The Planetary Turn

The Planetary Turn

Relationality and Geoaesthetics
in the Twenty-​­First Century

Edited by Amy J. Elias

and Christian Moraru

northwestern university press

evanston, illinois
Northwestern University Press
www​.nupress.northwestern​.edu

Copyright © 2015 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2015.

All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-​­in-​­Publication Data

The planetary turn : relationality and geoaesthetics in the twenty-first century /

edited by Amy J. Elias and Christian Moraru.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-8101-3073-9 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8101-3075-3
(pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8101-3074-6 (ebook)
1. Space and time in literature. 2. Space and time in motion pictures.
3. Globalization in literature. 4. Aesthetics.  I. Elias, Amy J., 1961– editor of
compilation. II. Moraru, Christian, editor of compilation.
PN56.S667P57 2015
809.9338—dc23
2014042757

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the
American National Standard for Information Sciences—­Permanence of Paper for
Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-​­1992.
 Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments vii

Introduction: The Planetary Condition xi

Amy J. Elias and Christian Moraru

Planetary Poetics: World Literature, Goethe, Novalis,

and Yoko Tawada’s Translational Writing 3
John D. Pizer

Terraqueous Planet: The Case for Oceanic Studies 25

Hester Blum

The Commons . . . and Digital Planetarity 37

Amy J. Elias

The Possibility of Cyber-​­Placelessness: Digimodernism

on a Planetary Platform 71
Alan Kirby

Archetypologies of the Human: Planetary Performatism,

Cinematic Relationality, and Iñárritu’s Babel 89
Raoul Eshelman

Planetarity, Performativity, Relationality:

Claire Denis’s Chocolat and Cinematic Ethics 107
Laurie Edson

Gilgamesh’s Planetary Turns 125

Wai Chee Dimock

Writing for the Planet: Contemporary Australian Fiction 143

Paul Giles

The White Globe and the Paradoxical Cartography of

Berger & Berger: A Meditation on Deceptive Evidence 161
Bertrand Westphal
Comparing Contemporary Arts; or, Figuring Planetarity 175
Terry Smith

Beyond the Flaming Walls of the World: Fantasy, Alterity,

and the Postnational Constellation 193
Robert T. Tally Jr.

Decompressing Culture: Three Steps toward a Geomethodology 211

Christian Moraru

Bibliography 245

Contributors 269
 Preface and Acknowledgments

Planetarity: our moment. A way of being and a way of measuring time, space,
and culture in the human sciences and on the planet at large. Whether a break
with modernity, as some argue, or its extension into the twenty-​­first century,
as others contend, this new moment involves, more than any other geosocial
shifts of the modern era, spectacular spatial-​­cultural reconfigurations on a
global scale. Evincing its epoch-​­making power are, certain critics point out,
the overall weakening of the ties between determinate locations and cultural
formations such as discourse, identity, and community, and, more specifically,
the enfeebling or even severing of the living, connective links between cul-
ture and nation-​­state sovereignty. Other scholars have insisted that planetary
modernity is a new cosmopolitanism, a less “bounded” model of cultural
origination in which autochthonous “roots” become rerouted first cross-​
r­ egionally and then globally, inherited filiation yields to voluntary affiliation,
and “vertical” derivation gives way to horizontal dérive (drifting) and playful
self-​­fashioning. For all their differences, both scenarios share a belief that
the contemporary place-​­culture nexus has been shifting, faster and faster,
across cultural practices and disciplines, and that a new form of relationality
is emerging worldwide among people and across language groups, national
boundaries, and categories of cultural expression.
Confronted with such onto-​­aesthetic changes, the humanities must revisit,
perhaps even jettison, established approaches and formulate new lexicons
and descriptive models. A radical upswing in population mobility, global
interconnectedness, and, following from them, discourse’s “worldly” inter-
dependence demands that theorists of art and culture work out apposite
accounts of global influences and palimpsests—­in Yoko Tawada’s poetry, for
instance, which, as John Pizer shows in this collection, carries one back to
Goethe and Novalis as much as to Japan’s history and national language. In
the same vein, we need to reformulate national literatures as planetary inter-
textuality, as Wai Chee Dimock does in her analysis of Gilgamesh; we have to
rethink the antipodes as rhizomatic connections, as Paul Giles counsels in his
essay; we must envision, as Christian Moraru has advocated, a “cosmodern”
arts vocabulary that pertains to our planetary time-​­space stage within and
without the United States.
Insofar as they can be traced back to the voyages, “discoveries,” and
displacements of the early Renaissance, our intellectual challenges, no less
than the world realities generating them, are not new; their pervasiveness

vii
viii Preface and Acknowledgments

and intensity are. Whether, once again, the planetary is the Habermasian end
point of modernity or it signals that both the modern and its postmodern
coda are behind us is not yet clear. In the thick of things at the dawn of the
third millennium, we have no unobstructed view of where we stand. What is
apparent to many, however, is what the introduction to this book identifies
as the “cultural-​­aesthetic symptomatology” of our juncture. The Planetary
Turn is devoted to this symptomatology and to the “condition” it appears
to attest to. Something is happening. Something is afoot. And this something
seems to fit neither the global, neocolonialist models of modernity nor Marx-
ist teleological diagnoses of capitalist globalization; it sits ill with definitions
of twentieth-​­century postmodernism, and it grates against easy celebrations
of cultural sovereignty and “difference”; it looks more substantial than an
“affectsphere” and significantly less politically articulated than a global rev-
olution. Thus, the questions posed in this book speak to the pressure this
condition puts on us to theorize it and recalibrate our critical instruments
and aesthetic-​­critical vocabularies to its newness and oftentimes amorphous,
contradictory character. This is what, critically and theoretically speaking,
the planetary turn strives for: a decisive reorientation toward the unfolding
present and its cultural paradigm.
This book has been made possible by an abundance of intellectual guid-
ance and logistical resources. Therefore, as coeditors, we have a large number
of individuals and institutions to thank for their support. We are grateful to
our contributors for their goodwill and substantial and patient involvement
in this enterprise. We also thank Northwestern University Press for faith in
the project and publication of what we believe to be a groundbreaking vol-
ume. We are especially indebted to Henry L. Carrigan Jr., senior editor and
assistant director at Northwestern, to his staff, and to the two anonymous
readers who evaluated our manuscript. We would also like to thank Jered
Sprecher for allowing us to use a reproduction of his painting Quell the
Storm (2010, oil on linen, 48" x 36") on the book cover, as well as the editors
of English Language Notes for giving us permission to reprint, in modified
form, Wai Chee Dimock’s article “Recycling the Epic: Gilgamesh on Three
Continents,” first published in ELN 51, no. 1 (Spring–­Summer 2013): 19–33
(http://​english.colorado​.edu/eln/).
Christian Moraru expresses his gratitude to the following programs, insti-
tutional entities, and people who have supplied much-​­needed funding, advice,
and venues of critical exchange: the German Alexander von Humboldt
Foundation, for a 2012 research stipend at Ludwig Maximilian University
of Munich; University of North Carolina, Greensboro (UNCG), for a 2012
Summer Excellence Fellowship; also at UNCG, the College of Arts and Sci-
ences, specifically for the assistance extended by the college’s dean, Timothy
Johnston, over the past few years; UNCG’s English Department, its past and
present heads, Professor Anne Wallace and Professor Scott Romine, respec-
tively, and its inquisitive and collegial faculty; UNCG’s dynamic Atlantic
Preface and Acknowledgments ix

World Research Network and its director, Professor Christopher Hodgkins,

whose support, encouragement, and genuine interest in the thorny issues
tackled here have been absolutely invaluable; UNCG’s Office of Research
and Economic Development and its vice chancellor, Terri L. Shelton; UNCG’s
International Programs Center, for a 2012 Kohler Research Award and other
grants enabling travel and work leading to this book; colleagues and graceful
hosts at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, University of Konstanz,
and University of Freiburg (Germany), University of Limoges (France),
University of Maryland, Ohio State University, University of Bucharest,
University of Cluj-​­Napoca, and Transylvania University, Braşov (Romania),
and University of Amsterdam and Radboud University, Nijmegen (the Neth-
erlands). Amy J. Elias, superb critic of postmodern and post-​­postmodern
culture, has been a great team player and a most dependable source of what
one would call, no doubt, “clarifying moments.” John McGowan, John Pro-
tevi, and Jeffrey J. Williams have offered great feedback on an earlier draft
of a portion of Moraru’s individual contribution to The Planetary Turn. Jef-
frey R. Di Leo’s support, friendship, expertise, and hospitality have made
a world of difference too. And Henry Sussman’s erudition, kindness, and
elegant writing continue to be an example one strives to emulate. Gratefully
acknowledged is also the support of Marjorie Perloff, David Cowart, Brian
McHale, Ursula Heise, Paul Maltby, Emily Apter, Brian Richardson, Jerome
Klinkowitz, Monika Fludernik, Jan Alber, Liedeke Plate, Yra van Dijk, Timo-
theus Vermeulen, Robin van der Akker, Radu Ţurcanu, Basarab Nicolescu,
Rodica Mihăilă, Mircea Martin, Ștefan Borbely, Corin Braga, Andrei Bodiu,
Caius Dobrescu, Alexandru Muşina, Adrian Lăcătuș, Ion Buzera, and Daniela
Rogobete, all of them distinguished scholars and friends who have offered
assistance, directly or indirectly.
Amy J. Elias would like to thank and acknowledge the support of the
following people and institutional programs: the University of Tennessee’s
(UT’s) Department of English and the Hodges Better English Fund for fund-
ing that led to this book’s completion, particularly a Hodges Research Grant
in summer 2012; Stanton B. Garner Jr., head of the UT English Department
during this project, for friendship and championing of this and other faculty
research projects; the University of Tennessee Humanities Center, headed by
Thomas J. Heffernan, for a fellowship in 2013 that granted time and office
space for writing and editing; the College of Arts and Sciences at the Uni-
versity of Tennessee for a 2012 SARIF travel grant enabling work toward
this project, and the UT College of Arts and Sciences’ dean, Theresa Lee, for
unflagging support of humanities initiatives. ASAP: The Association for the
Study of the Arts of the Present provided opportunities at its conferences to
explore and shape ideas expressed in these pages. Christian Moraru is to be
thanked emphatically for sharing his intellectual gifts, prodigious research
background, and friendship in this endeavor. Gratefully acknowledged also
are Ursula Heise, Amir Eshel, Alan Liu, Richard Grusin, John McGowan,
x Preface and Acknowledgments

James Phelan, Jonathan Eburne, Allen R. Dunn, Heather A. Hirschfeld,

Thomas Haddox, Judith Welch, Donna Bodenheimer, and the members of the
Critical Theory Reading Group at the University of Tennessee for collegial
conversations and valuable interchange that helped clarify many ideas funda-
mental to the individual essay Elias has contributed to this book. Thanks goes
to Margaret Dean, Katy Chiles, Urmila Seshagiri, Lisi Schoenbach, and HAH
for a roadstead during a rip-​­tide fellowship year, and to Jonathan Barnes for
everything else. James Civis, John Hurt Fisher Research Assistant in English
at the University of Tennessee for 2012–­13, did an excellent job of editing
and formatting initial drafts of the manuscript, and Darren Jackson deserves
thanks for translating Bertrand Westphal’s essay in The Planetary Turn.
Some of the insights set forth in our introduction and essays have been
tested out in our classes. We are grateful, therefore, to our undergraduate and
graduate students. Christian Moraru would like to recognize, specifically, his
UNCG students in post-​­2010 courses such as English 208: “Topics in Global
Literature,” English 740: “Studies in Contemporary and Postmodern Ameri-
can Literature,” and English 704: “Studies in Contemporary Literary and
Cultural Theory.” Amy Elias would like to thank University of Tennessee
graduate students in English 688: “Planetarity: Postmodernism and After”
and undergraduates in English 499 (Senior Seminar): “Virtual Worlds and
the Ethics of Character” for helping to explore the worlds of global media
and planetary exchange.
 Introduction
The Planetary Condition

Amy J. Elias and Christian Moraru

As its title suggests, this essay collection attends to the planetary turn in contem-
porary criticism and theory. Like other critical “turns” before it—­postcolonial,
postmodern, or global—­the shift under scrutiny here concerns artists’ and
critics’ new speculations about our world, one which seems to be outgrowing
modernity’s reigning sociological, aesthetic, and political-​­economic systems.
Less and less relevant to the twenty-​­first century, modern paradigms appear
increasingly unable to predict, let alone adequately explain, the global opera-
tions of technologically enhanced finance capital, cosmopolitanism’s struggle
to reinvent itself from the ashes of post-​­empire Europe, and the risk envi-
ronment brought about by the ever-​­escalating crises of world ecologies.1 A
reaction to the multiple and steadily widening inconsistency between what the
world is becoming and how this change registers in prevalent epistemologies
and cultural histories, the critical-​­theoretical model of planetarity attempts
a move away from the totalizing paradigm of modern-​­age globalization—­
and thus a critique or critical “completion” of globalism—­as well as from
the irony and hermeneutics of suspicion typical of what came to be known
as postmodernism. The postmodern has always been a fraught and unsatis-
factory analytical category also because, as Guy Debord, Jean Baudrillard,
Fredric Jameson, and David Harvey have maintained, it never severed its com-
promising ties to late socio-​­aesthetic modernity, market globalization, and the
society of spectacle, simulation, and empty pastiche. Little surprise, then, that,
on many fronts today, postmodernism is being relinquished as a dessicated—­
itself “exhausted”—­descriptor of the social macrocosm and world art.2
The discourse of planetarity presents itself, in response to the twenty-​­first-​
c­ entury world and to the decreasing ability of the postmodern theoretical
apparatus to account for it, as a new structure of awareness, as a methodi-
cal receptivity to the geothematics of planetariness characteristic of a
fast-​­expanding series of cultural formations. Admittedly transitional, “fuzzy,”
and frustratingly amorphous at times, these formations nevertheless seem
to indicate that there has been a paradigmatic translation of world cultures
into a planetary setup in which globalization’s homogenizing, one-​­becoming

xi
xii Amy J. Elias and Christian Moraru

pulsion is challenged by relationality, namely, by an ethicization of the

ecumenic process of coming together or “worlding.” That is to say, while
unfolding within the same historical moment as globalization, planetarity is
configured—­artistically, philosophically, and intellectually—­from a different
angle and goes in another direction. It represents a transcultural phenom-
enon whose economical and political underpinnings cannot be ignored but
whose preeminent thrust is ethical.
Synonymous, in a sense, with what Ulrich Beck and Edgar Grande have
termed “second modernity,” planetarity advances on a plurality of modern-
ization paths, Western and non-​­Western, “tak[ing] the varieties of modernity
and their global interdependencies as a starting point for theoretical reflec-
tion and empirical research.”3 In this emerging worldview and critical theory,
the planet as a living organism, as a shared ecology, and as an incrementally
integrated system both embracing and rechanneling the currents of moder-
nity is the axial dimension in which writers and artists perceive themselves,
their histories, and their aesthetic practices. Insufficiently systematic so far,
planetarity has yet to reach critical mass culturally and stylistically. As such,
it has not yet given birth to a well-​­defined world culture or to a coherent
model of relational localisms that might make up this kind of geocultural
conglomerate. We submit, however, that the burgeoning critical conversa-
tion around planetarity is leading to a better and better marked, more and
more consequential set of thematic, discursive, and cultural protocols. Nei-
ther entirely new nor everywhere identical in terms of its meaning, material
embodiment, and effects, planetary geoculture looks to be a powerful albeit
nascent paradigm, leaving its daily imprint on how people imagine them-
selves and the world in the third millennium.
Our project rests on two principal, intertwined claims. First, planetar-
ity as the location and formal operator of culture must be given pride of
place by any rigorous, historically minded effort to come to grips with con-
temporary representation in general and the arts in particular: the world
rise of the bioconnective is the present-​­day event horizon. Thus, planetar-
ity should be distinguished from other, coterminous approaches connoting
similarly ecumenic aesthetics and relational scenarios such as “globaliza-
tion” and “cosmopolitanism.” Second, if today’s planetary life consists in an
incessantly thickening, historically unprecedented web of relations among
people, cultures, and locales, to comprehend the planetary must entail grasp-
ing the relationality embedded in it. Consequently, relatedness, dialogue, and
interactivity are central to major aesthetic initiatives stirring at this stage
in world history. Indeed, clusters of problems are coalescing in the twenty-​
­
first-​­
century literary and visual arts around social connection, language
translation, cultural exchange, trafficking, cross-​­border mobility, and other
forms of “self-​­other” interplay. If planetarity is the cultural-​­discursive matrix
of innovative art, then the dialogical and the relational may well encapsulate
the planetary aesthetic.
Introduction xiii

Globalization and Planetarity

As a concept, “globalization” might be understood as a world vision, an

economic trajectory, a thematic-​­stylistic repertoire, and a scholarly focus. It
designates a highly complex category and array of concerns. Its planetary coun-
terparts, “planetarization” and “planetarity,” seem concurrently symbiotic
and oppositional concepts insofar as they assume, for many commentators,
the equivocal status of global studies offshoots.4 Globalization, however, may
be a fundamentally different animal. Its meaning spans three main semantic
zones—­internationalization, multinationalism, and transnationalism—­each
with its specific implications for political, environmental, and ethical global
organization.5 Thus, Nick Bisley interprets globalization as “the set of social
consequences which derive from the increasing rate and speed of interac-
tions of knowledge, people, goods and capital between states and societies.”6
His definition falls under the purview of sociology and economics, but the
debate about globalization roams across an astoundingly wide panoply of
discourses and disciplinary-​­historical perspectives. Given such a range, even
the modern origins of globalization are contested. There are, for instance,
those who take a “long view” of the phenomenon as well as those who place
its beginnings closer to our time. Certain critics claim that the networks of
intercultural contact originated with the seventh-​­and eighth-​­century spread
of Islam throughout the Middle East, Asia, and Africa; others point to mer-
cantilist Europe and early multinational corporations such as the Dutch
East India Company; and still others situate globalization’s “golden age” in
nineteenth-​­century colonialism and in the international politics ushered in by
industrial-​­era imperialism. Lopsided, scarcely affecting all people and places
with the same force or in the same fashion, its benefits darkly ambiguous and
unevenly distributed, globalization, some historians contend, has been in full
swing for a while now, if not for ages.
The longue durée methodology of a number of authors influenced by the
French Annales school merges these approaches, stressing that modernity had
been globalizing since the late medieval period and only became manifestly
global after World War II. These critics’ broad-​­compass tack sweeps across
whole geographical and geopolitical zones (countries, regions, continents)
and historical periods (centuries, epochs). Holding sway inside this camp is
Immanuel Wallerstein’s “world-​­systems” theory. In Wallerstein’s work, how-
ever, the world-​­system and the global are initially not equivalent; they would
become so only in the nineteenth century. Modeled on Fernand Braudel’s
“Mediterranean world,” the “world-​­system” may have “originated in Europe
in the sixteenth century,” Wallerstein ventures in Geopolitics and Geoculture,
but it reached a truly global level hundreds of years later, following several
globalizing stages.7 Likewise, the economic theory of Giovanni Arrighi is cen-
tered in systems analysis and posits a 700-​­year period of development of
capital. In this account, the genealogy of capitalism as a succession of “long
xiv Amy J. Elias and Christian Moraru

centuries” privileges certain nations and leads ultimately to the current world
hegemony of the United States.8 Wallerstein and Arrighi both postulate the
existence of transhistorical systemic aggregates underlain by capital flows
largely indifferent to the actions of human individuals and groups. For both
writers and those influenced by their conclusions, political events such as the
end of Word War II or of the Cold War do not change the trajectory of the
world system but rather serve its developmental purposes.
There are, of course, those who “believe that globalization is a myth, or
that, at any rate, it is much exaggerated as a distinctively new phenomenon.”9
Supporting this notion are critics who contest what they see as a Eurocentric
bias in many globalization models, namely, an alignment of this historical
process with Western modernity and, subsequently, an assumption that the
globalizing system functions uniformly and on a world scale.10 Authors such
as Martin Albrow, however, reason that in order for globalization to have
any meaning for current economic, social, and cultural systems, we must
look for it solely within industrial and post-​­industrial capitalism.11 Along the
same lines, voices in critical theory, globalization studies, and cognate fields
are keen to underline the more recent events leading to a qualitatively new,
twenty-​­first-​­century globalization. In cultural history and anthropology, for
example, many consider the tearing down of the Berlin Wall a watershed in
the narrative of globalization. To critics such as Christian Moraru, 1989 is
what “mondialization” historian Jean-​­Pierre Warnier would call une année
charnière: a “hinge year” opening a historical door onto “thick” or late glo-
balization.12 That year, we are told, set off the later phase of a momentous shift
from a “cubicular” world—­Pierre Chaunu’s univers cloisonné—­to one expe-
rienced and conceptualized as an incrementally all-​­pervasive “network.”13
From this standpoint, the Cold War world was a “soft,” quintessentially
bipolar system, loosely if counterintuitively held together by an antagonist-​
s­eparatist template whose keystone was the nation-​­state, with “division”
the logic of the Cold War-​­era geopolitical dispositif. Accordingly, territory
was parceled out worldwide into walled-​­in “influence zones” balancing each
other and functioning centripetally under the jurisdiction of relatively sta-
ble and recognized political centers. Underwritten and kept in place by its
mutually “deterring” antinomies of power, “common markets,” pacts, and
treaties, that world ended, some say, in 1991. The one to come, neoliberal
institutions and pundits were eager to assure us, would close economic gaps
between rich and poor and heal humanity’s historical wounds. Immediately
following the fall of the Berlin Wall, it seemed that the new world—­or at
least the new European-​­North American world—­had a modicum of hope for
a post-​­conflictual state of global affairs. Echoing Woodrow Wilson’s 1918
“new world” speech, sweeping, “new world order” pronouncements made by
Mikhail Gorbachev and George H. W. Bush fueled that optimism.
But this rhetoric was soon to be punctured by cultural theorists who had
grown suspicious of the international political consensus on the putatively
Introduction xv

universal economic gains of globalization. A case in point, Ken Jowitt wrote

of a “new world disorder” and was followed in his apprehensiveness of post–­
Cold War sanguinity by Zygmunt Bauman, Tzvetan Todorov, Amin Maalouf,
Wallerstein, and other chroniclers of “le Nouveau Désordre mondial.” Con-
cerned less with the Cold War, Joseph Stiglitz mounted a devastating critique
of economic globalization, while Zilla Eisenstein and others laid the disen-
franchisement of women and non-​­white, non-​­European peoples at the door
of globalization’s “philosophy,” neoliberalism.14 These critics painted pictures
of a hopelessly entropic, world-​­scale pandemonium triggered by the liquefy-
ing of Cold War binaries and by the triumph of neoliberal economics seeping
across continents and world financial markets. Their jeremiads outlined how,
in a “planetar[ily] diasphor[ic]” age, autopoietic world-​­systems were bound
to bypass human agency and meaningful planning altogether.15 Before long,
such critical exercises in catastrophism were joined by what would amount
to a post-​­1990 flood of more applied and patiently documented analyses of
“globalization,” “globalism,” and the “global age.” As a result, contempo-
rary theory underwent a “global turn” comparable to the paradigm-​­changing
“turns” of decades past.16 Breaks other than the end of the Cold War were
offered as equally plausible causes of globalization’s acceleration, with the
Al-​­Qaeda attacks on New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon as
main contenders.17 A Lacanian psychosocial examination of the same his-
torical interval led Phillip E. Wegner, for example, to the conclusion that
September 11, 2001, reenacted the earlier crumbling of the Berlin Wall and,
more generally, that the Cold War actually ended only with 9/11 and the
establishment of a twenty-​­first-​­century “New World Order.”18
Media and technology theorists put forth a rather different perspective.
Less interested in periodization, they zeroed in on cultural shifts, claiming
that the decisive impetus of globalization was not a political occurrence—­
such as the demolition of the Berlin Wall or the fall of the Twin Towers—­but
the advent of wide-​­ reaching communication technologies, including the
Internet. Media studies have long examined how film, television, music, and
other mediatic forms cross borders and transform cultural landscapes on a
vast scale.19 Epistemic or even ideologically colored political shifts are them-
selves viewed as indebted to technological advancements and networked
media. In works by McKenzie Wark, Paul Virilio, Douglas Kellner, Richard
Grusin, and others, the determining factor leading to new types of global-
ization is the forging of cross-​­national communication networks through
affordable and transportable digital technologies.20 In the most optimistic
accounts, popular protest movements and even political revolution are seen
as enabled by media or by newer technological communication networks.
Manuel Castells, for example, has written that burgeoning democracy move-
ments throughout the world are deeply indebted to international social
networking systems, while Jennifer Earl and Katrina Kimport’s work (mim-
icking studies of transnational advocacy networks in traditionally configured
xvi Amy J. Elias and Christian Moraru

organizations) exemplifies analysis that investigates how World Wide Web

affordances enable Web activism that crosses national boundaries and class
lines.21 Similarly, popular authors such as Pico Iyer and Thomas L. Fried-
man tell “global stories” featuring extensively, if somewhat euphorically, the
technologically enhanced milieux of transnational travel and the political
“flatness” of a world within the purview of capital.22
The globalization accounts supplied by writers like Iyer and Friedman beg
a number of questions. For even if statistics on population migration, data
dissemination, goods and services transfer, and communications’ internation-
alization were readily available, reliable, and easy to work into a cohesive
theory of globalization, conclusions about globalizing trends drawn by polit-
ical economists would still not necessarily match those by cultural theorists
grappling with issues of identity and the cultural productions expressing it.
As differentiated benefits accrue to different constituencies across the globe,
there is meager consensus today about the advantages and disadvantages
of globalization. Nor do all scholars agree on where we are right now in its
history. Is globalization accelerating, some ask? Has it peaked? Is it perhaps
now mutating into novel forms of local / global organization? If so, then what
about the rising, trans-​­statal “jurisdictional geographies” and their bearings
on the leverage, sovereignty, and overall significance of the nation-​­state?23
And, again, what is the role of culture, art, and their reception and interpre-
tation in the new geopolitical context? In a recent review, Albrow succinctly
formulates the questions that remain unanswered in globalization debates.
“In a democratic nation-​­state,” he notes, “we accept the legitimacy of laws
and regulations and demand that those responsible for their creation and
for their implementation should be publicly accountable. But who are the
authorities in global governance? And how can we, now a ‘global public,’
have any part in the process or exercise any kind of democratic control?”24
What Albrow underscores is globalization theory’s central critical struggle,
and, we would add, overall failure to come to terms with issues of political
control and technical administration in a developing world monoculture in
which fewer and fewer are at home.
Planetary studies responds to these concerns and shortcomings in sev-
eral ways, two of which are worth highlighting here not only because
they carry more weight but also because they intersect with the anti-​
­postmodern—­and “post-​­postmodernizing”—­reaction delineated earlier.
Chiefly eco-​­ cosmological, the first advocates an urgent conceptual shift
away from globalization to “worlding”—­or more precisely, from globe as
financial-​­technocratic system toward planet as world-​­ecology. This reorien-
tation calls for significant changes in perspective, which should eventually
lead, we believe, to notably different outcomes in and for the world. Directly
and indirectly, such a repositioning was influenced by the growth of environ-
mental movements and ecocritical analysis throughout the twentieth century,
especially in the decades when globalization theory was picking up speed.
Introduction xvii

Galvanized by the 1990s publication of Lawrence Buell’s The Environmental

Imagination and Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm’s The Ecocriticism
Reader as well as by the 1992 founding of the Association for the Study
of Literature and Environment (ASLE), ecocriticism promotes a systematic
inquiry into the place of nature in Western thought, oftentimes taking on
the sagas and legacies of global modernity and opposing to its abstractions a
grounded, phenomenal, earth-​­anchored ethics and aesthetics.25
Largely outside the projects of environmentalism and ecocriticism but
ostensibly sympathetic to them was also Basarab Nicolescu’s planetarily and
cosmically minded “world vision.” By the time the French polymath laid out
the latter in his 1994 Théorèmes poétiques and brought it to bear on the mod-
ern schemas of territorially, politically, culturally, and disciplinarily discrete
discourse, the world as cosmological entity had been part of conversation
in the arts and humanities for some time.26 The notion gained momentum
as a critical theme with Yi-​­Fu Tuan’s Cosmos and Hearth, Gérard Raulet’s
Critical Cosmology, Félix Guattari’s “chaosmotic” and “ethico-​­ aesthetic
paradigm” (Chaosmose), Anne Phillips’s cosmos-​­based multiculturalism, and
other similar, late 1990s and early 2000s increasingly well-​­configured efforts
to swerve from the rhetoric of the globe while drawing, with growing benefit,
on the figures of cosmos and cosmology.27 In hindsight, this looks like an
important and necessary discursive stage in the transition from the rhetoric,
hermeneutics, and, ultimately, the politics of globalization to planetarity. As a
phenomenologically oriented idea, the cosmological appealed to critics, who,
before leaving it behind, mined it for fertile, ecological-​­culturological and
ethical tropes, which in turn would pave the way to another key move: from
“cosmos” to “planet.” Many found this progression justified, for at least two
reasons. On the one hand, “cosmos” was too akin to “globe” and “global-
ization” in that it figured the Earth as a cosmic body, part of a macrosystem
organized according to system-​­specific rules and, more generally, to a ratio-
nality some scholars found culturally and epistemologically constraining. On
the other hand, the discourse of cosmos and cosmic relationality remained
too broad from the vantage point of an anthropologically pertinent scalarity.
As Amy J. Elias points out, “the planetary model” and the new “chronotope”
it has made available to the arts and their interpretation were “opposed to
the dehumanizing context of cosmic space constructed by science and then,
as a metaphor for the cybernetic, to scientific rationality.”28
The planetary field’s most significant counter to the global—­understood
primarily as a financially, economically, and technologically homogenizing
force—­is its relationality model and return to ethics. Indeed, in our judg-
ment, the best discussions of planetarity gravitate away from global studies’
obsessions with economic, political, and technical administration and move
closer to the vital problem of the ethical relation obtaining in new mod-
els of transnationality, internationality, or multinationality. This relational
potenza—­ the “strength” of the multitudes of the planet—­ multiplies the
xviii Amy J. Elias and Christian Moraru

meaning of relatedness and, by the same movement, challenges us to stabi-

lize relational ontosemantics, to articulate what relationality does and stands
for in the world.29 Concomitantly descriptive and prescriptive, analytic and
normative (“aspirational”), theories of planetarity unfold a vision not of glo-
balized earth but, as Elias maintains in her Planetary Turn essay, of a “world
commons,” thus helping us conceptualize how cultural productions such as
art enable this vision.
This move is particularly indebted to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and
Masao Miyoshi. The stakes of Spivak’s 1999 essay “The Imperative to Re-​
­Imagine the Planet” were profoundly ethical although, in keeping with her
poststructuralist and psychoanalytic allegiances, the “imperative” she spoke
of was non-​­totalizing and reaffirmed both a Levinasian ethics and a Derridean
courting of the uncanny, of unheimliche unhomeliness.30 In her intervention,
Spivak positioned planetarity “to control globalization interruptively, to
locate the imperative in the indefinite radical alterity of the other space of
[the] planet[,] to deflect the rational imperative of capitalist globalization,”
and thus “to displace dialogics into this set of contradictions.”31 In line with
Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of alterity, she insisted that life on the planet must
be “lived as the call of the wholly other.” Thus, in Spivak, the planet morphs
into a “cosmopolitheia,” both an astronomical body and a “defracted view
of ethics,” as space becomes another name for “alterity.”32 As she wrote a few
years later in Death of a Discipline (2003),

I propose the planet to overwrite the globe. Globalization is the impo-

sition of the same system of exchange everywhere. In the gridwork of
electronic capital, we achieve that abstract ball covered in latitudes
and longitudes, cut by virtual lines. . . . To talk planet-​­talk by way of
an unexamined environmentalism, referring to an undivided “natu-
ral” space rather than a differentiated political space, can work in the
interest of this globalization in the mode of the abstract as such. . . .
The globe is on our computers. No one lives there. . . . The planet is in
the species of alterity, belonging to another system. . . . Planet thought
opens up to embrace an inexhaustible taxonomy of such names [for a
radical alterity and intention toward the other].33

The planetary claims of Death of a Discipline have provoked replies from

various critical quarters. Continuing into the 1990s and the first decades of
the third millennium, Spivak’s inquiries into issues of translation, comparison
and the incommensurable, communication, globalization, subalternity, and
regional welfare led her to bring serious charges against globalist imperialism,
cosmopolitan arrogance, and the cultural parochialism typically following
from both. As a remedy, she proposed solutions as diverse as revaluation
of place, familiarization with other languages and thought paradigms, and,
more broadly, genuine contact with alterity, even though, in practice, her
Introduction xix

handling of Levinasian ethics and the semiological indeterminism of post-

structuralist extraction at play in her reasoning sometimes risked preventing
such dealings and exchanges from working more concretely as an effectively
relational, world-​­transforming dialogics.
Underscoring the same need for renewal on a similarly large scale, Miy-
oshi’s 2001 article “Turn to the Planet: Literature, Diversity, and Totality”
grounded its manifestly epochalist-​­epistemological argument in a planetary
paradigm shift. Miyoshi observed that a change of historical proportions had
been afoot since the globalizing 1980s; this change, as Neil Turnbull later
noted, “heighten[ed] the conceptual importance of the earth” across all mate-
rial and cultural forms and arenas.34 Miyoshi too found globalism wanting
because, plagued by a structural insufficiency, it appeared exclusionist, tout-
ing a universal good but bestowing it only on the privileged few for whom
techno-​­mercantile connectedness operates beneficially. Since “the return to
the nation-​­state,” he specifies in his essay, is not a realistic solution, “there is
[now] one such core site for organizing such an inclusiveness, though entirely
negative at present: the future of the global environment. For the first time
in human history, one single commonality involves all those living on the
planet: environmental deterioration as a result of the human consumption of
natural resources.”35 Acknowledging this “total commonality” as the premise
for “map[ping] out our world and [for] engag[ing] in research and scholar-
ship” is a stepping-stone to the all-​­too-​­important recognition that

literature and literary studies now have one basis and goal: to nur-
ture our common bonds to the planet—­to replace the imaginaries
of exclusionary familialism, communitarianism, nationhood, ethnic
culture, regionalism, “globalization,” or even humanism, with the
ideal of planetarianism. Once we accept this planet-​­based totality, we
might for once agree in humility to devise a way to share with all the
rest our only true public space and resources.36

In certain respects, Miyoshi’s take on planetarity is closer to posthuman envi-

ronmentalism than to Spivak’s cosmopolitan crypto-​­humanism. Moreover,
some of his assertions are not completely clear, fully developed, or entirely
persuasive. Together, however, the two critics made a decisive push down a
path further blazed by comparatists and theorists such as Emily Apter, Paul
Giles, and, in particular, Wai Chee Dimock, whose trans-​­nationalist, “deep-​
t­ime” forays and conceptualizations of a new, planet-​­oriented scalarity and
aggregation scheme in literary history have been particularly influential in
this burgeoning planetary vocabulary. A quick glance at the amount of schol-
arship inspired by these three critics’ ethical-​­relational and cross-​­territorial
reconstructions of globalization as planetarity suggests that, historically co-​
a­ rticulated with the global lexicon and concerns as it has been, the planet
model may be at this juncture well situated to fulfill, in the humanities at
xx Amy J. Elias and Christian Moraru

least, earlier dreams of critically “purging” the globe (Apter) or even “over-
writing” it (Spivak).37
Still somewhat bothersome, of course, is the “terminological quandary”
lingering in the interchangeable use of “globalization,” “globality,” and “glo-
balism,” as Marshall Brown has remarked. On the one hand, “globality” has
been defined by critics such as Beck as the global’s abstract cousin. As such,
it “means that we have been living for a long time in a world society, in the
sense that the notion of closed spaces has become illusory.” “No country or
group,” the German sociologist concludes, “can shut itself off from others”
any longer. Globality also implies “that from now on nothing which happens
on our planet is only a local and limited event; all inventions, victories and
catastrophes affect the whole world.”38 On the other hand, “by globalism,”
critics such as Brown “understand an idea, an image, a potential; by global-
ization[,] a process, a material phenomenon, a destiny.”39
As far as we are concerned, “globalism” is primarily a cosa mentale, a
subjective, reflexive-​­evaluative position designating an attitude or mode of
perceiving things “in global perspective.” In globalism, we underscore a life
perspective and an epistemological stance toward a global ensemble wherein
the parts communicate and must face up to their interdependence. But, as
we have stressed, the global paradigm has not been particularly effective in
weighing the cultural, political, and ethical implications of world intercon-
nectivity, and so, to avoid a confusion at once existential, methodological,
and terminological, we offer up planetarity as a critical substitute. Retooled
around planetary semantics and its ramifications across ethics, phenom-
enology, and epistemology, world cultures might leave room, in Roland
Robertson’s assessment, both for “relativism,” that is, for a sense that cul-
tures are “bound-​­up,” and for “worldism,” or “the claim that it is possible
and, indeed, desirable to grasp the world as a whole analytically” while keep-
ing in mind that no “reference t[o] the dynamics of the entire ‘world-​­system’ ”
can afford to lose sight of the complexities, contradictions, and other asys-
temic features that might leap at us whenever we do not base the analysis
too strictly on the “world-​­systemic, economic realm.”40 It is in this light that,
in an essay also chiming in with the positions formulated in The Planetary
Turn, Min Hyoung Song reaches the conclusion that “there is . . . something
sovereign about what gets signified by globalization, a nomos that divides,
restricts, hierarchizes, and criminalizes. It is a royal epistemology, a striation.
Planetarity, then, might be thought of as a different order of connection,
an interrelatedness that runs along smooth surfaces, comprises multitudes,
and manifests movement.”41 Thus, while flat-​­ out dismissal or wholesale
demonization of globalization processes in economy, technology, and cul-
ture remains misguided, the planetary perforce builds on the global, critiques
it, and, to some degree, “completes” it. But, as Warnier puts it bluntly, if
“speaking of the ‘globalization of culture’ is abusive,” the abuse may be even
more egregious if planetary culture is still conceived in similarly “globalistic”
Introduction xxi

ways.42 The “hard” materiality of globalization—­a “hard” planet—­is or has

the tendency of becoming a consistent oneness wedded to selfsameness, a
homogenous and “defacing” or disfiguring whole impervious to smaller
figures, cultural rhetorics, and voices. Instead, the geoaesthetic planetary
ensemble toward which our book’s essays variously work designates a “soft”
materiality within which relatedness both recognizes and hinges on negotia-
tions of difference and where, as such, being-​­in-​­relation may be pressed into
service with an eye to fostering ethical relations worldwide.

Cosmopolitanism and Planetarity

A fairly substantial body of critical literature has already gone some distance
toward accounting for this ethical relationality on a range of scales. This
corpus has coalesced around cosmopolis, the cosmopolite, and cosmopoli-
tanism, a set of time-​­honored ideas, foci, and geocultural-​­intellectual models
that regained force in the academy and popular press roughly at the same
moment as did globalization. As is well known, the ethical-​­philosophical
concept of cosmopolitanism has a long history in the West and elsewhere.
The origins of cosmopolitan deliberation can be traced back to the thinkers
of ancient Greece and Rome, primarily to the Cynics and the Stoics, who
argued for an individual’s belonging both to the local-​­national polity and to
humanity’s greater commonwealth beyond his or her family, kind, or coun-
try, outside which the kosmopolitēs must care for and generally be in an
ethical relationship with others. Is planetarity, then, simply another word for
cosmopolitanism?
To answer, it might be useful to turn briefly to Amanda Anderson’s discus-
sion of the dialectical tension between cosmopolitanism and universalism
in Western philosophy. Anderson treats cosmopolitanism not as a counter-​
m
­ odernity but as a strain of thought within modernity itself. Differentiating
between, on the one hand, a Habermasian, public-​­ sphere approach that
appeals to a sense of universal community, and, on the other, a popularized
“cosmopolitan sensibility,” she reminds us that cosmopolitanism was revived
in the humanities as a reaction to “a strictly negative critique of Enlighten-
ment” and combines a skepticism “of partial or false universals with the pursuit
of those emancipatory ideals associated with traditional universalism.”43 Like
“strategic essentialism” operating in cultural critique, cosmopolitanism so
defined is compatible with some aspects of Marxism and also counters overly
restrictive definitions of community sometimes expressed by identity poli-
tics. Moreover, it works against the early twenty-​­first-​­century reawakening
of violent nationalisms and nationalistic identitarian agendas. “In general,”
Anderson explains, “cosmopolitanism endorses reflective distance from one’s
cultural affiliations, a broad understanding of other cultures and customs, and
a belief in universal humanity.”44 She breaks down cosmopolitan philosophy
xxii Amy J. Elias and Christian Moraru

into two forms. One is “exclusionary” and values only an abstract or cos-
mic universalism. The other is “inclusionary.” In this variant, universalism
is shaped by “sympathetic imagination and intercultural exchange.” In this
sense, we learn, “cosmopolitanism also tends to be exercised by the specifi-
cally ethical challenges of perceived cultural relativisms; it aims to articulate
not simply intellectual programs but ethical ideals for the cultivation of char-
acter and for negotiating the experience of otherness, . . . to foster reciprocal
and transformative encounters between strangers variously construed.”45
Neither moral relativism nor rigidly abstract universalism, this cosmopoli-
tanism parts company with theories of local authenticity and rises at times in
history when the world grows in population and, seemingly, in complexity.46
Such a perspective shores up and qualifies universalism with a much-​­needed
“rhetoric of worldliness” and enlists translation as an ideal. Anderson turns
to James Clifford’s notion of “discrepant cosmopolitanisms,” Bruce Rob-
bins’s “mobile, reciprocal interconnectedness,” Seyla Benhabib’s “interactive
universalism,” and Julia Kristeva’s “transnational Humanity” to illustrate the
host of positions characterizing this “new cosmopolitanism.” She also notes
the more radical ideas that begin to swirl around it at this juncture, such as
Judith Butler’s “reconstructed universality” and Etienne Balibar’s real, fictive,
and ideal universalities, the last of which is characterized by an “insurrection”
against normalcy.47 Anderson admits, however, that anthropological ethics
has not had significant purchase in old or new cosmopolitanisms, which by
and large tend to gel instead around more urgent, counter-​­nationalist, anti-​
p
­ arochial, and non-​­localist platforms.48
Where such philosophical propensities and political programs are con-
cerned, new cosmopolitanism is closest to planetarity as we conceptualize it.49
Very roughly put, planetarity is to globalization what neo-​­cosmopolitanism
is to universalism. It is true too that, like certain neo-​­cosmopolitan variet-
ies, some theories of planetarity are less “counter-​­modernities” than critical
rearticulations of modernity’s own dialectics, thriving as they do in the con-
testatory spaces between warring universalism and particularism or between
local and global contexts. These interstices are, for example, the sites Ursula
K. Heise links to “eco-​­cosmopolitanism” from an emphatically planetary per-
spective.50 Similarly to some versions of neo-​­cosmopolitanism, a few models
of planetarity align themselves openly with a “modified universalism” or new
humanisms, affirming the role of shared human experiences and values across
cultures. Finally, not unlike cosmopolitan ethics, planetarity puts much stock
in encounter with difference, in recognition and toleration of alterity, and in
reciprocity and translation as seminal to any peaceful, cross-​­cultural, and
transnational interaction.51
The differences between planetarity and twenty-​­ first-​­
century cosmo-
politanism, however, should not be discounted. Though ancient and recent
cosmopolitanisms take into account behaviors, politics, and lifestyles and thus
attend to phenomenological being in the world, cosmopolitanism manifests
Introduction xxiii

itself chiefly as a philosophical enterprise whose cardinal thrust is ethical and

hermeneutical. It is a kind of knowledge and interpretation of the world, a way
one mentally processes environments, assesses them, and endorses attitudes
in them. In contrast, the planetary reaches beyond the hermeneutical to the
ontological. Planetarity is not, as Susan Stanford Friedman says, just an episte-
mology, merely an inquisitive forma mentis, a mindset eager to take the world
in.52 Planetarity is also in and of this world, its modality of being, describing
both a phenomenological perception and a new theater of being whose nov-
elty is becoming more conspicuous every day. “You wonder,” writes Bharati
Mukherjee in her 2004 novel The Tree Bride, “if everyone and everything in
the world is intimately related. . . . You pluck a thread and it leads to . . . every-
where.” And she goes on to ask: “Is there a limit to relatedness?”53 If there is
one, it is that of the cosmos itself, with planetarity both indexing and probing
the world as a relational domain. Thus, sympathetic as we certainly remain to
cosmopolitanism’s spectacular resurgence in critical theory, we define “planet”
and “planetary” as a noun and an attribute signifying and qualifying, respec-
tively, a multicentric and pluralizing, “actually existing” worldly structure
of relatedness critically keyed to non-​­totalist, non-​­homogenizing, and anti-​
h
­ egemonic operations typically and polemically subtended by an eco-​­logic.
Here, the eco-​­logical is not a subsidiary appendage, for its logic signals
another departure from new cosmopolitan theory. Unlike the latter, which
spotlights solely human and largely discursive cultural and intergroup rela-
tionships, planetarity opens itself as well to the nonhuman, the organic, and
the inorganic in all of their richness. Informed by an ecocritical perspective,
it affirms the planet as both a biophysical and a new cultural base for human
flourishing. Accordingly, planetarization and its outcome, planetarity, trace
a three-​­layered process whereby (1) the earth qua material planet becomes
visible to theory and its abstractions as the non-​­negotiable ecological ground
for human and nonhuman life; (2) individuals and societies of the earth as
cosmo-​­polis heed an imperative to “worlding,” that is, the creation of an ethi-
cal, “diversal,” and relational ensemble so as to guarantee the survival of all
species; and (3) the phenomenal earth seeps into our conceptual elaborations
and ways of seeing the world, thus refounding our interpretative categories,
our aesthetics, and our cultural lives.
Axial to the planetarity paradigm are the notion and practice of steward-
ship in the world commons. The regulative principle is either largely absent
from or suspect in cosmopolitan debates, where it raises uncomfortable
associations with paternalism, colonialism, and monopoly capital. In point
of fact, theories of cosmopolitanism are constantly plagued by—­much as
they struggle to undo and reweave—­the historically close and forever taxing
relation between, on the one side, cosmopolitan overtures and Orientalist
curiosity, and, on the other side, cosmopolitan contact and colonial control.54
In the ecocritically informed discourse of planetarity, however, “stewardship”
may be better positioned to take on politically less fraught connotations. It
xxiv Amy J. Elias and Christian Moraru

connotes both an ethics of care for both organic and inorganic planetary
resources and a social stance mindful to conserve cultural legacies. At the
end of the day, the most controversial aspect of planetary stewardship may
not be its paternalistic-​­colonialist disposition but rather its anthropocen-
tric bent, insofar as it implies that humans hold (and deserve) the privileged
role of stewards among animate and inanimate entities that are all together
entangled in planetary relation. Stewardship as we conceive it here, however,
would be both a recognition of and a counter to the negative effects of the
Anthropocene and anthropocentric effects in a global environment.55
In asserting a “world commons” as stewardship’s theater of operations,
planetarity also deviates from cosmopolitanism’s well-​­trodden geographies,
itineraries, and spatial fantasies. Cosmopolitan’s champions frequently talk
about travel and contact, border-​­ crossing, and negotiating difference in
unfamiliar territories. In contrast, planetarity’s proponents discuss how to
make the world a commonly familiar space, a shared resource, and a home
for all. Furthermore, the world commons so grasped are not universalist,
homogeneous, monocultural, or monological. They imply a complex plan-
etary network including nested but nonhierarchical cultural and material
ecosystems—­commutual constellations, sites, and forms of life ranging in
scale but acknowledging, serving, and honoring a shared, affectively and
materially interrelated, inhabited world space.
Planetary relatedness is thus bioconnective. Not a monologue but an echo,
speaking to us not through a mouthpiece but as through a sonar, cultural
discourse and identity come about through the connection of bodies in space
and time in the post–­Cold War, planetary age. They surface more relationally
and dialogically every day, according to the logic of the Greek dià: always
belatedly, obliquely, by a detour through the world’s distant or just “differ-
ent” places, intervals, and styles. Reading planetarily, then, is necessarily
reading comparatively, and this is a main reason we are witnessing, within
critical theory, a resurgence of interest in translation as comparative reading
and cultural interaction.56
Actively worlding the world, making it a world of relations, and attend-
ing to them: what we are talking about when we talk about the planet in
these terms is (1) the planetary configuration or ontological condition the
planet brings about and (2) an approach or cluster of approaches befitting
this condition’s cultural-​­aesthetic symptomatology, an apposite understand-
ing of virtual and physical spatiality that constitutes the lived circumstance of
interrelatedness. While tribal, feudal, consanguinean, and kindred relation-
ships are usually worked out in face-​­to-​­face relations or through established
community networks and protocols ordinarily closed to outsiders, woven
together into the classical, territorialized, geographically bounded Gemein-
schaft or “community” type of human association, the relationships typical
of planetary contemporaneousness operate across space, launched as they are
both from nearby and afar. In that, they are no less concrete or life-​­enhancing,
Introduction xxv

for they render the planet a cultural geography of distance management, a

platform of survival, an aesthetic trope connoting these attributes, and a criti-
cal lens through which to evaluate their shape, meaning, and impact. Now
that more and more of us are awaking to the fragility of our common world
ecosystems as well as to the tenuousness of some of their immediate, national
allegiances, a theoretically plausible and critically effective, social and aes-
thetic model turning on planetary relation is, we think, a matter of urgency.

Planetarity and the Bioconnective Aesthetic

A caveat is in order at this point: the planetary culture notion should be taken
as heuristic rather than deterministic. The function we assign it for now is
cautiously exploratory; we posit the planetary as an absolutely defining and
sole context neither for cultural production nor for its interpretation. As a
new episteme, and in contrast to well-​­known globalization models, the plan-
etary is not, to us at least, a one-​­world, genetically determinant, uniform, and
homogenizing totality. Poised to forge a culture of sharing and participation,
harbingers of planetarity have not yet erected a stable and wholly crystallized
sustentation for an ecumenically and equitably enjoyed, economic or sociocul-
tural commonwealth. Such an ethical configuration of material planetarity is
still to be adequately thought out and built, which is one reason a sufficiently
consolidated ecoculture is still on the horizon. Nonetheless, if, “soft” and
“loose” as it may be, planetarity furnishes the cultural-​­discursive matrix of
emerging art, then the dialogical and the relational may well encapsulate the
operations and values of a planetary imaginary and of its thematic-​­aesthetic
protocols. Moraru has observed that the post-​­1989 historical intermezzo of
“cosmodernism” translates, inside and outside the United States, primarily
into an imaginary, a way of picturing the world. As the contributors to The
Planetary Turn notice repeatedly, the planetary imaginary currently making
inroads across the arts shows a predilection for certain themes—­particularly
the arche-​­thematic “world”—­specifically for a sheaf of metathemes deployed
with characteristically growing frequency around the quasi-​­ omnipresent
world subject and its worldly subcategories. And, while a distinctively plan-
etary stylistics is still in the offing, isomorphic to this geothematics seems to
be a relational aesthetics visible in artists’ keen attention to at-​­distance inter-
action, intertextuality, remediation, mash-​­up, recycling, and quotation. As
marginalia to such encodings and interpolations of planetarity, our book asks
(1) if a geocultural arena of aesthetic production is taking shape in which
the various discourse-​­engendering functions, narratives, and epistemologi-
cal tools historically attributed to the operations of the nation-​­state model
are now being put to the test, broken, or refashioned; (2) if the twenty-​­first
century is witnessing the rise of a broader, postnational formation, which is
the planet; and (3) if the latter is thus becoming a dominant environment,
xxvi Amy J. Elias and Christian Moraru

onto-​­ethical ground, and conceptual-​­methodological frame of reference for

proliferating socio-​­aesthetics and critical exercise.
As a material and analytic master framework rather than a fully con-
solidated system, the planetary is capacious and integrative; it has its ebbs
and flows; it transforms and surprises. In keeping with the etymology of the
ancient Greek planaō, the planetary remains shifty, cannot help turning, liter-
ally and linguistically, and so it is neither an ontological nor a hermeneutic
given, let alone a completed project. The planetary does not stamp all art
objects or all artworks equally, nor does it elucidate them completely. To us,
the planet is not only a new cultural landscape throughout which people
and their sustaining projections wander, connect, and reproduce, but also a
“wondering” domain of twists and turns, perplexities, inquiries, and flashes
of insight. Our overall objective is to start mapping this expanse, that is, to
begin to read the planetary as a repertoire of aesthetic routines structurally
presupposing and further stimulating relationality.
This reading prompts at least five categories of query. First, what are plan-
etarity’s ethics, politics, and theories of value? Which are the benchmarks,
yardsticks, and tools that supply the basis and instruments of planetary criti-
cism? Second, in what ways is this geoaesthetic condition of planetarity new,
and how does it rehearse or critically move beyond the forms and tenets of
earlier cultural-​­aesthetic theories or historical movements such as modern-
ism and postmodernism? What new vocabulary do we need to talk about the
planetary’s distinctive nature? Third, to what extent are geoaesthetic spaces
familiar or compatible with the traditional cartographies, analytic grids, nar-
rative recipes, measuring and scalar units, and aggregation entities recognized
by “methodological nationalism” and, in particular, by literary history?57
Fourth, what would a “planetary art” be like? What would mark an unfold-
ing planetary aesthetics, and in what kind of stylistics, if any, are planetarity’s
relationality and dialogics couched? How might such an aesthetics reframe
classical values such as authenticity, originality, and novelty? What do we
mean when we claim that the planet animates work X or that author Y oper-
ates within a planetary horizon or outlook? Fifth and finally, what is the
relation between the universal and the particular, geoculture and local cul-
ture, place and planet in artworks stemming from or interpreted through a
planetary aesthetic? How does the planetary paradigm’s relational-​­dialogical
poiesis play out across discourses, styles, and media? How does “world art”
promote dialogue among and between people, institutions, traditions, and
forms? How are we to receive, decipher, and distribute planetary works?

Planetary Theory and Critical Praxis

In answering these questions, our contributors take steps toward (1) theoriz-
ing the planetary condition; (2) devising and testing modalities of reading
Introduction xxvii

aesthetic and cultural symptoms of planetarity in a fashion germane to the

planetary ethics of relationality; and (3) working out, albeit independently
and, for the most part, inductively, a reasonably functional and sufficiently
detailed model of the planetary aesthetic and its geocultural modus operandi.
With this threefold end in sight, we lead off with John D. Pizer’s “Planetary
Poetics: World Literature, Goethe, Novalis, and Yoko Tawada’s Translational
Writing,” which addresses the recent planetary turn against the backdrop of
eighteenth-​­century German criticism. Pizer examines the tripartite transla-
tion schemes of Goethe and Novalis to stress that Goethe’s “world literature”
model, so perennially influential in comparative studies, was grounded in
a largely Eurocentric literary cosmopolitanism that we might associate
nowadays with a similarly oriented globalism. Novalis, on the other hand,
envisioned, in Pizer’s reading, a proto-​­ Weltliteratur in literary fragments
that introduced an intermediary, collective, or local level of human contacts
that subtly shifted transnational literature from a global cosmopolitanism
of cultural interchanges to one similar to contemporary planetary relation-
ality. Today, Japanese-​­German author Yoko Tawada enacts such planetary
consciousness as sensitivity to translation issues in a way that proves, Pizer
asserts, more consonant with Novalis’s pre-​­nationalist cosmopolitanism than
with Goethe’s Weltliteratur.
Focusing, in the next chapter, less on the historical genealogy of plan-
etarity and more on its dimensionality, Hester Blum examines the mutual
investment of planetary and oceanic studies in the recalibration of the static
optics and chronometrics of land. “Terraqueous Planet: The Case for Oceanic
Studies” explains how the sea nulls time and space metaphors and abstrac-
tions imposed by global capital and nation-​­sponsored, landed geographies,
and, further, how authors like Henry David Thoreau and Herman Melville
endorse alternate, materialist, and labor-​­based understandings of time and
space that are so important to our own planetary moment. Both planetary
and oceanic studies reveal, Blum concludes, “the artificiality and intellectual
limitations of national, political, linguistic, physiological, or temporal bound-
aries,” as well as the risks incurred by a thinking that, wedded too deeply to
land-​­derived tropes and calculations, abstracts earth and sea from human
toil, employment, and daily struggle for survival.
In “The Commons  .  .  . and Digital Planetarity,” Amy J. Elias aligns the
planetary with “the commons” and implicitly offers a rejoinder to the
Spivakian poststructuralist ethics of alterity. Elias investigates how the “com-
mons,” as a social space organized on the model of neither the nation-​­state
nor the free market, is now brought in line with the idea of the Internet as a
new planetary collective. Reviewing key theoretical claims about commons
construction within the fields of public economy, digital media, and affect
studies, she contends that, because fully functioning common pool resources
demand dialogic relationality among users, such theories fail to account for
the necessarily ethical foundations of those resources. For, Elias demonstrates,
xxviii Amy J. Elias and Christian Moraru

conceptions of human agency, ethics, and law—­all suspect in contemporary

digital theory for some time—­are or should be central to the construction
and maintenance of any planetary digital commons.
“The Possibility of Cyber-​­Placelessness: Digimodernism on a Planetary
Platform,” Alan Kirby’s contribution to The Planetary Turn, furthers Elias’s
inquiry into the digital by nuancing the “digimodernist” coinage he intro-
duced in his 2009 book. As we learn, digimodernism is a descriptor of the
present stage, which replaces, Kirby ventures, a now obsolete postmodern
paradigm and is characterized by the digitizing of the textual artifact and
the technologizing of cultural expressions. Tying into “cyber-​­placelessness,”
digimodernism allows Kirby to refute Spivak’s claims that planetarity should
be set in opposition to computerization. The local, he proposes, can be rein-
scribed within a globalizing platform by way of a planetary dialectic.
Raoul Eshelman’s “Archetypologies of the Human: Planetary Performa-
tism, Cinematic Relationality, and Iñárritu’s Babel” directly takes on the
planetarity views Spivak articulated in Death of a Discipline. Not unlike
her, Eshelman is skeptical of traditional humanism. His solution, however, is
“performatism,” the new, anthropologically founded episteme he proposed
in his 2008 book. Performatist planetarity, Eshelman argues, casts light on
the human as a unified, biosocial construct motivated by the nondiscursive
modes of mimesis and intuition. Its dominant technique in artworks is “dou-
ble framing.” This procedure takes a narrative scene or detail and correlates
it to the mimetic logic of the whole work so as to manipulate audiences into
subscribing to the claims of an artificial, closed construct. Laying out the
performative as a textual-​­interpretive category over and against Spivak’s dis-
cursive figure, Eshelman illustrates how performatism structures Alejandro
Iñárritu’s film Babel (2006) and, more broadly, how a performatism-​­guided
planetary approach might work.
Also dealing with film, Laurie Edson’s “Planetarity, Performativity, Rela-
tionality: Claire Denis’s Chocolat and Cinematic Ethics” too trades on
Spivak’s planetarity to drive home the point that the relational ethics of plan-
etarity is well poised to replace globalization’s treatment of singularities. Her
patient examination of Claire Denis’s 1988 film Chocolat dwells on rela-
tionality, performativity, “learning from below,” “minor” transnationalism,
horizontal networks, and related issues and phenomena instrumental to the
planetary.
In “Gilgamesh’s Planetary Turns,” Wai Chee Dimock seeks to rethink
world literature within the paradigm the planetary turn has made avail-
able to literary studies. As she observes, revisiting the venerable notion from
the standpoint of shared planetary time and space changes our perceptions
of world literature from a set of texts in a static canon to mobile cultural
material—­tropes, motifs, themes, and texts in intercontinental circulation.
Focusing on the ways the Gilgamesh epic has been recycled throughout his-
tory in different cultural locations, she explicates how literature and ecology
Introduction xxix

are both co-​­articulated with processes of decomposition and recomposition

and how planetary life continuously works archetypal tropes into cultural
productions.
Paul Giles warns, however, in “Writing for the Planet: Contemporary
Australian Fiction,” against what might be described as a “reglobalization”
of planetarity, namely, against the notion’s lapsing back into a globalist-​
­essentialist trope liable to erase geographical and historical differences among
the world’s cultures once again. A theoretical-​­analytic stay against globalizing
U.S. market capitalism, the planetary is, in Giles’s assessment, also laden with
features of the American romantic worldview, and planetary critics would be
well advised to keep the term’s ambiguities in mind. Against Miyoshi’s notion
of the planet as unifying totality, planetary consciousness needs to be, Giles
further counsels, more tightly bound up with, and supportive of, the plural-
izing and “disorienting” perspective of cultural and historical “crosscurrents
and crossovers” such as those traced in the nineteenth-​­century prose of Edgar
Allan Poe and Melville as well as in twentieth-​­and twenty-​­first-​­century Aus-
tralian literature and art criticism of Bernard Smith, J. G. A. Pocock, Tim
Winton, Gail Jones, Christos Tsiolkas, and Alexis Wright. These authors are
exemplary in that, in Giles’s view, they disrupt conventional notions of social
scale and human agency and shed light on planetarity as a theater of unequal
cultural traffic and barterings.
The Planetary Turn’s next chapter, Bertrand Westphal’s “The White
Globe and the Paradoxical Cartography of Berger & Berger: A Meditation
on Deceptive Evidence,” specifically tackles the idea of “globe” as totality.
In his reflections on Laurent P. Berger and Cyrille Berger’s 2001 sculpture
Astre blanc (White Star), Westphal raises questions about the nature of the
blank map, uncharted space, and the planet’s depopulated areas. In the crit-
ic’s interpretation, whiteness adduces in Berger & Berger’s works “deceptive
evidence,” a saturation rather than a negation of meaning, which nonethe-
less evokes images of emptiness, cataclysmic decimation, and “white sands.”
Applying the geocritical method formulated and tested in La géocritique:
Réel, fiction, espace (2007) and elsewhere, Westphal understands geographi-
cal space as dynamic, mobile, and transgressive. Thus, he helps us discover
the complex chromatics of a planet whose multiple colors fade out in the very
attempt to colorize it on our geographical and political maps.
“Comparing Contemporary Arts; or, Figuring Planetarity,” Terry Smith’s
chapter, articulates a vision of twenty-​­first-​­century world art as characterized
by multiple, antinomial temporalities. He argues thus for a current move
from modernity through postmodernity, contemporaneity, and planetarity.
However, this historical trajectory does not rehearse traditional periodiza-
tion. Instead, it foregrounds a “splitting” of modernity complete with uneven
developments occurring at different rates and times throughout the world.
Smith’s critical narrative identifies three currents in post-​­1989 art: remod-
ernist, retro-​­sensationalist, and spectacularist tendencies flow into the first
xxx Amy J. Elias and Christian Moraru

while aesthetic expression following nationalist/identitarian priorities and

Do-​­It-​­Yourself art constitute the second and third. In these contexts, plan-
etary figuration comes into play on a number of levels, including world-​­scales
of vision enabled by technology, an aesthetics of disappearance, and the by
now ubiquitous imprint of “worlds within the World.”
In “Beyond the Flaming Walls of the World: Fantasy, Alterity, and the
Postnational Constellation,” Robert T. Tally Jr. maintains that through its
estrangement techniques, the “discursive modality” of fantasy undercuts
the conventions and standards of beauty embedded in national literatures
and draws the reader imaginatively into the world and beyond it. Unlike the
historical novel, which writers such as Walter Scott saw as serving national
interests, fantasy fundamentally attends to planetary otherness and in so
doing sets in train an otherworldly literary cartography of the postnational
world-​­system. In his argument, the critic pays special attention to how the
1968 Time magazine “Earthrise” photo embodied this otherworldly view of
the planet and became the focus of science fiction and fantasy literature as
well as the master figure for a utopianism linked to similar meditations on
the impossible.
Our book’s closing chapter, Moraru’s “Decompressing Culture: Three
Steps toward a Geomethodology,” is something of a hybrid. In the genre’s
formally and intellectually exploratory spirit, “Decompressing Culture”
blends a Deleuzian-​­Guattarian discourse of worldly territoriality, Levina-
sian ethics and concerns of space technology, analysis of post-​­9/11 fiction,
and a more provocatively couched axiomatics so as to compose a manifesto
of sorts and thus enter a plea on behalf of a certain algorithm of “plan-
etary reading.” A systematic description of this interpretive model, he tells
us, is as necessary as a strong emphasis on the model’s urgency, hence the
rhetorical shifts of Moraru’s presentation throughout his piece. Moraru enu-
merates some key planetary themes: the greater elsewhere and the planet
itself; remote spaces, customs, and their “others” represented as intrinsic or
internal to closer (“our”) places, groups, and their habits; a whole gamut of
time-​­space constriction games and the bioconnective imaginings they spawn;
and a new sense of togetherness and interdependence the resulting planetary
iconology in turn endorses. After laying out the components or steps of his
geomethodology, he applies it to works by Joseph O’Neill, Orhan Pamuk,
Mircea Cărtărescu, and other novelists, and goes on to conclude by pinpoint-
ing the ethical consequences of planetary reading.

