniques and expertise of planning and prediction
turn into those of diagnosis, when the forensic inves-
tigation of ruins reversed the techniques employed for
the making of the ruin by explosives. The develop-
ment in the technology of precision bombing allowed
for the tactics of targeted assassinations to emerge;
it also enabled the approximation of civilian deaths
and thus the advanced calculations of proportional-
ity. These in turn have also enabled the study and
interpretation of the ruin in relation to the event
that led to its destruction. It is in this sense that the
practice of forensic architecture relies upon the very
technologies of bombing they came to monitor. The
collapse of buildings was the method by which the
Pentagon planned and executed the assassination of
the Iraqi leadership. The rubble of buildings was also
the means by which forensic architects reconstructed
the attacks. My forensics is a reverse engineering
of the process of military destruction, Garlasco told
me. When studying a ruin the first thing I do is to
think how I would have planned the attack.56 Unlike
his private collection, Garlascos former career at the
Pentagon, and the actions he was responsible for, were
never seen as a liability. On the contrary, they were
flagged up extensively in the media: his military past
and strategic know-how were the very things that gave
him the visibility he enjoyed as a human rights analyst,
and it gave HRW the authority it needed in making its
humanitarian battle damage assessments credible. In
a positive portrait in 2008, the Washington Post called
Garlasco the man on both sides of air war debate, 57
and elsewhere he was often asked about crossing the
lines. But the notion that Garlasco really did cross any
lines, in any significant sense, is misleading. Although
Garlascos move from the Pentagon to a human rights
organization was understood by many as a kind of
redemption story like the person whose sainthood
could only ever be as great as his sins this misses
the extent to which human rights groups and militaries
have become intertwined in their methods and aims,
and the process by which, in forensic architecture,
destruction and diagnostic became interchangeable.
Another model to consider belongs to the detective
genre: the reading of history from the structures it
violated is not a benign process of tuning in or learn-
ing to listen, but one that partakes in violence, that
moves alongside its makers, morphing into it just as the
detective becomes as one with the criminal.
22
Notes
Thanks to my research assistant on the project from
which this article derives, Emilio Distretti, and to David
Cunningham, Alberto Toscano, Lieven De Cauter, Ste-
fano Harney, and members of the Centre for Research
Architecture/Second Table, for comments on the text.
1. Richard Goldstone et al., Report of the United Nations
Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, Human
Rights Council, 15 September 2009 (hereafter Goldstone
Report), http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcoun-
cil/specialsession/9/docs/UNFFMGC_Report.pdf.
2. HRW reports in whose making Garlasco participated
(not including those on Israel, which will be discussed
later) are: A Dying Practice: Use of Cluster Munitions
by Russian and Georgia in August 2008 (2008); Troops
in Contact: Airstrikes and Civilian Deaths in Afghani-
stan (2008); Flooding South Lebanon: Israels Use
of Cluster Munitions in Lebanon in July and August
2006 (2006); No Blood No Foul: Soldiers Accounts
of Detainee Abuse in Iraq (2006); Leadership Failure:
Firsthand Accounts of Torture of Iraqi Detainees by the
U.S. Armys 82nd Airborne Division (2005); Off Target:
The Conduct of the War and Civilian Casualties in Iraq
(2003). All are available online at www.hrw.org.
3. See Human Rights Watch, Razing Rafah: Mass Home
Demolitions in the Gaza Strip (2004), www.hrw.org/
en/reports/2004/10/17/razing-rafah; Gaza Beach In-
vestigation Ignores Evidence (2006), www.hrw.org/
en/news/2006/06/19/israel-gaza-beach-investigation-
ignores-evidence. For a contestation of the latter by
NGO Monitor, see Experts or Ideologues? The Gaza
Beach Incident 2006: http://ngo-monitor.org/article.
php?viewall=yes&id=2606.
4. The IDF operations killed some 1,387 Palestinians, at
least 762 of whom were civilians, according to a list of
names published by the Israeli human rights organiza-
tion BTselem. Thirteen Israelis died during the fighting,
three of them civilians. The UN Office for the Coordi-
nation of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) estimated that
3,914 buildings were completely destroyed, 21,000 hous-
ing units were destroyed or badly damaged and about
51,000 people were displaced. See Gaza Flash Appeal,
February 2009, p. 1, www.ochaopt.org/gazacrisis/admin/
output/files/ocha_opt_gaza_flash_appeal_2009_02_05_
english.pdf.
5. Omri Ceren, Marc Garlasco: Is HRWs Anti-Israel
Investigator A Nazi-Obsessed Collector?, www.mere
rhetoric.com/2009/09/08/marc-garlasco-is-hrws-anti-is-
rael-investigator-a-nazi-obsessed-collector/. The blogger
wondered if Garlascos obsession with anti-Semitic
Nazi genocidal lunatics was in any way related to his
apologism for anti-Semitic genocidal Hamas lunatics.
6. Dremer is quoted in Herb Keinon, Diplomacy: Israel
vs. Human Rights Watch, Jerusalem Post, 16 July 2009
(updated 18 July 2009), www.contendo.jpost.com/serv-
let/Satellite?cid=1246443832672&pagename=JPArticle/
ShowFull.
7. Goldstone Report, pp. 69.
8. Goldstones work was to pave the way for the establish-
ment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in
1995, a body that he strongly supported. Later allega-
tions embroiled Goldstone in a controversy of his own
when an Israeli newspaper revealed that he sent at least
twenty-eight black defendants to the gallows as a South
African judge under the apartheid regime. See Tehiya
Barak, Judge Goldstones Dark Past, Ynet, 5 June 2010.
 9. Quintilian, Institute of Oratory, book 9, chapter 2: http://
honeyl.public.iastate.edu/quintilian/9/chapter2.html#30.
Thanks to Thomas Keenan for this reference.
10. Orators would memorize long speeches, which they were
expected to deliver by heart by locating objects or foren-
sic evidence within a mental edifice most commonly
an actual or imaginary building. Walking an imaginary
path, they would reconnect objects with the ideas they
evoked. This pairing of an object with an idea in rheto-
ric has also been also understood as part of the art of
memory the mnmotechnique in which things stand
for ideas in a speech so famously unpacked in Frances
Yates, The Art of Memory, Chicago University Press,
Chicago, 1966.
11. See Fernando Vidal, Miracles, Science, and Testimony
in Post-Tridentine Saint-Making, Science in Context vol.
20, no. 3, 2007, pp. 481508. Thanks to Adrian Rifkin
for this reference.
12. In the nineteenth century, photographs as courtroom
evidence were often understood as pale substitutes for
first-hand evidence posing legal challenges, and even
referred to as the hearsay of the sun. See Joel Snyder,
Res Ipsa Loquitur, in Lorraine Daston, ed., Things That
Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science, Zone Books,
New York, 2007.
13. David Stark and Verena Paravel, PowerPoint in Public:
Digital Technologies and the New Morphology of Dem-
onstration, Theory Culture Society 25, 2008, p. 30.
14. See Steven Byers, Introduction to Forensic Anthropol-
ogy: A Textbook, Allyn & Bacon, Boston MA, 2002;
John Hunter, Charlotte Roberts and Anthony Martin,
eds, Studies in Crime: Introduction to Forensic Archae-
ology, Routledge, London, 1995; Margaret Cox, Human
Osteology: In Archaeology and Forensic Science, Cam-
bridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000. Confirming
the subtitle of this paper, the first large-scale human
remains inquiry was conducted by those experts in mak-
ing mass graves, the Germans, in 1943. Mass Murder in
the Forest of Katyn: A Factual Account is the result of
an international team of experts that examined 2,500
bodies of executed Polish officers exhumed from a mass
grave to prove that they did not suffer their fate at the
hands of the Third Reich.
15. Clyde Snow, cited in Dario A. Euraque, The Science
of Forensic Anthropology and Human Rights in the
Americas, www.trincoll.edu/orgs/scialnce/SFR/0102/
Files/Forensic%20Anthropology.doc.
16. This was cited to me by Thomas Keenan, who also men-
tioned the example of William Haglund, who is heading
the forensics unit at Physicians for HR, talking about a
dig in Bosnia: the dead are speaking to us, we are in-
terpreting for the dead, the dead are telling us the same
story that the living are telling the investigators, but this
[the ICTY] is the first time on this scale that they have
been allowed to speak. Thomas Keenan and Eyal Weiz-
man in conversation, ArteEast/Parson School of Design,
13 February 2010.
17. The first instance of a reconstruction of the narrative
of destruction of buildings (and people) in war that Ive
been able to trace relates to the destruction of the world-
famous university library in the Belgian town of Louvain
in 1914, which became a major propaganda issue, and
came to be seen as the beginning of total war, a case
of war crimes and war reparation. The original recon-
struction was by J. Bledier, who used captured soldiers
diaries to draw up the case. See Alan Kremer, Dynamic
of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First
World War, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007. An
even earlier reference for the documentation of destruc-
tion, although not of war, is related to the destruction
of Lisbon, which circulated throughout Europe in the
eighteenth century: Accounts offer detailed documenta-
tion of the damage wrought upon the city and specifi-
cally upon the built environment. Heading this category
is an elegant series of copper engravings produced by
the French artist Jacques-Philippe Le Bas in 1757. The
images are derived from drawings executed in Lisbon
by Paris and Pedegache and they offer highly detailed
records of the important buildings ruined by the disaster.
These pictures represent a kind of forensic reporting
of the damage. They would have required patient and
careful survey of the wreckage, presumably some time
after the immediate danger had passed. See Sharon Sli-
winski, The Aesthetics of Human Rights, Theory and
Critique, vol. 50, no. 1, 2009, p. 27.
18. Central to this development is the Kosovo Cultural Her-
itage Project carried out by Andrs Riedlmayer and
architect/architectural historian Andrew Herscher after
the Kosovo war in 1999. Riedlmayer and Herscher devel-
oped a large database of the destruction of architectural
heritage in Kosovo and mapped out the patterns of this
devastation in order to provide evidence to the ICTY,
where their report was presented numerous times.
19. Hito Steyerl, A Thing Like You and Me, e-flux, April
2010, www.e-flux.com/journal/view/134.
20. As Alberto Toscano has suggested to me, one should
not forget the Nietzschean lesson, from the Genealogy,
that conditions of genesis do not necessarily instruct
us as to the actual functioning of a given object or
phenomenon.
21. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub MD, Testimony: Crises
of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History,
Routledge, London, 1991; Annette Wieviorka, The Era
of the Witness, trans. Jared Stark, Cornell University
Press, New York, 2006.
22. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commis-
sion, the Australian National Inquiry into the Separation
of Indigenous Children from their Families and Com-
munities, and the Canadian Royal Commission on Abo-
riginal Peoples would be some of these examples. See
also Rosanne Kennedy, Lynne Bell and Julia Emberley,
eds, Decolonising Testimony: on The Possibilities and
Limits of Witnessing, Humanities Research, vol. 15, no.
3, 2009.
23. Robert L. Bernstein, Rights Watchdog, Lost in the Mid
east, New York Times, 19 October 2009.
24. Michal Givoni, Witnessing in Action: Ethics and Poli-
tics in a World Without Borders, http://roundtable.kein.
org/node/1077.
25. See Alain Badiou, Ethics, An Essay on the Understand-
ing of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward, Verso, London and
New York, 2001; Rony Brauman, From Philanthropy
to Humanitarianism: Remarks and an Interview, South
Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 103, nos 23, Spring/Summer
2004; Rony Brauman, Learning from Dilemmas, in
Michel Feher, ed., Nongovernmental Politics, Zone
Books, New York, 2007, pp. 13147.
26. Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity, Zone
Books, New York, 2007.
27. This relates to the term material witness that was
suggested by Susan Schuppli in her account of the
analogue materiality of media artefacts. See Of Mice
23
 Moths and Men Machines, Cosmos and History, vol. 4,
no. 12, 2008.
28. The pop culture manifestation of this shift is exemplified
in the career of the actor William Petersen. The first
role for which Petersen is famous is FBI agent Will
Graham in Michael Manns film Manhunter (1986), the
first movie version of one of Thomas Harriss Hannibal
Lecter novels, in which he plays an extreme case of the
detective as psychologist, driven mad by his empathic
capacity to put himself in the mind of a killer. His
famous second role, however, is as Dr Gil Grisom, the
main character in the initial version of CSI (begun in
2000), where hes a borderline autistic science geek,
who hates dealing with people rather than objects.
Thanks to David Cunningham for this suggestion.
29. Steve Goose, in HRW promotional video clip, www.
youtube.com/user/HumanRightsWatch#p/u/40/CDtDe
XS-iuE.
30. This is what is referred to as the day after: the rationale
of which is to leave an area sterile by razing it to the
ground. That way, as one of the Israeli soldiers inter-
viewed in Breaking the Silence explained, we have good
firing capacity, good visibility for observation, we can
see anything, we control a very large part of the area and
very effectively. See testimonies at www.shovrimshtika.
org/index_e.asp.
31. Personal interview with Marc Garlasco, New York, 27
September 2009.
32. See a detailed analogous work of classification in Ariella
Azoulay, The (In)human Spatial Condition: A Visual
Essay, in Adi Ophir, Michal Givoni and Sari Hanafi,
eds, The Power of Inclusive Exclusion: Anatomy of Is-
raeli Rule in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Zone
Books, New York, 2009.
33. Personal interview, 27 September 2009.
34. See Josh White, The Man on Both Sides of Air
War Debate, Washington Post, 13 February 2008;
Susanne Koelbl, The Pentagon Official Who Came
in From the Cold, Spiegel, 3 April 2009; and the
documentary film by Charles H. Ferguson, No End
in Sight (2007). Garlasco also featured in a 60 Min-
utes story on US military targeting practices that aired
28 October 2007, www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/
?id=4402000n&tag=related;photovideo.
35. Human Rights Watch, Leadership Failure: Firsthand
Accounts of Torture of Iraqi Detainees by the U.S.
Armys 82nd Airborne Division (2005), www.hrw.
org/reports/2005/us0905.
36. Human Rights Watch, Precisely Wrong: Gaza Civil-
ians Killed by Israeli Drone-Launched Missiles (2009),
www.hrw.org/en/reports/2009/06/30/precisely-wrong-0.
37. Personal interview, 27 September 2009.
38. NGO Monitor, Expert or Ideologue? HRWs Defense of
Marc Garlascos Nazi Fetish, 2009, www.ngo-monitor.
org/article/expert_or_ideologues_hrw_s_defense_of_
marc_garlasco_s_nazi_fetish.
39. John H. Richardson, Why Is This Good Man Getting
Hung Out to Dry?, Esquire, 13 October 2009, www.
esquire.com/the-side/richardson-report/marc-garlasco-
nazi-controversy-101309#ixzz0yqLuDcH0.
40. Marc Garlasco, Responding to Accusations, Huffing-
ton Post, 11 September 2009, www.huffingtonpost.com/
marc-garlasco/human-rights-watch-invest_b_284075.
html.
24
41. Steyerl, A Thing Like You and Me.
42. We might rather follow here, then, the way in which for
Marx objects really do have a fantastic form of relation
between them, asking: what would the commodity say
if it could speak? See tienne Balibar, The Philosophy
of Marx, trans. Chris Turner, Verso, London and New
York, pp. 5681.
43. Personal interview, 27 September 2009.
44. Aaron T. Wilson, Building The Perfect Beast: Proposals
to Improve Usaf Targeting Training, Air Command and
Staff College Air University, April 2006.
45. Sina Najafi, Eyal Weizman and Eve Hinman, The Build-
ing is Our Last Line of Defense: An Interview with Eve
Hinman, Cabinet 16, 2004/05, www.cabinetmagazine.
org/issues/16/weizman.php.
46. Personal interview, 27 September 2009.
47. Mark Benjamin, When is an Accidental Civilian Death
Not an Accident?, Salon.com, 30 July 2007, www.salon.
com/news/feature/2007/07/30/ collateral_damage.
48. Marc Garlasco, cited in ibid.
49. See Adi Ophir, Meta Violence and the End of Physics:
Derrida reads Levinas, in Lyyun: The Jerusalem Philo-
sophical Quarterly (forthcoming). Asa Kasher, one of
the people who drafted the IDF ethical code, states:
From the standpoint of the state of Israel, the [Pales-
tinian civilian] neighbour [of a terrorist] is much less
important. I owe the soldier more. If its between the
soldier and the terrorists neighbour, the priority is the
soldier. See Amos Harel, The philosopher who gave the
IDF moral justification in Gaza, Haaretz, 6 February
2009.
50. The HRW statement at www.hrw.org/en/node/84956
reads: Human Rights Watch maintains a position of
neutrality on issues of jus ad bellum, because it believes
that it is the best way to promote our primary goal of
encouraging all sides in armed conflicts to respect inter-
national humanitarian law, or jus in bello. In this way,
HRW took upon themselves some of the traditional role
played by the International Red Cross as the neutral
guardians of the Geneva Convention.
51. Thomas Keenan and Eyal Weizman in conversation,
ArteEast/Parson School of Design, 13 February 2010.
52. See Eyal Weizman, Lawfare in Gaza: Legislative At-
tack, March 2009, www.opendemocracy.net/article/
legislative-attack.
53. See Jorella Andrews, In-Situ: The Ethics of Standing
and Staring (forthcoming), in which she refers to the
visual prolongation of a disastrous event.
54. See Garlasco, Off Target, www.hrw.org/reports/2003/
usa1203/. In this comprehensive 147-page report Human
Rights Watch found that US forces could have prevented
hundreds of civilian casualties by abandoning two faulty
military tactics the use of cluster munitions and heavy
reliance on decapitation strikes designed to kill Iraqi
military and political leaders. The latter was the action
Garlasco was involved in.
55. Ibid.: For the most part, the collateral damage assess-
ment process for the air war in Iraq worked well, espe-
cially with respect to pre-planned targets. Human Rights
Watchs month-long investigation in Iraq found that, in
most cases, aerial bombardment resulted in minimal ad-
verse effects to the civilian population (p. 20).
56. Personal interview, 27 September 2009.
57. White, The Man on Both Sides of Air War Debate.
The African intellectual
Hountondji and after

Omedi Ochieng

Every thought, however original it may be, is to derisively dubbed ethnophilosophy. Ethnophiloso-
some extent shaped by the questions that it is asked. phers like Placide Tempels and Alexis Kagame had
Paulin J. Hountondji, The Struggle for Meaning asserted that African philosophy, in so far as it existed,
consisted in communally shared, anonymous (because
One of the characteristic features of African philosophy
collective) beliefs. Hountondji charged that ethnophi-
is that it tends to pose epistemological questions in
losophy reiterated Eurocentric caricatures of Africans
terms that preserve their dialectical entanglement with
as members of a herd-like mob, devoid of the capacity
questions of agency. In what follows I will examine
to think as independent individuals. His critics in turn
the kind of knowledge articulated and contested by
shot back that Hountondji was a Western stooge, even
Paulin Hountondji, arguably the most influential
a Trojan Horse for a second, post-colonial mission
African philosopher alive, and, in particular, the kind
civilisatrice in the African continent.
of habitus1 that Hountondji has argued must nor-
Hountondji carved out a place in the field of African
matively proceed from a commitment to the sort of
philosophy largely on the strength of his major work,
knowledge he champions. My definition of African
African Philosophy: Myth and Reality (1976).3 Twenty
philosophy, as will be clear from the discussion below,
years later he published an intellectual memoir trans-
follows from Gramscis definition of the intellectual.
lated as The Struggle for Meaning: Reflections on
As Gramsci points out, whereas everyone in some
Philosophy, Culture and Democracy in Africa (1997).4
sense is an intellectual, not everyone in a society
The term intellectual memoir may be misleading.
has the function of performing intellectual work. 2
The books original French subtitle, Un itinraire
One is designated an intellectual by processes of
africain (An African Journey), offers a better descrip-
recognition and credentialling that are inflected by
tion of it as an attempt to retrace and explain his
power relations. By African philosophy, then, I mean
intellectual development. 5 After an initial discussion
discourses produced by those interpellated as African
of his own intellectual inheritance and influences
philosophers by institutions of power such as schools,
(notably Husserl and Althusser), much of the book
universities and the media. This article will closely
consists of Hountondjis attempt to defend his work
map the contours of Hountondjis thought as it offers
from the veritable cottage industry that sprang up in
a particularly fruitful starting point from which to
response to his critique of ethnophilosophy.
understand the topography of African philosophical
debate more generally.