Notes

1. See Ulrich Beck, World Risk Society (Cambridge, Eng.: Polity; Malden,
Mass.: Blackwell, 1999).
2. The literature on post-​­postmodernism is now threatening to rival in vol-
ume the archive of postmodern theory, with scholarship by Mary Holland,
Introduction xxxi

Amy J. Elias, Timotheus Vermeulen, and Robin van den Akker (proponents of
“metamodernism”), Alison Gibbons, Caren Irr, Leerom Medovoi, Rachel Adams,
Min Hyoung Song, Bharati Mukherjee, and others steadily adding to it. Works
addressing the question “What comes after postmodernism?” include Jeffrey T.
Nealon’s Post-​­Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Just-​­in-​­Time Capital-
ism (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2012); a post-​­millennial special
issue of symploke (12, nos. 1–­2 [2004)]; a College English cluster of essays titled
“Twentieth-​­Century Literature in the New Century: A Symposium” (64, no. 1
[September 2001]: 9–­33); and a Twentieth-​­Century Literature special issue edited
by Andrew Hoberek, “After Postmodernism: Form and History in Contemporary
American Fiction” (53, no. 3 [Fall 2007]). See also Timothy S. Murphy, “To Have
Done with Postmodernism: A Plea (or Provocation) for Globalization Studies,” in
symploke 12, nos. 1–­2 (2004): 20–­34; Robert L. McLaughlin, “Post-​­Postmodern
Discontent: Contemporary Fiction and the Social World,” in symploke 12, nos.
1–­2 (2004): 53–­68; Brian McHale, “What Was Postmodernism?” in Electronic
Book Review, December 20, 2007, http://​www​.electronicbookreview​.com/
thread/fictionspresent/tense; Christian Moraru, Cosmodernism: American Narra-
tive, Late Globalization, and the New Cultural Imaginary (Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 2011); Neil Brooks and Josh Toth, eds., The Mourning After:
Attending the Wake of Postmodernism (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007); and Terry
Smith, Contemporary Art: World Currents (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Pren-
tice Hall, 2011). In “Thirteen Ways of Passing Postmodernism: Introduction
to Focus,” 3–­4, an essay introducing his guest-​­edited American Book Review
issue (34, no. 4 [May–­June 2013]) on “metamodernism,” Moraru shows that the
post-​­postmodern debate has reached the planetary stage. Additional evidence is
provided, along these lines, by Narrative in the “Postmodernist Fiction: East and
West” issue coedited by Wang Ning and Brian McHale (21, no. 3 [2013]).
3. Ulrich Beck and Edgar Grande, “Varieties of Second Modernity: The Cos-
mopolitan Turn in Social and Political Theory and Research,” British Journal of
Sociology 61, no. 3 (2010): 412.
4. See Christian Moraru, “The Global Turn in Critical Theory,” symploke 9,
no. 1–­2 (2001): 80–­92. David Held advances the “strong globalization thesis” in
the “Afterword” to his anthology A Globalizing World? Culture, Economics, Pol-
itics (New York: Routledge in association with The Open University, 2000), 171.
Christopher J. Kollmeyer takes up Held’s weak/strong globalization distinction
in “Globalization, Class Compromise, and American Exceptionalism: Political
Change in 16 Advanced Capitalist Countries,” published in Critical Sociology 29,
no. 3 (October 2003): 369–­91. On “late globalization” and its cultural relevance
in world and U.S. context, see, among others, Moraru, Cosmodernism, 33–­37.
5. Nicholas A. Ashford and Ralph P. Hall, Technology, Globalization, and Sus-
tainable Development: Transforming the Industrial State (New Haven, Conn.:
Yale University Press, 2011), 4–­5. For useful and succinct introductions to global-
ization, see Jürgen Osterhammel and Niels P. Petersson, Globalization: A Short
History, trans. Dona Geyer (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009);
Manfred Steger, Globalization: A Very Short Introduction, 3rd ed. (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2013); and Akira Iriye and Jürgen Osterhammel, eds.,
Global Interdependence: The World after 1945 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press), 2013.
xxxii Amy J. Elias and Christian Moraru

6. Nick Bisley, in Rethinking Globalization (Basingstoke, Eng.: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2007), 6, 30, outlines what he sees as the three key engines of global-
ization: economics, sociology, and politics (23). Bisley lists a number of theoretical
models for post–­World War II global development including, for economic glo-
balization, those of Samir Amin’s Re-​­Reading the Postwar Period (New York:
Monthly Review, 1994) and of Alex Callinicos, ed., “Europe on the Edge,” a
special issue of International Socialism 63 (1994). On sociological globalization,
Bisley references David Held and Anthony McGrew, eds., The Global Transfor-
mations Reader: An Introduction to the Globalization Debate, 2nd ed. (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); and Manuel Castells’s The Information Age
trilogy: The Rise of the Network Society, Vol. 1: The Information Age: Economy,
Society, and Culture (Oxford, Eng.: Blackwell, 1996); The Power of Identity, Vol.
2, The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture, 2nd ed. (Hoboken, N.J.:
Wiley-​­Blackwell, 2009); and End of Millennium, Vol. 3, The Information Age:
Economy, Society, and Culture (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley-​­Blackwell, 1998). Discuss-
ing political globalization, he cites, among others, Ankie Hoogvelt, Globalization
and the Postcolonial World: The New Political Economy of Development, 2nd
ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); and Randall D. Germain,
Globalization and Its Critics: Perspectives from Political Economy (Basingstoke,
Eng.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000). Germain’s more recent book on world admin-
istration and finance, Global Politics and Financial Governance (Basingstoke,
Eng.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), also deserves mention.
7. Immanuel Wallerstein, Geopolitics and Geoculture: Essays on the Changing
World-​­System (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press; Paris: Maison des
Sciences de l’Homme, 1991), 140. Wallerstein’s autopoietic globalization is artic-
ulated in his books The Modern World-​­System, volumes I–­IV, all reissued in 2011
by the University of California Press; see too Immanuel Wallerstein’s Utopistics,
or Historical Choices of the Twenty-​­First Century (New York: New, 1998).
8. See Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the
Origins of Our Times (New York: Verso, 2010), originally published in 1994.
9. Allan Cochrane and Kathy Pain, “Chapter 1: A Globalizing Society?” in A
Globalizing World? Culture, Economics, Politics, ed. David Held (New York:
Routledge in association with The Open University, 2000), 23.
10. In the context of media studies, for instance, this perspective informs Don
Slater’s New Media, Development and Globalization: Making Connections in the
Global South (Cambridge, Eng.: Polity, 2013).
11. See, for example, Martin Albrow, The Global Age: State and Society
Beyond Modernity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997).
12. Jean-​­Pierre Warnier, La mondialisation de la culture, 3rd ed. (Paris: La
Découverte, 2004), 32. Also see Moraru, introduction to Cosmodernism, 15–­75.
13. On Pierre Chaunu’s univers cloisonné, most relevant is the author’s book
Histoire, science sociale: La durée, l’espace et l’homme à l’époque moderne
(Paris: Société d’édition d’enseignement supérieur, 1974).
14. Ken Jowitt, New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1992). Zygmunt Bauman refers to Jowitt’s book
in Globalization: The Human Consequences (New York: Columbia Univer-
sity Press, 1998), 59. For Tzvetan Todorov, see Le nouveau désordre mondial:
Réflexions d’un Européen (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2003). On the “chaos” of the
Introduction xxxiii

contemporary world, the reader might consult Amin Maalouf’s recent book Le
dérèglement du monde (Paris: Grasset & Fasquelle, 2009); and Immanuel Waller-
stein’s article “New Revolts Against the System,” New Left Review, 2nd series,
18 (November–December 2002): 37. Joseph Stiglitz develops his critique most
famously in Globalization and Its Discontents (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003).
Zillah Eisenstein’s views have been set out in Against Empire: Feminisms, Rac-
ism, and the West (New York: Zed Books, 2004).
15. Allan Cochrane and Kathy Pain refer to Paul Q. Hirst and Grahame Thomp-
son’s 1996 book Globalization in Question: The International Economy and the
Possibility of Governance, 2nd ed. (1999). “Planetary dysphoria,” Emily Apter
explains in the closing chapters of her latest book, is a “geo-​­psychoanalytic”
concept that captures the essence of our planet’s “dark ecology” or “state of
the world at its most depressed and unruhig [restless], awaiting the triumphant
revenge of acid, oil, and dust.” See Apter’s Against World Literature: On the Poli-
tics of Untranslatability (London: Verso, 2013), 338, 341.
16. We refer the reader to the essays in Frank J. Lechner and John Boli, The
Globalization Reader (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000); and in Fredric Jameson
and Masao Miyoshi, eds., The Cultures of Globalization (Durham, N.C.: Duke
University Press, 1998). Some critics point to a “postglobal age.” See, in this regard,
Ulrike Bergermann, Isabell Otto, and Gabriele Schabacher, eds., Das Planetarische:
Kultur-​­Technik-​­Medien in postglobalen Zeitalter (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2010).
17. See Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on Sep-
tember 11 and Related Dates (New York: Verso, 2002), and his First as Tragedy,
Then as Farce (New York: Verso, 2009); Douglas Kellner, “Globalization, Terror-
ism, and Democracy: 9/11 and Its Aftermath,” http://​pages.gseis.ucla​.edu/faculty/
kellner/essays/-​­globalizationterroraftermath.pdf; as well as Kellner’s From 9/11
to Terror War: Dangers of the Bush Legacy (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Little-
field, 2003).
18. See Phillip E. Wegner, Life between Two Deaths, 1989–­2001: U.S. Culture
in the Long Nineties (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009), especially the
introduction.
19. See, for example, Terhi Rantanen, The Media and Globalization (Lon-
don: Sage Publications, 2004); William Uricchio, We Europeans? Media,
Representations, Identities (Bristol, Eng.: Intellect, 2009); Tanner Mirrlees,
Global Entertainment Media: Between Cultural Imperialism and Cultural Glo-
balization (New York: Routledge, 2013).
20. McKenzie Wark, Virtual Geography: Living with Global Media Events
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994) and Telesthesia: Communication,
Culture, and Class (Cambridge, Eng.: Polity, 2012); Paul Virilio, The Informa-
tion Bomb (New York: Verso, 2006); Douglas Kellner, Media Spectacle and
Insurrection, 2011: From the Arab Uprisings to Occupy Everywhere (London:
Bloomsbury Academic, 2011); Richard Grusin, Premediation: Affect and Medi-
ality after 9/11 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Sources discussing the
relation of media and technology to globalization are myriad and range through
political positions and disciplinary contexts. A few examples might include
David Tabachnick and Toivo Koivukoski, Globalization, Technology, and Phi-
losophy (Albany: SUNY Press, 2004); Kevin Robins and Frank Webster, Times
of the Technoculture: From the Information Society to the Virtual Life (London:
xxxiv Amy J. Elias and Christian Moraru

Routledge, 1999); and Kaushalesh Lal, Information and Communication Tech-

nologies in the Context of Globalization: Evidence from Developing Countries
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
21. Manuel Castells, Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in
the Internet Age (Cambridge, Eng.: Polity, 2012); Jennifer Earl and Katrina Kim-
port, Digitally Enabled Social Change: Activism in the Internet Age (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 2011).
22. See, for instance, Pico Iyer’s The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and
the Search for Home (New York: Random House, 2000) and Thomas L. Fried-
man’s books The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization (New
York: Picador, 2012) and The World Is Flat 3.0: A Brief History of the Twenty-​
­ irst Century (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2006).
F
23. Saskia Sassen takes on “the development of new jurisdictional geographies”
in “Neither Global nor National: Novel Assemblages of Territory, Authority, and
Rights,” published in Ethics and Global Politics 1, no. 1–­2 (2008): 61–­79.
24. Martin Albrow, “Who Rules the Global Rule Makers?” in La Vie des
idées (November 3, 2011). The text is also available in English at the mirror site
“Books and Ideas,” http://​www​.booksandideas​.net/Who-​­Rules-​­the-​­Global-​­Rule
-​­Makers​.html.
25. Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writ-
ing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press
of Harvard University Press, 1996); Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, eds.,
The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology (Athens: University of
Georgia Press, 1996).
26. Basarab Nicolescu, Théorèmes poétiques (Paris: Rocher, 1994).
27. Yi-​­Fu Tuan, Cosmos and Hearth: A Cosmopolite’s Viewpoint (Minne-
apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 187–­88; Gérard Raulet, Critical
Cosmology: On Nations and Globalization—­A Philosophical Essay (Lanham,
Md.: Lexington Books, 2005), especially 65–­ 80; Félix Guattari, Chaosmose
(Paris: Galilée, 1992); Anne Phillips, Multiculturalism without Culture (Prince­
ton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007), 42–­72.
28. Amy J. Elias, “The Dialogical Avant-​­Garde: Relational Aesthetics and Time
Ecologies in Only Revolutions and TOC,” Contemporary Literature 53, no. 4
(Winter 2012): 749–­50.
29. For the concept of potenza, see Antonio Negri, Art and Multitude: Nine
Letters on Art, Followed by Metamorphoses: Art and Immaterial Labor, trans.
Ed Emery (London, Eng.: Polity, 2011), 30. Maurizia Boscagli translates Negri’s
potenza as “strength” in Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State,
trans. Maurizia Boscagli, with a New Foreword by Michael Hardt (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2009). Boscagli’s note on p. 337 defines potenza
as “strength . . . resid[ing] in the desire of the multitude.”
30. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Imperative to Re-​­ Imagine the Planet,”
originally published in Imperatives to Re-​­ Imagine the Planet/Imperative zur
Neuerfindung des Planeten, ed. Willi Goetschel (Vienna: Passagen, 1999).
Reprinted in An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011), 335–­50.
31. Spivak, “Imperative to Re-​­Imagine the Planet,” 348.
32. Ibid., 349.
Introduction xxxv

33. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Colum-
bia University Press, 2005), 72–­73. For earlier formulations of this idea, see her
A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999) and “Imperative to Re-​
I­ magine the Planet.”
34. Neil Turnbull, “The Ontological Consequences of Copernicus: Global
Being in the Planetary World,” Theory, Culture & Society 23, no. 1 (2006): 133.
35. Masao Miyoshi, “Turn to the Planet: Literature, Diversity, and Totality,”
Comparative Literature 53, no. 4 (Fall 2001): 295.
36. Ibid., 296.
37. Some of these titles include Moraru’s Cosmodernism; Ursula K. Heise’s
by now classic Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagina-
tion of the Global (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Wai Chee Dimock’s
articles “Literature for the Planet,” PMLA 116, no. 1 (January 2001): 173–­88,
and “Scales of Aggregation: Prenational, Subnational, Transnational,” American
Literary History 18, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 219–­28 as well as her trailblaz-
ing book, Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008); Amy J. Elias, “Interactive
Cosmopolitanism and Collaborative Technologies: New Foundations for Global
Literary History,” New Literary History 39, no. 3 (Summer 2008): 705–­25; Joni
Adamson, “American Literature and Film from a Planetary Perspective: Teach-
ing Space, Time, and Scale,” Transformations 21, no. 1 (Spring–Summer 2010):
23–­41; Frances Ferguson, “Planetary Literary History: The Place of the Text,”
New Literary History 39, no. 3 (Summer 2008): 657–­84; Susan Stanford Fried-
man, “Planetarity: Musing Modernist Studies,” Modernism/Modernity 17, no. 3
(September 2010): 471–­99; Caren Irr, “Toward the World Novel: Genre Shifts in
Twentieth-​­First-​­Century Expatriate Fiction,” American Literary History 23, no. 3
(Fall 2011): 660–­79; Leerom Medovoi, “ ‘Terminal Crisis?’ From the Worlding of
American Literature to World-​­System Literature,” American Literary History 23,
no. 3 (Fall 2011): 643–­59; Mark Poster, “Global Media and Culture,” New Liter-
ary History 39, no. 3 (Summer 2008): 685–­703; Mary Louise Pratt, “Planetary
Longings: Sitting in the Light of the Great Solar TV,” in World Writing: Poet-
ics, Ethics, Globalization, ed. Mary Gallagher, 207–­23 (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 2008); and Min Hyoung Song, “Becoming Planetary,” American
Literary History 23, no. 3 (Fall 2011): 555–­73.
38. Ulrich Beck, What Is Globalization? trans. Patrick Camiller (Cambridge,
Eng.: Polity, 2000), 9–­10. Otherwise treading carefully, Beck is getting here on a
slippery slope toward a notion of the world as fully integrated “totality.”
39. Marshall Brown, “Globalism or Globalization?” Modern Language Quar-
terly 68, no. 2 (June 2007): 143. Brown’s definitions can be inconsistent (see, e.g.,
137).
40. Roland Robertson, “Social Theory, Cultural Relativity, and the Problem
of Globality,” in Culture, Globalization, and the World-​­System: Contemporary
Conditions for the Representation of Identity, ed. Anthony D. King (Minneapo-
lis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 73.
41. Min Hyoung Song, “Becoming Planetary,” 568. Song draws from Carl
Schmitt’s controversial The Nomos of the Earth, Paul Gilroy’s Postcolonial Mel-
ancholia, and Hardt and Negri’s three-​­volume opus on global-​­era multitudes.
xxxvi Amy J. Elias and Christian Moraru

42. Warnier, La mondialisation de la culture, 107.

43. Amanda Anderson, “Cosmopolitanism, Universalism, and the Divided Leg-
acies of Modernity,” in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation,
ed. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, 265–­89, especially 278 and 265 (Minne-
apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).
44. Ibid., 267.
45. Ibid., 268, 269. Quoting from Bruce Robbins’s Secular Vocations: Intel-
lectuals, Professionalism, Culture (New York: Verso, 1993), 181, Anderson notes
that cosmopolitanism “enables an embrace of worldliness in two senses: ‘1) plan-
etary expansiveness of subject-​­matter, on the one hand, and 2) unembarrassed
acceptance of professional self-​­interest, on the other.’ ”
46. Anderson, “Cosmopolitanism,” 267, 274, 276.
47. See Robbins, Secular Vocations, 197; James Clifford, “Traveling Cultures,”
in Cultural Studies: Now and in the Future, ed. Larry Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and
Paula A. Treichler, (New York: Routledge, 1992), 108; Seyla Benhabib, Situating
the Self: Gender, Community, and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (New
York: Routledge, 1992), 153; Judith Butler, “For a Careful Reading,” in Feminist
Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange, ed. Linda Nicholson (New York: Rout-
ledge, 1995), 130–­31; Etienne Balibar, “Ambiguous Universality,” differences 7,
no. 1 (1995): 48–­74; and Julia Kristeva, Nations without Nationalism (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1993)—­all discussed and quoted in Anderson. Our
summary here follows her language. For an updated formulation of “agonistic
universalism” by Butler, see Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary
Dialogues on the Left (New York: Verso, 2000) and Dispossession: The Perfor-
mative in the Political (New York: Polity, 2013). Also see Benhabib’s Another
Cosmopolitanism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008) for a more recent
discussion of the pragmatic ethics of interactive cosmopolitanism.
48. Anderson cites David Hollinger’s Postethnic America; Martha Nussbaum’s
“Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism”; and Arjun Appadurai’s postnationalist stance
from “Patriotism and Its Futures” (Public Culture 5 [1993]: 411–­29). Hollinger’s
distinction between pluralism and cosmopolitanism is particularly important
to our discussion. Pluralism endows certain groups with specific privilege and
protects culture, while cosmopolitanism has been typically more oriented to the
individual and disputes claims to cultural integrity (Postethnic America: Beyond
Multiculturalism [New York: Basic Books, 1995], 85–­86, quoted in Anderson,
278).
49. Shared topics and areas of theoretical concern inform such studies as the
transatlantic cosmopolitanism reconstituted by Susan Manning and Andrew
Taylor’s Transatlantic Literary Studies (2007), Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlan-
tic (1993), Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of
Strangers (2006); the contributions to Hemispheric American Studies, edited by
Caroline Field Levander and Robert S. Levine (2008); Yunte Huang’s books,
chiefly Transpacific Displacement (2002); Paul Jay’s Global Matters: The Trans-
national Turn in Literary Studies (2010); Paul Giles’s Antipodean America:
Australasia and the Constitution of U.S. Literature (New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2013); and the Spring 2003 Modern Fiction Studies special-​­topic
issue on the “trans-​­American imaginary,” guest-​­edited by Paula M. L. Moya and
Ramón Saldivar. To be sure, the list could go on.
Introduction xxxvii

50. Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet, 50 and following. Heise further
develops her eco-​­cosmopolitan argument in Nach der Natur: Das Artensterben
und die Moderne Kultur (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010).
51. For an interesting contrast between a focus on rights in the context of
globalization, on the one hand, and ethics within the framework of planetary
cosmopolitanism, on the other, consult the audio dialogue between Judith Butler
and Spivak, “A Dialogue on Global States, 6 May 2006,” Postmodern Culture
17, no. 1 (2006).
52. Susan Stanford Friedman writes in her 2010 article “Planetarity: Musing
Modernist Studies” (Modernism/Modernity 17, no. 3 [September 2010]): “As I
use the term, . . . planetarity . . . is an epistemology, not an ontology” (494).
53. Bharati Mukherjee, The Tree Bride (New York: Hyperion, 2004), 231.
54. “Heterogenizing” interplays with the global are outlined in Roland Rob-
ertson’s concept of “glocalization,” while in “creolizations” the global is further
customized, blending into native mixtures more aggressively, and even goes
“slumming.”
55. For a posthuman critique of the human-​­nonhuman hierarchy embedded in
classical ecocriticism, see Heise, Nach der Natur, especially 115–­49. Much has
been made recently in ecocriticism of the “Anthropocene era,” Paul Crutzen’s
2002 term for the geologic-​­chronological age in which humans radically affect
and alter the planet’s ecology; see Jan Zalasiewicz et al., “Are We Now Living in
the Anthropocene?” GSA Today (February 2008): 4–­8.
56. See, for example, Spivak’s Death of a Discipline (2005); Emily Apter’s The
Translation Zone (2006) and “Untranslatables: A World System,” New Literary
History 39, no. 3 (Summer 2008): 581–­98; Wai Chee Dimock, “Planetary Time
and Global Translation: ‘Context’ in Literary Studies,” Common Knowledge 9,
no. 3 (Fall 2003): 488–­507.
57. Paul Gilroy, “Planetarity and Cosmopolitics,” British Journal of Sociology
61, no. 3 (September 2010): 620. For “methodological nationalism” and the cos-
mopolitan reaction to it, see Ulrich Beck, “Toward a New Critical Theory with
a Cosmopolitan Intent,” Constellations 10, no. 4 (2003): 453. On postnational/
post-​­territorialist aggregation and its role in new literary history, see Wai Chee
Dimock’s pioneering articles and books, especially Through Other Continents.
The Planetary Turn
 Planetary Poetics
World Literature, Goethe, Novalis, and
Yoko Tawada’s Translational Writing

John D. Pizer

Because of its cosmopolitan and global orientation, as well as its focus on

transnational interchange, Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Weltliteratur (world
literature) paradigm has been engaged in a variety of works in which schol-
ars are in the process of developing an emerging planetarity paradigm. While
Goethe saw Weltliteratur as a still-​­evolving phenomenon in his time, it has
acquired a somewhat overdetermined character due to the disparate way
critics have defined and appropriated it since 1836, when the term became
widespread through the publication of the Gespräche mit Goethe (Conversa-
tions with Goethe), collected and edited by his former amanuensis Johann
Peter Eckermann, where it was first enunciated in print. Goethe initially
employed it in 1827, at a time when the fervent nationalism in Germany
attendant to the successful conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars had been effec-
tively suppressed through the edicts of the Congress of Vienna, executed with
Machiavellian skill under the leadership and guidance of Austrian statesman
Klemens Metternich. The almost coercively imposed cosmopolitanism that
inspired Goethe’s coinage was already crumbling by 1836, leading literary
historians subsequently to associate Weltliteratur with canonicity, the global
marketing of literature, and closed circulation. The ongoing planetary turn,
on the other hand, has more the resonance of a provisional, open-​­ended
dialogue. While it must be stressed that precisely such free, unclosed, interac-
tive exchange among the practitioners of culture across national boundaries
informs all of Goethe’s elucidations of his paradigm, elucidations marked by
a fragmentary and uncohesive character, many critics today, including those
who are preoccupied with the planetarity phenomenon, have lost sight of
this circumstance and associate Weltliteratur with a hoary traditionalism.
Therefore, the juxtaposition of “world literature” and planetarity as quite
disparate, if not antithetical, paradigms is unsurprising. Such a juxtaposi-
tion is evident, for instance, in Emily Apter’s essay “Untranslatables: A World
System,” published in a 2008 special-​­topic issue of New Literary History
devoted to “Literary History in the Global Age”: “ ‘World Literature,’ ” Apter

3
4 John D. Pizer

writes in “Untranslatables,” “is the blue-​­chip moniker, benefiting from its

pedigreed association with Goethean Weltliteratur. World Literature evokes
the great comparatist tradition of encyclopedic mastery and scholarly ecu-
menicalism. It is a kind of big tent model of literary comparatism that, in
promoting an ethic of liberal inclusiveness or the formal structures of cultural
similitude, often has the collateral effect of blunting political critique.” After
summarizing other transnational literary models such as Pascale Casanova’s
notion of a “world republic of letters” and certain recent Kantian cosmopoli-
tan/cosmopolitical formulations, the critic remarks that “ ‘planetarity’ would
purge ‘global’ of its capitalist sublime, greening its economy, and rendering
it accountable to disempowered subjects.”1 In contrasting world literature’s
putative tendency toward neutralizing effective political discourse with plan-
etarity’s positive ecological and socially inclusive trends, Apter does not imply
that Goethe himself is to blame for creating an “association” with Weltlitera-
tur that seems possessed of reactionary, or at least conservative, political and
literary tendencies. However, given the circumstance that it may be difficult
if not impossible to strip “world literature” of such linkages, a distinct but
related conceptual constellation might be more fruitful in helping steer the
course of the planetary turn.
The early German romantic author Friedrich Leopold Hardenberg, whose
nom de plume was “Novalis,” never used the term “Weltliteratur” in his writ-
ing. However, in his 1979 article “Novalis und die Idee der Weltliteratur”
(“Novalis and the Idea of World Literature”), Thomas Bleicher shows that in
many ways Novalis’s writing anticipates Goethe’s notion. Only 28 when he
died in 1801, Novalis did not experience the coerced Metternichian cosmopol-
itanism that led Goethe to postulate the concept of an evolving Weltliteratur.
Romantic cosmopolitanism in Novalis’s day was grounded, at the political
level, in the transnational hopes generated in the late eighteenth century by
the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Whereas Goethe’s musings
on world literature have a scattered, unsystematic character simply because
he only sought on random occasions to define and elucidate his paradigm,
the radically unclosed, fragmentary structure of Novalis’s proto-​­Weltliteratur
musings is consistent with his unmethodical methodology, partaking of a
deliberate strategy evident in most writings associated with early German
romanticism. Both Goethe and Novalis focused on the commerce-​­driven
nature of an increasingly European-​­wide literary exchange.2 However, typi-
cally for an early German romantic, Novalis’s ideas on such transnational
literature were more open-​­ended, utopian, and approximative than is the case
with Goethean Weltliteratur. While Goethe’s paradigm is grounded in the
dialectic of the universal and the particular, planetarity in this digital age of
solitary (albeit not necessarily isolated) men and women hunched in front of
their computers but interconnected through the Internet is more informed by
the dialectic of the individual and the collective. As the title to Barbara Senck-
el’s important 1983 study of Novalis’s “anthropology” indicates, his thought
Planetary Poetics 5

shuttles between the poles of Individualität und Totalität—­individuality and

totality (though in some cases he does consider the local and the particular, as
we will see)—­and this circumstance may allow us to bring this early romantic
into a more fruitful contiguity with the unfolding planetary turn than would
the effort to elucidate a productive intersection between planetarity and
Goethean Weltliteratur. Nevertheless, my drawing upon some theorists who
are beginning to work toward the development of a planetary consciousness
while excluding others is governed by my wish to highlight potentially useful
zones of filiation between contemporary planetarity, on the one hand, and the
cosmopolitan world literature ideas expressed by both Goethe and Novalis,
on the other. Not recognizing this filiation, in my view, would risk the failure
of twenty-​­first-​­century literary criticism to ground historically its attempt to
bring about the planetary turn.
The following chapter has four intersecting areas of focus. The first will
explore what Goethe intended by the term Weltliteratur, especially in the
historical context of its genesis, and what role this paradigm, along with the
broader concept of world literature, has been playing in the recent emergence
of the “planet” as a cross-​­ culturally oriented framework for comparat-
ism. I will then look at Novalis’s proto-​­Weltliteratur literary fragments and
examine how they are relevant to the nascent planetarity paradigm. Indeed,
though they precede Goethe’s thoughts on Weltliteratur chronologically, they
are in some ways more valuable to a truly planetary turn because they are
less rooted in a specifically western European framework. Goethe, at times,
consciously associates Weltliteratur with European literature, and he primar-
ily elucidates his term as a means to create greater balance and cosmopolitan
insight among literary circles of the western European nations. Novalis’s
proto-​­world literary fragments, on the other hand, adopt a relational model
that seeks an ideal romantic transcendence of cultural production grounded
in discrete nation-​­states. In this regard, his enunciations take a more authen-
tically transnational turn than do those of Goethe.
My examination of comments by Goethe and Novalis on the general prin-
ciple of Weltliteratur will be followed by a brief comparison of their tripartite
translation schemes, a key element in their respective ideas on world litera-
ture and of significance for the planetarity notion. Finally, I will explore a
recent work by the Japanese-​­German author Yoko Tawada as exemplary of
planetary consciousness, a consciousness, in her case, grounded in a reflec-
tive sensitivity to issues connected to translation in the broadest sense of that
term. Tawada’s poetics are located in what Apter, in the title of her 2006
book, terms “the translation zone.” Tawada’s stories and poetry are hyper-
conscious of the avenues through which transnational cultural exchange is
mediated in and through language. As I will show, she consistently evokes a
planetary hybridity rooted in a practice of border-​­crossing relationality more
resonant with Novalis’s pre-​­nationalist cosmopolitanism than with Goethean
Weltliteratur. Goethe’s paradigm was largely generated by a prophetically
6 John D. Pizer

accurate fear that the xenophobia triggered by the Napoleonic Wars fought
after Novalis’s death might soon reemerge. Tawada’s writing is generally
devoid of such fear. Given her uniquely acute attunement to how language
mediates transnational encounters, Tawada is included in this essay not only
because of her exemplary planetary poetic praxis, but also because her writ-
ing illustrates the major role translation plays, according to Goethe and
Novalis, in planetary interlingualism.

Goethe’s Weltliteratur in a Planetary Context

The publication of Fritz Strich’s Goethe und die Weltliteratur (Goethe and
World Literature) in 1946 was significant for two reasons. First of all, its
appendix brought together the passages scattered throughout Goethe’s dia-
ries, letters, and conversations in which Goethe, starting in 1827 and ending
in 1831 (the year before his death), employed the term “Weltliteratur.” This
gathering of all Goethe’s enunciations (albeit sometimes in abridged form) on
Weltliteratur into one brief (397–­400) contiguous compilation has enabled
scholars to access these remarks without the effort of combing through
editions of his collected works. Secondly, Strich’s own interpretation of
Weltliteratur as an expansive cosmopolitan paradigm allowing one to regard
the most noteworthy works of Europe, the Far East, and America as a broad
literary network collocated through Goethe’s visionary gaze inaugurated the
postwar tendency to link Weltliteratur to various forms of globalist discourse,
a trend most strikingly manifest once the “age of globalization” began after
the collapse of the Soviet Union and the concomitant end to the Cold War.
To be sure, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had forecast, in their 1848 Com-
munist Manifesto, the birth of a “Weltliteratur” from all the various national
literatures, going beyond Goethe in predicting their dissolution by bringing
them into allusive contiguity with national industries, which they saw as dis-
appearing through bourgeois world capitalism and—­so they hoped and were
calling for in the revolutionary year 1848—­the unification of the proletariat
on a global scale.3 However, such internationalism collapsed with the failure
of the 1848 Revolution, ushering in the intense nationalism of the Western
world, which lasted until the end of World War II. Thus, until the appear-
ance of Strich’s book—­and indeed in Strich’s own prewar engagement with
Goethe’s paradigm—­the cosmopolitan resonance of Weltliteratur was largely
ignored by critics, who tended to focus on canonicity, transnational commerce,
and reception as indicative of an author’s relative world literary status.4 The
National Socialist “scholar” Kurt Hildebrandt went so far as to claim that, for
Goethe, Weltliteratur was the product of Aryan populations who experienced
the Renaissance, and that Goethe’s perception was racially oriented.5
Apter’s previously cited association of Weltliteratur with “blue-​­chip,” “ped-
igreed,” and thus canonic works is not simply justified by such developments
Planetary Poetics 7

in the reception of Goethe’s paradigm, a phenomenon also evident in Strich’s

monograph and which continues today, but in Goethe’s own treatment of
the subject. In language that anticipates almost verbatim the claim of Marx
and Engels in the Communist Manifesto, Goethe asserted that national lit-
erature signified little at the time and that the epoch of Weltliteratur was at
hand.6 However, he also equated world literature with European literature,
primarily because the infrastructure and communication advances enabling
border-​­crossing literary discourse at that moment were restricted to west-
ern Europe.7 In addition, he prophesized what would become the literature
market-​­driving dictates of popular tastes, a trend one would strive in vain
to resist but which he believed to be only a temporary current (Strömung).
He therefore urged the serious-​­minded to create their own modest “church,”
presumably as a means to preserve the viability of elevated literature. He
issued this recommendation in the course of his famous pronouncement
that the world, in the current age, was nothing more than an expanded
fatherland.8
The interconnection between cosmopolitanism, on the one hand, and
qualitatively superior literature/discourse/intellectuals, on the other, is also
evident in a number of the fragments from Strich’s appendix. Strich himself
strongly contributed to the association between Weltliteratur and canonicity
in Goethe und die Weltliteratur. He argues that much work that has crossed
national borders and was widely read and translated does not deserve the
Weltliteratur appellation because such texts might be mere popular diversions
(Unterhaltungsliteratur), sensationalism, or fads, and so are likely to disap-
pear from the global literary catalogue as quickly as they rose to the top of
international bestseller lists. With respect to Goethe’s contemporaries, Strich
cites the example of August von Kotzebue, who, during the Age of Goethe,
had the greatest international commercial success of all German-​­language
authors but lacked the capacity to achieve enduring renown. According
to Strich, the German term Weltliteratur signifies not only supranational
(übernationale) but also supratemporal (überzeitliche) validity.9 However,
establishing the linkage between Weltliteratur and canonicity was not Strich’s
primary purport in his book; much previous scholarship had cemented this
bond, which has endured—­as the passage from Apter indicates—­to this day.
Rather, in the wake of the extreme, murderous xenophobia that gripped the
Axis powers, especially Germany, during the Second World War, Strich, a
Swiss-​­German scholar, wanted to hold up Goethe as an exemplar of genuine
cosmopolitanism to the German-​­speaking nations. He also hoped to recuper-
ate Germany’s deservedly damaged reputation with respect to transnational,
globalist outreach, a reputation the German-​­speaking regions just as deserv-
edly enjoyed during Goethe’s lifetime. The subsequent imbrications scholars
(including Apter, with her allusion to Weltliteratur’s “ecumenicalism”)10 have
highlighted in their work between cosmopolitanism and Weltliteratur show
Strich was quite successful in this regard.11
8 John D. Pizer

There is no question but that Goethean Weltliteratur is marked by a cer-

tain degree of elitism. Goethe stresses in one instance that it is cross-​­border,
translinguistic collaboration among the most advanced intellectuals and
scientists that is enhanced through world literary dialogue. In many cases,
leading thinkers from one nation are in a better position to judge the merits
of writers in another than critics who share the nationality of the authors
under discussion. As an example, he argues that Thomas Carlyle’s biography
of Friedrich Schiller exhibits greater perspicacity than might be found in the
perspective of Schiller’s fellow Germans, and finds the opposite is true with
respect to Shakespeare criticism.12 He also contended—­and this is frequently
overlooked by critics who believe Goethe first perceived world literary inter-
change as occurring at a wide-​­ranging international level—­that the different
lands had already been taking note of each other’s literary products for some
time, and that Weltliteratur signified productive social interchange among
a rather select group—­“die lebendigen und strebenden Literatoren” (“the
lively striving men of letters”)—­as he told a group of scientists in 1828.13
Given planetarity’s stress on outreach to “disempowered subjects,” Goethe’s
underscoring of an elite few who participate in the world literary dialogue
would seem to indicate that his Weltliteratur paradigm, in this respect, is
less than ideal in helping guide the planetary turn. However, Goethe was not
always consistent in this regard. In his last note on the concept, he remarks
that the consequence of Weltliteratur for the diverse nations would be the
ability to more quickly benefit reciprocally from each other’s advantages.14
Goethe’s concept is so deeply rooted in respect for alterity that Homi Bhabha
was able to use it as a heuristic instrument in turning to the work and lives
of the planet’s most dispossessed citizens. Alluding to Weltliteratur’s germi-
nation through the dislocations caused by the Napoleonic Wars, Bhabha
comments “that transnational histories of migrants, the colonized, or politi-
cal refugees—­these border and frontier conditions—­may be the terrains of
world literature.”15 Rüdiger Görner, who stresses the open-​­ended nature of
Weltliteratur as Goethe envisioned it, goes so far as to claim that “Goethe
was indeed the first European writer who had recognized, in the aftermath
of the French Revolution, that the sufferings of emigration would dominate
civilization henceforth.”16 This is what makes Goethe a natural ally, despite
his elitism, of those who, like Bhabha, see Weltliteratur as productive in elu-
cidating and promoting the thought of the marginalized and disenfranchised.
Goethe’s oscillation between an emphasis on national literatures as
enriched through cosmopolitan intercourse and the global (or at least
European-​­wide) networks enabling this border-​­crossing dialogue has inspired
Claudio Guillén’s assertion that Goethean Weltliteratur commences at the
national level, “thus making possible a dialogue between the local and the
universal, between the one and the many.”17 In her introduction to Sense of
Place and Sense of Planet (2008), a work which anticipates and helps inau-
gurate the planetary turn, Ursula K. Heise challenges the very notion of the
Planetary Poetics 9

local; a work such as Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Gal-
axy creates an interplanetary tableau in which Earth itself, the entire globe,
is articulated as a quite discrete particular space tout court, so that Adams’s
book “redefines the meaning of the word ‘local.’ ”18 Through discussions of
globalization, contemporary advocates of cosmopolitanism begin to move
away from national and even locally based modes of identity, in Heise’s view,
thus hinting at the possibility of a truly planetary consciousness.19 Already
in his seminal essay “Turn to the Planet: Literature, Diversity, and Totality”
(2001), Masao Miyoshi points to “the spread of desocialized individualism,”
a process that has come about through globalization, and bluntly speaks of
the growing inefficacy of the local and national domains as sites of positive
contestation in the public, cultural sphere.20 He goes so far as to argue that
there is no going back to the nation-​­state model and proclaims that “litera-
ture and literary studies now have one basis and goal: to nurture our common
bonds to the planet—­to replace the imaginaries of exclusionist familialism,
communitarianism, nationhood, ethnic culture, regionalism, ‘globalization,’
or even humanism, with the ideal of planetarianism.”21 Whether such a radi-
cally planetary approach on the part of literary scholars is desirable or even
viable may be subject to debate, but it does suggest that Goethean Weltlitera-
tur, with its oscillation between the local and a grounding in discrete national
literatures, on the one hand, and the transnational/universal, on the other,
may not be useful as a heuristic tool in the service of “planetarianism,” even
when it is adapted to Bhabha’s version of an anti-​­exclusionist approach to
the cultures of marginalized groups.
The next major work to suggest a planetary approach to literary studies,
and which has had a major influence on comparatism, is Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak’s 2003 volume Death of a Discipline. The discipline Spivak finds to
be in the process of demise is Comparative Literature. She suggests that its
impending doom is caused by a homogenizing globalization, which imposes
a uniform “system of exchange” across the planet.22 She objects to the very
term “globe,” a place, she claims, no one actually inhabits. The place we
inhabit is the planet, albeit on loan, and planetary—­as opposed to global—­
thought is Other-​­directed, grounded in alterity, and capable of reenchanting
the terrestrial sphere—­uniform and drab when conceptualized as “globe”—­
through its ability to reinvest it with the “unheimlich,” the sense of ineffable
mystery that can make everyday life interesting. Antithetical to such plan-
etary uncanniness, to Spivak’s mind, is world literature, which she associates
with English-​­language hegemony on a global scale. She fears the universal
spread of world literature anthologies, which, she predicts, will lead to such
scenarios as the reading by Taiwanese students of Chinese-​­language classics
like The Dream of the Red Chamber in English-​­language translation made
available in extremely abridged form in textbooks or compendia published
in the United States.23 Spivak worries about the specter of “U.S.-​­style world
literature becoming the staple of Comparative Literature in the global South”
10 John D. Pizer

because it would undermine the possibility that Comparative Literature on

a planetary scale could be enriched by cultural and linguistic diversity.24 In
her view, comparatism under the sign of planetarity is viable only when the
discipline’s practitioners, including those in America, are conversant with the
languages of the Southern hemisphere and possess a more than superficial
acquaintance with that region’s cultures; she proposes that an attention to
the latter’s nuances would be enhanced through an Area Studies-​­style immer-
sion into their particularities. Thus, a world literature approach as defined
by Spivak—­monolingual, univocal, and culturally hegemonic—­is completely
opposite to Comparative Literature as a field of study undertaken with a
planetary consciousness. Indeed, in her opinion, world literature is strongly
contributing to the slow “death” of Comparative Literature as a discipline.
In my 2006 book The Idea of World Literature, I have submitted that
“World Literature” as an introductory-​­ level humanities course—­ a peda-
gogical domain primarily to be found, contrary to Spivak, in colleges and
universities across the United States—­ must be conceptually disentangled
from the Goethean Weltliteratur paradigm. Death of a Discipline is not
exactly guilty of conflating “World Literature” with Weltliteratur, but Spivak
does treat Goethe’s concept rather negatively in criticizing Franco Moretti’s
widely cited 2000 essay “Conjectures on World Literature.” Partly inspired by
Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-​­systems theory, Moretti argues for a “distant”
reading that examines broad transnational trends in literature rather than
engaging in a New Critical–style “close reading” attentive to often minute
textual details and informed by philological rigor. Given Spivak’s desire that
comparatism should inculcate an appreciation of the “Otherness” of texts,
especially those of marginalized cultures in little-​­studied languages—­a telos
of planetarity quite distinct from that of Miyoshi—­her dissatisfaction with
Moretti’s approach is unsurprising, even though part of Moretti’s intention in
practicing distant reading is to bring “cultures that belong to the periphery of
the literary system” into critical consciousness through broad examinations
of literary genres and styles.25 Moretti opens his essay by complaining that
literary studies have not lived up to the promise held by Goethe’s approach
and proposes that “we return to that old ambition of Weltliteratur: after
all, the literature around us is now unmistakably a planetary system.”26 He
realizes that this return cannot involve studying all literatures from all times,
but rather must attempt to show how these literatures are “interrelated,”
constituting “one world literary system.”27 In her critique of Moretti, Spivak
recognizes as positive his attention to the periphery but maintains that “there
is something disingenuous about using Goethe, Marx, and Weber as justifi-
cation for choosing world systems theory to establish a law of evolution in
literature,” because such an approach relies on the work of others from the
periphery itself to fill in the necessary details. Though she does not use the
term, Spivak virtually suggests that adherents to Moretti’s model would have
to engage in a kind of scholarly outsourcing.28 Indeed, Moretti more or less
Planetary Poetics 11

admits this; he realizes that simply more reading of texts written in a plethora
of languages is not possible, so a reliance on the work of those who focus on
something other than western European narratives (Moretti’s specialization)
must be part of the equation.29
In her 2006 essay “Scales of Aggregation—­ Prenational, Subnational,
Transnational,” Wai Chee Dimock suggests a form of planetarity that incor-
porates Weltliteratur in a manner that taps into the local/universal dialectic
of Goethe’s paradigm. In so doing, she avoids both the homogenization
Spivak associates with world literature and the perhaps literally all-​­too-​
f­ arsighted scale proposed by Moretti in his world literary system conjectures,
even though Dimock refers neither to Goethe nor to his concept in her essay.
Bhabha, however, persuasively locates, via Mikhail Bakhtin, in the subna-
tional and prenational elements of Goethe’s work, in its local and particular
dimensions, the possibility of a transcendent historical synchronicity. Indeed,
for Bhabha, Bakhtin’s reading of Goethe evokes the uncanny, that liminal
sense of mystery Spivak would resurrect in her planetary approach to Com-
parative Literature.30 Whereas the subnational and prenational tendencies
in Goethe’s oeuvre, which inspire transnational topographies in the thought
of Bakhtin and Bhabha, were enabled by the circumstance that Goethe
never lived in a genuine, politically integrated German nation (which did
not undergo its first unification until 1871, almost forty years after Goethe’s
death), Dimock grounds her triadic terms in the principle of an “unbundling
and rebundling” of the humanities proposed by a variety of scholars, a par-
adigm shift that would occur with respect to both discipline and national
tradition, that is to say, would presuppose, for example, the elimination of
the exclusive (and exclusionary research) of American literature in depart-
ments of English and American Studies. Pre-​­, sub-​­, and transnational literary
studies would examine marginalized cultures and endangered languages not
affiliated with the nation-​­state, creating a “species-​­wide platform” linking
the disciplines of anthropology, history, and literary studies in a manner sug-
gestive of planetary comparatism, enriched, as proposed by Spivak, through
an Area Studies–type of immersion into cultural and linguistic localities and
particularities.31
In arguing for a transnational methodology mindful of localized details,
Dimock’s approach is germane to the universal/particular dialectic inherent
in Goethean Weltliteratur and at the same time anticipates a recent effort by
Reinhard Meyer-​­Kalkus, who wants to take “world literature beyond Goethe,”
as the title of his 2010 essay indicates. The maneuver is prompted by the rec-
ognition that contemporary writers are no longer bound by discrete ethnic/
linguistic/national affiliations, as is evident in the large number of authors
who were originally Iranians, Turks, or Arabs but now reside in Germany
and write in German. Meyer-​­Kalkus also argues for the need to closely exam-
ine the prenational “preliminary stages” of the planet’s literatures.32 Thus,
like Dimock, albeit in his case consciously drawing on Goethe’s paradigm,
12 John D. Pizer

he endorses a study of literature informed by pre-​­, sub-​­, and transnational

constellations and concludes that transnationalism is a relatively recent phe-
nomenon the tendencies of which scholars can only perceive when they “put
their ear to this rail network of the new cultural mobility.”33 His intervention
presents a model of how, when oriented by planetary consciousness, literary
studies may rely on Goethe’s Weltliteratur paradigm but move beyond it.
It is worth recalling that Goethe developed his thoughts on Weltliteratur
at a time of almost literally coercive cosmopolitanism. He had been horrified
at the extreme xenophobia that flared up when the tide turned against the
French in the last years of the Napoleonic Wars. He was enough of a vision-
ary to sense that extreme nationalism might overwhelm Europe in the near
future, as it did beginning in 1848 and lasting until 1945. In the conversa-
tion with Eckermann on January 31, 1827, in which Goethe made his most
often-​­cited pronouncement concerning the advent of Weltliteratur, he speaks
of a “pedantic darkness” that will befall the Germans if they do not cast their
gaze beyond the narrow circle of their own environs, a darkness he sensed
in the last stages of the Napoleonic Wars. There is a note of urgency when
he claims that all must do their part to accelerate (beschleunigen) the epoch
of Weltliteratur.34 Subsequent to the collapse of the Soviet Union, the world
also entered into an era of cosmopolitanism, coercive not through a net-
work of agents such as those who served Metternich but through economic
necessity; English became the world language of multinational capitalism
on a universal scale, and national governments lost the ability effectively to
regulate commercial activity. Cosmopolitanism continues to be thought of,
at least among most intellectuals, rather favorably, as long as it is attuned
to, and celebrates, cultural differences.35 The negative term used to describe
the cultural/economic coercion and homogenization of our time, the dark
side of contemporary cosmopolitanism, is “globalization.” This is evident,
for example, in Death of a Discipline, when Spivak refers to globalization
as “the imposition of the same system of exchange everywhere.” She dif-
ferentiates between the “globe” as uninhabited cyberspace and the “planet”
as the locus of diversity and difference.36 This kind of contrast explains the
move, exemplified by the essays in this volume, toward planetary thinking
and away from globalism/globalization, toward a heterogeneous rather than
uniform cosmopolitanism.37

Novalis’s Proto-​­Planetary Idealism

These considerations precede a consideration of Novalis’s proto-​­Weltliteratur

musings in order to highlight the radically different historical context in
which he evolved them. Nationalism had not yet swept through Germany, and
the French Revolution had not yet aroused deep antipathy toward France.
Early German romantic cosmopolitanism was marked neither by a sense of
Planetary Poetics 13

coercion nor by a sense of urgency, as it was in the later stages of Goethe’s life,
when he made his observations on Weltliteratur. This lack of duress in Nova-
lis’s proto-​­Weltliteratur formulations imbues them with a certain idealism,
indeed utopianism, and this aspect renders them productive in the envision-
ing of a liberatory planetarity. Novalis’s proto-​­Weltliteratur fragments also
lack the elitist dimension characteristic of certain elucidations by Goethe of
his paradigm. In their preface to Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age
of Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri define the multitude as “an
open and expansive network in which all differences can be expressed freely
and equally, a network that provides the means of encounter so that we can
work and live in common.” Unlike the “people” or the “masses,” the “mul-
titude” is a diverse, differentiated collection of individuals.38 While Novalis
addressed his remarks to the educated, he seems to favor literary networks
among writers, which, he thinks, would counteract the pablum marketed to
the multitude of readers around the world (whom mass literature marketers
themselves have tended to regard as a homogeneous collection of potential
buyers). As noted previously, Goethe, by contrast, proposed the formation
of a modest “church” that would stoically but quiescently constitute a coun-
tertrend to literary mass marketing. Where Goethean Weltliteratur, as Apter
suggests, is the model for a globally based but somewhat rarified Compara-
tive Literature, Novalis’s proposals speak to a more planetary stance. For, if
planetarity is to encompass some form of “world art,” a truly cosmopolitan
organization seeking to promote a planetary aesthetics through a creative
commercial approach directed toward diverse networks of readers in resis-
tance to the current worldwide marketing of literature geared to the lowest
common denominator of manipulated mass cravings for mindless entertain-
ment might be a desideratum, even though such a strategy might also be
regarded by some as elitist.
The rather speculative, visionary character of Novalis’s thought is evident
in his aphorisms on cosmopolitanism; he claims a truly complete human
must live simultaneously in a variety of locations and in other humans, with
a broad circle and multiple events constantly present to mind. In this way,
presence of spirit (Gegenwart des Geistes) will turn the individual into a
genuine cosmopolitan (Weltbürger) and make one thoughtfully active.39 A
genius has the ability to act on the basis of both imagined and real objects
and to engage with these objects. Without the capacity to act as a suprasen-
sual being (ein übersinnliches Wesen) capable of being outside oneself and
conscious while rising beyond the realm of the senses, one could not be a
cosmopolitan, indeed, one could only be an animal.40 The European stands
above the German, the German stands above the Saxon, and the Saxon above
the citizen of the (Saxon) city of Leipzig. Above the European (and apparently
above all) stands the cosmopolitan. This seems a relatively practical, politi-
cally rooted evaluative scale, but Novalis goes on to remark in this fragment
that all the more limited, confined entities—­the national, temporal, local, and
14 John D. Pizer

individual—­can be universalized. The individual coloring of the universal is

its “romanticizing” element: “Thus every national, and even the personal,
God, is a romanticized universe.”41 Such dialectical interplay between the
cosmopolitan and universal, on the one hand, and the local/national/indi-
vidual, on the other, promotes a self/Other dialogue unbound by political
and economic constraints. Grounded in his studies of early romantic phi-
losopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s idealism, Novalis’s fragments concerning
the relationship between the ego and the external world posit that personal
consciousness itself creatively shapes what lies outside it; the human spiri-
tual sanctum and the phenomenal universe external to it are so profoundly
interconnected that, as the previous quote suggests, the national God and
the personal God constitute a romanticized—­that is to say, wholly integral—­
universe. Such early romantic thought is unencumbered by worries on how to
cope with extreme national/political divisiveness. This virtually unmitigated
relationality between the self and all that is external to it, such unimpeded
interactivity on the part of the true cosmopolitan, may be attractive in for-
mulating utopian ideals for a planetary paradigm, ideals resistant to the
repressive elements of globalization. The danger, of course, is the potential
for solipsistic egoism on the part of interlocutors who might see in Novalis’s
Fichtean cosmopolitanism more the opportunity for a literal self-​­sufficiency
than the ability to employ a romantically invested imaginary in seeking genu-
ine dialogue and an understanding of what lies outside the personal sphere.
It should also be added that Novalis had some reservations concerning the
sweeping character of Fichtean consciousness and self-​­knowledge and recog-
nized that what is found through reflection already appears to exist.42
Central, in Novalis, to a cosmopolitan engagement with the world through
the romantic imagination is poetry, and his projection of a “poeticizing of the
world” is the fulcrum of his proto-​­Weltliteratur reflections.43 To this end,
Novalis called for “the establishment of a literary-​­republican order, which
is of a thoroughly mercantile-​­political character, an authentic cosmopolitan
lodge.”44 Cosmopolitan societies and lodges constituted an essential aspect
of intellectual life in eighteenth-​­and early nineteenth-​­century Germany, as
reflected in the popularity at that time of orders such as the Illuminati and the
Freemasons. Goethe was deeply involved with such orders, albeit not always
on a friendly footing when he felt they threatened the established political sys-
tem.45 In commenting on this and other passages in which Novalis proposes
to establish an “intellectual knightly order,”46 Bleicher speculates that the
writer may have imagined that such an organization would use the knightly
orders and Freemason lodges of the Middle Ages as a model; like most other
early German romantics, Novalis was fascinated by this period, and one of
his most widely read works, Die Christenheit oder Europa (Christendom or
Europe, 1799), expresses a yearning for the kind of politically and religiously
harmonious Europe that Novalis—­a Protestant—­believed was in existence
prior to the Reformation. Bleicher compares Novalis’s pronouncements
Planetary Poetics 15

concerning a literary/republican/intellectual order to the kind of Weltliteratur-​

­Bund (world literature federation) constituted by today’s global PEN Club.47
However, while PEN tends to work toward goals such as writers’ freedom
from governmental oppression, and, concomitantly, resistance to all forms of
censorship, Novalis’s emphasis on the mercantile character of the proposed
fellowship points in the direction of promoting the sale and marketing of
poetic literature on a worldwide scale. After all, Novalis proclaims elsewhere
that the spirit of commerce (Handelsgeist) is the great spirit awakening coun-
tries, cities, and works of art; it is the spirit of culture and of the perfection
(Vervollkommnung) of the human race. He distinguishes between the histori-
cal spirit of commerce, slavishly adherent to the needs of the moment, and
the creative (schaffenden) spirit of commerce.48
A central domain of Weltliteratur for Goethe, Novalis, and those who
seek to interpret and develop this paradigm today is constituted by the the-
ory and practice of translation. Indeed, in his well-​­received book What Is
World Literature? (2003), which contains an illuminating overview of the
genesis of Goethe’s Weltliteratur, David Damrosch argues that works can
be categorized as belonging to the select genre named in his title only when
they circulate widely throughout the planet—­and are critically enhanced—­by
means of translation.49 Certainly, even if one agrees with Spivak and many
others that reading in translation is detrimental to authentic comparatism,
the planetary turn cannot do without it. The tripartite translation schemes
proposed by both Goethe and Novalis can be helpful here. At the first level
of Goethe’s model, the translator creates a prose version of the text, which
faithfully transmits the content presented in the source language. The second-​
l­ evel rendering reflects the stylistic tendencies of the translator as grounded in
his or her own language. At the third level, the translator foregoes precisely
such tendencies, giving up an adherence to the grammatical and stylistic con-
ventions of the target language and surrendering them to the rhythms and
nuances of the source language. This method will lead to an initial sense of
estrangement on the part of the reader but ultimately enhances the supple-
ness and structural range of the target language.50
Such an approach is reminiscent of one of the qualities Novalis associates
with romantic poetry, namely, the art of making the object (Gegenstand) of
the literary work both alien (fremd) and familiar, as well as attractive.51 How-
ever, his classificatory scheme is somewhat distinct from that of Goethe. As
Novalis claims, a translation is either grammatical, infused with the power to
alter (verändernd), or mythic. Grammatical translations, not unlike those at
Goethe’s first, prosaic level, require scholarly knowledge (Gelehrsamkeit) but
are conventional and demand only discursive ability on the part of the transla-
tor. Like Goethe’s second-​­level translation, those renditions with the potential
for changing the character of the source-​­language text are most frequently
carried out by authors themselves: they must be undertaken by what Novalis
calls the (source-​­language) poet, who allows the poem to speak according to
16 John D. Pizer

the idea (Idee) of both individuals, the original author and his or her transla-
tor. However, Novalis’s third category, the mythic translation, is quite unique.
He contends that renderings of this kind do not completely convey the content
of the actual work of art but only its ideal. As such, no fully realized model of
this type of translation yet exists; only luminous traces (helle Spuren) of such
efforts are available. Not just books, but everything can be translated in these
three modes.52 In its hint at language’s lack of self-​­sufficiency, Novalis points
forward to a similar notion in Walter Benjamin’s celebrated 1921 essay “Die
Aufgabe des Übersetzers” (“The Task of the Translator”), with its notion of
an originary, prelapsarian language only glimpsed in trace form through the
palimpsest of the source language and the target languages into which it is
translated. Novalis’s scheme also suggests a utopian relationality potentially
valuable for planetary thought, but Goethe’s third-​­level translation concept,
Other-​­directed and grounded in a realizable alterity, may constitute a more
practical path toward a productive twenty-​­first-​­century geoaesthetics.
Neither Goethe nor Novalis eschews a national, indeed vaguely national-
ist dimension with respect to the relationship between translation and world
literature. Goethe believed that Germans would play a central role as inter-
preters (Dolmetscher) in the world literary marketplace. Indeed, whoever
speaks German will find himself or herself in the market where all nations
offer their wares, but it is also the case that every translator is a mediator
in the literary intellectual trade.53 In a study of early German romanticism,
Andreas Huyssen argues that the early German romantics saw Germans as
master translators on a global scale. Therefore, the German nation is destined
to lead Europe into a golden age. In discussing Novalis’s myth-​­centered trans-
lation postulate, Huyssen notes that at this level, the individuality of neither
the original author nor of the translator is relevant. Mythic translation can-
not be practically realized; rather, its articulation points in an eschatological
manner toward a future in which all humanity will be poetic and is also a
corollary to Novalis’s declaration that all poetry is translation. The mythic
translator translates reality into myth, and mythic translation is a cipher for
the aimed-​­for romanticizing of the world, through which harmony will reign,
and peace, love, religion, and poetry will predominate.54 Novalis’s mythic
translation is a constitutive element of what Huyssen refers to as an early
Romantic “literary spiritual utopia of a German Weltliteratur.”55 However, in
proposing a relational practice on a universal scale and not restricted to just
rendering words and syntax from one national tongue into another, Novalis’s
all-​­encompassing notion adds a unique dimension to planetary thinking.

Tawada’s Planetary Poetics

In her recent essay “Planetarity: Musing Modernist Studies” (2010), Susan Stan-
ford Friedman explains that “planetarity as I use the term is an epistemology,
Planetary Poetics 17

not an ontology. On a human scale, the ‘worldness’ the term invokes—­to

echo Glissant—­means a polylogue of languages, cultures, viewpoints, and
standpoints on modernism/modernity. It requires attention to modes of local
and translocal meaning-​­making and translation, to processes and practices
of perception and expression on a global scale.”56 In her description of what
she intends the term “planetarity” to signify, Friedman unintentionally sum-
marizes the poetics of the contemporary German-​­Japanese language author
Yoko Tawada. Unlike most other German-​­language writers for whom Ger-
man is not the mother tongue, Tawada is a true authorial polyglot; she writes
as much in her native Japanese as in German. The most consistent focus of
her oeuvre is precisely the “local and translocal meaning-​­making and transla-
tion” highlighted by Friedman; Tawada constantly reflects on how meaning
and modes of expression as well as signification vary according to their local
and translocal contexts. She is “polylogue” in the sense that her attention
is not solely focused on the interface between the languages, cultures, and
topographies of Japan and Germany; her second language is Russian, and
she has traveled and taught in the United States. The attention she pays in her
writing to “processes and practices of perception and expression” has a truly
“global” reach. She concentrates more on how perception and knowledge
alter from one language and topography to another rather than attempt-
ing to articulate an ideal overarching realm of being transcending linguistic
diversity, an ontology pursued by Novalis, Benjamin, and, albeit not in his
translation theory, by Goethe. This concluding section will examine Tawa-
da’s planetary poetics as exemplified by her 2007 collection of poetry and
prose entitled Sprachpolizei und Spielpolyglotte (Speech Police and Polyglot
Play).
Tawada is one among a large and increasing number of contemporary
German writers who are foreign-​­born inhabitants of that country, non-​­native
speakers, and not ethnically German. Other, more commercially successful
writers who immigrated to Germany and first learned the language there
include the Russian-​­ born Wladimir Kaminer, Turkish-​­ born Emine Sevgi
Özdamar, and Syrian-​­born Rafik Schami. While they and many other immi-
grant German writers frequently thematize issues such as transnational
understanding (or a lack thereof), cultural border-​­crossing, and interlingual-
ism, none are as attuned as Tawada to the way language mediates relationality
between and among diverse populations. This linguistic relationality is at the
core of a planetary turn that would—­or should—­not simply assume that
the global English spoken by the globe’s elites will be planetarity’s exclusive
mode of communication.
In his study A Transnational Poetics—­which, although it focuses on English-​
l­anguage literature across the globe, is sensitive to interlingual issues—­Jahan
Ramazani characterizes Melvin Tolson’s book of poems Harlem Gallery as
informed by “polyglot hybridity and pan-​­cultural allusiveness.”57 More than
other German authors of the present, Tawada’s work exhibits these traits
18 John D. Pizer

because of her hyperawareness of the linguistic, and often translational,

dimension of inter-​­national human (mis)understanding. This makes her work
especially exemplary for a planetary poetics that draws upon world literary
thinking. There is a perpetual liminality shaping Tawada’s works. They are
almost always situated at the intersections between and among cultures con-
sidered by most people to be discrete with respect to language and thought.
Working against this assumption, Tawada demonstrates the inherent inter-
relationality of such cultures, indeed their often-​­overlooked imbrication in
the current age. In this way—­and again, rather uniquely among German-​
­language authors—­she carries on the world literary dialogue envisioned by
Goethe and Novalis, on a planetary scale but without any trace of the for-
mer’s elitism and of the latter’s romantic eschatology.
In the opening poem of Sprachpolizei und Spielpolyglotte, “Slavia in Ber-
lin,” the entire planet is constellated through paronomasia, catachresis, and
other forms of wordplay. The first line, “Ich nahm Abu Simbel von meinen
Kamerun und ging/Los Angeles” (“I took Abu Simbel from my Cameroon
and went/Los Angeles”), connects three distinct geographic entities through
the short-​­circuiting misapplication of place names substituted for any other
potential nouns that might create lucid syntax and signification.58 Marjorie
Perloff describes the poem as a tableau “in which ordinary German street
conversation is viewed from the angle of the foreign visitor, who processes
simple directions and bits of information according to the place-​­names they
contain,” where such terms as “Ägypten” (Egypt) and “Finnland” suggest,
through homonymic relationality, German terms such as “gibt es” (there is,
there are) and “finden” (to find).59 However, the sheer jumble of such proper
place names brought into a striking and unexpected contiguity through
wordplay also forces the reader to consider how meaning is constituted in
and through signifiers for various localities. In their untraditional phonemic
and syntactic imbrications, they make one reflect on how translocal signifi-
cation is created when the words standing in for multiple geographic sites
across the globe literally collide. In this case, “worldness” comes into con-
sciousness through the concatenation of random cities, countries, and so on.
The poem concludes with the line “Du gehst in den Taunus zurück,/und ich
fahre zu dem Bahnhof Nirgendzoo” (“You travel back to the Taunus/and
I travel to the train station Nowherezoo”), whereby the narrative “I,” Sla-
via, indicates that her auditor returns to the comfort of a real existing site,
the Taunus region of the state of Hesse, perhaps the auditor’s home, while
Slavia travels to the train station “Nowherezoo,” a pun on “nirgendwo.”60
This “nowhere” is also everywhere, as it is (also) a zoo with animals from
throughout the globe. Thus, it is a cipher for the disoriented border-​­crossing
traveler in a poem that evokes all corners of the planet in a jumble of parano-
masic place-​­name signifiers; at the end of the poem as at its beginning, Slavia
is—­and is traveling—­everywhere and nowhere, even when she seems to be
in—­and traveling from—­Berlin.
Planetary Poetics 19

In an interview conducted around the time Sprachpolizei und Spielpoly-

glotte was published, Tawada noted that the German verb for “translate,”
übersetzen, also signifies the steering of a boat from one shore to the other.
Perloff cites this passage in conjunction with another in which Tawada
speaks of how, when an author whose native language is a “minor” tongue
starts writing in a “major” language, the target language itself becomes trans-
formed, and even the way the “magical” is sensually perceived may manifest
itself in “the target language.”61 We have observed that, for Goethe, the stylis-
tics, semantics, and even the sensual dimension of the target language can be
enhanced at the third level of translation. In Das Märchen (Fairy-​­Tale, 1795),
where a boatman shuttles passengers—­and “translates” Goethe’s text—­back
and forth between prosaic and poetic/eschatological realms, Goethe also
exploits the dual potential of übersetzen, which evokes the meaning noted by
Tawada when the stress in pronunciation falls on the first syllable rather than
the second. As Huyssen notes in describing Novalis’s early romantic world
literature utopia, poeticizing the world is to be equated with the creation of
the fairy-​­tale world; the world is “translated”—­carried over—­to the fairy-​
­tale. Playing on the dual signification of “übersetzen,” Huyssen comments
that, for Novalis, because poetry is translation (Übersetzung), it also brings
about the conveyance (Über-​­setzung) of the human race into a golden age
and thereby redeems it.62 Tawada does not engage in such fairy-​­tale eschatol-
ogy; her planetary poetics locate and elucidate magic solely in the domains of
words and syntax, but, as with Goethe and Novalis, this magic is instantiated
when Übersetzung takes place in the most inclusive sense of both acts signi-
fied by this term. In the longest text of the Sprachpolizei und Spielpolyglotte
collection, “U.S. + S.R. Eine Sauna in Fernosteuropa” (“U.S. + S.R. A Sauna
in Far East Europe”), the narrator opens with the tableau of a boat travel-
ing the short distance from a Japanese point of embarkation to the Russian
territory of Sakhalin, an island wrested from Japan by the Soviet Union at
the close of the Second World War. Tawada’s evocation of the ship as reso-
nant with interlingual, intercultural dialogue almost magically makes the
vessel itself, and not just the maritime territory it traverses, into a borderland
where Russia and Japan, Russian and Japanese, are intertwined. Thus, the
boat becomes a metonym for translocal space, indeed, for the intertextual,
interlingual blendedness of the planet itself. It carries out the act of “Über-
setzung” in both senses of the word, ferrying passengers from one nation
(Japan) to another (Russia), but also translating back and forth between
Russian and Japanese culture through the medium of a third language, Ger-
man. In this way, the narrative becomes a sort of Benjaminian palimpsest,
revealing cross-​­cultural truths through the collocation of all three national
entities and tongues, along with allusions to English and Korean. The linguis-
tic character of the journey is established at the outset, when after declaring
that there is always something solemn and ceremonious (Feierliches) about
disembarking from a ship and thus establishing the solemn significance of the
20 John D. Pizer

act of Übersetzung, she notes that she is balancing on the “tongue” that the
ship has extended out to the mainland.63 As in English, the German term for
“tongue”—­Zunge—­is a synonym for language. The narrator’s description of
her balancing, rather precariously, on a “tongue” at the outset of this story-​
­essay foregrounds the self-​­consciously multilingual milieu, labile with respect
to univocal meaning, she will soon establish not only on the boat but in her
wanderings on Sakhalin itself.
Tawada frequently interrupts the present-​­time narrative to reminisce about
Sakhalin’s earlier history and linguistic ambience. The narrator remarks that
the southern half of the island, under Japanese rule from the end of the Russo-​
J­ apanese War until the end of World War II, bore the name “Karafuto.” Kara
means “emptiness” and futo is the Japanese term for “sudden.” Thus, in the
narrator’s private etymology, “Karafuto” signifies “a sudden emptiness.” She
realizes that this etymology cannot be accurate, but, at the outset of the next
segment, finds herself standing “on the empty place or square” (Platz) in Kara-
futo.64 There is a rather sudden shift here from the narrator’s pondering the
significance and etymology of Karafuto to the mise-​­en-​­scène of her actually
standing on its empty square. As is the case throughout this story-​­essay, there
is no discursive transition between narrative segments; they are only indicated
through double-​­spacing. Similar to Novalis’s proto-​­Weltliteratur-​­oriented pos-
tulations, translation occurs on two levels here: Übersetzung takes place in both
nuances of the term. Verbally, Tawada renders Karafuto, through an admittedly
creative etymological act, into the German for “a sudden emptiness”—­eine
plötzliche Leere. The reader is thereupon instantly—­without any narrative
transition—­transported to the empty square in Karafuto, where the narrator
abruptly stands. Again, this double move lacks any sense of Novalis’s escha-
tological metaphysics. Instead, to once more cite Friedman’s definition of
planetarity, Tawada puts into play an etymologically grounded epistemology
by paying “attention to modes of local and translocal meaning-​­making.” “Sud-
den emptiness” constitutes Tawada’s self-​­consciously creative, translocal act
of meaning-​­making, while her constant focus on the labile modes of significa-
tion on Sakhalin—­alternating between Russian and Japanese and transmitted
in German—­inspires the reader to reflect on “processes and practices of per-
ception and expression on a global scale.”65 The etymologically faithful but
awkward rendering of “Karafuto” not only constitutes an example of what
Perloff refers to as “the stubborn literalism of Tawada’s logic,” but also allows
the author, through subtle paronomasia, to “translate”—­ über-​­setzen—­her
readers from a linguistically to a topographically oriented narrative segment
with the barest hint of a bridge, a bridge as Zunge, as tongue, a “mother”
(Japanese) and German tongue with a Russian ambience.66
Christian Moraru has recently argued that translation, in order to have
validity in the current age, must become more reflective and self-​­referential.
Translation is as much about the translator and the text he or she creates in
the target language as it is about the work and author of the source language.
Planetary Poetics 21

Citing contemporary theorists of translation such as Lawrence Venuti (whose

thinking was strongly influenced by Goethe’s third-​­level translation axiom),
Moraru asserts that if “relational semantics and the contingent critique it
capacitates” are self-​­
reflective enough, its practitioners “look ‘laterally,’
around the translator’s world and into him-​­or herself.”67 Tawada’s planetary
poetics render transparent the process of self-​­reflection and self-​­referentiality
Moraru finds to be desiderata for translation and translation theory in the
present age. Her work thus becomes exemplary for the double act/double
significance of übersetzen as suggested by Goethe and Novalis in their
respective world literary and proto-​­world literary models. Tawada both self-​
c­ onsciously foregrounds the act of translating words and sentences from one
tongue to another and transports the reader from one shore to more distant
shores, from the globe of the creating but solitary ego to the planet relation-
ally inhabited, as Spivak indicates, by the self and the Other.

Notes

1. Emily Apter, “Untranslatables: A World System,” New Literary History 39,

no. 3 (Summer 2008): 582.
2. See Thomas Bleicher, “Novalis und die Idee der Weltliteratur,” Arcadia 14,
no. 3 (1979): 254–­70.
3. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Werke (Berlin: Dietz, 1959), 4:466.
4. See, for example, Ernst Elster, “Weltlitteratur und Litteraturvergleichung,”
Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 107 (1901): 38–­
39; and Fritz Strich, “Weltliteratur und vergleichende Literaturgeschichte,” in
Philosophie der Literaturwissenschaft, ed. Emil Ermatinger (Berlin: Junker und
Dünnhaupt, 1930), 422–­41. This latter essay focuses not only on the necessity
of selectivity and superiority in critically establishing what works belong to
Weltliteratur, but also on the genetically specific popular (völkisch) quality of
the various national literatures. At this time, Strich argued that an author could
not be regarded as worthy of world literary status if his work did not reflect the
characteristics of his nation and people. For example, by virtue of the cosmopoli-
tanism exhibited by the German author Heinrich Mann, a putatively “French”
quality, this author does not deserve to be characterized as belonging to the pan-
theon of Weltliteratur (429–­30).
5. Kurt Hildebrandt, Goethe: Seine Weltweisheit im Gesamtwerk, 2nd ed.
(Leipzig: Philipp Reclam, 1942), 471.
6. Fritz Strich, Goethe und die Weltliteratur (Bern: Francke, 1946), 397.
7. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Gedenkausgabe der Werke, Briefe und Gespräche,
ed. Ernst Beutler (Zurich: Artemis, 1948–­54), 14:907.
8. Ibid., 14:914–­15.
9. Strich, Goethe und die Weltliteratur, 14.
10. In a similar vein, Apter has alluded to Weltliteratur’s “commitment to
expansive cultural secularism” in The Translation Zone: A New Comparative
Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006), 41.
22 John D. Pizer

11. I discuss how contemporary scholarship has addressed the interrelation-

ship between these concepts in “Cosmopolitanism and Weltliteratur,” Goethe
Yearbook 13 (2005): 165–­79.
12. Strich, Goethe und die Weltliteratur, 398.
13. Ibid., 399.
14. Ibid., 400.
15. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 12.
16. Rüdiger Görner, “Goethe’s Cosmopolitanism,” in Cosmopolitans in the
Modern World: Studies on a Theme in German and Austrian Literary Culture,
ed. Suzanne Kirkbright (Munich: Iudicium, 2000), 37. In making this claim,
Görner cites Goethe’s epic poem Hermann und Dorothea (1797), which creates a
poetic encounter between refugees from the French Revolution and a prosperous,
more easterly settlement as yet untouched by the revolution’s violence (36–­37).
The encounter culminates in the betrothal of the female refugee Dorothea with
Hermann, a local young man who is strongly rooted in the familial and com-
munity domains where the narrative takes place. Goethe’s poem makes it clear
that Dorothea will easily accommodate herself to her new world and positively
contribute to it.
17. Claudio Guillén, The Challenge of Comparative Literature, trans. Cola
Franzen (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 40.
18. Ursula K. Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental
Imagination of the Global (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 3.
19. Ibid., 6.
20. Masao Miyoshi, “Turn to the Planet: Literature, Diversity, and Totality,”
Comparative Literature 53, no. 4 (Autumn 2001): 289.
21. Ibid., 295.
22. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2003), 72.
23. Ibid., xii.
24. Ibid., 39.
25. Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” in Debating World
Literature, ed. Christopher Prendergast (London: Verso, 2004), 152.
26. Ibid., 148.
27. Ibid., 149.
28. Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 107–­8 n1.
29. Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” 149.
30. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 143.
31. Wai Chee Dimock, “Scales of Aggregation: Prenational, Subnational,
Transnational,” American Literary History 18, no. 2 (2006): 225.
32. Reinhard Meyer-​­Kalkus, “World Literature beyond Goethe,” trans. Kevin
McAleer, in Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Cambridge,
Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 114.
33. Ibid., 121.
34. Goethe, Gedenkausgabe der Werke, 24:229.
35. See, for example, the essay collections Vinay Dharwadker, ed., Cosmopolitan
Geographies: New Locations in Literature and Culture (New York: Routledge,
2001); and Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, eds., Cosmopolitics: Thinking and
Feeling beyond the Nation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).
Planetary Poetics 23

36. Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 72.

37. The term “globe” certainly did not have negative connotations for Goethe.
Indeed, Goethe’s Weltliteratur concept was largely inspired by his reading of
the French journal Le Globe. See Heinz Hamm, Goethe und die französische
Zeitschrift “Le Globe”: Eine Lektüre im Zeichen der Weltliteratur (Weimar:
Böhlau, 1998).
38. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the
Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004), xiii–­xiv.
39. Novalis, Schriften, ed. Paul Kluckhohn and Richard Samuel, 2nd ed. (Stutt-
gart: Kohlhammer, 1960–­75), 3:560.
40. Ibid., 2:420.
41. Ibid., 2:616.
42. Ibid., 2:112. In her book Delayed Endings (Athens: University of Georgia
Press, 1987), Alice A. Kuzniar notes that, for Novalis, the ego is actually “a nega-
tive entity, ever impure and ever striving,” a postulate that comes to the fore in his
Fichte Studies (81). He thus almost literally cuts the ego down to size and forces
it, as an “ever striving” entity, to reach out to the Other. This makes Novalis’s
view of the personal ego compatible with the valuation of alterity one associates
with the planetary turn. On Fichtean consciousness and self-​­knowledge, also see
Clare Kennedy, Paradox, Aphorism and Desire in Novalis and Derrida (London:
Maney, 2008), 21–­24.
43. Novalis, Schriften, 3:677.
44. Ibid., 4:268–­69.
45. W. Daniel Wilson’s study Unterirdische Gänge: Goethe, Freimaurerei und
Politik (Göttingen, Ger.: Wallstein, 1999) is especially instructive in this regard.
46. Novalis, Schriften, 3:464.
47. Bleicher, “Novalis, ” 265.
48. Novalis, Schriften, 3:464.
49. See David Damrosch, “Introduction: Goethe Coins a Phrase,” in What Is
World Literature? (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003), 1–­36.
50. Goethe, Gedenkausgabe der Werke, 3:555–­56
51. Novalis, Schriften, 3:685.
52. Ibid., 2:439–­40.
53. Goethe, Gedenkausgabe der Werke, 14:932–­33.
54. See Andreas Huyssen, Die frühromantische Konzeption von Übersetzung
und Aneignung: Studien zur frühromantischen Utopie einer deutschen Weltlitera-
tur (Zurich: Atlantis, 1969), 131–­38.
55. Ibid., 173.
56. Susan Stanford Friedman, “Planetarity: Musing Modernist Studies,” Mod-
ernism/Modernity 17, no. 3 (September 2010): 494.
57. Jahan Ramazani, A Transnational Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2009), x.
58. Yoko Tawada, Sprachpolizei und Spielpolyglotte (Tübingen: Konkursbuch
Verlag Claudia Gehrke, 2007), 7.
59. Marjorie Perloff, Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New
Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 137.
60. Tawada, Sprachpolizei und Spielpolyglotte, 10.
61. Perloff, Unoriginal Genius, 137 (emphasis in original).
24 John D. Pizer

62. Huyssen, Die frühromantische Konzeption von Übersetzung und

Aneignung, 133 (italics in original).
63. Tawada, Sprachpolizei und Spielpolyglotte, 124.
64. Ibid., 149.
65. Friedman, “Planetarity,” 494.
66. Perloff, Unoriginal Genius, 143.
67. Christian Moraru, Cosmodernism: American Narrative, Late Globaliza-
tion, and the New Cultural Imaginary (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
2011), 169, 170.
 Terraqueous Planet
The Case for Oceanic Studies

Hester Blum

To measure distance at sea is to measure time on an interstellar scale. We

demarcate the globe by temporally defined lines of longitude and latitude
whose origins come from seafaring. The ocean is in permanent opposition
to landmarks, inscriptions, and other localizing mechanisms presuming sta-
sis; the imaginary lines that subdivide the globe were conceived as a way to
abstract and solidify oceanic location in the face of the unstable surface of
planetary terraqueous space. Fixing degrees and minutes and seconds—­the
ordinal terms of global location—­has relied historically on the ability to mea-
sure a position relative to the sun and other stars. Before global positioning
systems, this could only be done by means of accurate sea clocks, sextants,
and charts that allowed mariners to plot their relative position among the
poles of Greenwich, the stars, and the bobbing horizon. Thus, by definition,
to know one’s place at sea was to know one’s place on the planet—­even
more, in the universe. And yet, in literary and philosophical history the nauti-
cal environment, despite covering more than 70 percent of the earth’s surface,
has been seen as a non-​­specific place, one outside of time, beyond time, or
hostile to time. A “sea which will permit no records,” in Herman Melville’s
phrase,1 could register as a medium both of generation and annihilation.
The presumed abstraction of time and space at sea, though, is a land-​­based
perspective that emerges from an understanding of the planet as subdivided into
political rather than ecoglobalist categories. How might our understanding of
planetary time and space be reoriented—­cast adrift—­when considered from
the vantage point of the earth’s oceanic spaces? This essay meditates upon the
planetary turn from the perspective of the coincident and complementary field
of oceanic studies. Both positions share the fundamental presumption that the
nation-​­state is an insufficient unit of comparative analysis. As Gayatri Chakra-
vorty Spivak proposes, thinking about the planet allows for an understanding
of ecological, cultural, and political relations as functioning independently
of the state-​­or capital-​­based exchanges familiarly identified as globalism.2
In Wai Chee Dimock’s formulation, a planetary sense of deep time serves a
similar purpose in dislocating our approach from nation-​­based temporalities.3

25
26 Hester Blum

Along the same lines, oceanic studies seeks to reorient our critical perspective,
finding capacious possibilities for new relational forms—­dispersion, erosion,
flotation, confluence, solvency—­adapted from the constitutively unbounded
examples provided by the ocean. And recent geophysical changes to the seas
caused by global climate change demand critical attention as well, as part
of a history of knowledge circulation plotted along sea routes. As Kären
Wigan writes of what has also been called New Thalassology, “No longer
outside time, the sea is being given a history, even as the history of the world is
being retold from the perspective of the sea.”4 Rather than viewing planetary
exchange as something that takes place transnationally, between geographi-
cally abstracted states, oceanic studies unmoors our critical perspective from
the boundaries of the nation. Planetary and oceanic shifts are invested, in
part, in recognizing the artificiality and intellectual limitations of national,
political, linguistic, physiological, or temporal boundaries in studying forms
of literary and cultural influence and circulation.5 A fundamental premise of
oceanic studies is that such recognized patterns of nation-​­and capital-​­based
relationality dissolve in the space and time of the sea.
In what follows, I consider the relationship between theories of oceanic
studies and planetarity in terms of their mutual investment in recalibrating—­
even annihilating—­the gauges of time and space. The science of latitude and
longitude provides one critical vocabulary for understanding how space
and time are weighed in a planetary balance. I also invoke several scenes
of oceanic and planetary accounting in the works of Henry David Thoreau
and Herman Melville, the U.S. writers who have arguably been the most
identified with ecoglobalist and oceanic perspectives. Thoreau, for instance,
surveys a body of water that had been imagined bottomless and finds that
theories of the infinite in fact have greater explanatory power once the mea-
surement of infinity has been countermanded. Melville, too, provides a model
for thinking through comparative notions of planetary location in theorizing
time as either horological (clock-​­based, locally relevant) or chronometri-
cal (idealized, spiritual—­that is, Greenwich Mean Time). Thus, I draw on
these two American writers for their insistence on the necessity of materi-
alist, labor-​­based practices when postulating philosophical understandings
of time and space. This point, I contend, is urgent in our current planetary
moment: metaphorizing earth and sea, abstracting them from the effects of
human actors, has severe consequences both environmentally and politically.
Oceanic studies is predicated on a belief in the sea’s imaginative and mate-
rial resources. Both kinds are under constant threat, a contingency that helps
account for the field’s present emergence at our moment of climate change.

“The Whims of Tides and Mariners”

We must think of the sea and the ships that butt about it as emphatically
embodied: even more so than in Michel Foucault’s now-​­familiar closing
Terraqueous Planet 27

proposal in his essay “Of Other Spaces,” where he writes that the ship
has been not only “the great instrument of economic development  .  .  .
but has been simultaneously the greatest reserve of the imagination.”6
Granted, when considering reserves of the imagination, we must be mind-
ful, too, of the gas and mineral sources that make the liquid and frozen
seas the target of mining, extraction, and other ecological threats, espe-
cially in a period of global climate change propelled by human actions.
These threats, for example, are producing new varieties of imperialist ter-
ritorial claiming: in 2007 Russia—­seeking to secure raw materials at the
North Pole, an oceanic region with no land or stable ice—­claimed not the
sea or “pole” but the tectonic plate beneath the seafloor.7 More recently,
at the opposite pole, Russia also drilled into the sub-​­glacial Lake Vostok
(over 13,000 feet under the Antarctic ice cap), the liquid contents of which
are estimated to have been under ice and thus untouched for 25 million
years. And Russia is, of course, not the only nation making new claims to
oceanic spaces. The United States, Canada, China, Denmark, Britain, and
Norway are among the other circumpolar nations seeking new access to
resources in or beneath the water. In addition, global warming produces
new access to planetary sea routes. The fabled Northwest Passage through
the seas of the Canadian Arctic archipelago, which provides a northern sea
route from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans, had been unsuccessfully—­
often fatally—­sought for half a millennium. However, by 2009 the Arctic
pack ice had been reduced to the point of open-​­water navigation through
the Canadian and Russian Arctic. The ship of Foucault’s imagination thus
produces economic development at the potential cost of the very reserves it
traverses.
However, there is another aspect of the sea’s materiality that is overlooked
in formulations such as Foucault’s and environmentalists’ discourse: the
figure of the sailor, the laboring body that brings human presence to the
ocean in the first place. The sailor is crucial to oceanic studies not just as the
agent of maritime commerce, transit, and mythology, but also for his literal
outlandishness: the sailor typifies the historic dissolution of the protections
afforded by national affiliations in the space and time of the sea.8 As the
first intra-​­planetary travelers, sailors were imagined free from many of the
constraints of social and political life. Yet they faced hostile environmental
conditions as well as repressive hierarchical structures aboard ship, neither
of which could be mediated by the protections of statehood or citizenship.
The two regularities in the lives of seamen were the disciplinary practices of
maritime navigation and time management: the taking of celestial readings,
the keeping of the log, the maintenance of watches or shifts as clocked by the
hour. The labor of mariners, in other words, was the metronome of human-
ized oceanic time.
And yet in the modern Western cultural imagination, seamen’s mobility
accounts in part for their roughness, their dissolution, and their potential
for agitation. In his preface to On the Shores of Politics, Jacques Rancière
28 Hester Blum

recognizes the centrality of these aspects of sailors and identifies as well the
reasons for their imaginative obliquity to the history of states:

The sea smells bad. This is not because of the mud, however. The sea
smells of sailors, it smells of democracy. . . . Before taking us down
into the famous cave, Socrates tells us a lot about triremes, incor-
rigible sailors and helpless pilots. Entering the cave we bid farewell
to this fatal and seductive seascape. The cave is the sea transposed
beneath the earth, bereft of its sparkling glamour: enclosure instead
of open sea, men in chains instead of rows of oarsmen, the dullness
of shadows on the wall instead of light reflected on waves. The pro-
cedure whereby the prisoner is released and offered conversion is
preceded by another, by that first metaphoric act which consists in
burying the sea, drying it up, stripping it of its reflections and chang-
ing their very nature. In response to these assaults we know, however,
that the sea will take its revenge. For the paradox of the undertaking
is that hauling politics onto the solid ground of knowledge and cour-
age entails a return to the isles of refoundation; it means crossing the
sea once more and surrendering the shepherds’ resurrected city to the
whims of tides and mariners.9

The oceanic counterpoint to Plato’s famous cave analogy might change

how we perceive both shadow and substance in the world, Rancière offers.
Drying out the sea as a philosophical figure strands those odorous, bois-
terous aspects of the political world represented in his figure by seamen.
And in invoking the “revenge” that the sea might seize in its response to
being rendered peripheral by political and philosophical orders, Rancière
underscores both the sea’s inhumanity and its embodiment. (We will see
this suggested in Melville’s work as well.) The political world in Rancière’s
formulation cannot be accurately assessed from the vantage point of the
stability and desiccation of the “solid ground of knowledge.” Instead, we
might take the bobbing, surging, unfixed shadows on the cave wall as an
encouragement to understand political and planetary questions as similarly
composed of a matter whose substance owes more to the ductility of the
watery world than has been heretofore measured. Democracy requires an
accord with the “fatal and seductive” aspects of the imaginative and material
oceans.
The sea of Rancière’s imagination is no longer figured as the world outside
of hearth and self, or even at the margins of the planet understood in terms of
political geography. His figure asks us not to assess the ocean from a position
on land but to locate ourselves among the “whims of tides and mariners” in
order to shape a new and different vision of the world. A land-​­based per-
spective takes its stability from what we might see as a kinesiological notion
of proprioception: we understand our position in the world in relation to
Terraqueous Planet 29

stimuli generated from within the perceiving body itself.10 In other words,
in the kinesiological model a person’s balance is derived not only from some
intrinsic stability, or from contact with the floor, but from his or her visual,
tactile, and other sensory awareness of and contact with the relative per-
manence of his or her surroundings. (This is why, for example, it is more
difficult to balance with one’s eyes closed.) The fluid environment disallows
such comparative forms of understanding. In this sense, the “enclosure” of
the cave in Rancière’s Platonic figure comes as a stabilizing force that stands
in contrast to the riotous a-​­referentiality of the sea. Absent the “sea legs”
necessary to anchor one’s vantage point and corporal positioning, an oceanic
perspective takes disequilibrium as its state of being. As I maintain elsewhere
in my work, critical positions premised on a planet organized by relations
between states and capital circulation could profit from an embrace of dis-
equilibrium and learn from the sea’s ways of gauging interchanges that are
both cosmic and measurable in some new form.

“Not Continent but Insular”

Consider, as an instance of the longitudinal logic of oceanic studies, the famil-

iar figure of the eco-​­materialist Thoreau at Walden Pond. The pond was both
repository and wellspring for his imaginative project, his determination “to
explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one’s being alone.”11
Throughout his writings, Thoreau is insistently mindful of the coincidence of
the practical and poetic dimensions of natural spaces. In Walden, for instance,
he writes of the pond, “when you look into it you see that earth is not conti-
nent but insular. This is as important as that it keeps butter cool” (391–­92).
Recognizing land as an “insular” plot, its existence contingent on water’s
recession (both locally and on a planetary scale), makes Thoreau’s voyage of
self-​­discovery reliant on an oceanic reorientation of geographic terms. That
is, the act of setting the land in a relation to water rather than to an ori-
enting pole allows him, instead, to create an imaginative “sea.” Experiential
knowledge of the pond, Thoreau proposes, produces imaginative capital; he
is interested in the epistemological payload of the insularity of land as well as
in the experiential knowledge of the pond.
The pond’s ability to serve theoretically as Thoreau’s ocean in miniature
is not necessarily more important, however, than its mundane powers of
butter-​­cooling. When Thoreau ventures out to survey the bottom of Walden
Pond, which locals had long thought to be literally and figuratively unfath-
omable, he sensibly takes up “compass and chain and sounding line,” finding
it “remarkable how long men will believe in the bottomlessness of a pond
without taking the trouble to sound it” (549). He records over one hun-
dred readings, noting the variance in the pond’s length and breadth, its coves
and bars. The results of his labor are printed in Walden as a map—­the only
30 Hester Blum

illustration or diagram in the book—­with all the various depth measurements

provided and labels to mark the pond’s dimensions. Thoreau’s scientific doc-
umentation of Walden’s foundation is not entirely clinical, nor is it intended
to anesthetize any more ethereal contemplation of the pond’s imaginative
depths. In fact, Thoreau finds that “not an inch” of the pond’s rather unusual
depth “can be spared by the imagination.” He wonders, “What if all ponds
were shallow? Would it not react on the minds of men? I am thankful that
this pond was made deep and pure for a symbol. While men believe in the
infinite some ponds will be thought to be bottomless” (551). An imagination
capable of considering the infinite might find its reflection in deep waters. Yet
Thoreau has taken the trouble to quantify the pond’s dimensions, to expose
the myth of its infinitude. Although factual accounting here could limit his
range of interpretation, Thoreau argues that geophysical knowledge grants
him broader ground for contemplation. A belief in bottomlessness or the
infinite is a passive belief, borrowed from conventional thinking rather than
one sounded independently; it is a belief without referent or logical scale.
What Thoreau has done, instead, is to seize the physical fact of the pond’s
depth out of the realm of the unknowable, to mark it with his own intellec-
tual and mechanical labor. The ability to fix a location, to establish a point
of reference, frees the subject to contextualize, and then reproduce, any other
readings from the perspective of the point thus fixed. In setting the pond
in material relation to the world instead of retaining its symbolic value for
abstraction, Thoreau thus rescues unknowability as a philosophical problem
rather than an empirical one.
The notion of the earth as “insular” rather than “continent[al]” exempli-
fies the perspectival shift proposed by the planetary turn and oceanic studies
alike. Just as the Copernican revolution outmoded a Ptolemaic model of the
heavens by revealing the small, subject Earth to be peripheral to the Sun, an
oceanic revolution—­if of different proportion—­repositions continental land
as circumscribed, minimized, and mere island amid the waters that dominate
the globe. From the earliest days of nautical travel, those venturing upon the
deep faced an indefinitely proliferating unknown, one that reduced the once
Ptolemaic earth to a receding spot of dark on the horizon. Columbus famously
dealt with the existential horror that oceanic distance threatened in his men
by keeping two logbooks for his 1492 voyages to the Americas. One book
recorded the actual distance traveled, according to the navigational tools of
the time. But as that distance became attenuated beyond what the expedition
had expected, Columbus doctored a second, public logbook meant to be read
by the crew, a log that radically shortchanged their daily advance and thus
assuaged the men’s fear that they would sail off the edge of the earth. Colum-
bus judged nautical distance in balance with the psychic distance in space and
time that could be reasonably understood by his frightened crew members
adrift at sea: the tools of measurement at sea were therefore relational. Even
though Columbus’s move, unlike Thoreau’s, falsified aqueous information in
Terraqueous Planet 31

order to deny the materiality of relation, both posit the unknown as some-
thing other than immediate or empirical.
But against which control might Columbus’s men have observed the
truth? At every moment, every coordinate, the maritime world of the ship
lists, heaves, rolls, plunges, and rocks. Should an impulse to stability even
obtain at sea? In the oceanic world, such celestial reflections resist meta-
phorics in favor of a metaphysics that more closely resembles a better (albeit
more abstract) physics. The Galilean utterance “and yet it moves” is a state of
being in the space of the sea, particularly in its evocation of the measurement
of the relative position of planetary bodies to one another. In Father Mapple’s
sermon at the beginning of Moby-​­Dick, Melville illustrates this very equivo-
cality in the figure of Jonah, who has run to sea rather than submit to God’s
command to preach to the residents of Nineveh. The presumption behind his
flight is, in part, that God’s reach would hold no purchase at sea. In Melville’s
telling via Father Mapple (the seamen’s chaplain), the divine light from which
Jonah seeks obscurity is no blinding flash. Instead, it illuminates the oceanic
contours of contingent systems of valuation. Here is Jonah in his cabin, look-
ing at an actual lamp:

Screwed at its axis against the side, a swinging lamp slightly oscillates
in Jonah’s room; and the ship, heeling over towards the wharf with
the weight of the last bales received, the lamp, flame and all, though
in slight motion, still maintains a permanent obliquity with reference
to the room; though, in truth, infallibly straight itself, it but made
obvious the false, lying levels among which it hung. The lamp alarms
and frightens Jonah; as lying in his berth his tormented eyes roll
round the place, and this thus far successful fugitive finds no refuge
for his restless glance. But that contradiction in the lamp more and
more appals [sic] him. The floor, the ceiling, and the side, are all awry.
“Oh! so my conscience hangs in me!” he groans, “straight upward,
so it burns; but the chambers of my soul are all in crookedness!”12

Jonah’s dilemma is something like this: aligning himself with the light of his
conscience or God’s commands will put him in “permanent obliquity” with
the structure of the material world around him. Neither Jonah’s eye nor the
lamp can find repose; their spatial dislocation from truth becomes an unceas-
ing movement for which every moment renders obsolete the movement that
had preceded it. Melville makes material the process by which oceanic spaces
force “awry” the referents with which one normally organizes a sense of the
world.
Throughout Moby-​­Dick Melville stages similarly equivocal scenes of plan-
etary orienteering. One of the more memorable passages in the novel takes
on an added dimension when considered in terms of the oceanic forms of
location. I refer here to the scene in “The Quarter-​­Deck” in which Ahab lays
32 Hester Blum

out for the crew his true motivation for the voyage: not a general whale
hunt, but his monomaniacal pursuit of the white whale that had devoured
his leg. The only significant opposition that Ahab encounters comes from
the first mate, Starbuck, whose worldview is shaped by his Christian belief;
Starbuck finds blasphemous the idea of taking “vengeance on a dumb brute.”
Ahab’s famous response reveals his own indifference to answering the ques-
tions that undergird causality. His desire is to obliterate causality without
understanding it: “All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But
in each event—­in the living act, the undoubted deed—­there, some unknown
but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind
the unreasoning mask. . . . That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and
be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that
hate upon him” (163–­64). Captain Ahab accepts that there is an unfath-
omable force that governs action in the world; yet the “unknown but still
reasoning thing” that determines causality as embodied by the whale is for
him only something to hate and destroy rather than to seek to understand in
relation to Judeo-​­Christian ideology, or to zoology, or to eco-​­biology. Irrel-
evant to him, in other words, is the question of whether Moby Dick’s seeming
malice toward Ahab originated with the whale, or with some broader, unseen
force on whose behalf the whale acted. In accepting that the oceanic world
provides no answers, only “inscrutable” agency against which to rail, Ahab
provides a fatalistic (and ultimately fatal) counterpoint to Columbus and
Jonah, who push against oceanic uncertainty by falling back on structures of
thought borrowed from the relative stability of terrestrial philosophies.

Chronometric and Horological Conceits

Neither Columbus’s nor Jonah’s experiences were exceptional; oceanic mea-

surement is ever provisional. At its most speculative, we find the blind form
of navigation known as “dead reckoning” (or “ded. [deduced] reckoning”),
an unreliable method employed only when celestial referents are hidden and
other navigational tools incapacitated, whether by weather or circumstance.
Using dead reckoning, a sailor guesses a ship’s position based on probable
drift in the time elapsed, as well as on any prior knowledge of the currents or
conditions. Even more rigorous modalities of navigation are based on forms
of conditional triangulation. Latitude, or one’s angle from the equator on a
north-​­south axis, is determined by plotting the sun’s altitude either at noon or
by the star Polaris by means of a tool such as an astrolabe or a sextant (pre-​
s­ atellite-​­based global positioning systems in the age of sail). These readings
are in turn compared with the celestial charts and navigational manuals pro-
duced by other, earlier voyagers. But this is an imperfect science. The swell of
the waves, the haziness of the horizon, or atmospheric changes all make accu-
rate readings an ideal rather than a reality. Determining longitude or one’s
Terraqueous Planet 33

distance on an east-​­west axis from the prime meridian that runs through
Greenwich, England, is a more difficult proposition, requiring a measure-
ment not just of space but also of time. (Even the Greenwich prime meridian
is only a provisional convenience, for historically it faced challenges from a
rival meridian in Paris.) Measuring both space and time is necessary given
that the earth rotates fifteen degrees every hour, and calculations relative to
the prime meridian must account for the temporal turn. Much like Colum-
bus’s two logbooks, navigators needed to keep two clocks: one set to a local
time in which the sun at a 90-​­degree angle signified noon and one set to an
unchanging Greenwich mean time. Before the invention of a more accurate
sea clock by John Harrison in 1761, which kept time well over a much longer
duration without adjustment, longitude was exceptionally difficult to calcu-
late accurately by any specialists other than expert astronomers—­to be sure,
not by the average ship’s navigator.
The prime meridian is invoked by Pascale Casanova as a way to locate
literature in time and space. “Just as the fictive line known as the prime merid-
ian, arbitrarily chosen for the determination of longitude, contributes to the
real organization of the world and makes possible the measure of distances
and the location of positions on the surface of the earth,” she writes in The
World Republic of Letters, “so what might be called the Greenwich merid-
ian of literature makes it possible to estimate the relative aesthetic distance
from the center of the world of letters of all those who belong to it.”13 For
Casanova, this time extends latitudinally—­measuring north and south, for-
ward and backward in time. In Melville’s novel Pierre; or the Ambiguities,
however, spatiotemporal location has a longitudinal logic. The novel’s title
character had spent his youth imagining himself as the linear climax of his
family’s genealogical promise, but after a series of rash and incestuous actions
force a rupture and disintegration of that familial line, he embraces a new
temporal theory. An ephemeral, incomplete pamphlet Pierre encounters upon
renouncing the family estate pronounces that all wisdom is “provisional.” The
pamphlet’s own contingency is reinforced by beginning and abruptly termi-
nating in the word “if” (as well as in its subtitle, “Being not so much the Portal,
as part of the temporary Scaffold to the Portal of this new Philosophy”).14
Pierre finds in the pamphlet a philosophy that both draws from and
defines an oceanic, planetary perspective. It begins by stipulating that the
human soul is irreconcilably distant and out of tune with divine truth, and
gives names to those two poles by incorporating time-​­keeping nomencla-
ture. By this theory, humans keep expedient “horological” or terrestrial time
(say, Eastern Standard Time), while God keeps idealized “chronometrical” or
celestial time (Greenwich mean time), one akin in its accuracy, we are told, to
the chronometers crafted by John Harrison. In the following extended figure
of a ship attempting to navigate while in China—­taking readings with respect
to the Greenwich time then 120 degrees or eight hours away—­Melville asks
the question of how one might live in one time knowing that the other exists:
34 Hester Blum

But though the chronometer carried from Greenwich to China,

should truly exhibit in China what the time may be at Greenwich at
any moment; yet, though thereby it must necessarily contradict China
time, it does by no means thence follow, that with respect to China,
the China watches are at all out of the way. . . . Besides, of what use to
the Chinaman would a Greenwich chronometer, keeping Greenwich
time, be? Were he thereby to regulate his daily actions, he would be
guilty of all manner of absurdities:—­going to bed at noon, say, when
his neighbors would be sitting down to dinner. . . . Nor does the God
at the heavenly Greenwich expect common men to keep Greenwich
wisdom in this remote Chinese world of ours; because such a thing
were unprofitable for them here, and, indeed, a falsification of Him-
self, inasmuch as in that case, China time would be identical with
Greenwich time, which would make Greenwich time wrong. (212)

This is not just a post-​­lapsarian observation or the realization that one’s local
or mundane existence can only be recognized as such in the knowledge of
a universal or ideal time. In Melville’s conception both the terrestrial and
the celestial remain live, synchronic, and in relation, together constituting
an oceanic third space in which the horologue and the chronometer triangu-
late an ever-​­askew subject position. And in the provisional truths established
in the spatiotemporal logic of the pamphlet, we see not only the freighted
time of Dimock’s planetary conception, but also Spivak’s alternative to glo-
balism. That is, if the terms of globalism flatten all planetary distance—­if
such a notion makes Greenwich mean time or the logic of capital the uni-
versal standard—­then an oceanic sense of planetarity allows for a protean
understanding of space and time alike, one that rests uneasily on Rancière’s
“whims of tides and mariners.” We can see in this as well Gilles Deleuze’s
identification of the characteristic “deterritorialization” of American litera-
ture, for which “everything is departure, becoming, passage, leap, daemon,
relationship with the outside.”15
China time versus Greenwich time, insular earth versus continent earth:
both oceanic and planetary studies add a geometric and conceptual dimen-
sion to our standard practices of referentiality. By this I mean that if relations
are normally plotted linearly, in a point-​­to-​­point trajectory, then the example
of oceanic spatiotemporal accounting registers in a third if not fourth dimen-
sion, necessitating a celestial or interstellar connection in order to describe
one’s place in the world. An oceanic standard helps, too, to give new mean-
ing to the figure of the “turn” in thinking of planetarity, as well as in the
many turns of recent decades (the transnational, the linguistic, the temporal,
the spatial, and the hemispheric, among many others). The fact that these
reorientations are predicated on the use of the word “turn” suggests an orien-
teering impulse, one that presumes routes whose transits have a continuity, a
linearity, a cartography. To “turn” is to have had a path, a line of demarcation.
Terraqueous Planet 35

While the terminus of that turn might be unknown or imagined, it has an

established trajectory, a traceable origin. And yet what a turn produces is a
triangulation: the point from which one begins and the point at which one
ends might be more closely located on the triangular axis. Nonetheless, the
longer, perpendicular route is necessitated, even mandated, by imagining such
intellectual routes as “turns.” One of the fundamental premises of the emerg-
ing field of oceanic studies is that such patterns of relationality dissolve in the
space and time of the sea.

Notes

1. Herman Melville, Moby-​­Dick; or, The Whale, vol. 6 of The Writings of

Herman Melville, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tan-
selle (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press; Chicago: Newberry Library,
1988), 60.
2. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Planetarity,” in Death of a Discipline
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 71–­102.
3. See Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature
across Deep Time (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006).
4. Kären Wigan, introduction to “AHR Forum: Oceans of History,” American
Historical Review 111, no. 3 (June 2006): 717. See also the “Theories and Meth-
odologies” cluster on oceanic studies in PMLA 125, no. 3 (May 2010): 657–­736.
5. In these terms we might locate oceanic studies at the critical intersection of
a Spivakian notion of space and a Dimockian sense of time.
6. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16,
no. 1 (Spring 1986): 27.
7. I discuss Russia’s North Pole “land” grab in my article “John Cleves Symmes
and the Planetary Reach of Polar Exploration,” American Literature 84, no. 2
(June 2012): 243–­71.
8. I make this argument in more detail in my article “The Prospect of Oceanic
Studies,” PMLA 125, no. 3 (May 2010): 670–­77.
9. Jacques Rancière, On the Shores of Politics, trans. Liz Heron (London:
Verso, 1995), 2.
10. This extends into a corporeal (and labor-​­aware) dimension of Dimock’s
spatiotemporal concept. Pascale Casanova also writes that “literary space creates
a present on the basis of which all positions can be measured, a point in relation
to which all other points can be located” (The World Republic of Letters, trans.
M. B. DeBevoise [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004], 88).
11. Henry David Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods, in A Week, Walden,
The Maine Woods, Cape Cod, ed. Robert F. Sayre (New York: Library of
America, 1985), 578. All references hereafter are to this edition and are noted
parenthetically.
12. Melville, Moby-​­Dick, 44–­45. All references hereafter are to this edition and
are noted parenthetically.
13. Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, 88 (emphasis in original).
36 Hester Blum

14. Herman Melville, Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, vol. 7 of The Writings of
Herman Melville, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle
(Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press; Chicago: Newberry Library, 1971),
210–­11. All references hereafter are to this edition and are noted parenthetically.
15. Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and
Barbara Habberjam, rev. ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 36.
 The Commons . . . and Digital Planetarity

Amy J. Elias

The only sense in which we are Communists is that we care for

the commons: the commons of nature, the commons of what is
privatized by intellectual property, the commons of biogenetics.
For this, and only for this, we should fight. Communism failed
absolutely, but the problems of the commons are here.
—­Slavoj Žižek

We must be able to explain success as well as failure of efforts

to achieve collective action. . . . Mobs, gangs, and cartels are
forms of collective action as well as neighborhood associations,
charities, and voting.
—­Elinor Ostrom

Everyone knows what a “commons” is: it’s a public, community location

open to all, controlled singly by no one, and somehow linked to public beliefs
and communication. Synonyms for the word “common”—­such as “ordi-
nary,” “everyday,” “widely known,” “usual,” “jointly shared,” “standard,”
“low born”—­have a range of connotations, but all imply a leveling, a state
of equality where no one has a special or notable designation, status, or rank.
“Common law” is law developed through customs and usages rather than
through statutes; at a university, “the Commons” is often a communal din-
ing hall or a public green. We like people with whom we have something
“in common,” people with whom we share an abstract commons such as a
personality or lifestyle.
Experts define a commons as a shared resource in which all stakeholders
have an equal interest: “Nothing belongs to anyone, yet everything belongs
to everyone.”1 Yet “the commons” is in the category of tricksy things that
disappear when you try to touch them, like fog, floating soap bubbles, or
financial markets. Calling something a commons gives it a pseudo-​­utopian
halo, an implication of equality and sharing aligned with fraternité in the
best sense, but we tend to forget that a modern commons is often an enclosed

37
38 Amy J. Elias

space dependent on an exclusionary border that designates an inside and an

outside, brother and Other. We also tend to forget how commons are created
in modern societies: a commons is produced either from within itself, a mise
en abyme situation in which one requires a commons to define a commons
(in such cases of exemplary democracy, few commons actually see the light
of day), or from a paradox, in which developing a commons depends on the
military power, beneficence, or sheer will of autocrats, bureaucrats, entre-
preneurs, or wealthy patrons in the private or power sectors. (How many
public parks in the United States originated from private gifts from wealthy
patrons or from acts of imminent domain by government?) Many places
that most people believe to be commons, such as public parks, or university
quads, or waterways, are often revealed to be private or legislated spaces
when someone becomes angry or litigious about how others are using the
space. Certainly, that’s one of the things that the various Occupy movements
of 2011 illustrated; occupiers who camped out in Zuccotti Park, seemingly
a commons area, found themselves the target of hostility from passersby as
well as from the actual owner of the park, Brookfield Office Properties. The
point is that not only are archaic commons, such as an agrarian society’s
grazing area, necessarily defined differently in modern, urbanized contexts,
but also that in order to function efficiently and fairly, a commons might need
to be mediated by authority and law.
Today, a reconsideration of the commons is, implicitly or explicitly, every-
where redefining the concept on a planetary scale. At a moment of world
population explosion and depletion of natural resources, the rhetoric of the
planetary commons is central to environmental studies; within the context
of global finance capitalism, notions of the financial commons preoccupy
sociology and economics; as world nations experience increased travel and
labor mobility and weakening of nation-​­ state boundaries as a result of
globalization, the commons comes to the fore in cultural theories of cosmo-
politanism and in world democracy movements. But we need a better sense
of the sociological and anthropological work tackling the problem of the
commons—­or, more accurately, common pool resources—­if our conversa-
tion about this often under-​­theorized topic is to avoid the dangerous political
poles of communitarian fantasy or political authoritarianism. In our new
twenty-​­first-​­century zeal to create a global commons, we should remember
that there is a material history to commons creation, development, and man-
agement to which attention must be paid.
A rethinking of the commons began with research about simple commons
(or common pool resources [CPRs]), moved to consideration of complex
CPRs, and expanded exponentially with the rise of the global environmen-
tal movement and its early adoption of commons discourse.2 Deliberations
about the commons today almost always take as their starting point a 1968
paper in the journal Science by biologist Garrett Hardin, who presented a
theory of the commons that argued for its inevitable tragic outcome. He
The Commons . . . and Digital Planetarity 39

claimed that, in any commons, people will be motivated to increase their own
profit by optimizing their use of the common resource; however, if everyone
does this, the resource itself will be rapidly depleted, since its longevity and
health are predicated not on everyone’s maximum individual profit based
on maximum individual yield, but on maximum profit based on maximum
resource yield, ideally distributed equitably among resource users. Hardin’s
famous example is that of the herdsmen’s common grazing area:

Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman

will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. Such
an arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries
because tribal wars, poaching, and disease keep the numbers of both
man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. . . .
As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain. . . .
The rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for
him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another;
and another. . . . But this is the conclusion reached by each and every
rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each
man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd
without limit—­in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination
toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a
society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a
commons brings ruin to all.3

Hardin maintained that relying on morality to regulate the commons will not
circumvent this tragedy, for morality is “system-​­sensitive,” depending often
on context, and is thus impossible to determine unilaterally.4 For instance,
he maintains that in places of low population density and huge bison herds,
a hunter’s killing a bison just for the tongue meat would be less ethically
fraught than the same act would be if the dependent population were large
and only a thousand bison remained on the earth. He asseverates that to
ask individuals to restrain themselves for the general good by means of con-
science will also lead only to tragic outcomes, for those who break the rules
and operate selfishly will be more successful over the long run and eventually
dominate the system.
Hardin’s social Darwinism is much maligned in leftist circles, but often
overlooked is the fact that he also called for an “exorcism” of Adam Smith’s
“invisible hand” theory from economic affairs, rejecting the assumption
“that decisions reached individually will, in fact, be the best decisions for an
entire society.”5 Because people have no motivation to act ethically in rela-
tion to the commons and have every incentive to shirk, free-​­ride, cheat, or
respond opportunistically regardless of the economic system that is in place,
Hardin concluded that the only way to avoid the tragedy of selfish overuse
was to regulate the commons either through privatization (that is, markets)
40 Amy J. Elias

or through governmental oversight. “The social arrangements that produce

responsibility,” he wrote, “are arrangements that create coercion, of some
sort. . . . The only kind of coercion I recommend is mutual coercion [such as
taxes], mutually agreed upon by the majority of the people affected.”6
My question is this: what impact has such thinking had on today’s discus-
sion of the planetary commons, particularly in the context of digital culture
and media studies, where talk of the commons has always been part of the
indigenous language? Perhaps the rhetoric of “open source” and “digital com-
mons” did not originate when the first computational machines were created,
but certainly it is characteristic of cyber research after the birth of the Internet
Protocol Suite in 1982, the introduction of hypertext, and the creation of the
World Wide Web (WWW). The Internet may have been born of the military-​
­industrial complex, but it was from the start considered by developers to be a
commons space, and commons thinking fundamentally drove innovation in
it. In the second decade of the twenty-​­first century, however, as telecommu-
nications goes global, technologies such as smartphones become ubiquitous,
and platforms such as social networking systems encroach on the open graz-
ing lands of cyberspace, privatization is wildly disputed among developers
and users. As more and more of our material and informational reality gets
transferred to the oversight of machines and stored in the cloud, who owns
these machines and these clouds (and how ownership impinges on the nature
of the WWW as a global informational commons) will become increasingly
central to, among other things, fundamental definitions of individual and
group autonomy, collective oversight of resources, property rights, profit dis-
tribution and labor production, and privacy rights.
This is not a new insight. In fact, the wars over online privatization have
been waged for so long that weariness, cynicism, and naive utopian accom-
modation are now easily identified rhetorical norms in digital culture studies.
Movies have been made about this. Thus, rather than rehearse yet again the
stories of Napster and other start-ups that ran into a wall of privatization, in
this article I’d like to go back to basic definitions and address the complexi-
ties of the commons—­what it is, how it operates, and what controversies
surround its management. Specifically, I will consider three ways that the
figure of the commons is now being reimagined, after decades of contesta-
tion, to answer Hardin’s original theory and also how these reconceptions
are impacting discussion regarding the planetary media environments of the
Internet and World Wide Web.
The word “digital” is of course a plenum, designating everything from
social networking sites to Krzysztof Wodiczko’s public video projections; to
talk about “digital planetarity,” then, risks further complicating and perhaps
confusing the discussion with multiply overlapping digital domains, scales,
platforms, and aesthetics. I therefore set my sights primarily on theory and
have deliberately picked three radically different domains in which the com-
mons is apprehended—­ public economy, discussions about digital culture
The Commons . . . and Digital Planetarity 41

and open source, and affect theory—­in order to illustrate how a range of
approaches can be used to address the problem of the planetary digital com-
mons. At the site of commons inquiry in digital media studies, distinctions
between “planetarity” and “globalization” become clear: it is precisely the
issue of the commons—­as a social space that is organized neither on the
nation-​­state model nor on the neoliberal global model—­that is most aligned
with the idea of the Internet as a new planetary collective. The last section
of this chapter evaluates the effectiveness of these three avenues of theory
for addressing central issues related to the planetary digital commons. Since
the second of the three example discourses—­namely, the debate about open
source and property rights—­should be familiar to most readers involved in
technology studies, I will focus primarily on the other two, though all address
two questions I see as key to any discussion of digital planetarity: What does it
mean to understand life online as living in the planetary commons? And what
direction might be posited for commons life in this virtual, planetary space?

Elinor Ostrom, Public Economy, and The Commons

A significant counter to Hardin’s “tragedy of the commons” scenario emerged

in public economics through the work of Elinor Ostrom, who in 2009 was
awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics “for her analysis of economic gov-
ernance, especially the commons.”7 Ostrom made two unique contributions
to theories of the commons. First, she turned to game theory to try to map
and understand interactions between appropriators of, and outcomes within,
common pool resources (CPRs).8 Second, she tested projected CPR outcomes
against those of actual field settings and case studies, assessing the predictive
capacities of game theory and also the results of lab experiments in relation
to documented human use of CPRs across the globe.
Ostrom is clear that simple and complex common pool resources require
different oversight to operate efficiently and fairly. Complex CPRs may call,
for instance, for the inclusion of experts to provide research background and
information to CPR appropriators/managers as well as to supervise the imple-
mentation of sanctions stipulated by them. “Providers,” she says, are “those
who arrange for the provision of a CPR,” and a “producer” is any person
“who actually constructs, repairs, or takes actions that ensure the long-​­term
sustenance of the resource system itself.” In some cases, providers and pro-
ducers are the same people, but in other cases they are not: Ostrom gives the
example of a national government providing the financing and design of an
irrigation system and then arranging with local farmers to produce and main-
tain it, at which point the farmers themselves become the providers as well
as the producers. A group of many people or more than one firm can be the
producer of a CPR, but “the resource units . . . are not subject to joint use or
appropriation.” For example, a number of fishermen may control a common
42 Amy J. Elias

fishing ground as providers and/or producers, but “fish harvested by one boat
are not there for someone else.”9 Thus, “CPR appropriators who organize
themselves to govern and manage a CPR are faced with some problems that
are similar to those of appropriating private goods and other problems that
are similar to those of providing public goods.”10
Ostrom also clearly asserts that interdependence is the state in which
appropriators of a material resource (recognized as such) find themselves,
and the motivation for acting interdependently in good faith is the maximiza-
tion of profit, however defined. She specifically rejects a view frequently seen
in much popular and academic discussion, where “interdependence” within a
commons is presented as a moral good and ethical goal or outcome.11 In other
words, the commons in much of Ostrom’s work is not the happy if somewhat
vaguely defined space of an ethical cosmopolitanism, nor is it a contestatory
sphere of planetary intercultural communication.12 Practically speaking, in
Ostrom’s view, acting interdependently means coordinating action strategies
to obtain higher joint benefits or reduce joint harm. A commons is the shared
bedrock of survival, where success or failure is defined in terms of a function-
ing economy of goods.
Ostrom’s research seems shaped by a pragmatic approach to human
nature. She implicitly rebuts conceptions of the commons based on the evo-
lutionary basis of human altruism,13 but she also ignores or is not aware of
a poststructuralist radical interrogation of individual self-​­determination and
agency that might inhibit the pursuit of a commons. Much more down to
earth, she understands a commons as a benefit to material life but humans
as beings subjected to constant temptation to act opportunistically in rela-
tion to resources. Her research avoids utopian promises that a commons
will revamp human subjectivity and concludes instead that CPRs and their
situational contexts themselves do not produce ethical outcomes. She posits
that people basically need to be ethical going in to the CPR situation or be
given incentives to act ethically once the CPR is operating. “The capacity
to design their own rules,” Ostrom argues, “will not enhance the outcomes
achieved by the nontrusting and narrowly selfish individuals of the world,
but will enhance the outcomes of those who are prepared to extend reciproc-
ity to others and interact with others with similar inclinations.”14 Based on
lab experiments measuring cooperation in different simulated CPR circum-
stances, Ostrom contends that there are at least three kinds of settings that
seem unlikely to be improved by self-​­organization: those where people “have
no expectation of mutual trust and no means of building it”; those in which
“mistrust is already rampant, and communication and continued interac-
tions do not reduce the level of distrust”; and settings in which many people
“are willing to extend reciprocity to others but lack authority to create their
own self-​­governing institutions.”15 In order for a CPR to function optimally,
appropriators themselves must have the opportunity to lay down rules, mon-
itoring systems, and penalties.
The Commons . . . and Digital Planetarity 43

In fact, the central problem facing any self-​­organized group seeking to

operate a CPR is “the commitment problem,” or adhering to the principles
of the CPR without an external enforcer. Unlike Hardin, Ostrom thinks that
though this problem will inevitably arise, a resulting “tragic” outcome is not
inevitable. In the face of great temptation to break rules for personal gain,
producers/appropriators “have to motivate themselves (or their agents) to
monitor activities and be willing to impose sanctions to keep conformance
high.”16 Research has shown, she also reports, that “users of a resource sys-
tem will continue to harvest resource units, without trying to self-​­organize,
unless they perceive that the benefits they would receive from a change in
their rules will be greater than the costs involved.”17
Highly relevant to The Planetary Turn’s axial focus on relationality is a
CPR’s communicational dynamic. Notably, Ostrom’s team found that face-​
­to-​­face communication played a significant role in the successful functioning
of CPRs in laboratory situations. After running a series of game models with
test subjects, her group concluded that “the inability [of subjects] to communi-
cate [with one another] limited the durability of their agreements.” However,
“in a decision environment where subjects were given repeated opportunities
to communicate [face-​­to-​­face and without having to pay for the opportu-
nity], subjects offered and extracted promises of cooperation and chastised
one another when conformance was not complete, thereby increasing their
joint yield significantly above that obtained prior to communication.” In their
experiments, they also found that the highest yield of a CPR was gained, and
the defection rate from agreements was lowest, when subjects/appropriators
had “the right to choose a sanctioning mechanism [for rules-​­breakers] and a
single opportunity to communicate” face-​­to-​­face.18
This flies in the face of Hardin’s tragedy scenario, but, as Ostrom notes,
also of assumptions by theorists of noncooperative games, such as John Nash,
who see “words alone . . . as frail constraints when individuals make private,
repetitive decisions between short-​­ term, profit-​­
maximizing strategies and
strategies negotiated by a verbal agreement.”19 These theorists maintain that
what keeps people honest are enforceable contracts (the Hobbesian-​­based
model of interaction), not whether they were able to communicate with one
another. Olstrom’s own research indicates otherwise:

In many of these [CPR dilemmas], but not all, individuals overcome

the temptations present to overuse the CPR. They do this by commu-
nicating their desires to reach acceptable sharing agreements. They
build trust in these agreements by extending reciprocity through the
use of personal heuristics like measured reactions. In difficult set-
tings, they use measured reactions to bolster their agreements as well
as imposing sanctions on those who violate agreements. Individuals
who extend reciprocity to others and who learn to craft their own
effective rules can accomplish more than individuals who do not,
44 Amy J. Elias

especially when they can identify others following the same heuris-
tics. Such individuals achieve more than predicted by noncooperative
game theory as currently understood.20

It seems that communication between producers of a CPR is not only central

to its most efficient operation but also may sometimes offset the “tragedy of
the commons.”
This may be good news for planetarity, specifically for any discussion of the
“planetary commons,” for this is one area in which digital technologies can
contribute unprecedented benefactions. If face-​­to-​­face communication plays
a significant role in the construction and operation of successful common-​
p
­ ool resources, the “digimodernist” global world of the twenty-​­first century
can facilitate such interactions cheaply, at a pace and on a scale that has never
been seen before in human history.21 Real-​­time, direct written language-​­based
online chat (such as instant messaging), social networking systems (such as
Facebook), and proprietary voice-​­over-​­IP services combined with software
applications (such as Skype) offer now-​­familiar and easily accessed means
to overcome distance on a global level, and more advanced technologies are
being created daily. Many of these communications platforms allow people
to meet “virtually face-​­to-​­face” in real time. If their potential for expediting
and simplifying communications is not hampered by politicians or corpo-
rations, these new communications systems offer previously unparalleled
opportunities for CPR providers and appropriators to create new commons
on a planetary scale. At the same time, of course, privatization and politics
are working to limit access to this type of ownership and control, which
is increasingly available only to those who can afford it, to those whose
governments allow it, to those whose communication and digital literacy is
sufficiently advanced to use it, to those who speak the lingua franca of the
digital system, and to those who are logged into systems that have security
sophisticated enough to control misuse and surveillance. These are not trivial
limitations.
Equally important, while Ostrom does not completely reject Hardin’s
pessimistic hypothesis and, as noted above, she fundamentally agrees with
Hardin that people will be tempted to use the commons selfishly, her research
offers tested criteria that can lead to appropriators’ equitable use of CPRs
with optimum output. Whereas Hardin saw tragedy as inevitable and thereby
advocated governmental or privatized oversight as the only means to regulate
a commons and avoid its misuse, Ostrom and her team submit that the com-
mons tragedy is one possible outcome among many and suggest lab-​­tested
strategies for CPR use that might avoid Hardin’s prognoses under certain cir-
cumstances.22 The good news is that as research on CPRs has evolved, there
has been a convergence of studies concerning collective action and common
pool resources that presents these as “social-​­ecological systems” (SES). These
are complex CPR systems (such as the world’s oceans) that need to be studied
The Commons . . . and Digital Planetarity 45

so that CPR investigators learn how to describe and empirically and reliably
predict their operation. As Amy R. Poteete, Marco A. Janssen, and Ostrom
note, scale is important when considering a full SES. Such systems are char-
acterized by a nested hierarchical structure in which subsystems function as
semi-​­autonomous units that interact across scales or system levels and are
often challenged by changes in leadership and resources.23 This seems an
obvious point, but it poses particular difficulties when trying to organize and
predict the behaviors of the system as well as of the appropriators of complex
CPRs such as the stratosphere—­or the World Wide Web. Thus, contrary to
popular notions that often picture the commons as a vast, open, mutually
supportive collective, these studies indicate that CPRs operate in all kinds
of ways, can be nested within one another on all kinds of scales, and can be
overseen by all kinds of appropriators. As a result, a CPR must be consider-
ably researched up front, before it is implemented, if it is to yield maximum
profit (as defined by its maximum carrying capacity) for all appropriators.
Otherwise, producers can expect a long period of trial and error, potentially
devastating to the CPR, before the CPR usage problems are resolved.
It would seem that logistical and administrative planning—­the mundane
bureaucratic stuff of organization building rather than the sexy utopian call
to collective action—­is key to the viability and sustainability of a common
pool resource. Centering on the components of CPRs and the logistics of
their operation, Ostrom clearly thinks that common pool resources are good
things and that it is imperative for researchers and policymakers to address
the issue of the global commons.24 Yet her projects and those studies build-
ing upon them tend neither to posit ideal CPR environments that might be
instituted by public policy advocates nor to formulate regulations and laws
setting restrictions on CPR creation. What Ostrom attempts to reveal are
the nuts and bolts of CPRs: what they need in order to thrive and which
questions are still left to be investigated in relation to their genesis and opera-
tion in the real world.25 This work is perhaps most important to the large
and exponentially growing conversation about behaviors in cyberspace—­
particularly behaviors in contexts directly or indirectly related to digital arts
such as MMORPWs (massively multiplayer online role-​­playing worlds) and
SNSs (social networking systems, such as Facebook).
To illustrate, a very old example comes to mind, one referencing the old-
est functioning Multi-​­User Domain Object-​­Oriented (MUD or MOO) and
familiar to anyone working in digital culture studies. In 1993, freelance jour-
nalist Julian Dibble made digital culture history when he published a Village
Voice article titled “A Rape in Cyberspace: How an Evil Clown, a Haitian
Trickster Spirit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database into
a Society.”26 Dibble documented “the Bungle Affair” in LambdaMOO, an
early text-​­based, real-​­time Internet multiplayer game or MUD (Multi-​­User
Dungeon).27 This incident involved a gamer who appeared inworld as Mr.
Bungle, an evil clown. At around 10:00 pm PST on a Monday in March 1993,
46 Amy J. Elias

when the virtual world was populated with many users, the gamer logged in
and Mr. Bungle went to the “living room” and began running a “voodoo
doll” script which allowed him to control other characters’ actions. Target-
ing specific characters, he caused them to engage in sex acts and perverse
self-​­mutilations that they could not stop, and “his distant laughter echoed
evilly in the living room with every successive outrage” until someone named
Zippy used a different script (a gun that enveloped targets in an impermeable
cage of protection) to stop his rampage.
One might write off the incident as a very early example of online “troll-
ing” (malicious behavior), now a staple of almost any online community (one
thinks of the horrible below-​­the-​­line comments on YouTube or the treat-
ment of newbies in MMORPGs). To us today, the LambdaMOO incident is
hardly shocking, and people who don’t think much about the Internet often
write it off as a just another stupid online prank. For LambdaMOO after all
wasn’t “real-​­life”: it was “just a middlingly complex database, maintained
for experimental purposes inside a Xerox Corporation research computer in
Palo Alto and open to public access via the Internet.”28 In fact, the incident
probably would not have garnered the international attention it did if it were
not for Dibble’s provocative analysis of what happened next.
Dibble made clear that the Bungle Affair was so distressing, first, because
it ended up having real-​­world effects: the avatars that had been violated in
the virtual world were controlled by real people logging in from different
geographical locations, and those people felt themselves traumatized by Mr.
Bungle’s “rape” of their avatars. The incident brought to light questions con-
cerning the relationship between real-​­world and online personae—­and online
ethics incumbent on those personae—­that we are still hashing through today
in discussions about the psychological implications of intermeshed human-​
­avatar identities, from online relationships to gameworld role-​­ playing.
Second, the Bungle Affair raised queries about how real-​­world acts translate
into online contexts: as Dibble notes, while everyone using LamdaMOO that
day saw a “rape” happen, violated users chastised Mr. Bungle for his lack of
“civility”—­not the ethical terminology we would normally apply to rape.
Actions, particularly violent ones, somehow had double meanings, or new
meanings, in the inworld context; there was an ontological as well as an ethi-
cal problem to be overcome when a line of code became an act of real-​­world,
personal violation.
Third, and most important to the discussion of cyberspace CPRs, the
long-​­term questions generated by the Bungle Affair concerned the nature
of commons governance in online communities. One LambdaMOO user
named evangeline, “who identified herself as a survivor of both [this] virtual
rape . . . and real-​­life sexual assault, floated a cautious proposal for a MOO-​
­wide powwow on the subject of virtual sex offenses and what mechanisms if
any might be put in place to deal with their future occurrence.”29 Following
her post, another user named legba called for Mr. Bungle’s “toading” (the
The Commons . . . and Digital Planetarity 47

deletion of his account from the MOO—­essentially a “death sentence”) for

“raping Starsinger.” While many in the collective agreed to this, it could not
be done without unilateral action from a “wizard,” one of the master pro-
grammers of the MOO. In the case of LambdaMOO, this was Pavel Curtis,
a Xerox researcher and the MOO’s principal architect, who had early on
issued a declaration that wizards would not be involved in day-​­to-​­day, mun-
dane operations of the virtual world. LambdaMOO was in a quandary:

Since getting the wizards to toad Mr. Bungle  .  .  . required a con-

vincing case that the cry for his head came from the community at
large, then the community itself would have to be defined; and if the
community was to be convincingly defined, then some form of social
organization, no matter how rudimentary, would have to be settled
on. And thus, as if against its will, the question of what to do about
Mr. Bungle began to shape itself into a sort of referendum on the
political future of the MOO.30

The online community met to discuss options: various participants expressed

their opinions about the action and what its consequences should be, and
this played through a number of political positions from libertarianism to
anarchism to dictatorial fiat. In the end, the band of MOO users reached
a stalemate, and it was only through the unauthorized act of a wizard—­
JoeFeedback, who acted alone and toaded Mr. Bungle—­ that the matter
was immediately resolved. The long-​­term outcome of the Bungle Affair for
LambdaMOO was the institution of a “new regime” that included a petition-​
­and-​­ballots system that would allow citizens to define and impose sanctions
and a procedure for adjudicating conflicts, “an ad hoc arbitration system in
which mutually agreed-​­upon judges have at their disposition the full range of
wizardly punishments.”31
Ostrom’s CPR research becomes visible here. In particular—­and contra-
dicting much utopian rhetoric upholding the idea that online cooperation is
natural or automatic—­the Bungle Affair supports Ostrom’s claims that coop-
erative ethics and civility must be either part of the appropriator’s disposition
going in to the CPR situation (in Mr. Bungle’s case, it was not) or must be
cultivated by specific procedures of CPR operation that appeal to the self-​
­interest of appropriators. In contrast to the hymns of praise we hear so often
for “flow” or horizontal structure and self-​­organization that eschew unilat-
eral rules and hierarchy, the LambdaMoo appropriators learned that in a
completely open commons there are no checks and balances on behavior, and
that this can bring such a sodality to a grinding, even traumatizing, halt.32
But the LambdaMoo incident posed additional questions that apply today
to any digital commons. What constitutes an online community and what
are the rules governing such a commons space? Who should decide those
rules: the commons provider, producer, or appropriator? If there is always
48 Amy J. Elias

an “admin” behind the scenes who has control of the code—­always a “man
(or corporation) behind the curtain” who has the ability to act unilaterally
to toad players, manipulate the platform, or pull the plug on an entire virtual
environment—­can cyberworlds ever truly be “commons”? Or are they just
commons more complex than we had imagined, in fact perfectly illustrat-
ing Ostrom’s contention that some CPR situations call for administrative
oversight by commons providers or even require the inclusion of experts to
oversee sanctions created by appropriators. (If they do need administrative
monitoring, then we should be discussing how appropriators of cyber-​­CPRs
might negotiate and legally formalize sanctions rules with providers. This
of course leads us, as we shall see below, to the property rights problem
diagnosed by open source advocates.) And significantly, in view of the pres-
ent discussion, Dibble’s article raises the question of human ethics in digital
space. If, as Ostrom claims, even minimal face-​­to-​­face communication plays
a decisive role in the successful functioning of CPRs, what will replace this
human interaction in the digital environment, particularly if we haven’t yet
come near to sorting out the relation between online personae and real-​­life
human identity in digital worlds? As we try to engender and maintain com-
mons across cultures on a planetary scale, will new, Skype-​­like platforms that
“actually” offer us the chance to see one another’s faces be perceived by us
as the same ethical situation as face-​­to-​­face meetings, or will this be a third,
avatar space between fiction and reality for which we need to revise our
negotiating and commons-​­building skills?

The Digital Commons, the Anticommons, and Open Source

New media studies analyzing the nature of “cyberspace as commons” have

been another rejoinder to Hardin’s theory, which is cited frequently in debates
about “open source ethics.” In fact, open source is the most easily recognized
commons desideratum in digital culture contexts. In the work of writers such
as James Boyle, David Bollier, Lawrence Lessig, Clay Shirky, Diana Saco, Car-
olyn Guertin, Manuel Castells, and many others, the conversation about the
network society has fundamentally defined scholarship concerning the Inter-
net, World Wide Web, and online cultures.33 One could argue that this inquiry
was in fact birthed with the Internet itself. But certainly with the develop-
ment of Richard Stallman’s GNU Unix operating system, with its “CopyLeft”
rules of appropriation, and the FOSS (Free/Libre and Open Source) software
movement, combined with newer ideas about “net neutrality” and the devel-
opment of peer-​­to-​­peer file-​­sharing software, the idea of the global Internet
as a public commons took permanent hold.34 Yet as early as 1998, it was
clear that bellicosity regarding the Internet Commons was focused primar-
ily on property distribution rights and copyright laws. Douglas Noonan, for
example, proposed that the Internet is a commons because it “meets both
The Commons . . . and Digital Planetarity 49

criteria of (1) nonexcludability and (2) rivalrous consumption.”35 The second

criterion has been examined extensively, and the first is not used primarily
to assess commons resources but rather to gauge to what extent things meet
the definition of public or collective goods.36 The overlap between theories of
the commons and of public goods continues in deliberations about the digital
commons because such inquiries often involve arguments about copyright
and management of open-​­source software.37
Those of us in language studies might note the key role played by meta-
phor in these debates. The Internet is in fact understood in terms of property
rights when the dominant trope organizing discussions is that of “cyberspace
as place” or planetary space. Dan Hunter has pointed out how frequently the
“cyberspace as place” metaphor is used in legal scholarship, thereby fostering
a regulatory environment. This metaphor, he contends, is “leading us inexora-
bly towards an undesirable policy outcome: the staking out of private claims
in cyberspace and concomitant reductions in the public ‘ownership’ of the
space”—­one version of “the tragedy of the anticommons.”38 “Anticommons”
is a term Hunter appropriates from James Boyle, a major player in the open
source movement who writes prolifically about the need to keep the Internet
an open commons space.39 Boyle writes that “we are [now] in the middle of a
second enclosure movement,” an “enclosure of the intangible commons of the
mind” that mimics in many ways the English enclosure of arable lands in the
nineteenth century.40 He makes the case that, historically, intellectual prop-
erty law worked to protect the intellectual commons, but that key changes
in intellectual property rights are now radically extending those rights’ tra-
ditional boundaries—­such as the troubling move by the European Database
Directive to attempt to copyright compilations of facts.41 However, Boyle
cites two important differences between the nineteenth-​­century enclosure of
the arable commons and the movement attempting to regulate intellectual
property today: (1) the “commons of the mind” (unlike the arable commons)
may be “non-​­rival,” that is, one person’s use does not preclude or undermine
use by another, and (2) this use is also “non-​­excludable,” meaning that the
good can be used and duplicated again and again by many people without its
diminishment. The second of these sounds like a good thing in relation to the
arable commons, but in the context of the digital commons, it could actually
undermine incentive to create the resource in the first place, for creators of
products would not be able to regulate copying of, block usage of, or charge
for their creations.
There are also ways to wreck an online commons that are unique to its
digital character. With the development of the WWW, for instance, the strat-
egy of overloading websites became an intentional, premeditated method for
hacking and disrupting websites and public access to them. Critics such as
Noonan point out that sophisticated users often can easily overload differ-
ent links in the network chain, “reducing the value of other transmissions
congested at that point” and thereby “pos[ing] collective-​­action dilemmas”
50 Amy J. Elias

related to bandwidth and its use.42 In the same vein, Gian Maria Greco and
Luciano Floridi stress that overloaded bandwidth (“bandwidth exploita-
tion”) and spam (“information pollution”) should be considered online
forms of Hardin’s “exploitation” and “pollution of the commons.”43
Boyle’s thesis, however, is that “a global network actually transforms our
assumptions about creativity and innovation so as to reshape the debate
about the need for incentives.” He specifically references the collaborative
work at the heart of the free software and open source movements: here,
one does not simply donate work to a public domain, but rather the domain
itself is “a continual accretion in which all gain the benefits of the program
on pain of agreeing to give their additions and innovations back to the com-
munal project.”44 This definition makes the similarities between open source
and commons clear. His notion of distributed production—­whereby smaller
groups work on chunks of a problem and then coordinate results—­implicitly
accords with Ostrom’s assertion that complex CPRs will need to be broken
into smaller coordinated units. Boyle also is not adverse to intellectual prop-
erty regulation but tends to see the Internet as a vast experiment in new kinds
of commons production that may or may not be compatible with some forms
of intellectual privatization: “our concerns about the excesses of intellectual
property were simply the ones that Jefferson, Madison, and Macaulay gave
us so long ago.”45 But important to Boyle’s argument as well as to others’ in
his camp is the idea that it doesn’t matter why or with what attitudes people
engage in this commons behavior (for instance, the love of others, participa-
tion in a gift economy, or potlatch), just that often they will work within
distributed production without proprietary/exclusion laws and that if gover-
nance processes are needed, these too can be assembled through distributed
methods.
Yet I would venture to ask in what ways our perspectives on, say, Wiki-
pedia would change if we saw it less as a flashpoint for discussions of
copyright and intellectual property rights and more as an example of par-
ticipatory, digital art on a global scale that avoided the “cyberspace as place”
metaphor. Joseph Michael Reagle has made a strong case, for example, that
“Wikipedia is both a community and an encyclopedia” and “a good faith
collaborative culture.”46 His presentation of Wikipedia dovetails perfectly
with Ostrom’s definition of well-​­functioning commons communities, for he
see it not as the completely open, egalitarian, and free space of public con-
tribution often praised or bemoaned in popular discussions but rather as
a highly defined and policed community effort. Reagle examines the three
core community policies outlined on Wikipedia’s metapages (“Neutral Point
of View,” “No Original Research,” and “Verifiability”) as commons prin-
ciples formulated by providers and supported by appropriators that keep
the wiki from locking into self-​­interested points of view, and he analyzes
the multiple vehicles for user interaction (the page editing, the talk/dis-
cussion page associated with each article, Wikizine bulletin, Wikiprojects,
The Commons . . . and Digital Planetarity 51

Wikipedia-​­related blogs, aggregators, and podcasts) as if they were dialogi-

cal, face-​­to-​­face encounters between appropriators.47 He strongly implies that
appropriators’ attitudes matter, but that they need to be reinforced by rules and
oversight.
As pointed out above, retracing all the ins and outs of the discussion about
open source and the “anticommons” would be to rehearse an exchange foun-
dational to the entire field of digital culture studies. It is important to note,
however, that Ostrom’s work rarely is mentioned in this exchange, which
concentrates not on how to make a commons or on its actual operational
logistics but on intellectual property rights and laws built upon the “cyber-
space as place” metaphor. Thus we see how two approaches to the digital
commons can talk past one another—­or, put more positively, address very
different aspects of commons creation. On the one hand, the feuds about
open source call attention to right of access to CPR platforms (software),
and this skews the conversation toward the “cyberspace as place” metaphor.
Since open access to the digital commons is the primary concern, theories
extolling open source tend to center on property and access rights: rather
than examining closely the ethics of appropriators or providing clear defini-
tions of the territory that is threatened, this conversation converges on new,
privatizing “enclosure movements” and warns against the construction of
an “anticommons” that both locks out new CPR producers and administra-
tors and radically limits the actions of all appropriators. On the other hand,
Ostrom’s work in the field of public economics tends not to focus on the
threat of privatization or regulatory oversight (though she does acknowledge
and, clearly, disapprove of this) and instead delineates the concrete opera-
tions of common pool resources themselves. Her work may in fact prove to
be central to the effectiveness of arguments in the other camp: it is difficult to
preserve the freedoms of an ill-​­defined commons.
Certainly, however, Ostrom’s work speaks to many assertions that a global
digital commons will emerge organically from the inorganic space of online
life. Rejecting a strict Hobbesian view of sociality,48 but also rejecting an easy
communality, Ostrom emphasizes that trust, reciprocity, and ethical relation-
ality all maintain a role in the successful operation of a CPR while also insisting
that the CPR does not always create these ethical attributes (a claim implicit
in some open source positions, such as Boyle’s) but rather that it depends on
them. Relationality is the condition of the commons, but relation can be mere
adjacency, coterminous occupation, contiguity, or even hostile cohabitation
that collectively builds and sustains nothing. A healthy and operationally
successful CPR grows from appropriators’ ethical relationality—­reciprocity
and trust—­and while a CPR can be constructed so that it fosters and grows
mutual trust, it also hinges on the ethical maturity and trust of administrators
and appropriators entering the CPR situation. Nonetheless, Ostrom’s theory,
centered as it is on the logistics of CPR operation, does not help determine
where and how this ethical maturity may be developed.
52 Amy J. Elias

Affect Theory and the Planetary Commons

So there is still a piece missing in theories of the digital planetary commons.