Born in Abidjan in 1942 and educated in Paris at
The episteme of the African intellectual
the cole Normale Suprieure in the mid-1960s at the
height of Althussers influence, Paulin Hountondji is Hountondji affirms four main ideas concerning the
one of the most lionized and influential in the African definition and role of philosophy, all of which are
intellectual landscape. Not entirely paradoxically, intended to establish the domain in which an African
however, there is also probably no philosopher who philosophy might be articulated, while excluding
has been as much reviled within African philosophical ethnophilosophy as an impostor (if not as a contra-
discourse. This is largely traceable to Hountondjis diction in terms). First, in his book African Philosophy,
confrontation with a school of thought that he has Hountondji defines African philosophy as a set of

R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 16 4 ( N ove m b e r / D e c e m b e r 2 010 ) 25
texts, specifically the set of texts written by Africans
and described as philosophical by their authors them-
selves.6 Though the definition at first sight comes
across as disarmingly straightforward, it in fact rests
on a number of assumptions diametrically opposed
to the school of thought that Hountondji dismissed
as ethnophilosophy. Like other critics, Hountondji
traces the origins of ethnophilosophy to the work of
the Belgian missionary Placide Tempels (19061977).
In his book Bantu Philosophy (1945) Tempels argues
that Africans conceive of reality as a hierarchy of
interacting forces. According to Tempels, this view of
reality is held by all Africans and is attributable to the
natural disposition of the African mind. The Rwandese
philosopher Alexis Kagame (19121981) attempted
to extend and refine Tempelss theory, notably in
his books La Philosophie bantu-rwandaise de ltre
(1956) and La Philosophie bantu compare (1976).
Kagame, unlike Tempels, argued that African phil-
osophy emerged from a shared cultural essence, rather
than an African nature. This shared culture consisted
in African traditions, customs and language.
It is these notions that Hountondjis definition of
philosophy as a set of texts seeks to challenge.
The emergence of philosophy, Hountondji holds, is
dependent on a dialectical or critical method which can
only take place with literacy and written or archival
transmission. According to Hountondji,
oral tradition favours the consolidation of known
into dogmatic, intangible systems, whereas archival
transmission promotes better the possibility of a
critique of knowledge between individuals and from
one generation to another. Oral tradition is domi-
nated by the fear of forgetting, of lapses of memory,
since memory is here left to its own resources, bereft
of external or material support. Written tradition,
on the contrary, providing a material support,
liberates the memory, and permits it to forget its
acquisitions, provisionally to reject or question them
because it knows that it can at any moment recapture
them if need be.7
Philosophy existed in the West, Hountondji asserts,
because the history of the West is not directly cumula-
tive but critical: it moves forward not through a mere
plurality of knowledge, but through the periodical
questioning of established knowledge, each questioning
being a crisis.8 Ethnophilosophy, Hountondji contends,
errs in naming as philosophy forms of thinking that
are merely implicit and unwritten. For Hountondji,
genuine philosophy renders legible and meaningful
bits of knowledge into a text of knowledge.
Hountondjis insistence on written texts as phil-
osophy partly hinges on his belief that texts offer some
26
form of evidence against which duelling interpretations
may be compared to determine the correct one. He
argues,
The discourse of ethnophilosophers, be they
European or African, offers us the baffling specta-
cle of an imaginary interpretation with no textual
support, of a genuinely free interpretation, in
ebriated and entirely at the mercy of the interpreter,
a dizzy and unconscious freedom which takes itself
to be translating a text which does not actually exist
and which is therefore unaware of its creativity. By
this action the interpreter disqualifies himself from
reaching any truth whatsoever, since truth requires
that freedom be limited, that it bow to an order that
is not purely imaginary and that it be aware both of
this order and of its own margin of creativity.9
In his intellectual memoir, Hountondji elaborates
on a second reason why he opposes ethnophilosophys
claim to being genuine philosophy, one that draws
on Husserls distinction between a first-order hyle
or matter and a second-order morphe or form. For
Husserl, the hyle is the nonintentional or primary
aspect of the mind, the stratum of thought through
which sensory data or perceptual content is manifested
or appears. The morphe, on the other hand, is the
stratum of thought which relates the experience of the
hyle to its objective correlate that is, which confers
on sensations their objectivity. In his elaboration and
reconstruction of Husserls thoughts, Hountondji argues
that the hyle is the incipient first stage towards greater
knowledge. The hyle, he continues,
expresses our primordial interlacing with the world,
and the initial complicity that conditions any later
distance that might be observed; it expresses this
place of silence where, before any enunciation and
verbal expression, the configurations of our relation
to the world and to others are sketched out.10
Thus, in so far as ethnophilosophy attributes to Afri-
cans an implicit philosophy, Hountondji condemns it
for making a category mistake.
If we pose that it is absurd to speak of unconscious
algebra, geometry, linguistics, etc. and if we accept
that no science can exist historically without an
explicit discourse, then by the same token we must
regard the very idea of an unconscious philosophy as
absurd.11
Ethnophilosophy is a rank failure because of its
obliviousness to the difference between first-order and
second-order forms of knowing. Africans, Hountondji
holds, did and do possess as do all humans the
capacity for abstract thought. Husserl had shown that
there exists a universal architectonic of conscious-
ness. By alleging that the Africans thinking was
communal, ethnophilosophers were undermining the
most basic condition of possibility for the existence
of philosophy, namely the universality of individual
human consciousness.
Third, Hountondji contends that philosophy desig-
nates, in its role as clarifier of scientific concepts, the
privileged method for the discovery of truth. Husserls
method of the transcendental epoch, the bracketing
of the world and the natural attitude, deeply influ-
ences Hountondji and inspires his general disdain
for empiricism. For Hountondji, empiricism is mere
psychologism.12 He states in African Philosophy that
he remains attached
to a certain idea of philosophy which, since Plato,
demands that it be episteme rather than doxa,
science rather than opinion; to Husserl, who identi-
fies in a very technical manner some of the intel-
lectual devices and methods that allow philosophy
to become a rigorous science; to Descartess cogito;
and to all the doctrines that value intellectual
responsibility and demand that each affirmation be
sustained by a proof or a rational justification.13
One reason why Hountondji regards ethnophilosophy
as something other than philosophy is because he
thinks its empiricist methods reduce it to a form of
anthropology. Moreover, Hountondjis adoption of the
epoch as a methodology also strongly influences his
own intellectual habitus. It is at least partly what drives
his remarkable capacity for relentless argumentation,
his readiness methodically to follow a train of thought,
concept, or argument down to the furthest reaches of
its claims.
Fourth, Hountondji argues that by making explicit
the unarticulated, philosophy made possible the emer-
gence of science. Hountondji follows Louis Althusser
in conceiving of philosophical knowledge as signifying
a rupture or break that founds a new science by a
violent repudiation of subjectivism, myth and doxa.
The history of philosophy, he states, does not move
forward by continuous evolution but by leaps and
bounds, by successive revolutions, and consequently
follows not a linear path but what one might call a
dialectical one in other words, that its profile is not
continuous but discontinuous.14 If this signifies epis-
temological progress, it is no less a moral one as well.
Philosophy is possible in literate cultures, he avers,
because literacy liberates the memory. He continues:
Such is the real function of (empirical) writing. It
leaves the task of conservation to matter (books, docu-
ments, archives, and so on) and liberates the mind to
make innovations that may shake established ideas
and even overthrow them completely.15 In his memoir,
Hountondji hails his critique of ethnophilosophy as
marking nothing less than an intellectual liberation.16
Drawing on Husserl and Althusser, he argues for
a conception of philosophy as Wissenschaftslehre,
a theory of science necessarily called upon by the
very movement of science as realization, or at least
the condition of realization of this need for integral
intelligibility that permeates science.17 Through this
method, Hountondji claims, ontology could then clari-
fied as knowledge of a universal essence or foundation
upon which all subsequent sciences can then be built:
Therefore, there is an order of things, an objective
articulation of being, a universal legality that regulates
the sphere of truth. Scientific discourse must account
for this pre-existing order.18 The ultimate goal of phil-
osophy is nothing less than a Platonic duty to truth
and the desire for apodictic certainty.19
Hountondji lays out the implications of these
critiques in stark terms. We [Africans] must relearn
how to think, he states.20 Ethnophilosophers, he argues,
have not seen that African philosophy, like African
science or African culture in general, is before us,
not behind us, and must be created today by decisive
action. To get it started requires that the African admit
that African philosophy is yet to come. 21
Controversies and polemics
In his major work, African Philosophy: Myth and
Reality, Hountondji is prone to dismiss those he
disagrees with as engaged in a discourse other than
philosophy. But he does so only on the strength of his
definition of philosophy as a set of texts. In doing so
he simply begs the question. The lack of a textual basis
for ethnophilosophy condemns it as non-philosophical
in advance.
Unfortunately, in the case of African philosophy
there are no sources; or at least, if they exist, they
are not philosophical texts or discourses. Kagames
institutionalized records, or those which Tempels
had earlier subjected to ethnophilosophical treat-
ment, are wholly distinct from philosophy. They are
in no way comparable with the sources which for
an interpreter of, say, Hegelianism, or dialectical
materialism, or Freudian theory, or even Confucian-
ism are extant in the explicit texts of Hegel, Marx,
Freud, or Confucius, in their discursive development
as permanently available products of language.22
What Hountondji does not acknowledge here is that
the status of what counts as philosophy and philo-
sophical discourse is exactly what is being debated.
Its not enough to define rival discourses as not-
27
philosophy and declare the argument won. Nor is it
enough to treat the field of philosophy, oriented by a
neo-Althusserian emphasis on revolutionary breaks, in
terms that effectively reduce its structuring principles
to a heroic clash between the ideas of Great Men.
The first thing that Hountondji fails to account for
is the historical determinations that structure his own
philosophical thought. In African Philosophy, he points
to the historical conjuncture of racialist supremacy and
African nationalism as the impetus for the favourable
reception of ethnophilosophy. What he does not do,
however, is subject his own philosophy to the same
contextual critique. In his intellectual memoir, when
he engages the influences on him, he offers a litany of
Great Men (notably Immanuel Kant, Edmund Husserl
and Louis Althusser) as his forebears, and he offers
his text-based definition of philosophy as superior to
other definitions because he sees it as simply referenc-
ing the philosophical intention of the authors, not
the degree of its effective realization, which cannot
be assessed.23 It is a short step from here to the bald
assertion that philosophy is what the writer says it is.
And yet Hountondjis work bears ample testimony
to the contextual determinations that structure the
presuppositions of his beliefs. There is, to begin with,
a set of broadly modernist assumptions that he takes
for granted. My definition of modernization, drawn in
part from Perry Anderson and T.J. Clark, 24 takes it
to be a historical conjuncture marked by the struggle
for self-definition of the professional classes, the
rationalization and bureaucratization of the life world
(including processes of standardization, routinization,
and surveillance), and the emergence of a global public
sphere through the agency of mass media technologies.
Modernization was of course highly variegated, and
the response to processes of industrialization, mass
commodification, professionalization and standardiza-
tion were highly differentiated from field to field (thus
what is often termed modernist art and literature
tended to be anti-modernizing in its thrust).
Hountondjis work is best understood in light of this
historical conjuncture. Consider his portrayal of phil-
osophy as primarily a value-free method, which goes
hand in hand with his suspicion of engaged subjectiv-
ity. Hountondji finds seductive Husserls argument for
a science that foregrounds an ethics of effacement.25
In such a science the subject abandons itself to truth,
neutralizes itself, to be nothing more than a pure spec-
tatorial gaze.26 The neutrality Hountondji invokes in
his critique of ethnophilosophys cultural relativisms
is based in presumptions he adapts from Kant and
Husserl: reason is not reducible to the accumulation
28
of sensory impressions or of cultural habits. Emphasis
on the necessary and universal (a priori) conditions of
cognition and experience, however, opens the door to
a frictionless idealism: the rough ground and bewilder-
ing diversity of the empirical world are sacrificed for
the sublimity of coherence and order.
Hountondjis own writing bears traces of the intel-
lectual and ideological imprint of the Cartesian style
on the modern French university. He lavishes praise
on his teacher Georges Canguilhem for the beauty
of his writings rigorous analyses, an austere style,
and conceptual rigor.27 It is a style that brilliantly
shimmers in Hountondjis own prose: a pithy, impacted
form of expression that is seemingly effortless in its
translucence. Its a style that resonates with that ethos
of objectivity so prized in our professional era. But
precisely because it works so hard at performing its
transparency, there is at the same time an antipathy in
Hountondjis work to this very performance. It is no
wonder, then, that Hountondji himself is contemptuous
of rhetoric, dismissing his opponents as rhetoricians
and contrasting his own logic to their rhetoric. 28
The paradox, then, is that for all of his contempt for
rhetoric, Hountondjis rhetorical style is in tune with
modernitys ideology of clarity and transparency as
signature strategies of distinction.29
It is in the light of his modernizing allegiance to
a form of transcendental idealism, therefore, that one
ought to understand Hountondjis fetishism of writing
and literacy. Hountondji regards literacy as essentially
a neutral medium for the acquisition and engagement
of knowledge. He claims that his definition of phil-
osophy is intended to be neutral: I wanted to take
note of the fact of [African philosophical] writings,
outside of any assessment of value judgment.30 It
is not a particularly convincing argument, for his
definition is structured around a series of oppositions
favourable to his own position: philosophy versus
ethnophilosophy, critical written philosophy versus
spontaneous oral thought, and explicit written texts
versus implicit oral utterances. Hountondji assumes
that written texts are explicit, articulated philosophies
by virtue of the fact that they are written. But what
is written, of course, is often as implicit as what is
spoken. That is, written texts are utterances which are
explicit about some things, implicit about others, and
necessarily rest on certain assumptions. It is therefore
important to try to reconstruct how Hountondji is blind
to the diverse forms of written texts and reduces them
to a single manifestation: those that explicitly argue a
case, generally in the form of a book. For Hountondji,
in effect, the only philosophy is written, and the only
philosophical writing worthy of the name is presented
as a book. This idea of the book as a stand-in for all
written texts is itself embedded within a very particular
representation of the medium as inseparable from
another activity, namely reading. It is not just that
books are assumed to automatically possess explicit or
critical traits, but that this can only be assumed because
they confer particular skills. Reading is metonymic of
technique, and contributes to a modernising technicism
the fetishization of technique and, its corollary, the
sacralization of technology. However unconvincing
the series of leaps required to enable Hountondjis
conflation of the written with the philosophical, it
dovetails with the modern states bureaucratic function
of cataloguing, measuring, recording and, not least,
accrediting.
Hountondjis claims of transcendental objectivity
notwithstanding, it is clear that his critique springs
from a deep vein of moral disapproval of ethno
philosophy. If there is one word that echoes through-
out his African Philosophy, it is courage. African
philosophy, he states, may today be going through its
first decisive mutation, the outcome of which depends
on us [Africans] alone, on the courage and lucidity
we show in bringing it to its conclusion.31 For Houn-
tondji, ethnophilosophy was symptomatic of a kind of
dogmatic sleep of consciousness that his compatriots
ought to be awakened from. As he elaborates in his
intellectual memoir,
What I refused deep down was a philosophy in the
third person [that] consisted in lazily taking refuge
behind group thought, in abstaining from taking a
personal position and from giving ones opinion on
the problems to which, in its own way, this thought
of the ancestors was a response. In place of this
lazy recourse to group thought, I appealed for the
intellectual responsibility of the thinker, of each
thinker.32
Hountondjis anger at ethnophilosophy for what
he considers its extraversion its orientation towards
the West, its desire to prove that Africa was equal
to Europe because of its own storied civilization
thus, after all, springs from a sensibility he shared
with the ethnophilosophers: the quest for recognition.
He dismisses the ethnophilosophical consciousness
as motivated by a desire to show off that grows
increasingly hollow until it is completely alienated in
a restless craving for the most cursory glance from the
[Western] Other. 33 Ethnophilosophy is thus faulted for
its cringing desire for approval from the West. In the
interstices of Hountondjis rhetoric, then, seeps not only
anger but also shame. He thought that ethnophilosophy,
despite its flourishes about restoring African pride,
heralded another era of African abasement: The
same subservience, the same wretchedness, the same
tragic abandonment of thinking by ourselves and for
ourselves: slavery.34 Hountondjis broader polemical
stance betrays the burden of this shame. His country,
Benin, he argued in 1972,
was characterized politically by the loss of all
meaningful sovereignty, by its international mendac-
ity, servility in its relations with great or middle-
level powers, its inability to keep to its internal and
external financial commitments, and its creepy-
crawliness and obsequiousness.35
Thus, Hountondjis rejection of ethnophilosophys
attribution of African philosophy to a collectivistic
mentalit is as much prompted by moral scruples as
it is an epistemological critique. Philosophical truth is
only truth in so far as one can attribute it to individual
agency. As he puts it, philosophy is produced
when every thinker, every author, engages in total
responsibility: I know that I am responsible for what
I say, for the theories I put forward. I am respon-
sible for them in the literal sense of the word,
because I must always be prepared to answer for
them; I must be ready to justify them, to attest to
their validity.36
It is here that his notions of what it means to be
an intellectual can be plumbed all the way down to
Immanuel Kant. Kant, it will be recalled, defined
Enlightenment in forceful terms:
Enlightenment is mans emergence from his self-
imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability
to use ones understanding without guidance from
another. Laziness and cowardice are the reasons
why so great a proportion of men, long after nature
has released them from alien guidance, nonetheless
gladly remain in lifelong immaturity, and why it is
so easy for others to establish themselves as their
guardians.37
Though Hountondjis language is suffused with
moral, even moralistic, sentiment, the idiom it speaks
in is that of disciplinarity an idiom, one has to
remember, which is embedded in modernitys interpel-
lation of certain classes and functions as professionals.
Hountondjis definition of African philosophy takes for
granted the disciplinary divisions that are the norm in
the modern university. He argues, for example, that
scientific method demands that a sociological
document is interpreted first in terms of sociology,
a botanical text (written or oral) first in terms of
botany, histories first in terms of historiography, etc.
29
 Well then, the same scientific rigor should prevent us
from arbitrarily projecting a philosophical discourse
on to producers of language which expressly offers
themselves as something other than philosophy. In
effecting this projection, Kagame and Tempels
before him, along with those African ethnophiloso-
phers who followed suit committed what Aristotle
called a metabasis eis allo genos, i.e. a confusion
of categories.38
The modernist intellectual stance that Hountondji
cultivates, to use Michel Foucaults characterization,
is that of the specific rather than the universal
intellectual. To Foucault, the universal intellectual
for example, Jean-Paul Sartre should be and has
been replaced by the specific universal exempli-
fied by the American physicist Robert Oppenheimer.
The universal intellectual is the master of truth and
justice, the consciousness/conscience of us all. The
specific intellectual, on the other hand, works within
specific sectors, at the precise points where their own
conditions of life or work situate them (housing, the
hospital, the asylum, the laboratory, the university,
family, and sexual relations). 39
But one drawback to this stance is that its com-
mitment to specialization and division of labour takes
for granted or offers little critique of the categories
through which it analyses the world. In other words,
Hountondji does not seek to explore the manner in
which the analytical categories he employs and the
spheres (public, private, and so on) emerged histori-
cally. Moreover, his analytical categories fail to offer
convincing accounts of the connections or articulations
among the discrete categories and spheres what
early Marxism referred to as totality. This articulated
knowledge is conceived here as, first, a delineation of
the relationships among types of knowledge: university
knowledge (in the forms of episteme, techne or gnosis),
political knowledge (in the forms of bie, metis or
praxis), knowledge within civil society (in the forms
of doxa, muthos or kerdos); local knowledge (nomos);
worldly or universal knowledge (kosmopoliteia).40
The first of these considerations must centre on
university knowledge. The ancient distinction between
episteme (knowledge) and techne (craft or art) by
no means instituted an absolute separation between
these two forms. Plato and Aristotle both speak of a
techne that may be interanimated by episteme, though
both, regrettably, privilege episteme over techne. It
was largely the legacy of Descartes who declared
himself certain of no knowledge but the knowledge
that he could think (which then serves as a guarantee
of methodical or demonstrable knowledge more gen-
30
erally) that drove a wedge between the two forms.