What is not put in place in hypotheses about the commons in biology, public
economics, or digital culture studies appears, in effect, to be the generating
operational principle, which is neither legal nor logistical but ethical and
based upon rational communication. A critical investigation known as “affect
studies” attempts to remedy this oversight and find this missing ethical piece,
and yet it too seems, at this point, shy of this goal. But before fleshing out
that claim, I’d like to examine affect studies as a third entry point to current
constructions of the planetary digital commons.
Affect studies range across a number of disciplines, topics, and scales, and
here I’d like to look at only a few examples that speak to the relation between
affect and commons creation. For instance, Michael Hardt and Antonio
Negri have addressed the problem of the mislaid keystone in the commons
edifice by bringing together affect studies and theories of the commons in a
Deleuzian-​­inflected model of global collectivity. In Commonwealth, Hardt
and Negri (H&N) champion the term “love” as a concept for inducing a new
sociality, of bringing about a new notion of the social predicated upon, or
birthing, a new subjectivity in a Foucaultian sense.49 Hardt asserts that cur-
rently we lack “a political concept of love” that would unite political interest
and our affective lives, would operate on multiple scales and in the encounter
with difference, and would help us to transform our world but also give us
a lasting foundation upon which to build a new one.50 This may or may not
be true, and, indeed, one can think of examples, from Socrates’s hemlock to
Christ’s Passion to modern anti-​­apartheid movements, where love seemed to
have serious political dimensions and was theorized, accordingly, as a trans-
formative social power.51 Nonetheless, H&N argue that “love is a process
of the production of the common and the production of subjectivity,” and,
moreover, that “love—­in the production of affective networks, schemes of
cooperation, and social subjectivities—­is an economic power.”52
With Spinoza and Bergson in the background, H&N maintain that love
is joy and the recognition of an external cause, God, which they immediately
secularize to “love of nature as a whole.” To this they add a twist of Deleuze
and Guattari, to the effect that this joy/love is corrupted in two ways. First,
it is made into “identitarian love, or love of the same” in which love becomes
love for “those most like you.” This love includes family love, race love,
patriotism: “Family, race, and nation, then, which are corrupt forms of the
common, are unsurprisingly the bases of corrupt forms of love.” Combating
these is the mandate to love the Other: “The mandate to love thy neighbor,
then, the embodiment of each and every commandment for the monotheistic
‘religions,’ requires us to love the other or, really, to love alterity.”53 Anyone
familiar with the biblical story of the Good Samaritan will not be surprised;
however, the great monotheistic religions do not assert that love is love of
The Commons . . . and Digital Planetarity 53

alterity per se. This is H&N’s Deleuzian move, which also requires a radical
secularization of love that simultaneously imbues the affect itself with trans-
formational, even sublime, power. Second, for H&N, corrupt forms of love
stem from a “process of unification or of becoming the same,” namely, from
what Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus call a despotic forma-
tion. Such forms include the unity of the state but also the unity bestowed
by identity politics. What H&N essentially want is love as a line of flight, an
immanence in movement without telos, or an assemblage (that is, a multi-
tude) but not a unity (that is, a nation).54
This is the basis of their hypothesis that a commons derived from emo-
tion, from love, is not the same as a unity. Instead, they posit, this commons
is made up of “multiple singularities”—­that is, it is more like a Leibnitzian
universe or a Deleuzian plane of consistency. The powers of love are, first, its
creation of the common as social relation (in Marxist terms, these would be
its powers of association and rebellion); second, its force “to combat evil,”
defined as a corruption of the common; and third, the ability to form “the
multitude,” the name for a new collective released from the shackles of iden-
tity and telos associated with Marxist definitions of the proletariat.55
And how do we learn love? Where do we learn the reciprocity and trust
necessary to the function of the commons? The authors conjecture that “the
deployment of love has to be learned and new habits have to be formed
through the collective organization of our desires, a process of sentimen-
tal and political education. Habits and practices consolidated in new social
institutions will constitute our now transformed human nature.”56 (This is
the move that radically departs from the doctrines of major monotheisms:
the transformation of human nature itself.) Since, however, H&N disregard
religion, nation-​­state, and ethnicity-​­based communities, they don’t answer
the questions of how human nature can be transmuted and what might be
the nature of the new social institutions that alter it. Clearly these institutions
hold considerable power and seem to iterate the claim often made in digi-
tal culture studies that a commons produces the community and ethos that
sustains it. And so it appears that H&N’s utopian version of the planetary
common is the reworking, through Deleuzian metaphysics, of an old Marxist
dream: the rise of a global underclass undivided by race, class, ethnicity, or
beliefs, which will bond together in brotherly love born out of opposition to
material oppression and will be collectively organized by new social institu-
tions that will both guide action in the new material common and help to
transform human subjectivity.57
For Hardt, love, as affect, has this sublime power, but it also operates as a
metaphor for something like “collective spirit.” It is both an operand in the
creation of the common and a figure for an eternally open and nonteleologi-
cal political collectivity: the multitude, another name for the common itself
as a new form of being. It may thus be important that H&N continually refer
to “the common” rather than “the commons.” The former connotes a larger,
54 Amy J. Elias

more abstract territory than the latter, a reorganization of Being rather than
a reorganization merely of space or material resources.58 Where love comes
from—­from what ethics or ontologies it is born and why it is created instead
of something else, such as competition—­is not clear. H&N sidestep the very
problem they set out to solve, which is how love can serve as the catalyst
and foundation for a new global collectivity. Love here is alpha and omega:
the affect (love) links to a Deleuzian line of flight (in H&N, “exodus”) and
transforms the global workforce into a multitude and commonwealth, but
love also is the result of global collective organization that brings about a
new ontology. The difference from older Marxisms as well as from the con-
crete, worldly ethics of monotheism—­and, to me, an unsatisfying swerve into
metaphysical vagueness—­is the turn from politics to ontology in the interest
of pure utopianism. Real, lived human communities such as the family or the
group with shared ethnic history are suspect and discarded while the com-
mon is defined as eternal, the opening of a space of nonteleological possibility
inhabited by the multitude, which evinces a new subjectivity born from love
and exodus.
Hardt has defended these ideas in his dialogues with Lauren Berlant, who
herself explores the notion of affect as bedrock for the foundation of a com-
mons. Like Hardt, Berlant sees affect as an opening, providing new access
to the social: as a psychosocial concept, it replaces older terms that con-
note stasis and normativity or that have lingering associations with Hegelian,
teleological idealism or with “great man theory” of the “Zeitgeist” type.59
Berlant’s approach to affect blends the notion of “a spirit of an age” (as
a kind of general feeling about the present) with modern psychology and
theories of globalization: individually felt affects can be shared generally, as
an intuition about the times, and may thus lead to transformations in per-
ception and even to new social formations. Berlant is interested in how the
singular becomes the general, how the local becomes the global—­that is, how
affect experienced viscerally by one person indicates a shift in the culture
at large—­but unlike H&N, she does not say that affect necessarily gathers
the planetary multitude or that love is the key to any affective collectivity.
Like Ostrom, who is cautious about the dangers of understanding common-​
­pool resource communities as inherently positive and collegial, Berlant seems
wary of Hardt’s “love” as a recuperated institutional fantasy and psychic
investment.60 While to some extent she shares H&N’s Deleuzianism, Berlant
allows only that “affective atmospheres are shared,” that “affect, the body’s
active presence to the intensities of the present, embeds the subject in a his-
torical field, and that its scholarly pursuit can communicate the conditions of
a historical moment’s production as a visceral moment.”61
In Cruel Optimism, Berlant is interested in historicizing the present as a
point in time when affect is itself a new kind of subjectivity, an intuitionism
that is fundamental to the cognitive mapping abilities of an “affective class”
that is the global “precariat.” This new subjectivity is born of shock—­the
The Commons . . . and Digital Planetarity 55

shock of the triumph of finance capital that makes apparent that the old
promises of upward mobility, the welfare state, and the fantasy of “the good
life” no longer hold for most people. These people experience a crisis reaction
that jolts habitus, the collective affects that are the culmination of institutional
fantasy: “a rhythm of life, a habit, all of the things that are affectively incul-
cated in one’s orientation towards the world are institutions.”62 Unmoored
from stable social foundations and denied a progressive or even a custodial
future, the precariat loses faith in, and sees for the first time, the ideological,
fantasy narrative that structures its lifeworld; affects associated with that
lifeworld are inadequate to the new precarious reality in which it finds itself.
The affective class, living in a time of constant threat and crisis, feels that
something is off-​­kilter, and it uses its intuitions to map a new epistemologi-
cal and political landscape. The disaffected cross traditional class lines, and
they respond to the crisis-​­event of the present in radically different ways but
through the same means: intuitively and viscerally, through affective reac-
tions to social changes and intuitions of alternatives to the status quo. Berlant
writes that “a shift between knowing and uncertain intuitionisms enables
us to think about being in history as a densely corporeal, experientially felt
thing whose demands on survival skills map not the whole world in one
moment but a way to think about the history of sensualized epistemologies
in the atmosphere of a particular moment now (aesthetically) suspended in
time.”63
Berlant reasons that this is a postwar phenomenon related to the collapse
of the welfare state, no longer upheld by what used to be strong political
narratives. She claims that this moment in the twenty-​­first century consti-
tutes a historical situation, “a state of animated and animating suspension
that forces itself on consciousness, that produces a sense of the emergence
of something in the present that may become an event.” Consequently, we
experience the present as a kind of duration, an “impasse” or a “glitch” that
“is lived as adjustment, remediation, or adaptation.” Brilliantly, she writes
that this is “a space of time lived without a narrative genre. . . . An impasse
is a holding station that doesn’t hold securely but opens out into anxiety.”64
Berlant thus brings together affect, contemporary sociality, politics, psychol-
ogy, and art: each refracts affective intuitions about a present that voices its
truth slantwise, in not-​­yet-​­formed articulations.
Berlant’s notion of the present as duration or “impasse” that is lived as
adjustment, remediation, or adaptation is completely compatible with the
notion of the planetary commons as metaphysics of flow, queering of time,
or digital stream.65 Like H&N, she sees the new commons as a provisional,
a-​­
teleological space of lived possibilities, inhabited by those disaffected
with, or reeling from, the aftershocks of global capital. While H&N stress
the rhyzomatic nature of this commons, Berlant underscores its psychoso-
matic foundations. The commons is a kind of “nervous system,” an affective
atmosphere that is shared.66 Thus if there is a collectivity forming from the
56 Amy J. Elias

precariat’s affective perception of the present, it is the “affectsphere,” the

social commons located not in the future but in the “becoming-​­event” of
the present, the becoming-​­historical of the affective, “prehended” event.67
The commons that is germinated—­this provisional, affective, atmospheric
commons that we might call, using an older language, “common sense”—­is
not based on “love” but does put people into relation (with others, with
the world) and features other affects central to relationality, including those
“involving proximity, . . . friendship, . . . aversions.”68 Unlike Hardt, Berlant
leaves open the ethical valence of this affective commons that is also the his-
torical present, though she strongly implies that it is a positive collectivizing
movement.
But how is affect theory addressing media studies and its particular focus
on a planetary digital commons? Situated within the province of digital
culture studies, Richard Grusin’s work might provide one answer. Like Ber-
lant, Grusin understands “the real” to be thoroughly mediated. His focus,
however, is not on somatic or even on ideological intervention, though his
argument builds upon both of these ideas. His primary concern is with what
he terms “the affective life of media”: “Our contemporary media forms
and practices also collapse into a single heterogeneous action a number of
specific human and nonhuman, cognitive and affective, interactions, which
create affective feedback loops in conjunction with our everyday media
forms and practices.”69 For Grusin, these feedback loops—­this affective life
of telecommunications—­are distinctly not derived from an ethics of love, nor
do they reflect a kind of intuited Real that allows cognitive mapping in the
historical present. In fact, they specifically foreclose the latter. The real world
has become the world of digital communications: in the twenty-​­first century,
specifically after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, we live in a state
of culture that is “hypermediated” into “diverse and interconnected media
formats of social networking” and where televised and Internet newscasting
invent a cultural logic that Grusin terms “premediation.”70 “Premediation” is
a specific effect of news coverage and journalistic reporting in all technologi-
cal platforms. It is a kind of temporal distortion or flattening of time in which
the news and social networking services constantly try to articulate, in the
present, all possible immediate or near-​­future disaster scenarios in order to
anticipate them. They do so in order both to assuage citizens’ fear of being
surprised by terrifying natural, economic, or social acts and (in collusion with
political power) to keep the citizenry in a state of anxiety that precludes real
political action. Thus, rather than distracting viewers, the media construct
“an affect of anticipation.” Affect here fashions a collective in Berlant’s sense,
but this affect does not spontaneously make its presence felt in response
to conflicts defining a social milieu. The collective affect is, instead, fully
controlled and created by communications venues, which thereby become
“agents of juridicality” as well as “governmentality”: there is a “social net-
working among the executive branch, the military, and the media.”71 In some
The Commons . . . and Digital Planetarity 57

ways, this is a newer, global, informational version of the twentieth-​­century

“military-​­industrial complex.” Public broadcasts as well as other information
formats together produce “premediation,” or the affects of anticipation. Any-
thing that happens seems, to the public, to be inevitable, and the possibility
of an unmediated future is staved off.
Building upon Niklas Luhmann’s theory of autopoietic systems, Grusin
argues that “there is  .  .  . an ontological aspect of premediation in which
[media guarantee that] the future is always remediated at the very moment
that it emerges into the present.” Rather than an event, the “future pres-
ent” will be a present that is the product of, and completely defined within
the parameters of, information systems and communications technology,
“the continuation of a recursive system of irritation and stabilization.”72
The media don’t exist to patrol government or even to report events to the
citizenry: they exist solely to reproduce themselves, and to produce a false
continuity between past, present, and future that may in fact collude with the
aims of power.73 As Grusin writes,

More like designing a video game than predicting the future, preme-
diation is not concerned with getting the future right, as much as with
trying to map out a multiplicity of possible futures. Premediation
would in some sense transform the world into a video or computer
game, which only permits certain moves . . . [and] only some of those
possibilities are encouraged by the protocols and reward systems
built into the game.
. . . In fact it is precisely the proliferation of competing and often
contradictory future scenarios that enables premediation to prevent
the experience of a traumatic future by generating and maintaining a
low level of anxiety as a kind of affective prophylactic.74

The difference between premediation and video games, however, is that in a

game there are a limited number of possible moves allowed by the system.
Premediation works not with the possible but with the virtual: it remediates
(or puts into technological formats) in the present the virtual potentialities
of future actions to generate possibilities for such occurrences. All of these
possibilities are “real” in the sense that they all have an effect in the present
regardless of which ones turn out to be true. Grusin notes that “to think of
premediation as virtual [à la Deleuze], and therefore as real, is to refuse this
metaphysical distinction [between true and false] and to insist instead on
the efficacy, or force, of the multiplicity of premediations in and of them-
selves—­no matter how the future might actually turn out.” Premediation’s
main effect is to change “the relationship of proximity, closeness, or intimacy
to embodiment” into a kind of “distributed affect.”75
Grusin’s vision of the affective commons is the most pessimistic of those
I’ve noted here. Unlike H&N, Grusin sees little emancipatory potential in
58 Amy J. Elias

such a commons, for it would be produced within an autopoietic media sys-

tem whose gaze is turned only upon itself in its many forms and networks of
distribution. From the perspective of his account, which is compatible with
popular world-systems theories, the members of Berlant’s precariat seem to
be cogs in a machine, manipulated by the system according to its own needs
for self-​­reproduction and self-​­extension.76 If there is a “real” outside of this
system, it is increasingly difficult for people to access; in the proliferation
of social media that constitutes our modernity in the twenty-​­first century,
there may indeed be, as Berlant claims, an “affectscape,” but for Grusin, this
is not based in human psychology and intuition. It is instead constructed
through an overload of information geared to produce a low-​­level intensity.
Grusin maintains that the media manufacture content that becomes “com-
mon sense” and short-​­circuits the precariat’s relation to the real; the media
commons is a homeopathic machine that stays or inhibits political action by
constantly producing the affect of paralyzing anxiety in the citizenry.
In its various forms, affect theory thus positions the planetary commons
as a somatic or cognitive miasma, circulating through media and culture and
determining human perception and social action. It may be defined positively
(“love”) or negatively (“premediation”), but in all of its formulations, affect
implies the irrelevance of human rational agency. The planetary commons
in this theoretical sphere is shared intuitive perception rather than shared
communal project. Such a definition easily supports the bleakest pictures of
the coming media technocracy and biopolitical control. But even at its most
optimistic, such a planetary commons offers the possibility only of affective
cognitive mapping and somatic intuition of political oppression, duplicities,
and hypocrisies. People may think, “Something has gone wrong: I feel it to be
so, and I will join with others who feel it to be so.” But how to build upon this
feeling in a way that leads to an egalitarian, productive planetary commons
constructed at various scales is a question that remains largely unanswered.
While affect theories give provocative reasons why collectivization might
occur, it is left to other conceptual models to account for the actual rise and
maintenance of the commons, as well as for the ethical values needed to
maintain its productivity and fair use.

Worlding the Technological Commons

In his concert performance Stripped, Live, the British comic Eddie Izzard
quipped that after downloading, the new version of iTunes “starts asking
you questions, like, ‘Will you sign a new agreement with iTunes?’ I’ve signed
many agreements with iTunes. I don’t know what they want from me any-
more. Surely they know that I agree with them.”77 Whether we agree with
iTunes, as a global conglomerate redefining the digital commons, is part of
the fun here.
The Commons . . . and Digital Planetarity 59

It would seem that today, in fact, a reconsideration of the commons is,

implicitly or explicitly, everywhere. As the planet is seen more and more as
a closed system, and as technology advances into territories once reserved
for science fiction,78 the planet as commons becomes increasingly tied to
notions of the common media grid. Different perspectives situated within
biology, property rights law, digital culture studies, political economy, and
affect theory speak of the wedding of the planetary commons to the tech-
nological sublime, the machinic territory of the posthuman. The shadows
of Deleuze and Guattari loom over this theoretical scene, which implies that
Pierre Macheray was prescient in 1979 when he predicted a shift from Hegel
to Spinoza in contemporary thought: in articulations of the commons, across
discourses and disciplinary borders, we see the language of flow, becom-
ing, posthumanism, alterity, and affective and somatic relationality often
privileged over that of rational planning, ethics based in habitus, dialogic
relationality, and institution-​­building.79
In the context of digital culture and global media studies, the commons
is treated differently than it is in environmental studies, comparative arts,
ethics, or even political economy. The textual and remediated territory of the
Internet seems to elude a humanism interpreted as embodied performative
mimesis.80 Cyberspace also poses unique problems to a planetarity defined,
in Spivak’s terms, as recognition of materiality, placedness, and difference.81
While I hesitate to agree with Mark Poster that “global culture can only
be global media culture,” certainly it is true that “the human/information
machine link introduces new configurations of the binaries of space and
time, body and mind, subject and object, producer and consumer, indeed all
the constituents that form cultures.”82 In response, cyber-​­theorists and open
source advocates often appear to adopt radically different perspectives on
the commons and on the possibilities for human agency in it. Some advocate
a Habermasian conception of communicative agency and public sphere, in
which human initiative and self-​­determination (based in fundamental needs
of survival and communication within social systems) are frequently under-
stood to be ingredients central to the construction of creatively imagined,
collaborative digital commons.83 And yet critics from these same fields have
also issued some of the most frightening predictions about global surveillance
and mind control in this online environment.
Oftentimes, researchers and advocates in the open-​­source technology camp
who campaign with zeal for a planetary digital commons seem undisturbed
by the idea that “flow” may come at the price of the human, perhaps even at
the price of the organic. Autopoiesis is, after all, a machinic idea, and systems
theories proliferating in digital culture studies routinely drift in the direc-
tion of Singularity religiosities.84 In the most ecstatic as well as the bleakest
pictures of the emerging technological planet (such as the global-​­collective-​
a­s-​­
Matrix image), the most human of concepts—­ that of a commons, a
collectively managed territory promoting survival but also a shared space of
60 Amy J. Elias

negotiated values—­may be precisely what is occluded, wresting control from

people and placing it in the domain of machines and networks, undermin-
ing notions of human agency, and overriding humans’ ability to rationally
plan and negotiate their realities by streaming affect through our cognitive
processing centers and/or short-​­circuiting, through new legal and illegal sur-
veillance, our determination of public space.
It may be difficult to be jubilant about digital planetarity as it is currently
being configured if it just mirrors older notions of globalization—­that is, if
the digital commons we create is just a new platform for creating us in its
own image and according to the dehumanizing logics of the market, or if
the digital commons is merely a way to funnel free labor to multinational
corporations. In 2013 I visited the website for “hack/reduce,” a Boston-​­based
nonprofit organization supported by the state of Massachusetts and MIT that
advertises its membership as “a meritocracy based around community and
innovation.” I was perplexed to see that this “hacker” organization touting
open-​­source rhetoric and collaborative organization was funded by, among
other entities, Microsoft, IBM, Dell, Google, and Bain Capital Ventures.85
Of course, it is precisely in the territory of the digital that the most vehe-
ment protests and subversive action are taking place against privatization
and market appropriation of the planetary commons—­from the Hackers
on Planet Earth (HOPE) annual conferences featuring speakers such as The
Yes Men and Steve Rambam to global online actions by Anonymous and
Wikileaks. On the side of these protests and informed by research such as
Ostrom’s, we are not simply championing theoretical naïveté when we assert
that “a broader theory of human behavior views humans as adaptive crea-
tures who  .  .  . learn norms, heuristics, and full analytical strategies from
one another, from feedback from the world, and from their own capacity to
engage in self-​­reflection and imagine a differently structured world. They are
capable of designing new tools—­including institutions—­that can change the
structure of the worlds they face for good or evil purposes.”86 Such a claim
does not necessarily impose anthropomorphic machinery upon the planet
and its life forms. Rather, it is recognition that humans are clever little ani-
mals who occupy the top of their planetary food chain, and often it is good
for everyone’s and everything’s survival when these social mammals learn to
collaborate.
Certainly, the planet will be impacted by technology, as is most apparent in
such initiatives as “Hack the Planet,” a geoengineering project to technologi-
cally control the planet’s weather. In his book of the same title, Eli Kintisch
quotes Stewart Brand, author of the original Whole Earth Catalog, as noting,
in 2009, “Whether it’s called managing the Commons, natural infrastructure
maintenance, tending the wild, niche construction, ecosystem engineering,
mega gardening, or intentional Gaia, humanity is now stuck with the plan-
et’s stewardship role.”87 If stewardship of the planet is to be the goal of the
new planetary commons—­and I think it is the only option linked to human
The Commons . . . and Digital Planetarity 61

survival—­then perhaps we should pay more attention to Ostrom’s model,

which seems to me to offer the most reasonable discussion of operational
commons and a particularly useful set of cautions when planning a digital
commons that will inevitably operate on a planetary scale. But, as I’ve tried
to show, her model needs to be supplemented by some kind of discourse—­
philosophical, religious, affective—­that posits a way to fashion its ethical
keystone. This is the starting place for the good-​­faith values that will organize
and maintain the planetary commons. These are not necessarily “traditional
values” (though they are not necessarily radically new values either) and they
will not come naturally to the human animal. They must be constructed in
the spirit of the commons itself—­relationally, collaboratively.
Oddly, therefore, looking at the planet as digital commons may require
us to develop a new form of humanism rather than an anti-​­humanism (Rosi
Braidotti’s work is particularly useful in this regard).88 Surprisingly, in the end,
planetary cyberspace in fact may not be incompatible with Spivak’s demand
for a re-​­cognition of humanity through planetary dialogue. For some time
now, I have been researching, and thus steeped in, the ethics and politics of
dialogue and have come to understand that there is often an excluded middle
in both constructivist and essentialist theories of human agency—­namely,
the territory of negotiation between the phases of construction and adop-
tion, and, located between identity and exchange, the negotiated selfhood
that provides the very territory of dialogics. In other words, if we do not
assume an autopoietic system (even one based in affect) acting similarly at all
levels of the planetary system and training persons to act in accordance with
its own objectives, and if we can, without theoretical embarrassment, posit
that effective human action requires rational planning, the missing ethical
linchpin in current theories of the commons must be forged through dialogic
exchange between persons in a public sphere. What Mr. Bungle made clear,
and what new research about online civility illustrates, is that in lived human
contexts, relationality does not necessarily equal dialogue. Ethics and the
politics of ethics matter. The birth of the digital planetary commons need not
be divorced from conceptions of human agency, ethics, law, and optimism, if
these are what it takes to build a commons that is not a hive or a sweatshop.89
I have written elsewhere about the linkages between planetarity and dia-
logism; in the discourse of the planetary, we see a concept opposed to “the
global” and a return to the idea that survival depends on dialogic relation,
on persons able to negotiate with their surroundings—­with other persons,
with cultural and natural environments.90 In Ostrom’s theory of common
pool resources, we see how important dialogue is to maintaining integrity
and good faith in commons interactions, even if these need to be undergirded
by law that is itself of our own making. We need to think much more about
how dialogue and negotiation—­the face-​­to-​­face relation—­are not just pos-
sible but imperative to any functioning commons, even to one encompassing
the planet, in cyberspace.
62 Amy J. Elias

Notes

The first epigraph is from Slavoj Žižek (speech, Occupy Wall Street after a
march near Washington Square Park in New York City, Oct. 9, 2011). A video of
the speech was online at http://​www​.youtube​.com/watch?v=Xjcm2djpimQ&fea
ture=player_embedded.
The second epigraph is from Elinor Ostrom, “Analyzing Collective Action,”
supplement, Agricultural Economics 41, no. S1 (November 2010): 156.
1. Tibor R. Machan, “Introduction: The Commons,” in The Commons: Its
Tragedies and Other Follies, ed. Tibor R. Machan (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Insti-
tution, 2001), xxi.
2. For an example of how concerns of the environmental movement merge
with commons research, see Susan J. Buck, The Global Commons: An Introduc-
tion (Washington, D.C.: Island, 1998).
3. Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162, no. 3859
(December 13, 1968): 1244.
4. Ibid., 1245.
5. Ibid., 1244.
6. Ibid., 1247. Analysts of Hardin’s essay align him with various politics;
recently, Rob Nixon has shown how his “antipastoral logic” often resonates with
neoliberalism’s “hostility to shared goods, a hostility inseparable from the neo-​
­liberal drive for resource appropiation and for dismantling regulatory oversight,
whether by international, nation-​­state, or local bodies.” However, as Nixon does
note, this is precisely opposite to Hardin’s objective, which was a call for more
(possibly governmental) oversight of commons areas; his primary concern was
population control, and, alarmingly, he called for a repeal of the UN Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, asserting that the size of families should be regu-
lated by the state. See Nixon, “Neoliberalism, Genre, and ‘The Tragedy of the
Commons,’ ” PMLA 127, no. 3 (May 2012): 597.
7. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, “The Prize in Economic Sciences
2009,” press release, October 12, 2009, http://​www​.nobelprize​.org/nobel_prizes/
economics/laureates/2009/press.pdf.
8. “The term ‘common-​­ pool resource’ refers to a natural or man-​­ made
resource system that is sufficiently large as to make it costly (but not impos-
sible) to exclude potential beneficiaries from obtaining benefits from its use.”
Examples include ocean fisheries and groundwater resources. CPRs come in two
strata: the resource system associated with stock (“groundwater basins, graz-
ing areas, . . . parking garages,” etc.) and resource units (RU) produced by the
system associated with flow (“the acre-​­feet or cubic meters of water withdrawn
from a groundwater basin or an irrigation canal, the tons of fodder consumed
by animals from a grazing area, . . . the [number of] parking spaces filled,” etc.).
Each stratum is dependent on the other. With renewable resources, one factors in
a replenishment rate: “as long as the average rate of withdrawal [i.e., “appropria-
tion”] does not exceed the average rate of replenishment, a renewable resource
is sustained over time. CPR access can be limited to a single individual or firm
or to multiple individuals or teams of individuals who use the resource system
at the same time.” Appropriators may themselves “consume the resource units,”
may “immediately transfer ownership of resource units to others,” or may “use
The Commons . . . and Digital Planetarity 63

resource units as inputs into production processes.” For instance, fishermen can
use an RU in the process of making something else (such as irrigating a field) or
sell it directly, thereby transferring ownership (such as selling fish at market).
See Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for
Collective Action (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 30–­31.
9. Ibid., 31.
10. Ibid., 33.
11. For one example of the many Declarations of Interdependence, see
Interdependence Movement, “Declaration of Interdependence,” http://​ www​
.interdependencemovement​.org/declaration_form.php. A comfy and undertheo-
rized sense of the commons as moral ground and ethical position permeates Jay
Walljasper’s All That We Share: How to Save the Economy, the Environment,
the Internet, Democracy, Our Communities, and Everything Else That Belongs
to All of Us (New York: New, 2010), which is linked to the “On the Commons”
commons movement strategy center website at http://​www​.onthecommons​.org/
all-​­that-​­we-​­share.
12. I would put Appiah’s theory of cosmopolitanism in the first camp; see
Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New
York: W. W. Norton, 2006). Spivak’s view would be a part of the second; it is
more muscular, recognizing the role that economic disparity and cultural dif-
ference will play in any intercultural contact, but her Derridean assumptions
lead her to valorize difference as such and can construct only an abstract plan-
etary commons made and unmade in a perpetual cycle of unmasking, undoing,
and rearticulation. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2003).
13. “Yet by now,” Nixon notes, “most sociobiologists accommodate a broader
vision of species self-​­perpetuation, one that acknowledges how altruism—­forms
of apparent selflessness—­may be genetically beneficial, enhancing the prospects
of collective survival. Hardin’s genetic-​­generic method fails to acknowledge the
evolutionary role that the paradox of selfish selflessness may play.” See Nixon,
“Neoliberalism,” 594.
14. Elinor Ostrom, Roy Gardner, and James Walker, Rules, Games, and
Common-​­Pool Resources (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 329.
15. Ibid., 328.
16. Ostrom, Governing the Commons, 44.
17. Amy R. Poteete, Marco A. Janssen, and Elinor Ostrom, Working Together:
Collective Action, the Commons, and Multiple Methods in Practice (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010), 236–­38. The authors here cite previous
research by Ostrom as well as by Robert L. Axtell, including “The Emergence and
Evolution of Institutions of Self-​­Governance on the Commons” (working paper,
Department of Computational Social Science, George Mason University, Fairfax,
Va., 2013).
18. Ostrom, Gardner, and Walker, Rules, Games, and Common-​­Pool Resources,
171, 193.
19. Ibid., 145.
20. Ibid., 327–­28.
21. “Digimodernism” is Alan Kirby’s term for the new digital era. See his
essay in this volume, as well as Kirby, Digimodernism: How New Technologies
64 Amy J. Elias

Dismantle the Postmodern and Reconfigure Our Culture (New York: Contin-
uum, 2009).
22. I am closely paraphrasing Hess and Ostrom here. See Charlotte Hess and
Elinor Ostrom, “Introduction: An Overview of the Knowledge Commons,” in
Understanding Knowledge as a Commons, ed. Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007), 7.
23. See Poteete, Janssen, and Ostrom, Working Together, 243–­45.
24. “Since our future is dependent on our joint use of the global commons
[defined as ecological environments], we either must face up to the issues dis-
cussed in this volume [concerning use of land, water, and atmosphere] or find
ourselves destroyed by our own indifference to the major set of problems facing
us as we near the twenty-​­first century” (Elinor Ostrom, foreword to The Global
Commons, by Buck, xiv).
25. Ostrom herself notes that her studies have implications specifically for pub-
lic policy. See Ostrom, Gardner, and Walker, Rules, Games, and Common Pool
Resources, 193–­94.
26. Julian Dibble, “A Rape in Cyberspace: How an Evil Clown, a Haitian Trick-
ster Spirit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database into a Society,”
Village Voice (December 23, 1993), http://​www​.villagevoice​.com/2005–­10–­18/
specials/a-​­rape-​­in-​­cyberspace/full/.
27. At the time of this writing, LambdaMoo was still operating; see its gateway
at http://​www​.cc.gatech​.edu/classes/cs8113e_99_winter/lambda​.html.
28. Dibble, “A Rape in Cyberspace.”
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid.
32. In contrast, see Clay Shirky’s hyperbolic utopianism concerning digital
commons, open source, and horizontal organization in Cognitive Surplus: How
Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators (New York: Penguin, 2010) or
Steven Johnson’s pean to interconnectivity in Future Perfect: The Case for Prog-
ress in a Networked Age (New York: Riverhead, 2012).
33. See, for example, James Boyle, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Com-
mons of the Mind (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008); David
Bollier, Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their
Own (New York: New, 2008); Lawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas: The Fate
of the Commons in a Connected World (New York: Random House, 2001);
Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus; Diana Saco, Cybering Democracy: Public Space
and the Internet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); Carolyn
Guertin, Digital Prohibition: Piracy and Authorship in New Media Art (London:
Continuum, 2011); and Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, Vol. 1,
The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).
34. For a discussion of GNU and FOSS in relation to commons research, see
Sam Williams, Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman’s Crusade for Free Soft-
ware (Sebastopol, Calif.: O’Reilly, 2002); Eric S. Raymond, The Cathedral &
the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary
(Sebastopol, Calif.: O’Reilly, 1999); and Charles M. Schweik, “Free/Open-​­Source
Software as a Framework for Establishing Commons in Science,” in Understand-
ing Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice, ed. Charlotte Hess and
The Commons . . . and Digital Planetarity 65

Elinor Ostrom (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007), 277–­310. Net neutrality
is the principle that states that Internet providers, governments, or corpora-
tions cannot prevent consumer access to networks that are part of the Internet,
which access also includes manipulating down-​­access speeds to competitors;
see Marlene H. Dortch, “Federal Communications Commission,” FCC 05–­151,
September 25, 2005, http://​ hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-​
­05–­151A1.pdf. For a key statement about the challenges to intellectual property
law posed by Internet and digital culture, see the National Research Council’s
report The Digital Dilemma: Intellectual Property in the Information Age (Wash-
ington, D.C.: National Academy, 2000).
35. Douglas S. Noonan, “Internet Decentralization, Feedback, and Self-​
­Organization,” in Managing the Commons, ed. John A. Baden and Douglas S.
Noonan, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 189.
36. In economics, a public good is defined as a good available to all (“nonex-
cludable”) and one in which one person’s use does not subtract from another’s use
(“nonrivalrous”). For the classic statement on public goods, see Paul A. Samuel-
son, “The Pure Theory of Public Expenditure,” Review of Economics and Statistics
36, no. 4 (1954): 387–­89. A public good is therefore distinguished from common
pool resources, where subtractability or rivalry plays a major role in the viability
of the resource (one person’s use has the potential to subtract from another’s
use). Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom provide a useful short discussion of the
difference between public goods, private goods, and CPRs in “Introduction: An
Overview of the Knowledge Commons,” especially on pages 7–­10.
37. See, for example, Steven Weber’s discussion of open source and/as the com-
mons, in The Success of Open Source (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 2004), particularly his summary on pages 243–­48. Justyna Hofmokl con-
tends that Internet goods do not fall into the common pool category at all; see
“The Internet Commons: Towards an Eclectic Theoretical Framework,” Inter-
national Journal of the Commons 4, no. 1 (2010): 226–­50. Noonan posits a
criterion of “rivalrous consumption” important to studies claiming that digital
spaces contradict Hardin’s original “tragedy of the commons” scenario—­not, as
Ostrom maintains, because users can find ways to negotiate resource use but
because the goods that electronic sites make available are (1) nonmaterial and (2)
cannot be depleted (downloading a pdf from a website does not reduce the num-
ber of pdfs available later to others); see “Internet Decentralization, Feedback,
and Self-​­Organization.” However, Karthik Jayaraman argues that it is not par-
ticipation in commons based peer production (CBPP) but lack of participation in
it that has more impact on a CBPP project’s success (“Tragedy of the Commons
in the Production of Digital Artifacts,” International Journal of Innovation, Man-
agement and Technology 3, no. 5 [2012]: 626).
38. Dan Hunter, “Cyberspace as Place and the Tragedy of the Digital Anticom-
mons,” California Law Review 91, no. 2 (2003): 499, 444.
39. Boyle gets the term from Michael A. Heller and Rebecca S. Eisenberg, “Can
Patents Deter Innovation? The Anticommons in Biomedical Research,” Science
280, no. 5364 (1998): 698–­701.
40. James Boyle, “The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of
the Public Domain,” Law and Contemporary Problems 66, no. 33 (Winter/Spring
2003): 37.
66 Amy J. Elias

41. Dan Hunter notes that “the anticommons effect occurs when multiple par-
ties [though not everyone using a resource] can prevent others from using a given
resource so that no one has an effective right of use.” He correlates the digital
anticommons to the situation in Japan following the 1995 Kobe earthquake, in
which rebuilding was stymied because of “a ‘world class’ tangle of property”
rights claims in the area that led to an “anticommons” situation (“Cyberspace
as Place,” 502, 510, 513). Hanoch Dagan and Michael A. Heller define a lib-
eral commons in “The Liberal Commons,” Yale Law Journal 110, no. 4 (2001):
553. Michael A. Heller’s theory is outlined fully in The Gridlock Economy: How
Too Much Ownership Wrecks Markets, Stops Innovation, and Costs Lives (New
York: Basic Books, 2008).
42. Noonan, “Internet Decentralization, Feedback, and Self-​­Organization,”
189. Noonan also responds to George Gilder’s warning in “Feasting on the Giant
Peach” (Forbes ASAP, August 26, 1996) about the tragedy of the Internet com-
mons in relation to the problem of spam (which would be akin to pollution of the
CPR) and points out that in order to maintain order online, we probably will see
the creation of “privatized, proprietary, secure intranets, enmeshed in a broader
public Internet framework” (192).
43. Gian Maria Greco and Luciano Floridi, “The Tragedy of the Digital Com-
mons,” Ethics and Information Technology 6 (2004): 76 (emphasis in original),
78, 74.
44. Boyle, “Second Enclosure Movement,” 44 (emphasis in original), 45.
45. Ibid., 49.
46. Joseph Michael Reagle Jr., Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wiki-
pedia (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2010), 1.
47. Reagle, Good Faith Collaboration, 12, 53ff.
48. There is no space here to analyze how Hobbes’s own theory has been
oversimplified in recent discussions to make it seem the über-​­neoliberal theory of
state-​­managed, pro-​­capital force—­something a bit astray from Hobbes’s notion
of the Leviathan as commonwealth, created when every man makes an agreement
with every other man to give the right to govern.
49. See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge,
Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009).
50. Michael Hardt, “For Love or Money,” Cultural Anthropology 26, no. 4
(2011): 676.
51. Hardt and Negri’s appropriation and secularization of much of Chris-
tian theological thought is consistent with neo-​­Marxism’s recent moves in that
direction. See, for instance Alain Badiou’s celebration of universalism and the
immanent event in St. Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003); or Slavoj Žižek, The Frag-
ile Absolute: or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (New York:
Verso, 2009).
52. Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, 180.
53. Ibid., 181, 182.
54. For Deleuze and Guattari, the rhizome also produces the unconscious;
exceeds unity; replaces transcendence with immanance; rejects dualism; is neither
One (a totality) nor multiple in the sense of aggregative, but rather is dimensional
motion; is not subject to social authority. It has no “general” or hierarchical
The Commons . . . and Digital Planetarity 67

structure and is linked to micropolitics, and it is a machinic assemblage of desire.

For a presentation of these rhizomatic traits, see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guat-
tari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
55. Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, 195.
56. Ibid., 195–­96. One hears echoes here of Boyle’s claim that the digital com-
mons will itself alter user subjectivity. There is some neuroscience supporting this
claim: see, for example, work on neuroplasticity and emerging work on the rela-
tion between playing video games and altered brain patterns.
57. Joss Hands’s excellent analysis in @ Is for Activism of H&N’s “commons
multitude” identifies many of the same questions I raise here and below. Hands
accounts for and locates H&N’s heralded “new social institutions” in the arena
of dematerialized and somewhat autonomous labor that is situated in the bodies
of laborers themselves (thinking and feeling work in a new information econ-
omy) brought about by the growth of cognitive and affective work related to
media expansion (170).
58. In her excellent discussion of Negri’s notion of “the common” in rela-
tion to the “inoperative community” of Jean-​­Luc Nancy, Helen Morgan Parmett
notes that “the common” was formulated through the Italian “Autonomia”
movement and emerged in the 1970s as a way to theorize the collective as living
labor. Parmett distinguishes the relevant theorists on the basis of “their differing
ontological theories of being as alterity (Nancy) and being as immanent totality
(Negri).” See Helen Morgan Parmett, “Community/Common: Jean-​­Luc Nancy
and Antonio Negri on Collective Potentialities,” Communication, Culture & Cri-
tique 5 (June 2012): 174, 175.
59. During a joint interview that also included Hardt, Berlant notes that “Unlike
Michael, who is trying to think love as a better concept for suturing or inducing the
social, I’m trying to think about what the affects of belonging are without attach-
ing them to one or another emotional vernacular [such as love]. . . . We’re thinking
of the affective phenomenology of these conditions, not how to do it.” See Heather
Davis and Paige Sarlin, “ ‘On the Risk of a New Relationality’: An Interview with
Lauren Berlant and Michael Hardt,” Reviews in Cultural Theory (2008): 9.
60. On this topic, see Lauren Berlant, “A Properly Political Concept of Love:
Three Approaches in Ten Pages,” Cultural Anthropology 26, no. 4 (2011): 683–­91.
61. Lauren Berlant, “Intuitionists: History and the Affective Event,” American
Literary History 20, no. 4 (2008): 845–­46 (emphasis in original). For a different
treatment but support of this claim to shared affect, see Teresa Brennan, The
Transmission of Affect (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004); and Nigel
Thrift, Non-​­Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect (London: Routledge,
2007). Thrift’s work is particularly important to Berlant’s theories of the affective
present.
62. Quoted in Davis and Sarlin, “ ‘On the Risk,’ ” 12.
63. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press,
2011), 64.
64. Ibid., 5, 199.
65. Berlant acknowledges her debt to queer theory’s rethinking of time and
reciprocity within a new phenomenology and particularly her use of Michael D.
Snediker’s Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and Other Felicitous Persuasions
68 Amy J. Elias

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008) and Sara Ahmed’s Queer

Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, N.C.: Duke University
Press, 2006).
66. Berlant takes this term from Michael Taussig, The Nervous System (New
York: Routledge, 1992).
67. Again, the echoes of Deleuze and Guattari, Bergson, and Foucault are clear
here, as becoming and prehended event are elevated over being and analysis. As
Berlant writes, “Life in the impasse turns from threat to aim. To enter experience
without eventilizing it will mean knowing something is afoot without forcing
prediction into being, as though it would be possible to place one’s affect on a
kind of confident cruise control. The literary figures grow something like that: a
historically capacious, neointuitive sense of becoming-​­present” (Cruel Optimism,
70–7­1).
68. Berlant, “A Properly Political Concept of Love,” 687.
69. Richard Grusin, Premediation: Affect and Mediality after 9/11 (London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 103–­4.
70. Ibid., 3. Grusin notes that he adopts the concept of “logic” from “late 1980s
American cultural studies . . . It is meant to hold on to the Foucauldian sense that
there are rhetorical and conceptual continuities across different discursive and
biopolitical formations” (5). He prefers affect theory to trauma theory, which
he believes is more “reli[ant] upon various psychoanalytical methodologies” (7).
71. Ibid., 154, 42, 43.
72. Ibid., 48, 55. Grusin is basing his analysis on that of Niklas Luhmann from
The Reality of the Mass Media, trans. Kathleen Cross (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford
University Press, 2000).
73. Grusin, 55.
74. Ibid., 46.
75. Ibid., 61, 91, 94.
76. In addition to the overwhelming impact of Luhmann’s systems theories,
Immanuel Wallerstein’s work on mini-​­systems, world empires, and world econo-
mies has grown in influence. See Immanuel Wallerstein, The Essential Wallerstein
(New York: New, 2000); and David Palumbo-​­Liu, Bruce W. Robbins, and Nir-
vana Tanoukhi, eds., Immanuel Wallerstein and the Problem of the World:
System, Scale, Culture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011).
77. Eddie Izzard, Stripped, Live, directed by Sarah Townsend (UK: Universal,
November 23, 2009), DVD.
78. See Steven Shaviro’s Connected, or What It Means to Live in the Network
Society (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), in which he exam-
ines network society as it has been prefigured by science fiction.
79. See Pierre Macherey, Hegel or Spinoza, trans. Susan M. Ruddick (Minne-
apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).
80. See Raoul Eshelman, Performatism, or the End of Postmodernism (Aurora,
Colo.: Davies Group, 2008).
81. See Spivak, Death of a Discipline.
82. Mark Poster, “Global Media Culture,” New Literary History 39, no. 3
(2008): 698, 689.
83. It is important to note that Habermas himself moved to a more open frame
for the commons as he considered the problem of the contemporary nation-​­state—
The Commons . . . and Digital Planetarity 69

­ amely, the post–­Cold War consolidation of the European Union and what it
n
might mean for new political configurations. On the ground, and in the twenty-​
­first century, the public sphere is undergoing transformations Habermas cannot
yet articulate but that seem tied to environmental thinking. See Jürgen Haber-
mas, The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays, trans. and ed. Max Pensky
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001).
84. For a position both outlining and resisting such Singularity thinking, see
Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
2010); for a critique of social media networks, see Geert Lovink, Networks with-
out a Cause: A Critique of Social Media (Cambridge, Eng.: Polity, 2011).
85. See the “membership” and “about” pages at http://​www​.hackreduce​.org/.
86. Ostrom, “Analyzing Collective Action,” 160.
87. Quoted in Eli Kintisch, Hack the Planet: Science’s Best Hope—­or Worst
Nightmare—­for Averting Climate Catastrophe (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 2010),
234.
88. See Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge, Eng.: Polity, 2013).
89. Hands writes, “To conceive the multitude and its production of the com-
mon as something other than a swarming aggregation of atoms, and as a political
entity, requires the application of a theory of mediated rational communication”
(@ Is for Activism, 172).
90. See Amy J. Elias, “The Dialogical Avant-​­Garde: Relational Aesthetics and
Time Ecologies in Only Revolutions and TOC,” Contemporary Literature 53, no.
4 (2012): 738–­78.
 The Possibility of Cyber-​­Placelessness
Digimodernism on a Planetary Platform

Alan Kirby

There are always problems attendant upon historicizing the present. First,
descriptive terminology seemingly accurate at one historical moment is
quickly outdated and replaced by newer, ostensibly more accurate character-
izations of the time period, which in turn are often shown to be programmatic,
exclusionary, partisan, or self-​­interested. Historical accounting is also a com-
plex cumulative process: post-​­factum historicizations need to account not
only for current and recently past events but also for the characterizations
of events proposed when the events themselves were unfolding. And yet, if
formed on the basis of the best and most complete information available,
period descriptors can generate new perspectives on the past as well as stimu-
late new perspectives on, and spur innovation in, the present.
Both in my essay “The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond” and in my
book Digimodernism, I utilized such a new descriptive term that attempted
to historicize the present: “digimodernism.”1 In these texts I argued, first,
that the overriding fact of our cultural time, and one with which all analyses
of the contemporary must begin, is the digitization of the text. This digitiz-
ing trend, leading into multiple domains of reading and writing activity, is
by now several decades old; it emerged in the mid-​­to-​­late 1980s with the
creation and development of the Internet and accelerated as technologies
associated with portable telephony have reached critical mass. Since then,
text has been taking digital form everywhere and in ways all too familiar to
us. Thus, nowadays the typewriter turns into the word processor; the private
letter gives way to the e-​­mail and the scribbled note to the text message; the
atlas is superseded by Google Maps and the road map by in-​­car satellite navi-
gation; the personal diary becomes the online blog; the book or multivolume
encyclopedia is displaced by Wikipedia; celluloid photographs and films are
digitized, while genre movies morph into computer games; recording media
such as the videotape and the vinyl record are superseded by digital formats,
a process facilitated by online file-​­sharing platforms that sync with portable
media devices such as the iPod; broadcast media abandon analog for digital
transmission; and the death of print is said to be presaged with the unveiling

71
72 Alan Kirby

of digital “e-​­book readers.” The list could easily go on. This immense sys-
temic shift or cluster of transformations, which doubtless date back to, or
were first identified during, the immediate postwar period, have an intense
speed and relentless momentum, perhaps making it too easy to overstate
their long-​­term historical significance. To describe this cluster of shifts as
“digimodernism” and the primary event or set of events of our cultural time
may seem controversial since the word replaces the older and more accepted
concept of “postmodernism” as period descriptor. On the one hand, adopt-
ing the new term appears to necessitate an overhaul or even jettisoning of
assumptions about the period covered by the postmodern paradigm, which,
as an account or explanation of the present, has held sway in some circles
since the early 1970s. On the other hand, this identification of the cultural
primacy of digitization may also seem self-​­evident, although its precise for-
mulation may be more elusive.
My second argument has been that because these reorientations form a
systemic pattern with certain paradigmatic traits affecting artistic form, con-
tent, production, reception, economics, and value, they should be seen en
bloc as a new cultural dominant in the terms that Fredric Jameson adapted
from Raymond Williams. Thus, the dominant in question requires its own
descriptive label, “digimodernism,” and should be read as displacing a post-
modernism whose exhaustion, retreat, or neutralized diffusion into the
sociocultural milieu has become evident.
This does not simply mean that, as one critic wrote recently, the post-
modern has given way to the Internet.2 What I call “digimodernism” both
encompasses the artistic-​­creative and connects and intermeshes it with the
discursive-​­critical, consequently incorporating and remediating the postmod-
ern. It includes Facebook and Twitter as well as popular movies such as 300
(Snyder, 2007) and Avatar (Cameron, 2009) and auteur films such as The
Boss of It All (von Trier, 2006), Ten (Kiarostami, 2002), and Life in a Day
(Macdonald, 2011). Digimodernism foregrounds certain highly sophisticated
contemporary narrative video games such as Metal Gear Solid 4 (2008), but
it equally speaks to a shift to semi-​­narrativized, “low” genres in television
like “reality TV” or docusoap formats, and popular, highly narrativized, and
long-​­running series such as The Office (BBC, 2001–­03), Peep Show (Chan-
nel 4, 2003–­present), and Lost (ABC, 2004–­10). If digimodernist podcasting
revitalizes radio, long assumed to be in terminal decline, digimodernist tex-
tuality also redefines such forms as the short story or the novel—­as, for
example, with Jennifer Egan’s “Black Box” (2012) or A Visit from the Goon
Squad (2010), the latter of which contains a PowerPoint presentation as part
of its narrative, or with Chris Ware’s Building Stories (2012), an unbound
graphic novel in a box that materializes hypertext format. As an expansive
set of aesthetic tendencies characterized predominantly by their location
within digitally based performance, digimodernism extends to artistic under-
takings such as Antony Gormley’s One & Other, in which 2,400 individuals
The Possibility of Cyber-­Placelessness 73

successively performed for one hour each over 100 days on the fourth plinth
in Trafalgar Square in London in summer 2009. Gormley’s project, streamed
online to a global audience that commented on the performances on Twit-
ter, was attacked by pseudonymous contributors to the London Guardian’s
cultural blog who were seemingly unaware that the textual principles applied
by Gormley inhered equally in the format of the message board and online
forum used by these critics: evanescence, “ongoingness” or openness, hap-
hazardness and improvisationality, and multiple and variegated authorship.3
These in fact are among the principal features of the digimodernist text.
Moreover, both the artistic event itself and the critical response it elicited
in this case opened out toward a planetary cultural practice or discourse, a
trend that is the focus of this essay.

Digimodernism and Its Peers

As a theory about the emergence of a new cultural dominant beyond post-

modernism, “digimodernism” is a political reading of contemporary culture
and art. Not intended to be programmatic, it does not dogmatically claim
that the postmodern suddenly went extinct, though, like other recent inter-
rogations of the postmodern paradigm, it maintains that a certain conceptual
ground-​­clearing is now necessary. It has accorded with assertions elsewhere
about the supersession of postmodernism, such as Andrew Hoberek’s 2007
claim that “declarations of postmodernism’s demise have become a critical
commonplace.”4 Digimodernism, which begins with a revolution in the mate-
riality of the text, differs in its intellectual emphasis from those “–­isms” that
concentrate primarily on the content of texts whose material form remains
wholly or largely traditional and familiar. A digimodernist analysis highlights,
for instance, the displacement of theater as cinema’s “other” by the video
game, which increasingly supplies the archeological, mythological, or ludic
aesthetic of genre movie-​­making; likewise, such an approach foregrounds the
effects of the filmic intromission of the computerized between the directorial/
teleological and the found/external of traditional cinema. But this interpre-
tation also emphasizes how the postmodern is sedimented in digimodernist
platforms such as Wikipedia. For digimodernism, as the form of the word
suggests, the relationship of the socio-​­technological with the textual-​­cultural
is neither causal nor contextual; it is symbiotic. Moreover, digimodernism’s
techno-​­textual aesthetics cannot be read as inevitably more rewarding or suc-
cessful than are print or analog aesthetics, though a sense of approbation
of the digital aesthetic is apparent in many historicizations of the cultural
present.
The period of the rise of planetary digimodernism is therefore that of
the retreat of First World postmodernism, and—­due in no small part to
the ambiguous nature of the latter—­the relationships between the two are
74 Alan Kirby

multiform and complex. An abundance of meanings has been invested since

the 1970s in the term “postmodernism” to the degree that today it seems
plausible to consider it under the aegis of Wittgenstein’s notion of “family
resemblances,” that is, as a term whose many usages do not share any one
common feature but are instead held together by “similarities, relationships,
and a whole series of them at that.”5 The various meanings of the word
“postmodernism” have always appeared to form “a complicated network
of similarities overlapping and criss-​­crossing: sometimes overall similarities,
sometimes similarities of detail” with no Merkmal or unifying element.6 Said
to signify that which was fundamentally plural and multiform, “postmodern-
ism” as a concept embodies multiple and even contradictory instantiations
in the aesthetic and cultural spheres. If we can distinguish many varieties of
postmodernism from one another, we might also agree that different ver-
sions or manifestations of postmodernism might not share the same end date
or even the same moment of superannuation, form of extinction, or rate of
retreat or passing. Postmodernism thus might be said to experience many
(and many kinds of) deaths, some of which cannot be described appropri-
ately in terms of a biological image. The end of postmodernism, prefigured
in the term’s own proliferation of meaning to the point of near-​­evanescence,
will be multitiered and will take place at different times in different contexts.
This would explain why the notion of the “end” of postmodernism can seem
straightforward to some and untimely to others, tediously old hat (“a critical
commonplace”) or nonsensically premature.
While there is no space here to explore or even to enumerate the many ways
that postmodernism has withered as a cultural dominant since the turn of the
twenty-​­first century, we can easily point to visible examples of its waning in
the arts: the comfortable assimilation and therefore historical saturation of
postmodernism in such conservative cultural spheres as the children’s car-
toon (Pixar, DreamWorks), the middlebrow novel (Jasper Fforde, etc.), and
the Oscar-​­winning movie (Shakespeare in Love [Madden, 1998]); the loss
of any sense of threat, subversion, or novelty from the work of a postmod-
ern street artist like Banksy; and the relative decline of art forms associated
with 1980s postmodernism such as music video, pop music-​­based subculture,
and spectacular television. Such postmodern remnants contrast, for example,
with newer participatory digital arts like vcasting or participatory cultural
platforms such as Pinterest. Postmodernism may now seem facile and generi-
cally repetitive or nostalgic, even bordering at times upon ennui. However,
hybrid postmodern-​­digimodernist texts are easily identified—­movies such as
The Cabin in the Woods (Goddard, 2012) or the Harry Potter series (2001–­
11), by which postmodern tropes are retooled through an encounter with
digimodernism. If the term “postmodernism” seems in literary criticism and
academic studies to have gone out of fashion or to have been reduced to
a historical category akin to romanticism, the importance of this process
should not be overstated. On a theoretical level, the historical passing of
The Possibility of Cyber-­Placelessness 75

postmodernism may occur according to a conceptual absorption, dispersal,

or recontextualization. In response to the counter-​­argument that the charac-
teristics of digimodernism are encompassed by the rubric of postmodernism,
it can be asserted that, at the very least, the digitization of the text is a vast
and significant cluster of processes, so much so that its cultural consequences
merit study and definition in their own right. Such study would provide the
basis for a minimalist digimodernism.
As a theory attempting to name what follows from and develops out
of postmodernism, digimodernism counts among its peers Raoul Eshel-
man’s performatism, Nicolas Bourriaud’s altermodern, Christian Moraru’s
cosmodernism, Gilles Lipovetsky’s hypermodernity, and Robert Samuels’s
automodernity.7 It distinguishes itself from these other characterizations
through its foregrounding of the technological basis of contemporary cultural
expressions. Digimodernism today is not defined as a fully developed aesthetic
norm or arts movement, though it is associated with certain aesthetic pat-
terns; it is primarily a theory of cultural practice. In this sense, it can compete
with other current characterizations of the present or may complement them,
as it does with Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker’s notion of
“metamodernism.” For instance, performatist and digimodernist readings of
Lost or Yann Martel’s Life of Pi (2001) might be combined to rewarding effect.
On the other hand, digimodernism needs to be set apart from theories of
digital media to which it bears a superficial resemblance. For one thing, digi-
modernism traces the radical disruption of the very notion of “media,” for it
describes a moment at which much traditional media (such as print newspa-
pers, books, analog recording, and film) are systemically demonetized.8 More
importantly, the manifestations of digimodernism belong as much to “old”
media like cinema and radio as to “new” digital media and permit for the
older forms a historicizing account of transformations and continuities. An
example of such transformation might be the contrast between the postmod-
ern tropes of the original, mechanical-​­analog Star Wars film trilogy (Lucas,
Kershner, and Marquand, 1977–­83) and the digitized and digimodernist traits
of the later prequel trilogy (Lucas, 1999–­2005). A digimodernist analysis of
Avatar would focus on the film’s earnest recuperation, via the technologies
of digital motion capture or 3D cinema, of the devices of children’s literature
or mythology; in this example, digimodernism can be seen to approach the
“digital revolution” from the perspective of cultural criticism, interrogating,
for instance, how an entirely new technological basis of cultural production
and dissemination is translated into textual forms and meanings.

Cyber-​­Placelessness

Digimodernism is thus understood as a newly dominant cultural paradigm

based on the transformations and configurations associated with digitization,
76 Alan Kirby

and its theorization might chime with a twenty-​­first-​­century planetary turn

via the apparent placelessness opened up by the Internet and the technologies
of portable telephony. At least since William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer
(1984), published almost thirty years ago and now central to both the science
fiction and postmodern canons, computerization has been thought to give
rise to an autonomous field called “cyberspace” that abolishes or transcends
the location-​­specific or the geographically particular. In Neuromancer, cyber-
space is evoked as a “consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions
of legitimate operators, in every nation”; it is the protagonist’s “distanceless
home, his country, [a] transparent 3D chessboard extending to infinity,” and
a “nonspace.”9 Cyberspace might be understood to recuperate the materially
sited within the computerized, and to anticipate the formation of contingent
online communities and exchanges composed of and engaged in by individu-
als based anywhere in the “real world.”
That the Internet permits a supranational, global, or radically delocal-
ized space requires some immediate caveats, however. First, as a digitized
location, cyberspace is not the same as the “nonplaces” in the “real world”
theorized by Marc Augé, Melvin Webber, or Henri Lefebvre. Moreover, the
Internet is not a universally accessible or occupied space: a study published
in September 2012 by Tim Berners-​­Lee’s World Wide Web Foundation sug-
gests that only one in three of the world’s population use it, the number
falling below one in six in Africa.10 While these proportions are presumably
rising, even countries that represent highest use and access to cyberspace
show, when compared to one another, marked disparities or variations in
terms of both the amount of time people spend online and the scale or nature
of their involvement in international, planetary discursive exchanges, and
these strongly uneven usage statistics are doubtless connected to differences
of users’ gender, age, or social background.
Nevertheless, that the Internet and World Wide Web appear to permit
a global or delocalized circulation of discourse remains a commonplace in
digital humanities studies. The socio-​­historical starting point of this digi-
tized possibility is an easily recognizable one: sitting with his or her laptop
or iPhone in a departure lounge in Slovakia, a hypothetical academic can
buy books to be delivered to his or her home in England or onto his or her
portable e-​­book reader, consult scholarly journals published in Australia or
Minnesota, read reviews written in Mexico or South Africa, submit a paper
proposal to a university in Peru, e-​­mail an editor in India, argue on message
boards with readers based in Greece or South Korea, and so on. Postmod-
ernism set the stage for this. In the same year as Neuromancer, as well as
Jameson’s “Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” David
Lodge published Small World, a satirical portrait of late twentieth-​­century
academia globalized through an international conference circuit itself enabled
by the expansion of affordable air travel and improvements in communica-
tions. Lodge’s internationalized academics also saw their nation-​­based critical
The Possibility of Cyber-­Placelessness 77

perspectives transformed by 1960s theorists, some of whom, such as Roland

Barthes and Hans Robert Jauss, appear lightly disguised in Lodge’s novel.
The work of some of these authors appeared to transcend the narrowness
of traditional academic disciplines and boundaries, and, here already, the
delocalization of discourse, specifically academic discourse, was inextricable
from contemporary tendencies in cultural theory. My hypothetical twenty-​
fi
­ rst-​­century academic is stationary, not in transit; he or she moves through
a digitized, not a stratospheric, plane of worldwide discursive exchanges. Yet
with his or her PowerPoint lectures, seminar blogs, and Skype supervisions,
this academic performs at this one sitting web-​­based activities that represent
only a fraction of the distance-​­annihilating, textual digitization of his or her
working life, which itself assumes the internationalism of perspective that
Lodge’s academics experienced.
Today, it might seem as if the Internet, the World Wide Web, and portable
telephony permit a worldwide diffusion of literary or cultural discourse that
triumphs over a previous straitened sitedness, breaking open geographical
privilege, destabilizing hierarchies based on location, and promising a utopian
equality and freedom within the digital sphere. The Internet and the World
Wide Web do provide a structural platform that moves us toward the plan-
etary in the form of cyberspatiality, a digitized placelessness or delocalization.
However, it looks to me as though this unremitting and inescapable move-
ment toward cyberspatiality is constantly being constrained by or negotiated
in terms of an awkward reintegration of a “real world” sitedness. The local
or geographically particular reemerges persistently, and it would appear at
this presumably early stage in the history of cyberspace, unavoidably, to skew
and compromise the digital drive toward delocalization. Berners-​­Lee defined
the Internet in 2012 as “a global conversation,” but he also cautioned against
the undermining and distortion of its discursive scope by socioeconomically
determined inequalities of access and governmental restrictions such as the
notorious “great firewall of China.” His advocacy of a “web for all” takes for
granted, apparently, the political, social, economic, and personal benefits of
an ever wider and more closely knit cyberspatiality.11
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s account of planetarity, on the other hand,
sets the concept over and against both economic globalization and com-
puterization. Defining globalization as the financialization of the world by
which the latter becomes exploitable and controlled in order to yield capital-
ist profits, she states emphatically that “the globe is on our computers. No
one lives there. It allows us to think that we can aim to control it. The planet
is in the species of alterity, belonging to another system; and yet we inhabit
it, on loan.”12 Thus, planetarity involves “a more sensitive and attuned way
of understanding the materiality of the world and our collective place and
responsibility as humans within it.”13 Spivak asserts that we are called to be
not global agents but planetary subjects. This is in the spirit of other critics’
calls for a planetary ethos—­Ursula Heise, for example, calls not for globalism
78 Alan Kirby

but for an “eco-​­cosmopolitanism.”14 If planetarity is indeed not “on our com-

puters” and also lies, as Christian Moraru argues, beyond the postmodern,
then the status of digimodernism might seem problematic as a theory of what
follows the postmodern, for it is focused on the cultural consequences of
clusters of flows across computers.
One example might clarify the tension between the local and the planetary
that characterizes digimodernism. Digimodernist cinema can exist because of
delocalizing, globalizing digital technologies; yet it chooses repeatedly topics
concerning, and ideologically moves toward, a planetary environmentalist
ethos as the other, planetary side of delocalization. In Avatar, for instance,
digital motion capture as a production process becomes identical with the
narrative’s reach toward cross-​­cultural empathy and works to ground its envi-
ronmentalist politics. Systemically, digitization appears primarily, though not
monolithically, to achieve a triumph over or alienation from the geographi-
cally local, whether localism is embodied in a village, city, nation, or social
grouping based on race, religion, lifestyle, or class. Favoring the mythopoeic,
often infantilized, “other” of video games, American popular digimodernist
cinema slides quickly over the details of the proximately territorial toward
what may appear at different times a space vastly expanded and unique to
itself or a space voided of content. In parallel to this turn in digimodernist
cinema, a digimodernist Internet—­via, for example, Web 2.0 formats, which
were embryonic at the turn of the twenty-​­first century, when Spivak was
writing—­foregrounds the body of and the scope for worldwide discursive
exchanges that break out again from the geographically proximate. In both
cases, digimodernism appears as the possibility of a planetary cultural prac-
tice, its potential prompt, mediator, and platform: its impulse toward either
a “global” or “planetary” scale is relentless but ambiguous both structurally
and ideologically.
Such a practice occurs, of course, specifically within a digitized plat-
form. Just as Avatar’s Occidental bias is obliterated at the level of theme
but reinserted at another narrative or structural level, so the geographically
proximate is not annihilated by digitization but is instead re-​­placed. There-
fore, a spiral obtains: through digitization, the local is overcome or recedes;
the planetary scale emerges “in the species of alterity,” that is, as other to us,
a space we cannot enter, a “nonspace.” Yet “we inhabit it” as a “distanceless
home.” In consequence of this, we reintroduce our locality within it, recon-
figured. At last, this reintegrated locality is supplanted or recedes anew, and
so the spiral keeps turning. It is possible thus to regard cyberspace (figured,
for instance, in the textual “place” of Peter Jackson’s 2001–­2003 Lord of the
Rings film trilogy) simultaneously as a universe closed in on itself, as a larger
locality overwhelmingly determined by hegemonic (cultural, economic, polit-
ical, social) power flows from the “real world,” as a nowhere, and as an
emblem of a Spivakian planetarity belonging to us collectively and placing
responsibility on all. Whether in the guise of a vaster Occident, as a seemingly
The Possibility of Cyber-­Placelessness 79

universal state, as an eco-​­cosmopolitan home, or as an autonomous field, the

specter of digimodernist textual place(lessness) glimpsed at different points
within a spiral is unceasingly awakened by the technology that permits it.
Two case studies will seek to unpack this process.

Digimodernism and the Bookstore

Founded in 1995, Amazon​.com is almost the same age as the World Wide
Web itself and perhaps its most enduring commercial success story. Amazon
emblemizes the influence and effects of Web HTTP protocol, browsers, and
hyperlinking on the distribution of literary texts and other art forms. The
obvious point to make would be that Amazon enacts the dematerialization
and hence the delocalization of the bookshop. An individual interested in
purchasing a novel in the 1980s would have probably needed to identify
a specific store with a unique address found on a particular street, travel
to it, and, once inside, locate the volume desired, transfer it to a cash desk,
pay for it, and then take it home. The personal acquisition of books or their
distribution from publisher to consumer therefore took place in terms of
spatial otherness and specificity. Amazon delocalizes these processes into
cyber-​­commerce: a twenty-​­first-​­century person Googles a website, types in
the name of a desired book, traces it, and purchases it via a series of mouse
clicks, data inputs, and changes of screen; the book is delivered to his or
her residence a certain time later. Displacement in the physical world with
its geographical specificity dissolves into the digital acts of scrolling up and
down screens and manipulating the functionality of a website. Moreover,
with this digitization of the text and transaction process, which also delo-
calizes the consumer, comes an equivalent and identical shift on the part
of the distributor: bricks-​­and-​­mortar bookstores have a limited capacity of
titles given inherent restrictions in retail floor space, but Amazon’s locations
primarily in commercial districts permit it to hold a far wider range and to
sell at lower prices.15 Delocalization through digitization affects both pur-
chaser and seller, and the consequence is a generalized placelessness: books
can be ordered anywhere an individual possesses an Internet connection; the
metropolis’s historic advantage in giving consumers literary access is weak-
ened as the city/country cultural divide is largely dissolved; titles published
abroad are now easily obtained; books are held apparently nowhere and
seem to emerge through one’s letterbox as if by magic.
However, this seemingly hocus-​­ pocus transferral of the object can be
oversimplified or overstated, and not only because even in the 1980s there
were ways of purchasing books remotely. Like a “real” bookstore such as
Blackwell’s, Amazon has a head office located in a particular city (Seattle); it
abides by the business regulations of a certain locality; it too has an organi-
zational hierarchy and a full-​­time staff; and it also owns warehouses found
80 Alan Kirby

on specific geographical sites. As a bookseller, it is, then, indistinguishable

from Blackwell’s in everything except its eschewal of site-​­specific retail, that
is, its elimination of the shop as a customer interface point. And, to a degree,
it achieves this by a sleight of hand by which part of that interface, namely,
the material translation of the book to the customer’s home, passes from
the aegis of the bookseller to that of the local postal service; it is outsourced
but not digitized, and so it remains geographically determined. Accordingly,
delocalization is partial and above all experiential for the consumer: the book
purchase is lived as location-​­free because an “actually existing” store has
constructed it as such and, perhaps as importantly, sold it as such.
If, for its customers, Amazon’s delocalized presence is in practice limited
and less than novel, its planetizing impulse strikes one as stronger on the
supply side, where it looks like it gives access to the whole world’s sum of
commoditized texts in both bound and electronic forms. This appearance is
marketed through the corporate logo, where an arrow pointing from the first
to the fourth letter of Amazon is meant to suggest alphabetical and therefore
expressive completeness. Amazon can therefore stand as both synecdoche of
and precursor to the Internet as repository of the globe’s textual output in
digital form. At a historical point where the Internet’s discursive scope still
seems to be exponentially expanding, the sense that “the world” is present
in one or another format online would appear experientially persuasive. It is
true that by exploiting delocalization solely to achieve a more effective means
of commodity exchange, Amazon leans toward globalization rather than
planetarity; however, its activities suggest that Spivak’s distinction between
the global and the planetary should be seen as aspects of, or emphases within,
one impulse rather than as adversaries in a zero-​­sum game.
Postmodernism has likely foreshadowed this element too. In a novel often
used by critics to define the characteristics of postmodern metafiction, Italo
Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (1980), we see the bookstore
positioned as synecdoche for local-​­global tension. The novel self-​­reflexively
describes how a reader of it acquires the volume in a bookshop, and this
extended passage highlights many of the recognized traits of postmodern
globalization: the flattening of cultural hierarchies and the dissolution of cul-
tural boundaries; the commercialization of art or the repositioning of the
artist and text in terms of a system of commodity relations; the precession
of intertextuality; and a contemporary textual overload culminating in the
text’s superseding the “real world” it might once have reflected:

You went to the bookshop and bought the volume. Good for you.
In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with
the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have
forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books
You Haven’t Read, which were frowning at you from the tables and
shelves, trying to cow you. But you know you must never allow
The Possibility of Cyber-­Placelessness 81

yourself to be awed, that among them there extend for acres and
acres the Books You Needn’t Read, the Books Made For Purposes
Other Than Reading . . . With a rapid maneuver you bypass them and
move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There
Are Others You Must Read First, . . . the Books You’ve Been Planning
To Read For Ages, . . . the Books Read Long Ago Which It’s Now
Time To Reread and the Books You’ve Always Pretended To Have
Read And Now It’s Time To Sit Down And Really Read Them.16

In contrast to this kind of postmodern Library of Babel, digimodernism

represents a shift of perspective from material overabundance of texts and
phenomenological, experiential overload to dematerialization and isolation
of texts contained in the digital literary purchase. On Amazon, the individual
title is sought by name or author or keyword; browsing across a range of
juxtaposed volumes in search of a serendipitous discovery seems precluded,
though this too can be overstated. If in a city bookstore a dedicated customer
with time reserves might inspect and come to master, over several days, its
entire current stock according to the categorizations and display principles
imposed on it, Amazon’s vast holdings render this unfeasible. Yet Amazon
compensates for this loss through digitization, which permits the customer to
search those holdings more haphazardly, typing any keyword into a search
engine designed to yield a range of possibilities both individualized and open-​
e­nded. Browsing an overwhelming quantity of materialized, site-​­ specific,
retail-​­classified titles becomes in Amazon’s domain the idiosyncratic explora-
tion of an immense mass of dematerialized, delocalized, consumer-​­classified
titles. Calvino’s comedic fantasy of personalized book display principles is
achieved through digitization, though without industrial satire or readerly
guilt. In short, browsing reemerges, reconfigured, in digital form.
Moreover, while functionally producing an experiential-​­digital apparent
placelessness, Amazon’s web pages for individual titles are poised to attempt
textually the semi-​­rematerialization of its stock. The potential customer is
informed about the book’s number of pages, its language and dimensions,
as though to compensate him or her for being unable to touch the physical
thing prior to delivery; the site permits the consultation of the book’s front
and back covers, its contents or random pages within it in order to mimic the
way a potential buyer might scrutinize or dip inside a possible purchase in
an old-​­fashioned bookshop. As well as returning to the customer the physical
qualities of the book and the results of its physical inspection, Amazon repro-
duces much of a book’s industrial paratext, such as its endorsements and
blurb, reinforcing the sense of a published, materialized object. Equally, the
listing of other titles bought by customers who “purchased this item” restores
the experience within the bookstore evoked by Calvino, whereby acquired
volumes are necessarily juxtaposed and intermeshed with others. Whereas a
visit to an urban Barnes & Noble involves tracing a single item from the total
82 Alan Kirby

stock, Amazon appears to present a commercial context unique to each title

and enhanced by its “sales ranking” system and its derivatives. In addition,
the web pages provide for each paperback or hardcover a set of “customer
reviews” or their possibility; again, they seem to restore to the lonely indi-
vidual at his or her laptop or iPad the sense that he or she would immediately
get in a store of his or her choosing, buying, and responding to books within
a real, if unstable, community of readers.
These are, however, ambiguous outcomes of Amazon’s platform and mar-
keting strategies. Each of the features of Amazon’s web pages can equally be
regarded as a digitization, a dematerialization: the book’s shape is not felt
in how it rests in one’s hands as one stands before a commercial bookshelf
but spreads across a computer screen; other book lovers do not mill around
one but are present only as the words they have previously typed on their
keyboards. On the whole, Amazon’s digitization and distribution of books
would seem coterminous with dematerialization and delocalization and to
unfold toward a textual-​­commercial globalization. Yet, simultaneously, Ama-
zon is hamstrung by the necessity to negotiate with the physically, materially,
and geographically specific: the company’s approach to cyber-​­placelessness
requires it to digitally recuperate and reconfigure that intractable specific-
ity and can thereby function as a mediator of a planetary cultural practice
malgré lui.

Digimodernism and the Reader(s)

Quantitatively, the default setting of metaliterary discourse on the Internet is

represented by “bookchat,” a term coined by Gore Vidal to describe an infor-
mal discussion of literature driven by readers outside the professional world
of academia. As Vidal suggests in his essay “The Bookchat of Henry James,”
the term “bookchat” is not necessarily derogatory.17 Instead, it refers to the
articulation of a quest for readerly pleasure that can sometimes be rigorous
but is nevertheless amateur, weakly theorized or non-​­theorized, and focused
above all on recent publications and living authors. Thus, while it is often
highly uneven in terms of quality, bookchat looks like one of the inescapable
social consequences of a widespread interest in literature, with parallels in
popular discussions of politics and sports figures. Today, it operates on three
levels of diffusion: the age-​­old localized and interpersonal oral conversation;
the more recent regional or national article or debate in generalist print media
such as newspapers and magazines or in broadcast media such as television
and radio programs; and the contemporary digitization of this discourse. The
online dissemination of journalism is currently allied to the message board,
blog, or web forum and permits a slippage from the first and second to the
third of these levels. That it triumphs over local or national restrictedness to
achieve a worldwide reach is easy to assume but also too simplistic. I have
The Possibility of Cyber-­Placelessness 83

previously discussed the dialogic quality of one example—­an online article

and its comments thread, the London Sunday Telegraph’s “110 Best Books:
The Perfect Library”—­and will here go back briefly to this article’s discursive
geography.18
Illustrating the category of bookchat, “110 Best Books,” for which no
author was credited, belongs to a more recent subgenre often denigrated col-
lectively as “lists” or the tendentious journalistic itemization and ranking
of allegedly important texts. However, not all such lists are equal. In the
absence of a developed consensus such as exists for, say, opera or pre-​­1914
art, the film critic polls carried out and reported every ten years by Sight
& Sound magazine represent the medium’s closest approach to a publicly
established and recognized canon of its works. Likewise, the results of the
intermittent writer polls in rock music magazines such as the New Musi-
cal Express and Rolling Stone seek, without the institutional weight of an
academic department or institution, to shape into a canon what might oth-
erwise be a near-​­chaos of artistic value. Here, the media take on the task of
constructing a collection of texts of enduring worth in a social context that
academia often is either unwilling or unable to address. Such “lists” therefore
reflect shifts that have occurred since the 1970s and 1980s in the academy
and are broadly related to postmodernism’s negation of universal taste values
as well as to its insistence upon pluralism and emancipatory destabilization
of all universal axiological hierarchies.
Published in 2008, “110 Best Books: The Perfect Library” contradicto-
rily but unself-​­ consciously evinces both cultural-​­
theoretical layers. The
vestige of Enlightenment universalism implicit in its title is reflected in its
choice of texts from an age of canonical solidity (the Iliad and the Odyssey,
Paradise Lost, etc.), while it valorizes hitherto marginalized forms such as
romance novels, children’s literature, and science fiction in a manner that
could be seen as broadly postmodern. As bookchat, it gives disproportion-
ate weight to recently published texts, while it seeks to sustain the conceit
of a “library” by including works of history, life writing, and philosophy.
Spatially or geographically, it reflects the linguistic, national, social, and
political particularity of its publishing house as refracted through its staff
writers and their perceptions of the newspaper’s print edition readership.
Consequently, it favors texts originally written in English, by British or
especially southern English authors, that instantiate a politically or socially
conservative worldview. This skewing is visible across the eleven categories,
which feature such narrowly focused and/or appreciated texts as Anthony
Trollope’s The Barchester Chronicles (1855–­57); Jean Plaidy’s The Planta-
genet Saga (1976–­82); Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons (1930);
Delia Smith’s How to Cook (1998–­99); Peter Mayle’s account of middle-​
c­ lass English expatriation, A Year in Provence (1989); Lynne Truss’s plea for
grammatical rigor, Eats, Shoots and Leaves (2003); and the Diaries (1993,
2000, and 2002) of Alan Clark, a right-​­wing English politician. Though in
84 Alan Kirby

the long run the list may have little if any inherent importance, its biases
are interesting and may derive from a commercial imperative to confirm,
and at most only tentatively extend, the tastes of the publication’s audience.
This closed cultural economy may be qualitatively just as evident in the Sight
& Sound or rock music polls, or, indeed, in the Los Angeles Times’s list of
“61 Essential Postmodern Reads,” which featured predominantly American
novels.19
Uploaded to the newspaper’s website, digitized and opened to a poten-
tially worldwide readership, “110 Best Books” received 679 below-​­the-​­line
comments before the thread was closed two years later. The overwhelming
majority of comments identify, with varying degrees of hostility, even feroc-
ity, what the comment posters consider untenable omissions from the list or
biases in its selection. A systemic or structural tension is apparent between
the global scope of the discursive forum and the local specificities both of
the Sunday Telegraph’s staff writers and many of its website “below the line
comment” participants, since a large proportion of the latter, in seeking to
address the perceived shortcomings of the former, finally only reproduce their
biases within their own national, linguistic, or social particularity. A number
of comments by presumably Italian posters decry the absence of Alessan-
dro Manzoni’s The Betrothed (1827, 1842), while an even greater number
of seemingly American posters lament the exclusion of Ayn Rand. Roma-
nian, Persian, and South American writers are proposed by contributors with
names indicative of these areas; the Bible and the Quran are put forward
in devout terms; successive posters call for multiple authors who all hap-
pen to be from the same country. Both above the line and in the comments
thread, a universality hypothetically permitted by the digital online platform
is repeatedly returned to a geopolitical or cultural narrowness in a spiral of
critique and disavowal. The provision of a conceivably worldwide forum for
discussion appears to permit only the often aggressive juxtaposition of local
perspectives, which seek to displace each other competitively rather than to
interconnect in an enriching manner. In the tradition of bookchat, general
principles of selection or value are not seriously addressed, while the posters
rarely acknowledge each other but instead react to the original list such that
the thread devolves mostly into a succession of disconnected interjections in
a discursive void.
The thread also throws into relief one of the more obvious local dis-
tortions of the worldwide impetus of the Internet, which, accordingly,
overcomes geographical distances only to foreground linguistic groupings,
such that contributors in Seattle, Belfast, or Adelaide can argue and interact
discursively while individuals separated by ten miles and a language barrier
cannot. Spatial difference is attenuated as a discursive limitation and over-
written by patterns of language usage; the Internet’s geography is mapped
less by regions, states, or continents than by formations of linguistic compe-
tence nevertheless anchored in those geopolitical units. To the distributions
The Possibility of Cyber-­Placelessness 85

of native speakers are added patterns of diaspora, expatriation, and second-​

­language acquisition, all three strongly and evidently marked by histories of
imperialism and more recent economic and political inequalities or power
relations. In this instance, an article apparently conceived not on a national
but on a regional scale, through the perceptions and preferences of writers
and readers from the southern English home counties, is turned by the Inter-
net not into an international or planetary conversation but into a kind of
Anglo-​­Globe-​­ish colloquy, grouping together a contingent and self-​­selecting
subsection of individuals worldwide who happen, for whatever reason and
on varying levels of ability or cultural access, to speak English. Similar discur-
sive forums in other languages will reflect similar historically shaped lingua
franca that necessarily cross borders but fall well short of planetary discourse.
Patterns of linguistic competence may overlap and sidestep, without erasing,
their economic or political determinants; the latter are identified in the “110
Best Books” readers’ comments in expressions of resentment at a perceived
English “prejudice” and “egocentricity.”
The “110 Best Books” thread also raises the question whether such aggres-
sive localism is inevitable in such a format, or whether, as the Internet’s
connective impulse continues to be felt, such localism may eventually weaken
or be mitigated by planetary perspectives. There would seem to be some
grounds for the latter: if affordable international travel of the sort enjoyed
by Lodge’s academics enhanced certain cultural exchanges, then cross-​­border
online debate may over time lead to both original publications and to com-
ment threads that are less narrow and more open. Three factors, however,
would need to be taken into account.
The first is the anonymity or pseudonymity of the posters in these debates,
particularly its capacity to strip their contributions of particularizing and
contextualizing meaning. It is difficult to isolate and overcome the national
or social specificity or bias of contributors who do not present themselves in
such spatial terms—­one can only guess that those posters calling for Rand or
Manzoni are Americans or Italians evincing their distinctive national tenden-
cies, since in fact they are not geographically constituted or self-​­identified
on the thread. In this sort of forum, the planetary risks being swamped by
departicularization.
Second, a successful planetary cultural or meta-​­literary discourse, either
online or in the “real world,” may need an expansion of foreign language
acquisition, liable to disrupt, and moving beyond, the acceptance of English
as the only language of economic globalization. By such acquisitions I do not,
however, mean those by which the economically or politically marginalized
appropriate or submit to the discourse of the hegemonic center. In the “110
Best Books” thread, global power flows are culturally evident, challenged,
mimicked, and unresolved, even unresolvable, and this particular cyberspace
locality dissolves into incoherently expanded locality or localities where com-
munication fails and resentment festers. While no transcendental perspective
86 Alan Kirby

is available, the discursive limitations and inadequacies of Anglo-​­Globe-​­ish

debate are painfully conspicuous and linguistically underpinned.
Thirdly, the emergence of a truly worldwide discussion of literature would
presumably require a sharing of terms of reference with regard to aesthetic
value. Some kind of agreement or common framework of literary interest
or achievement is, in all likelihood, necessary to debates if they are to have
an influence in a significantly widespread online community. This is a far-​
r­ eaching suggestion, and the trace of Enlightenment universalism evoked and
then traduced so brazenly by “110 Best Books” becomes very apposite: if
eighteenth-​­century notions of a “public sphere” constructing shared values
have been undermined by twentieth-​­ century critiques frequently identi-
fied and historicized as postmodern, then a truly planetary online dialogue
among readers would seem to presuppose some sort of (perhaps digimodern-
ist) return to, or movement toward, an aesthetic and philosophical commons.
But how this might happen and whether its outcome would be for good or
ill are another matter.

Conclusion

Digimodernism would seem to carry the gene or DNA of a symbolic signifying

totality, by which it is refocused from a cultural dominant onto an immensely
vast and problematically placeless textual singularity. A figure, or prefigura-
tion, of this totality emerges with Amazon and the Internet as a whole, and also
with the e-​­book reader: famously capacious and aggregating serial volumes,
the device primarily resembles a multilocational, portable, and personal library
rather than the individual book with which it is conventionally contrasted.
In 2011, for the first time, the judges of Britain’s Man Booker prize received
the more than 100 novels submitted by e-​­book reader rather than through
the post, in a historical shift unlikely to be reversed. As the Sunday Telegraph
article and comments thread suggests, the question is whether this textual con-
centration tending toward singularity can find a unitary community of readers
and writers liberated from sited particularity, and, if so, on what terms.
I have argued that a digimodernist tendency to delocalization or placeless-
ness is simultaneously relentless, bound up in processes of dematerialization
and departicularization, and negotiated awkwardly with an intractable “real
world” and its power flows such as those shaped by economic globalization.
As for what kind of mapping of semi-​­delocalized, public, and digital texts
might emerge, it is partially but not wholly true to say that this is up for grabs.
Berners-​­Lee’s online “global conversation” awaits its content. In practice,
neoliberal globalization tirelessly seeks to flood every discursive void. If, as I
have submitted, digitization is the dominant cultural fact of our time, it can-
not be seen in reductively negative or simplistically celebratory terms. Instead,
we may need to consider that Spivak’s planetary dream, which presupposes
The Possibility of Cyber-­Placelessness 87

an attitude of sympathy, responsibility, and tact toward our shared home, the
earth, and its variegated inhabitants, can be fulfilled through a digitization
whose impulses, however, tend powerfully both to planetarity and its travesty.
This is more than encouraging but less than optimistic.

Notes

1. See Alan Kirby, “The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond,” Philosophy

Now 58 (November/December 2006): 34–­37; and Alan Kirby, Digimodernism:
How New Technologies Dismantle the Postmodern and Reconfigure Our Cul-
ture (New York: Continuum, 2009).
2. See Hari Kunzru, “Postmodernism: From the Cutting Edge to the Museum,”
review of “Postmodernism” exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Lon-
don, The Guardian, September 15, 2011, http://​ www​.guardian.co.uk/artand
design/2011/sep/15/postmodernism-​­cutting-​­edge-​­to-​­museum.
3. See online comments to Charlotte Higgins, “The Birth of Twitter Art,” The
Guardian, July 8, 2009, http://​www​.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jul/08/
fourth-​plinthy-​antony-​gormley.
4. Andrew Hoberek, “Introduction: After Postmodernism,” Twentieth-​­Century
Literature 53, no. 3 (2007): 233.
5. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Ans-
combe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958), 32, 31.
6. Ibid., 32.
7. See Raoul Eshelman, Performatism, or the End of Postmodernism (Aurora,
Colo.: Davies Group, 2008); Nicolas Bourriaud, The Radicant, trans. James Gus-
sen and Lili Porten (New York: Lukas and Sternberg, 2009); Christian Moraru,
Cosmodernism: American Narrative, Late Globalization, and the New Cultural
Imaginary (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010); Gilles Lipovetsky,
Hypermodern Times, trans. Andrew Brown (Cambridge, Eng.: Polity, 2005);
and Robert Samuels, New Media, Cultural Studies, and Critical Theory after
Postmodernism: Automodernity from Žižek to Laclau (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2009).
8. This paragraph was rewritten in January 2013 as, in France, Virgin Mega-
store, and, in Britain, Jessop’s, HMV, and Blockbuster went into administration.
Rendered uncompetitive by digitized textual production and distribution, each
can be seen as a victim of digimodernist economics, though reductivism should
be avoided when the hand of neoliberalism is also so apparent.
9. William Gibson, Neuromancer (Ace Books, 1984; New York: Ace Trade
Paperback, 2000), 51, 52, 62. Page references are to the 2000 edition.
10. “Sweden Tops Tim Berners-​­Lee’s Web Index,” BBC News Technology, Sep-
tember 5, 2012, http://​www​.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-​­19478298.
11. Ibid.
12. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2003), 72.
13. See, among other similar comments, Katie Smith’s short essay on Spivak,
http://​www​.globalautonomy.ca/global1/glossary_pop.jsp?id=PR.0024.
88 Alan Kirby

14. See Ursula K. Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental
Imagination of the Global (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 205–­10.
15. See Chris Anderson, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling
Less of More (New York: Hyperion, 2006).
16. Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, trans. William Weaver
(1980; repr., New York: Everyman’s Library, 1993), 4–­6.
17. Gore Vidal, “The Bookchat of Henry James,” in Armageddon? Essays
1983–­1987 (London: André Deutsch, 1987), 157–­67.
18. See Kirby, Digimodernism, 106–­11. The article cited is “110 Best Books:
The Perfect Library,” Sunday Telegraph, April 6, 2008, http://​www​.telegraph.
co.uk/culture/books/3672376/110-​best-​books-​The-​perfect-​library​.html.
19. “61 Essential Postmodern Reads: An Annotated List,” Los Angeles Times,
July 16, 2009, http://​latimesblogs.latimes​.com/jacketcopy/2009/07/the-​­mostly
-​­complete-​­annotated-​­and-​­essential-​­postmodern-​­reading-​­list​.html.
 Archetypologies of the Human
Planetary Performatism, Cinematic Relationality,
and Iñárritu’s Babel

Raoul Eshelman

When Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak coined the term “planetarity” in her 2003
essay Death of a Discipline, she described her project as an “experience of the
impossible.”1 The planet—­as opposed to the homogeneous “globe” of glo-
balization—­is in her understanding a catachrestic figure into which the most
varied experiences of alterity are inscribed. Crucial to this figure is a specific
understanding of the human as being “intended toward the other” and the
stress on ethical (collective) responsibility for others and education.2 Spivak,
who is skeptical of both technocratic and environmental perspectives that
would allow unified approaches to the planet, wants to pursue readings that
“dis-​­figure” “transcendental figurations” like “mother, nation, god, nature,”
which for her represent an “inexhaustible taxonomy” of possibilities for criti-
cal interrogation.3 In Spivak’s planetarity, the human is no longer written off
as an illusory effect of discourse but is reinstated as a privileged, originary
figure that is “set” towards otherness. In this way, planetarity tacitly shifts
the source of the deconstructive project from the textual to the human. The
human, in turn, is conceived from the start as a split figure irreducible to any
sort of unified experience, including a planetary one (hence the “impossibil-
ity” of her project). Planetarity itself, however, is not thinkable without the
ethical urgency implied by the reappearance of the human as the basic unit of
reckoning in a globalized world.
Spivak’s half-​­anthropological, half-​­deconstructive approach to the plan-
etary is a good indicator of the fundamental changes that were taking place
in the humanities as well as in the arts around the turn of the century. Both
academics and creative artists were reacting to the exhaustion of postmodern
strategies that had no positive place for the human, which was always there,
of course, but merely as a fall guy for an endlessly receding, ironic critique of
its transcendental pretensions. However, Spivak’s—­and, of course, not only
Spivak’s—­turn toward ethical anthropology opened up room for a whole
slew of positive instantiations of the human that were previously not think-
able in a world where textuality was the main focus of attention and radical

89
90 Raoul Eshelman

irony the principal mindset. Spivak, for example, restricts the human to a
specifically ethical and intellectual mode. However, if we take her reasoning
to its logical conclusion, many of the “transcendental figurations” reduced
by deconstruction to mere effects of discourse must also be rethought as
specifically human, universal dispositions. The most powerful of these are
the dispositions toward love (the erotic), toward beauty (the aesthetic), and
toward belief (the religious). The anthropological turn in critical thinking
and the arts is thus more than just a belated correction of a small blind spot
in the postmodern episteme. Rather, in its broadest implications, it shifts our
entire mode of thinking from one of critical irony to one of anthropologi-
cal affirmation. This kind of affirmation is perhaps no less “impossible” in
global terms than Spivak’s deconstructive project. However, it is infused by
an entirely different logic than that which guides the still influential post-
structuralist theories and still prevailing postmodern strategies. In short, it
marks the beginning of a saliently different episteme whose contours are
becoming ever sharper with the passage of time.
This is also the starting point of my own approach to planetary relations.
Like Spivak, I am skeptical of both technocratic and ecological approaches
suggesting that either technical innovations (electronic media) or a common
theme (the environment) will transgress all linguistic and ideological bound-
aries and somehow bring us closer on a planetary scale. And, also like Spivak,
I do not look to traditional humanism as a source of inspiration or value. It
is not enough to simply postulate the return of love, beauty, and belief in a
human guise. Rather, our goal must be to work out, as precisely as possible,
the way the human is now being constructed in the arts on a global scale, and
to examine how those constructs interact with our perceptions of political
and social reality. In the last dozen years or so, based on analyses of numer-
ous media, genres, and individual works, I have developed a theory called
performatism, which sets forth the minimal requirements of this new, anthro-
pologically founded episteme.4 Because I have treated performatism at length
elsewhere, I will not outline it in detail here. However, because the theory
can be expressed in terms of two minimal propositions, it can be introduced
quickly to those unfamiliar with it.
In the emerging episteme of performatism, to begin with, the human
appears as a unified bio-​­social construct (it is neither entirely natural nor
is it entirely an effect of discourse). Obviously, the details of the human or
humans as construct or constructs vary from case to case. However, they all
share one common trait: they have a primarily mimetic and intuitive, rather
than a discursive and intellectual, motivation. “Mimesis” is used here in the
way that it is understood by René Girard and Eric Gans: it assumes that
foundational or primary forms of human interaction occur through imitation
of others. Such imitation has both a violent and a reconciliatory potential
and is prior to all discourse (you do not need language to imitate the actions
of an other, who in mimetic terms is always a potential rival).5
Archetypologies of the Human 91

One can make this clearer by contrasting the mimetic approach to Spi-
vak’s notion of the human. In her view, which follows the so-​­called ethical
turn commencing in the late 1980s, the human subject is “intended toward
the other,” and this relation is mediated by a discourse that occludes access
to that other as much as it enables it. Hence the emphasis on grappling with
an alterity that paradoxically “contains us as much as it flings us away”
and on “educat[ing] ourselves into this peculiar mindset.”6 Hence also the
insistence in practical terms on reading, on “inviting the kind of language
training that would disclose the irreducible hybridity of all languages,” and
on having graduate students learn the subaltern “languages of the South-
ern Hemisphere.”7 Spivak’s “impossible” planetary project, in short, works
by unceasingly interrogating the refractory interface with the other that is
discourse. The immediate result is a “pluralization [that] may allow the imag-
ining of a necessary yet impossible planetarity.”8 In the performatist episteme,
by contrast, the human is conditioned not by the belatedness and particularity
of discourse, but by the originary experience of mimesis and intuition prior
to discourse. In their constructs of the human, performatist narratives tend to
privilege characters who have trouble using discourse (hence the prevalence
of taciturn, simple-​­minded, and autistic characters) or to forefront visual,
intuitive forms of communication at the expense of discourse by allowing
discursively deficient characters to prevail within the work as a whole. One
case in point is Mark Haddon’s novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in
the Night-​­Time (2003), in which the hero, who suffers from a mild form of
autism, lacks the ability to use language in anything but a literal way and
yet triumphs in the end.9 Another common strategy is to construct works in
such a way that a discursive critique or deconstruction is easily achieved but
leads to nothing in the way of understanding the text. Thus, in works like Ian
McEwan’s Atonement (2001) or Yann Martell’s Life of Pi (2001), we realize
at the end that a narrating character has been lying to us—­but we do not
care, because the aesthetic power of the preceding stories has forced us into a
position of wanting to believe rather than of wanting to be skeptical.10 While
it seems “impossible” from a poststructuralist or postmodern perspective to
forego or marginalize discourse, this is precisely what performatism does—­
and also what makes it irreducible to postmodernism. As I will show further
on, this occlusion of discourse opens the way for a planetary approach that
does not become bogged down in the particularities of local discourse every
step of the way.
In critical practice, this necessitates a shift from poststructuralist theo-
ries emphasizing discourse to theories aimed at mimesis and the intuition.
Girard’s scapegoat theory, Gans’s generative anthropology, Jean-​­Luc Mari-
on’s post-​­metaphysical phenomenology, and Peter Sloterdijk’s spherology, to
name the most notable, all address these issues directly and in depth (it goes
almost without saying that all are marginal or play no role at all in present-​
d
­ ay academic discussions in the arts).11 Both in artistic practice and in theory,
92 Raoul Eshelman

the human is no longer restricted to a merely ethical mode, but now includes
originary aesthetic, erotic, and religious attributes derived specifically from
the mimetic and intuitive interaction between humans.
This non-​­discursive interaction, in turn, achieves results that poststruc-
turalism rejects as “metaphysical” or simply chimerical. Most notably, these
include the experience of successful, unifying identification with an other
(occurring when someone’s mimetic gesture is successfully picked up and
used by someone else), the experiencing of presence (triggered by the trans-
parent immediacy and efficacy of the successful mimetic transfer between
two humans), and the experiencing of totality (caused by imposing formal
closure on a field of experience). The unthinkable, transcendent “others”
of postmodern practice and poststructuralist theory—­ unity, presence,
and totality—­are made real in art through the performative occlusion of
discourse.12 Discourse, language, and translatability remain practical prob-
lems, but ones that can be bridged, albeit imperfectly, through mimesis. The
mimetic transfer of value between humans—­and not the endlessly obscure
discourse of those humans—­becomes the principal focus of attention.13 At
the same time, though, mimesis contains a raw potential for violence that
continually undercuts the contractual solutions to human strife produced by
Enlightenment and Reason. For this reason mimetic theories like performa-
tism or Gans’s generative anthropology assume that violence is an originary,
insoluble aspect of human existence—­and, concurrently, that transcending
that violence is an imperative of human existence, albeit one that cannot be
fulfilled entirely. This peculiar focus on the ever-​­present potential for vio-
lence, on the one hand, and the impossible need to transcend it, on the other,
distinguishes performatism from critical poststructuralist theories (which are
dedicated to dismantling the illusion of transcendence and avoid addressing
“foundational” problems like violence directly) and humanist ones (which
assume that violence can be resolved through contractual means or by resort-
ing to reason).
The second distinguishing feature of performatism—­its dominant tech-
nique—­is what I call double framing. Double framing operates by taking
some particular element in a work—­usually an odd or unbelievable scene,
situation, or detail, sometimes also an odd bio-​­social disposition—­and con-
firming its mimetic or intuitive logic on the level of the work as a whole. The
reader or viewer is in effect faced with a self-​­confirming construct that forces
him or her to accept formally a scenic or visual given that is prima facie unbe-
lievable or dubious in terms of prevailing discursive logic.14 A good narrative
example is the movie American Beauty (1999), which in purely discursive
terms seems to be nothing more than an ironic, scathing satire of “ugly”
American suburban life. The film narrative, however, concludes by linking a
single odd scene (the twirling plastic bag Ricky Fitts calls animated, beauti-
ful, and benevolent) with Lester Burnham’s posthumous speech, which not
only repeats Ricky’s words verbatim but also suggests we can only appreciate
Archetypologies of the Human 93

the beauty of the world after we, too, have died. Lester’s and Ricky’s “unbe-
lievable” intuitions do not completely occlude the discursive critique of
American middle-​­class life contained in the film, but they provide a strong—­
and in fact logically irrefutable—­counterpoint to that critique by offering a
metaphysically optimistic perspective that practically forces us to believe (at
least within the formal confines of the work). The film makes us experience
transcendence as performance, which is to say through specifically aesthetic
or artificial means whose universal—­one might also say planetary—­validity
has yet to be fulfilled. Granted, it is possible to “ignore” this experience, but
only at the expense of ignoring the form of the work itself.
The double frame imposes upon us a tautological, mimetically or intui-
tively defined free space that separates itself willfully from the boundless field
of discourse, in the same way the human in its mimetic or intuitive mode
is separate from discourse. This free space implicitly—­and sometimes also
explicitly—­instantiates both the aesthetic and the transcendent as core ele-
ments of the human. By raising formally separated, idiosyncratic instances
of mimetic and intuitive experience to a higher, more complex formal level,
which always necessarily includes some form of discourse, performatist
works force viewers or readers to believe in an artificial, closed construct
(as opposed to having them “dis-​­figure” an endless skein of discursive fig-
urations). Viewers and readers can always resist the logic of these closed
aesthetic constructs in intellectual terms. However, intuitively they have little
choice but to identify with what is being projected onto them. In short, the
act of receiving the aesthetic construct is experienced formally as an act of
transcendence—­the viewer or reader is remade through the form of the work
(per formam). Similarly, the palpably artificial, often highly manipulative
way in which this transferral is conducted points to the existence of a higher
authorial power rather than to the endless regress of discourse into which
the postmodern author is usually said to disappear. The authorial position in
performatism marks the point of undecidability between the human as a self-​
­constructing force and as a construct received from a higher, as yet unknown
(theist) source. The degree to which authoriality and the apprehension of
transcendence are projected and experienced varies from work to work, but
both are fundamental to the new episteme.15 All in all, the strategy of double
framing occludes the endless proliferation, pluralization, and dissemination
peculiar to discourse by forcibly imposing artificial, closed categories onto its
seemingly endless, open field. Whereas in Spivak’s “classical” planetarity the
focus is on the discursive figure, in performatist planetarity it is on the cat-
egory or frame, which imposes a certain problematic aesthetic and political
order on the global field of human relations while at the same time reopening
the horizon of transcendence for the human via the frame.
Just how widespread is the performatist paradigm in narrative? My own,
necessarily selective interpretations in Performatism, or the End of Postmod-
ernism (2008) suggest that it started in the mid-​­1990s and became ubiquitous
94 Raoul Eshelman

as of the mid-​­2000s. However, it is perhaps most convincing if the reader

simply takes the criteria outlined above and applies them herself to the nar-
rative works she has read or viewed in the last five years or so. Do these
works stress discursive competence or occlude it? Do these works highlight
freewheeling boundary transgression or impose frames and categories on
characters? Do these works imply we are caught in an endless regress of irony
or do they provide specific narrative resolutions transcending that irony?
Are the actions of characters in these works dependent on outside discourse
or do they exhibit simple forms of agency that are uniquely their own? If
your answers consistently land on the latter part of the binary options listed,
you will begin to intuit yourself that we are dealing with an epistemic shift
toward a new epoch and not with random permutations in an endless regress
of post-​­historical filiations.

Archetypologies: A Planetary Perspective on the Episode Film

Performatist planetarity is, as already noted, no less “impossible” than Spi-

vak’s anthropologically revised brand of deconstruction in the sense that its
“God’s-​­eye view” can never be realized entirely or thought separately from
the particulars that it encompasses. It does, however, open up entirely dif-
ferent possibilities for approaching planetary relations in the arts. These
possibilities are in no way ideal or utopian—­they are inevitably accompanied
by a kind of quid pro quo with discursive logic that will always make their
full realization “impossible”—­but they occur in a mode of affirmation that is
foreign to the anthropologically supplemented poststructuralism propounded
by Spivak and many others. As noted above, this mode of affirmation allows
the experiencing of unity, presence, and totality in a way that is quite liter-
ally unthinkable in postmodernism and poststructuralism. In the following
remarks I would like to develop a planetary perspective for performatism
using Alejandro Iñárritu’s movie Babel (2006) as a point of departure.
As an “impossible” gesture, performatist planetarity suggests the possibil-
ity of an affirmatively conceived global relationality among humans that is
unthinkable in its entirety. It is therefore all the more interesting to address
a case in which this “impossible” point of view is brought into play none-
theless. This case is the movie Babel. The work belongs to a cycle of recent
films that radically garble or interrupt narrative sequences while in the end
linking together what at first seem to be entirely disconnected episodes or
strands of plot.16 Rather than radically diffusing our sense of linear time
by allowing “sheets” of time to overlap fluidly (as described by Deleuze in
regard to, say, Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Mirror [1975] or Alain Resnais’s Last
Year in Marienbad [1961]17), these movies all reorder time in such a way that
linearity, although radically interrupted and scrambled, can be reconstructed
after the fact. The emphasis lies on presenting time in discrete, temporarily
Archetypologies of the Human 95

disconnected chunks that are experienced all the more intensely because they
at first appear to have no connection to a greater telos or to the other nar-
rative segments to which they are juxtaposed. The formal discreteness of
the time chunks and the intensity which they convey lead, one way or the
other, to a specifically aesthetic experience of temporal and spatial imme-
diacy. This temporal reordering and aesthetic immediacy is experienced by
the viewer as specifically authorial and artificial, in the sense that it has nei-
ther a psychological (dreamlike or hallucinatory) nor a semiotic motivation
(it is not the result of linear film narrative being broken up because images
interact uncontrollably with other images by way of audiovisual associa-
tions).18 Quite simply, it can only be explained as the willed effect of a higher
force—­an author—­and it confronts us with the question as to why such an
author is imposing this radical new order upon us. This kind of movie plays
out to a lesser or greater degree the ambivalence between authoriality and
theism noted above. Is the work “merely” the whim of a strong-​­willed author
or is the strongly conceived work the symptom of a still higher force that we
cannot yet entirely comprehend? The fact that these movies can all be logi-
cally reordered in the end in spite of all initial confusion implies that there is.
Moreover, the aesthetically charged individual chunks or scenes of the movie
tend to be set off in a way that indicates that there is a unity of experience
on a lower level, which is necessarily congruent with unity of experience on
a higher narrative or structural level (the double frame noted above). The
degree to which this necessity is felt depends a great deal on the particulars of
the given movie, but it is a defining feature that sets these more recent episode
films apart from comparable works from the 1960s or 1970s.
Babel takes these basic strategies and raises them to a global level. The film
sets in motion three internally linear plot lines (in Morocco, the Mexican-​
­American borderlands, and Japan) that are continually juxtaposed with one
another on the narrative level but which eventually prove to be out of sync
on the story level (there is no way of determining their temporal and causal
relations until near the end of the film; the Japanese story line, for exam-
ple, runs four or five days after the Moroccan story line has ended, and the
Mexican-​­American story line takes place immediately after the end of the
Moroccan one). The specific selection and positioning of the time chunks can
be explained only by reference to an author—­a specifically human point of
origin—­and not to the signs or discourse that in poststructuralist thinking
always already conditions that point of origin before it even begins. The film
asserts itself as a specifically human construct whether we like it or not, and it
takes our ability to understand the authorship of the human to its outermost
limits.19
The movie not only scrambles time, but also juxtaposes four extremely
different cultures. There is a comfortable and leisurely American “suburban­
scape”; the dirt-​­poor, austere peasant life of Morocco; an upper-​­middle-​­class
Japanese milieu marked by high tech, neon, and the impersonal coolness of
96 Raoul Eshelman

Tokyo’s urban ambience; and, finally, the vibrant disorder of Iñárritu’s native
Mexico. Although dissimilar in almost every conceivable way, each of these
cultural venues has its own peculiar aesthetic and achieves its own kind of
dignity through that aesthetic. Iñárritu and his cameraman Rodrigo Prieto use
the natural grandeur of the Moroccan mountains and their intimate acquain-
tance with Mexican local color to full effect, but they are no less generous
in their cinematic presentation of Tokyo’s skyline, street life, and interiors,
avoiding as they do both the clichéd Japan of Lost in Translation (2003) and
the easily achieved critique of urban haste in Koyaanisqatsi (1982). (This
applies no less to the short American suburban segment, which is marked
by the inner warmth and child-​­friendly clutter of the home.) Through slow,
panoramic pans, nature (the Moroccan mountains) is presented as equivalent
to culture (the Tokyo skyline) and the other way around, with the Mexican
scenes containing a carnivalesque jumble of both. On the other end of the
scale, all three venues are implicitly connected by detailed close-​­ups of quo-
tidian objects (most notably water, wells, fountains, animals etc.) that speak
to a planetary commonality between cultures at the most elemental level.
This aesthetic framing and affirmation of local particularities is accompa-
nied by a categorically, rather than discursively, guided construction of the
human. This asserts itself through what I would like to call archetypologies.
These are authorially framed, aesthetically sublimated chunks of reality that
are particular and local and yet also seem to have a primordial, archetypal
core. Babel and other performatist works present us with templates for per-
ceiving reality that are circumscribed, bounded, and particular but that at
the same time remain anchored in what appears to be timeless scenes or
situations open to the intuition rather than to discourse. Archetypologies are
hence more than mere empirical typologies and less than universal arche-
types: they are categories with an originary “feel” but lacking an a priori
justification, as is the case, I might add, with C. G. Jung’s archetypes, which
are always already “there” in the collective unconscious waiting to unfold
through individuation, or with Northrop Frye’s archetypal criticism, which
would reduce all literary forms to a set of fixed, quasi-​­organic categories. Sum-
ming up, one could say that archetypologies are free-​­floating, aesthetically
generated frames or categories rooted in direct modes of human interaction
underpinned primarily by the intuition and mimesis; they are symptomatic
of a broader epistemic mindset that has become impatient with approach-
ing human reality through the endless critique of discourse. Archetypologies
make possible a planetary approach to culture by generating overarching
categories that allow us to compare different cultures in their mimetic and
intuitive operations beneath the threshold of discourse.
We can observe the way these archetypologies work at first hand in Babel.
At first, the differences between the various characters seem to outweigh any
similarities, in particular because they bear the typical imprints of their own
cultures. Culture, in turn, appears as a unity of nature and socially normed
Archetypologies of the Human 97

artifice that frames the characters in very different ways. This can be seen
most directly in the way that sexual drives are presented. The literally most
visible instance is that of the exhibitionism practiced by Chieko and Yussef’s
sister Zohra. In social terms the circumstances are completely different: the
emotionally traumatized Chieko exposes herself to strangers in anonymous
urban settings, whereas Zohra exposes herself to Yussef in a semi-​­incestuous
way that is no doubt motivated by the goatherd family’s extreme isolation
(in accordance with utterly different social norms Chieko goes unpunished
even when she exposes herself to a policeman, whereas Yussef and Zohra
are beaten by their father). The causal logic of the film strongly suggests,
however, that we must regard (natural) sexuality and culturally mediated
agency as a kind of bio-​­social unity. For example, the film makes a direct
connection between Yussef’s sexual drive and his desire to use the hunting
rifle (he is masturbating when his brother calls him to go shoot). There is also
a less explicit suggestion that the Japanese father’s status as a hunter/loner
contributed to his wife’s suicide (she killed herself with a gun and was found
by Chieko, leading to the latter’s trauma). Sexual desire is channeled into cer-
tain social actions that take place within the framework of local norms and
moral categories, and that in turn may have natural repercussions (wound-
ing, death) that once again merge into social acts. Through an irresistible,
authorial, totalizing gesture the film renders these very different bio-​­social
acts equivalent without suggesting any sort of intrinsic superiority of one
over the other; they are offered to us as visual pieces of evidence rather than
as discursive conundrums. At the same time, on a root level and in spite
of all local differences, Babel suggests that all cultures function in a simi-
lar, mimetic way—­in the presence of face-​­to-​­face encounters. Language—­as
hinted at by the “Babel” of the movie’s title—­gets in the way of this mimetic
interaction all the time, but this interference is, in spite of the symbolically
loaded title, not the movie’s central interest.
This can be seen in the specific ways in which language is thematized
within the film itself. While linguistic problems impede communication in a
number of instances, most notably when the American husband in Morocco
aggressively tries to get medical help for his wounded wife, language itself
does not seem to be an unbridgeable gap (the husband is helped by a loyal and
very patient local guide and translator). The Mexican nanny Emilia calms her
young charges at bedtime by speaking Spanish with them (which they appear
to understand). It is also probably no accident that the film makes a point
of treating language as a bio-​­social, rather than as a simply encultured phe-
nomenon: the Japanese teenager Chieko is a deaf-​­mute who communicates
through lip-​­reading, sign language, and writing. Forcing others to com-
municate with her face-​­to-​­face, her disability underscores the reduction of
language to an originary state of visual contact and presence. The film seems
to be saying that understanding, rather than being a linguistic or even cultural
problem, is based on the willingness to respond mimetically to an other’s
98 Raoul Eshelman

distress, that is, to react sympathetically to his or her immediate emotional

state or situation. I might also point out that the role played by the media in
all this is contingent. Various mediatic forms from long-​­distance phones and
cell phones with video functions to television make instant communication
with faraway partners possible, but the essentials of communication always
take place face-​­to-​­face or locally (as when Detective Mamiya reads Chieko’s
note shortly after their meeting). In Babel, the privileged medium of planetar-
ity is definitely film, which is able to combine the local and particular with
an overarching narrative perspective that overrides language. Film makes its
case to us by appealing to the intuition (from intuere, “to look at”), which is
prior to language; it argues by presenting us chunks of visual evidence rather
than devolving into an endless skein of discursive figures.
If “Babel” in the biblical sense does not explain the movie very well, what,
then, is the causal logic behind its plot? Many critics have remarked about
the “butterfly effect” that supposedly motivates the film’s plot (i.e., the notion
that a small local change in an unstable non-​­linear system—­the flap of a
butterfly’s wing—­can result in large differences on a higher level—­a hur-
ricane). On the story level this is perhaps true (the Japanese father’s gun
indeed sets off the Moroccan and Mexican catastrophes), but not on the
narrative one. There can be no ethical responsibility on the part of the Japa-
nese father for Yussef’s action, which results, as noted above, from a mixture
of sexually motivated bravado and mimetic rivalry with his brother.20 The
planetary point being made here is quite the opposite from the banal “we-​
a­ re-​­all-​­responsible-​­for-​­one-​­another” type of thing that some critics see in
the movie’s message. Rather, the film seems to be saying that ethical respon-
sibility is first and foremost a local and, indeed, individual matter that is
mediated by bio-​­socially defined culture. The film as a whole raises those
local, particular matters to a higher plane—­planetarity—­in an aesthetically
affirmative way but does not suggest any discursively guided resolution. The
film makes the impossible possible by forcing us to apprehend very different
ethical decisions and outcomes in terms of an aesthetic totality that always
remains below the threshold of a semantic generalization. The totalizing ges-
ture of the film—­its double frame—­forces us to turn inward towards the
film’s (human) particulars once again if we wish to understand it. However, it
also forces us to consider what the demonstrably artificial and manipulative
frame might be excluding.
The question thus necessarily arises as to whether the combined gesture
of aesthetic totalization and a focus on individual ethical decisions leads to
an “uncritical” attitude towards global and/or local power structures. This
can be tested more closely by examining how public power and private ethi-
cal behavior interact in the plot. Here as elsewhere in the film, there does
not seem to be any unity in the various outcomes. The different story lines
are resolved through highly divergent combinations of political interventions
and private gestures: the shooting of Ahmed, the capture of Yussef and his
Archetypologies of the Human 99

father by the Moroccan police, and Yussef’s confession; the arrest and depor-
tation of Amelia by the American Border Patrol and her reunification with
her son; the rescue of Susan by the American authorities and Richard’s leave-​
­taking from his Moroccan guide; and the fatherly consolation of Chieko by
the Japanese detective.
The film’s argumentation here uses two overlapping, bio-​­socially defined
archetypologies. The first is political and encompasses the relations between
power, patriarchy, and individual dignity. In the Moroccan story, police
power and patriarchal violence appear as mutually confirming practices: the
Moroccan police officer slaps around the villagers in much the same way
that the father slaps around his children, and the police officer threatens
to “cut off [Yussef’s] balls” if he is lying. Bio-​­social and political behaviors
merge here into a punitive, degrading unity. Yussef, however, acts ethically
in the sense that he takes the full burden of guilt upon himself (we later
see this confirmed in a television image). In the second, Mexican-​­American
case, state authority asserts itself in an impersonal and bureaucratic, though
perhaps no less emasculating guise; it is the extended, intrusive actions of
the studiously polite American border guard that eventually causes Emilia’s
nephew Santiago to bolt with the car (the dubious decision to abandon her
and the children in the desert is all his own). Finally, in the Japanese story
line, police authority dissolves into caring patriarchal behavior (that of the
detective consoling Chieko in lieu of the absent father). On the highest plane,
we have international diplomatic tensions between America and Morocco,
which resists American claims, inspired by its global viewpoint rather than by
knowledge of local conditions, that the tourist has been a victim of terrorism
(it is an “arche” position lacking knowledge of typological, local particulars).
The movie’s archetypology is rooted in an analysis of immediate, face-​­to-​­face
social relations with variable ethical choices and open-​­ended outcomes. It
presents us with a (necessarily incomplete) typology of political and patri-
archal power relations and—­I think quite deliberately—­does not attempt a
sweeping ideological critique of those relations, which would involve return-
ing to a discursive mode.
Instead, it argues by presenting us with a second archetypology that might
be called “relations of caring” and that exists coextensively with the arche-
typology of patriarchal power relations. The Japanese detective Mamiya,
Yussef’s father, Emilia, the Moroccan translator, the American husband Rich-
ard, and even the American Border Patrol searching for the lost children all
exhibit different kinds of caring behavior that intersect in unpredictable ways
with patterns supplied by the film’s archetypology of patriarchal power. The
mere exertion of power does not exclude ethical, caring behavior (Detective
Mamiya, the Border Patrol), and, conversely, a victimary or powerless status
does not guarantee proper ethical action (as when Santiago abandons his
aunt and the children in the desert, or when Yussef takes a potshot at the
bus). By breaking up the story lines into discrete, juxtaposed chunks, the
100 Raoul Eshelman

film reveals the specific interaction of the ethical and the political in an arti-
ficial, specifically aesthetic mode. On the one hand, we achieve a planetary,
Godlike view of these relations, and on the other, we feel as if we are direct
participants in them; our position as viewers is simultaneously universal and
particular, authorial and figural.21
The reason for this is due not just to a personal whim of the moviemakers
but is also structural, a result of the epistemic shift from the metaphysical
pessimism of postmodernism to the metaphysical optimism of performatism.
Spivak’s postmodern ethics, which are representative of much of poststructur-
alist critical thinking, are rooted in resistance to an all-​­encompassing system
of domination and exploitation that she calls “capitalist imperialism.”22 Cap-
italism as a means of production, though, has no real economic rival—­if we
take Spivak at her word, socialism “at its best” is parasitic upon capitalism
but is not an autonomous means of production in its own right.23 Hence
also Spivak’s emphasis on the alterity of pre-​­capitalist societies as a source
of resistance24 as well as upon the obscurity of local languages that cannot
be assimilated to “hegemonic” languages like English. As Alain Badiou has
pointed out in his essay on ethics and evil, the radical pathos of this and simi-
lar stances subordinates the political to the ethical. These positions assume the
existence of a self-​­evident “radical Evil” from which the definition of Good is
derived; consensus on this radical Evil is achieved through “opinion,” which
is to say discourse.25 Good, rather than being a quantity that can be defined
in terms of positive truth processes, is reduced to a set of human rights to
the “non-​­Evil” (the right not to be mistreated, exploited, marginalized, etc.).
Spivak’s position, in sum, depends on the ethically motivated, “impossible”
participation in the experience of being subaltern (of being other) and of pro-
tecting that subalternity from hegemonic exploitation. It is this experience or
defense of otherness, rather than a positive political program or alternative
economic mode of production, that confounds the hegemony of “imperialist
capitalism.”26
How critical or politically relevant, then, is a movie like Babel, which
avoids victimary logic and discursively founded ethics? In answering, a great
deal depends on recognizing in it the quality or capability that I have called
aesthetic. This aesthetic is not supplementary ornamentation—­pretty images
or snazzy editing meant to distract us from critical interrogation of the exist-
ing order—­but is what gives the archetypologies their political bite. The
archetypologies may be thought of in this sense as artistic practices that,
to borrow a phrase of Jacques Rancière’s, enact a “distribution of the sen-
sible” that “disturbs the clear partition of identities, activities, and spaces.”27
The archetypologies impose new forms of artistically mediated order upon
us that are analogous to the political destabilization of existing order, and
they do this by appealing to the intuition rather than to discursive reason.
It is noteworthy in this regard that Babel’s presumably “contrived” aesthetic
quite accurately anticipated numerous aspects of the Arab Spring. In Tunisia,
Archetypologies of the Human 101

for example, the rebellion was set off by the degradation of a single indi-
vidual, Mohammed Bouazizi, an educated young man who was prevented
by the police from earning money as a street vendor; his fiery, sacrificial sui-
cide led to mass protests that eventually toppled the regime and then quickly
spread to other countries, aided by both the mass media and social network-
ing. The main driving force behind the uprisings was less programmatically
guided discourse than mimesis—­imitation of others’ actions—­and one of its
main features seems to have been an attempt to assert individual dignity in
the face of authoritarian repression (the uprising in Tunisia was originally
dubbed “The Dignity Revolution”). Obviously, the way the Arab uprisings
were conducted and the reasons they arose are much more complex and less
coherent than anything that can be conveyed in a film.28 However, Babel’s
archetypological approach managed to foreground a number of their cru-
cial features before the fact: the importance of individual dignity and ethical
responsibility, the high tech-​­aided mimesis by which the rebellions spread,
and even the bio-​­social issue of women’s right to show their own bodies
within Islamic societies.29 Thus, the film’s supposedly “contrived” narrative
form demonstrates the urgent need to grasp planetary developments both in
terms of their temporal simultaneity and of their categorical overlap—­the
Arab uprisings not only took place more or less simultaneously but were also
soon projected back onto Western experience (the “Occupy” movements in
the West sometimes used the slogan “We are Tahrir Square”). Although Babel
has been criticized, perhaps justifiably, as a compromise between auteur and
Hollywood norms,30 it is precisely this sort of formal compromise on which
the performatist planetary perspective hinges: being able to intuit distant cul-
tures will always remain an artificial, and necessarily incomplete, venture.

The Planetary: A Performatist Approach

I have chosen Babel as a point of departure not because it marks a new

sub-​­genre or cycle of planetary narrative—­the movie has not found any
immediate imitators, and it is not likely to do so—­but because it undertakes
a radical “redistribution of the visible” that can help us rethink the way we
approach narrative art after the end of postmodernism and critically address
current global problems (and problems of globalization). Using Babel’s radi-
cal aesthetic vision as a jumping-​­off point, I would like to provide a brief,
three-​­point outline of how this vision can be used to help articulate a perfor-
matist approach to the planetary.
1. Politics of performatist planetarism. Performatist planetarism is an aes-
thetic and political project in the sense that this is used by Rancière, which is
to say as the “sensible delimitation of what is common to the community.”31
It would undertake the study of how archetypologies are used to order the
world in narrative works of art (and, by extension, how they assert themselves
102 Raoul Eshelman

in sociopolitical reality). Performatist planetarism would reconstruct the con-

tours of local particulars but would simultaneously examine them in terms
of overarching categorical assumptions about human social interaction. This
project is “impossible” to achieve in the sense that “arche” (what is originary
and general) and “typology” (what is empirical and particular) will never fall
together entirely. Both perspectives are however necessary if we are not to fall
into making abstract, a priori generalizations about human cultural behavior,
on the one hand, or to fetishize its unrepresentable differences, on the other.
2. Anthropology of performatist planetarism. Performatist planetarism
has a specific anthropological justification. It does not regard the human
as a mere effect of language or discourse and stands in contradistinction
to rhizomatic and deconstructive paradigms that use the term “human” to
supplement discursive or relational figures. Instead, performatist planetarism
tries to explain the human in terms of bio-​­social unities as they arise under
different cultural conditions. These bio-​­social categories may be thought of
(among other things) in terms of sexuality and human (dis)ability as well as
in terms of caring vs. mimetically motivated violence, which arguably both
have a partially biological basis. Planetary performatism studies the way the
bio-​­social is projected onto the aesthetico-​­political (and vice versa). The goal
is not to establish a rigorous system of binary categories resulting from their
overlaps (that would be structuralism warmed over), but to engage in a kind
of intuitionism that would reconstruct newly arising, aesthetically mediated
archetypologies of the human in a global context. I also do not envision
this intuitionism as a merely hermeneutic operation. As noted earlier, there
already exist well-​­founded theories from thinkers like Gans, Marion, Sloter-
dijk, and Girard, which seek to describe the intuition or the mimetic aspects
of human existence in categorical terms, and it would be imperative to
draw on such theories when constructing archetypologies on a planetary
level.
3. Agency in performatist planetarism. Performatist planetarism is inter-
ested in agency and event rather than in the endless, incremental play of
discourse and with the resulting emphasis on failure, misprision, misrepre-
sentation, contingency, and dysfunctionality. The point is not that agency and
event are always positive and must always succeed, but that they act as cata-
lysts for the archetypologies outlined above. Archetypologies in fact may be
thought of as coalescing immediately around events or unexpected redistri-
butions of order; they suggest (but do not guarantee) the possibility of change
rather than the endless differentiation of that which has always already been,
and they assume that bio-​­socially defined human agency—­rather than discur-
sively defined subjectivity—­is the driving force behind such events. Agency,
in turn, is linked closely with authorship, with the ability to produce closure
and structure in the field of the real. The degree to which both humans and
fictional characters can successfully “author” their reality is an important
focal point of performatist planetary analysis.
Archetypologies of the Human 103

The programmatic points outlined above can help us move beyond the
endless reapplication of the poststructuralist critique of discourse, away from
a totalizing critique of capitalism, and toward a more differentiated approach
describing how human interaction takes place within a global capitalism that
imposes constraints—­but also opens up certain free spaces—­for local cul-
tures and the individuals acting within them.

Notes

1. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia

University Press, 2003), 102.
2. Ibid., 73.
3. Ibid., 72–­73.
4. See my Performatism, or the End of Postmodernism (Aurora, Colo.: Davies
Group, 2008).
5. For an in-​­depth discussion, see the descriptions of mimesis and mimetic crisis
in Eric Gans, Signs of Paradox: Irony, Resentment, and Other Mimetic Structures
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997), 13–­29.
6. Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 73.
7. Ibid., 9–­10.
8. Ibid., 92.
9. For more on this, see my article “Transcendence and the Aesthetics of
Disability: The Case of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-​­Time,”
Anthropoetics 15, no. 1 (Fall 2009), http://​www​.anthropoetics.ucla​.edu/ap1501
/1501eshelman.htm.
10. For more on these and similar strategies, see “Performatism, or the End of
Postmodernism,” in my Performatism, 1–­36.
11. See, most notably, René Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the
World, trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 1987); Eric Gans, Signs of Paradox; Jean-​­Luc Marion, Being Given:
Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans. Jeffrey Kosky (Stanford, Calif.:
Stanford University Press, 2002); and Peter Sloterdijk, Bubbles: Spheres, Volume
I: Microspherology, trans. Wieland Hoban (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2011).
12. Performative utterances, which transcend the literal side of discourse, are
obviously intrinsic to discourse itself (Derrida’s Politics of Friendship, to which
Spivak repeatedly returns, plays continually on this theme). In deconstruction,
though, the “performative contradiction” is simply another binary opposition that
ultimately can only be worked through in terms of a critique of discourse. In per-
formatism, the position is reversed: we are confronted with situations in which
discourse is deliberately occluded, suppressed, or reduced to sheer banality, so that
we are forced to focus on the performative, non-​­discursive side of communication.
13. Spivak’s emphasis on cultivating the “idiomaticity of nonhegemonic lan-
guages” (Death of a Discipline, 10) comes strangely close to the romantic view
equating language with ethnic essence (the difference being that in Spivak’s case
an endless hybridization is possible—­see ibid., 12). It is also characteristic of this
quasi-​­romantic position that language itself can be “hegemonic” at all.
104 Raoul Eshelman

14. For more on this, see “Performatism, or the End of Postmodernism,” in my

Performatism, 1–­36.
15. It is important to emphasize, in case the point is not sufficiently clear,
that transcendence and authoriality are experienced performatively and not the-
matically: performatism is not a religious revival. The deconstructive approach
also acknowledges religion, but once more in terms of an undecidable discursive
strategy marking the outlines of an unreachable future (see Derrida’s use of “the
messianic” in Politics of Friendship or Specters of Marx, or Spivak’s frequent
references to “teleopoesis”).
16. Similar movies include Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994), Robert
Altman’s Short Cuts (1993), J. P. Anderson’s Magnolia (1999), Petr Zelenka’s
Buttoners (1997), Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000), Erik Poppe’s Hawaii,
Oslo (2004), and Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004).
For a critical overview of the theme, see David Denby, “The New Disorder:
Adventures in Film Narrative,” The New Yorker, March 5, 2007, 80–­85.
17. See “Peaks of Present and Sheets of Past: Fourth Commentary on Bergson”
in Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-​­Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert
Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 98–­125.
18. I am referring here to Gilles Deleuze’s basic opposition between motion-​
­images and time-​­images. In my view, it is not possible to describe this type of
movie using this opposition, which has no way of accounting for the extreme
temporal disjunction driven by narrative manipulation rather than by images.
For more on this, see my Performatism, 89–­99.
19. David Denby, whose view is representative of those critics who dislike the
movie’s “puzzle-​­box” narrative structure, objects to the “pretentious fatalism and
structural willfulness” he thinks marks Babel and similar films and dismisses it as
a “highbrow globalist tearjerker” (“New Disorder,” 84).
20. Denby argues that “in ‘Babel,’ the privileged carelessness of the First World
characters, giving their guns away and leaving their kids behind, plants the seeds
of what goes wrong” (“New Disorder,” 84). This one-​­sidedly “global” reading
ignores the local side of the film, which explicitly emphasizes individual ethical
responsibility.
21. For opposing views from a poststructuralist perspective, see Todd
McGowan, “The Contingency of Connection: The Path to Politicization in
Babel,” Discourse 30, no. 3 (2008): 401–­18; and Sebastian Thies, “Crystal Fron-
tiers: Ethnicity, Filmic Space, and Diasporic Optic in Traffic, Crash, and Babel,”
in E Pluribus Unum?: National and Transnational Identities in the Americas /
Identidades nacionales y transnacionales en las Américas, ed. Sebastian Thies and
Josef Raab (Münster: LIT Verlag; Tempe: Bilingual, 2008), 205–­28. McGowan’s
(Lacanian) and Thies’s (culturalist) readings of Babel stress the impossibility of
communication and the possibility of forging lasting or real social bonds. Thies
writes that “human understanding is shown to fail in a world shaped by post-
modern mobility and the mediascapes of the information age, yet divided by
postcolonial cleavages between post-​­Fordist and Third World societies” (220),
and McGowan maintains that “nothing underwrites the social bond but a contin-
gent moment” (413). Thies notes critically that “seemingly insurmountable ethnic
conflicts” in the film “are resolved by means of a surrogate narrative resolution”
(225), whereas McGowan (who avoids addressing the film’s use of narrative
Archetypologies of the Human 105

closure) maintains that the point of the film “lies in accepting the disturbance
that the encounter with excess brings” (414) and in demonstrating “that the real
Other is an absence” (415). The film’s peculiar authorial aesthetic with its intent
toward closure and order is either seen as an irritating supplement or simply
ignored, and the failure of communication and social bonding in a globalized
world is a foregone conclusion.
22. Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 54.
23. “Socialism at its best would persistently and repeatedly wrench capital
away from capitalism.” Ibid., 100.
24. “The planetarity of which I have been speaking in these pages is perhaps
best imagined from the precapitalist cultures of the planet.” Ibid., 101.
25. See Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans.
Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2001), 8–­10.
26. Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 51.
27. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sen-
sible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004), 13.
28. Other reasons usually mentioned include unemployment, underemploy-
ment, rising prices, corruption, and authoritarian rule. Economic protest seems
to have been directed more against crony capitalism than capitalism per se,
and nowhere was socialism touted as a viable alternative. For more on this see
Suzanne Maloney, “The Economic Dimension: The Price of Freedom,” in The
Arab Awakening: America and the Transformation of the Middle East, ed. Ken-
neth Pollack et al. (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 2011), 66–­75.
29. The topic of exhibitionism treated in the movie became a political issue in
Egypt when a female blogger, Aliaa Magda Elmahdy, exposed herself on a web-
site as a protest against Islamic fundamentalism.
30. This has been done most compellingly by Marina Hassapopoulou in
“Babel: Pushing and Reaffirming Mainstream Cinema’s Boundaries,” Jump Cut:
A Review of Contemporary Media, no. 50 (Spring 2008), http://​www​.ejumpcut​
.org/archive/jc50.2008/Babel/index​.html. Hassapopoulou, who thinks the movie
is postmodern, concludes that “Babel is perhaps the best we can expect in terms
of mainstream experimentation—­at least for now. Babel could be as close to get-
ting viewers to actively (not just retrospectively) think about the film’s form and
content as mainstream postmodernism can get. . . . In making viewers question
the causality of events, temporal continuity and narrative space, Babel demon-
strates how contrived continuity actually is in film. Nonetheless, in the case of
Babel, the film’s narrative compromises defeat the possibility of an unfettered
artistic creation and suggest that the film’s ultimate aim is to be—­as Babel’s tag-
line says—­‘understood.’  ”
31. Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 18.
 Planetarity, Performativity, Relationality
Claire Denis’s Chocolat and Cinematic Ethics

Laurie Edson

In a remarkably self-​­conscious way, much of the literature and art of our

postcolonial age bears witness to the realities of transnationalism and dias-
pora. In a post-​­1989 world distinctively marked by increased movements of
people, culture, materials, and capital, as well as by shifting national borders
and evolving geostrategic alliances, theorists, like artists, continue searching
for new ways to think about the contemporary realities taking shape on our
planet. Thus, inherited notions of identity and nation have been increasingly
probed, refined, problematized, and called into question; models that implic-
itly rely on oppositional thinking (“us/them”) appear to have lost ground
to more nuanced discussions seeking to underscore the complex relational-
ity that characterizes human life. In the pages that follow, I examine some
of the important work in relationality and planetary thinking in order to
propose Claire Denis’s film Chocolat (1988) as an exemplary artistic inter-
vention that takes up these issues and permits insight into some of the most
pressing ethical issues of our time. In “performing” the houseboy’s identity
in ways undercutting imperial silencing and assimilation of colonial subjects,
in dramatizing the development of a child’s precognitive emotional reality as
she enters into relation with those around her while learning about colonial
power relations, and in calling attention to the fissures in its own status of
authoritative representation as it opens up a space for the emergence of voices
and perspectives of silenced “others,” Chocolat lays, I argue, the groundwork
for a planetary ethics.
With a view toward conceptualizing a more just and ethical world,
numerous theorists have moved away from thinking along “global” lines
and have preferred, of late, to speak in terms of the planet—­the place or
space of exchanges and sharing that we all inhabit, in the words of Gayatri
Spivak, “on loan.” “Planet-​­thought,” she explains, requires that “we imag-
ine ourselves as planetary subjects rather than global agents.”1 “Planetarity”
leans in a different philosophical direction from that of “globalization,”
which seems to privilege an all-​­embracing unit bent on erasing singularities.
Kwame Anthony Appiah is one of many who have drawn attention, in this

107
108 Laurie Edson

context, to the ethical imperative of attending to the particular and the local.
In Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, he stresses an ethics of
relationality and reminds us that “the problem of cross-​­cultural communica-
tion can seem immensely difficult in theory, . . . [yet] when the stranger is no
longer imaginary, but real and present, sharing a human social life, . . . you
can make sense of each other in the end.”2 Keen on particularity and deeply
aware of the ways in which categories of knowledge themselves shape analy-
ses and understanding, Appiah is among those concerned about avoiding the
kind of totalizing discourses of globalization that would imply dominance
and whose full articulation activates exclusionary mechanisms. If he locates
the ethical intervention he calls for, on the one hand, in empirical reality
(“when the stranger is no longer imaginary, but real and present, sharing a
human social life, . . . you can make sense of each other in the end”) and,
on the other hand, in existing disciplines, Spivak extends this approach into
the domain of a new, planet-​­oriented Comparative Literature. In her impor-
tant chapter on “Planetarity” from Death of a Discipline, she suggests that
a planetary Comparative Literature might move beyond ethnic studies with
its grounding in “the authority of experience” and instead seek to defamiliar-
ize the home, to render it uncanny. Planetarity would also involve “learning
to learn from below”; it would “persistently and repeatedly undermine and
undo the definitive tendency of the dominant to appropriate the emergent.”3

The Relational, the Performative, and the Planetary Subject

The “learning to learn from below” idea has been gaining momentum. Part
and parcel of this development is, for instance, Françoise Lionnet and Shu-​­mei
Shih’s argument for “minor transnationalism.”4 While postcolonial studies
have tended to focus on vertical relations between colonizer and colonized,
a dynamic that has historically worked to reinforce oppositional thinking of
the above-​­mentioned “us/them” kind, the newer transnational model draws
attention to the lateral networks existing among marginalized, subaltern,
and minority people of different places. Theoretically, with its focus on the
always-​­already hybrid nature of culture, minor transnationalism carries on
the work of Edouard Glissant’s Poétique de la relation and builds on ideas
about the ethical importance of cultural diversity such as those brought for-
ward by Amin Maalouf in Les identités meurtrières.5 Paul Gilroy, too, studies
horizontal networks among groups of people in The Black Atlantic, draw-
ing on Glissant as well as Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of the rhizome
in Thousand Plateaus; in his introduction, he describes, in fact, his study as
“the rhizomorphic, fractal structure of the transcultural, international for-
mation I call the black Atlantic.” Gilroy’s book is meant as a response to the
work of scholars whose views, he felt, are still informed by unexamined con-
cepts of political-​­cultural nationalism and ethnic particularism. As he sees it,
Planetarity, Performativity, Relationality 109

“Marked by its European origins, modern black political culture has always
been more interested in the relationship of identity to roots and rootedness
than in seeing identity as a process of movement and mediation.”6 To shift
focus away from theories that relied on the integrity or “purity” of modern
nation-​­states and toward the movements and exchanges between various
locales, Gilroy proposes as his starting point the image of ships traveling
through the spaces between Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, and the Ameri-
cas. As he puts it, the image of sailing ships foregrounds not only the Middle
Passage but also the reality of cultural, artistic, and political diffusion and
influence. All that influence, in turn, contributes to the presence of an inher-
ent multiplicity within identity that profoundly marks who we are and, in the
words of Maalouf, serves an important ethical function. “When one observes
in oneself, in one’s origins and in the course one’s life has taken, a number of
different confluences and contributions, of different mixtures and influences,”
writes Maalouf, “then one enters into a different relationship both with other
people and with one’s own ‘tribe.’ It’s no longer just a question of ‘them’ and
‘us’: two armies in battle order preparing for the next confrontation.”7
As theorists keep probing our accepted formulations of identity, nation,
and related notions, writers, composers, and filmmakers too have been prob-
lematizing these concepts in innovative ways, often taking great care not
to blindly manufacture “truths” about people and communities along the
lines of gender, class, race, or sexuality. Because verbal, visual, and aural
representations powerfully shape ideas about culture, artists play an impor-
tant ethical role in providing that which, in building on the work of Gilroy,
Mary Louise Pratt calls “a counterdiscourse to the centrism of metropoli-
tan accounts.”8 By querying the dominant perspective of the metropolitan
and exposing how such a construction depends on silencing the presence
and perspective of the non-​­dominant already living within the metropoli-
tan borders, theorists such as Pratt, Gilroy, and Homi K. Bhabha show how
“the cultural temporality of the nation inscribes a much more transitional
social reality.”9 Instead of a historicist narrative of the nation, Bhabha, for
example, favors strategies that avoid any attempt to assert authority, such
as attention to the performative. In “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and
the Margins of the Modern Nation,” he sets forth his ideas about the nation
as “an obscure and ubiquitous form of living the locality of culture. This
locality is more around temporality than about historicity . . . more hybrid
in the articulation of cultural differences and identifications—­gender, race
or class—­than can be represented in any hierarchical or binary structuring
of social antagonism.” Questioning whether “the emergence of a national
perspective—­of an elite or subaltern nature—­within a culture of social con-
testation . . . can ever articulate its ‘representative’ authority in that fullness
of narrative time,” Bhabha locates a doubling, a conceptual ambivalence,
where people are both “the historical ‘objects’ of a nationalist pedagogy”
and “the ‘subjects’ of a process of signification.” The “pedagogy” is already
110 Laurie Edson

sedimented, historically crystallized; the latter is ongoing, fluid, performative.