Hountondji embraces what Pierre Bourdieu in another
context termed logicism an attempt to found science
on general a priori rules, but that in its idealism and
romanticization of scientific practice falls into an idle
scholasticism.41
In any case, the episteme versus techne divide, even
in its ancient forms, may wrongly give the impression
that different methodologies are a priori mutually
exclusive or conflictual.42 Even worse, in its claim
that one method is superior to another it leads to a
pernicious and ultimately destructive arms race for
disciplinary cultural capital. Such struggles for cultural
capital are not only provincial, but ultimately under-
mine the autonomy of intellectual practice in so far
as they prevent the kind of constitutive practices for
example, disciplinary and cross-disciplinary and multi-
perspectival knowledge necessary for establishing a
contextual (and therefore deeper) rigour.
Universities are, of course, not the sole spaces for
the articulation of knowledge. Hountondjis critique
of ethnophilosophy tends to conflate its spontaneous
philosophy with doxa and mythos. He thereby loses an
opportunity not only for a more fine-grained critique
of the different strains of doxa and mythos, but also
the extent to which power relations are constitutive of
what is legitimized as episteme and what is ruled out
as doxa and mythos. As Steven Feierman has shown
in his brilliant ethnographic study in the Shambaai,
peasant intellectuals articulated a complex discourse
that demonstrated a far more thoroughgoing elabora-
tion of democratic theory and practice than the official
discourse.43 To be sure, the field of doxa, no less than
that of episteme, ought not be romanticized. What are
often described as civil societies in Africa are quite
often not so much shoots of grassroots community
activism but rather appendages of US State Depart-
ment policy and fundamentalist evangelical churches
paternalism.44
The same critique would apply to mythos. Houn-
tondjis secularist commitments must stand, alongside
that of the Kenyan philosopher Odera Oruka, as one
of his finest legacies to African philosophy and intel-
lectual theory. Apart from ethnophilosophys dissemi-
nation of the canard that Africans think as a herd, one
of its most pernicious legacies was to legitimize the
notion that African people are generally in the sway
of religious or supernaturalist thought; indeed, that in
their animism they are unable to make any distinc-
tion between the natural and the supernatural. The
Kenyan theologian John Mbiti would carry on with this
ethnophilosophical myth: African people do not know
how to exist without religion, he claims: religion is
their whole system of being.45 Hountondji did more
than anyone, in the field of philosophy, to expose
such myths for what they were. And yet, here again,
it is necessary to make distinctions. It is obvious, for
example, that Hountondjis thought is bereft of any sus-
tained engagement with African art, literature, music,
film and architecture. Such an engagement might have
offered him a far more subtle, more complex under-
standing of the different varieties of mythos, and
perhaps even tempered his grammacentrism.46
University politics
Hountondjis eidetic bracketing serves not only to
valorize the primacy of philosophy, it also functions
as a firewall between philosophy and politics. For
Hountondji, this was not an entirely abstract discus-
sion. His philosophy was worked out not only within
an African philosophical discourse marked by fever-
ish contention among rival schools of thought that
had deep ideological divergences, but also within the
constraints of living in repressive states that demanded
fealty to the ruling ideology. In his intellectual memoir,
Hountondji recounts his experience of teaching in
universities in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of
Congo) at the height of the dictatorship of Mobutu. On
return to his own country, Benin (formerly Dahomey),
he witnessed the seizure of power by a Stalinist junta.
These experiences had a lasting effect on Hountondjis
view of both politics and philosophy.
The fierce exchanges within African philosophical
debate in the 1970s are best understood in light of
the convulsions that were occurring in African states.
Three schools were broadly discernible. The first were
the traditionalists (such as the ethnophilosophers), who
advocated for a reactivation of a traditional African
Weltanschauung. The major proponents of this school
included Alexis Kagame and William Abraham. The
second school were left-leaning nationalists. This
school included Kwame Nkrumah and Julius Nyerere.
The last school of thought are liberal modernists
like Hountondji and Marcien Towa, who advocated for
universal Enlightenment thought.47
Hountondji took on the rival schools of thought
with brio. In his memoir he states that one of his main
purposes in the 1970s was to put politics in its right
place.48 For Hountondji, the materialist thesis, as exem-
plified by Lenins Materialism and Empirio-Criticism,
was mistaken because of the different registers in
which politics and philosophy operate. He states that
the uncontested authority of the Russian revolutionary
[Lenin], a midwife of history, and henceforth, indis-
pensable in the area of political theory and practice,
did not necessarily give him comparable authority in
the quite different field of speculative thought.49 If
the place of politics was unity of action, the place
of thought was free and responsible thought. 50 To
that end, and against Lenins denunciation of idealism
as reactionary, Hountondji celebrates the intellectual
daring of Descartes who, in his quest for apodictic
certainty, readily accepted the risk of madness and,
through the argument of the dream, provisionally
rejected all belief in the existence of bodies includ-
ing his own. 51 Hountondji prefers Althussers early
conception of philosophy as the theory of science,
or the theory of the theoretical science to his later
characterization of philosophy as class struggle in the
realm of theory. Oriented by its scientific vocation,
philosophy does not merge with ideology any more
than algebra or linguistics do.52
He levels the same sort of critique at Kwame
Nkrumahs book Consciencism. 53 Hountondji objects
to Nkrumahs notion that politics presupposed a phil-
osophy. He finds Nkrumahs claim that idealism favours
oligarchy while materialism favours egalitarianism to
be arbitrary:
Our political choices stand on their own feet. If they
need justification, it must be political justification,
belonging to the same level of discourse and not to
what is the completely different (ex hypothesi) level
of metaphysical speculation. 54
In the context within which he offered his critique,
at a time when regimes such as the one he had to
contend with in Benin imposed ideological correct-
ness tests on intellectuals, Hountondjis intervention
was bracing and intellectually stimulating. The dog-
matism of the Stalinist regime in Benin was such that
it prevented an appreciation of the depth of Marxs
own texts, let alone those vilified as bourgeois. As
Hountondji put it, there is a danger that the time may
soon come when, in the name of Marxism, we will be
forbidden to read Marx. 55
Nonetheless, in much the same manner as he does
when he reifies disciplinary categories, Hountondji
consistently takes for granted the categories within
which his analyses proceed. In other words, he fails
to offer an account of the relationship of philosophy
to politics, including all the political oppositions that
he establishes. This is true particularly in the case
of his idea of Africa and the West [lOccident].
Hountondjis memoir states repeatedly that the main
aim of his critique of ethnophilosophy was to end
Africas extraversion. What this extraversion consists
31
in he never clearly spelt out, but one gleans that it is
primarily Africas orientation towards the West; much
of the intellectual work done in Africa is designed to
solicit the approval of audiences in the West rather
than audiences in Africa. Throughout his discussion,
however, Hountondji takes the existence of the West
for granted. In other words, he never registers the
fact that the West is a political rather than simply a
natural kind. 56 It is, moreover, a specifically modern
creation brought into being by the construction of
Africa and the East as its Other. 57 Such a realization
would have complicated Hountondjis sweeping claim
that he wanted to demystify Africanness by reduc-
ing it to a fact the simple and, in itself, perfectly
neutral fact of belonging to Africa; by dissipating the
mystical halo of values arbitrarily grafted to this fact
by ideologues of African identity. 58 But this is to be
oblivious of the fact that the emergence of African
identity only came about for political reasons. African
identity only gains coherence when understood politi-
cally it is certainly not because of any similarity in
genes, culture, or even geography. In any case, it seems
perplexing that Hountondji thinks of geography as a
value-neutral signifier. The designation of continen-
tal boundaries has always been decided by political
configurations and the markers said to cut off one
continent from another have not been so much natural
as naturalizing. 59 Why should a geographical criterion
be in any sense less arbitrary a foundation of identity
than other criteria?
If the problem with Stalinism is its vulgar reduc-
tion of theory to politics, therefore, the problem with
Hountondjis idealism is that he assumes that politics is
in and of itself vulgar by definition. After Kant and
Husserl, Hountondji acknowledges a transcendental
subject, the universal I think of scientific conscious-
32
ness; after Althusser, however, he dismisses the politi-
cal subject as nothing more than an effect of structure,
an obedience interpellated by ideology. The account
of politics it paints is monolithic, given that ideology
is conceived of as singular, and, ultimately, disabling
of agency.60 It is, in other words, a mechanistic and
instrumental conception of politics.61 To be sure, Houn-
tondji is rightly suspicious of reductive accounts of
intellectual work as politics by other means, and was
right to dismiss Stalinist suggestions that his Parisian
agrgation proved he was an ally of the imperialist
enemy. By taking his Stalinist opponents as representa-
tives of philosophical materialism, however, he fails
to engage a much richer and more complex Marxist
corpus. As Raymond Williams argues, the notion of
determination bears at least two senses: There is, on
the one hand, from its theological inheritance, the
notion of an external cause which totally predicts or
prefigures, indeed totally controls a subsequent activ-
ity. But there is also, from the experience of social
practice, a notion of determination as setting limits,
exerting pressures.62
Of the institutional determinations that set limits,
exerted pressures on his intellectual work, Hountondji
again has little to say. And yet his work through the
1970s to the 1990s in universities across Africa, in
Kinshasa, Lubumbashi and Cotonou, was a witness
to some of the most wrenching changes in African
intellectual history. These changes were spurred by
the perfect storm of internal and external explosions
that tore through African polities during these years.
In the 1960s, immediately following independence
from colonial rule, many African universities were
geared towards the training of civil servants for the
bureaucratic behemoth that would become the African
state. This period saw the growth of some of the most
acclaimed universities in the African continent such as
Ugandas Makerere University and Tanzanias Univer-
sity of Dar es Salaam.63 It was followed in the 1970s
by massive contractions and convulsions of the world
economy just as the African universities experienced
an unprecedented influx of second-generation students.
As the edifices of their institutions crumbled and they
began to face rapidly diminishing prospects in the
patronage machinery of the state, students and faculty
in the African university system were increasingly
radicalized. Universities exploded into open revolt and
African states cracked down brutally on faculty and
students. The 1980s and 1990s saw an even greater hol-
lowing of the African university as the world powers
imposed structural adjustment programmes on virtu-
ally every African nation.
 The external pressures on development were clear
enough. African states that wrested political independ-
ence from colonial rule in the early to mid-1960s
were even more completely absorbed into the circuits
of global capitalism as the reach of the market now
affected the furthest encampments of the rural popu-
lace. By and large this development initially fuelled
economic growth as African economies found ready
markets for what remained largely primary products
(agriculture, minerals, oil), and as capital packaged
as loans flowed to African countries. This then
changed dramatically due to two factors. Politically,
the strife among the world powers led to the funding
of proxy wars and coups dtat; in so far as narrow and
exclusive African elites often had little broad-based
support, they relied on ethnic and religious appeals
to mobilize opinion, further exacerbating political
upheaval. Economically, the global recession of the
1970s compounded the impact of internal develop-
ments. As Giovanni Arrighi noted, early economic
growth in many African countries was perverse in so
far as it rested on surplus absorption of labour into
bureaucratic employment, the primitive accumulation
of labour aristocracies and their transfer of this
wealth abroad; the conspicuous mass consumption of
these new labour aristocracies; and the continued reli-
ance of African economies on foreign export markets
for agricultural products.64 After a decade of growth
in many African economies, the mid-1970s witnessed
a precipitous decline. The aggressive promotion of the
Washington Consensus, which called for the rolling
back of the state, led to the almost complete collapse
of many economies in Africa in the 1980s.
It is in light of these developments that the sheer
ferocity with which the ethnophilosophy debate was
waged ought to be seen. Neither theoretical confu-
sions (as Hountondji would have it) nor ideological
divergences (as his rivals would have it) fully explain
the stakes of the debate. The African university was
being buffeted by the shrinking of its resources just
as a new generation of students, its expectations now
stratospheric, reached an all-time high. Hountondjis
critique was increasingly received in the atmosphere
of a widespread legitimation crisis that was as much
epistemological as institutional and political.
The first legitimation crisis was of a dominant ana-
lytical paradigm that can be described as the moderni-
zation school. As African countries achieved nominal
independence from colonial rule, this school of thought
emerged touting an array of politically liberal reforms
and programmes designed to help developing nations
catch up with North American and European coun-
tries. For example, what was little acknowledged by
Hountondji was the extent to which his assumption
that writing was superior to orality was resonant with
the salvational role then being attributed to literacy
programmes and modern communications technology.
Daniel Learner, whose Passing of a Traditional Society
served as useful propaganda for the US projection of
power in imperialized formations, was one of the
most prominent promoters of these views.65 According
to Learner, the media teach people participation
With the spread of curiosity and imagination among a
previously quietistic population come the human skills
needed for social growth and economic development.66
Hountondjis African Philosophy which echoed some
assumptions of this school was published at a time
when the modernization school was on the defensive.
Its core thesis was not only under attack by a rival
school of thought the Dependency School67 but also
as the Chicago school fought to replace the state with
the multinational corporation.
The second legitimation crisis was more narrowly
disciplinary. The emergence of the sciences to a
position of dominance in the twentieth century had
severely undercut the cultural capital that philosophy
had enjoyed ever since the philosophes toppled
theology during the Enlightenment. It is telling that
Althusser and Hountondjis claim for a privileged
role for philosophy tethers itself to this hegemony by
proclaiming philosophys role as an adjunct of science.
Hountondjis fetishization of methodological rigour,
hand-waving about objectivity, and voluntarist equation
of consciousness with liberation are of a piece with
this reigning scientism. It is notable, however, that
Hountondjis intervention was a rearguard struggle not
against science its hegemony was secure, hence their
attempt to find a niche within it but against the social
sciences: principally, economics and sociology.68
The third legitimation crisis was political. Houn-
tondjis pan-African claims were made in a context
in which the African states legitimacy was under
external attack from neoliberal institutions demand-
ing privatization and internal attack from within
by a variety of groups calling on citizens to pledge
allegiance to ethnic and religious associations rather
than to the state. African Philosophy was thus widely
disseminated just as there were renewed calls often
by African elites seeking to mobilize support for a
return to ethnic roots. The World Banks demands
that the African states cut back on their funding
of universities in the 1980s was so devastating that
George Caffentzis talked of it as a policy of academic
exterminism69 while Silvia Federici described it as
33
the intellectual recolonization of Africa.70 The result
was a severe curtailment of access to institutions that
were already open only to a minority; the sporadic
payment of faculty wages; untenable faculty loads with
overflowing classes; a mass exodus of faculty to non-
governmental organizations, industries and, sometimes,
universities abroad; nonexistent support for research.71
The dominant ideology of neoliberalism was no less
disastrous: a vulgar utilitarianism transformed the
universities into factory floors of credentialling and
little else.
The upshot is that Hountondjis own philosophical
theory cuts deeply against his professed desires. Houn-
tondji is right to want to seek autonomy for intellectual
practice. And yet such autonomy cannot be secured
through individualism and methodological fetishization.
Engagement with history should be a dimension of any
inquiry. Moreover, the autonomy of an intellectual field
must begin from a radically self-reflexive critique of
the institutional deep structure that is the condition of
possibility of specialized knowledge.
African philosophy after Hountondji
Hountondji set many of the terms upon which the dis-
course on African philosophy now turns. In particular,
it was Hountondjis achievement to raise the question
of the relationship between episteme and doxa and to
tie it to the question of agency. There are broadly two
streams of thought that have emerged in the wake of
Hountondjis pathbreaking work (though it is perhaps
striking that such is the cliquishness of contemporary
Africanist discourse that Hountondji has rarely been
credited for anticipating many of the current debates
within the field). The first, dominated by African phil-
osophers primarily from the anglophone countries,
such as Kwasi Wiredu, Odera Oruka and Kwame
Anthony Appiah, has attempted a nuanced recupera-
tion of African doxa in order to help transform it into
a genuine episteme. The second, represented mainly
by francophone African philosophers, such as V.Y.
Mudimbe and Achille Mbembe, declare any African
doxa lost or nonexistent.
In his book In My Fathers House (1992) Appiah
is concerned to articulate a pan-African identity that
is not based on a mythical racial foundation. Instead,
he argues for a cosmopolitan notion of identity based
on rational solving of Africas problems. By rational
problem-solving, he is referring to the abandonment in
Africa of a belief in the ontology of invisible things,
by which he means beliefs in spirits, for what he takes
to be a belief in science. Appiah, like Hountondji,
34
believes that the absence of an scientific conception of
reality in Africa can be attributed to the lack of literacy
on the continent. Noting the progress of literacy rates
on the continent, Appiah urges what he calls the
new generations of literate African intellectuals to
examine and analyse African traditions and produce
new, unpredictable, fusions of knowledge.72
Even in this early book, many of the limitations
that have attended much of Appiahs intellectual work
are fully apparent. There are, to begin with, Appiahs
Whiggish historiographical assumptions that posit lit-
eracy as a sleek vehicle towards the sunlit uplands of
scientific and moral progress. He patronizingly urges
African intellectuals to be tutored in the ways of the
modern world: we [Africans] have the great advan-
tage of having before us the European and American
and the Asian and Latin America experiments
with modernity to ponder as we make our choices.73
The implication is, of course, that other continents
are modern while Africa remains traditional. But
what is most telling about Appiahs book lies in his
conception of the political as essentially consisting of
technical problems, as a matter for suitably educated
technocrats to puzzle over and solve. Thus, there is
little engagement with the historical gravity within
which particular problems emerge and are contested,
little understanding of the fact that many of the deep
conflicts in Africa are powered by radically different
interests, far more than by a lack of education or a
simple matter of conceptual confusions.
If Appiahs vision represents a naive Whiggish
view of progress, that of Achille Mbembe offers a
radically different historiography of death, decay and
decadence. Mbembe, in his widely acclaimed book
On the Postcolony (2001), launches a series of bitter
broadsides against, on the one hand, Western epistemes
for their reductionist portrayals of African identities,
and, on the other, nativist and traditionalist attempts at
counter-discourses. He rails against various European
constructions of Africa as a timeless essence, a para-
doxically negative non-identity, a sign of the strange
and the grotesque. Against these, Mbembe aims to
rethink the theme of the African subject emerging,
focusing on him/herself, withdrawing, in the act and
context of displacement and entanglement.74 At the
same time, he underscores the extent to which African
doxa is entangled in power and corruption:
In the postcolony an intimate tyranny links the
rulers with the ruled, just as obscenity is only
another aspect of munificence and vulgarity a
normal condition of state power. If subjection
appears more intense than it might be, it is because
 the subjects of the commandement have internal-
ised the authoritarian epistemology to the point
where they reproduce it themselves in all the minor
circumstances of daily life, such as social networks,
cults and secret societies, culinary practices, leisure
activities, modes of consumption, dress styles,
rhetorical devices, and the whole political economy
of the body. It is also because, were they to detach
themselves from these ludic resources, they would,
as subjects, lose the possibility of multiplying their
identities.75
Two problems have confounded Mbembes project.
The first is that for all his railing against the reduc-
tionisms of Western and nativist discourse, he himself
engages in a vicious caricature of Africa and Africans.
For example, he claims that his book On the Post-
colony aims to do
justice to what J.F. Bayart describes as the true
historicity of African societies that is, the founda-
tions of what might be called their true lawfulness,
true raisons dtre and relation to nothing other
than themselves76
as if there is only one history of Africa, one reason
for its being, one Africa that could be apprehended
as a thing in itself. Mbembes reductionisms run
systemically throughout his uvre. He speaks of a
postcolony, reducing vastly differing regions and
discourses to one logic; and he sprinkles his book with
categorical statements about a postcolonized subject.
Thus, for all his claims to historicity, Mbembes project
remains rooted in an abstract Africa and an equally
abstract African subject, oblivious to both history
and geography.
Second, Mbembe subsumes agency to a gestural and
quietist politics. In a gesture that is now de rigueur
in the academy, Mbembe avers that he has tried to
write Africa, not as a fiction, but in the harshness
of its destiny, its power, and its eccentricities, without
laying claim to speak in the name of anyone at all.77
Like many a postmodernist, therefore, he thinks it
sufficient to disavow any attempt to speak for any
group. What Mbembe is blind to, however, is an
account of the groups, institutions and socialities that
speak through him. It may well be, in other words,
that he does not speak for any group, but by failing
to offer a rigorous accounting of the institutions and
socio-political fields that speak through him he ends
up re-enacting the myth of the absolutely autonomous,
self-standing subject.