For Bhabha, it is through the intervention of the performative that the nation
“becomes a liminal form of social representation, a space that is internally
marked by cultural difference and the heterogeneous histories of contending
peoples, antagonistic authorities, and tense cultural locations.”10 Spivak, too,
notes the importance of the performative as a key element in the analysis of
identity and culture; as one attends to what she calls “the performative of
the other, in order not to transcode but to draw a response,” the hope is for
heightened communication and understanding across diverse cultures, which
may culminate, if managed ethically, in a heterogeneous transnationalism or
cosmopolitanism that remains alive, vibrant, and characteristically geared
toward forming new relations or transforming those already in place.11
The planetary space of such transnational or cosmopolitan exchanges
is much different from the one implied by hegemonic globalization in that,
unlike the global, the planetary does not seek to reduce or assimilate the
particular. It is along these lines that Emily Apter has pointed to planetar-
ity’s philosophical difference from globalization. “Wai Chee Dimock, Gayatri
Spivak, and Edward Said,” Apter specifies, “have taken planetary criticism
in other directions, focusing  .  .  . on using planetarity to impede globaliza-
tion’s monolithic spread: its financialization of the globe and proselytism of
orthodoxies of likeness and selfsame.”12 In valuing heterogenous particulari-
ties, Apter, Dimock, and others extend the work of Spivak and Gilroy and
remind us that “planetarity” derives its allure, in part, from its emerging,
not-​­yet-​­fixed status. The term, Dimock says, “stands as a horizon impossible
to define, and hospitable in that impossibility. . . . It is a habitat still waiting
for its inhabitants, waiting for a humanity that has yet to be born, yet to be
wrested from a seemingly boundless racism.”13
In trying to come to grips with planetarity’s evolving condition, it is per-
haps useful to return to ideas formulated by Michel Foucault, especially in
such key texts as “Theatrum Philosophicum” and “Nietzsche, Genealogy,
History.” Foucault is one of many theorists to have questioned what he calls
the humanist desire to totalize or explain the present by dissolving singular
events into ideal continuities.14 As he points out, any ideology bent, at the
outset, on discovering influences, origins, teleologies, models, groundings, or
any other type of continuity remains bound to a metaphysics of presence and
will be unable to recognize difference, discontinuity, or disparity. Whenever
a continuity is thus postulated, a frame can be and usually is established that
inevitably valorizes certain variables at the expense of other information.
Thinking explicitly outside this model, Foucault, in “Theatrum Philosoph-
icum,” proposes the event. “The event,” as Foucault writes, “is always an
effect produced entirely by bodies colliding, mingling, or separating.” Neither
a state of things nor a concept, the event is “devoid of any grounding in an
original, outside of all forms of imitation, and freed from the constraints of
similitude,” in particular from those imposed by the “model” (that which one
Planetarity, Performativity, Relationality 111

follows, imitates, or otherwise reproduces).15 Foucault’s essay is a concisely

formulated critique of the model as well as the philosophy of representation.
Along with Deleuze, he offers up a different kind of philosophical thought,
one that would embrace divergence instead of remaining caught in the rigid
system of oppositional or bipolar thinking inherited from Plato’s thought
and its grounding in the original, the prototype, and the paradigm of resem-
blance. For our purposes here, it is noteworthy that this bipolar thinking
continues to underwrite a postcolonial Eurocentrism and impedes an ethical
planetarity from coming into being. Foucault sets out to replace the philoso-
phy of representation with one of phantasms, where the latter arise between
“surfaces” and acquire meaning there, “freed from the dilemmas of truth and
falsehood and of being and non-​­being.” Instead of picturing the phantasm as
something already shaped, we should conceive of it, he submits, “without the
aid of models.”16 The philosopher argues, in this vein, the necessity of freeing
thought from the model, that is, from the concept (for which he substitutes
the event), no less than from representation, oppositional thinking, and cate-
gories. Foucault’s event, then, seems to resonate with Bhabha’s performative.

Chocolat: An Other Performance

Of late, there has been a spate of movies that investigate hybrid identity,
transnationality, and the relational aesthetics and ethics implicit in planetar-
ity. They raise important questions: How might artists represent the planetary
subject’s participation in vertical, “pedagogically” nationalist, mimetic, and
“stabilizing” structures, as well as in lateral, fluid, trans-​­categorical and
transnational processes, an ambivalence captured by Bhabha’s “doubling”
and germane concepts reviewed in this chapter’s opening section? What tech-
niques and strategies might a moviemaker employ to allow the performative
to emerge within representation so as to illuminate the problems swirling
around the subject’s ambivalent status?
While cinema has traditionally provided a fertile ground for exploring the
performative and its function in undermining ossified categories of analy-
sis, the planetary era’s filmmakers have shown great interest in this issue. A
case in point is Claire Denis, who has treated this problem in the context of
France’s imperial past. In her award-​­winning film Chocolat, she questions
French colonial history, specifically the role of the dominant perspective in
that history’s public representation.17 One of a number of movies revisiting
France’s colonial past (Outremer [1990] and Indochine [1992] are two other
examples), Chocolat provides a significant counter-​­discourse to that domi-
nant representation as well as a sophisticated analysis of the way subjects
are socially constructed, all the while staging the inability of mainstream
discourse to account for the inconsistencies in its own narrative.18 As the
film unfolds, it becomes clear that its centering perspective is a white French
112 Laurie Edson

woman named France who returns to Cameroon, where she spent her years
as a child growing up under French colonialism, with the black houseboy
Protée her only friend. Yet Chocolat is by no means a nostalgic return to
some ideal past, nor is it the story of a woman in search of her roots. Instead,
Chocolat proves to be an artistic intervention that allows the double silent
minority perspectives of a child and a houseboy to seep onto center stage so
as to reveal the inadequacies of colonization’s hegemonic representation.
In imagining minority standpoints and enabling them to emerge in her
film, Denis tackles some of the issues Spivak deals with in “Can the Subaltern
Speak?” published, incidentally, the same year as Chocolat. As Spivak writes,
“It is impossible for contemporary French intellectuals to imagine the kind
of Power and Desire that would inhabit the unnamed subject of the Other
of Europe. It is not only that everything they read, critical or uncritical, is
caught within the debate of the production of that Other. . . . It is also that,
in the constitution of that Other of Europe, great care was taken to obliterate
the textual ingredients with which such a subject could cathect, could occupy
(invest?) its itinerary.”19 As we shall see, Denis succeeds in creating a film
that, in imagining what Spivak calls the Other of Europe, does so by simul-
taneously critiquing dominant representational strategies. In this, she joins
an ethical project that Spivak finds already in Foucault. “Foucault,” Spivak
observes, “is correct in suggesting that ‘to make visible the unseen can also
mean a change of level, addressing oneself to a layer of material which had
hitherto had no pertinence for history and which had not been recognized as
having any moral, aesthetic, or historical value.’ ”20
The story of Chocolat takes place in two distinct time periods: the present
moment of France’s return to Cameroon, where she accepts a ride into town
with a black man and his son, and the past time of her African childhood
under colonization. While riding in the back seat of the car and gazing out
the window, her daydreams enable a flashback to the earlier years, and so the
film transitions to the space of her memories, where she appears to us as a
child. Chocolat thus stages another kind of doubling, in which France occu-
pies a subject as well as an object position in relation to her mature self; at the
same time, she is a subject in relation to her younger self, and, in that, very
much a subject-​­in-​­process. In this way, Chocolat works against cinematic
conventions that create the illusion of a unified, coherent “I” who occupies
a coherent national space in a coherent historical interval. The “I” the movie
illuminates is already hybrid, a planetary subject, and the character’s name
suggests that Denis is drawing attention to the country’s hybrid identity as
well, questioning an outmoded concept of identity that no longer applies to
either the individual or the nation.
In presenting France as an isolated, young, naive child growing up in
colonial Cameroon, Denis opens up a space for exploring how subjects are
socially constructed. The child does not yet know about racism; she has not
yet grasped the power relations between colonizers and colonized; and she
Planetarity, Performativity, Relationality 113

has not yet ossified her own experiences into concepts she can understand. As
she tries to make sense of what surrounds her, she lacks representations that
might help her interpret her experiences. Her parents are strangely absent
for her; her best friend is the houseboy Protée. As an isolated child in need
of emotional connection, France relies solely on Protée, and yet we gather
that she does not understand much about him. Nevertheless, they form a
strong bond. He protects her even though she remains very much a stranger
to him. They communicate more with gestures and silent understanding than
with words, all of which poses problems of interpretation for the audience.
There are, in effect, no easy answers here; Denis has deliberately created a
film in which spectators become aware of the extent to which their own
interpretive responses are already conditioned by conventions and categories
of knowledge.
Instead of relying, as we usually do, on our cognitive apparatus to inter-
pret the relationship between France and Protée, we can turn instead to the
focus on emotion that the film develops at length. Dimock is one of the schol-
ars who have recently singled out emotion as a critically underrated topic.
“Cognition,” she remarks, “is no longer the sole player, the sole determinant
of consciousness, and the unfailing ally for language. Emotion has entered
the field [the study of consciousness] as a new, undertheorized, and poten-
tially more interesting research topic, with as yet unpredictable implications.”
She points to the challenge of neuroscientists such as Antonio Damasio who
have argued for a precognitive, neurophysical ground for emotion. “We first
register objects in a ‘nonlanguage form,’ ” Dimock explains, “for our core
consciousness rests on a mental substrate at once precognitive and prelinguis-
tic: a ‘nonverbal, imagined narrative’ that serves as the neurophysiological
ground for our powerful emotions.”21 Keeping in mind Dimock’s words
about the undertheorized importance of emotion, especially in the context
of relationality, performativity, and planetarity, and in light of Denis’s desire
to open up possibilities for the emergence of non-​­dominant perspectives
regarding colonialism, it is useful to notice how Denis shifts attention to
the thickening of the emotional relationship between France and Protée as
they grow accustomed to each other. Two episodes seem especially important
in terms of the powerful emotional bond that links France to Protée and
grounds her trust in him.
The first takes place during the night when France is so frightened by the
howling of a hyena that she comes into her mother’s bedroom for protection,
only to discover that she is also fearful and cannot protect her. The mother
calls Protée into the room, hands him a gun, and gives him a chair to sit in
all night in case the hyena attacks, but Protée does not obey. As we see in the
next scene, Protée leaves the bedroom to go out into the night with the little
girl on his shoulders, shouting loudly at the hyena, matching his power and
force with that of the hyena. We gather that this experience affects France in
deep ways, as a powerful difference has just been created in her unconscious
114 Laurie Edson

between her mother’s perceived weakness and Protée’s agency, bravery, and
power. This scene serves to cement the growing emotional tie France feels
with Protée as it distances the child from her mother.
The second pivotal episode unfolds the following day, when, on a visit
to the neighboring Norwegians, France notices the bloodied corpses of the
animals the hyena has killed during the night. A close-​­up shot of France’s trau-
matized and uncomprehending face as she looks to Protée for help announces
the emotional importance of this scene. The camera shows Protée pondering
the incident as he surveys the carnage, then taking a bloodied chicken’s leg
and gently setting it down next to France’s hand. The girl tentatively touches
the leg, after which Protée draws some marks on France’s arm with blood.
To the little girl, this act is full of meaning, for as they prepare to leave, we
see that she is carefully holding her arm away from her body as though pro-
tecting the inscription. Neither France nor the spectator understands exactly
what has taken place here, but we do sense that the connection France feels
with Protée has been strengthened considerably, since he is the one who suc-
ceeded in bringing closure to her fear by “containing” it within the act of the
blood inscription. For the young girl living in Cameroon, separated from oth-
ers her age, living in emotional solitude, and encountering incomprehensible
experiences of fear and death, Protée becomes her single pillar of support.
Whereas the story of French colonialism in Cameroon has historically
reflected the colonizers’ standpoint, Denis provides a powerful counter-​
­discourse as she tells the story from a perspective that is generally obscured:
that of the white female child who happens to be in Cameroon simply because
her father is a French administrator. From her angle, we catch sight of the
layering down of affective reality as she enters into relation with the people,
objects, and landscape around her. From the same perspective, we also get
glimpses into the African people’s lives, which remain hidden to her parents
and the other white colonials. She enters the world of the black workers and
participates in their games, transgressing the rigid divide between colonizer
and colonized.22 The film thus opens up a space that reveals how authorita-
tive colonial discourse necessarily blocks out the natives’ reality.
As the film unreels its story about French Cameroon, the houseboy’s voice
is ostensibly silenced. Throughout, Protée is represented as a calm and quiet
presence simply serving his colonial family, always polite, performing his
functions effortlessly and patiently. Like a piece of furniture, he is simply
“there,” as if he had no life or thoughts of his own.23 He is meant to appear
as an object of perception not only for the members of the colonial family,
but for the spectator of the film as well. Nevertheless, in certain key scenes
the director allows his agency and subjectivity to break through, as we shall
see below. Chocolat thus stages the dehumanization and erasure of the colo-
nized under colonial rule while simultaneously pointing to the existence of
a subject-​­in-​­process underneath that treatment, a presence who neverthe-
less remains invisible to the colonizer’s eye. In this sense, too, Denis’s film is
Planetarity, Performativity, Relationality 115

performative and provides the kind of doubling Bhabha deems instrumental

to a critique of colonial power.
Although seemingly peripheral to the film’s narrative, a few scenes in
Chocolat take up the strategic function of reminding the viewer that Protée
has a life of his own, outside his household role. At such moments, the movie
hints that it withholds a great deal of information about Protée and that, by
implication, colonial authority does not extend as absolutely as the specta-
tor may be tempted to imagine. One brief nighttime episode, for instance,
pre­sents Protée talking with a woman. During the conversation, he is com-
fortably relaxed, smiles, and otherwise behaves in ways we have never seen
before; this scene contrasts sharply with that in which he is rigidly dressed in a
tuxedo, silently standing at attention and awaiting orders. Another revealing
moment that jolts the spectator into realizing that Protée exists as a subject
in his own right, endowed with an agency the colonial context either ignores
or stifles, comes up during his interaction with the black schoolteacher who
helps him write a letter to his parents. From this brief encounter we learn
that Protée has a family, that he sends his parents money, and that his sis-
ter is getting married. This segment, too, serves to show the spectator that
Protée exists outside the narrative frame of the film, more exactly outside
the position colonialism has assigned him. Here as well, Denis advances and
performs Bhabha’s argument about the colonizer’s “other” always exceeding
the discourse purporting to contain his or her otherness within “totalizing”
and “authoritative” representations.
As if to puncture the illusion of seamless authority over its subjects, the
movie allows Protée’s affective life to come through now and then despite
the rigid colonial dictates that he fulfill his duties obediently and generally
comply submissively and mechanically, as a non-​­person of sorts, devoid of
inner life. Protée is indeed expected to act but not feel, obey but not question.
Despite his decorum, self-​­control, and success in mastering a neutral façade
in front of his masters, his frustration comes to the surface as he kicks the
empty buckets of water he has just poured so that Aimée, France’s mother,
can have her shower. His mounting tension erupts through the façade a sec-
ond time, when he believes that he has been seen naked by France and Aimée
while taking his own shower. These two scenes let us know how difficult it is
for Protée to preserve the neutral status quo affectively speaking. As specta-
tors of the film, we thus have access, briefly, to a side of Protée’s inner life that
no colonial whites see. Through its technique of doubling—­Protée is simul-
taneously silent object of perception and subject endowed with agency and
emotion—­Chocolat opposes that which its cinematic presentation portrays,
namely, dominant discourse’s efforts to construct Protée as a human automa-
ton devoid of inner complexity and processes.
To be sure, this construction remains consistent across the movie. Even
when newcomers threaten to disrupt the status quo, Protée’s demeanor does
not change. With the arrival of Luc Ségalen, who threatens norms of proper
116 Laurie Edson

behavior by inserting himself into the female space of Aimée (he spends time
reading to her in the garden), Protée steps into the scene in an attempt to
disrupt the transgression. In the scene where Aimée reaches out to touch Pro-
tée’s leg as he closes the drapes, he again maintains the status quo by silently
pulling Aimée up to her feet, where she belongs, thus reminding her that
the boundary between them will be respected. Protée understands that his
employment depends on strict maintenance of appropriate relations, a task
made even more difficult whenever the head of household, Marc, disappears
to travel on business; as it becomes clear, Marc’s presence guarantees adher-
ence to “proper” behavior, while, when he is away, the job falls to Protée.
In realizing that his survival depends on the colonial family’s stability,
Protée proves much savvier than the homologous protagonist featured in
Ferdinand Oyono’s Houseboy (Une vie de boy), the 1956 novel that can be
read as Chocolat’s “uncanny neighbor.”24 Both the novel and the film are
set in Cameroon during French colonialism, and both explore power rela-
tions between a houseboy and his colonial family. Furthermore, in the book
and the movie alike, the wife’s boredom and transgressive inclinations lead
inevitably to the banishment of the houseboy from the house; indeed, he
knows too much about the behavior of the colonials, and his knowledge
gives him a great deal of power, which makes the whites uncomfortable.
However, while the movie shows him as a silenced “object” in the eyes of
others, the novel makes him the subject of perception. In the book, he nar-
rates his own thoughts about the events that unfold, and this difference in
positioning allows the reader access to a perspective Chocolat silences delib-
erately, except for those places where it erupts without explanation and calls
attention to itself most forcefully.
Oyono’s Houseboy opens with a scene in which a mysterious narrator
finds the dying houseboy Toundi, who utters the phrase that will serve as
the philosophical underpinning of the entire novel: “What are we blackmen
who are called French?”25 His use of the word “what” instead of “who”
hints that he has acquired, during the course of events depicted in the novel,
an understanding of his positioning as object from the perspective of the
colonizers. We discover, too, that Toundi has been keeping diaries ever since
the missionaries taught him how to write, and now, by reading the jour-
nals, we are about to learn firsthand about Toundi’s experience in a colonial
family, including his reactions to those experiences. Thus, we have access to
Toundi’s thoughts as he gradually gets to the point where he begins to see
through the façade of colonial power. Early on in the narrative, for instance,
when he notices that his master is uncircumcised and thus not truly a man
as defined by native standards, he concludes that his master is not powerful
and wonders why he ever feared him. Similarly, he interprets the white man’s
inability to control his wife as signifying the husband’s weaker status. As the
novel continues, we follow Toundi’s transformation into the wiser man who
finally recognizes the extent to which his knowledge of the infidelities of
Planetarity, Performativity, Relationality 117

his master’s wife puts him, Toundi, in danger, precisely because it threatens
existing master-​­servant power relations. Unfortunately, he does not heed the
advice of the wiser chambermaid Kalisia, who urges him to flee before it is
too late: “How can they go strutting about with a cigarette hanging out of
their mouth in front of you—­when you know. As far as they are concerned
you are the one who has told everybody and they can’t help feeling you are
sitting in judgement on them. But that they can never accept. . . . If I were in
your shoes, I swear I’d go right away. . . . I wouldn’t even wait for my month’s
wages.”26 As tensions mount, Toundi eventually learns to fear for his life as
the white couple becomes increasingly unpredictable and sadistic. Realizing
that he knows too much and that his knowledge threatens their elevated view
of themselves, he flees. At last, his rhetorical question, “What are we black-
men who are called French?” speaks to his understanding of the scapegoating
leading to his death and, more generally, to colonial dehumanization.
So powerfully foregrounded in Oyono’s novel, the houseboy’s subjectivity
is underemphasized in Chocolat, although, as already noted, Denis allows
traces of it to emerge in the film’s fabric. As a subject “under erasure,” Protée
proves an active participant in the film even though he is ultimately portrayed
from the perspective of the isolated child seeking emotional interaction. The
movie sustains its double focus on the silent houseboy and the quiet child all
the way through the long flashback, with the result that we never know for
sure what France or Protée is thinking because they say nothing for much of
the time. No doubt, this challenges the spectators, for they are forced into an
unfamiliar space that tests an audience’s interpretative abilities. At the begin-
ning of the flashback, for example, the child France does not yet know about
racism or about the line separating colonizers from colonized, but the house-
boy does. From her relatively innocent vantage point, Protée is her best friend;
she even tries to play “house” with him, feeding him from a spoon. He obeys
her command to eat, but when he licks a drop of food that falls on her hand
and she instinctively giggles, his expression suddenly freezes. Denis leaves it
to us to interpret what has just happened, putting us in the same position as
France, who does not understand why he has become so serious. Protée, it
seems, has suddenly realized that he has just crossed an important line.
This double focus on France, who casts Protée into the role of her playmate,
and on Protée, aware of the dangers of any transgression (his own included),
continues throughout the film. We again witness France’s confusion about
the houseboy’s behavior in the scene where Luc Ségalen, a white man who
has come to Africa for unknown reasons, shares an intimate moment in the
garden with France’s mother. Protée arrives with lemon drinks in an attempt
to intervene and disrupt their growing intimacy, while Luc deliberately reads
a passage about skin color from German officer Curt von Morgen’s account
of his 1891 Cameroon expedition. France and Aimée both look instinctively
at Protée as if they have just been made aware of something for the first time,
and Protée is turned into an object of curiosity. The scene is silent, so we have
118 Laurie Edson

no access to anyone’s thoughts. Spectators may surmise that Luc is deliber-

ately trying to make everyone uncomfortable, but France cannot understand
what has just taken place; she looks inquisitively from one adult to another.
We are not privy to Protée’s thoughts either. Something is taking shape in
Protée’s mind as well as in France’s, but Denis declines to spell it out for us.
Here, in this complex moment of relationality, the film seems ethical in its
cinematic refusal to create the illusion that it possesses sufficient authority to
“explain” the thoughts of colonialism’s “others.”
The twin narrative centering on France and Protée culminates in the pow-
erful final scene between them in the garage, Protée’s new work space after
Aimée has him removed from the house because his presence reminds her of
her own transgression. France has relied on Protée all along as companion,
teacher, and emotional support, but now he asserts himself and, still silently,
teaches her that they can no longer be friends in the colonial context. At great
physical cost to himself, he tricks her into putting her hand on a hot pipe,
which will scar her physically and emotionally. The eye contact between them
speaks volumes but is indecipherable. Devastated, she does not understand
why he has tricked her; her trusted companion has now become a stranger.
For the first time, the child realizes that the houseboy is not there for her.
Aptly named Protée (Proteus), he has changed beyond recognition. From the
close-​­up of his pained but controlled expression, we understand that Protée
knows that his premeditated act has broken her trust, and he walks away
into the night, leaving France with her scars.

Representation, Authority, and Planetary Ethics

The scars are as individual as they are collective; France’s name is, of course,
also that of a nation. Thus, we can return to Bhabha’s ideas about perfor-
mativity and conclude that here, yet again, Denis’s film stages colonialism’s
inability to fully assert its desire and authority over the colonized. In having
allowed spectators to glimpse Protée’s silenced subjectivity throughout, the
film has been foreshadowing the site from which resistance to the totalizing
discourse of colonialism emerges.
Extending the idea of the film’s performativity, one can identify other kinds
of instances in which Chocolat deliberately stages its own insufficiency as
“authoritative” representation. The flashback section of the film, for instance,
is supposed to feature the young woman’s memories as a child in Cameroon,
but critics have noticed several sequences in which the child could not have
been present. They like to point, for instance, to the incident where Aimée
reaches out to touch Protée’s leg, but this takes place in the house, and France
might have watched it. An episode France could not have witnessed, however,
occurs inside the tribal chief’s hut as the chief tells France’s father his story
about the face scar he received in an encounter with a lion. Since the young
Planetarity, Performativity, Relationality 119

France could not have been there, the question bears asking, what is the film
performing in attributing this scene to France’s memory? It is altogether pos-
sible that she imagined the hut scene after reading a description of it in her
father’s journals, which she carries with her upon her return to Cameroon
as an older woman. In this respect, the older France occupies a double posi-
tion as a subject with lived experience as well as a reader who accesses her
colonial past through the writing of others. What she remembers, then, and
what we see in the movie’s flashback, combine both her own perceptions and
those of her father, who has already represented them in his journal. The fact
that France’s memories appear seamlessly alongside material she could only
have acquired indirectly through other people’s accounts opens the door, of
course, to a consideration of the film’s ethical function as it purports, on the
one hand, to represent “truth” and as it ostensibly performs, on the other
hand, a questioning of its own truth-​­claims. In so doing, Chocolat draws
attention to itself as an artistic intervention that resists any attempt to assert
absolute authority, especially the authority associated with representation
itself. Many critics have demonstrated how representation has functioned to
construct “truths” about Europe’s “others”—­Edward Said’s Orientalism still
serves as the classic example27—­but Denis’s film is vigilant as it makes visible
the fissures in any official representation of French colonization told from the
perspective of the colonizer.
Chocolat introduces a new complexity when it moves out of the flash-
back and returns to the main narrative frame. Now an older France rides in
the back seat of a car driven by the black man who has offered her a ride
in contemporary Cameroon. He notes that she does not talk much, and, in
fact, we realize in retrospect that she has said very little to the man since she
has accepted the ride. He has tried to make polite conversation with her, but
she has remained aloof and non-​­communicative. To pass the time, the man
divulges a bit about his life, and it is now that the film reveals its surprising
twist: the black man is not a native inhabitant of Africa, as both France and,
most likely, the spectators also have imagined, but African American. “You’re
not disappointed?” he asks her, assuming that she has come to Africa to inter-
act with indigenous Africans. Thus, it is not only her national home that is
problematized by the film, but his as well; the assumptions made about what
it means to be African are clearly being called into question here. From the
moment France hears that this man is not an African who has endured the
history of French colonization, her expression changes, her aloof manner dis-
appears, and she indicates her desire to be friendly and talk. In other words,
because he was not a French colonial subject, she feels she is not stepping
over the line by entering into dialogue with him. In her childhood, Protée
had taught her to keep her place by not befriending an African, and she has
been living out that lesson, along with its metaphorical and physical scars,
ever since. However, because French colonization is not part of this African
American man’s background, she feels at no risk of breaking any rules.
120 Laurie Edson

The crucial element for France, then, is not race but history. As she learns,
the man is, like herself, a displaced person with cultural and historical con-
nections in several spaces, in short, a transnational. Thus, she acknowledges
their equality and invites him to share a drink, leaving the door open to
further communication. But he is not interested; he has his own existential
preoccupations (“Here, I’m nothing. . . . If I died now, I’d disappear totally”).
He has relocated to Africa assuming that he would come back to his roots,
to understanding and brotherhood, but he has found nothing of the kind.
This is another indication that Chocolat is no nostalgic return to origins, nor
is it a celebration of nomadism; it does not offer up vagrant postnational-
ism as a utopian space. Instead, it remains firmly embedded in what Lionnet
and Shih have called “minor transnationalism,” which deems particular
historical context pertinent. The two critics stress, in fact, this important dis-
tinction between nomadism and their brand of transnationalism. “Flexible or
nomadic subjects function,” Lionnet and Shih maintain, “as if they are free-​
­floating signifiers without psychic and material investment in one or more
given particular geopolitical spaces. By contrast, minor transnational subjects
are inevitably invested in their respective geopolitical spaces.”28 It is precisely
because France is a transnational deeply marked by her own history that she
is reluctant to pursue communication with this man until she discovers that
he has not experienced French colonization and they are therefore equals.
However, while these two transnationals may share a space of non-​
­dominance with respect to their individual historical realities, that shared
space does not necessarily bind them together and guarantee their solidarity.
Denis makes this point as well. Toward the end of Chocolat, before they part
ways, the man reaches for France’s hand to read her palm. Noticing the scar
that has effaced her palm lines, his remarks—­“No past, no future”—­suggest
that she is a nomad with no history and no direction. But Chocolat has not
borne out this reading at all; on the contrary, the film has shown that she
carries with her a very solid history wherever she travels. Like the native
artifacts loaded into the cargo hold of the Cameroonian Airlines jet plane at
the end of the film, she, too, has been exported to Europe from elsewhere,
but she still maintains her status as a subject grounded in a specific historical
time and place—­as a human among other humans whose movement across
the planet, as Dimock might gloss, is “weaving our history into our dwelling
place,” thus “making us what we are, a species with a sedimented imprint.”
“Honoring that imprint, and honoring also the imprints of other creatures
evolving as we do,” she goes on, “we take our place as one species among
others, inhabiting a shared ecology, a shared continuum.”29
In emphasizing a communal planetary environment here and elsewhere in
her work, Dimock is gesturing toward a planetary ethics of relation. Choco-
lat moves in this direction as well. At the very end of the film, the camera
follows neither France nor the African artifacts back to Europe. Instead, it
stays in Cameroon and records, for an extended duration, the movements
Planetarity, Performativity, Relationality 121

of three airline workers who take a break and carry on a relaxed, animated
conversation (which we cannot hear) while the soundtrack of South Afri-
can jazz artist Abdullah Ibrahim plays at full volume. In its closing gesture,
Chocolat reaffirms once more its non-​­authoritative, ethical perspective by
giving the last scene to the three native men in their own space and to the
powerful music that seems to tell a story of its own, beyond the verbal and
visual narrative of the film. Indeed, during the last few minutes of the film,
its status as representation diminishes in importance as the music’s perfor-
mativity dominates. Here, as it has done throughout, the movie does not
attempt to “formulate” or “possess” the other. Rather, it respectfully stages
what Emmanuel Levinas has defined as an ethical dynamics of relationality,
one in which, as the philosopher says, “such relation involves not striving to
possess the other’s freedom, but rather experiencing—­and delighting in—­the
other’s surpassing our cognitive ‘grasp.’ ”30 Denis lets us see that the three men
enjoy life in their own space, but we do not have to know what they are say-
ing by eavesdropping on their conversation.
Chocolat promotes and partakes of a planetary consciousness, too, in
reminding us throughout about the reality of cultural, artistic, and political
diffusion and influence. The image of traveling ships that Gilroy proposed
in The Black Atlantic is now replaced by airplanes; Denis’s film leaves us
at the airport, where the aforementioned native workers load large African
carved wooden objects into a plane’s cargo hold. We know that these pieces
are destined for export to places like France, where they will be reclassi-
fied as “artworks” to be displayed in museums or commodities to be sold
in the marketplace, severed from their original function. With a Texaco gas
station in the background in one scene, Chocolat reminds us that the colo-
nizing countries and multinational corporations have made and continue
to make enormous profits from the extraction of African oil. The film’s cri-
tique of imperialism even extends to an arrogant French coffee grower who
exploits the land as he wishes, treats everyone around him with disdain and
disrespect, and assumes that by flashing his money he can have anything
he wants. Colonialism guaranteed continued unequal social relations and
economic expansion, so while our increasingly transnational world does,
indeed, promote cultural relations and artistic influences, it also facilitates
the exploitation of the planet’s natural resources and populations as pros-
perous countries continue to form alliances and accumulate wealth at an
unprecedented speed.
We live in a world of interconnections and relationality, but, given the
geopolitical realities of transnational financial systems, profit-​­geared shar-
ing of data banks, unfair and even predatory commercial practices, unequal
distribution of natural resources, and increasing global warming, urgency
demands an ethical intervention for the good of the planet. The interaction of
geography, history, and empire has created hierarchies of power, and even an
optimistic cosmopolitanism cannot guarantee that, as “citizens of the world,”
122 Laurie Edson

people will care about learning from others whose beliefs or cultures are dif-
ferent from their own; in effect, cosmopolitanism can still be, as it has been
at various moments in its history, ethnocentric. Thus, an ethical relationality
is desirable—­the kind that overcomes inequality and instead honors, from
the outset, equality-​­in-​­difference. Planetarity is thus an epistemological as
well as an ethical project geared toward this relational ideal, a way of think-
ing that necessitates thinking-​­in-​­relation, where the terms themselves are not
already marked in advance according to value or hierarchy. Here, we can
return to the Foucauldian ideas summarized in the early pages of this chapter,
especially to his critique of a philosophy of representation grounded, since
Plato, in a system of dichotomies where one of the terms is already coded
as positive and the other, relegated to its status as “other,” as negative. This
kind of thinking guarantees hierarchical thought and will never be able to
value equality-​­in-​­difference. Walter D. Mignolo takes this point even further
in “The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference,” where he
highlights the importance of thinking not from the perspective of European
philosophy but from the vantage point of “the colonial difference.” The future
of ethics, he notes, lies in “the densities of the colonial experience,” which are
also “the location of emerging epistemologies.”31 For an ethical planetarity to
take shape, he contends, philosophy itself needs to be decolonized along the
lines proposed by Enrique Dussel: “An Ethic of Liberation, with planetary
scope ought, first of all, to ‘liberate’ (I would say decolonize) philosophy from
Helenocentrism. Otherwise, it cannot be a future worldly philosophy, in the
twenty-​­first century.”32 Incorporating the inherently relational, philosophical
idea of equality-​­in-​­difference into the ethical project of planetarity, Mignolo
coins the term “diversality.” “An other logic (or border thinking from the per-
spective of subalternity) goes,” he explains, “with a geopolitics of knowledge
that regionalizes the fundamental European legacy, locating thinking in the
colonial difference and creating the conditions for diversality as a universal
project.”33 Chocolat seems to move in this direction as well, for Denis has
offered us different kinds of new and provocative insights into French colo-
nialism from the non-​­authoritative perspectives of a child and a houseboy, all
the while questioning the truth-​­claims of authoritative representation itself.

Notes
1. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2003), 72, 73.
2. Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 98–­99.
3. Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 76, 82, 100.
4. See Françoise Lionnet and Shu-​­mei Shih, “Introduction: Thinking through
the Minor, Transnationally,” in Minor Transnationalism, ed. Françoise Lionnet
and Shu-​­mei Shih (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005), 1–­23.
Planetarity, Performativity, Relationality 123

5. See Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1997), originally published as Poétique de la rela-
tion (Paris: Gallimard, 1990); and Amin Maalouf, In the Name of Identity:
Violence and the Need to Belong, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Arcade, 2001),
originally published as Les identités meurtrières (Paris: Grasset & Fasquelle,
1996).
6. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 4, 19.
7. Maalouf, In the Name of Identity, 31.
8. Mary Louise Pratt, “Modernity and Periphery: Toward a Global and Rela-
tional Analysis,” in Beyond Dichotomies: Histories, Identities, Cultures, and the
Challenge of Globalization, ed. Elisabeth Mudimbe-​­Boyi (Albany: State Univer-
sity of New York Press, 2002), 32.
9. Homi K. Bhabha, “Introduction: Narrating the Nation,” in Nation and Nar-
ration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), 1.
10. Homi K. Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of
the Modern Nation,” in Nation and Narration, 292, 295, 297, 299 (emphasis in
original).
11. Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 13.
12. Emily Apter, The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (Prince­
ton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006), 92.
13. Wai Chee Dimock, “Introduction: Planet and America, Set and Subset,”
in Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature, ed. Wai Chee
Dimock and Lawrence Buell (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007),
5.
14. See Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language,
Counter-​­ Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F.
Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press, 1977), 139–­64.
15. Michel Foucault, “Theatrum Philosophicum,” in Language, Counter-​
­ emory, Practice, 173, 177 (emphasis mine).
M
16. Ibid., 170, 171. I have found Foucault’s ideas pertinent in interarts analy-
sis; see my Reading Relationally: Postmodern Perspectives on Literature and Art
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000).
17. Claire Denis, dir., Chocolat, prod. Alain Belmondo and Gérard Crosnier,
wr. Claire Denis and Jean-​­Pol Fargeau, perf. Giulia Boschi, Isaach de Bankolé,
François Cluzet, Cécile Ducasse, Mireille Perrier, music Abdullah Ibrahim, Ciné-
manuel, MK2 Productions, Cerito Films, La S.E.P.T., Caroline Productions, Le
F.O.D.I.C. Cameroun, Wim Wenders Produktion Berlin, TFI Films Production,
Orion Films, 1988.
18. For a discussion of three important films that revisit France’s colonial
past, see Alison Murray, “Women, Nostalgia, Memory: Chocolat, Outremer, and
Indochine,” Research in African Literatures 33, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 235–­44.
Unlike Murray, I do not read Chocolat as a “nostalgia film.”
19. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and
the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1988), 280.
20. Ibid., 285.
124 Laurie Edson

21. Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature across
Deep Time (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006), 155, 156 (empha-
sis in original).
22. Adam Muller sees the child France as an embodiment of moral cosmo-
politanism and calls Chocolat a film with a “powerfully contemporary moral
sensibility”; see Muller, “Notes toward a Theory of Nostalgia: Childhood and
the Evocation of the Past in Two European ‘Heritage’ Films,” New Literary His-
tory 37, no. 4 (Autumn 2006): 741. He reads Chocolat as an example of what
Svetlana Boym has called “reflective nostalgia”; see Boym, “Reflective Nostalgia:
Virtual Reality and Collective Memory,” in The Future of Nostalgia (New York:
Basic Books, 2001), 49–­55.
23. Donald R. Wehrs has proposed a non-​­Western interpretation of this kind
of self-​­regulating behavior in the context of maintaining an ethical relationship
to the other: “The stress upon self-​­restraint and rational self-​­regulation integral
to the moral traditions of Islam, Hinduism, and polytheistic sub-​­Saharan Africa
(among others) may be accounted for as ethical modifications of freedom, not
mere mechanisms of control”; see his article “Sartre’s Legacy in Postcolonial
Theory; or, Who’s Afraid of Non-​­Western Historiography and Cultural Studies?”
New Literary History 34, no. 4 (Autumn 2003): 772.
24. Ferdinand Oyono, Houseboy, trans. John Reed (London: Heinemann,
1990), originally published as Une vie de boy (Paris: Julliard, 1956). Borrowing
from Kenneth Reinhard, Apter develops the concept of neighboring, a comparing
of two texts that are “uncanny neighbor[s]” of each other, “determined by acci-
dental contiguity, genealogical isolation, and ethical encounter” (The Translation
Zone, 247). I have developed similar ideas about “relational reading” across the
fields of literature and visual art; see Edson, Reading Relationally.
25. Oyono, Houseboy, 4.
26. Oyono, Houseboy, 100–­101 (emphasis in original).
27. See Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978).
28. Lionnet and Shih, “Introduction,” 8.
29. Dimock, Through Other Continents, 6.
30. Quoted in Wehrs, “Sartre’s Legacy,” 771.
31. Walter D. Mignolo, “The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Dif-
ference,” South Atlantic Quarterly 101, no. 1 (Winter 2002): 67.
32. Quoted in Mignolo, “The Geopolitics of Knowledge,” 70. Mignolo cites
Enrique Dussel’s work in “Beyond Eurocentrism: The World-​­System and the Lim-
its of Modernity,” in The Cultures of Globalization, ed. Fredric Jameson and
Masao Miyoshi (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998), 3–­31.
33. Mignolo, “The Geopolitics of Knowledge,” 91.
 Gilgamesh’s Planetary Turns
Wai Chee Dimock

Can we understand the turn to “world literature”—­as David Damrosch

defines it—­as a turn not to a designated canon but to a circulatory effect,
“the effective life” of any text “whenever, and wherever, it is actively pres-
ent within a literary system beyond that of its original culture”?1 If so, then
what are the consequences of thinking of literature in this way, that is, as
a far-​­flung network of redistribution, recombination, and recontextualiza-
tion? And is it possible to add another analytic layer, putting the emphasis
less on the networks projected to come into being than on the ones already
enjoined, feeding a stream of reusable material from earliest antiquity
into an ever-​­ growing body of work, sustaining a planetary ecology and
bringing newness into the world through the turns of decomposition and
recomposition?
In what follows, I experiment with this approach, looking at the epic
not in isolation but as part of a recycling process unfolding on three con-
tinents, across a variety of genres and media, and over a period of several
thousand years. The text being recycled is Gilgamesh, an epic originating
from Mesopotamia and developing multiple variants even in 1700 b.c.e. The
novel Gilgamesh (2001), by the Australian author Joan London, is the one
of the most recent spin-offs from it. There are many others, including many
from the United States, and in thinking about the “planetary ecology” of Gil-
gamesh, it is worth looking outside a strictly text-​­based medium to engage
a distributive process that not only reuses the old but also spills over in all
conceivable directions, into all conceivable venues.

Staging

I begin with a collaboration between dramaturge Chad Gracia and Pulitzer

Prize-​­winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa. In 2006, these two teamed up for a
stage adaptation of Gilgamesh. The text was published by Wesleyan Univer-
sity Press,2 and the play was performed in New York, Chicago, Boston, and
New Orleans, Komunyakaa’s home for many years.
These were lean productions, with a small crew, no set to speak of, and
about six actors doing double or triple duty, playing more than one role, and

125
126 Wai Chee Dimock

often serving as handy stage props. Making ingenious use of simple objects,
actors produced a wealth of visual effects to make up for the bareness of the
stage. In the Chicago performances by the Silk Road Theatre Project, the
Goddess Ishtar, for instance, was shown only as a silhouette, a face in the
moon, an effect accomplished with a flashlight and stretched cotton over a
hula hoop. Humbaba, the guardian of the cedar forest and Gilgamesh’s main
adversary, was meanwhile represented by a bamboo frame covered with green
and brown fabric and moved around by three actors. The Silk Road Theatre
Project called this kind of theater “stylized and actor-​­driven.” Another name
for it would be poor man’s theater: low-​­tech and low-​­cost, using nothing
more than the primitive resources of the dramatic medium. However, this did
not mean low-​­quality. The Silk Road Theatre Project is a respected company,
receiving grants from Google, IBM, the MacArthur Foundation, and the
National Endowment for the Arts. Their low-​­budget production is rather a
point of pride, the signature style of a theater with a particular vision of itself.
Founded in 2002 by Malik Gillani and Jamil Khoury as a response to the
anti-​­Arab and anti-​­Islam sentiments sweeping across the United States after
the 9/11 attacks, it set out to be a grassroots theater for the multi-​­faith and
multiethnic communities that once flourished on the trade routes linking Asia
to Africa and Europe. The Komunyakaa-​­Gracia adaptation of Gilgamesh is
very much in that spirit.
I go into these details because these empirical circumstances are almost
never mentioned in theories of the epic. While Mikhail Bakhtin draws on the
language of theater to create an analytical vocabulary for the novel—­for the
“carnival” in Rabelais—­the politics and pragmatics of stage adaptation are
subjects that never come up when he discusses the epic, which he dismisses
as a dead-​­end genre, ossified and moribund, with a past but no present or
future.3 What difference does it make to see the epic through an empirical
lens, through specific instances of translation, citation, and stage adaptation,
instances of recycling that bring it back, break it up, and redistribute it across
a variety of locations and platforms? How do these activities, often happen-
ing at irregular intervals and at locations hard to predict, complicate our
understanding of this particular genre and of “genre” as a planetary phe-
nomenon, an evolving field spread across temporal as well as geographical
coordinates?
The Komunyakaa-​­Gracia adaptation reaches back to the oldest known
epic, a non-​­Western one, predating the Iliad and the Odyssey by a thou-
sand years. It reminds us of the local and largely ungeneralizable contexts for
recycling, some having to do with the quirks of on-​­site production and some
much broader in scope, fueled by large-​­scale events such as global terrorism
and the 9/11 attacks. How do these input networks—­macro, micro, and any
number of intermediaries—­bear on the form of the epic, its morphological
spectrum over the course of five thousand years, as well as the permutative
possibilities of any particular moment? What is the typical scale of operation
Gilgamesh’s Planetary Turns 127

for the genre, and how much variation might we expect as we navigate within
one work and among several works?

Mash-up

The case of Gilgamesh is especially instructive. Unlike the Iliad and the
Odyssey, the Mesopotamian epic originated in written form, etched into clay
tablets. It was not improvisationally composed by rhapsodes, who selectively
rearranged the oral epics as they traveled. And yet, in its enormous range of
variations—­far more diverse than the Homeric epics—­this epic stands as the
earliest (and still most stunning) example of a text that was never integral to
begin with, a text that upon its transcription was immediately translated and
continued to flourish only through various turns of translation, combination,
and recombination.
Gilgamesh was a historical king who ruled in the Mesoptamian city of
Uruk around 2750 b.c.e. Legends about him probably arose shortly after
his death; they were first written in Sumerian, a non-​­Semitic language with
no relation to Akkadian, the Semitic language in which Gilgamesh would
eventually be circulated across Mesopotamia. This earliest Sumerian material
seems to have existed as five separate poems for about a thousand years, long
after the Sumerian people were overrun by their Semitic neighbors; around
1700 b.c.e. the poems began to be collated and translated into the cuneiform
script of the Babylonian language, a dialect of Akkadian. The best preserved
were twelve tablets pieced together a bit later, probably around 1200 b.c.e.
by the scholar-​­priest Sin-​­liqe-​­unninni, and eventually brought to the library
of Ashurbanipal, king of Assyria (668–­627 b.c.e.).
As is clear from this brief account, the making of Gilgamesh was long
drawn out even in ancient Mesopotamia; the shape of the text and its basic
features varied tremendously from one collator to another and one transla-
tor to another. These early efforts at collation, however, were nothing like the
monumental labor performed in the nineteenth century by European scholars
faced with hundreds and thousands of broken fragments of such clay tab-
lets.4 How to restore these to some legible order? Since the epic existed in so
many different versions, put together by so many different scribes over such
a long period of time, and since none of these had survived intact—­even the
most complete set, Sin-​­liqe-​­unninni’s, is missing approximately one-​­third of its
lines—­guesswork was unavoidable in the nineteenth century, and it remains
unavoidable in every modern translation. Stephen Mitchell’s, one of the most
readable, uses Sin-​­liqe-​­unninni’s twelve-​­tablet “Standard Version” as the pri-
mary source, filling in the gaps with words or lines from some other tablets
and from the Sumerian poems. Andrew George’s 1999 Penguin edition and
Benjamin Foster’s 2001 Norton Critical Edition go even further. In the Penguin
edition, Sin-​­liqe-​­unninni’s “Standard Version” is presented along with four
128 Wai Chee Dimock

other versions: Babylonian texts from the early second millennium b.c.e.; Bab-
ylonian texts from the late second millennium b.c.e.; texts from the late second
millennium b.c.e. but from outside Babylonia; and, finally, the Sumerian poems.
In the Norton Critical Edition, four texts are offered: the “Standard Version”;
the Sumerian poems; a late second-​­millennium b.c.e. translation of Gilgamesh
into the Hittite language; and, finally, a parody called The Gilgamesh Letter.
Both the Penguin and the Norton editions use square brackets and ellipses to
indicate either conjectural inserts or unfilled gaps in the text.
What counts as the “text” of Gilgamesh—­what is included and what is left
out, how the gaps are filled and with what additional material—­reflects an edi-
tor’s preferences more than anything else. These preferences can go quite far in
remaking the text, giving it an up-​­to-​­date purpose, an up-​­to-​­date agenda. Ste-
phen Mitchell, for instance, translating Gilgamesh in the twenty-​­first century,
cannot help seeing in the Mesopotamian epic an “eerie counterpoint to the
recent American invasion of Iraq.” In the poem, Gilgamesh’s sudden announce-
ment of epic purpose sounds in this context like the immemorial words of “the
original preemptive strike”: “where the fierce monster Humbaba lives. / We
must kill him and drive out evil from the world.”5 Is this really a battle of good
against evil, as Gilgamesh claims? “Everything in the poem argues against
it,” Mitchell says. “As a matter of fact, the only evil we are informed of is the
suffering Gilgamesh has inflicted on his own people; the only monster is Gil-
gamesh himself.” Humbaba, the targeted villain, “hasn’t harmed a single living
being”: Mitchell explains that it is “impossible to see Humbaba as a threat to
the security of Uruk or as part of any ‘axis of evil.’ ” On the contrary, as the
guardian of the Cedar Forest, he “is a figure of balance and a defender of the
ecosystem. (Having a monster or two around to guard our national forests
from corporate and other predators wouldn’t be such a bad thing.)”6
Komunyakaa and Gracia do not claim for Gilgamesh quite this degree of
contemporary relevance, although, as we will see, their play is not without
topical accents of its own. Since theirs is not a translation but a stage adap-
tation venturing into an entirely different medium, the allowable deviations
are also much greater. Komunyakaa took full advantage of these, not only
inventing entirely new characters but also in some instances using the out-
line of the epic only as a loose-​­fitting shell to develop themes he had already
been exploring elsewhere. The initial idea for the play had come not from
him but from Gracia. Unlike Komunyakaa, a Pulitzer Prize-​­winning poet,
and unlike Stephen Mitchell, celebrated translator of the Bhagavad Gita, the
Tao Te Ching, and the Book of Job, among other works, Gracia is a drama-
turge operating on a considerably lower level. (On his own website he is now
listed as working in international trade and development, specializing in the
Middle East.) It is fair to say that he is less the top dog in the theater world
than a persevering fan of the Mesopotamian epic, determined to give it a
contemporary staging.
Gilgamesh’s Planetary Turns 129

Corruptible Body

Gracia was first introduced to Gilgamesh as a young reader of Will Durant’s

Our Oriental Heritage. It was the beginning of a lifelong attachment. For
weeks after reading it, he could not get this line out of his head: “I too shall
die, for am I not like Enkidu?”7 The line is Gilgamesh’s. He and Enkidu have
been inseparable up to this point, their partnering not an issue. After the
slaying of Humbaba, however, this inseparability suddenly becomes vexed.
Gilgamesh does not want to be exactly like his friend at just this moment for
Enkidu has been singled out for punishment by the gods: of the two, he is
the one who must die. This differential outcome is in some sense the logical
extension of the initial difference between the two friends: from the first we
know that Gilgamesh is part God (through his mother, Ninsun, he is sup-
posed to be “two-​­thirds divine, one-​­third human”), whereas Enkidu seems to
be part animal: he is the “man-​­beast of the Steppe.”8 Both, it seems, are only
fractionally human but fractional in opposite ways, pointing to two antitheti-
cal forms of identity. How do these get resolved? If humans are always going
to be part-​­animal and part-​­god, which of these two gene pools will rise to the
top, or, realistically, which will turn out to be the non-​­negotiable baseline, the
most fundamental fact about us?
The death of Enkidu raises the question to a fever pitch. No longer fully
human, is there enough humanity left for the corpse to resist being banished
to the other side? How long can it put off that eventuality? How long can it
hold on to its fractional species membership before being relegated once and
for all to a much lower rung of the taxonomic hierarchy? Hanging in the bal-
ance seems to be the very nature of “humanness”—­our place in the animate
and inanimate world, our relations to other living things and to non-​­sentient
organic matter. Who are our kin, our kind? Especially troubling here are the
physicality of the body and its seemingly inexorable outcome. Does a body
like that not doom us to being more animal-​­like rather than godlike? What
exactly does it mean to be attached to, and coextensive with, a body that is
perishable and corruptible?
Gilgamesh is unsparing on this point. Rather than giving Enkidu a digni-
fied and ceremonious end, the Gilgamesh author(s) show him at the last as
a corpse, a mound of dead flesh. Enkidu’s deadness is accented by a small
visual detail that has maximum shock effect, a revolting close-​­up from which
we are not allowed to look away. It is this small detail that is stuck in Gracia’s
mind. We can think of it as a moment of “microcization”: Gilgamesh hanging
onto the corpse, not letting go, until

a maggot
drop[ped] from Enkidu’s
nose.9
130 Wai Chee Dimock

Gracia was reading Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death at the same time as
he was reading Gilgamesh, and it seemed to him that what Becker was saying
about human beings—­that we are “gods with anuses”—­could have served
as well as a motto for the Sumerian epic.10 Gross physicality is, of course, a
common sight in the epic; there are numerous instances in Homer’s work,
especially in the Iliad. But Gilgamesh is unique in putting the maggot at
center stage, magnifying it far beyond its objective puniness. This is the less-​
­than-​­human emblem of the less-​­than-​­human baseline of our species: it unites
all of us, and it unites our species to all the others. As common denominators
go, this one is exceptionally low, setting the bar for species membership at a
level where there is in fact no sharp distinction between humans and nonhu-
mans, nor between the so-​­called civilized and the so-​­called barbaric. Death
seen up close, fear of dying oneself, the instant degradability of the physical
body: these are the basic ingredients that make up the epic landscape shared
by humans and animals. The genre is “primitive” in this sense: not only is
Gilgamesh the oldest literature known to humans, but also the emotions pro-
voked by it are raw, visceral, and primal. From the standpoint of evolution,
they represent the most elemental brain processes, evolved in and robustly
shared by a large number of animal species, having been there from the first
and likely to be there till the bitter end.
Yet rather than being permanently stuck in the past and cut off from the
living world, as Bakhtin contends, the epic is the genre of the living world.
It is the genre that carries forward the most physically grounded, basic emo-
tions known to humankind. The epic is a prehistoric continuum surviving
into the twenty-​­first century, enunciating fears and hurts undiminished in
strength and sway over the species. It is able to serve as this carrier mostly
by remaining a “low” genre both in terms of its simple, death-​­driven narra-
tives and in terms of the deflationary view of humanity that such narratives
call up. This is a genre that constructs a spectrum of life forms—­gods on
the one end, worms on the other—­and leaves little doubt about where we
humans stand. “Mortals”: this is the label that the epic reserves for our spe-
cies. It sums us up. And, when the end arrives, as it is guaranteed to do, the
epic quite often marks that occurrence with a formal spasm: simultaneously
magnifying, contracting, and disorienting, it gives the end of life a hallucina-
tory intensity that fills every inch of space yet shrinks to a smaller and smaller
point.

Macro and Micro

All of which is to say that the epic is doing active work on more than one
scale, going back and forth between the large and the small and bring-
ing these two into dialogue, bringing one to bear on the other, if not as an
inverted prism, then as a persistent counterpoint. Aristotle is wrong, then, to
Gilgamesh’s Planetary Turns 131

associate the epic only with the vexingly large. The vexingly small is equally
within its province.11
In fact, it probably does not make a lot of sense to maintain a strict sepa-
ration between the epic and other genres simply on the basis of a text’s own
size or of the size of that which it examines, for the epic’s operating coordi-
nates are far from uniform, with a broad spectrum of variation linked to an
alternating rhythm, often crossing over into the territory that is traditionally
assigned to other genres.
In what follows, I would like to argue against a strict separation between
epic and lyric. Rather than aligning the former only with the macro and
the latter only with the micro, I would like to see these dimensional planes
as up-​­and-​­down scalar variations that can be switched into and switched
out of quite routinely, without too much fuss. Epic and lyric, in this view,
are complementary registers, a functional duality allowing representational
space to expand or contract as the need arises, to alternate when necessary
between the technically neutral bird’s-​­eye view and the deliberately charged
close-​­up. While it still makes sense to think of lyric and epic as distinct genres,
the “lyricization” of the epic is by no means oxymoronic but rather an impor-
tant operational dimension of the genre, making it scale-​­rich, scale-​­variable.
For this reason, the otherwise localized phenomenon of death, happen-
ing inside just one body, can be both hidebound and world-​­destroying, both
center and circumference. In Gilgamesh death is figured in both the concen-
trated repulsiveness of the maggot and the reproducible story of grief and
fear, occasioned by the corruptibility of the body and expanding to include
many spin-offs from the death event. It is a story populated by a host of
gods and a host of unclassifiable creatures (such as Humbaba and the Scor-
pion People). All have some relation to humans, to the mortals that we are.
The epic is a multi-​­scale, multi-​­species environment that stretches the bounds
of representation far beyond the customary borders of the “real,” turning
unthinkably alien life forms into companionable creatures and interlocutors
on life’s journey.
It should come as no surprise, then, that one of the names the epic would
adopt in the twentieth century is “science fiction.” A modern mutation of the
ancient genre, science fiction adds extraterrestrial species and interplanetary
travel to the epic plot but otherwise sticks with the same death-​­driven and
life-​­seeking narratives and the emotions they reproduce and reactivate. Inti-
mation of mortality, the physical nature of the body, and the up-​­for-​­grabs
definition of “humanness” itself: these basic ingredients of the Mesopota-
mian epic are also the basic ingredients of science fiction. One telling example
illustrates this. Nearly five thousand years after Gilgamesh’s inception, the
102nd episode of the 1990s television series Star Trek: The Next Genera-
tion reaches back in self-​­conscious tribute to the ancient epic. The “Darmok”
episode, well known among literary scholars, reinscribes the “epic DNA”
of Gilgamesh—­what made it so powerful and widely translated in ancient
132 Wai Chee Dimock

Mesopotamia and also what makes it so eminently recyclable now. And yet,
while this Star Trek episode does reenact the iconic scene of one companion
dying and the other grieving, its overwhelming focus is not on the biological
necessity of death but rather on the human determination to survive.12
This example, and numerous others like it, suggests that the epic is best
explored as a cascading form, with a downstream textual field exploding
in volume, energized by various projective arcs and increasingly scattered
across a variety of genres and media. The Star Trek episode is indeed a
striking example, a transcoding and redirecting of those cuneiform tablets
onto a non-​­text-​­based (or at least not strictly text-​­based) platform that is
mass-​­circulated and low in literary prestige but high in popular appeal, as
measured in number of viewers. The ease with which the epic can make it
onto the TV screen points to at least three possibilities. First, the genre seems
to have an easily mobilized set of optics and a predisposition towards images,
perhaps because humans have always been more visual than linguistic or
because human emotions before the advent of language were triggered by
visual cues.13 Second, popular culture is not a problem for the epic. It is
entirely at home there, its primitive griefs and fears and its easily visualiz-
able plots comprehensible even to the unschooled and needing no exegesis.
And finally, the frequency of recycling in the epic speaks to “lyricization” as
one of the most important self-​­propagating mechanisms of the genre, since
a very small group of words, and certainly not the entire epic, is selectively
highlighted, extracted, and circulated anew, gaining new meanings and enter-
ing into new associations in entirely different environments. It is not the large
size of the epic but the portability of a tiny fraction of it that allows it to
spread far and wide, to be cited and embedded over and over again, in count-
less new updates and remakes.
But if this is true, portability would seem to rest on something like the
non-​­integrity of the original text—­the ease with which the latter can be bro-
ken up, pieces of it dislodged and taken elsewhere, and the ease with which it
can be mixed in with new material, not only in contexts increasing far away
in time and geography but also in registers often operating at a lower cultural
elevation. As we have seen with Gilgamesh, the general tendency for the epic,
in the thousands of years of its recycling, is to drift steadily downward, assimi-
lating itself to more popular tastes, moving to more popular venues, speaking
the street vernacular of the locals. The epic is eminently “corruptible” in this
sense: random composting is natural to it, while fragmenting, fermenting,
and disintegrating are its life-​­processes. Not only does the genre have a the-
matic interest in the degradability of matter, but it also is itself a part of that
process, degrading with gusto and feeding the unsparing but microbially vital
downward percolations that carry the process forward. From this perspec-
tive, the maggot is not only a repulsive detail; it is a counterintuitively lyrical
detail, a close-​­up too gross for comfort but also life-​­giving in that grossness.
It keeps the epic going, just as it keeps the planet’s ecosystem turning.
Gilgamesh’s Planetary Turns 133

The Maggot and the DNA of Epic

What would a play look like that gives pride of place to the maggot, a play
dedicated to the twin concepts of corruptibility and renewability? Gracia
started casting about for a playwright already thinking along those lines.
Komunyakaa caught his attention right away, since the poet already has
under his belt a poem entitled “Ode to the Maggot”:

Brother of the blowfly

& godhead, you work magic
Over battlefields,
In slabs of bad pork
& flophouses. Yes, you
Go to the root of all things.
You are sound & mathematical.
Jesus Christ, you’re merciless
With the truth. Ontological & lustrous,
You cast spells on beggars & kings
Behind the stone door of Caesar’s tomb
Or split trench in a field of ragweed.
No decree or creed can outlaw you
As you take every living thing apart. Little
Master of earth, no one gets to heaven
Without going through you first.14

“Ode to the Maggot” was published in 2000 in Talking Dirty to the Gods.
Komunyakaa was probably not thinking of Gilgamesh when he wrote this
poem, and in fact its emotional orientation is significantly different. In
Gilgamesh, the maggot is harsh, unstoppable, the voice of necessity from
the biosphere. “Ode to the Maggot,” on the other hand, is almost a fond
tribute to the “little / Master of earth,” finding something “ontological &
lustrous” where most people would feel disgust. The poem employs a shift
in perspective and in scale of attention that marks a shift from epic to lyric,
recognizable even within a strict definition of those two genres. The shift is
not too difficult, for the maggot in fact has the scalar flexibility that allows
it to be at home in the alternating rhythm that links the two genres. On a
lyrical note, Komunyakaa’s poem reminds us that decomposing texts, like
decomposing bodies, are the lifeblood of any generative process, a thought
twined around the disintegration of matter that it executes on the epic stage.
This modern-​­day maggot, in short, has enough in common with the ancient
one in Mesopotamia to convince Gracia that Komunyakaa “had a Gilgamesh
waiting inside him all along.15
It is an interesting idea, a theory of literature based on the virtual guarantee
of cross-​­time reproduction. Even as the epic carries forward the evolutionary
134 Wai Chee Dimock

psychology of the human species on a large scale, it would seem itself to be

enacting a micro-​­evolution on its own, long drawn out but apparently fairly
dependable. What Gracia is proposing, in fact, is a special kind of textual
genetics, based not on the replication of a DNA script but rather on the
mutation and fragmentation of textual motifs, linguistic clusters, into smaller
and smaller recombinable units. This would be a “lyricization” uniquely able
to propagate, to produce new and altered assemblages at greater and greater
distances. How do we otherwise account for the proven track record of Gil-
gamesh, for its history of being recycled over and over again, not always
predictably, but not without some degree of regularity?
The environmental reason for this continuity is both simpler and more
inexorable than we might think. For, to the extent that the death of physical
organisms has remained a hard fact across time—­in effect, one of the key
constants of the biosphere—­and to the extent that most of us have remained
unreconciled to it, unconsoled in the face of its necessity, mortality might turn
out to be the single most consequential human event on the planet, experi-
enced to the full from one generation to another. The primitive devastations
of Gilgamesh are no less devastating now than they were five thousand years
ago. The potency and transmissibility of this particular bit of genetic material
make the epic robust, durable, and adaptable.
As Komunyakaa’s poem illustrates, however, the epic DNA reproduced
throughout his corpus might not be mortality as a general condition but
rather the smaller, grosser pressure point that is the maggot. This particular
fascination no doubt has something to do with the author’s background and
the entwined coarseness and delicacy surrounding death in that particular
environment. Son of a carpenter, Komunyakaa grew up in Bogalusa, Louisi-
ana, forty miles north of New Orleans. He was given the name James William
Brown, but later reclaimed the African name Komunyakaa, the name of his
grandfather, a stowaway from the West Indies:

My grandfather came from Trinidad

Smuggled in like a sack of papaya
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The name Brown fitted him like trouble.16

The family was poor. One of the effects of that poverty was a kind of com-
panionship with death, an accommodation to the act of killing and with
what happens after the killing. In the “Meat” section of the long poem “A
Good Memory,” Komunyakaa writes:

Folk magic hoodooed us

Till the varmints didn’t taste bitter
Or wild. We boys & girls
Gilgamesh’s Planetary Turns 135

Knew how to cut away musk glands

Behind their legs. Good
With knives, we believed
We weren’t poor.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  . . .
Sometimes
We weighed the bullet
In our hands, tossing it left
To right, wondering if it was
Worth more than the kill.17

Someone who kills to eat every day is going to have a very different atti-
tude than would well-​­to-​­do urbanites about meat consumption and about
the edible nature of bodies. Hunger, a perennial problem in Bogalusa, would
have been much worse if individual animal bodies were not so easily degrad-
able, so easily absorbed back into the vital processes of the biosphere. This
recycling-​­based aesthetics gives the maggot an honored place in Komun-
yakaa’s poetry, assigning it the same ontological centrality (if a somewhat
different emotional charge) that it carried in Gilgamesh. And, of course, it
was this small, diligent, and easily portable bit of epic DNA that would also
accompany the poet as he went to war.
For, in fact, Komunyakaa went to Vietnam. He was there from 1969 to
1970, working for the Army’s newspaper, The Southern Cross, covering the
military action and writing articles on Vietnamese history that won him a
Bronze Star. He also published a volume of poems, Dien Cai Dau, perhaps
the most memorable poetry to come out of the Vietnam War. In this volume,
there is another poem, “We Never Know,” also seemingly descended from
Gilgamesh, that reenacts the same divided tableau of dying and surviving and
once again puts flies and maggots at the center:

He danced with tall grass

for a moment, like he was swaying
with a woman. Our gun barrels
glowed white-​­hot.
When I got to him,
a blue halo
of flies had already claimed him.
I pulled the crumbled photograph
from his fingers.
There’s no other way
to say this: I fell in love.
The morning cleared again,
except for a distant mortar
136 Wai Chee Dimock

& somewhere choppers taking off.

I slid the wallet into his pocket
& turned him over, so he wouldn’t be
kissing the ground.18

The dead man in the poem is a complete stranger, most likely an enemy
combatant, someone the poet has just killed, someone he is supposed to kill.
Yet this death is anything but routine. On the contrary, it is self-​­consciously
lyrical: a spot of time special unto itself, luminous and overflowing with
meaning, its smallness amplified into something much larger. It is fitting that
this subjectively magnified event should be coupled with and offered in coun-
terpoint to the larger narrative of war, here miniaturized in its turn. For death
in combat is indeed a classic moment of scalar instability, oscillating between
two or more phenomenal planes, between epic expanse and lyric compres-
sion, between the impersonal necessity of killing and the convulsiveness of
death as bodily event.
The poem begins on a lyrical note, with a slightly blurred, almost halluci-
natory image of the enemy combatant swaying and dancing. But it pulls back
from that lyricization as it moves swiftly to the other end of the emotional
spectrum, its descriptive lens zeroing in on the now-​­fallen body, with a “halo
/ of flies” already gathered. It is unsightly, grossly reductive and deflating,
turning the dead soldier instantly into an abject corpse: edible flesh, food for
worms. We could call this a moment of ecological realism; an impersonal,
across-​­the-​­board recycling downward. Yet this particular form of recycling
is one that acknowledges the subjectivity of each organism rather than eras-
ing it completely. In fact, in a double-​­stranded structure almost like a double
helix, the ecological realism is coupled here with an organism-​­based lyricism
that counters it, a lyricism that grants the fallen soldier a degree of individu-
ality. Startlingly, completely out of the blue, the poet announces that he has
fallen in love. We do not know with whom he has fallen in love, whether it
is the dead man or the person in the crumbled photograph pulled out of his
wallet by the speaker just before the man dies. But that almost does not mat-
ter. The identity of the love recipient is less important than the fact that the
sentiment is there, amplified, attended to, and given poetic life. Both epic and
lyric are honored by this alternating rhythm, a scalar flexibility that unmakes
and remakes, as tender as it is hard-​­nosed.
And the alternation persists. The poem’s speaker now makes another ges-
ture in the direction of lyric as he does two last things: he puts the wallet back
into the dead man’s pocket and turns him over, to face up. These gestures,
each deliberate, each unexplained, and all non-​­trivial, do not change the fact
that the dead man is organic matter. They do not have the power to fend off
the “blue halo / of flies” that are most certainly there. On the contrary, it is
the visceral proximity of those flies that makes the cross-​­stitched rhythm of
epic and lyric so powerful, with two force fields intertwined and yet pulling
Gilgamesh’s Planetary Turns 137

in opposing directions, energized by that paradox, carrying forward both the

non-​­negotiability of our physical end and the infinitely negotiable turns of
textual reproduction.

Variation and Mutation

Since this alternating rhythm is so close to the expanding and contracting

phenomenal planes of death in combat,19 we should not be surprised that,
in his more recent collection, Warhorses (2008), as Komunyakaa turns from
Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan, the same genetic material from Gilgamesh
and the same double-​­stranded structure would be brought along, put to work
in these new environments. The cross-​­stitching of the large and the small is
reflected this time in the very form of the poetry. In a long, fourteen-​­section
poem called “Love in the Time of War,” Komunyakaa devotes an entire
section to the Sumerian epic, taking in the gods and the cosmos but also
lyricizing the death of one particular individual, turning it into an arresting
micro-​­phenomenon:

Gilgamesh’s Humbaba was a distant drum

pulsing among the trees, a slave to the gods,
a foreign tongue guarding the sacred cedars
down to a pale grubworm in the tower
before Babel. Invisible & otherworldly,
he was naked in the king’s heart,
& his cry turned flies into maggots
& blood reddened the singing leaves.20

The death of Humbaba is here given a context, a dense psychology, and a

visceral immediacy. Once again, the maggots are impossible to miss, although
this key signifier has now been transferred from Enkidu to Humbaba. This
unexpected shift suggests that the epic is perhaps distinguished above all by
its “mutating genes.” Periodic shifts in its centers of gravity might turn out
to be a crucial self-​­propagating mechanism, as important to the ongoing life
of the epic form as anything that was written on the original clay tablets.
This is another way of saying that, for the planet-​­wide continuum that is
the epic, variation is the rule rather than the exception. Its ontology is the
ontology of local input and local inflection: ever-​­multiplying, often randomly
generated.
Humbaba is a case in point. As he appeared in the Mesopotamian texts,
Humbaba was the guardian of the sacred Cedar Forest, restricted more or less
to that sole function. He embodied a divine prohibition, and yet, strangely, he
was also supposed to be evil. Stephen Mitchell, as we have seen, has seized
upon this apparent contradiction and turned it into a fable for our own
138 Wai Chee Dimock

time. According to him, the supposed evil of Humbaba is largely projected

by Gilgamesh, a preemptive name-​­calling to justify a preemptive first strike.
Komunyakaa and Gracia do not go quite so far, but, like Mitchell, they are
also struck by Humbaba less as a substantive entity than as a hollow sound.
With no demonstrable physical might, he is merely a rumbling sound. The
stage directions say, “The marching-​­rolling sound of Humbaba’s approach is
heard—­circular. He is not seen. ‘Humbaba’ grows into a resounding echo.”
A creature of hearsay, Humbaba falls apart almost instantly in this stage
adaptation. Enkidu says:

Humbaba is no god.
He is a small beast
in a big forest.
He is only a roar
among the night trees.21

Humbaba as a small beast in a big forest is not strictly an invention by

Komunyakaa and Gracia; the character is not an absolute departure from the
Mesopotamian epic. This ambiguously unclassified creature has always been
an agent, a proxy; he executes the will of the gods and serves at their pleasure.
And the Mesopotamian gods are nothing if not treacherous. It is Shamash,
after all, who unleashes the thirteen winds that blind Humbaba and pin him
down, turning his imminent victory over Gilgamesh into a defeat. Still, it
takes the stage adaptation and “Love in the Time of War” to turn the fate
of Humbaba into a fully imagined story about a low-​­level functionary, quite
far down on the totem pole, done in by the higher power he serves. He is not
only “a slave to the gods” (which is more or less what we might expect) but,
surprisingly, always “a foreign tongue” to them, meaningless as far as they
are concerned, a tongue they never bother to learn.
But in what sense is Humbaba “a foreign tongue”? This is a manner of
speaking, of course, since there is no evidence anywhere that Humbaba’s
actual language requires translation. His foreignness to the gods and his sta-
tus as an alien come rather from the fact that, existentially and taxonomically,
he belongs to a different level, a lower order: they are immortal, but he is not.
Unlike the gods, and very much like Enkidu, Humbaba is perishable and cor-
ruptible, and the flies and maggots are there to prove it. These creatures are
certainly nothing new: they have been with humans “before Babel.” What is
new, though, is that what is a given for humans is now a given for Humbaba
as well. Not even remotely godlike, he is no better and no different from his
supposed adversaries. The label “mortal” applies to him just it does to them,
making him an eternal underling, “invisible and otherworldly” to the gods. If
there had been any previous ambiguity about how to classify Humbaba and
where he stood on the spectrum between gods and humans, the nature of his
servitude and the nature of his death put that beyond doubt.
Gilgamesh’s Planetary Turns 139

The “humanization” of Humbaba—­here, effectively a demotion—­is indeed

a significant departure from the Sumerian epic, a recycling so radical that I
would like to call it a base modification. In “Love in the Time of War,” it is
not through Gilgamesh, and not even through Enkidu, but rather through
Humbaba, that “humanness” is being defined. And it is being defined in terms
of its lowest common denominator, its physical degradation and psychologi-
cal abjection. If the vitality of the epic comes in part from a downdrift, a
channeling of its emotional charge toward the lower rungs of the hierarchy,
in the hands of Komunyakaa that downward momentum reinvents the genre
even as it redraws the boundaries between what is human and what is not.
That impetus gives us a repopulated baseline that is increasingly the center of
gravity, and it puts corresponding pressures on the shape of history told from
that standpoint. Moreover, though “slave to the gods” could have been just a
catchphrase, the word “slave,” coming from Komunyakaa, is neither casual
nor trivial. Nor is it casual or trivial that this particular layer of American his-
tory is being called up by the Iraq war, a military operation manned by those
with no say in the process, “slaves” to higher powers who act as if they were
gods. What results from this base modification is a radical redrawing of the
epic map, a redefinition that loosens the criteria for species membership even
as it turns over the most vital part of the story to the lower ranks.

Another Continent

This outcome, so striking in “Love in the Time of War,” is not the only one
possible, however. How would the epic map and its emotional baseline be
modified again, when it is recycled on yet another continent and woven into
the lives of other below-​­the-​­threshold groups? In her novel Gilgamesh (2001),
the Australian author Joan London brings Gilgamesh to Nunderup, in south-
western Australia. However, remaining true to this epic’s peregrinations over
the course of the past five thousand years, she does not limit her action to
one geographic or temporal location. Instead, her narrative is looped through
major historical events of the twentieth century: World War I, the Armenian
genocide, the Soviet invasion of Armenia, and the outbreak of World War II.
It brings Edith Clark, a young Australian woman, and her young son, Jim,
first to London and then to Yerevan, Armenia, and finally through Persia and
Syria before returning to Nunderup.
What sets this planetary travel in motion is the arrival in Nunderup of two
young men: Edith’s cousin Leopold, who had been working on an archaeo-
logical dig not far from Baghdad, and Aram, his Armenian driver. The two
companions had driven all across Mesopotamia, visiting ancient sites such
as Ur, Nineveh, and Uruk. And now, in Australia’s southwest, what they miss
the most is the site of the royal libraries of Nineveh, where the clay tablets
of Gilgamesh were first found. Leopold is never without this text: he “and
140 Wai Chee Dimock

Aram spoke of Gilgamesh as if they knew him.” They tell Edith about what
great friends Gilgamesh and Enkidu were, and how “the two of them became
so arrogant together that the gods decreed Enkidu must die and go to the
Underworld.”22
Once again, the stage is set for two companions and the death that awaits
one of them. Who will it be? Edith’s fate is intertwined with that of both men:
it is Aram, the father of her child, whom she has set out to look for, but it is
Leopold who shows up and escorts her on her return trip. It is also Leopold’s
jeep that hits a land mine not far from Aleppo. He has just left Edith and
Jim there, in the safety of an orphanage; the explosion can be heard where
they are. Yet he turns out to be alive and well at the end of the novel, send-
ing a letter in his still-​­recognizable handwriting to let Edith know that he is
in Baghdad once again, drinking coffee every day in a café, learning Arabic.
There will be no reunion between him and Edith, but Jim is taking “the first
ship out” to see for himself (256).
In this recycling, Gilgamesh dies and is resurrected. It seems that nobody
has thought of this permutation before, just as nobody has thought of a
young Australian woman as an epic protagonist or her lover as an Armenian
who is able to survive several wars. The baseline population has shifted yet
another way, and not in a way that anyone could have predicted. But we
should not be too surprised, after all. Something new always happens when
the old decomposes, as the epic is bound to do. Reaching back to several
non-​­Western ancient languages, and mutating to incorporate countless local
circumstances in a five-​­thousand-​­year-​­old recycling, these macro and micro
networks of variants, at once finite and yet endlessly extendable, show that
literature is above all a series of planetary turns.

Notes

1. David Damrosch, What Is World Literature? (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton

University Press, 2003), 4 (emphasis in original).
2. See Yusef Komunyakaa and Chad Gracia, Gilgamesh: A Verse Play (Middle-
town, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2006).
3. Mikhail Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four
Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Aus-
tin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 3–­40.
4. David Damrosch, The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great
Epic of Gilgamesh (New York: Henry Holt, 2007), 3.
5. Stephen Mitchell, introduction to Gilgamesh: A New English Version, trans.
Stephen Mitchell (New York: Free, 2004), 26.
6. Ibid., 29–­30.
7. Chad Gracia, “Collaborating with Komunyakaa: The Creation of Gil-
gamesh,” Callaloo 28, no. 3 (Summer 2005): 542.
8. Komunyakaa and Gracia, Gilgamesh: A Verse Play, 27.
Gilgamesh’s Planetary Turns 141

9. Ibid., 56.
10. Gracia, “Collaborating with Komunyakaa,” 542.
11. While in Poetics the epic’s bulk and breaking of dramatic unity are a
challenge for Aristotle, the hexameter is able to turn the epic’s extra mass into
acceptable size, letting in all sorts of elements that would not have been admit-
ted into a form such as tragedy. Here again we have a productive interchange
between macro and micro at the level of form. In addition, Aristotle points
to the presence of foreign words and metaphors in the epic, but the influx of
foreignness—­material coming from the outside, not there from the first and not
there by invitation—­would seem far more endemic than his isolated examples
would suggest, its effects not incidental but fundamental to the genre. See Aristo-
tle, Poetics, trans. Gerald F. Else (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970),
sec. 22. For a longer discussion of this section of Poetics, see my Through Other
Continents: American Literature across Deep Time (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 2006), 81–­82.
12. “Darmok,” Star Trek: The Next Generation, season 5, episode 2, aired
September 30, 1991.
13. Antonio R. Damasio and Jonathan H. Turner, among others, have argued
that emotions evolved much earlier than language did, and that pre-​­linguistic
affect was largely visual in nature. See, for instance, Antonio R. Damasio, The
Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness
(New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999); and Jonathan H. Turner, On the Origins of
Human Emotions: A Sociological Inquiry into the Evolution of Human Affect
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000).
14. Yusef Komunyakaa, “Ode to the Maggot,” in Talking Dirty to the Gods
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), 10.
15. Gracia, “Collaborating with Komunyakaa,” 544.
16. Yusef Komunyakaa, “Mismatched Shoes,” in Magic City (Hanover, N.H.:
University Press of New England / Wesleyan University Press, 1992), 42.
17. Yusef Komunyakaa, “A Good Memory,” in Neon Vernacular: New and
Selected Poems (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England / Wesleyan
University Press, 1993), 14–­15.
18. Yusef Komunyakaa, “We Never Know,” in Dien Cai Dau (Middletown,
Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), 26.
19. In his classic meditation on historical method, Carlo Ginzburg argues that
war is an occasion interweaving the “extreme long shots” of macrohistory with
the extreme “close-​­ups” of subjective experience. See Ginzburg, The Cheese and
the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-​­Century Miller, trans. John Tedeschi and
Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980).
20. Yusef Komunyakaa, “Love in the Time of War,” in Warhorses: Poems (New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 4.
21. Gracia and Komunyakaa, Gilgamesh: A Verse Play, 47, 50.
22. Joan London, Gilgamesh: A Novel (New York: Grove, 2001), 41–­42. All
references hereafter are to this edition and are noted parenthetically.
 Writing for the Planet
Contemporary Australian Fiction

Paul Giles

Interest among writers in conceptions of the planetary is far from a recent

phenomenon. Srinivas Aravamudan, for instance, has discussed how “inter-
planetary reflections” were a staple of intellectual life during the Enlightenment,
when astronomical attempts to explicate rotations of the planets worked as a
corollary to the geographical exploration of distant lands that was also char-
acteristic of this era.1 Hester Blum has similarly emphasized how “theories
of planetarity” are freighted with “a historical specificity” through her dis-
cussion of John Cleves Symmes’s appropriation of Arctic space in his highly
idiosyncratic geophysical inquiries of the 1820s, which involved attempts to
discover a hollow interior to the Earth.2 In this sense, there is a possibility
that twenty-​­first-century debates around “a turn to the planet,” in the title of
a celebrated essay by Masao Miyoshi, may risk foreshortening complex cul-
tural and historical perspectives by focusing so insistently on one irreducible,
all-​­encompassing sphere, as if the planet were a fundamental trope, like the
one true god. Miyoshi’s 2001 essay does evoke specific material and political
concerns: “global neoliberalism,” the importance of class, the way the world
is “deterritorialized” for the rich but “sectioned into nations and nation-
alities for those who cannot afford to move or travel beyond their home
countries.” Nevertheless, Miyoshi ultimately goes on to argue that in light
of “the all-​­involving process of air pollution, ozone layer depletion, ocean
contamination, toxic accumulation, and global warming,” the very concept
of “literary studies” has now been reduced to “one basis and goal: to nurture
our common bonds to the planet—­to replace the imaginaries of exclusion-
ist familialism, communitarianism, nationhood, ethnic culture, regionalism,
‘globalization,’ or even humanism, with the ideal of planetarianism.”3 Along
parallel lines, Wai Chee Dimock has suggested that, in relation to ecology
and “the non-​­negotiability of our physical end,” the idea of the “planetary”
involves a sense of scale that challenges “the territoriality of the nation-​
­state,” bound as the latter customarily is to protectionist understandings of
sovereignty.4 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak likewise distinguishes between the
words “planet” and “world” or “globe,” which latter terms are, in Spivak’s

143
144 Paul Giles

account, more beholden to “the imposition of the same system of exchange

everywhere,” in “the gridwork of electronic capital.”5
But if the planetary turn has fluctuated through time, it also fluctuates
across space. One specific difficulty associated with this field is that the uni-
versalist and utopian proclivities woven into the very conception of what
Miyoshi calls a “planet-​­based totality” frequently involve an extrapolation of
much more localized perspectives.6 Indeed, there is often an uneasy conjunc-
tion between the planetary and the parochial, a sense that the idealist rhetoric
of planetarity serves to obfuscate narrower material or ideological interests.
In his invocation of the Pacific Ocean as a site of epiphany and perpetual
metamorphosis, to take one example, Rob Wilson effectively reconstitutes
the American sublime in another form, drawing explicitly for the title of
his book on a phrase taken from a 1640 sermon by Puritan elder Thomas
Shepard, of the First Church of Cambridge, Massachusetts: “Be always con-
verting, be always converted.” Though Wilson’s reading of Indigenous poetry
as “lines of flight across the Pacific” works as an illuminating corrective to
more land-​­based understandings of territorial formation, his aim “to remake
the terms of a U.S. covenant as something subject to poesis and change” all
too obviously involves dehistoricizing colonial formations and reimagining
them in transcendental terms. From this perspective, the process of what he
calls (following Paul Gilroy) “outer-​­national” self-​­formation becomes little
more than a mirror image of internalized self-​­formation, where traditional
U.S. values of spiritual apotheosis are projected upon the “Sea of Islands.” In
truth, such “Oceanic Kisses across Asia-​­Pacific” are poisoned darts, and this
is the time-​­honored American missionary impulse in another guise.7
The conundrum here is that an oppositional politics of the planet so clearly
informed by American perspectives has tended to critique what Chris Con-
nery (writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz) described as the
hegemonic values of U.S. market capitalism, while seeking instead to appro-
priate what Connery called the “geo-​­elemental” aspects of place as a way to
escape “the ideological binds of continents or regions.” Yet the irony endemic
to such a position involves a transposition of the values of romantic indepen-
dence traditionally ascribed to American literature and culture—­an escape
from “ideological binds”—­and their reinscription within a wider planetary
realm. Rather than addressing the more diffuse nature of colonial and geo-
political relations, American ecocritics sometimes lapse into a Manichaean
polarity, as if the framework of the planet could be sustained by what Con-
nery terms a geography of “resistance.”8 In truth, the politics of the planet are
always more complicated and variegated than such unilateral forces of “resis-
tance” can countenance, and planetary studies should rather take its cue from
cultural geographers such as Edward W. Soja, who argued a decade ago that
space should be seen as a “dialectical” phenomenon, or Doreen Massey, who
has suggested more recently along the same lines that the “time-​­space com-
pression” endemic to globalization needs to be differentiated socially and
Writing for the Planet 145

politically.9 What is true of globalization is also true of planetarity: rather

than being weighed down by a gravitational pull of uniform identity, whether
emanating from environmentalist or other sources, it is necessary to modu-
late the rhetoric of the planet through an understanding of how its trajectory
is always in earthly orbit. The most fundamental thing to say about a planet
is not that it is a finite resource, a scientific hypothesis which may or may not
be true, but that it is by definition always in rotation. A greater recognition
of how planetary perspectives are inherently mutable and shifting might thus
help to reorder the idea of the planet more within a material force field.
An uneasy consciousness of the planet as a disorienting phenomenon, a
sphere of crosscurrents and crossovers, can be tracked back into the canoni-
cal narratives of nineteenth-​­ century American literature. We find it, for
example, in Melville’s Moby-​­Dick (1851), which uses the watery nature of
the planet to hollow out the conventional pieties of life on land, or in Edgar
Allan Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), whose phantasmagori-
cal vision of the South Pole exposes as relative the magnetic needle of the
mariner’s compass. Poe’s final representation of how cartographic direction
slides away under the pressure of the blank Antarctic is reminiscent of his sci-
entific exegesis in “Eureka: An Essay on the Material and Spiritual Universe”
(1848), which considers Earth “in its planetary relations alone,” choosing
to disregard the “vanishing minutiae” of “exclusively terrestrial matters.”
Poe’s emphasis here is on the vastness of the solar system, the incapacity of
either the human mind or language to fathom “Infinity” other than as “the
thought of a thought,” and the concomitant impossibility of adducing “a fun-
damental First Cause” to explain the formation of the planets. Poe ridicules
attempts on the part of “the empire of Philosophy” to establish the unity of
the universe, humorously dismissing Kant as “the originator of that species
of Transcendentalism which, with the change merely of a C for a K, now
bears his peculiar name.” He thereby punningly disparages Kantian transcen-
dentalism as “cant,” and seeks instead to explicate the universe in terms of
a dynamic of attraction and repulsion, where the rotation and ellipses of
“planetary orbits” are predicated upon the interaction of magnetic crosscur-
rents.10 Given its discussion of specific astronomers—­Herschel, Laplace, Lord
Rosse, and others—­and its specific focus on the position of Neptune, Uranus,
and other planets, one might have expected Poe’s extended essay “Eureka” to
be a more foundational text in planetary studies than it actually is; yet Poe’s
marked skepticism about the extent to which the teleology of space can be
conceptualized and his specific disavowal of any understanding of primary
causes would make “Eureka” far too uncomfortable an experience for those
who would prefer to understand the planet in terms of more emollient forms
of biodiversity.
For Poe and Melville, then, the notion of the planet becomes above all
a destabilizing phenomenon, one that interrogates landlocked horizons by
revealing how conventional maps are always weighted in one manner or
146 Paul Giles

another. The oceanic dimensions of Moby-​­Dick explicitly take issue with the
assumptions of Matthew Maury, cited by Melville in a footnote to chapter 44
of the novel (“The Chart”), about how a supposedly providential geography
grants the Northern Hemisphere a divinely sanctioned hegemony over its
southern counterpart. The assumption of Maury, an officer in the U.S. Navy,
was that the oceanic sphere is readily susceptible to the laws of Manifest
Destiny, and in The Physical Geography of the Sea (1855) he characteristi-
cally described the Southern Hemisphere as the “boiler” and the Northern
Hemisphere as the “condenser of the steam-​­engine.”11 In Maury’s eyes, this
testified to a divine plan whereby the lower hemisphere had been designated
as inherently subordinate, but in Moby-​­Dick and his other works, of course,
Melville sports playfully with such received conceptions of the world through
manifold images of inversion. Within the “gigantic involutions” of Moby-​
­ ick, where the Pequod cruises across the Equator and round the Cape of
D
Good Hope before heading across the Indian Ocean and crossing again into
the Northern Hemisphere, the rotation of the planet betokens a relativizing
impulse that reveals ways in which traditional maps have become ossified.12
Much more recently, New Zealand-​­born historian J. G. A. Pocock has
described his own antipodean provenance as a factor in the tendency of his
subsequent work to construe “the world as an archipelago of histories rather
than a tectonic of continents.” Though Pocock specifically disavows “the
absurdity of imposing an antipodean framework on the history of the British
kingdoms,” what he calls his own “antipodean perception” does nevertheless
“invite their inhabitants to see themselves as an association of insular and
emigrant peoples, who had set going a diversity of histories in settings archi-
pelagic, Atlantic and oceanic.”13 It is such an understanding of transnational
fluidity and continuity as the abiding principle of social and political history,
rather than the kind of apocalyptic regeneration more typical of an American
missionary impulse, that has helped to shape the expansive planetary reach of
Pocock’s scholarship. In another version of planetarity similarly indebted to
cultural materialism, Australian art historian Bernard Smith, writing in 1986,
praised Peter Fuller for being, as Smith put it, “the first person to grasp the
trans-​­national implications of the Antipodean intervention of 1959.”14 Smith
was referring here to his “Antipodean manifesto,” where he and seven mod-
ern painters argued they had a “natural” right to “see and experience nature
differently in some degree from the artists of the northern hemisphere,” a
polemical gesture that foregrounded again the inherently politicized dimen-
sions incumbent upon any recourse to the planetary sphere.15 Smith’s
intellectual focus was not on the abstractions of false universalism, as he saw
them, but on the unequal processes of cultural exchange across national and
hemispheric space; he was thus, as Peter Beilharz has acutely remarked, “a
theorist of peripheral vision,” whose version of antipodes is best “understood
as a relation, not a place.” Whereas much American work on planetary space
seeks to impose a universalist form of abstraction in a way all too redolent
Writing for the Planet 147

of the familiar rhetoric of U.S. empire, Smith’s writing, with what Beilharz
calls its “lifelong interest in unequal cultural exchange,” produced a more
hard-​­edged, “non-​­identitarian” account of planetary politics, countering the
synthetic model of environmentalism with more Marxist and surrealist per-
spectives on how particular forms had achieved a global hegemony.16

Spherical Rotation: Winton, Jones, Tsiolkas, Wright

Following in the wake of the antipodean intellectual legacy charted by Smith

and Pocock, I want here to sketch ways in which the activist aspects of
planetary perspectives are playing themselves out in contemporary Austra-
lian fiction, so as to illustrate how the abstract universalism of U.S. critical
discourse on the planet might usefully be countered by more robust engage-
ments with the dynamics of spherical rotation. Tim Winton, for example, is a
popular Australian writer whose 1991 novel Cloudstreet, a saga of two fami-
lies growing up over several generations in Western Australia, was ranked in
a poll conducted by the Australian Society of Authors as the top Australian
book of all time.17 Part of Winton’s success involves his appeal to a middle-
brow audience, with his committed Christianity being of a piece with his
attachment to the protective bonds of community, nation, and family, and
Winton’s own public stances on environmental politics displaying similar
kinds of investment, particularly in relation to his home state of Western
Australia. This scenario is played out most explicitly in Winton’s novel Shal-
lows (1984), where Queenie Cookson’s campaign to save the whales runs
up against the more traditional class interests of local union leaders, whose
priority is saving jobs rather than the environment. Yet despite the book’s
own deprecating references to questions of formal reflexivity—­ Queenie
finds hardbound novels “were mostly about the writing of more novels, and
the poetry concerned itself with itself,” and she reads them simply to get to
sleep—­Shallows is itself highly self-​­conscious about its own belated posi-
tion, both spatially and temporally, in relation to global culture.18 Winton’s
narrative positions itself “on the southernmost tip of the newest and oldest
continent, the bottom of the world,” and it uses this antipodean starting point
to interweave accounts of Western Australia in the nineteenth-​­century past
and the twentieth-​­century present, thereby deliberately refurbishing Mel-
ville’s Moby-​­Dick within a more postmodern context. Queenie’s estranged
husband, Cleveland Cookson, is actually said to be reading a “Penguin edi-
tion of Moby-​­Dick,” and Winton’s novel describes how whales in the vicinity
of the Australian coast get trapped in shallow water, with the book’s last
section showing how they move “from one warm body of shallow water to
the next” and end up as “huge, stricken bodies lurching in the shallows.”19
But the broader discursive marker here involves a more systematic inquiry
into whether assumptions of profundity and depth can be sustained in what
148 Paul Giles

appears to be the ontologically flat environment of the late twentieth century.

The novel thus turns on questions of fakery and authenticity—­Cleve declares
that Queenie’s political campaign is “as dishonest as hell, as fake as this whole
town”—­and the outcome here, more ambiguous than it appears at first sight,
involves a representation of how all the novel’s dramatis personae, whales
and activists alike, are “beached” in the “shallows” of a depthless country,
from which the capacity of “exceptional grace” has been evacuated. Citing
an 1831 journal by an American whaler, the book narrates how humans
confronted their prey “looking very like Mr Swift’s Lilliputians poring over
Gulliver,” and this intertextual dimension—­going back through the fictitious
journal to Melville and Swift—­lends Shallows an explicitly self-​­referential
quality, with its antipodean reversals indicating ways in which, formally as
well as thematically, environmental issues are renegotiated within a contem-
porary Australian context.20
Winton’s fiction thus uses a comparative structure to position his narra-
tives in dialectical argument with European and North American cultural
norms. The Riders (1994), set partly in Ireland and partly in France, has an
explicitly comparative framework, juxtaposing the lingering smells of Aus-
tralia’s “burnt country” to the “hauteur and hubris” of Paris, as it plays off
the hypothetical spaces of Fred Scully’s native Australia against the storied
landscapes of Europe: “Every field had a name, every path a stile. Every-
thing imaginable had been done or tried out there. It wasn’t the feeling you
had looking out on his own land. In Australia you looked out and saw the
possible, the spaces, the maybes.”21 In his most ambitious work, Dirt Music
(2001), which took seven years to complete, Winton projects the landscapes
of Western Australia in uncomfortable parallel to the synthetic space of
American digital culture, so as to evoke a complex, multidimensional world
where relations between “real” and “virtual” have become increasingly
difficult to determine. Dirt Music does not just contrast the meretricious vul-
garity of American popular culture with raw Australian authenticity; instead,
it uses points of comparison as an epistemological axis to interrogate ways
in which the native landscape may (or may not) be able substantially to sig-
nify through its own inherent presence. Thus, Luther Fox says on a road trip
through Western Australia that he “feels like he’s driving through a movie. A
western,” while Horne remarks sardonically that Western Australia is “like
Texas. Only it’s big.”22 Later in Fox’s road trip, the novel juxtaposes maps of
Western Australia, Ireland, and “multiples of France” as if to emphasize how
the Australian territory exceeds conventional cartographic outlines. As with
Shallows, the surrounding sea is described in Dirt Music as “flat,” and the
novel’s idiosyncratic prose style—­eliminating conventional syntax, so as to
produce an illusion of stream of consciousness or what the novel calls “living
in the present tense”—­reinforces this sense of a postmodern world of depth-
lessness, from which traditional syntactic markers have been eliminated.23
Dirt Music plays with the idea of a discrete environment, an isolated and
Writing for the Planet 149

autochthonous region, but it also discursively orients this antipodean coun-

try in relation both to romantic language—­the novel starts with an epigraph
from Emily Dickinson about “solitude of space” and goes on to cite Words­
worth, Blake, and Keats, among others—­and to the musical culture that gives
the novel its title. All kinds of music resound through the narrative—­Roy
Orbison, Ry Cooder, Arvo Pärt, J. S. Bach—­and Winton’s title flirts with
an oxymoronic inclination whereby the ethereal quality of these harmonies
becomes “dirty,” with “bluegrass” parodically translated into “browngrass,”
as the music itself becomes an integral instrument of the life it describes.24
This ultimately points toward a different order of being, more Platonic in its
dimensions, where music is not so much created as already inherent within
the sphere of creation, as in the model of bird life configured here as a coun-
terpart to the human species: “Music wants to be heard . . . the world lives in
him . . . He sings. He’s sung.”25 Dirt Music’s last word is “real,” and one of the
key questions in the book is the ontological status of corporeal presence in
a world dominated by media industries and associated forms of cultural dis-
placement: “After weeks of the virtual, it was queer and almost painful to be
completely present.”26 This idea of presence relates to local environments as
well as to questions of human psychology and sexuality, although of course
the myths of authenticity popularly associated with “the wide, brown land”
are carefully framed within an ironic structure, with even the name of one
of the book’s fictional locales, Coronation Gulf, importing a Canadian place
name into an Australian setting.27
This sense of the country as a site of planetary crossover and transposi-
tion also haunts the writing of Australian novelist Gail Jones, who draws
explicitly on surrealist motifs to project her native territory as mapped
incongruously in time and space. In Black Mirror (2002), which takes its
title from Salvador Dali and its ambience from André Breton, Australia is
represented visually as “a kind of stripey pattern,” with “The Dead Heart
of Australia” pointed out by a teacher with a ruler. In a scene set in Paris
during the 1930s, Marcel Duchamp greets the artist heroine of this novel,
Victoria Morrell, as “L’Australienne,” whereupon she “felt herself suddenly
endowed with symbolic accessories: bounding kangaroos, vistas of orange
earth, spectral stringy eucalypts, empty dead centres, any number of odd and
arresting Antipodean inversions.” Within this framework, national identity
itself becomes flattened into a fetishistic phenomenon, a collection of visual
signs that flaunt their detachment from any connection with organic entities.
True to the book’s surrealist provenance, there is a play throughout Black
Mirror between internal and external perspectives, with the love between a
Jamaican man and an Australian woman being framed in terms of a cosmic
geography, where the outside world is superseded and trumped by imagina-
tive designs: “The earth’s globe dissolves and is reformed to their design; in
this upheaval both lovers become tropical and dark.”28 In Jones’s later novel
Dreams of Speaking (2006), the Australian passport itself comes to resemble
150 Paul Giles

a surrealist object, “a royal-​­blue square with the kangaroo and emu stand-
ing posed in the centre.”29 And in Five Bells (2011), the transnational sense
of worlds merging and overlapping—­Catherine feels that “Restlessness had
caused her to move across the planet,” while James senses that “Worlds were
converging” and “Australia was Asian”—­is framed within what this narra-
tive calls “the surreal element of displacement,” where the spectres of Dali,
René Magritte, and Max Ernst preside over a story where time reverses and
patterns flip over. On the final page of the novel, the Chinese character Pei
Xing thinks of how “some of us walk backwards, always seeing what lies
behind.”30
This idea of a “backwards” motion, posterior to both the canonical centers
of Western civilization and Australia’s own Indigenous past, places contem-
porary Australian fiction once again in a self-​­consciously belated position,
through which traditional narratives are remapped from a reverse, although
not necessarily subsidiary, perspective. Imagery of planetary space, and of
Australia introducing into narrow domestic enclosures a sense of cosmic
distance, resonate powerfully throughout Five Bells. Catherine meditates on
how “somewhere in America some poor bastard was thinking of Ireland,
thinking of distance, and the turning planet, and of the sky sliding its twin-
kling diagrams through the dark, lonesome night,” while Ellie, recalling a
school lesson, contemplates how “birds curve around the planet,” swooping
in “speedy arcs” across the boundaries of nation and hemisphere as they pur-
sue their migratory patterns.31 In Jones’s Sorry (2007), Stella similarly paints
Australia as “the dark other-​­side of the planet,” with the Aboriginal darkness
coming to stand synecdochically for the relative darkness of Australia itself in
relation to the planet as a whole. Here the “theories on human development
and the diversity of cultures” propounded by a Cambridge anthropologist
are deemed as “imperial and arrogant,” and this text by a Western Australian
novelist makes a point of describing instead the “fullness and detail” of the
bush country, whose Indigenous specificity makes alien academic theories
seem “irrelevantly abstruse.”32 There are also many allusions in this story of
a lost daughter to Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale, with the novel describing how
the map of Europe “ripples and lifts” in the face of Aboriginal culture. In this
way, the novel’s evocation of a “parallel universe” works again both formally
and thematically to encompass a wider world where the slanted, hegemonic
nature of imperial interests are reimagined through an oppositional impetus
of transnational disjunction and surreal juxtaposition.33
The point to emphasize here is how contemporary Australian fiction writ-
ers often engage with contemporary processes of globalization from a slanted
perspective, addressing not only the conditions of migration and diaspora but
also attributing to this planetary environment a distinctively politicized tem-
per. In Christos Tsiolkas’s first novel, Loaded (1995), the author remarks on
how “a web of hatred connects the planet . . . The Serb hates the Croat who
hates the Bosnian who hates the Albanian who hates the Greek who hates the
Writing for the Planet 151

Turk who hates the Armenian who hates the Kurd who hates the Palestinian
who hates the Jew who hates everybody.”34 Rather than being invested in any
benign code of multiculturalism, the book uses its nihilistic, grunge ethic to
inscribe a perverse code of postnationalism, within which national identity is
hollowed out—­“I’m not Australian. I’m not Greek. I’m not anything”—­and
replaced instead by a sexually oriented focus on the gay male body. Enjoying
the “debasement” of “dark paths and silent alleyways,” the narrator declares
that “experiencing the body” becomes for him the highest good. By attribut-
ing his sense of well-​­being to a specifically Australian environment—­he says
that the “sea breeze of the southern ocean, the breeze that comes up from the
end of the world, makes me strong”—­Tsiolkas’s character implicitly aligns
his own reclamation of a proscribed gay sexual body with an environmen-
talist politics that appears to have been equally repressed.35 Tsiolkas’s later
and more wide-​­ranging novel Dead Europe (2005) continues this brand of
Australian exceptionalism, contrasting the moribund and “claustrophobic”
landscape of Europe to the more expansive domain of his home in Mel-
bourne: “It was only when I first travelled to Europe that I realised how rare
was the profusion of space so close to my city.” The global narrative is set
in a post-​­9/11 world dominated by U.S. security interests, where the Stars
and Stripes flying all over Prague send “a defiant fuck-​­you to the rest of
the world.”36 However, the narrator contrasts this collective paranoia, along
with the old ghosts of European hatred and vengeance where men are “still
searching for the battles of long-​­forgotten wars,” to the prospect of pastoral
renewal and gay domestic bliss in “pure vast Australia where the air is clean,
young.” This is the Henry James international theme updated to an antipo-
dean rather than transatlantic environment; indeed, Tsiolkas’s Sula remarks
in Paris that the Australians there “remind me of a character from Henry
James, they have an innocence that the Americans have now lost.” But, in
its apocalyptic invocation of how a “fire, just and swift and magnificent,
should rage through all of Europe,” the novel also attests to the Protestant
church influences carried over from Tsiolkas’s own youth.37 In a 2002 inter-
view, the writer claimed he wanted to recuperate “notions of religious faith”
by using them in a different kind of way, so as “to not exclude anyone from
the social body”; and his subsequent work has been about transposing what
he called in this interview the “shared responsibilities” of “communal forms
of politics” to a more radical and utopian context, where the familial body of
Australia becomes a site of provocative regeneration.38
In Dead Europe, the more obviously American and corporate forms of
globalization—­Visa cards, McDonald’s, and so on—­play only a background
role. What Tsiolkas focuses on instead in this novel is a world intercon-
nected through family migration and visceral hatreds, within whose toils an
emphasis on the most perverse aspects of gay sex becomes paradoxically
redemptive and regenerative. Sal Mineo is said to be attracted to the work
of American fetish photographer Robert Mapplethorpe’s “composition of a
152 Paul Giles

thick black cock emerging triumphantly out of an unzipped business suit,”

just as in Tsiolkas’s subsequent novel The Slap (2008) the sense of Austra-
lian pastoral—­“the dazzling sea, the brazen endless sky”—­is bolstered by a
pronounced emphasis in the book on physical health, albeit translated from
its familiar Australian stereotype of rugged outdoor life into a more hetero-
dox idiom, where the gay condition of a sexually active body becomes a
paradoxical marker for the rude health of national culture as a whole.39 By
taking Australian civic and family norms in The Slap and rotating them on
their axis—­so that seeing a child being slapped becomes for Hector “electric,
fiery, exciting,” a form of sexual provocation, just as a racist “jolt of hatred”
against a taxi driver whom she mentally berates as an “ignorant fundamen-
talist Muslim pig” is said to give Anouk “an illicit thrill”—­Tsiolkas evokes a
world somewhere between the suburban blandness of a John Cheever and the
deviant cathexis of a Michel Houellebecq, where the tolerance of enlightened
parents and guardians in Melbourne toward their sexually active teenag-
ers reinscribes an alternative version of the Australian good life.40 Tsiolkas
admits to having been heavily influenced by Nietzsche—­indeed, one of the
chapters in Dead Europe is entitled “The Nietzschean Hotel-​­Porter”—­and
there is considerable emphasis throughout all of his fiction on questions of
bodily well-​­being together with an implicit disgust at the idea of getting what
Thanassis in The Slap calls “fat and lazy.”41 This represents a peculiarly sexu-
alized version of more traditional conceptions of Australian nature, where the
erotic integrity of the gay body comes to represent the health of the national
body. In the last section of The Slap, the “young art-​­fag boy” Richie, who
views gay sex and drugs as forms of liberation, comes across a boy wearing
a black T-​­shirt across his chest, in which “the Union Jack had been replaced
by the Aboriginal flag,” and indeed Tsiolkas has explicitly linked Aboriginal
history with ecological and gay politics, suggesting that all these movements
have traditionally been “silenced and shunned in Australia.”42 The originality
of Tsiolkas’s work, however, involves crossing Christian conceptions of civic
community with a Nietzschean emphasis on the strong human physique,
thereby twisting familiar ethical conceptions in a new direction.
Such an interest in “silenced and shunned” pressure groups accords with
the parallel contributions of Tsiolkas and Alexis Wright, a Waanyi Indige-
nous writer, to a “Sydney Three Writers Project” in 2007. Here Tsiolkas’s
explicit hostility to all forms of censorship—­he is a champion of Pasolini’s
films, long a subject of contention in Australia, and asserted that writers
and artists should be “blasphemous,” beyond “bourgeois politeness”—­runs
alongside Wright’s suggestion that Australians in general, who are “not fools
about the country they love,” have become more attuned to environmental
issues. This is at least in part, says Wright, because of the way a legacy of
Aboriginal philosophy that is inherently “holistic” and “tied to the land” has
entered into mainstream Australian consciousness.43 Libby Robin, thinking
along similar lines, remarked in 2012 on how it was no coincidence that
Writing for the Planet 153

references to “ecologically sustainable” development were embedded at that

time in no less than 129 pieces of Australian federal legislation.44 Whereas
Tsiolkas reimagines global landscapes in relation to the politics of the human
body, Wright focuses on how Australia foregrounds the politics of the natural
body, the environment of Earth; but for both writers there is an emphasis on
using alternative scales to recalibrate relationships between mind and matter,
playing off the abstractions of globalization against the physical exigencies
of the planet. This accords with Nancy D. Munn’s discussion of ways in
which Aboriginal conceptualizations of space differ from the more estab-
lished cartographies of Western mapmaking. In Aboriginal law, observes
Munn, markers provide not “spatial boundaries” but “identifying centers
from which a space with uncertain or ambiguously defined limits stretches
out,” and Aboriginal custom thus specifically “works against abstracting the
problem of space from that of the body.”45 Such a conception of “mobile
spatiosensual fields,” in Munn’s phrase, can be seen as structurally analogous
to Tsiolkas’s rejection of identity politics in favor of a more chameleonic con-
ception of what Ben Authers calls “renegotiated subjectivities and contingent
belongings.”46 What Aboriginal law asserts in relation to geographic space, in
other words, Tsiolkas asserts in relation to human psychology, and in his eyes
the key question for a rhetoric of national politics involves neither incorpora-
tion nor the reification of a communal state but, rather, the capacity within its
borders to imagine queer difference.
Wright’s own novel Carpentaria (2006) negotiates crosscurrents between
history and myth through its account of ways in which global mining inter-
ests impact upon the fictional Aboriginal community of Desperance, located
in northern Queensland. Yet the considerable imaginative power of this
work derives in part from its multiple ambiguities, specifically, from the
ways in which “outsider” and “inside knowledge” are constituted differently,
with the tropes of tricksterdom displacing Indigenous legends into a realm
of the surreal imagination.47 Reluctant to abandon the spirit of one of his
dead compatriots, Aboriginal activist Will Phantom keeps “speaking to and
replying for Elias as though he was alive,” and Wright’s novel is similarly
established around a complex aesthetic principle of echo and response, where
the relationship between invocation and manifestation remains enigmatic.
Such interactions between the collective dream-​­world and the purportedly
“spirit world” are frequently given a comic turn, as in the way Norm Phan-
tom recounts his own “sad stories” to a “huge, white cockatoo bird, named
Pirate,” who is granted by the “old people” the status of “an enchanter” with
“psychic powers.”48 After Will has blown up part of the mining company’s
engineering apparatus, the scene weirdly appears on television with “bits of
pipeline sticking out of the ground and throughout the surrounding bushland
like an exhibition of postmodern sculpture outside the Australian National
Gallery or Tate Modern in London”; and this sense of jarring and incompati-
ble perspectives, where the “powerful spirituality” of Indigenous peoples and
154 Paul Giles

“the ancestral spirit who governed the land” consort incongruously with the
“stuffed baby crocodiles” proudly displayed by Norm Phantom as among his
“special works of local fish” on the walls of comfortable pubs, lends the novel
its compelling, contemporaneous tone of indeterminacy.49 This humorous
and quirky idiom is underlined by the frequent allusions to surrealism—­“the
surreal fresco of fishermen coming to collect their trophies,” a man on the
beach with “the appearance of the surreal,” and “the surreal stillness” after
the fire—­as if to highlight, as in Gail Jones’s narratives, the fractured and
disjunctive nature of this cultural landscape.50
Though Francis Devlin-​­Glass has suggested that Carpentaria “mobilizes
the mythological in order to argue the interconnectedness of the Aboriginal
sacred and political and ecological matters,” it might conversely be argued
that the remarkable force of Wright’s novel derives from the way it problema-
tizes such putative connections and abjures any kind of closure by holding
competing possibilities always in tension.51 There is also much discussion in
Carpentaria of stars and planets, of how the Aboriginal community orga-
nizes its world with reference to the sea and “the world of the Milky Way,”
a scenario projected here as “the spirits of dead people twinkling as stars in
the night ocean of the skies.” Yet such an apotheosis is displaced again by
metaphorical configuration into mere similitude: “the night droned away as
though the whole planet was alive with the sound of Indian tubulas and clay
drums” (my italics).52 Just as the last word of Winton’s Dirt Music is “real,”
so the last word of Wright’s Carpentaria is “home”; yet this sense of plan-
etary constellations upholding the idea of “the Aborigine people sitting at
home in their rightful place” is held in check by the structural ironies within
which this world of spirit is framed.53 At the same time, Wright’s focus on the
uncanny, on Will Phantom being “like an animal sniffing the air and sensing
danger approaching,” or on how “the great creators of the natural world”
produce gigantic cyclones that cause mere human “history” to be “obliter-
ated,” elucidates a world in which social designs of every kind are always in
the shadow of planetary space.54 While Wright’s novel politicizes the planet,
it also describes planetary perspectives as a corrective to the more limited
economic positivism of corporate interests and the equally purblind concep-
tions of technological modernity.

View from the Bottom: The Planetary Turn

and the Southern Hemisphere

All of this, in the context of the planetary turn, testifies to the pertinacity of
Fredric Jameson’s remark about how “one of our basic political tasks lies
precisely in the ceaseless effort to remind the American public of the radical
difference of other national situations.” Jameson was writing back in 1986
about “third-​­world literature,” but the same thing holds true for theories
Writing for the Planet 155

of the planetary: the “view from the top is epistemologically crippling,” as

Jameson put it, and what the planet signifies to those in the United States is
not necessarily the same as what it signifies to those in Australia or, indeed,
other parts of the Southern Hemisphere.55 It is true that, in the wake of con-
cerns about the potential havoc that might be wrought by climate change,
the specter of the planet has introduced into Western consciousness a strange
conceptual mix of the local and global, where vast environmental issues exist
in uneasy juxtaposition with more narrowly focused domestic interests, but
this has induced odd and at times grotesque anomalies between theory and
practice rather than any consistent form of political action. The address to
the United Nations in 2006 by Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela, where
he invoked the possibility of “the peoples of the South”—­from Africa, Latin
America, and Oceania—­rising up against the northern empire of neoliberal
globalization may remain, as any kind of active program, within the realms
of hypothetical fantasy; but Chavez’s intervention did nevertheless serve to
give a distinctive political articulation to a perspective from the Southern
Hemisphere, in its historically subordinate relation to the vested interests of
the north.56
One of the structural ironies incumbent upon Indigenous perspectives of
every kind is how they are intertwined, both socially and ontologically, with
a rhetoric of modernity. On one hand, as David Morley and Kevin Robins
argued, the recent interest in Indigenous rights across the globe has been
interwoven symbiotically with reactions to the “psycho-​­geography” of dis-
placement in an era of electronic media, since a nostalgic return to roots
always tends to be the product of the “anxiety and fear” associated with a
climate of alienation.57 On a more abstract level, as Michael R. Dove has
suggested, the relationship between “indigenous people and environmen-
tal politics” necessarily involves “a host of contradictions,” since, through
a characteristic back formation, it is the very concept of “modernity [that]
makes indigeneity possible in the first place.”58 Without trying to reconcile
such contradictions or to shoehorn contemporary Australian literature into
any kind of uniform pattern, it might nevertheless be worth suggesting that
this planetary dimension now forms as systematic a matrix for the produc-
tion of Australian fiction at the beginning of the twenty-​­first century as did
the postcolonial impetus during the last third of the twentieth century. Julian
Murphet has argued that Australian literature was for most of the twenti-
eth century “neo-​­colonial” in its knowingly subaltern relation to the cultural
empires of Britain and the United States, and it was only “the remarkable
sense of unmooring from a British centre of cultural gravity” in the 1960s,
followed by the historic referendum granting full citizenship rights to Aborig-
inal Australians in 1967 and the turning away from America after Vietnam,
that induced a more programmatic policy of “self-​­determination” from the
1970s onwards.59 But if the institutional apparatus of the late twentieth
century sought to enhance the status of Australian literature in relation to
156 Paul Giles

its British and American forebears, Australian literature of the twenty-​­first

century might better be defined as a literature for the planet because it is
predicated less upon old-​­style calls for national attention than upon a more
subtle, nuanced recognition of ways in which the local and the global inevi-
tably intersect across both an economic and an environmental axis.
In this sense, recent Australian literature, predicated as it is upon a
cathexis of disorientation, typically projects the planet in a more disjunctive
way than it appeared within the proselytizing agenda of Miyoshi, for whom
the irreducible “totality” of the planet was its foremost claim on our critical
attention. To be Australian is necessarily to have some recognition of the
spherical shape of the planet, since, within our contemporary digital world
of electronic instantaneity, the very days of the week and seasons of the year
manifest themselves differently from the order in which they appear to deni-
zens of the more crowded Northern Hemisphere. Such a hybridized model
of affiliation, where Australian discourses are symbiotically linked to local
spaces and transnational passages simultaneously, challenges more conven-
tional understandings of what is meant by a “national” literature. Thinking
again of the planet as a site of rupture and discord rather than unity, Dipesh
Chakrabarty argued in 2012 that the fundamental “challenge” of climate
change involves the dilemma “of having to think of human agency over mul-
tiple and incommensurable scales at once,” a disorienting teleological shift
that implies how “humans are now part of the natural history of the planet.”
Such a philosophical disturbance, noted Chakrabarty, effectively dismantles
the “wall of separation between natural and human histories that was erected
in early modernity and reinforced in the nineteenth century” by the human
sciences.60 In this sense, the cultural landscape of Australia, within whose
geophysical formations questions of vast spatial and temporal scale have
always been uppermost and where distinctions between natural and human
history have never been so clear-​­cut, could be said to be ahead of the game.
The most interesting Australian fiction writers in the twenty-​­first century tend
to expose their narratives to the kind of jarring continuities between Indig-
enous and Western cultures that disrupt traditional understandings of social
scale and, as a corollary, questions of human agency. It is their recognition of
the implicitly loaded and potentially adversarial nature of such globalizing
perspectives that makes the fiction of Winton, Jones, Tsiolkas, and Wright
characteristic of contemporary Australian writing for the planet.

Notes

1. Srinivas Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the

Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 118.
2. Hester Blum, “John Cleves Symmes and the Planetary Reach of Polar Explo-
ration,” American Literature 84, no. 2 (June 2012): 246.
Writing for the Planet 157

3. Masao Miyoshi, “Turn to the Planet: Literature, Diversity, and Totality,”

Comparative Literature 53, no. 4 (Autumn 2001): 293, 292, 295.
4. Wai Chee Dimock, “Recycling the Epic: Gilgamesh on Three Continents,” in
Scenes of Reading: Is Australian Literature a World Literature?, ed. Robert Dixon
and Brigid Rooney (Melbourne, Australia: Australian Scholarly Publishing,
2013), 12; Wai Chee Dimock, “Planetary Time and Global Translation: ‘Context’
in Literary Studies,” Common Knowledge 9, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 488, 490.
5. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2003), 72.
6. Miyoshi, “Turn to the Planet,” 295.
7. Rob Wilson, Be Always Converting, Be Always Converted: An American
Poetics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), 20, 30, 120, 132.
8. Christopher L. Connery, “Ideologies of Land and Sea: Alfred Thayer Mahan,
Carl Schmitt, and the Shaping of Global Myth Elements,” boundary 2 28, no. 2
(Summer 2001): 175; Christopher L. Connery, “Pacific Rim Discourse: The U.S.
Global Imaginary in the Late Cold War Years,” boundary 2 21, no. 1 (Spring
1994): 56.
9. Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Crit-
ical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989), 78; Doreen Massey, “A Global Sense
of Place,” in Reading Human Geography: The Poetics and Politics of Inquiry, ed.
Trevor J. Barnes and Derek Gregory (London: Arnold, 1997), 315.
10. Edgar Allan Poe, “Eureka: An Essay on the Material and Spiritual Uni-
verse,” in The Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Harold Beaver (London:
Penguin, 1976), 213, 222, 297, 214, 261.
11. Matthew Fontaine Maury, The Physical Geography of the Sea and Its
Meteorology (New York, 1855), 27–­28.
12. Herman Melville, Moby-​­Dick, or The Whale, ed. Harrison Hayford, G.
Thomas Tanselle, and Hershel Parker (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University
Press, 1988), 455.
13. J. G. A. Pocock, The Discovery of Islands: Essays in British History (Cam-
bridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 19, 21.
14. Bernard Smith, foreword to The Australian Scapegoat: Towards an Antipo-
dean Aesthetic, by Peter Fuller (Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press,
1986), xiii.
15. Bernard Smith et al., “The Antipodean Manifesto,” in The Antipodean
Manifesto: Essays in Art and History, by Bernard Smith (Melbourne: Oxford
University Press, 1976), 166.
16. Peter Beilharz, Imagining the Antipodes: Culture, Theory and the Visual
in the Work of Bernard Smith (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press,
1997), xii, xiv (emphasis in original), 94, 188.
17. Robert Dixon, “Tim Winton, Cloudstreet, and the Field of Australian Lit-
erature,” Westerly 50 (November 2005): 248.
18. Tim Winton, Shallows (1984; repr., Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1985), 103.
19. Ibid., ix, 17, 222, 235.
20. Ibid., 192, 222, 114, 24.
21. Tim Winton, The Riders (Sydney: Pan Macmillan, 1994), 154, 260, 51.
22. Tim Winton, Dirt Music (Sydney: Pan Macmillan, 2001), 246.
23. Ibid., 295, 130, 53.
158 Paul Giles

24. Ibid., viii, 418, 388.

25. Ibid., 415, 451.
26. Ibid., 461, 10.
27. Winton, Dirt Music, 414; and Brigid Rooney, Literary Activists: Australian
Writer-​­Intellectuals and Public Life (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press,
2009), 178.
28. Gail Jones, Black Mirror (Sydney: Pan Macmillan, 2002), 259, 29, 98.
29. Gail Jones, Dreams of Speaking (Sydney: Random House, 2006), 22.
30. Gail Jones, Five Bells (Sydney: Random House, 2011), 17, 38, 87, 171.
31. Ibid., 90, 136.
32. Gail Jones, Sorry (Sydney: Random House, 2007), 7, 551, 22.
33. Ibid., 125, 206.
34. Christos Tsiolkas, Loaded (1995; repr., London: Random House-​­Vintage,
1997), 64.
35. Ibid., 149, 132, 23, 133.
36. Christos Tsiolkas, Dead Europe (Sydney: Random House, 2005), 27, 139,
193.
37. Ibid., 159, 375, 282, 368.
38. Mary Zournazi, “On Believing—­with Christos Tsiolkas,” in Hope: New
Philosophies for Change (Annandale, Australia: Pluto Press Australia, 2002), 99,
121, 109, 107.
39. Tsiolkas, Dead Europe, 213; and Christos Tsiolkas, The Slap (Crows Nest,
Australia: Allen and Unwin, 2008), 123–­24.
40. Tsiolkas, The Slap, 41, 62.
41. Zournazi, “On Believing,” 100; Tsiolkas, Dead Europe, 329; and Tsiolkas,
The Slap, 318.
42. Tsiolkas, The Slap, 428, 478; and Zournazi, “On Believing,” 117.
43. Christos Tsiolkas, Gideon Haigh, and Alexis Wright, Tolerance, Prejudice
and Fear: The Sydney Three Writers Project (Crows Nest, Australia: Allen and
Unwin, 2008), 48, 149, 157.
44. Libby Robin, “Round Table” (paper, “Rethinking Invasion Ecologies:
Natures, Cultures and Societies in the Age of Anthropocene,” University of Syd-
ney, June 19, 2012).
45. Nancy D. Munn, “Excluded Spaces: The Figure in the Australian Aborigi-
nal Landscape,” Critical Inquiry 22, no. 3 (Spring 1996): 453, 465 (emphasis in
original).
46. Munn, “Excluded Spaces,” 464; Ben Authers, “ ‘I’m Not Australian, I’m
Not Greek, I’m Not Anything’: Identity and the Multicultural Nation in Christos
Tsiolkas’s Loaded,” Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Litera-
ture 4 (2005): 143.
47. Alexis Wright, Carpentaria (2006; repr., Artarmon, Australia: Giramondo,
2007), 59, 3.
48. Ibid., 176, 103.
49. Ibid., 416, 437, 407, 340.
50. Ibid., 213, 73, 412.
51. Francis Devlin-​­Glass, “Review Essay: Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria,” Antip-
odes 21, no. 1 (June 2007): 82.
52. Wright, Carpentaria, 251–­52, 383.
Writing for the Planet 159

53. Winton, Dirt Music, 461; Wright, Carpentaria, 519, 160. In Carpentaria,
this structural irony is heightened by the acknowledgment on its final page of
“the Australian government,” through its “arts funding and advisory board,” as
a sponsor for the book’s production.
54. Wright, Carpentaria, 461, 491–­92.
55. Fredric Jameson, “Third-​­World Literature in the Era of Multinational Cap-
italism,” Social Text 15 (Autumn 1986): 77, 85.
56. On Chavez, see Rob Wilson, “Afterword: Worlding as Future Tactic,” in
The Worlding Project: Doing Cultural Studies in the Era of Globalization, ed.
Rob Wilson and Christopher Leigh Connery (Santa Cruz, Calif.: New Pacific;
Berkeley, Calif.: North Atlantic Books, 2007), 209.
57. David Morley and Kevin Robins, Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Elec-
tronic Landscapes and Cultural Boundaries (London: Routledge, 1995), 197.
58. Michael R. Dove, “Indigenous People and Environmental Politics,” Annual
Review of Anthropology 35 (October 2006): 203, 193.
59. Julian Murphet, “Postcolonial Writing in Australia and New Zealand,” in
The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature, ed. Ato Quayson (Cambridge,
Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 1:446, 1:452, 1:457.
60. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate
Change,” New Literary History 43, no. 1 (Winter 2012): 1, 10.
 The White Globe and the Paradoxical
Cartography of Berger & Berger
A Meditation on Deceptive Evidence

Bertrand Westphal

We “climb above” and, voilà—­we have just committed an ugly pleonasm.

We say that evidence is “deceptive.” That is another pleonasm. “Not so sure,”
would retort the purist. “Why should evidence be deceptive? Why should
deceptive evidence be pleonastic?” And yet, is there evidence other than of
the deceptive sort? The question makes sense if we consider, for example,
the color white, which corresponds evidently to an absence of color. White
is an empty space that seems to demand no more than to be filled. So be it.
Let us agree on this. But let us also agree that we are caught in an illusion.
So let us try a small experiment. Let us superimpose three circles—­one red,
another green, and yet another blue—­so as to form a common intersection.
What color will this intersection be? In the “subtractive colors” of paint and
ink—­it will be a false black. In additive colors—­the colors of light—­it will
be a non-​­color, a white of sorts, which is the product of a combination of the
three primary colors. All of this intersectional space is a “nothing,” strictly
speaking, for white results from a perception of an excess of color. Thus the
evidence voids itself as the certainty inspired by the visible fades. Elementary
as this evidence may appear, it turns out to be in no way evident. Which color
is Henry IV’s white panache? The famous question is less foolish than it may
look.
Since 2006, Berger & Berger has been the manufacturing brand of two
quasi-​­twin artists: Laurent P. Berger, a visual artist, and architect Cyrille
Berger. The reputation of the two brothers has continued to grow in recent
years.1 Cyrille exhibited in the prestigious context of the Venice Biennales
of Architecture, in 2008 and 2010. From October 7 to November 24,
2011, the artists’ work was hosted by the Rosascape gallery, in the heart
of Paris. This work subverts space, proposing—­as the title of the exhibition
suggests—­“altered states.”2 Among the exhibition’s “alterations” we find,
pell-​­mell, Parquet Vassivière—­an edge of flooring made from the wood of
tree stumps showing through the surface of the artificial Lake Vassivière, in

161
162 Bertrand Westphal

Limousin—­and a world map titled Ghost Towns, in which vanished towns

cast their shadowy presence over a planet whose twentieth century saw such
ghostly vestiges multiply worldwide. In addition, in this exhibition Berger &
Berger have attempted, through their work Astre blanc (White Star), to pro-
vide their own answer to the question of the deceptive evidence of whiteness
by employing the medium of a whitish globe made of porcelain and metal,
with an irregular surface, and a diameter of some several decimeters.
In a manner evoking the negative map of Ghost Towns, Berger & Berg-
er’s globe points toward an uncertain cartography, a tricky representation of
absent referents. It is about this cartography, remarkable even in its simplic-
ity, that I wish to speak here.3 For, indeed, what color exactly is the white
star of Berger & Berger? To be sure, there is no easy answer to this and
related questions prompted by things that otherwise may seem to be all too
evident. The globe, for example, is too full of colors to be white. It is like the
blood cell (globule), whose color would be white if it were not red. When
it is terrestrial, which is primarily what I am thinking of, the globe would
sooner be blue. In fact, that is what we have learned from the astronauts
and other cosmonauts upon their return from their interstellar journeys. All
in all, the globe is more round and more blue than an orange. “Ah,” one
might retort, “you have a surrealist penchant; have you read Eluard?”4 Yes, I
have. And yet this is where doubt creeps in. What if the earth’s globe were at
this point so saturated with color that, instead of being blue, it was actually
white, dazzling us enough to prevent us from comprehending it? And, for
good measure, what if it was not completely smooth and round, but quite
dented? If this were so, then the work of Berger & Berger would be “realistic”
and we would be among the few to “get” its realism. But—­in reality—­this is
not the case, and so what makes the terraqueous globe a uniformly colored
quasi-​­sphere is no more than a convention naturalized by a large number
of observers held hostage by “evidence.” We learn from this art that the size
of an audience has never been a guarantor of the “truth” concerning reality,
whatever that reality may be. We are made aware of this every Sunday in the
stadiums, where all eyes are trained on a twirling globe, sometimes white,
over which fight twenty-​­two athletic actors.
Berger & Berger do not in fact empty the globe; they return to it its excess
of color and light. Thus, they empty the evidence. Their sincere regard for the
globe’s true nature, however, frustrates our expectations. For, after all, what
could a white globe be? What should it be? This question is as slippery, as
“round,” as the artists’ object. It does not give play to any hierarchy. To try
to respond to it means groping in the dark endlessly, to propose a critical
hypothesis, and no more than that, in the margins of all evidence. But per-
haps one might offer a rejoinder, one obtaining somewhere between avoiding
and acknowledging the evidence? Surely. Why not? Contributing to the emp-
tying of the excessive plenitude of meaning by which the world is afflicted is
not the worst course of action imaginable.
The White Globe and the Paradoxical Cartography of Berger & Berger 163

So here is the beginning of a critical proposition, of a non-​­evidential

rejoinder.

The White of Deserts and Ice

At an altitude of a little less than three hundred meters, near Alamogordo,

there is a gypsum desert whose whiteness sparkles under the deep blue sky
of New Mexico. I briefly passed through the area in June 2005, but it could
have been yesterday. The place looks almost lifeless except for the solitary
yuccas holding court at the summit of dunes, like so many absurd artifacts
placed there by a hand inclined to defy nature—­the hand of a Frankenstein
of the arid zones exhibiting a monster plant. With a little luck, you will also
catch a glimpse of a lizard or two melting into the environment. Beyond that,
nothing other than the empty splendor of the place. Even though the route is
marked and the danger of getting lost is reduced, it is recommended to stock
up on water before entering White Sands National Monument. This hazy
stretch should inspire fear, but what it inspires, above all, is a feeling of lib-
erty, of liberation, possibly the same emotion felt by the Mescalero Apaches
who once wandered White Sands.
At sunset, the whiteness of the land is contrasted by the mauve shimmers
of the setting sun amidst the shadows accentuating the sloping angles of the
dunes. In the morning, the sun floods the gypsum crust and sparks reflections
that slightly distort the contours of the meager vegetation. In the shadow
of the dunes, somber rills moistened by the pink of sunrise break the white
uniformity of the desert. The region is little visited by tourists, who have
much to do elsewhere in New Mexico. Here, you can enjoy the beginning of
solitude; you are seized by the desire to kick off your shoes and run across the
miniscule gypsum crystals, more delicate than grains of sand. You actually
do it.
Was it necessary to detour through the American Southwest to gambol
in the gypsum dust? I am not sure. More people prefer to trample the white
beaches of the seas, close or distant, in Sardinia, Malta, or under the tropical
sun. There, the whiteness of the sand is highlighted by the turquoise burst of
the waters or the fleeting reflection of a thousand colored fish. Sometimes,
the reflected image is that of Ursula Andress’s diving knife as she emerges
from the waves to set foot on a Caribbean beach or that of Halle Berry as
she replays the primordial scene in Cuba (we are told) several decades later,
faced with another James Bond, under the eyes of other spectators. And so,
again, we forget that white is a saturation of colors that lively colors decolor.
We give in, as we say, to the “evidence.” It is so easy to do so. But we realize
right away that the situation is more complicated. We are too ready to forget
where we actually are, that is, along the border between lands, in the grip of
a misery that butts against the gold of the beach and the shiny façades of the
164 Bertrand Westphal

hotels. We want, in other words, to associate the white sand of the beach with
paradise; we really insist on it.
So what would the veritable paradise be, then? It would be the ideal sum
of all the White Sands and all the white sand beaches, evidently, at the exclu-
sion of everything else, too—­evidently, alas. Paradise would be a white globe
whose sparkling whiteness was born when the rays of a distant star, the
sun—­an other—­washed over different kinds of powdered minerals. But this
paradise, an idealizing, touristic reflection, would be emptied of all humanity.
A globe of white sand would be as dry as the surface of the skull on a pirate
flag that the absence of the seas would condemn to boredom.
It is true that this infernal paradise would be conceivable. For the sake of
argument, let us imagine a moment when the water of the seven seas evapo-
rated. Further, let us imagine that they left in their absence a planetary bed of
white sand—­for, without water, just like the depths of the sea, the surround-
ing green spaces would not survive very long, and not even the yuccas would
be able to hold out. What would happen then? Would we have to deal with
this situation in terms of scale, of a large scale, in effect, wherein too much
white sand would suffocate, dehydrate, and shock? The questions are apt
because any planetary paradise fades for lack of contrast; paradisiac is that
which escapes hell or, on a more optimistic note, purgatory (a late creation,
fruit of the sense of compromise and of a bottomless need for consolation).
Bored to death in a space they think uniformly perfect, Adam and Eve begin
to amuse themselves when the idea of a possible alternative space comes to
them. And, after tasting the alternative, they become right away nostalgic for
the kind of space that rejected them. So one can say that the world is badly
made from the very beginning. No need to make a drawing either: a global
White Sands would perhaps be the happiness of some lizards but not ours.
Actually, if you think about it, and also about the aforementioned contrast,
even the lizards would be depressed, for what is the point of remaining cha-
meleonic when there is no one left to hide from?
In other words, differentiation is key; play with it, and you change the
world. Let us alter the scale, then. Imagine a middle between nothing and
everything (ah, Blaise Pascal . . .).5 Say, a little scrap of white globe, just a
little scrap, nothing more—­a little, or much more, than White Sands, but
not the planetary desert I evoked earlier. In imagining that place, I am toy-
ing with the idea of a Mediterranean space as deprived of the sea as other
regions are deprived of their deserts. This playful notion would render the
contours of the shores less brutally marked, a soft a priori, and would undo
the sea’s claim to a clearly demarcated space. The reliefs of the seabed would
become visible. Cyprus, where Aphrodite was born, would be transformed
into a mons veneris. The Mediterranean’s southern and northern shores
would move closer after the maritime currents had calmed down between
the Columns of Hercules. (The student of Mediterranean history might reply
that the columns support a heaven whose sense of ethics sags.) At any rate,
The White Globe and the Paradoxical Cartography of Berger & Berger 165

there would be no inaccessible beaches any more. The vessels of fortune, too,
would become obsolete, as would submarines. The Nautilus would no longer
belong to science fiction but would be the vain offspring of a bygone past. No
longer would there be capsizing, massive floods, or private dramas above the
surface of crashing waves. We would move differently; we would get around
better. Great! What a big deal! We would bump against new, lowered barri-
ers. Schengen and its spirit would be always and everywhere present.6 And,
inevitably, newly erected walls would face the vast world in the places from
which the waters had evaporated.
I write these lines in Portland, Maine, where water is everywhere. The tor-
tilla curtain the states of the American Southwest have been raising to stop
Latin American immigration, an influx they otherwise need so much, stands
at the antipodes of Maine. I saw this hideous fence in Nogales, Arizona, while
on my way to White Sands. I even crossed it involuntarily. It is crazy how
easy it is to get to Mexico from the United States, at least from Nogales. All
you have to do is take what becomes suddenly a one-​­way drive, then, once
on the other side, ask yourself how to turn around. Of course, you forgot to
bring all the mountainous paperwork needed to extinguish the bureaucratic
thirst of sinister-​­looking U.S. customs agents.
And, far off, toward the northeast, in Portland, a fragment of the Berlin
Wall is erected on a pier, supplemented by a wise commentary:

The Berlin wall. Forget not the tyranny of this wall.

Horrid Place.
Nor the love of freedom that made it fall.

“Horrid, indeed,” one hastens to agree. But there are walls whose fragments
we still do not display. We justify them when, politically, they seem proper. It
is no good! Draining the Mediterranean would not render its space less peril-
ous. It would not make for one of those smooth spaces so much appreciated
by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.7 In fact, it would prompt a certain num-
ber of Mediterranean countries to go conquer the territory formerly covered
by the high seas, which is what international right protects from the greed of
nation-​­states. And this conquest would be done quickly, with tanks, planes,
missiles, and discourse, with an arsenal of fire and incendiary words. Deter-
ritorializing the sea and its waters would entail an aggressive and doubtlessly
bloody reterritorialization that, in turn, would “update” our maps.
In my theory of geocriticism, the stable territory reconfigures itself accord-
ing to a steady dynamic, for everything is here grasped consistently according
to a productive in-​­between (entre-​­deux) model.8 My 2007 book Geocriticism
(La Géocritique) presented me with the opportunity to develop my under-
standing of this dynamic that more than one critic locates at the core of the
postmodern approach to the world. Now, where Deleuze and Guattari reveal
a line of escape that traverses all territory, others conceive of society—­and
166 Bertrand Westphal

modernity—­as “fluid” (Zygmunt Bauman) and its “mobilization” as “infi-

nite” in time as well as in space (Peter Sloterdijk).9 Thus, common to a
growing number of theories or even simple hypotheses exploring the “geophi-
losophic” surface of the planet (as Deleuze and Guattari would say) is a sense
of a movement that delinks territory and stasis, identity and its anchorage in
the singular, as well as the nation and its boundaries. Apropos of this move-
ment, one thinks of the 2009 public debate in France, called upon to discuss
the theme of its own national identity. The ensuing public debate came to
a sudden end. It could not have been otherwise: in the twenty-​­first century,
the concept of a national identity stated in the singular is a contradiction in
terms. In my work, I have postulated that one of the driving principles of
the geocritical approach is “transgressivity,” which does not correspond to
a “transgression” in the moral sense of the term (the only sense of the word
that the French language knows), but to a state of cultural and social mobil-
ity.10 Thus, in my account, the Latin limes—­a kind of border considered to be
absolutely impermeable—­transforms itself into a limen, a porous border, or
(when the latter is “stabilized” and unambiguously assumed) into a threshold
destined to be crossed and thereby used to bring heterogeneous but in no way
incompatible spaces into contact. The zones of contact are themselves par-
ticularly stimulating in that they shelter the constant emergence of the new.
These zones of absolute contact are the third spaces that in work of the great
geographer Edward Soja become “thirdspaces” and in my own work (and in
French), tiers espaces. These spaces have been studied by several of the finest
observers of today’s cultural planet—­in addition to Soja, one could mention
Homi Bhabha, Michel Serres, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Salman Rushdie, a novel-
ist who has often reflected on the creative processes behind his work.11
However, today’s defenders of the national border are finding new allies.
In their ranks, we notice the presence of Régis Debray who, in a recent essay,
Éloge des frontières, remarks that Terminus, the Roman god of the confines
who was honored at the edges of the fields, is beginning to regain his ancient
power. “It is a big gap,” Debray sighs. And he goes on: “Rarely have we seen,
in the long history of Western credulity, such a hiatus between our spiritual
state and the state of things.”12 Maybe so. And yet the question is whether
it falls to the spiritual state to resign itself to a state of supposed things.
Personally, I am not convinced. Culture has the right to imagine better and
to propose it, even if, as the newspapers keep reminding us, in the political
sphere the notion of State territory still exists. Culture does not kill. If it did,
I would hope that it would cease to be called “culture.” However, a politics
without conscience turns lethal.
Consider the vast surfaces whitened when material is returned to
chaos—­we have seen some of those in recent years and have imagined others
in the margins of recent artists’ apocalyptic projections. We commemorated,
in fact, the tenth anniversary of September 11, 2001 a little before the open-
ing of the Berger & Berger exhibition; while I was traveling through Maine,
The White Globe and the Paradoxical Cartography of Berger & Berger 167

preparations were well under way. Many Stars and Stripes flags, whose stars
had been replaced by the inscription “9/11,” were to be found in all the drug-
stores. Ten years ago, we all saw the terrible images of the attacks replayed
in the media over and over again. Their flashes, no longer volatile, remain
graven in our memories. Many of those, at least. One memory is of dazed
people, whitened by ash, running through the streets of Manhattan, and
scattered papers raining down from the burning towers. Other images, from
another time and place, have shown the areas hit by the white phosphorus
bombs condemned by the international conventions. These were fleeting pic-
tures, strewn with corpses contorted by a fierce agony, bodies of innocents
who found themselves at the wrong place at the wrong moment. The contour
lines of these victims imprint themselves on that part of the globe whitened
to phosphoric translucence. In the French vocabulary of photography, that
which enlarges a negative is called a “shooter” (tireur) or “marksman.” In this
case, to the contrary, another shooter, who exercises a military craft, resists
photography—­and, for that matter, any form of publicity.
But let us come back to the world of fiction, which is sometimes sup-
posed to maintain a looser rapport with the real world—­with the world of
a more material reality, a more solid one, a more evident one, and a more
explosive one. Take, for instance, Cormac McCarthy, undoubtedly one of the
great American novelists of the last generation. The man was born in Provi-
dence, Rhode Island. On this account, consider Chamfort too, who wrote
that “someone said that Providence is the baptismal name of chance.” It is
certainly true that McCarthy ceaselessly baptizes chance in his books; it is
true also that this task is daunting. But he left Providence quickly and moved
to New Mexico, where he has lived ever since. He knows the desert. He
certainly knows White Sands: he transformed the entire United States into
a great desert in his novel The Road. What color are the post-​­nuclear lands
that have survived the “day after” and spread from one side of the country
to the other, from the horizon to the road? The answer is, “every color and,
therefore, white.” In the book, a man and his son are survivors of what seem
to be a nuclear attack or catastrophe. They leave their home, now ruined, and
plot an erratic course through nothing. Their destination is the ocean shore,
somewhere further southeast. In the middle of chaos, they scramble to find
something to eat, all the while avoiding becoming the prey of survivors look-
ing for sustenance and, lacking other food, human flesh. Ash is everywhere.
It covers the globe entirely or in part, for we do not know the extent of the
catastrophe. The ash is not black; it is white-​­grey. It reflects the vestiges of the
world that has collapsed. It testifies to that which no longer is.
For McCarthy, White Sands have somehow scorched the human environ-
ment. They do not, however, provide any warmth. It is true that White Sands
is not only a nature preserve crushed by the New Mexico sun. On July 16,
1945, the U.S. Army tested the first atomic bomb in a part of the desert bor-
dering the preserve. Several weeks later, it dropped others on two Japanese
168 Bertrand Westphal

cities. We know what happened. The code name for the desert operation
was Trinity. Later, someone inquired of Robert Oppenheimer, director of
the American atomic program, why he had chosen this religious reference.
Oppenheimer did not recall the real reason. What he remembered, instead,
were three lines from baroque poet John Donne:

. . . As west and east

In all flat maps—­and I am one—­are one,
So death doth touch the resurrection.13

Taken from “Hymn to God, My God, in My Sickness,” these lines are less
enigmatic than they seem. Sick, the poet is stretched out in bed. Driven by sci-
entific passion, his doctors have become cosmographers, examining the body
laid out as if it were a map of the world. We must remember that on library
globes, the east and the west touch, always relative and intermediate to one
another: Donne lies at such an intersection. He hangs around the crossroads
of death and resurrection. But what is the fragment’s connection to the
bomb? This link slips without doubt in the unsaid, for Oppenheimer forgot
to cite the following line: “Is the Pacific Sea my home?” In August 1945, this
question had taken on a special meaning. Oppenheimer was obsessed by the
Empire of the Rising Sun, archipelago of the Pacific.
In New Mexico, Oppenheimer saw the explosion lead to, among other
effects, a deluge of colors running from purple to green. But white was domi-
nant. In 1966, the parts of White Sands containing the bomb crater and its
environs were included in the official list of historic places of the United
States of America. Today, the radioactivity level there is still ten times higher
than the norm. In fiction, monitoring danger is more difficult. What are the
radiation levels in McCarthy’s novel, those striking the earth of the father
and his son? The instruments of measurement, including thermometers, are
absent. We know that in their ashen world, it is not warm. On the contrary,
the cold astonishes them. The Atlantic coast is as frozen as the interior lands.
The father and son’s reasoning to get to the sea for protection proves, finally,
to be flawed: as it turns out, the sea does not always warm tired bones.
And the gypsum of the land, which is beautiful, is replaced by a viscous and
glaucous matter. Glauque, the French word for “glaucous” (or “whitish”),
derives, via the Latin glaucus, from the Greek glaūkos, which was a kind of
white with a greenish tone, roughly similar to mucus. The swath of the white
and frozen globe over which the man and his son flee has this consistency,
for the world has got the flu. The man, whose respiratory tracts are damaged,
passes away at the edge of a talus slope. His son hangs on. Hope is not dead.
The flame of hope weakens, but, as always, McCarthy avoids blowing it out.
Maybe the globe, white or glaucous, will reclaim its colors or, to the contrary,
it will lose them, so as to be reborn. It all depends. But on what? The last
paragraph of McCarthy’s novel is quite beautiful, plunging us into a dense
The White Globe and the Paradoxical Cartography of Berger & Berger 169

and brief interval between hope and sadness, evoking the trout that wriggled
in the clear mountain torrents once upon a time or upon a future: “On their
backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming.
Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right
again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and
they hummed of mystery.”14 The mystery of living maps.
Too hot, then too cold. But what if the white globe received its excess of
color (or its non-​­color) from the reflection of sun not on sand but on ice? Its
whiteness then would result from the extension of the polar ice caps. This
is unlikely, we are apt to retort, for the ice is melting everywhere. There are,
however, those who evoke the dawn of a new glaciation: obviously, the faces
of the apocalypse are shifting. But in Berger & Berger’s Astre blanc, we see
another possible world, one that asks only to be mentally visualized in a dif-
ferent way. So let us pose then an Arctic or Antarctic version of the White
Sands hypothesis. To do so, let us think of several books: White by Marie
Darrieussecq or Arctic Dreams by the great Barry Lopez. We would do well
also to summon Jean Echenoz’s Je m’en vais or Daniel Del Giudice’s Oriz-
zonte mobile, among so many others, some much older.15
The singularity of the Arctic or Antarctic adventure resides in how it chal-
lenges an extreme but well-​­demarcated environment. It starts in contrast
with what the protagonist’s life is in the daily universe of home, so stable
and linear. The extreme cold and the ice it generates take their particularity
from their deviation from a norm indispensable to human life. Something
similar happens with extreme heat. The universal desert would be banal and
unlivable, and so would be an ice cap as large as the world itself; unlivable,
they would quickly be uninhabitable by mankind, in any case, by man and
woman. Yes, the white globe of the hot or the cold apocalypse would not
make sense by itself; it also would not present any interest in self as such, for
it would come after life. At best, it would be the expression of a posthuman
aesthetic in the most radical sense of the term. So let us switch perspective
and approach our white, dented sphere from a different angle; leave the sand
and ice where they are.