Mbembe writes very much in the apocalyptic post-
structuralist mode. His sentences bristle with rhetorical
flourishes, spooling out in clause after clause of often
cryptic, sometimes histrionic oracular declarations.
What this conceals, however, is the extent to which his
writing is almost uniformly derivative. He denounces
Marxist and neo-Gramscian talk of resistance
and counter-hegemony in favour of a thoroughly
Foucauldian project of documenting African subjects
as engaged in the play, pleasure and enjoyment of
an economy of death.78 So intent, however, is he on
rejecting binaries about resistance and passivity that
all he succeeds in doing is substituting a new vocabu-
lary for the old the approved words now being play
counterposed to resistance, displacement favoured
against location, and entanglement valorized instead
of domination.
As an articulation of an intellectual habitus, there-
fore, Hountondjis enlightened modernism represents
perhaps one of the most attractive and influential intel-
lectual characteristics and styles in the African context.
Considered alongside its most prominent alternatives,
the traditionalism of a Mbiti, or the Whiggish liberal-
ism of an Appiah, or the postmodern existentialism
of a Mbembe, Hountondjis intellectual power and
brilliance are without compare. And yet thanks to
his uncritical belief in several fetishes of the modern
intellectual rigour, objectivity, compartmentalization,
specialization Hountondji loses an opportunity to
re-examine how the documents of civilization he has
rightly championed are nonetheless also documents
of barbarism.
Notes
1. Pierre Bourdieu defines habitus as systems of durable,
transposable dispositions, structured structures predis-
posed to function as structuring structures, that is, as
principles which generate and organize practices and
representations that can be objectively adapted to their
outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at
ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary
in order to attain them. Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of
Practice, trans. Richard Nice, Stanford University Press,
Stanford CA, 1990, p. 53.
2. Antonio Gramsci, Intellectuals and Education, in The
Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings 19161935,
ed. David Forgacs, New York University Press, New
York, 2000, p. 304.
3. Paulin Hountondji, Sur la philosophie africaine,
Maspro, Paris, 1976; translated by Henri Evans as
African Philosophy: Myth and Reality, Indiana Univer-
sity Press, Indianapolis, 1983; hereafter abbreviated as
AP.
4. Paulin Hountondji, Combats pour le sens: un itinrai-
re africain, Editions du Flamboyant, Cotonou, 1997;
translated by John Conteh-Morgan as The Struggle for
Meaning: Reflections on Philosophy, Culture and De-
mocracy in Africa, Ohio University Press, Athens OH,
2002; hereafter abbreviated as TSM.
5. Kwame Anthony Appiah, Foreword in TSM, p. xi.
6. AP, p. 33.
35
 7. Ibid., pp. 1034.
8. Ibid., p. 104.
9. Ibid., p. 189.
10. TSM, p. 24.
11. Ibid., p. 47.
12. Ibid., p. 33.
13. AP, p. vii.
14. Ibid., p. 72.
15. Ibid., p. 104.
16. TSM, p. xvii.
17. Ibid., p. 31.
18. Ibid., p. 39.
19. Ibid., pp. xviixviii.
20. Ibid., p. 53.
21. Ibid., p. 53.
22. AP, p. 42.
23. Ibid., p. 34.
24. See, for example, T.J. Clark, Origins of the Present Cri-
sis, New Left Review 2, MarchApril 2000, pp. 8596.
25. TSM, p. 49.
26. Ibid., p. 46.
27. Ibid., p. 7.
28. Ibid., p. 194.
29. For more on distinction, see Pierre Bourdieu, Distinc-
tion: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans.
Richard Nice, Routledge, London: 1984, p. 6.
30. TSM, p. 97.
31. Ibid., p. 71.
32. Ibid., pp. 18990. In his memoir, Hountondji makes no
bones about it: It was clear: I was a Kantian (TSM, p.
90).
33. TSM, p. 101.
34. Ibid., p. 102.
35. Ibid., p. 115.
36. AP, p. 72.
37. Immanuel Kant, An Answer to the Question: What Is
Enlightenment? trans. and ed. James Schmidt, in What
Is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and
Twentieth-Century Questions, University of California
Press, Berkeley CA, 1996, p. 58.
38. AP, p. 43.
39. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews
and Other Writings 19721977, ed. Colin Gordon, Pan-
theon, New York, 1980, p. 126.
40. The literature on these varying forms of knowledge is
deep and varied. On episteme and doxa, see for example
Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice. On metis, see Marcel
Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, Cunning Intelligence
in Greek Culture and Society, trans. Janet Lloyd, Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1981; and James C.
Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to
Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, Yale Uni-
versity Press, New Haven CT, 1999. On cosmopolitan-
ism, see Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism:
Ethics in a World of Strangers, W.W. Norton, New York,
2007.
41. Pierre Bourdieu, Science of Science and Reflexivity,
trans. Richard Nice, University of Chicago Press, Chi-
cago, 2004, p. 104.
42. See John Guillory for a good critique of this view: Re-
alism and antirealism espoused at the highest level of
epistemological generality do not seem to me very use-
ful positions to take in advance of specifying some way
of talking about categories of objects, along with some
particular object about which we would like to know.
Consider what it would mean to establish in advance a
realism or antirealism that would be equally adequate
for all of the following objects: igneous rocks, God,
adolescents, the color red, dementia praecox, poverty,
a Sidney sonnet, desire, chaos, algorithms, dinosaurs,
freedom, disability, status, c sharp minor, capitalism,
gamma rays, honor, the Renaissance, democracy, race,
menopause, beauty, foreigners, the culture industry, na-
tions, grammar, mitochondria, alienation, global warm-
ing, disciplines John Guillory, The Name of Science,
The Name of Politics, Critical Inquiry, vol. 29, no. 3,
Spring 2003, pp. 52641.
43. Steven Feierman, Peasant Intellectuals: Anthropology
and History in Tanzania, University of Wisconsin Press,
Madison WI, 1990.
44. See, for example, James Fergusson, Global Shadows:
Africa in the Neoliberal World Order, Duke University
Press, Durham NC, 2006, p. 101.
45. John S. Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy, Hein-
emann, Nairobi, 1992, pp. 23.
46. Hountondjis anti-mythological commitments imply not
just an affirmation of science but a full-fledged scient-
ism. In African Philosophy, he argues: If philosophy
can also be of use, it is only by helping to liberate a
genuine theoretical tradition on this continent, an open
scientific tradition, master of its problems and of its
themes, and also to the extent that it proves capable,
once this tradition is established, of contributing in
one way or another to its enrichment. That philosophy
that theoretical quest strictly hinged on science will
carry us a thousand miles away from the preoccupa-
tions which have inspired and shaped the myth of a so-
called traditional African philosophy. It will get us far
away from the metaphysical problems of the origins of
the world, the meaning of life, the wherefore of death,
human destiny, the reality of the beyond, the existence
of God and all those insoluble problems which really
belong to mythology, yet are the usual fodder of philo-
sophical rumination (AP, pp. 989).
47. I do not propose these categories as mutually exclusive.
They often overlapped. Many nationalists, for example,
invented and advocated for traditional African values
in the service of their nationalist goals.
48. TSM, p. 144
49. Ibid., p. 145.
50. Ibid., p. 146.
51. Ibid., p. 145.
52. AP, p. 214.
53. Kwame Nkrumah, Consciencism, Heinemann, London,
1964.
54. AP, p. 154.
55. TSM, p. 148.
56. Silvia Federici, ed., Enduring Western Civilization:
The Construction of the Concept of Civilization and Its
Others, Praeger, Westport CT, 1995.
57. Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of
Classical Civilization, Rutgers University Press, New
Brunswick NJ, 1987.
58. TSM, p. 126.
59. Martin W. Lewis and Karen E. Wigen, eds, The Myth of
Continents: A Critique of Metageography, University of
California Press, Berkeley CA, 1997.
60. The whole existence of the structure consists of its ef-
fects, in short, that the structure, which is merely a specif-
ic combination of its peculiar elements is nothing outside
its effects (Louis Althusser and tienne Balibar, Read-
ing Capital, New Left Books, London, 1970, p.189).

36
 61. Valentino Gerratano notes the strange indulgence ini-
tially shown by Althusser to the historical-materialist
content of Stalins political science (Valentino Ger-
ratana, Althusser and Stalinism, New Left Review,
January-April 1977, I/101102, pp. 11021.
62. Raymond Williams, Problems in Materialism and Cul-
ture: Selected Essays, Verso, London, 1980, p. 32.
63. The University of Dar es Salaam was the locus for the
articulation of some of the most imaginative and criti-
cal thinking on African historiography and history and
historiography, not least because of its interdisciplinary
and internationalist orientation. Among the celebrated
international thinkers at Dar es Salaam were Terence
Ranger, John Iliffe and Walter Rodney.
64. Giovanni Arrighi, The African Crisis, New Left Review
15, MayJune 2002, pp. 536.
65. Christopher Simpson, Science of Coercion, Oxford Uni-
versity Press, New York, 1994, p. 10.
66. Daniel Learner, The Passing of Traditional Society:
Modernizing the Middle East, The Free Press, New
York, 1965, p. 412.
67. See, for example, Penelope Hetherington, Explaining
the Crisis of Capitalism in Kenya, African Affairs, 1993,
pp. 89103.
68. Note, for example, Pierre Bourdieu: But I was no less
strongly opposed to philosophy, whether it was the in-
stitutional philosophers who clung to the defence of the
agrgation and its archaic syllabi, and especially the
aristocratic philosophy of philosophy as a caste of high-
er essence, or all the philosophers who, in spite of their
anti-institutional mood and, in some cases, their flaunted
break with philosophies of the subject, continued to
profess the statutory contempt for the social sciences
that was one of the pillars of the traditional philosoph-
ical credo I am thinking of Althusser referring to the
so-called social sciences, or Foucault placing the so-
cial sciences in the lower order of knowledges. I could
not fail to feel a certain irritation at what seemed to me
to be a double-game played by these philosophers, who
would take over the object of the social sciences, while
seeking to undermine their foundation. Pierre Bourdieu,
Science of Science and Reflexivity, trans. Richard Nice,
University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2004, p. 104.
69. George Caffentzis, The World Bank and Education
in Africa, in Silvia Federici, George Caffentzis and
Ousseina Alidou, eds, A Thousand Flowers: Social
Struggles Against Structural Adjustment in African Uni-
versities, Africa World Press, Trenton NJ, 2000, p.9.
70. Silvia Federici, The Recolonization of African Educa-
tion, in Federici et al., A Thousand Flowers, p. 19.
71. See, for example, Megan Lindow, African Universi-
ties Face a Looming Shortage of PhDs, Chronicle of
Higher Education, 12 May 2008; also Silvia Federici,
The Recolonization of African Education, p. 19.
72. Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Fathers House: Africa
in the Philosophy of Culture, Oxford University Press,
New York, 1992, p. 134.
73. Ibid., p. 134.
74. Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony, University of Cali-
fornia Press, Berkeley CA, 2002, p. 15.
75. Ibid., p. 128.
76. Ibid., p. 5.
77. Ibid., p. 17.
78. Ibid., p. 115.
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37
Who needs postcoloniality?
A reply to Lindner
Harry Harootunian
In Marxs articles for the New York Tribune on British
colonialism in India and the events leading to the
Second Anglo-Chinese War (Opium War), critics have
caught sight of a double mission attributed by him to
British imperialism and colonialism to tear down the
structure of archaic societies and lay the foundations
for a new social order that would eventually reflect the
capitalist model. A much later variation of this double
mission was promoted by modernization and conver-
gence theory during the early days of the Cold War
(before the USA discovered the technique of proxy
wars against the Soviets), whereby colonialism, which
this theory of development often ignored or over-
looked, was credited with putting into place the proper
infrastructure for the later, successful postcolonial
modernization of states like India, and, especially,
Taiwan and South Korea, both of which were said to
have benefited from the Japanese imperial intervention.
While the modernizing mission of colonialism can
be found in Marxs early articles, it was replaced
by modernization theory dedicated to endowing a
world-historical narrative (Hegel) with a civilizational
grammer and direction, as well the task of overseeing
a transnational experience by administering capital-
ism as it ideologically captures historical time and
deploys it as means. During the Cold War, moderniza-
tion theory and its knowledges aimed to manage life
in the so-called Third World through the imperial
instrumentality of a developmentalist policy, which
was perceived as a form of neocolonialism.1 But the
accusations of Eurocentrism and Orientalism were
particularly important for a postcolonial theory, which
dematerialized Saids version of colonial discourse
in the name of radicalizing it, and its campaign to
provincialize Europe and unthink Eurocentrism. 2
Kolya Lindners recent essay Marxs Eurocentrism:
Postcolonial Studies and Marxian Scholarship (RP
161)3 is a recent reminder of both the persistence of
this question and its capacity to fuel discussion. In
38 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 16 4 ( N ove m b e r / D e c e m b e r 2 010 )
these discussions, what is interesting is the fascina-
tion, bordering on desire, that postcolonial discourse,
especially, has continued to exert for Marxism, and the
possibility of establishing some sort of rapprochement
that might end the academic division of labour between
two antagonistic intellectual strategies and put to rest
the apparently embarrassing charges of Eurocentrism.
It should be stated that this peacemaking mission
began several years ago, with attempts to imagine a
Marxian postcolonial approach that might open the
path to a more productive partnership. In her intro-
duction to Marxism, Modernization and Postcolonial
Studies (2002), Crystal Bartolovich observed the near-
absence of direct and serious dialogue between
Marxism and proponents of postcoloniality.4 Noting
that too often postcolonial theorys indebtedness to
post-structural philosophy encouraged dismissal of
Marxism or ignored it out of neglect and even igno-
rance, Marxism, for its part, fell into discounting
postcolonial studies frequently for overlooking the
material dimensions of imperialism and colonial life,
especially the intervening mediations posed by capital-
ism and colonial enterprise. Any reading of the novel
The Singapore Grip by J.G. Farrell (a writer who
was not a Marxist), with its narrative of how British
businessmen were planning to sell their rubber to the
Japanese, whose troops were already within the city,
will reaffirm Bartolovichs judgement. In this dispute,
she correctly proposed that the existence of a large
fund of misunderstanding linking the two discourses
in mutual antagonism was often accompanied by cari-
cature and misrecognition.
If Marxism was vulnerable to charges of an
inaugural Eurocentrism, postcoloniality was answer-
able for its collaboration with imperialism in its most
contemporary manifestation of globalization. This
apparent complicity with forms of neocolonialism
stemmed from its prior relationship with the Cold War
and, in the aftermath, its affiliation with modernization
theory. Despite competing claims, Bartolovich was
convinced that Marxism is the theoretical perspective
suited to accomplishing the necessary critique of both
the colonial violence of contemporary neocolonial
residues, what the writer Kiran Desai (The Inheritance
of Loss, 2006) described as the shabbiest modernity,
and the more distant colonial past. 5 Regardless of the
distance separating these discourses, she is persuaded
that they do have something to say to each other, if
for no other reason than such an engagement would
provide the opportunity to air their respective differ-
ences. But postcolonial discourse would hardly cede
its own claim to theoretical privilege.
A few years later Neil Lazarus remarked that silence
on class in postcolonial studies, especially beginning
with the class location of the postcolonial theorist
relative to that of whom he or she is theorizing, is
precisely the problem the gap that needs to be as projecting false universalism for reshaping the
examined since it undoubtedly has played a principal
role shaping the particular field of inquiry.6 Lazarus
has also pointed to the preponderant culturalist bias
informing postcolonial studies, its inordinate concerns
with subaltern address and enunciative capability, the
formation of subjectivity drawn from psychoanalytic
theory yoked to unstated claims of cultural authenticity
(and reductionism), and coupled, I would add, with
declarations of neo-nativism, ironically echoing an
understanding of the world outside of Euro-America
founded on the assumption that Foucault was less
Eurocentric than Marx.7
Whatever the complex reasons prompting this
Marxian attention to postcolonial studies, it has, I
believe, much to do with the successful institutionali-
zation of postcolonial studies and cultural studies in
colleges and universities of the USA and UK, first in
departments of English and then in semi-autonomous
programmes of instruction and graduate training. For
its part, Marxism, at least in US colleges and universi-
ties, has always been marginalized and never occupied
a position to play the role commanded by postcolonial
studies. In a way this was acknowledged by Fredric
Jameson, when he proposed that cultural studies con-
stituted a desire, 8 which, among its many ambitions,
was the yearning to succeed Marxism and replace it,
a challenge that persisted in residing at the heart of
the Marxian effort to win recognition by establish-
ing a dialogue with postcolonial studies by situating
itself in such a way as to refigure its critique in order
to gain entry into the academic procession. Beyond
this institutional detour there was also the politics
of a reigning textualism in the literary fields and the
insinuations of history and political economy into
disciplines traditionally unreceptive to what they had
to offer. It is often overlooked, in this connection, that
a symmetrical relationship was forged between English
literary studies and a postcoloniality preoccupied with
Englands largest former colony, India and especially
the province of Bengal. (Ireland seems like a natural
candidate, with a history of 500 years of continual
occupation but the British always had a problem with
seeing it as a colony.9) Specifically, I am calling
attention to the way English studies, armed with new
textual strategies (Saidian colonial discourse and post-
structural philosophy) turned towards colonies that had
been intimately implicated in the metropolitan country
once the discipline had exhausted the productivity
of received practices. Inadvertently, the development
of postcolonial studies made India (Bengal) the con-
densed substitute of choice what Lindner describes
colonial world according to the protocols of a local
experience in such a way as to imply a commonality
everywhere. In the vast literature on postcoloniality,
its hard to find much emphasis on the French, Dutch,
Portuguese, American and Japanese colonial posses-
sions, and even less consideration of their significant
experiential differences. The alliance between post-
colonial studies and post-structural theory resulted in
the emphasizing of subject formation (and thus culture)
and thus led to a dematerializing of the subject by
substituting subaltern agency finding a voice ( itself
a form of cultural identity) where identity is transferred
to ethnicity. Marx considered ethnicity a historical
value, as opposed to the roles played (and personified)
by worker and capitalist, the subjects of value-in-
process that is, capital in every moment.10 It is,
I believe, this legacy that loosely accepted the Cold
War caricature of Marxism as Eurocentric, which
led to the subsequent postcolonial accusation that
capitalism formed simply another Western narrative
and that history was another name for Europe. In this
vocation to distance itself from an imperial self by
foregrounding the suppressed other, a dyad recently put
into question by a number of thinkers, postcoloniality
has run the risk of sliding into an unstated valorization
of cultural authenticity and, perhaps, signalling the end
of its productivity.
None of these considerations appears in Lindners
informed essay, which often echoes the Cold War
caricature. But it also gives a glimpse of the kind of
cultural and political lag between the world of German
scholarship and its preoccupation and those of the USA
and the UK. On the one hand, Lindner aims to show
through a reading of the New York Tribune articles
39
how Marx moved from a perspective that viewed
Englands colonization of India as accruing eventual
benefits that would lead to the necessary transforma-
tion of the subcontinent (the conceit of the English
jackasses, in Lindner, 27), and put it on the road to
socialism to the abandonment of this expression of
Eurocentrism and cultural superiority. On the other
hand, this tack is accompanied by the recognition that
Marxs substantive and theoretical writings relating to
the critique of political economy, capitalism and the
world market revealed, despite Orientalist hangovers,
the existence of pre-capitalist communal organization
throughout the ancient world and its importance for
later history. Further, the expansion of capital would
result in establishing conditions leading to changes in
the received order according to differing circumstances
in time and place. But the trouble with this twin posi-
tionality is that it is unnecessary in its desire to have
it both ways: to show that Marx pulled back from an
earlier Eurocentrism, for a show of sympathy for socie-
ties outside Euro-America might satisfy a postcolonial
demand to be free from racism but it is outweighed
by Marxs coextensive account of political economy
and how it transforms every society it manages to
touch. This recognition could not have been acceptable
to postcolonialisms proponents since it would have
required suborning its own theoretical aspirations to
those of Marxism. It should be recalled that in some
versions of postcolonial theory, Asia (i.e. India) was
designated as the site of an alternative modernity.
With this dedication to an alternative modernity (and
all its names), we have already entered the precinct
of the cultural dominant the colonizing space of
culture which demands a parallel move away from
considerations of time and its relationship to space to
spatial primacy, whereby the possibility of temporal
conjuncture loses its momentary and historical status
to become a fixed and unmoving countenance. The
Marxian critique of political economy was histori-
cal, always referred to the world at large, and joined
colonial expropriation to the expansion of capitalism
as it became the lever in forming the world market.
Postcolonial studies has been less worldly and more
local and reflects the moment when decolonization
resulted in disappointment with what came after. In
Lindners reckoning, the disclosure of Marxs later
ethnological notebooks concerning societies of Euro-
America clinches the argument against charges of
Eurocentrism, even though much of this material was
published in Lawrence Kraders Introduction to Karl
Marxs Ethnological Notebooks (1974) and found its
way into the under-used The Asiatic Mode of Pro-
40
duction (1975) and was amplified recently in Kevin
Andersons important Marx at the Margins (2010).11
What therefore seems evident is that the more theoreti-
cal texts provide ways to circumvent the instances of
Eurocentric sentiment that occasionally crept into the
newspaper articles and supplied a prefiguration for the
heterogeneous history Marx was demonstrating in his
letters to Vera Zasulich and Russian progressives and
in his ethnological notebooks.
Rather than pursue this narrative demonstrating
Marxs ethnological consciousness in later life, detailed
by both Lindner and Anderson, Id like merely to
follow through on some of the possibilities offered
by Marxs conception of history (articulated in the
Grundrisse) and the analysis of capitals logic and
pre-capitalist formations, which both the Grundrisse
and Capital provide. Such an accounting requires
envisaging Capital not as an x-ray of national capi-
talism transformed into an ideal type, but instead as
the abstraction of a constitutive historical process.
It is less about a configuration of national economies
which will establish relations between sovereign states
than a network of international exchange and the
crystallization of national markets. Genealogically,
commercial and finance capital were constituted on
the periphery of social formations, in the widening
fulcrum of international exchanges. But the capital-
ist mode of production, properly called, implies the
submission of production itself to the law of capital.12
In other words, capital presumes the exchange of
commodities in their function as value and is thus
not preoccupied with the pre-capitalist exchange and
production of goods. Hence, the historic genesis of
capitalism, the existence of the world market, appears
only in the tearing of a coherent synchronic system,
with other categories (representing practices) like
primitive accumulation, the incidence of the tendency
of the falling rate of profit, and the formation of
finance and commercial capital following successively
throughout the volumes of Capital.13 There is no
place in Marxs analysis for a separate accounting
of the world market that will demand a degree of
unification more advanced than what this market has
already attained. It is not accidental, Daniel Bensaid
has remarked, that the literature inspiring Marxist
narratives on modern imperialism originated in the
stage of colonial expansion and the formation of
finance capital dating from the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries.14
In fact, it was the contemporaneity of this syn-
chronic system, a system in which the expansion of
capital will result in value independently valorizing

itself, that commanded Marxs analytic attention. This
would explain why he appeared less concerned with
the history of pre-capitalist formations, and somewhat
ambiguous toward the possibility of knowing them,
even though their putative historicity is considered in
the Grundrisse. Yet it is also in this same text that he
envisioned a new understanding of history departing
from his reflections in the German Ideology precisely
at the moment he was driven to construct a critique
of the world of contemporary bourgeois political
economy. It is because bourgeois economy is the most
developed historic organization of production that a
new understanding of history is required, especially in
view of the convention of political economy to posit the
natural development of capitalism and smudge over all
differences to see bourgeois relations in all forms of
societies.15 Here, too, Marx introduced the observation
of unevenness, when he noted that bourgeois society is
itself a panoply of contradictory forms of development
derived from earlier forms found within it only in
stunted form, or even travestied.16 The upshot is thus
a mode of historical presentation of development
founded on the fact that the latest form regards
the previous ones as steps leading up to itself. This
rejection of the retrospective illusion led to imagining
a real history of the relations of production based on
observing and deducing its laws, as having themselves
become in history like the empirical numbers in
natural science which point towards a past behind
this system. Such indications, he continued, accompa-
nied by a correct grasp of the present, offers the key to
understanding the past.17 Moreover, the suspension of
the present form of production relations will supply
the signification of its becoming foreshadowings
of the future. In these passages and elsewhere, Marx
clearly outlined what Bensaid has called a new tem-
porality of knowledge. The societies of the past are
never historical in their immediacy but only acquire
this status through the present. There is no horizontal
trajectory here, as supposed by a linear, chronological
historical trajectory the before and after but rather
verticality, the necessity of excavating the depths of
the present, where the traces and residues of pasts
coexist with and within it, often remaining hidden or
unrecognized, like the purloined letter or appearing in
stunted, and caricatured form but always with an
essential difference.18
What Marx showed in the Grundrisse was the
historic shape of pre-capitalist formations as com-
munal and clan-based typifications that might have
existed before the separation from land that marked
the momentous beginnings of primitive accumulation
and the installation of wage labour. Reflecting an
uncertainty relating to the accessibility of knowledge
on ancient societies, Marx, in one of his letters to
the Russian Vera Zasulich, he confesses how little is
known of these archaic communities and that what is
known from available sources represents the formation
in its final term.19 Implied in this new account was a
division between history, which referred to the order
that concepts and categories appeared historically, and
capital logic, which arranged their relationships to each
other differently according to a more formal principle.20
But in both cases we have instances of the workings
of contingency, not teleological destiny. Marxs historic
perspective was concerned with presuppositions, what
he named suspended presuppositions, the merely
historical, past and gone, that were no longer visible
or evident but clearly important to later development
but in no way to its contemporary history, that is, not
to the real system of the mode of production.21 With
Capital, moreover, Marx outlined capitals immense
conceptualization of the organization of time and with
the establishment of the working day the successive
permeation of value throughout everyday life. In this
respect, the world of pre-capitalist social formations
would always remain hostage to the capitalist present,
always mediated by the unstated force of its temporal
accountancy.
Since so much of the Grundrisse was concerned
with showing how wage labour developed from the
41
separation of free workers from the land and their
fall into a state of dependence based solely on the
only thing they owned, the sale of their labour power,
it is not surprising that Marxs description of the
prior moment would reflect the opposite of what had
previously existed, namely the absence of working to
create value.22 Here, the presupposition of capital was
the free worker before being released from the land as
his natural workshop, which meant the dissolution
of small, free landed property under clan-based com-
munal ownership resting on the oriental commune.23
These communal organizations functioned like chrono
topic variations of an earlier pre-capitalist mode of
production, whereby a specific conception of space
dissolved time. What seemed to characterize the
Asiatic forms (Marx earlier called them Oriental
despotism) was the commonality of labour and the
extraction of surplus product. 24 Anderson has pro-
posed that Marx took a more even handed position
towards these communities from the views expressed
in the 1853 articles on India.25 But it is important that
in the Grundrisse, Marx includes areas outside of
Asia, emphasizing the centrality of the commonality
of labour throughout diverse regions of the archaic
world, implying a universal disposition, which stands
in contrast to what replaced it after the great separa-
tion from conditions of living labour and the means
of existence.26 More importantly, Marx additionally
saw the incidence of free day labourers in all places
where either the Oriental community (Gemeinwesen)
or the western commune (Gemeinde) dissolved into
individual element through the loss of conditions of
self-sustaining labour.27 Here, Marx asserted that a
presupposition of wage labour historically is free
labour.28 The result of this inversion was the disap-
pearance of free workers as proprietors members
of the community who at the same time work. 29
Here, it seems, Marx resorted to the tactic of inverting
the inversion (recalling the negation of the negation),
whereby the naturalness attributed to capitalism by
political economy already constituted an inversion of
the historical real, which he now tried to restore with
a second inversion. Communal land owners, in any
case, worked not to create value, but to maintain the
individual proprietor and his family, not to forget the
total community itself.30 While Marx emphasized this
forms relationship to the property of the community,
whereby each individual constitutes a link as a member
and proprietor, he was convinced that the form could
be realized in very different ways in the Asiatic,
Slavonic and Romanian communes, if not the Russian
mir. The various forms present variations of a primary
42
historic presupposition, not evolving in progressive
sequences and stages in a unilinear chronology but
rather moving according to different and uneven tem-
poralities contingent on their historically different
circumstances. The commune, wherever encountered,
appeared as a coming-together (Vereinigung) a
unification made up of independent subjects, landed
proprietors, not as a unity. 31 Their aim was survival
through reproduction, 32 and the collapse of these
archaic communities followed a rhythm determined
by their different circumstances. The Asiatic, Marx
observed, held out longest, owing to its presuppositions
that the individual does not become independent vis-
-vis the community that is, their difference from a
universalist norm of communal labour and naturally
arisen, spontaneous communal property. 33
The temporal unevenness accompanying the dis-
solution of the ancient form was at the heart of Marxs
new view of history. By the same measure Capital
makes clear that his sketch derives from the English
example, which represents the classic form. But the
history of the expropriation of agricultural producers
assumes different aspects in different countries, and
runs throughout various phases in different orders of
succession, and different epochs. 34 To be sure, primi-
tive accumulation referred only to countries already
embarked on the capitalist route, but there is no reason
to exclude those colonized regions like India and China
in the late nineteenth century, where forms of wage
labour were already established in certain enterprises
devoted to the production of tea, if not opium. This
suggests that differential temporal rates, if not histories,
marked each societys development along a capitalist
itinerary that reflected the uneven development of
material production relative to, for example, artistic
development35 and indeed between different spheres
of social activity and among a diversity of societies.
It is interesting to note that Japanese philosophers
before World War II who were not Marxists had
already recognized the different temporalities and
histories lived by different societies and had identified
the false universalism represented by the European
model. 36 The new historical temporality did away
with the image of a universal history and its abstract
notion of progress, which was invariably based on
the presumption of a linear and homogeneous history,
wherein the flow of time and meaning coincide. 37
In fact, logical order took precedence over genetic
order, which, accordingly, was confused with empiri-
cal history. 38 But this was precisely the conception
of historical time promoted by the nation-state. When
both nation form and the representation of history were
designated as the political form for entry into the world
market and the placeholder for capital, the necessity
to extinguish spectral reminders of unevenness and
untimeliness became even more compelling. At this
juncture the time-lag appeared and was exported to
regions outside of Euro-America as the sign of their
collective underdevelopment, even though it functioned
to conceal both its instance within advanced capitalist
societies and capitalisms own unscheduled cycles,
waves, irregular rhythms the world of zeitwidrig, non-
contemporaneity, discordance.39 By contrast, the tempo-
rality of time lag in postcolonial theory primarily an
economic category was transmuted into the moment
of subaltern address, just as the spectre of unevenness
was reinscribed as hybridity and diasporic cosmopoli-
tanism! Each present, then, supplies a multiplicity of
possible lines of development, as Marx proposed in his
letters to Zasulich when he envisioned the possibility
of the Russian commune freeing itself gradually from
the fetters of primitiveness to promote production on a
national scale. Yet, precisely because it is contempora-
neous with capitalist production, the rural community
may appropriate all its positive achievements without
frightful vicissitudes.40 (Such trajectories do not
possess the same index of normality, on which only
the second and third internationals insisted.41)
We can infer from all this that Marx had moved
towards envisaging the multiple possibilities for radical
transformation among the worlds societies that no
longer depended upon their capacity to replicate the
European model supplied by colonial experience and
that, as the his views on Russia showed, could utilize
the residues of prior modes of production to create
either a new register of formal subsumption or bypass
capitalism altogether. Lindner reminds us that in the
early British Rule in India (1853) Marx already raised
the question of whether mankind could fulfil its destiny
without a fundamental revolution in the social state
of Asia. If not, he replied, whatever may have been
the crimes the British committed, the nation was the
unwitting and unconscious tool of history in bringing
about that revolution. But only if Asia fails to do so
on its own and from its resources. In this regard, the
Grundrisse was more hopeful when Marx remarked
that when the limited bourgeois form is stripped
away, what is wealth other than the universality of
individual needs, capacities, pleasures, productive
forces etc. created through universal exchange?
The absolute working out of creative potentialities,
with no presupposition other than the previous his-
torical development, whereby mankind strives not
to remain something [it] has become, but in the
absolute movement of becoming?42 With this view, the
question we must ask is, who needs postcoloniality?
For Lindner, it is important for Marxism to enter into
a cooperative discussion between a Marx stripped of
charges of Eurocentrism and cultural superiority and
postcolonial studies that will deepen their analysis
of contradictions by adopting a global perspective.
Yet what else was Marxs critique and Marxism but
an analysis devoted to dissembling capitals contra-
dictions on a global scale? Postcolonial studies pro-
vides a new perspective for understanding historical
progress. But in the heterological history made possible
by uneven flows and the prospect of untimeliness,
progress would, as I have suggested, have to be
released from its unilinear mooring and rethought as
a relative progress that considers missed opportunities
and vanished, defeated possibilities.43 Marxism must
be open to the prospect of contingency. Here, Lindner
quotes approvingly from Louis Althusser, who, at the
last count, was a Marxist of long standing, and points
to his reflections on the materialist philosophy of
the encounter. But Althusser, following Marx and
Lenin, saw this encounter as identical with the idea
of conjuncture, the optic through which to think the
historical reality of those moments when a diversity
of circumstances from different sectors confront each
other to present a world, torn between powers in col-
lusion and the crises which unites them in a circle.44
This historical reality referred to the conviction that
while historical periods have their laws, they can also
change at the drop of a hat revealing the aleatory basis
that sustains, without reason without intelligible
end.45 This is the history of capitalism, a series of
contingent historical encounters producing practices,
which subsequently were reordered as categories into
a logic of relationships to become the mature form of
capitalism. Well before Althusser, I should add, the
Japanese economist Uno Kozo had already worked out
this Marxian conception of contingence and recognized
how it necessarily separated history from logic. Where
the cleft remains between Marxism and postcoloniality,
in the final analysis, is in the dematerialization of the
latter as a condition of its own discursive possibil-
ity and opposition to the former. For its part, what
Marxism needs to learn is how to shed its parochial
Western identity (in what has been named Western
Marxism), since it has contributed to reinforcing the
idea of a unified West. This modest task might hope-
fully be begun by ending the practice of referring to
regions outside Euro-America in the negativity of non-
Western. It might also learn to acquire a sensitivity
towards postcolonialisms concerns for memory and a
43
melancholy provoked by the irretrievable loss inflicted 22. Ibid., p. 471; Anderson, Marx at the Margins, p. 156.
by capitalisms immeasurable destruction of what 23. Ibid., p. 471.
24. Grundrisse, p. 473; Anderson, Marx at the Margins, p.
Fanon described as received cultures of reference.46 157.
25. Anderson, Marx at the Margins, p. 157.
Notes 26. Grundrisse, p. 463.
Thanks, again, to Kristin Ross for critical commentary 27. Ibid., p. 465.
and editorial suggestions. 28. Ibid., p. 471.
1. John Kraniauskas, Difference Against Development: 29. Ibid.
Spiritual Accumulation and the Politics of Freedom, in 30. Ibid., p. 472.
H. Harootunian and H.O. Park, eds, Problems of Com- 31. Ibid., p. 483.
parability/Possibilities for Comparative Studies, special 32. Ibid., p. 493.
edition of boundary 2, vol. 2, no. 2, Summer 2006, p. 33. Anderson, Marx at the Margins, p. 161; Grundrisse, p.
68. 472.
2, Neil Lazarus, The Fetish of the West in Postcolonial 34. Capital, Volume 1, p. 876.
Theory, in Crystal Bartolovich and Neil Lazarus, eds, 35. Grundrisse, p. 109.
Marxism, Modernity and Postcoloniality, Cambridge 36. See Koyama Iwao, Sekaishi no tetsugaku (The Philosophy
University Press, Cambridge, 2002, p. 6. of World History), Tokyo, pp. 446ff. This text was actu-
3. Kolya Lindner, Marxs Eurocentrism: Postcolonial ally written in 1941, by one of the leading philosophers
Studies and Marxian Scholarship, RP 161, May/June of the Kyoto School, and represents the most thorough
2010, p. 4. nationalist critique of European models of modernity.
4. Bartolovich and Lazarus, Marxism, Modernity and 37. Bensaid, Marx for Our Times, p. 21.
Postcoloniality, p. 1. 38. Ibid., p. 26.
5. Ibid., p. 3. 39. Ibid., p. 23.
6. Neil Lazarus, ed., Cambridge Companion to Post- 40. Shanin, Late Marx, p. 106.
colonial Literary Studies, Cambridge University Press, 41. See Bensaid, Marx for Our Times, p. 32.
Cambridge, 2004, p. 6. 42. Grundrisse, p. 488.
7. Ibid., p. 9. 43. Bensaid, Marx for Our Times, p. 32.
8. Fredric Jameson, On Cultural Studies, in The Ideolo- 44. Louis Althusser, Philosophy of the Encounter, ed.
gies of Theory, Verso, London and New York, 2008, pp. Franois Matheron and Olivier Corpet, trans. G.M. Gosh
598635. garian, Verso, London, 2006, p. 188.
9. See J.G. Farrell, Troubles, Review Books Classics, New 45. Ibid., p. 196.
York, 2002, on the last days of the British imperial pres- 46. Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory, Columbia Univer-
ence in Ireland, centred on the irreparable hotel of this sity Press, New York, 1998, pp. 517.
fading glory, the Majestic, a sure inspiration for the later
Fawlty Towers.
10. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, Introduction to the Critique
of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus, Penguin,
London, 1973, p. 536. In Capital, Volume 1, Marx was
equally clear when he wrote In truth value is here
the subject of a process that valorizes itself independ-
ently, an automatic subject (trans. Ben Fowkes, Pen-
guin, London, 1976, p. 255).
11. Lawrence Krader, Introduction to Karl Marx, Ethno-
logical Notebooks, Van Gorcum, Assen, 1974; The Asi-
atic Mode of Production: Sources, Development and
Critique in the Writings of Karl Marx, Van Gorcum,
Assen, 1975; Kevin Anderson, Marx at the Margins:
On Nationalism, Ethnicity and Non-Western Societies,
University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2010.
12. Daniel Bensaid, La Discordance du temps, ditions de
la Passion, Paris, 1995, p. 18.
13. Ibid., p. 19.
14. Ibid.
15. Grundrisse, pp. 105, 460.
16. Ibid., pp. 1056.
17. Ibid., pp. 46061.
18. Bensaid, Marx for Our Times, p. 27; Grundrisse, p.
106.
19. Teodor Shanin, ed., Late Marx and the Russian Road,
Monthly Review Press, New York, 1983, p. 106.
20 Stavros Tombazos, Les catgories du temps dan
lanalyse conomique, Cahiers des Saisons, Paris, 1994.
This proposition was advanced much earlier in the writ-
ings of the Japanese economist Uno Kozo.
21. Grundrisse, p. 459.

44
reviews

Flexploitation
Brett de Bary, ed., Universities in Translation: The Mental Labor of Globalisation, Traces, Hong Kong University
Press, Hong Kong, 2010. 408 pp., 56.50 hb., 28.50 pb., 978 962 209 991 3 hb., 978 962 209 992 0 pb.
Andrew Ross, Nice Work If You Can Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times, New York University Press,
New York, 2009. 254 pp., 18.99 hb., 13.99 pb., 978 0 8147 7629 2 hb., 978 0 8147 7691 9 pb.

Universities in Translation contains an anecdote from
a Yucatan professor, Gabriela Vargas-Cetina, who was
thrilled to discover that her students normally quite
uninterested in theory were proving avid readers
of Discipline and Punish. They told her they had
discussed it all week, and thanked her especially at
the beginning of the seminar for this eye-opening text
explaining how society punishes deviance and how
disciplinary structures permeate all social institutions.
But they were going to use it, they told her, as a sort of
manual to keep themselves in check, so as to conform
as much as possible to normalcy and be able to get
good jobs. When the horrified Vargas-Cetina told
them that her generation saw this book as a tool to
change the world, not a manual for self-vigilance, they
discussed her idea among themselves again, before
thanking her for understanding the generation gap
so well.
Both Universities in Translation and Nice Work
If You Can Get It are marked by a commitment to
internationalizing accounts of the contemporary expan-
sion of precarious and cognitive/immaterial modes of
labour, modes which universities are often taken both
to exemplify and to be in the forefront of promoting. In
Nice Work If You Can Get It, the university is treated
as but one example of this process, and placed in the
context of a wider array of case studies of sites that
are both subject to and reactions against it from the
anti-sweatshop movement and environmental archi-
tecture through to debates over the creative industries.
In Universities in Translation, universities are both the
key point of analysis and the prism through which this
topic is viewed.
What is striking across both books is the consistency
between many of the different stories offered, in that
they deal with a recently changed landscape marked
by increasing precarious labour, vocationalism, techno-
cratic managerialism and competitive self-exploitation.
Both foreground how whilst these conditions affect and
are affected by people across a wide social spectrum; it
is often a younger generation who are at the sharp end
of these changes, as Vargas-Cetinas anecdote illus-
trates. As Ross puts it, for American youth entering
the labour market today, stories about those decades of
stable employment are tall tales indulged by the elderly,
not unlike the lore of great depression hardship that
baby boomers endured from their parents. Similarly,
he writes, Beijing youth are now predominantly raised
to believe they must be authors of their own lives,
their parents having witnessed the shedding of social
securities and descent into precarious circumstances
on a much more momentous scale than anywhere
else.
Clearly the political geographies of the paths to
this point of transnational cultural commonality are
divergent. For Chinese workers, they are routes from
(and alongside) autocratic communism to the savagery
of free-market neoliberal capitalism; whereas for Euro-
Americans the path is from Keynesian consensus to its
unravelling by the savagery of neoliberal capitalism.
Ross is one of those keen to point out that now, with
historical hindsight, the Keynesian moment where
state security (in the form of public pensions, educa-
tion and so on) offsets the wilder excesses of capital
increasingly looks like a historical blip. But he points
out that not only did the temporary Fordist truce rely
on imperialism, rigid social hierarchies and a reservoir
of unpaid domestic labour, but that today is no simple
neo-Victorian age: pre- and post-Fordist moments are
qualitatively different. For whereas the Great Depres-
sion was the result of a collapse of capitalist control,
contemporary precarity is the result of capitalist
control, as organizations have eagerly embraced the
flexploitation of short-term contracts and outsourcing
as the new template for work.
The different roads travelled, globally, towards pre-
cariousness therefore often end up at a similar point
a crossroads that is the combined effects of the
World Trade Organization (WTO), the International
Monetary Fund (IMF), the General Agreement on
Trade in Services (GATS), the triumphs of the Wash-
ington Consensus and of neoliberal discourse from the

R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 16 4 ( N ove m b e r / D e c e m b e r 2 010 ) 45
bottom up as we are encouraged to be entrepreneurial
subjects scrabbling over each other for success in
a so-called meritocracy. Whereas these tendencies
often hit the young hardest, neither book seeks to
blame solely the youth for their acquiescence or the
old for selling off their privileges. Ross, for example,
points out that in American university labour activism
it is casualized staff who now make up two-thirds
of employees who have driven the fight for rights
to a far greater extent than tenured radicals. Rather,
both emphasize the connections that need to be forged
across generations and from the inside and outside of
universities against neoliberal practice in order effec-
tively to reinvent solidarities for a new century.
The essays in Universities in Translation work
to foreground the university as a site of rich contra-
diction: both subject to a dramatic restructuring over
the last two decades, from public service to corporate
entity, and one of the sites from which critiques of
neoliberalism and managerialism despite all the
acquiescence and inaction in universities continue
to be most loudly generated. In this respect, they are
often (like Ross) influenced by those post-Operaismo
theorists such as Hardt and Negri, Virno and Laz-
zarrato who view a cognitive workforce as harbouring
potential political power, as well as being subject to
new modes of flexploitation, even if the negative effects
are most immediately evident.
The reports from different countries on the results of
neoliberal restructuring have both strong commonali-
ties and pronounced differences. The discussion of the
Mexican academic whose accountability is no longer to
the public or a broader conception of ethics, but to the
administration of the university through a clerical book-
keeping of ones acts, resonates with Laurent Dubriels
account of a French university system in which a logic
of bureaucratic rationality is lived as an end in itself.
Dubriel terms this erosion of power facadism: a
condition in which the university is retained as a form
whilst faculty become more inert, and are driven, not
driving and in which conflicts are internalized into the
employees psyche. But Iwasaki Minorus discussion of
Japanese universities hyper-accommodating response
to pressures from business and government, in which
opening up to the outside world has only involved
opening up to business, paints a picture by contrast
with which Europe appears as a zone marked by strong
public welfare and rampant political dissensus. Rosss
accounts of the failures of Euro-American overseas
campuses also work to create a more variegated picture
of the weaknesses as well as the triumphs of contem-
porary educational outsourcing and colonization.
46 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 16 4 ( N ove m b e r / D e c e m b e r 2 010 )
Similarly, the histories and local specificities of
universities are differently textured even whilst they
are intertwined. The legacies of Western imperialism
remain: in the cases of Korean academics forced to
publish in English journals and Chinese institutions
seeking to emulate the excellence of Harvard and
Princeton, for example. In the USA, the Campus
Watch campaign was orchestrated by a bunch of
neocons to target pro-Palestinian individuals and
others opposed to US policy on the war on terror
(such as Ward Churchill, the Ethnic Studies scholar at
the University of Colorado, sacked for arguing that the
USA was not an innocent victim of 9/11). In China, a
discourse of anti-traditionalism has been mobilized
to embrace capitalist entrepreneurship, begging the
question of how it might also be mobilized beyond
new habits of corporate obsequience.
The narratives used to explain the deeper historical
development of universities in the West are often tales
of transitional stages: from the Kantian university of
enlightened men of knowledge, to the Humboldtian
university of citizens of the nation-state, to the con-
temporary corporate University of Excellence (as
diagnosed by Bill Readings) in which excellence
is but an empty signifier. Andrew Jewett stringently
argues that Western notions of academic freedom were
in any case largely created by universities concentra-
tion, during the Cold War, on subjects important to
federal agencies, which worked in tandem with the
universalizing discourse of the humanities to prop
up the values of Western civilization in a time of
Strangelovian disharmony. Many contributions argue
that the industrialized University of Excellence threat-
ens the humanities most. In China, for instance, there
is considerable debate over whether departments of
philosophy should be eliminated; and in Singapore,
US overseas campuses are being helped by the state to
cater for the future regional business elite, generating
an apolitical population for which the humanities are
often deemed an unnecessary and potentially destabi-
lizing enterprise. These will be recognizable models
to many working in UK universities. However, some
gesture in Universities in Translation towards the
transitions happening within the sciences would have
helped think about how to build coalitions within
institutions.
The alternatives offered by Universities in Transla-
tion are tantalizingly embryonic, or infuriatingly brief,
depending on your perspective. The Korean research
commune Suyu + Nomo is considered by Ko Mi-Sook
as a space that sought to integrate intelligence into the
stream of everyday life through activities ranging from
group yoga to students teaching children. A variety of
projects that seek to break down intellectual enclosures
and create intellectual commons are described or
evoked, such as a one-page account of Edu-factory, the
collaborative project/web journal which seeks to invent
a university of the common. The Delhi-based Sarai
collective is vaunted for its experimental projects that
act as a meeting place for research on global media
technologies and anti-imperial politics from below.
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, in arguing that we have
moved from an age of imagined community (based
around print) to imagined networks (based around
the net) looks to the open-source movement as an
inspiration for the open streams university. This is an
idea Andrew Ross (whilst more critical in pointing out
the exploitation of prosumptions free labour and the
corporate co-optation of open source) also picks up on,
citing MITs free OpenCourseWare syllabus.
If these alternatives gesture towards an array of
potential global responses, then they also gesture
towards how, as Doreen Massey is quoted pointing
out, there are different types of globalization, despite
our habit of talking as if there was only one kind the
neoliberal kind. Universities in Translation is a book
that instantiates these alternative forms of globalization
both through its politics and as a collection that so
obviously tries to extend its transnational conversation
further than usual by carrying contributions from
outside the global North or Minority World. At the
same time although this may seem churlish given the
extent to which it works to extend its transnationalism
this very gesture inevitably brings to light its own
privileges and exclusions: stories from Africa, for
instance, do not appear, and the North American
R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 16 4 ( N ove m b e r / D e c e m b e r 2 010 )
organizational basis of the collection often shows
through in the weighting of contributions.
Regarding the effectiveness of such modes of
countering neoliberalism in universities, analyses and
prescriptions for alternatives vary: Iwasaki Minoru
follows Readings in arguing for the university as a
community of dissensus, whereas for Ukai Satoshi
universities need to work to generate a notion of per-
petual peace by atoning for their historical complicity
in imperialism. Helen Petrovsky fires out a warning
from Russia to the popularizing scholar in the humani-
ties who becomes a media character, a product of the
media themselves a pure function of the media inti-
mately linked to the contemporary institutes of power;
whereas Andrew Jewett argues that, whilst the kind of
critical debunking so beloved by humanities scholars
is one mode of political activism, it is ill-suited for
coalition-building beyond the academy. Jewett suggests
that we need to use alternative rhetorical strategies
to build a base of support for the idea that critical
scholarship is a social good, given the marked failure
of this narrative thus far.
It is on this issue considering how oppositional
languages and strategies might begin to be forged that
Andrew Rosss work on precarious labour is particularly
strong. Rosss analysis combines an understanding of
the formal organizational instruments of neoliberalism
with a sense of how its popular language has worked.
Noting that the demand for flexibility emerged not only
through managerialism but also through Autonomias
revolt against work and the constraints of patriarchal
and hierachical labour structures in the early 1970s,
Ross argues against a blinkered romanticization of
Fordist security and for a recognition that the appeal
of self-employment cannot
be exclusively identified with
the neoliberal entrepreneur,
but needs to be espoused by
individuals in more democratic
environments. Self-direction,
he argues, does not necessar-
ily mean selfish neglect for
welfare; for autonomy is not
the opposite of solidarity. On
the contrary, solidarity, if it
is to be authentic, has to be
learned it cannot be enforced
and this can only occur when
we are free enough to choose
it as an outcome of efforts
and ideas that we share with
others.
47
 Nice Work therefore repeatedly argues for the pro-
motion of models of flexicurity in which pay and
welfare entitlements for flexible and short-term workers
are strengthened, in direct contrast to neoliberalisms
love of flexploitation. Outside anglophone countries,
this flexicurity model has had some success. Pioneered
in Denmark and the Netherlands in the 1990s, and
adopted by other Nordic countries, it is currently being
pushed by European legislators as a goal for the EU
as a whole. Alongside these legislative examples, Ross
looks to the anti-precarity movement, the nascent inter-
est in green-collar jobs and, crucially, the ability to
build cross-class and cross-interest alliances to create
new forms of solidarity. His case studies here include:
what green architects might learn from migrant labour-
ers and what the anti-sweatshop movement can learn
from anti-consumerism (and vice versa). Discussion
of the creative industries in Europe, America and
China analyses the intellectual traffic between different
conceptions of cultural politics and the imbrication of
the cosmopolitan legacies of Mao and Gramsci within
Archi-osophers
Gevork Hartoonian, ed., Walter Benjamin and Architecture, Routledge, London and New York, 2010. 182 pp.,
75.00 hb., 978 0 415 48292 9.
If there is anything missing in the spatial turn in con-
temporary Marxism the attention to cognitive mapping
and urban space, extending from Henri Lefebvre to
Neil Smith, David Harvey or Doreen Massey, to as
far as The Wire depending on how loosely the term is
interpreted it is a lack of specific attention to archi-
tecture as such. Networks, infrastructures, enclosures
and generic, standardized structures are studied, but
architecture itself particular buildings, particular
architects, and the ideological choices behind their
forms and ideas are oddly considered less important.
This has its own reasoning, in the avoidance of the
inflation of architects own agency and autonomy,
which can be found perhaps in the Venice school
of architectural historians centred around Manfredo
Tafuri in the 1970s, and the avoidance of architecture
as an allegedly autonomous specialism, but it has the
side effect of letting architecture, and architects them-
selves, off the hook. The work of Walter Benjamin,
with its attention to specific architectural forms the
arcade, the department store, the new glass culture
48 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 16 4 ( N ove m b e r / D e c e m b e r 2 010 )
these discursive streams as a means of considering their
distinctive tendencies and possible potential. It traces
the connections between a UK in which creativity has
become regarded as a renewable energy resource to
fuel economic growth, a greater scepticism in other
parts of Europe towards this model, and a China in
which an emergent creative economy is producing
economic growth solely via export markets, due to
anxieties over the power of cultural politics.
Nice Work If You Can Get Its key contribution
lies in its demarcation and rearticulation of the fault-
line between work as creative self-realization and
creative self-exploitation, and an expanding model
of flexicurity which does not romanticize Keynesian
securities and stratification. By paying attention to
alliances within and beyond university labour, Nice
Work, like Universities in Translation, provides some
signposts towards new types of transnational and local
solidarities. Together they represent an impressive and
galvanizing beginning, whilst nonetheless pointing out
how far there is left to travel.
Jo Littler
of the 1920s and its dialectic of abstraction and
experience, has no such divide.
At the same time, although with rather less produc-
tive results, theory has entered architecture. Without
architecture being seriously theorized as a product
of politics and economics, architecture schools have
long been prey to the flattering mangling of Deleuze,
Heidegger and sundry others into descriptions of archi-
tecturally reproducible folds, rhizomes and chthonic
dwellings (depending on your stylistic preferences).
Benjamin has been one of the principal victims of this
process, his work either conflated with Heidegger into
a concern with the eternal qualities of dwelling or used
as a guide to the pre-modernist urbanism of flnerie. In
the process, there is a persistent lack of attention to one
of Benjamins Brechtian maxims the need to start
from the bad new things rather than the good old ones.
In his introduction to the anthology Walter Benjamin
and Architecture, Gevork Hartoonian explicitly takes
issue with the use of theory in architecture schools, and
claims that Benjamin has managed to exempt himself
from the general farrago. While many have not given
up the attempt to fold, deconstruct or phenom-
enologise architecture, not only in seminar rooms,
but also in the abyss of design studios, Benjamins
case remains unique, because somehow, in the present
trendy and exhausted mood of philosophy applied to
architecture, he has survived. The anthology goes on
to undermine this case somewhat.
Hartoonian makes two moves in his introduction,
which are continued in many of the essays. The first is
to make a convincing claim for Benjamins continued
relevance in the context of twenty-first-century hyper-
capitalist urbanism, creating a less and less concrete
city: Benjamins reflections [are] of interest today
when technification of architecture has pushed the art
of building to the domain of phantasmagoria of com-
modity fetishism (sic), and hold out the promise, in a
context where production and distribution become ever
more invisible and quasi-magical, of how to demystify
technology. He then states that the anthology will
perhaps not [be] a recipe for architects, which is a
relief. So, this is all well and good. Yet Hartoonian
also has a couple of peculiar ideas about Benjamin.
In one alarming sentence, he claims: Aloof from the
extreme ideas formulated by the left and right wing
politics of the mid-1930s, [Benjamin] chose to navigate Magdalena J. Zaborowskas essay on the architecton-
in the realm of solitude to be captured posthumously ics of race and sexuality in the differing portraits
in whatever the adjective Marxist-Rabbi might mean of Paris by Benjamin and James Baldwin promises
today. Aside from the windy W.G. Sebaldry of all much, but spends more time telling us how important
this navigating in the realm of solitude (presumably an analysis of these spaces in their intersection with
hiding from the dreaming collective that is the actual queerness and racial otherness is than actually pro-
protagonist of the Arcades Project) there is the outright ceeding to analyse it. Baldwin becomes a cipher, a
inaccuracy of the opening statement: Benjamin in fact black and gay voice to bash sundry centrisms with (Le
had close links with communists, occasionally of a Corbusier receives a particularly factually inaccurate
Stalinist bent, and was a persistent and perspicacious attack, via a mislabelled photograph of his Beistegui
reader of theories of German fascism, from Junger to apartment), while his actual spatial politics are left
Schmitt hardly aloof. The liberal Benjamin untouched tantalizingly unclear. The comparison of Benjamins
by these two antipodes is a fiction. Benjamins paeans Arcades and the interiors of Giovannis Room is
to a completely mechanized, totally anti-natural archi- inconclusive, leaving the main focus as an analysis of
tecture, not to mention his theories of revolution, are the repressed American protagonist of Baldwins novel
extreme or they are nothing. as someone who fails to dwell properly, being held
The essays in Walter Benjamin and Architecture back by his attachment to a clean, ordered and tech-
negotiate this gap between liberalism and a concrete nological American (sub)urbanism, unwilling to give
attention to the urban phantasmagoria with decidedly himself over to Pariss primal pleasures. Real cities
erratic results. Some of it is good, if slightly predict- like Paris live and breathe, take space, eat, excrete and
able work Andrew Leachs analysis of Manfredo stink to high heaven, no matter the WASP notions of
Tafuris sometimes tendentious, distorting use of purity and sanitized notions of national origins, writes
Benjamin, or Andrew Benjamins typically allusive, Zaborowska. The slum has so much soul, as ever.
elusive reading of Benjamins Naples, for instance. Reading of all this earthy dwelling, one cant help but
But it is at the point where the anthology should be wonder for neither the first nor the last time if the
strongest where it moves from the theoretical to writer hasnt confused Benjamin with his philosophical
the concrete that it is most flimsy. As an example, and political antipode, Martin Heidegger.

R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 16 4 ( N ove m b e r / D e c e m b e r 2 010 ) 49
 Neil Leachs otherwise interesting discussion of
mimesis begins with a similar move, noting that in
an age of alienation and via the modernist campaign
for transparency, light and air, human beings are
no longer cocooned within their dwelling spaces.
Architectural spaces are no longer reflections of the
human spirit. Something has been lost. For Benjamin,
this is problematic, because human beings need to
recognise something of themselves in their environ-
ment. Its daunting to untangle the misreadings here,
but, in short, Benjamins analysis of the decline of
the bourgeois interior is in no way a lament for a lost
mode of dwelling; it is rather, for better or worse, a
gleeful smashing up of all these rooms that look as
overcrowded as halls full of funerary urns. The discus-
sion of mimesis that follows is hence vulnerable to Jane
Jacobs pieties about the human scale, which sit oddly
with this enthusiast for the Galerie des Machines.
The three essays that discuss particular architectural
artefacts are a guide to the books limitations, and, in
one case, its missed opportunities. Daniel Libeskind is
an architect keen on Benjaminian citations, regardless
of Benjamins allegedly unscathed encounter with the
architectural schools, and accordingly his principal,
and by far most interesting, work, the Jewish Museum
in Berlin, is the subject of a decent enough essay here
by Terry Smith, Daniel among the Philosophers.
This at least draws attention to the chutzpah of
Libeskinds move, one repeated throughout this anthol-
ogy, of conflating Heidegger with Benjamin. In the
voids and angles of the museum, Libeskind tries to
concretize a hope-filled negativity through a heavily
dialectical, fragmented approach to space. Yet this
isnt laudatory of the architects ability to traverse
these contradictions instead this is fundamentally
an analysis of a failure. Libeskind strained here to
avoid iconism and the reduction to one-liners and
clich, only to find the floor plan reproduced as a logo
on the museums publicity material; and, as is well
known, the power of the naked building was quickly
stuffed full of theme park experiences and a clutter of
artefacts. Soon after, Libeskind became the architect
of choice when it came to building up hope within the
aftermath of modernity at the World Trade Center and
elsewhere, which is a politer version of Martin Fillers
jibe at an architect who had become a human Yahrzeit
candle. If anything, the Jewish Museum is evidence
that redemption, in the Benjaminian sense, cant be
merely architectural.
The persistent hint of memorializing piety that is
never far away when Benjamin is discussed (but which
50 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 16 4 ( N ove m b e r / D e c e m b e r 2 010 )
is markedly absent from his own corpus) is brought
into focus in Port Bou and Two Grains of Wheat:
In Remembrance of Walter Benjamin, Renee Tobes
discussion of the memorial placed in the vague vicinity
of the site where Benjamin killed himself. Here, the
use of a staircase up to a dim, minuscule lightwell
(the strait gate through which the Messiah might
enter, no doubt) is imagined as a passage not to Paris,
but to Paradise. This is kitsch, and literary kitsch at
that, most unlike the mass-produced dreamkitsch that
intrigued Benjamin. By contrast, the most powerful
and insightful essay in the book, by an extremely
long chalk, discusses a far less self-effacing, though
similarly deterministic, work of architecture: Mario
Sironis 1932 Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution,
analysed by Libero Andreotti as an example of the
techno-aesthetics of shock. Interestingly, this is the
most Benjaminian essay in the book while citing or
invoking Benjamin far less often than any of the other
essays a disturbing and daring investigation into the
technological and architectonic means of aestheticizing
politics developed by Italian Fascist modernists, which
neatly eschews the liberalism on show elsewhere by
making clear the various ruptures Sironi had to make
with his Russian constructivist sources. In a situation
where superficial formal similarities are frequently
used to equate various totalitarianisms and their cor-
responding aesthetics, the essay is especially valuable
as is its dissection of shock as a means to impose
upon rather than empower the spectator, something
which could be adapted to the contemporary landscape
of shock and awe in media and warfare.
The promise of contemporary usefulness in Andre-
ottis excellent essay draws attention to an especially
glaring question, one which is otherwise absent
throughout the anthology: the lack of any serious con-
sideration of how Benjamins work might be applied
in contemporary spaces. Hartoonian and others glance
at the idea, before opting for something vaguer. The
prospect of any of these assembled theorists and his-
toriographers devoting their time to a combined eco-
nomic and dream-analysis of the shopping mall, which
is essentially the project of the Arcades, is hard to
imagine. Instead of such vulgarity, the familiar spaces
of European heritage urbanism Les Halles, and Paris-
ian garrets, rickety old Mediterranean streets, signature
galleries in regenerated city centres, monuments take
up the space. Benjamins architectural theory loses its
critical, disjunctive edge in these familiar spaces, but
it need not do so elsewhere.
Owen Hatherley
Postmodernism redux
Reinhold Martin, Utopias Ghost: Architecture and Postmodernism Again, University of Minnesota Press, Min-
neapolis and London, 2010. 248 pp., 46.50 hb., 15.50 pb., 978 0 8166 6962 2 hb., 978 0 8166 6963 9 pb.
Architectural postmodernism, as Reinhold Martin
observes, has served a number of thinkers, including
Fredric Jameson, David Harvey and Andreas Huyssen,
as a focal point through which to comprehend the
broader cultural, social and economic significance
of the postmodern turn. For Jameson, in his Post-
modernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,
architecture offered this privileged analytical perspec-
tive since it constituted a
seam between the economic organization of society
and the aesthetic production of its (spatial) art,
which architecture must live more dramatically than
any of the other fine arts (save perhaps film), but
whose scars it bears more visibly even than film
itself, which must necessarily repress and conceal its
economic determinations.
Jameson was later to elaborate and refine this thesis so
as to avoid the suggestion of a purely reductive, one-to-
one relationship between the economic and the aesthetic,
writing, in The Brick and the Balloon in 1998, that any
such reductionism fails to respect the specificity, the
autonomy or semi-autonomy, of the aesthetic level and
its intrinsic dynamics. Rather than an immediate rela-
tion between shifts in capitals modes of investment and
the development of new styles in architecture, Jameson
proposes that other levels, such as new technologies,
effectively mediate these relations.
In Utopias Ghost: Architecture and Postmodernism,
Again, Reinhold Martins purpose, in returning to
postmodernism, is to rethink the relations between its
architecture and the forms of power with which its
emergence coincided; to explore the possibility that
architecture offers something more than just material
evidence of the cultural logic of late capitalism, and
that its spaces and surfaces do something more than
repress and conceal its economic determinations. So
this is not, writes Martin, a history of postmodernism;
it is a historical reinterpretation of some of its major
themes. Its subject is architectural thought as much
as it is the architecture itself. Martins objective is not
simply to rethink the past, however, but, through this
reinterpretation, to rethink the future. Postmodernism,
by almost all accounts, permanently foreclosed on the
possibility of Utopia around which so much modernist
and avant-garde architecture had focused its theory
and practice. The end of history in the globalization
of capital and its liberal democracy, triumphantly
R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 16 4 ( N ove m b e r / D e c e m b e r 2 010 )
proclaimed by Francis Fukuyama in 1992, appeared
already confirmed in the collapse of architectural form
into stylistic historicism and pastiche under way since
the 1970s. Martin sets out to rescue the spirit of Utopia,
as the promise of an alternative space and time to that
of global capitalism, by relocating it, as a spectral pres-
ence, within postmodern architecture itself. Utopias
ghost, he writes, stands as the permanent possibility
of its unexpected return, as ghosts tend to do.
Chronologically and methodologically Utopias
Ghost follows Martins earlier study of architecture
and power: The Organizational Complex: Architecture,
Media and Corporate Space (2005). There he had
presented an analysis of the corporate architecture of
the United States, in the 1950s and 1960s, in relation
to the dominance of cybernetic models in science and
their adoption as organizational paradigms by firms
such as IBM and Bell Laboratories. Here, his period
is the 1970s and 1980s, and in it he sees a continua-
tion and development of architectures organizational
role within the globalization of capital, as opposed
to its reduction merely to a provider of dissimulating
surface effects. In The Organizational Complex Martin
argued that the corporate reorganization of space in
postwar America constitutes a nascent form of what
Deleuze termed a society of control; a space, that
is, in which the mode of power defined by Foucault
as disciplinary is released into an expanded terrain
which comes to occupy the entirety of the social
field. In Utopias Ghost Martin not only attempts to
trace the further development of control society and
its architectural dimensions through the latter part of
the twentieth century, but adopts too Foucaults own
rethinking of contemporary power complementary
to, but preceding by some years, that of Deleuze as
the environmental management of subjectivity by
neoliberal governmentality.
Rethinking the postmodern from these theoretical
perspectives involves Martin in a return to the key loci
through which its history and interpretation has been
staged. Among these, inevitably, is the PruittIgoe
housing development in St. Louis, a project which,
as he notes, had even before its demolition in 1972
become an icon of modern architectures presumed
failures in the area of social reform. Most famously
it was Charles Jencks, in his 1977 The Language of
Postmodern Architecture, who declared,
51
 Happily, we can date the death of Modern Archi-
tecture to a precise moment in time Modern
Architecture died in St. Louis, Missouri, on July 15,
1972 at 3:32 p.m. (or thereabouts) when the infa-
mous PruittIgoe scheme, or rather several of its
slab blocks, were given the final coup de grce by
dynamite.
Following the remarks made by Foucault on neoliberal
governmentality, in his 197879 lectures on biopolitics
at the Collge de France, Martin, however, refigures the
demolition of PruittIgoe as symbolic of the point at
which the market assumed responsibility for, and over,
the social. Any orientation towards a collective and
utopian impulse within public housing, as represented,
however problematically, by PruittIgoe, is replaced
by the neoliberal impetus to produce the subject as
a Homo conomicus reflected in the fact that in
cities from New York to Mumbai, as a matter of state
housing policy, governance has increasingly devolved
onto the markets.
Equally inevitable is Martins return to the Westin
Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles, the focal point of
Jamesons account of architecture in his original Post-
modernism essay. There, Jameson writes that whereas
high modernism had attempted to insert a new Utopian
language into the tawdry and commercial sign system
of the surrounding city, postmodern projects such
as the Bonaventure rather seek to speak that very
language. Symptomatic of postmodern architectures
ventriloquizing of the sign system which surrounded
it was, for Jameson, the Hotels reflective glass skin,
in which, he wrote, you cannot see the hotel itself but
only the distorted images of everything that surrounds
it. Yet Martin complains of Jameson that he is not
really looking at the mirror itself. Rather he seems
to be looking into it, at its contents, which have been
reduplicated and distorted by the curved surfaces to
the point of unrecognizability:
Despite the traditional equation between mirrors
and mimesis, an architecture of mirrors does not
merely reflect the protocols of new socioeconomic
52 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 16 4 ( N ove m b e r / D e c e m b e r 2 010 )
arrangements. It helps to produce those arrangements,
in space and time. Architecture therefore does not (or
does not only) mirror late capitalism as its cultural
equivalent. It belongs to late capitalism.
In belonging to late capitalism the role of architecture
is not, then, argues Martin against both Jameson
and Harvey, to conceal its economic determinations,
through the dissimulation or dislocation of its presence
in the mimetic reflection of its surroundings, but to
make apparent the economic operations of which it
is a part: Its function is not to hide but to reveal, to
make visible the actual abstraction of finance capital,
it spectral capacity to be here and here and here.
Martin attempts to exemplify this proposition in
his analyses of other mirror-surfaced buildings of the
period, including Pennzoil Place, Houston, and the
Investors Diversified Service Center in Minneapolis,
both designed by Philip Johnson and John Burgee, in
1976 and 1974 respectively. These corporate build-
ings, he writes, employ extensive use of rereflection,
a device he defines as a mise en abyme produced
by placing mirrors at specific angles to one another.
Through the multiplication of inner and outer corners
and their juxtaposition,
these buildings produce
a hall of mirrors that
operate like a diagram
of finance capitals self-
sustaining feedback loops.
The doubled-up volumes
of this architecture, writes
Martin, produce a time
space that is neither inte-
rior nor exterior, neither
here nor there, neither this nor that, neither now nor
then; they materialize, he adds, a sense of inescapable
ubiquity and recursivity. There is, then, nothing hidden
behind the mirror since the operations on its surface
already exemplify the networked, fluid and omnipresent
character of global capitalism: What we are looking
at or more properly, what we are watching is not
the network hiding behind a mirror, but a network of
mirrors, unfolding.
However differently interpreted, such analyses
remain concerned with the surfaces of architectural
postmodernism, and in order to locate the cybernetic
organizational paradigms of the period, as well as the
environmental controls invoked by Foucault within
architecture, Martin turns his attention to a corpo-
rate interior, that of the Union Carbide Headquarters,
in Danbury, Connecticut, designed by Kevin Roche,
John Dinkerloo and Associates, in 1982. Prescient
of more contemporary managerial strategies, Union
Carbide sought in its new headquarters to produce
an atmosphere of parity among its employees through
the modulation of the working environment and its
interiors spaces. Workers are here transformed into
human resources, or human capital, each afforded
a choice of office design and full control of their
immediate environment as an incentive towards their
being personally involved in the companys objec-
tives. These managerial and design strategies suggest
precisely the forms of subjectivation through environ-
mental management that Foucault articulated in his
account of biopolitics and neoliberal governmentality.
As Martin writes of the new subject of corporate
space: In biopolitical terms, such a figure is theoreti-
cally customizable under a computationally intensive
human genomics as a well as under a computationally
enabled, expansionist corporate consumerism and the
subjectivities it proliferates.
In addressing, through the later thought of Deleuze
and Foucault on power, the production of subjectiv-
ity within such environments, Martin elaborates a
significant and largely overlooked dimension to the
understanding of postmodernism. What is perhaps
most striking here, however, though the author does
not address this as explicitly as he might usefully
have done, is how different his account of the subjects
relation to postmodern space is to that of Jameson.
For the latter the interior of the Bonaventure repre-
sented a larger mutation in space which had finally
succeed in transcending the capacities of the indi-
vidual human body to locate itself, to organize its
immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively
to map its position in a mappable external world. In
Martins analysis, by contrast, the production of post-
modern space, as exemplified at the Union Carbide
Headquarters, or, elsewhere, in Venturi, Rauch and
Scott Browns Lewis Thomas Laboratory, Princeton,
is oriented precisely towards the shaping of the sub-
jects cognitive and orientational capacities in accord
with the corporate agenda. Where Jameson called for
a cognitive mapping to ameliorate the dislocative
effects of postmodern space, Martins analysis suggests
that architecture already provided such a mapping
in order to render the subject at home in the now
ubiquitous space of the market.
Less persuasive are his attempts to locate the spec-
tral presence of a modernist Utopia in the very spaces
of the architecture supposed to have eliminated its
possibility. Adopting, in the books final chapter, the
hauntology of Derridas Specters of Marx as his
method, Martin suggests as candidates the archi-
R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 16 4 ( N ove m b e r / D e c e m b e r 2 010 )
pelago projects of Rem Koolhaas or Mathias Ungers,
with their reference to modernist urban projects such
as Magnitogorsk, and the claustrophobic interiors of a
Charles Moore condominium whose historicist eclecti-
cism may, after all, be utopian in its failure to add
up and thus suggest the forever-deferred possibility
of arrival, of a break, of irreversible and maybe even
revolutionary historical change. Yet as a method for
rethinking the future such arguments seem not only,
perhaps necessarily, insubstantial, but raise the ques-
tion of the value of resurrecting, as the means to do so,
any strictly modernist sense of Utopia. As Jameson, in
his own response to Derridas hauntology, observed in
The Brick and the Balloon, the wish to be haunted;
to long for the great passions that now exist only in
the past was a nostalgia which could only manifest
itself in a replay of the empty stereotypes of all those
things, and a vague memory of their fullness on the
tip of the tongue.
Douglas Spencer
The same song
Judith Butler and Catherine Malabou, Sois mon corps:
Une lecture contemporaine de la domination et de la
servitude chez Hegel, ditions Bayard, Paris, 2010. 126
pp., 19.00, 978 2 227 48144 2.
This first collaboration between Judith Butler and
Catherine Malabou returns to familiar themes in the
work of both philosophers, taking the form of a dia-
logue that riffs on the work of Hegel and its relation
to the larger canon of contemporary European phil-
osophy. It tackles the question of the body (or absence
thereof) as a philosophical problematic in Hegels Phe-
nomenology of Spirit through a debate-style exchange,
which focuses on a brief and much annotated passage,
Independence and Dependence of Self-consciousness:
Lordship and Bondage. The fulcrum of this exchange
is the eponymous phrase You be my body for me,
a citation from Butlers exegesis of Lordship and
Bondage in the opening chapter of The Psychic Life
of Power (1997). This imperative captures the enforced
delegation of the body to the bondsman, a means for
the lord to flatter his disembodied desire for self-
reflection (Butler). To prove itself to be pure abstrac-
tion, self-consciousness must expunge any attachment
to life and to the body. It initially seems that the lord
achieves this absolute detachment by instrumentalizing
the bondsman, who in turn becomes bound by his
own indefectible link to life, that is to say his body
53
(Malabou). This passage raises questions
about the disembodiment of the Hegelian
subject and the very possibility of detach-
ment from and attachment to the body.
Is it possible to delegate the body to
another? Is it possible to detach yourself
completely from the body? And are we
ever really completely attached to it?
Much of the context for these ques-
tions is provided by Malabous opening
essay, which centres around three inter-
pretations of this scene of attachment
and detachment: Kojves Introduction
to the Reading of Hegel, Derridas
From Restricted to General Economy:
A Hegelianism without Reserve, and
Butlers The Psychic Life of Power. Malabou calls
these readings acts of philosophical ventriloquism,
which draw out unarticulated meanings in Hegels
text. Malabou as ventriloquist leads us through Hegel
read by Kojve, Bataille read by Derrida, and Foucault
read through Hegel by Butler. There is a great deal
of exposition here and the ventriloquism of other
philosophers and their Hegelian commentaries leaves
Malabous own reading a little squeezed. This may
be intended to make the book more accessible for
those unfamiliar with Hegel and his commentators
(Lordship and Bondage is included as an addendum).
Nevertheless, initiated readers may find this a little
repetitive, whilst accessibility is perhaps undermined
by the scope and complexity of philosophical themes
and texts discussed.
The real stuff of Malabous reading of Hegel comes
in the short concluding section in her essay Plasticity
and Hetero-Affection and in her response to Butler.
It is here that we get to see Hegel read by Malabou
through a Derridean lens. Leitmotifs from her previ-
ous work emerge: principally, plasticity and hetero-
affection as structuring conditions of the subject. For
Malabou, the separation of consciousness and body
in the Phenomenology is not to be read as a neo-
Platonic devalorization of the body, but rather as a
deconstructive gesture before its time, denouncing the
impossibility of auto-affection. There is an originary
scission in the Hegelian subject between the empirical
and transcendental forms of the I: the body is the
place of this discordance, subject to two masters
(empirical and transcendental), all the while having
none at all. Malabou writes that this hetero-affection
is structural to subjectivity and so concepts such as I,
my body and my consciousness are problematic; for
Hegel they are no more than philosophical fictions. In
54 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 16 4 ( N ove m b e r / D e c e m b e r 2 010 )
order to understand the subject and its attachment to
the body, we have to turn to the condition of plastic-
ity, the ability both to give and to receive form. It
is through the subjects engagement in this work of
formation, the sculpting of the empirical and given,
that an attachment to the body develops.
Whilst Malabous emphasis is on the structural
scission of the subject as constantly other to itself,
Butler focuses on the confrontation between the uni-
versal and the particular, the interrelation of Gattung
(genus rendered here as species) and the I. Butler
contends that the central stake in the imperative You
be my body for me is the very idea of what it is to
be related to an other. In a reading reminiscent of
Hippolytes analysis of self-consciousness as being
untenable in isolation, only able to recognize itself in
a world which it constructs, in the other selves which
it recognizes, Butler writes that the confrontation with
the other permits an encounter with the self and also
the limit of what I can call myself. Her reading
focuses on the dissonance between the substitutability
of the subject as one instance of life and the singularity
of its determinate existence. The ability of the other
self-consciousness to act as substitute for me is where
the I meets finitude; however, for this finitude to be
possible, the I has to be animal, part of an organic
nature. Drawing from Derrida, Butler reads the body
as the spectre haunting Hegels text, the unarticulated
presupposition that underpins all the themes of life,
finitude, form, and so on; it is a trace that operates
without being explicitly named, the unnamed media-
tion between substitutability and finitude. Ultimately,
even the lord cannot eradicate this trace as his
consummation of the bondsmans produce relates him
back to it attempting to delegate the body to the other
always brings us back to the bind of being bound.
 The dialectical conclusion of the dialogue between
Malabou and Butler is summed up by the latter as
a chiasm rather than a schism, attributable to an
antagonism at the heart of Hegel. This text certainly
does not give the impression of any schism; apart
from a refrain on the differences and similarities
between Hegel and Foucault, the two collaborators
are singing from the same philosophical hymn sheet
and draw from the same group of modern European
philosophers. This is an ambitious project for a book of
this length, in terms of both themes and philosophical
exegeses discussed. Its length understandably limits
its scope, but the discussion would arguably have
been enriched by an analysis of the politics of the
imperative You be my body for me. The delegated
relation is not an equal one (as de Beauvoirs analysis
shows): what is it to be forced to be the body for the
other? Is detachment or attachment to that body the
same for all subjects equally? This book raises some
interesting and complex questions, but it is a little short
to follow through. As such, it provides an introduction
to the two authors interpretations of Hegel and their
philosophical leitmotifs, which can be pursued in more
depth in their individual works.
C.E. McMenamin
Trembling
fascination
Isabelle Graw, High Price: Art between the Market and
Celebrity Culture, trans. Nicholas Grindell, Sternberg
Press, Berlin and New York, 2009. 244 pp., 18.00 pb.,
978 1 933128 79 5.
At first glance Isabelle Graws location of contemporary
art between the market and celebrity culture appears
to be critical, albeit a familiar and even self-evident
criticism. High Price is replete with quotations from
celebrity and fashion magazines, private observations
about the art world, as well as theoretical speculations
about biopolitics, artist reifications and artwork
subjectivations, which all seem intent on proving what
needs no proof: that the market has a powerful impact
on contemporary art. It is because of this impact that
Graw advocates an artistic strategy of market reflexiv-
ity. This is not intended to be seen as obligatory or
as a normative aesthetics. But, clearly enough, the
thrust of the argument is that artists should indeed be
able to practice market reflexivity. Graw states further
R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 16 4 ( N ove m b e r / D e c e m b e r 2 010 )
that perhaps the market-reflexive artist must retain a
measure of navet, or rather faux navet, since only
a nave view allows him to rise above the situation.
Elsewhere she writes that the market-reflexive artist
may well act strategically, but without always knowing
what hes doing or why hes doing it.
Struggling throughout most of the book to provide
a clear definition of contemporary art production under
present market conditions, Graw resorts in the end to
a sixty-year-old concept: Adorno and Horkheimers
unity of the opposites of market and autonomy from
Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947). However, in Graws
repackaging it remains unclear how the navet and
market reflexivity distinguish the artist from any other
ambitious person striving for success in a free-market
society. And her attempt to define the source of the
high prices of artworks rests upon questionable and
contradictory comparisons and differentiations. For
example, her differentiation of artworks and luxury
goods concludes that one can drive a Mercedes Benz,
but not an artwork. Therefore art (as the invariant
substance of all artworks) owes its special status to
its detachment from the utility principle. But what of
luxury goods that are not meant to be driven, that are
not useful, or artworks that are useful, or perhaps even
meant to be driven, such as a Warhol-designed BMW?
More generally, Graw fails to address the fundamental
question of value of artworks.
Rather than extending the questions of the Frankfurt
School, Graw resorts to Bourdieus account of symbolic
value. As readers of Bourdieu will know, the symbolic
value of art is produced through the critical negation of
prevailing, canonized artistic positions. The rule of art
is to break the rules of established art. Yet we know
that under capitalism everything has a price, a potential
exchange value, including the symbolic value of art-
works. This is where Graw locates the market value of
art, which is paradoxically produced by an ostensible
strategy of market avoidance, or market reflexivity.
From Graws perspective, the explanation for the high
prices of contemporary artworks lies entirely in this
production of symbolic value. However, it is perhaps
the books signal shortcoming that it does not live up
to the ambition of its thesis that Bourdieus rules of art
no longer hold. Near the beginning of her text, Graw
claims that the time for Bourdieus analysis of sym-
bolic accumulation is now over. It was years ago. The
glamour magazines and private observations presented
to the reader as evidence seem to imply that avoidance
of market success no longer generates symbolic value.
If anything, the opposite seems to be true: the market
alone seems to produce symbolic value today. But by
55
the end of the book Graw withdraws from this claim
and diagnoses another transformation. Until recently
the market model seemed to be triumphing, as the
value of knowledge was measured more and more in
terms of commercial success. Critical distance and
knowledge are still needed after all, and are even in
growing demand at all art venues. It is because of this
growing demand for symbolic value that the market-
reflexive artist and his congenial sidekick, the critical
art critic, are both needed to produce the symbolic
value responsible for high prices.
The critics opinion is seen most often to prevail
in the end. Critics have often formulated justified
objections to commercially successful practices that
only made an impact indirectly or in the long run.
Graw has her own justified objections. She believes
that, because they are not market reflexive, the works
of high-selling artists such as John Currin and Lisa
Yuskavage will at some point see their value vanish
from todays record highs to next to nothing; whereas
the works of Andrea Fraser or Merlin Carpenter, which
actively and directly reflect their own involvement in
the market, are destined to soar. The latters nave
market reflexivity seems to make them interesting,
meaningful and in all likelihood therefore, in the long
run, valuable. So, bound to the production of symbolic
value by the market-reflexive artist is the activity of
the art critic, Graws own profession. And it is art
criticism that is voted beyond all else as a key creator
of all-important symbolic value.
This perspective reveals the books most interesting
if veiled and perhaps unconscious contribution.
And, beyond the problematic equation of art criticism
and knowledge, or public relations and criticality,
the book can even be read as a political polemic. In
so far as sustainable high prices on the art market are
produced primarily by market-reflexive artists and
knowledge-controlling art critics, the book may be
interpreted as a welcome, though ultimately ineffective,
attempt to make visible the largely under-analysed
position and value of the art critic in the construction
of art as a super luxury commodity. While the artist is
often recognized for his value production, the art critic
comes across here as a hidden proletarian, expropriated
of the extreme value he or she generates at exhausting
effort. The reason critics in particular are so notori-
ously underpaid lies in the intangible nature of the
surplus value they produce.
Graws analysis, however, doesnt do much to make
any of this more tangible. Take, for example, her
critique of the notion of a consistent and uniform
art market, which she sees instead as four distinct
56 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 16 4 ( N ove m b e r / D e c e m b e r 2 010 )
segments, the commercial art market, the knowledge
market, the institution market and the market of major
exhibitions, each involved in producing high market
prices for artworks. Naming these segments markets
is speculative and arbitrary. If there is a distinction to
be made, it is far more decisively between the commer-
cial art market where artworks (material commodities
with symbolic means) are materially exchanged and
what Graw calls the knowledge market, the institution
market and the market of major exhibitions; that is, the
universities, museums, biennials and magazines that
are distinct segments of the production of symbolic
value, rather than different segments of the art market.
The latter can be understood as markets, but only in a
very different sense from Graws claim, namely only in
so far as they consume what Marx called the special
commodity: human labour.
Graws failure to conceptualize these relations con-
vincingly means that the book can be read and studied
as a perfect symptom of the prevailing ideology of our
time. This becomes clearer if one considers her core
argument about market reflexivity. At first glance this
appears as nothing other than a somewhat superficial
appeal to the familiar terms of critical theory. On
closer inspection, however, a surprising and novel
evolution is at stake. The seemingly critical imperative
of market reflexivity is no longer linked to the fact that
capitalism subordinates every production and every
realm of life to the logic of accumulation of surplus
value and, subsequently, to economic and environ-
mental crises. Despite her appeal to catchwords like
biopolitics, Graw does not treat market reflexivity as
a matter of criticizing social conditions, but instead,
and quite openly, as a strategic concept geared towards
producing sustainable market values for artworks.
This is evident when considering, for instance, the
notion of navet that Graw appropriates from T.J.
Clarks study on Courbet Graws original paradigm
for a market-reflexive artist. In his book Image of the
People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution,
Clark criticizes the conventional image of Courbet as
a nave, simple-minded painter, showing that Courbets
navet is in fact a complex strategy, a mask used
to, at one and the same time, belong and not belong
to the very core of the Paris art world. In Clarks
view, Courbets strategy was inseparably connected to
his revolutionary practice, which can in turn neither
be understood as a nave adventure nor separated
from his artistic practice. But in Graws conception,
Clarks revision is turned into an affirmative strategic
paradigm to reliably produce sustainable market value
under capitalist conditions. Political questions exceed-
ing the art world and capitalism remain aside from
a few superficial remarks and clichs firmly outside
the scope of the analysis.
It is ultimately clear that Graws call for market
reflexivity neither needs nor wants to imagine the
possibility for different conditions of artistic produc-
tion and distribution. Graws own navet is therefore
not what she attributes to some of her favoured artists
such as the dream of aesthetic autonomy or another
world not governed by capitalism. It is rather the
navet of an unexamined belief that such dreams
are uncool, unsexy, and at any rate impossible. As
such, it is a rather straightforward recommendation
that since sustainable artistic value is produced by
market-reflexive artists and art critics works by the
likes of Andrea Fraser and Merlin Carpenter are a
safe investment. This relation to the market is without
any sense of the content and imaginative reach of the
former social and aesthetic critique it ostensibly rests
upon. This loss of critical sense and fantasy is also
detectable on a formal level in Graws language, dense
in technocratic neologisms and empty clich phrases
a problem that is attenuated in Nicholas Grindells
English translation, which also manages to sharpen up
some of the original texts concepts.
In a passage unfortunately edited out from the
English translation, Graw confesses that she follows
the recent art market affairs with a trembling fascina-
tion, even though her own relation to the art market
is marked by ambivalence (see Der groe Preis, p.
234). She suggests that one should not be art market
phobic or art market euphoric. But there remains no
equivocation about the nature of Graws commitment
to the art critics entitlement to a proportionate share
of the value produced and the price achieved on the
market. Not only shall collectors, auctioneers, dealers
and artists become wealthy and illustrious celebrities:
so shall the art critic.
Philipp Kleinmichel
R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 16 4 ( N ove m b e r / D e c e m b e r 2 010 )
Less is not always
a bore
David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital and the Crises
of Capitalism, Profile Books, London, 2010. viii + 296
pp., 14.99 hb., 987 1 84668 308 4.
Derived from a Marxian account of crises of over-
accumulation and under-consumption, David Harveys
concept of the spatial fix first introduced to his
work nearly three decades ago refers to the ways in
which capitalism seeks to overcome its internal crisis
tendencies through a restructuring of space. More
broadly, the concept of the fix draws upon a tripartite
model of space, indebted to Lefebvre, which argues that
the material spaces of production fixed, for example, in
Taiwan both require spatial representation and must be
liveable that is, experiential spaces. The valorization
process is thereby also given to us in experience. This
does not mean that such experience is merely the sec-
ondary subjectivizing of reality, but that the subject is
both the one who determines the structure or space of
representation by its situatedness in the world, and also
its outcome, formed by its apprehension and imagining
of the world, its representations of space.
Harveys overwhelmingly descriptive approach
in The Enigma of Capital could be read, in line
with this model, as offering a kind of phenomenal-
ity of accumulation, in which the reproduction of
the means of production, or of socialist resistance, is
a process of iteration and differentiation, spawning
multiplicities of spatially aggregated resources. Such
an emphasis both on the relationality of heterogene-
ous elements or multiplicities and on the constructed
nature of space underlines the proto-phenomenological
character of Harveys work. His description of the
lived nature of space (combining the experientially
material, the imagined/represented space and their
57
conceptual reflections) is illustrated, for example, by
the ways in which space is differentially apprehended
via canals, roads, railways, planes, and so on. Hence,
while the Aristotelian idea of a fixed space itself
lacking substance, but filled with it is merely the
same space seen differently according to what fills it,
Harveys view is rather that the relationality of spaces,
produced by for example transport links, materializes
different kinds of spaces the spaces we encounter
in everyday life and that their absolute, physical
existence is inextricable from lived space and the con-
ceptualizations consonant with this. Thus, as against
the primacy accorded to Aristotelian substance as
that which precedes its qualities, the claim that the
qualities normally associated with experience touch,
colour, smell, taste are inextricably linked to spatial
extension as substance leads, in Harvey, to the assimi-
lation of the world to experience. It is this, then,
Harvey argues, that leads to the constitutive ambiguity
underlying the process of capitals spatial aggregation
as a bundling of qualities that creates its own fix,
in that substance effectively appears ex nihilo and, as
such, is both present as accomplished fix and absent
in so far as the event or process of the fix itself has
no spatial location.
On this basis, the more historically specific argu-
ment of The Enigma of Capital is that capitalism,
rather than being a fixed thing, can best be character-
ized by its flows that is, as a process dependent
on the relationality or mutual affinity of productive
resources in a given location that temporarily satiate
capitals perpetual search for opportunities to expand.
Capital flow is mediated by seven common factors:
technologies, social relations, administrative systems,
mental conceptions (objectively real spaces of repre-
sentation), production systems, relations to nature and
patterns of daily life. These factors are co-evolutionary
and develop unevenly across the spaces they con-
struct or fix. Hence, philosophically, Harvey follows
Whiteheads argument that the materiality of space is
essentially seen not in the continuity of its substance
but rather through its ongoing structural features, a
dependence on the cogredience (as Whitehead called
it) of its elements to establish permanence or dure.
Harveys take on this is that different spaces will
have their own forms of temporality or dure, given
by the combinations of factors within them. Hence we
might find that experiences of space vary profoundly
between London and, say, the manufacturing centres
of Chinas Pearl River Delta, while labour-intensive
processes produce a different sense of dure from
Internet banking, and so on.
58 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 16 4 ( N ove m b e r / D e c e m b e r 2 010 )
Dures are punctuated by periods of upheaval, or
creative destruction, in which capital mutates and
migrates: a perpetual search for novelty which char-
acterizes not only the development or evolution of
capitalism, but, as with Whitehead, also the natural
world itself. Hence process is best understood when
framed as a socio-ecological totality in which the
seven types of elements mentioned above combine
in dynamic but unpredictable ways as assemblages.
Harvey argues that, much as with the unpredictability
and contingency of Darwinian mutation, it is the
uneven development between and among spheres of
activity (spatial fixes) and their tensions and contra-
dictions that drives change. One illustration used to
back up this description of capitalist movement is the
ways in which the products of the system become
increasingly opaque: black-boxed against casual
enquiry. Commodities ranging from information tech-
nology to financial products based on mathematical
formulae are, on the one hand, supposedly foolproof,
but, on the other, have unpredictable consequences, as
the formula for the packaging of sub-prime mortgages
demonstrates.
At this point one might conclude that capitalisms
heterogeneity and contingency are in danger of being
overplayed: that such a conception of space risks, in
a word, appearing too monadological in its thinking
of these different spheres of activity. As Barbaras
notes of Leibniz, the relationality, so to speak, of
the monads may deal with the problem of substantial
being in space, but only by shifting it to the exteriority
of monadic structures in such a way that the con-
comitant of substantial being, empty space, necessarily
reappears. In Barbarass own words, the Bergsonian
appropriation of Leibniz, although introducing the
idea of process as a negation of the substantiality
of being, does so by replacing empty space with a
massive opposition between a nothingness that would
be completely negative and a fully positive being. This
reintroduces a question of the dynamics of process
and, as with the original empty space model, entails
the self-defeating question: how do we get something
from nothing? Harveys Bergsonian emphasis on the
externally related nature of co-evolving elements and
their development as a process of replication/novelty
(aggregations, mutations) reinforces this problem.
Noticeably, while Harvey explains the fixing of
global flows of capital as a process of co-evolving ele-
ments, it is not clear that this can adequately answer the
question of what, for example, the specific globalizing
processes are that may be shifting economic domi-
nance from the West towards, say, the so-called BRIC
countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China). The trans-
formation of the BRICs cant really be explained
separately, but only through their presence within the
West as part of a dynamic of investment/consumption.
Hence whilst global capitalism appears as a series of
separate geographical fixes, these, contra Harvey, are
not fundamentally heterogeneous or discontinuous in
this case, but are determined by one process or conti-
nuity capital flow which operates across different
spaces and temporalities. There is, then, arguably, a
different kind of space from the fully substantial, one
that limits or feeds, fixes, these contesting but linked
projects.
None of this should cancel out Harveys very real
achievement in articulating a constructionist alternative
to the objectivist dualism of traditional geography,
which relativizes space but at the same time preserves
its objectivity, anchoring its physical and intellectual
moments phenomenologically. And, in this his most
recent book, Harveys discussion of the fetishism of
fixes is undoubtedly insightful in evoking Marx on
the bourgeoisies obsession with the annihilation of
space/technology in ever-new solutions to the fetters
on capital. The black-boxing effect of the fix is general-
ized to capitals concealment of the historical situated-
ness and daily life of its projects, and to its effect on
bourgeois self-consciousness as a self-destructive nar-
cissism. Here, it is the substantial notion of space that
rules: there is to cite, ironically, Jessops comment
on Harveys own work no constitutive outside to
bourgeois space. It vampirically swallows its grounds
(concrete labour/use value), its fixes are seen as a lib-
eration from space and time, development annihilates
the past evidenced in a paranoiac fear of being out
of date and the ascendant bourgeoisie appears as
identical with the social order. As Harvey remarks of
the 1980s, such a bourgeoisie thoroughly permeated
the social fabric with the language of its project during
this period, rendering its specific character invisible. It
seemed to be everywhere and nowhere: neoliberalism
uninterrupted.
An anti-capitalist fix would obviously involve
winning back spaces from the neoliberal project and
entail a re-temporalization of spatial complexity. Yet,
on this, Harvey again seems less than convincing, in
so far as he rejects spatio-temporalizations which are
not confined to particular places as lived and con-
ceptualized. Globallocal links and real abstractions
are out because they dont fit neatly into Harveys
idea of monadic creative replication, aggregation as
self-generating. Instead he tends to focus almost exclu-
sively on the temporalities of the capital spatial fix.
R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 16 4 ( N ove m b e r / D e c e m b e r 2 010 )
Yet it may be that the materials and processes which
get valorized are not only part of the discordant tem-
porality of the capitallabour relation. Certainly it is in
these terms that we might think through some of the
complexities involved in the homologies which David
Cunningham has pointed to between the abstractions
of urban form and those of valorization. If we take
as an example the urban space that is Milton Keynes
shopping centre, it embodies the processes of rent and
consumption, but also contains the non-homologous
space, as Owen Hatherley observes, of Victor Gruens
Weimar public modernism, designed inter alia as
a space for real popular interaction, which in its
orientation towards the summer solstice has older,
calendrical rather than linear temporal resonances.
Spacetime both reinforces and negates its objects:
modernist minimalism may connote the timespace
compression of capital accumulation but it can also
celebrate the ideal of public space. However, we can
only understand this via a grounding of objects/places
which opens them to alternative constitution, as a
negation within the ascendancy of a specific dominant
project.
Hence the ambiguities of space remain a site of on-
going contestation. This is something Harvey certainly
recognizes in terms of the struggle over public and
private terrain. Whats missing, however, is a sense of
internal dynamism, processes of transformation which
spatial ambiguity communicates through the inter-
weaving temporalities of an object/space in this case,
the sedimented presence of a non-capitalist modernity.
Harveys Bergsonian evolutionism rejects this pos-
sibility of a less substantial space in favour of that of
the fully given ascendant (neoliberal) project, and its
concomitant internal processual opacity. (Interestingly
enough, Whiteheads programme argues in fact against
the existence of any discrete spatio-temporal entities,
an aspect of organic philosophy that, he believed, had
been falsified by the theory of relativity, and demon-
strated that the same space/object precisely can have
different temporal interpellations.) At the same time, it
may be that the culmination of the book, entitled What
is to be done, reveals Harveys actual inclinations,
against the grain of the books dominant theoretical
account, when he suggests that we cant understand
factory-based struggles outside their supportive urban
context and their combined but differential spacetime
fixes. From this perspective, space looks less like
heterogeneous unpredictable mutation and more like
the conflictually continuous: the space of less is more
vis--vis the Enigma variations.
Howard Feather
59
Letter
Who Was Oscar Masotta? Response to Derbyshire
Philip Derbyshire (Who Was Oscar Masotta? Psycho-
analysis in Argentina, RP 158) should be commended
for his insightful consideration of the literary and
psychoanalytic writings of Oscar Masotta, one of
the most important Argentine intellectuals of the
1960s and 1970s. I would like to make a case for
juxtaposing these texts with Masottas idiosyncratic
and interdisciplinary explorations of aesthetics, which
included actual artistic production between 1965 and
1967 years omitted from Derbyshires account. This
period lies directly between the early and later phases
of Masottas writing, the former being more focused on
literary criticism, the latter on Lacan. I can offer two
reasons for including Masottas brief interest in art in
any larger history of his output: first, a full picture of
his relationship to foreign sources only becomes clear
in light of these activities, and second, there is some
intriguing shared ground.
Derbyshire characterizes Masotta as a would-be
beacon author who struggled with and reflected upon
the obligatory mastery-effect implicit in translating
and interpreting foreign thinkers such as Lacan for
his Latin American readership. Masottas aesthetic
production, however his El pop-art lectures of
1965, essays in the collection Happenings and quasi-
manifesto Despus del Pop: Nosotros desmaterializa-
mos (After Pop, We Dematerialize), both 1967, as well
as four event-based artworks organized and executed in
1966 does not translate or explicate textual sources
so much as pilfer from and intermingle them to gener-
ate entirely novel critical and artistic models. From
the start, he incorporated terms that he had previously
applied to Lacan into his aesthetic theory. For example,
code and message appear in Masottas 1964 essay
on Lacan (The subject of psychoanalysis wanders for
Lacan between the code and the message) as well
as in his argument in the El pop-art lectures a year
later that Warhols repeated silkscreens of advertise-
ments and journalistic photography aim to make us
feel the presence of the code. Transposing Lacans
fixation on the signifier to Warhol, Masotta developed
an aesthetic system in which the work of arts purpose
was to direct attention to deep structure (code) at the
expense of superficial content (message).
60 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 16 4 ( N ove m b e r / D e c e m b e r 2 010 )
This system lay at the heart of Masottas calls for
a new genre of art that was designed to critique and
demystify artistic, mediatic and political structures
for a newly enlightened viewer. His initial target was
the happening, at that time the object of a media
craze in Buenos Aires: chaotic, seemingly spontaneous
participatory events. Masottas artworks Para inducir
al espritu de la imagen and El helicptero created
situations in which the authenticity or presence of a
given art-event was undermined. In the former, a group
of seemingly impoverished people (actually played by
actors) were put on display in an attempt to reveal
their constructed identities; in the latter, a flyover by
a helicopter was scheduled to be seen by only some of
the participants, who were then obligated to describe
the event to the others, converting it into information.
These works were described and explained at length
in Masottas own writings (he was artist and critic in
one). They promote a structuralist awareness of ones
imbrication with structures of language and power,
albeit in formats and contexts that would have been
alien to Lacan himself.
Between 1965 and 1967 Masotta was not content
to dramatize the anxiety of influence brought on by
the labours of the beacon author. His engagement
of contemporary art availed him to interdisciplinary
critical strategies that, for a time, made him much
more than a writer and a wholly independent source
of ideas.
Daniel R. Quiles