The White of Maps

The time has come to avail ourselves of the services of a search engine, and
to ask it what might be meant by “white globe” in another possible world,
a more commercial one than Berger & Berger’s. Let us try Google; it might
make us think of Globe. The response of Google’s search engine is predictible.
The keyword search of the French for “white globe” (globe blanc) turns up
references to lamps, bulbs, chandeliers, and other light sources, and even a
“white terrestrial globe for your desk.” Mehr Licht! For the novice botanist
that I am, still more surprising is the reference to “white globe” begonias,
170 Bertrand Westphal

not to mention the “white globe” turnip. A search in English for “white
globe” also sparks an utterly exuberant imaginary. Here, we discover quickly
enough the existence of “white globe onions”; we could well conceive, I sup-
pose, of a globe that would peel like an onion. But I am dead set on setting
the apocalypse aside for now. In fact, Anglophone and especially American
searches pull up more pictures of the earth as a white globe, pictures of the
white earth in its geographic varieties, than do Francophone searches. One
finds an array of images of globes.
The first image is beautiful and good: it is in white chocolate. A second
is the logogram of a designer. A third interests me: it is of a perfectly round,
white ball that bears a pithy but programmatic commentary: a world without
any discremenation”—­Sic! one might be tempted to add. (The multiple “i”s
of “discrimination” are here “discriminated against,” in a strange, perhaps
George Perec-​­like manner.) There is indeed something to this idea of whiting
out the world. I confess that something like this crossed my mind immediately
when I saw Berger & Berger’s white globe. Indeed, what would the world be,
wondered the cartographer in me, if we were to re-​­whiten the maps?
Traditionally, maps were never white. Long ago we did not know the
world at all, much less the universe. Even the principle of a globe was not
evident. The more we learned about the world, the more we had to hide
our ignorance or lack of awareness regarding the many things we did not
know about it. And so we filled the void of the unknown with various figures
drawn or painted on the borders of places known and nimbly mastered (or
just stolen from others). We used and abused the recourse to goddesses and
gods taken from familiar mythologies, to monsters, exotic animals, and men
and women still more exotic. The more the globe demanded to be white and
empty—­the vaster the space of our ignorance—­the more color it took on.
And then our knowledge about the world reached its apex—­above all, in the
eyes of the West, whose appetite for conquest was insatiable. The globe then
filled with place-​­names, and the silhouettes of the gods disappeared, useful
no more for concealing a void.16 We traced new and abundant borders. We
formed territories, forgetting that they crossed spaces belonging to others.
We transformed the globe into a puzzle whose different pieces were reduced
to little, symbolic colors. Red was for the British Empire, as a general rule.
Cecil Rhodes, who gave his name to Rhodesia, which later became Zimba-
bwe, Malawi, and Zambia, wanted to make the African map a red ensemble.
G. K. Chesterton had summarized this vision in one of his “songs of educa-
tion” consecrated to geography:

The earth is a place on which England is found,

And you find it however you twirl the globe round;
For the spots are all red and the rest is all gray.17

Here, the globe is red and English or it is gray and void.

The White Globe and the Paradoxical Cartography of Berger & Berger 171

But the French Empire, which had meanwhile accelerated its own coloniz-
ing work, preferred a world map in a uniform blue; what was not red was
no longer necessarily gray. The palette of colors served to fuel competition
among the colonial powers. Other than red and blue, there was pink, orange,
yellow, and green. Color-​­wise, there eventually remained few options to those
charting the world. Of course, the actual inhabitants of the global puzzle
board had not been asked for their chromatic choices. The white spots on
maps did not exist prior to the second half of the eighteenth century, and
they did not convey the mapmaker’s helplessness or ignorance but a political
objective. White indicated the direction in which the colonial power should
turn. And it did turn, very quickly. Consequently, white spots disappeared
from world maps and globes within a century. Everything was appropriated,
with the exception of some corner of Antarctica or recess of the retreating
jungle, so many crumbs left over from the opulence of the imperial feast.
Joseph Conrad and Jules Verne were the last witnesses to this frenetic gorging.
After the Second World War, the puzzle board gained in subtlety and
nuance. It was unmade and remade and continues to be so. The processes
of colonization had given innumerable colors to the maps and to the globe.
But the idea of cartographic saturation persisted. For there are only colors
imposed by some on others. There are also lines, all those parallels, merid-
ians, borders, and abstract demarcations that caused so much drama. The
streaks that furrow the world are gaping wounds, today as yesterday. The
walls that I have evoked are only one type of streak among others, visible
and less so. In effect, sometimes these fences and borders are immaterial.
They subtend the designs of the prejudiced. But their expression is always
violent. Gilles Deleuze fought these streaks and striations; he wanted to
“smooth out” space. Berger & Berger, for their part, have erased the danger-
ous symbols that, in connoting the planet, imprison its beings. They offer an
alternative within anybody’s reach, one that eshews measuring-​­and control-​
o
­ riented lines and signposts. They give an alternative beyond discriminations
and without a “message.” To be sure, they are not naive. Their globe is lumpy
like a skull that has taken a heavy blow. But their artistic solution allows for a
new departure, a new hypothesis. Their white globe gives carte blanche to the
freest spirits to do something other than nourish the apocalypse, the advance
of white sands, the glaciation of ideas.
I must say that I rather like the idea of this deliberately imperfect sphere
that inspires reflection and imposes nothing. Here, whiteness suggests the
effacement of any landmark. It exempts the earth from a task that the planet
has sometimes assigned itself and that has proven to be the source of many
conflicts: the quest for a center and thus the establishment of a hierarchy of
gazes and viewpoints, referents and references—­the very hierarchy of col-
ors that the maps have reproduced. As we know, the West and its cultures
have not ceased to promote this quest, which, in many respects, resembles
a very Proustian “search for lost time.” We have, however, arrived at the
172 Bertrand Westphal

point where we should at last ask what cultural universality might signify for
this West, indeed, for this nostalgic West. What would a planetary cultural
space be today, a space that would connect the world’s grand narratives,
the mythoi, which were already “grand narratives” for the ancient Greeks?
While working on a piece18 about the anthropological structures described by
Gilbert Durand in the wake of Mircea Eliade, Gaston Bachelard, and several
other great specialists of world mythology, I came to the conclusion that we
should not subsume under the same scheme or “system” myths originating
from different cultures—­for instance, from Dravidian India, central Europe,
or Brazilian Amazonia. For what would this “system” be other than one that
would replicate the West’s colorfully mapped contours? Orbiting around this
self-​­
proclaimed center would suddenly appear innumerable mythic satel-
lites (“narrative units”) whose consistency would stem from the dynamic
relations formed around the referential “node” that would be the West and,
in particular, Europe. In France, François Jullien has raised the question in
De L’Universel: De l’uniforme, du commun et du dialogue entre les cultures
(2008). Jullien, a philosopher and a Sinologist, was taken to task for dis-
tinguishing too neatly between the great cultures, for instance between the
West and China. At the very least, however, he does pose a question quite
pertinent, even a little . . . impertinent: “Is the universal not derived from a
composite, not to say chaotic dynamic? And does the universal’s prestige, in
Europe, not rest precisely on this universal’s contribution to holding together
the heterogeneous by serving as the latter’s ideological keystone?”19
Yes, it does, but in what terms would it be possible to escape ethnocen-
trism? The answer calls for patient reflection. One should give oneself, as I
have tried here, some time to meditate on this question. It would be the kind
of moment that Václav Havel—­great thinker, Czechoslovakian dramaturge,
and, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, first president of the Czech Republic—­
recommended that Europe take a break to reflect in order to better confront
the challenges of tomorrow, as do the wise at sunset before going to bed.
Havel was not heard. He died not long ago, and Europe is not doing well
either. As for the rest of the globe, it is not much better off. Indeed, it is pre-
cisely the kind of reflexive exercise that Václav Havel submitted to our (in)
attention that Berger & Berger invite through the spectacle of their sculpture.
The globe is battered but, ideally, it can be rethought, emptied of its non-​
­sense. Vox clamantis in deserto candido? (The voice of him that crieth in the
wilderness?) Without a doubt—­and not to offend Régis Debray—­the spiri-
tual state is often a prelude to the state of things. This idea is refreshing, and,
given our present circumstances, not at all negligible. Undoubtedly, a white
globe—­an intersection of suppressed or excessive colors—­represents all but
“evidence.”

Translated from the

French by Darren Jackson
The White Globe and the Paradoxical Cartography of Berger & Berger 173

Notes

1. To learn more on Berger & Berger’s work, one can consult their website:
http://​www​.berger-​­berger​.com.
2. See the exhibition’s website at http://​www​.rosascape​.com/site/expo-​berger
berger2011-​us​.html.
3. In a different version, this text, written in French, accompanied the exhibi-
tion where it was presented in the form of a pamphlet.
4. This is a reference to one of the most famous lines in French surrealist
poetry: “The earth is blue like an orange” (my translation). The line is taken
from Eluard’s poem “The Earth Is Blue,” included in L’amour la poésie (Love,
Poetry, 1929) (Paris: Gallimard, 1929), republished as Love, Poetry: L’amour
la poesie, trans. Stuart Kendall (Boston: Black Widow Press of Commonwealth
Books, 2007).
5. “For at last, what is man in nature? A nothing faced with infinity, an every-
thing faced with nothing, a middle between nothing and everything.” See Blaise
Pascal, Pensées (1670 [par. 72]), in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1954),
1106 (my translation and emphasis).
6. Schengen is a village in Luxembourg where several European accords (1985,
1990) have been signed. Thus, the agreements constituted what is called the
“Schengen space,” which is to say a zone of (relatively) free circulation at the
heart of the European Union, whose customs borders are now located at the
exterior limits of the participating states.
7. “Sedentary space is striated, by walls, fences, and paths between fences,
while nomadic space is smooth, marked only by ‘traits’ that fade and move with
the trajectory.” Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Capitalisme et Schizophrenie 2:
Mille Plateaux (Paris: Minuit, 1980), 472, my translation.
8. See my La géocritique: Réel, fiction, espace (Paris: Minuit, 2007), trans. Rob-
ert T. Tally Jr. as Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2011); and my Le monde plausible: Espace, lieu, carte (Paris: Minuit,
2011). On geocriticism, see also Robert T. Tally Jr., ed., Geocritical Explorations:
Space, Place, and Mapping in Literary and Cultural Studies (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2011); and Laurence Dahan-​­Gaida, ed., “Numéro special Géocri-
tique,” special issue, Epistémocritique 9 (Fall 2011), http://​www​.epistemocritique​
.org/spip.php?rubrique60&lang=fr.
9. See Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge, Eng.: Polity, 2000);
and Peter Sloterdijk, Eurotaoismus: Zur Kritik der politischen Kinetik (Berlin:
Suhrkamp, 1989).
10. Geocriticism posits “spatio-​­temporality,” the notion that space is in time
and vice versa. This is seized in a permanent movement (transgressivity) and is
articulated as a link between the real and its fictional representations (referential-
ity). The notion also implies that these representations activate a phenomenon of
global legibility (the referential space deploys itself in a fictional manner in the
text or in the image that in turn informs space).
11. For other treatments of this issue and for a selective bibliography, one can
consult Westphal, Geocriticism, 69–­74.
12. Régis Debray, Éloge des frontières (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), 20 (my
translation).
174 Bertrand Westphal

13. John Donne, “Hymn to God, My God, in My Sickness,” in Poems of John

Donne, ed. E. K. Chambers (London: Lawrence and Bullen, 1896), 1:211–­12.
14. Cormac McCarthy, The Road (London: Picador, 2006), 307.
15. Marie Darrieussecq, White (Paris: P.O.L., 2003); Barry Lopez. Arctic
Dreams (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1986); Jean Echenoz, Je m’en vais
(Paris: Minuit, 1999); Daniel Del Giudice, Orizzonte mobile (Turin: Einaudi,
2009).
16. On these questions, see chapter IV, “L’invention du lieu,” in my essay Le
monde plausible, 156–­204.
17. Gilbert Keith Chesterton, “Geography,” in The Collected Poems of G. K.
Chesterton, ed. Gilbert Keith (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1946), 93.
18. Bertrand Westphal, “Une lecture géocritique des structures anthro-
pologiques de l’imaginaire,” Iris 43 (2012). The referenced text is Gilbert Durand,
Les structures anthropologiques de l’imaginaire (1960; reprinted, Paris: Dunod,
1992).
19. François Jullien, De l’universel: De l’uniforme, du commun et du dialogue
entre les cultures (2008; reprinted, Paris: Seuil, 2011), 14.
 Beyond the Flaming Walls of the World
Fantasy, Alterity, and the Postnational Constellation

Robert T. Tally Jr.

The planet is in the species of alterity, belonging to another

system; and yet we inhabit it . . .
—­Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline

In his influential 1827 essay “On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composi-

tion,” Sir Walter Scott extols the beauty and power of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s
writing but criticizes “the wildness of Hoffmann’s fancy,” declaring that the
German romantic’s taste and temperament have “carried him too far ‘extra
moenia flammantia mundi,’ too much beyond the circle not only of prob-
ability but even of possibility.” Scott is concerned that the “fantastic” mode
is only acceptable to the degree that “it tends to excite agreeable and pleas-
ing ideas.”1 In his use of the Latin phrase (borrowed from Lucretius), Scott
invokes a spatial metaphor to make a broader point. By venturing “beyond
the flaming walls of the world,” the fantasy author indulges, in Scott’s view, in
an extravagant aesthetic that evokes horror or even disgust by conjuring up
a radical alterity that defamiliarizes the habitus and aggrandizes the horrible.
Not stated directly by Scott but implied in his mild critique is the degree to
which this outré sensibility disrupts the conventions and expectations of a
national literature. In addition to providing a nationally circumscribed space
for a particular country’s authors, such a literature, we gather, must some-
how represent the recognizably national character of or in its narratives, a
character that must above all be familiar to readers. Extravagant fantasy sub-
verts, however, nationalistic standards of beauty by becoming “grotesque”
and “Arabesque.” Such fiction undermines the national vocation of literature
through its techniques of estrangement, that is, by its imaginative flights away
from familiar landscapes, customs, and events; it tends to domesticate the
strange elements and represent them in a comfortable, recognizable pattern.2
A romantic realism of the sort found in Scott’s own historical novels offers
a fitting mode for such a national narrative, as the foundational legends and

193
194 Robert T. Tally Jr.

myths can be incorporated into a calm, more quotidian, and rather familiar
culture. In contrast, by positing a radical alterity from the outset, the fantastic
mode exceeds national and cultural boundaries, drawing the narrative out
into the world and beyond.
Today’s planetary turn in literary and cultural studies may be associated
with a number of interrelated historical phenomena that have forcefully
inserted the intertwined matters of spatiality, fantasy, and postnationality into
the critical discussion. Above all, the multiform processes now aggregated
under the rubric of globalization, including those practices in the aesthetic or
cultural spheres sometimes called postmodern, have occasioned the diminu-
tion of the national in favor of the global, the elevation of space above (or
at least to the level of) time, and the interrogation of representational pro-
tocols linked to the nation-​­state. In sum, most of the formerly recognizable
hermeneutics are deemed no longer suitable for making sense of the present,
dynamic world-​­system. As numerous artists, critics, philosophers, and social
scientists have observed, the revolutionary social transformations throughout
the world in the postwar era have fundamentally altered the effectiveness of
sense-​­making systems of past epochs, be they scientific, religious, or, as is my
concern here, literary-​­cultural. Narrative fiction, for example, may no longer
operate as it had in Scott’s day, when the “form-​­giving form” of the historical
novel (to use Georg Lukács’s expression) could organize an ostensible totality
(Lebenstotalität) through which the individual could locate him-​­or herself
within a cognizable world-​­system.3 Scott’s historical novels attempted to
shape the diffuse passions, partisan interests, and different spaces into a dis-
tinctively national imaginary geography, and, as Jonathan Arac has pointed
out, these novels were essential precursors to national narrative in American
literature.4 However, in the twentieth century, the postmodern predicament
of representation is part and parcel of an existential crisis akin to being lost
in space; it is an utterly alienating experience, evoking an anxiety that Mar-
tin Heidegger had associated directly with the uncanny, the unheimlich or
“unhomely,” the Nicht-​­zu-​­hause-​­sein (“not-​­being-​­at-​­home”).5 But, then, the
loss of a sense of “home” is also a recognition of the disruptions of “domestic”
or national space caused by forces of globalization. Fredric Jameson’s high-
lighting of “cognitive mapping on a global scale” as both a partial solution to
the crisis of representability and a vocation of postmodern art emphasizes the
spatial anxiety and postnationality of such a cartographic project.6
I would propose, in my turn, that such mapping is incomplete unless it is
also speculative, figurative, and, in a broad sense, fantastic. Unlike the naively
mimetic maps of an earlier epoch, the literary cartography of the postnational
world-​­system has to be, in some ways, otherworldly. Such, at least, is my
argument here. Although there is no question about the value of myth, folk-
lore, or “national fantasy” in establishing national narrative,7 I would submit
that, in the present world-​­historical moment, the radical alterity of fantasy is
well positioned to foster a postnational and thus planetarily oriented literary
Beyond the Flaming Walls of the World 195

perspective. I am not speaking of fantasy as a genre, although I am interested

in the potential of what Jameson has called “generic discontinuities” in nar-
ratives as part of the overall undertaking of literary cartography.8 Rather, I
am thinking of fantasy as a discursive modality, one that is marked by its
fundamental attention to otherness or otherworldliness. Fantasy, of which
science fiction and utopia may be considered subsets, enables a figurative
mapping of the (so-​­called) real world while using the (so-​­called) unreal or
impossible as its means. In theory and in practice, the alterity of fantasy
makes possible new ways of seeing—­and, by the same token, of interpret-
ing and perhaps changing—­the world-​­system forming the untranscendable
horizon of all thinking today.9 Somewhat as it did for earlier local, regional,
or national space, but far more so, thinking planetary space in the age of
globalization requires cognitive abstraction and imagination that makes
“the literature of estrangement,” to use China Miéville’s phrase, the form
potentially best suited to our postmodern and postnational condition. As
Miéville asserts pointedly, “the fantastic . . . is good to think with.”10 For, to
be sure, the fantastic allows us, among other things, to see the planet anew,
to visualize our world in novel ways, and to imagine different approaches
to representing and otherwise engaging the world-​­system. In “constellating”
and working through the various intersecting forces affecting the existential
experience of life on the planet at this historical moment, we may venture—­
like the wayward imagination of Hoffmann in Scott’s analysis—­beyond the
flaming walls of the world in order to discover, in a more meaningful sense,
the real world after all. In this “postnational constellation,” to recall the
phrase Jürgen Habermas used in a different context,11 the principal vocation
of literary and cultural work may be to project novel cartographies and alter-
native trajectories by which to navigate this increasingly unrepresentable,
even unrecognizable, Lebenswelt. After the planetary turn and in the context
of an increasingly visible world literature whose representative space is nei-
ther regional nor national but global, the postnational constellation may be
an apt figure for the present world-​­system itself, and a fantastic mapping of
the planetary space we occupy may constitute an urgent project for contem-
porary theorists and critics.

Imagining the Planet

Widely known as “Earthrise,” one of the past century’s most famous photo-
graphs depicts a distinct, blue-​­and-​­white planet emerging in the distance over
the barren grey-​­white surface of the moon. Taken by Apollo 8 astronauts
in lunar orbit on December 24, 1968, the iconic image became a world-
wide sensation when it appeared on TV sets and in newspapers on Christmas
morning. Humans have been using their vision and imagination to make
sense of the world throughout their history, and yet never before had such a
196 Robert T. Tally Jr.

vista been available to them, as, for the first time, they ventured beyond the
boundaries of the terraqueous globe and looked back upon it as outsiders.
From this new perspective, viewers of the “Earthrise” photograph were repo-
sitioned in the universe. Now able to achieve a critical distance from their
planet, they were no longer cosmopolites comfortably at home in the world
but saw the latter as a strange otherworld, as if for the first time. Arguably,
in the contemplation of this image and of its ramifications, a planetary con-
sciousness emerged.12
This is certainly how American poet Archibald MacLeish envisioned the
import of the event. Writing in the New York Times only hours after the
first appearance of the photograph, MacLeish considered the moment an
epochal shift in humankind’s relationship to the world. Referring first to
Dante’s geocentric universe, then to its waning and ultimate collapse after the
Copernican Revolution and modern physics, which had rendered the earth
a metaphysically meaningless ensemble of violent forces that could bring
about the slaughter of millions in absurd world wars and nuclear destruction,
MacLeish announced that “now, in the last few hours, the [planet] notion
may have changed again. For the first time in all of time men have seen it not
as continents or oceans from the little distance of a hundred miles or two or
three, but seen it from the depth of space; seen it whole and round and beau-
tiful and small.” As MacLeish explained on that Christmas day,

The medieval notion of the earth put man at the center of everything.
The nuclear notion of the earth put him nowhere—­beyond the range
of reason even—­lost in absurdity and war. This latest notion may
have other consequences. Formed as it was in the minds of heroic
voyagers who were also men, it may remake our image of mankind.
No longer that preposterous figure at the center, no longer that
degraded and degrading victim off at the margins of reality and blind
with blood, man may at last become himself.
To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that
eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the
earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold—­
brothers who know now they are truly brothers.13

This somewhat grandiose interpretation of an astronaut’s timely snapshot

indicates the extent to which a kind of planetary turn, in poetry, philosophy,
and the arts and sciences as a whole was not only already under way but also
deeply longed for by so many of the inhabitants of that “small and blue and
beautiful” orb.14
The image of the planet captured in and promoted by “Earthrise,” which
functioned simultaneously as an aesthetic, scientific, ideological, and uto-
pian work of art, occasions a powerful rethinking of the relations among
space, narrative, geopolitics, and the world-​­system. Ironically perhaps, the
Beyond the Flaming Walls of the World 197

repercussions of the “Earthrise” phenomenon led not to the extension or

intensification of the space age, but to a “return to earth,” as it were, with
more scientific and humanities-​­based attention being paid to this planet and
far less to Mars, Jupiter, and the great beyond. As Robert Poole observes
in Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth, the postwar period had been
dominated by rockets and space travel whose proponents could proclaim,
with Wernher von Braun, that the party who conquered space would control
the planet. This notion certainly inspired a great deal of military and political
enthusiasm for space research. Along the same lines, science fiction depict-
ing space exploration would dominate popular culture in various media
throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Obviously, astrophysics, technology, sci-
ence fiction, and interplanetary expeditions remain salient today—­witness
the recent burst of interest in the Curiosity rover’s Mars landing on August
6, 2012, for example—­but they have no longer the cultural cachet they had
achieved in the early 1960s. After “Earthrise,” the fevered imaginations of the
populace turned back to the planet Earth. As Norman Cousins put it, “the
significance of the lunar expeditions was not that men set foot on the Moon,
but that they set eye on the Earth.”15
Time magazine used the photograph as the cover of its final issue of 1968,
with the one-​­word caption (“Dawn”) as if to emphasize the image’s liminal
and inaugural role in marking the transition to a new stage of world his-
tory. Given the turbulence of that year—­what with the assassinations, riots,
and political turmoil in the United States; the upheavals and repressions in
Prague, Paris, and elsewhere in Europe; and the warfare and violence of Viet-
nam, South America, and Africa—­the “Earthrise” image, when couched as
a “dawn,” acquired a poignant, optative, and utopian nuance. Where the
future had previously been determined as a “space race” among antagonistic,
destructive superpowers, this austere, beautiful vision of a small, fragile, and
isolated planet reoriented the very idea of spatiotemporal progression. For
many like MacLeish, this image was itself a sign that national boundaries
and ideological differences were no longer of any great importance. The time
had come to view the Earth and its inhabitants as a single people occupying
a single global space.
What I want to suggest in dwelling on these pictures is that the moment of
this global self-​­image constitutes a nexus where several important aspects of
the planetary turn in the arts, sciences, and humanities intersect. Significantly,
this literal turn back toward the planet from the outermost reaches of human
space exploration is representative of an aesthetic planetary turn whereby
the entire Earth is for the first time seen in its global totality.16 This moment
coincides with tumultuous geopolitical events, most spectacularly visible in
the wars of Southeast Asia and the Middle East, in the anticolonial national
movements in Africa, in the revolutions in Latin America, and in the internal
conflicts throughout Europe and the United States. Also, although this would
come into focus more clearly only later, with the collapse of the Bretton
198 Robert T. Tally Jr.

Woods agreement, the rise at this time of multinational capital and trans-
national economies was making the older colonial and mercantile financial
systems obsolete, paving the way to widespread financialization and other
forms of cultural-​­economic globalization.17 The boom in “Third World” lit-
erature complements and supplements the innovations in fiction and poetry
in the West, while a burgeoning aesthetic of postmodernism in fiction, cin-
ema, visual art, and especially architecture alters the way space and culture
are perceived. Thus the widely distributed “Earthrise” image of the planet
emerged at a time of radical transformation worldwide.18 Amid so much real-​
w
­ orld activity, something quite otherworldly—­the earth itself—­appeared.
To be sure, this “Earthrise” photograph conveyed a striking reality;
indeed, its photographic realism was literal, and grasping its import is crucial
to understanding its influence and effect in imagining the planet anew. But
the image was also the stuff of the most extremely outré science fiction: the
fantastic voyage beyond the moon. Parodied in Lucian’s True History and
celebrated by Georges Méliès in Le voyage dans la lune, with hundreds of
lunar fantasies occupying the spectrum in between, this sort of cosmic travel
made possible the discovery of hitherto unknown or unimagined realities.
The fantastic nature of the worldview afforded from outer space might be
said to have inspired a wholly different way of thinking on the surface of the
little green-​­blue sphere. National, regional, and local concerns and conflicts,
for instance, suddenly may have looked trivial in the face of an abruptly more
salient global space. The rivalries that animated the geopolitical Weltanschau-
ungen of the era may have seemed petty and absurd from this postnational
and supracontinental perspective. This was indeed the case for the more
optimistic of commentators who dared to imagine a united and harmoni-
ous future that formerly only the most wide-​­eyed dreamers could envision.
As Poole points out in a reference to the Apollo 8 mission that produced the
“Earthrise” photograph, “the mightiest shot in the Cold War turned into the
twentieth century’s ultimate utopian moment.”19 And utopia, like the planet
itself, is a figure of radical alterity. As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has put
it in her discussion of planetarity and world literature, the planet’s “alterity,
determining experience, is mysterious and discontinuous—­an experience of
the impossible.”20

A Meditation on the Impossible

Utopia is currently a favored topic among many spatially oriented crit-

ics, including Jameson and David Harvey.21 In some respects, it represents
a paradigmatically modern genre or discursive form, with major literary
works (including Thomas More’s 1516 genre-​­establishing Utopia) coming
about during the Age of Discovery and the European voyages to the “New
World”22 and another wave of utopianism finding its voice and audience
Beyond the Flaming Walls of the World 199

amid the nineteenth century’s Industrial Age uncertainties with Charles Fou-
rier’s phalansteries, Edward Bellamy’s “nationalism,” and William Morris’s
“news from nowhere.” But, as I have argued elsewhere,23 a sort of utopian
mode has reasserted itself most strenuously in the postmodern world of
our globalization era, paradoxically a world in which utopian alternatives
to the status quo seem utterly impossible, even inconceivable. Jameson has
famously observed that it appears easier today to imagine the end of the
world than the breakdown of late capitalism; often forgotten, however, is
Jameson’s indispensable follow-​­up to this remark: “perhaps that is due to
some weakness in our imaginations.”24
An empowered imagination, one that would set out to map a planetary
space rather than limiting itself to its local or national subsets, would need to
come to grips with the radical alterity of the world, specifically with the fan-
tastic otherworldliness emerging in conjunction with an altogether unfamiliar
perspective, such as the view from outer space. Obviously, this imaginative
project would have to exceed the limits of the real and the known; it would
involve not only a consideration of the possible but also “a meditation on
the impossible.”25 This meditation on the impossible seems in fact to be part
of the cartographic efforts of fantasy, as the projection of imaginary spaces
becomes an essential aspect of our engagement with the all-​­too-​­real world-​
­system after the spatial or planetary turn.
Yet the term “fantasy” itself presents a problem. Numerous spatial critics
have embraced utopian discourse as a means of conceiving radical alterna-
tives to the status quo, but many of these commentators have been openly
hostile to fantasy as a mode or genre on the grounds that fantasy is an escap-
ist, politically reactionary, and backward-​­looking art form. A case in point
is Darko Suvin’s groundbreaking 1979 science fiction study, which dismissed
fantasy as anti-​­rational and metaphysical.26 Another is Jameson himself, who,
in his own extensive statement on utopia, condemns any confusion between
fantasy and science fiction (“We must now lay this misunderstanding to
rest”), referring to their distinction as “The Great Schism.”27 Nor does it help
that the most inescapably popular figure in fantasy literature, J. R. R. Tolkien
(who, incidentally, was politically conservative), actively defended fantasy
precisely as a kind of “escapist” practice. Complaining that anti-​­fantasy crit-
ics have confused “the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter,”
Tolkien asks, “Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he
tries to get out and go home. Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks
about other topics than jailers and prison-​­walls?”28 Indeed, Tolkien goes so
far as to claim that the world outside this prison is just as “real,” whether the
prisoner can see it or not, which suggests a view of fantasy as an imaginative
method for apprehending the “real world” rather than a means of escaping
from it.
It is perhaps ironic, then, that a similar argument has been made by Miéville
in his spirited defense of the genre against charges brought by Marxists and
200 Robert T. Tally Jr.

utopian critics. Miéville has said some rather mischievous things about Tolk-
ien, most famously that the Oxford professor’s influential presence was “a
wen on the arse of fantasy literature,” although he has repented of this view
a bit in recent years.29 As a Marxist, Miéville represents, of course, nearly the
political antipode of Tolkien. Yet, even though he comes from such a differ-
ent perspective, Miéville contends that fantasy is superior to realism when it
comes to getting at the truth of “ ‘the real world.’ ” After discussing Marx’s
own analysis in Capital of the fetishism of the commodity and the hidden
social relations embedded in it, Miéville offers that “ ‘real’ life under capital-
ism is a fantasy: ‘realism,’ narrowly defined, is therefore a ‘realistic’ depiction
of ‘an absurdity which is true,’ but no less absurd for that. Narrow ‘realism’
is as partial and ideological as ‘reality’ itself.”30 Further, Miéville insists, “the
apparent epistemological radicalism of the fantastic mode’s basic predicate,”
namely “that the impossible is true,” makes it well suited to the task of an
oppositional or critical project.31 As Miéville concludes, “the fantastic might
be a mode peculiarly suited to and resonant with the forms of modernity. . . .
Fantasy is a mode that, in constructing an internally coherent but actually
impossible totality—­constructed on the basis that the impossible is, for this
work, true—­mimics the ‘absurdity’ of capitalist modernity.”32
Tolkien’s and Miéville’s positions respond to the perception that fantastic
literary works are not only inferior to more realistic stories but also morally
or politically suspect. Tolkien famously quarreled with fellow conservative
C. S. Lewis over whether it was immoral for a Christian to embrace myth,
which Lewis disparaged as “lies breathed through silver.”33 And, as a practic-
ing fantasist as well as a socialist activist in his own right, Miéville is forced
to defend fantasy from those on the Left who have objected to its escapism,
nostalgia, or ideological incorrectness. Thus, even when the opposition to
fantasy is less morally or politically charged, the prevailing view of political
critics is that realism, with its familiar and recognizable world presumably
shared by reader and writer, is the preferred mode.
This is, after all, Sir Walter Scott’s rejoinder to Hoffmann in “On the
Supernatural in Fictitious Composition.” In finding Hoffmann’s work both
grotesque and Arabesque—­the very terms Edgar Allan Poe gleefully adopted
to refer to his collected stories, although it is noteworthy that Poe had
intended to name the revised and expanded collection Phantasy Pieces—­
Scott does not hide a certain disdain for the otherworldly, which here covers
the merely exotic (as the term “Arabesque” makes clear) as well as the twisted
or horrible. His essay offers a foundational text for the debate about the
suitable proportion of fantasy and reality in literature during the nineteenth
century. This polemic also famously includes Nathaniel Hawthorne’s apo-
logia for “romance” as opposed to the more strictly realistic “novel,” which
“is presumed to aim at a very minute fidelity, not merely to the possible,
but to the probable and ordinary course of man’s experience.”34 And, as we
have seen, this argument about how much fantasy is acceptable in serious
Beyond the Flaming Walls of the World 201

literature—­what Kathryn Hume has succinctly named the “fantasy versus

mimesis” controversy35—­continues to elicit heated responses.
Yet again, it is important to reiterate that it is Scott who casually delin-
eates the contours of the battlefield. To do so, he first quotes a paragraph of
Hoffmann’s The Entail, in which a frightfully supernatural occurrence cul-
minates with a calm, somewhat revelatory, but still eerie explanation. Scott
then elaborates as follows:

The passage which we have quoted, while it shows the wildness of

Hoffmann’s fancy, evinces also that he possessed power which ought to
have mitigated and allayed it. Unfortunately, his taste and temperament
directed him too strongly to the grotesque and fantastic—­carried him
too far “extra moenia flammantia mundi,” too much beyond the circle
not only of probability but even of possibility, to admit of his compos-
ing much in the better style which he might easily have attained. The
popular romance, no doubt, has many walks, nor are we at all inclined
to halloo the dogs of criticism against those whose object is merely to
amuse a passing hour. It may be repeated with truth, that in this path of
light literature, “tout genre est permis hors les genres ennuyeux,” and of
course, an error in taste ought not to be followed up and hunted down
as if it were a false maxim in morality, a delusive hypothesis in science,
or a heresy in religion itself. Genius too, is, we are aware, capricious,
and must be allowed to take its own flights, however eccentric, were it
but for the sake of experiment. Sometimes, also, it may be eminently
pleasing to look at the wildness of an Arabesque painting executed by
a man of rich fancy. But we do not desire to see genius expand or rather
exhaust itself upon themes which cannot be reconciled to taste; and the
utmost length in which we can indulge a turn to the fantastic is, where
it tends to excite agreeable and pleasing ideas.
We are not called upon to be equally tolerant of such capriccios as
are not only startling by their extravagance, but disgusting by their
horrible import.36

Neither a naive realist nor an advocate of a strictly mimetic narrative art,

Scott is willing to forgive literature that extends “beyond the flaming walls
of the world” so long as it can “excite agreeable and pleasant ideas.” Thus,
he introduces a pragmatic and moral dimension into the discussion of liter-
ary aesthetics. That is, the question is less about what constitutes fantasy and
more about the consequences of using such fantastic elements.
The French maxim that Scott paraphrases is Voltaire’s assertion that “all
genres are good except boring genres.” However, he cribs the Latin expression
not from literary fiction, whether fantastic or realistic, but from philosophy,
specifically from Lucretius’s first century b.c.e. treatise De Rerum Natura
(On the Nature of Things). In the original, the expression extra moenia
202 Robert T. Tally Jr.

flammantia mundi does not carry a negative connotation. On the contrary, in

fact, for Lucretius the phrase signifies a great achievement, a sign of the intel-
lectual courage of the scientific or philosophical mind willing to go beyond
the superstitious chimeras of religion in order to seek the truths that lie
“beyond the flaming walls of the world.” The famous line refers to Epicurus,
the atomist and materialist Greek philosopher whose “victory,” according to
Lucretius, brought religion down under our feet and placed human beings on
a level with heaven.37 It is also worth noting that, in this original Epicurean
context, the movement “beyond the flaming walls of the world” is not con-
sidered an attempt to escape from the real world into a false one but rather
a brave discovery of precisely that more truly real world that had been hid-
den and veiled by the false realities of superstition and religion. In its oddly
tortuous philological journey from the first century b.c.e. to the nineteenth
century, the phrase as used by Scott had developed a meaning nearly opposite
to what Lucretius had intended. However, in what might be considered one
more turn of the screw or yet another dialectical reversal, one can argue that
Scott’s own use of the expression as a means of criticizing fantasy actually
reveals the power of fantasy as a device for social and literary critique.
Indeed, one could suggest that Lucretius’s defense of the materialist
thought of Epicurus against the superstitions of religious belief finds modern
and postmodern counterparts in Jameson’s pro-​­utopian argument against so-​
c­ alled practical thinking and also in Miéville’s defense of fantasy against its
Marxist detractors (including, of course, such science fiction enthusiasts as
Jameson himself). In both cases, a theorist inveighs against the prejudices
and barriers to thinking that predominate in his place and time. For example,
in Marxism and Form, Jameson acknowledges the anti-​­utopian positions of
Marx and Engels in the nineteenth century. Referring in particular to the
reemergence of utopian discourse in Herbert Marcuse’s critical theory, Jame-
son argues, however, that by the 1960s another “dialectical reversal” had
occurred. He contends that while

in the older society (as in Marx’s classic analysis) Utopian thought

represented a diversion of revolutionary energy into idle wish-​
­fulfillments and imaginary satisfactions, in our own time the very
nature of the Utopian concept has undergone a dialectical reversal.
Now it is practical thinking which everywhere represents a capitu-
lation to the system itself, and stands as a testimony to the power
of that system to transform even its adversaries into its own mirror
image. The Utopian idea, on the contrary, keeps alive the possibility
of a world qualitatively distinct from this one and takes the form of
a stubborn negation of all that is.38

Along similar lines, utopian theorist Russell Jacoby has maintained that “any
effort to escape the spell of the quotidian . . . is the sine qua non of serious
Beyond the Flaming Walls of the World 203

thinking about the future—­the prerequisite of any thinking.”39 In this sense,

the more realistic, practical, or feasible position becomes antithetical to the
necessarily fantastic, critical project of meditating upon the impossible.
But, again, this is the very crux of Miéville’s defense of fantasy. In his
“Cognition as Ideology,” Miéville questions the supremacy of Suvin’s influ-
ential characterization of science fiction as a form of cognitive estrangement,
with the corollary that the estrangements of fantasy or myth are fundamen-
tally non-​­alienating, metaphysical, mystifying, or anti-​­ rational.40 Miéville
decries the attitude that has allowed “generations of readers and writers to
treat, say, faster-​­than-​­light drives as science-​­fictional in a way that dragons
are not, despite repeated assurances from the great majority of physicists that
the former are no less impossible than the latter.”41 Against the anti-​­fantasy
sentiments of the spaceship enthusiasts or dragon detractors, Miéville files all
genres—­science fiction, utopia, and fantasy—­under the label “the literature
of alterity.” This intensive regard for otherness, whether presented in terms of
the past or future, the earthly or the interstellar, the monstrous or the alien,
is shared by all forms of the fiction of estrangement, including some, like
Moby-​­Dick, that are inexpressibly “strange” even while featuring absolutely
realistic (or, at least, possible) persons and events. Miéville’s terminology thus
enables the fantastic to exceed or even invert tightly circumscribed genre
boundaries. For Miéville, science fiction or utopia are mere subsets of the
broader category of fantasy, which allows a meditation on the impossible
that can enable a radically different vantage point from which to view the
“real world.” As Miéville puts it, “we need fantasy to think the world, and
to change it.”42
Change and form go hand in hand here. What Jameson has said of the
dynamic of form and world transformation in utopian thought applies
equally well to the notion of fantasy as the literature of radical alterity: “uto-
pia as a form is not the representation of radical alternatives; it is rather
simply the imperative to imagine them.”43 Truly radical alterity would, in a
somewhat literal sense, be unrepresentable since, in the apprehension of the
novel otherworld and in its incorporation into our own mental databases,
this representation refamiliarizes this otherness and, in one way or another,
domesticates estrangement. As Jameson notes elsewhere, “insofar as the Uto-
pian project comes to seem more realizable and more practical, it turns into
a practical political program in our world, in the here-​­and-​­now, and ceases to
be Utopian in any meaningful sense.”44 Or, on the flip side of the same argu-
ment, “the more surely a given Utopia asserts its radical difference from what
currently is, to that very degree it becomes, not merely unrealizable but, what
is worse, unimaginable.”45 Hence, we are left once more with a tenebrous
conception of radical alterity as a meditation on the impossible rather than
as a viable otherworld to dwell in.
Nevertheless, the value of this fantastic effort seems to be confirmed in the
imaginative endeavor involved in mapping our own “real world,” particularly
204 Robert T. Tally Jr.

the postmodern world-​­system in which the traditional guideposts are no lon-

ger trustworthy or desirable. “Happy are those ages when the starry sky is
the map of all possible paths,” writes Lukács of the centuries dominated by
the epic. “The world is wide and yet it is like a home.”46 In our world-​­system,
the celestial cartography is not so reliable or heimlich, and the existential and
critical paradigm coming on the heels of the planetary turn may require the
speculative or fantastic extension beyond the world’s flaming walls in order
to chart, albeit provisionally and tentatively, both our location and our avail-
able courses of action.

“Shall I Project a World?”

The planetary space and fantastic mode of apprehending it find their nexus
in a speculative critical activity I have been associating with literary car-
tography and geocriticism. I have been particularly interested in the ways
narratives map a postnational space that cannot easily fold itself into the
ideological and geographical atlases of an earlier configuration.47 I do not
mean to say that the existential mapping of one’s Lebenswelt (à la Heidegger
and Sartre, or even with Lukács’s “transcendental homelessness” as a model)
emerges only with the postmodern condition, but rather that this kind of
cartography reflects the profoundly different spatial and cultural anxieties of
a postnational world-​­system in which former certainties are made uncertain
and familiar codes lose their meaning. Ironically, in the postnational constel-
lation, the insights of a pre-​­national Weltanschauung might offer clues to a
speculative, fantastic geocriticism adapted for the critical exigencies of the
current moment of globalization.
The “pre-​­national” view I have in mind is a variation of the medieval
conception of the world, a vision described by Erich Auerbach in “Philol-
ogy and Weltliteratur” in the immediate aftermath of World War II, at what
might be thought of as the incipient stage of postmodernity. In this essay,
Auerbach maintains that the national (and nationalist) traditions of literary
study, however valuable in the past two centuries, were no longer suitable for
understanding the world. “To make men conscious of themselves in their own
history,” the critic reflects, “is a great task, yet the task is small—­more like a
renunciation—­when one considers that man not only lives on earth, but that
he is in the world and in the universe.”48 Auerbach asserts that “our philologi-
cal home is the earth: it can no longer be the nation. . . . We must return, in
admittedly altered circumstances, to the knowledge that prenational medi-
eval culture already possessed: the knowledge that the spirit [Geist] is not
national.” Auerbach then quotes the words of a medieval thinker, Hugh of
St. Victor, who taught that “the man who finds his homeland sweet is still a
tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong;
but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land.” By invoking
Beyond the Flaming Walls of the World 205

this “mundus totus exilium est” as his motto, Auerbach turns on its head the
wisdom of a medieval Christian, who cautions against attaching oneself to
the earthly world; as Auerbach explains, “Hugo intended these lines for one
whose aim is to free himself from a love of the world. But it is a good way
also for one who wishes to earn a proper love for the world.”49
The perspective of the exile, of one who cannot be “at home” in the world,
is embraced by Edward Said in his reading of Auerbach and in his own work.
In “Reflections on Exile,” Said argues that “seeing ‘the entire world as a for-
eign land’ makes possible originality of vision.”50 This originality of vision
or critical distance is, I would add, not altogether dissimilar from that which
obtains through a fantastic or otherworldly vantage, such as the one achieved
by the Apollo 8 photographers who witnessed the planet Earth rising above
the horizon of the moon. Both Auerbach’s plea for a postnational approach
to world literature and Said’s conviction that the condition of exile affords
one a paradoxically privileged position as an observer suggest that the exile
is the exemplary figure for the critic in the age of globalization.51 This is not
to say that the perspective of the exile, even if it captures the situation of
the contemporary critic, is a comfortable one.52 The new vista afforded by
finding oneself in an unfamiliar situation is more likely to be bewildering
than liberating. Amid the spatial anxieties and temporal confusions of the
postnational condition, the artist or critic is called upon to come to grips with
things as best as one can. As I have proposed, this may require an exercise
in the fantastic, a speculative and perhaps even unrealistic practice, but one
that can produce a map, albeit a provisional one, by which to make sense of
the world-​­system.
Lending itself to such mapping or reading is, to take just one example, a
key scene in Thomas Pynchon’s 1966 novel The Crying of Lot 49. The pro-
tagonist, Oedipa Maas, finds herself inexplicably entangled within a global
conspiracy, surrounded by bizarre characters, and lost in the confusion of
competing, often inscrutable interests, while she is attempting to sort out
the complex details of a dead man’s estate. At her wit’s end and thoroughly
frustrated by her predicament, Oedipa resolves to reread Pierce Inverarity’s
will in an effort to gain a clearer sense of things. Thus, she imagines herself as
a “dark machine in the center of the planetarium” that can “bring the estate
into pulsing stelliferous Meaning” and writes the following in her memoran-
dum book: “Shall I project a world? If not project then at least flash some
arrow on the dome to skitter among the constellations and trace out your
Dragon, Whale, Southern Cross. Anything might help.”53
“Projecting a world” seems a perfectly appropriate task for both the artist
and the critic after the planetary turn, and Pynchon’s astronomical metaphor
offers another intriguing trope for aesthetic and critical maneuvers. The con-
stellation is at once utterly fantastic, inasmuch as the tracings drawn in the
night sky are thoroughly imaginary, and also terrifically real, insofar as trav-
elers and navigators have been able to reliably locate themselves and chart
206 Robert T. Tally Jr.

courses in the world based upon these fantastic celestial drawings. With few
exceptions, constellations are completely artificial, human-​­made, and even
arbitrary. As anyone who has tried to identify and memorize the constella-
tions will concede, their names are not particularly descriptive and rarely
fit the images purportedly sketched in the skies. Canis minor, for instance,
which comprises only two stars, looks more like a line than a small dog. In
a recent, only somewhat tongue-​­in-​­cheek article titled “Starry Blight: How a
Bunch of Peasants from Mesopotamia Ruined the Night Sky,” Daniel Eng-
ber refers to these constellations as “a smog of Bronze Age graffiti.”54 Yet, in
antiquity as in the modern world, such imaginary lines, fantastically projected
from human stargazers situated on the surface of this planet, have helped one
make sense of one’s place in the world, serving as points of reference in a
broadly defined terrestrial cartography, as well as operating in a quite practi-
cal way to help humans navigate the “real world” below the heavens. This
is a clear example, among many others, of the real-​­world effects of fictions
produced in a fantastic mode.
If the present world-​­system lacks traditional guideposts or reveals such
markers to be less than helpful, then it may be fitting to advocate the fantastic
project of “projecting a world”—­of “constellating” the various forces, places,
and events in the global space in new ways so that we can better understand
and engage with the world. One of the formerly indispensable “guideposts”
to be challenged or superseded in this effort is the nation-​­state itself. Although
this spatio-​­political ensemble retains immense power even in the postnational
constellation, and even though it tenaciously maintains its influence over
literary and cultural studies (particularly in university curricula), its effec-
tiveness is waning amid the overwhelming, trans-​­or supranational forces
of the world-​­system.55 With the term “postnationality,” I might add, I refer
specifically to the current condition, in the era of globalization, in which the
nation-​­state is no longer the locus classicus or primum mobile of culture, of
the economy, or even of politics. As Habermas has observed, in the past, “the
phenomena of the territorial state, the nation, and a popular economy consti-
tuted within national borders formed a historical constellation in which the
democratic process assumed a more or less convincing institutional form. . . .
Today, developments summarized under the term ‘globalization’ have put this
entire constellation into question.”56 Under the auspices of globalization, the
national models, including those employed in the study of literature and cul-
ture, are no longer reliable or even desirable. The “historical constellation”
in which the nation-​­state constituted the dominant force in social, political,
economic, and spatial organization of the world-​­system is as much an imag-
inative projection as other constellations. However, just as the ideological
comes to appear natural, the national paradigm has seemed so constitutive of
human sociality that it is harder to imagine alternatives. The radical alterity
of fantasy or of the fantastic mode broadly conceived enables and promotes
a projection of a world that can, if only provisionally, be mapped.
Beyond the Flaming Walls of the World 207

Therefore, it is not surprising that literary and cultural critics such as

Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno (or their Frankfurt School successor
Habermas) should find the figure of the constellation so useful for theory.
In organizing the swirling, vicissitudinous elements of modern culture and
society, the critic draws imaginary lines not to fix such phenomena in place as
a way of determining once and for all their true meaning or of constraining
their mobile diversity but to arrange them in a cognizable pattern for further
use. Amid the disorienting and dynamic phenomena of the postmodern con-
dition, one may wish to “project a world,” in other words, to create patterns
that, while obviously artificial, provisional, and imaginary, can aid us in con-
ceptualizing and navigating the planetary space we inhabit. As Oedipa Maas
knowingly concluded, “Anything might help.”
Along these lines, a fantastic, postnational criticism may enable a new way
of seeing and mapping this planetary space that now provides the ultimate
ground or horizon of thought in the age of globalization. Like those Apollo
8 astronauts who ventured into the universe and beyond the moon—­quite
literally “beyond the flaming walls of the world”—­a critical practice such as
geocriticism, operating as it does in a fantastic mode, may thereby achieve
novel vistas, look back on the worldly world from our radically otherworldly
perspective, project new constellations and maps, and maybe just see things a
bit differently. In navigating the planetary space of a postnational constella-
tion geocritically, we may thus embrace the strangeness of the contemporary
world-​­system, imagine radical alternatives, and descry—­if only in uncertain,
tentative, and momentary glimpses—­the features of other worlds.

Notes

1. Sir Walter Scott, “On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition; and Par-
ticularly on the Works of Ernest Theodore William Hoffmann,” in Sir Walter
Scott on Novelists and Fiction, ed. Ioan Williams (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1968), 348.
2. See, for example, Wai Chee Dimock, “Planet as Duration and Extension,” in
Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006), 1–­6.
3. See Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971); see also Georg Lukács, “The Classical Form
of the Historical Novel,” in The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah Mitchell and
Stanley Mitchell (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 19–­88.
4. See Jonathan Arac, The Emergence of American Literary Narrative, 1820–­
1860 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 6–­8.
5. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward
Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 233.
6. See Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capital-
ism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991), 51–­54.
208 Robert T. Tally Jr.

7. In addition to the relatively obvious uses of national myths or legends, and

just to mention works pertaining to U.S. culture, I include here the “fantasy”
that underlies and promotes nationalism, as discussed in Lauren Berlant, The
Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1991); Wai Chee Dimock, Empire for Liberty: Mel-
ville and the Poetics of Individualism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
1989); and, more recently, Donald E. Pease, The New American Exceptionalism
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).
8. See Fredric Jameson, “Generic Discontinuities in SF: Brian Aldiss’ Starship,”
in Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other
Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005), 254–­66.
9. As Fredric Jameson has put it, “all thinking today is also, whatever else it is,
an attempt to think the world system as such.” See The Geopolitical Aesthetic:
Cinema and Space in the World System (Bloomington: Indiana University Press;
London: British Film Institute, 1992), 4 (emphasis in original).
10. China Miéville, “Editorial Introduction,” in “Symposium: Marxism and
Fantasy,” ed. China Miéville, special issue, Historical Materialism 10, no. 4
(2002): 46 (emphasis in original).
11. See Jürgen Habermas, The Postnational Constellation, trans. and ed. Max
Pensky (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001).
12. Indeed, as a number of environmentalist and ecocritics have noted, the
“Earthrise” photo may have sparked the environmentalist movement and led to
Earth Day, partially ended the “Space Age” by recalling attention to the planet
Earth itself, and transformed humanity’s attitude toward the planet, confirming a
“Spaceship Earth” vision that reimagines the global space not as an empty back-
drop for human activity but as a dynamic and affective geographical domain. See
Robert Poole, “From Spaceship Earth to Mother Earth,” in Earthrise: How Man
First Saw the Earth (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008), 141–­69.
13. Archibald MacLeish, “Riders on Earth Together, Brothers in Eternal Cold,”
New York Times, December 25, 1968.
14. Similar in spirit to MacLeish’s conclusion, Arthur C. Clarke declared that
the Apollo 8 mission constituted “a second Copernican revolution” and specu-
lated that the children born that year might one day “live to become citizens of
the United Planets.” Quoted in Poole, Earthrise, 5–­6.
15. Quoted in Poole, Earthrise, 3.
16. Although subsequent missions would achieve lunar landing and other
milestones of the space program, the Apollo 8 astronauts traveled the furthest
from the Earth’s surface, going beyond the moon, hence gaining the vantage from
which to capture the “earthrise.”
17. See David Harvey, “Time-​­Space Compression and the Postmodern Con-
dition,” in The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of
Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 284–­307; Giovanni Arrighi, “Epi-
logue: Can Capitalism Survive Success?” in The Long Twentieth Century: Money,
Power, and the Origins of Our Times (London: Verso, 1994), 325–­56; and my
“Meta-​­Capital: Culture and Financial Derivatives,” Works and Days 30, no. 2
(2012): 231–­47.
18. For a rather different analysis focusing on environmental criticism in its
assessment of globalization and cosmopolitanism, see Ursula K. Heise, Sense
Beyond the Flaming Walls of the World 209

of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
19. Poole, Earthrise, 11.
20. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2003), 102.
21. See, for example, Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future; and David Harvey,
Spaces of Hope (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
22. Significantly, in Thomas More’s Utopia, the utopian island is discovered on
one of Amerigo Vespucci’s transatlantic voyages. See More, Utopia, trans. Paul
Turner (New York: Penguin, 2003).
23. See my “Radical Alternatives: The Persistence of Utopia in the Postmod-
ern,” in New Essays on the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, ed. Alfred J.
Drake (Newcastle upon Tyne, Eng.: Cambridge Scholars, 2009), 109–­21; and my
Utopia in the Age of Globalization: Space, Representation, and the World-​­System
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
24. Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1994), xii.
25. Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, 232.
26. See Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and
History of a Literary Genre (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979).
27. Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, 56. See also “The Great Schism,” in
Archaeologies of the Future, 57–­71.
28. J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-​­Stories,” in The Tolkien Reader (New York:
Ballantine Books, 1966), 60.
29. See China Miéville, “There and Back Again: Five Reasons Tolkien Rocks,”
Omnivoracious (blog), June 15, 2009, http://​www​.omnivoracious​.com/2009/06/
there-​­and-​­back-​­again-​­five-​­reasons-​­tolkien-​­rocks​.html.
30. Miéville, “Editorial Introduction,” 42 (emphasis in original).
31. Ibid., 42–­43. Note, however, that Miéville quite rightly does not claim
that fantasy is itself a revolutionary mode or “acts as a guide to political action”
(46). The value of fantasy lies less in its politics—­which could lie anywhere on
the political spectrum—­than in its imaginative encounter with radical alterity
itself.
32. Miéville, “Editorial Introduction,” 42 (emphasis in original).
33. J. R. R. Tolkien, “Mythopoeia,” in Tree and Leaf (New York: Harper Col-
lins, 2001), 85.
34. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables, ed. Michael Davitt
Bell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 1. In the prefatory remarks to his
other novels, The Scarlet Letter, The Blithedale Romance, and The Marble Faun,
Hawthorne includes similar statements justifying his use of fanciful or unrealistic
matter and methods.
35. See Kathryn Hume, Fantasy and Mimesis: Responses to Reality in Western
Literature (New York: Methuen, 1984).
36. Scott, “On the Supernatural,” 348.
37. See Lucretius, The Nature of Things, trans. A. E. Stallings (New York:
Penguin, 2007), 29.
38. Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-​­Century Dialectical Theo-
ries of Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971), 110–­11.
210 Robert T. Tally Jr.

39. Russell Jacoby, Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-​­Utopian

Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), xvii (emphasis in original).
40. See China Miéville, “Cognition as Ideology: A Dialectic of SF Theory,” in
Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction, ed. Mark Bould and China Miéville
(Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2009), 231–­48. For more on
Suvin’s characterization of science fiction as a form of cognitive estrangement, see
Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, 7–­9.
41. Miéville, “Cognition as Ideology,” 234.
42. Miéville, “Editorial Introduction,” 48.
43. Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, 416.
44. Fredric Jameson, “A New Reading of Capital,” Mediations 25, no. 1 (Fall
2010): 13.
45. Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, xv.
46. Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, 29.
47. See, for example, my “On Geocriticism,” in Geocritical Explorations:
Space, Place, and Mapping in Literary and Cultural Studies, ed. Robert T. Tally Jr.
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 1–­9; and my Spatiality (London: Rout-
ledge, 2013).
48. Erich Auerbach, “Philology and Weltliteratur,” trans. Maire Said and
Edward Said, Centennial Review 13, no. 1 (Winter 1969): 16–­17.
49. Ibid., 17. For the translation of the Latin, see The Didascalicon of Hugh
of St. Victor: A Medieval Guide to the Arts, trans. Jerome Taylor (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1961), 101.
50. Edward Said, “Reflections on Exile,” in Reflections on Exile and Other
Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 186.
51. See, for example, my “Mundus Totus Exilium Est: Reflections on the Critic
in Exile,” Transnational Literature 3, no. 2 (May 2011): 1–­10.
52. For a much more nuanced critical reading of the new cosmopolitanism in
the age of globalization, see Timothy Brennan, At Home in the World: Cosmo-
politanism Now (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997).
53. Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (New York: Harper and Row,
1966), 82.
54. Daniel Engber, “Starry Blight: How a Bunch of Peasants in Mesopota-
mia Ruined the Night Sky,” Slate, July 12, 2012, http://​www​.slate​.com/articles/
health_and_science/a_fine_whine/2012/07/against_constellations_why_are_we_
stuck_with_bronze_age_graffiti_​.html.
55. On the postnational approach to American literature in the world today,
see Wai Chee Dimock and Lawrence Buell, eds., Shades of the Planet: Ameri-
can Literature as World Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
2007); Paul Giles’s fascinating trilogy, Transatlantic Insurrections: British Culture
and the Formation of American Literature, 1730–­1860 (Philadelphia: Univer-
sity of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), Virtual Americas: Transnational Fictions and
the Transatlantic Imaginary (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), and
Atlantic Republic: The American Tradition in English Literature (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2006); and Yunte Huang, Transpacific Imaginations: History,
Literature, Counterpoetics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008).
56. Habermas, The Postnational Constellation, 60.
 Decompressing Culture
Three Steps toward a Geomethodology

Christian Moraru

Everything begins with Houses, each of which must join up its

sections and hold up compounds—­Combray, the Guermantes’
house, the Verdurins’ salon—­and the houses are themselves
joined together according to interfaces, but a planetary
Cosmos is already there, visible through the telescope, which
ruins or transforms them and absorbs them into an infinity of
the patch of uniform color.
—­Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?

The world has moved back to [the] centre of political

consciousness, not in the traditional sense of the “earth as
garden,” but as new technologically worlded and pneo-​­stoic
cosmopolitical percept of the “earth-​­as-​­planet” . . .
—­Neil Turnbull, “The Ontological Consequences of Copernicus”

Let us remain masters of the mystery that the earth breathes.

—­Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom

“The face of the earth”: have you ever pondered the idiom? If thousands of
years of use have worn it thin, the dawn of the third millennium is witnessing
the old chestnut’s semantic reset. This makes you wonder what the phrase
is conveying nowadays. Tying some of us down to exploit, disenfranchise,
and otherwise “expe[l] from the narratives of futurity,”1 globalization is also
drawing more and more of the earth’s denizens farther and farther afield,
and so it bears asking: How is our historically unmatched familiarity with
the beyond-​­the-​­familial rekindling the syntagm in casual conversation, in
popular media, and in the humanities? How might we defamiliarize its all-​
t­oo-​­familiar words privately and publicly, colloquially and academically, as
we chat, fantasize, roam the biennales, write, or cuddle up with our favorite

211
212 Christian Moraru

books? Conversely, while windows are opening wider and wider onto the
world—­whether in Microsoft or, no less innovatively, in Frédéric Beigbeder’s
2003 9/11 best-selling Windows on the World—­what kind of figures are the
earth’s places cutting in our digital and fictional frames?2 And, along the
lines of the global-​­planetary imbrications and tensions tackled throughout
this collection, what is the tired locution’s awakening teaching us as techno-​
­economic, sociopolitical, and cultural trends of unprecedented magnitude
impact on and are impacted by those places? How is the earth’s face revealing
us, in and across those locales, something that globalization often obfuscates
and stymies while planetarization forefronts and nourishes?
Undoubtedly timely, the questions boil down to a critical act, to inter-
pretation. Generally speaking, they all invite renewed scrutiny of the earth’s
fast-​­changing figure in the aftermath of the planet’s latest, themselves multi-
faceted reconfigurations. More specifically, more practically, and thus more
closely to our private homes and disciplinary abodes, the sheer existence
of the socioeconomic layout, saliently interconnective logic, and courte or
longue durée etiology of the in-​­progress world-​­system are not at issue here,
or not in the first place. As far as I am concerned, the overall global nar-
rative is legible enough both diachronically, as an evolutionary rationale,
and synchronically, as a present if still evolving “form.” In plainer English,
whereas the roots of the geocultural framework contextualizing the plan-
etary visions—­the primal scenes of planetarity—­adduced later in this essay
admittedly push deep into the early Renaissance’s transcontinental travels,
“discoveries,” and redistributions of territory, community, affect, and capital,
this framework, this worldly form of the present, remains no less unparalleled
for that; the historical uniqueness of this “physiognomy” strikes me as hard
to ignore. I call it macroscopic because it breaks forth and appears acces-
sible, not to say obvious, from above or afar—­from technologically enabled,
spatial-​­evaluative positions and postures—­but also because of its scope, of
its scalarity. Indeed, it implies and often is a distant judgment, a large-​­scale
representation, image, or photo. This is the proverbial bird’s-​­or, more accu-
rately, astronaut’s-​­eye view; the interval-​­informed approach and what this
yields; what “appears” and what one makes out from the physical-​­intellectual
distance that brings into relief, without always rendering “evident,” the cross-​
­territorial, integrative-​­interlinking, and world-​­systemic operations coming
loosely under the heading of “planetarization.”

The Infinite and the Infinitesimal

Yet again, the issue at hand is not, or is solely in part, the macroscopic. Our
problem, or at least the problem my intervention is wrestling with, falls chiefly
under the microscopic. It is of the order of the infinitesimal. This is where the
rubber meets the road and the material landscape the road runs through. But,
Decompressing Culture 213

as I shall reiterate, the micro focus does not involve a complete shift away
from the macro, from the cosmic perspective of the NASA (“Apollonian”)
“gaze” and the “infinite” it gestures toward while paradoxically construing
Earth as one, limited “unit.”3 The macro and the micro work—­must work, of
necessity—­as the two arms of the analytical scissors.
Consequently, in the era of the “big picture,” of a picture taken by a see-​­it-​
a­ ll—­and see-​­it-​­as-​­all—­eye-​­in-​­the-​­sky, the challenge to the discerning observer
is the indiscernible or, better still, the planet’s unsettlingly ambiguous encryp-
tion in it, the macro’s murmur in the vernacular of the micro, in the tiny,
the local, and the humble. For, fraught with distinctions and codifications
of planetarity, the indistinguishable is or looks so only at first glance. To
pick up the gauntlet, therefore, is to try and ascertain what entails to work
out cultures’ fine print with this planetary configuration, figure, or face as
master framing device; what it takes to attend geoaesthetically to the endur-
ingly enticing arabesque of “small things” alongside and through their godly
and human handlers, venues, and styles; in brief, what it means to us, now,
to read “with” the planet: to read it, namely, not as a reductive totality—­a
wrongheaded, unethical, and futilely globalist undertaking—­but, in reading
against that ominous oneness, to read the planet with and ultimately for the
myriad of places, archives, and artifacts of which its fragile, pluricentric, and
makeshift whole consists.
My premise, in other words, is that the planet is swimming into the crit-
ic’s ken. On a less Keatsian tone, the earth’s face is coming into view in its
fully tangible dispensations and cultural-​­intellectual affordances complete
with their sometimes uneven, contradictory, and plainly deleterious upshots.
Controversially complex, this development is nevertheless bringing about
a “discontinuity” in how we understand ourselves and others and, in that,
has all the makings of an event.4 As such, it is an occasion not so much for
uncritical cheering as for earnest and sustained interrogation. For instance,
does the earth have a face to begin with? Has it ever had one, and, if so,
how visible was or is that face? Of course, our earth does have a surface.
It has had one all along, if not a solid one ab ovo. This is not what I am
talking about, though. Primarily a matter of geometry, geodesy, and, more
basically, geology—­after all, “earth” supplies here a geological synecdoche
for “planet”—­the earth as surface is, so to speak, sur-​­facial, hence culturally
superficial, impassive. This blank, faceless face is pre-​­figurative, as geological
vastness, or post-​­figurative, as one big riverbed for liquidities. Either way, it
is aesthetically “asleep,” as Michael Ondaatje might say.5 Less an expression
than sheer expanse, this unmarked flatness—­this “undented” plane, Bertrand
Westphal might gloss—­lacks in cultural volume as it does in variety.6 Thus,
the mysteries it harbors are either hollow or redundant. Depthless, smooth,
and uniform, this is not a face proper but a geographical façade, indiffer-
ent theater for the drama of difference rather than the “semiosphere” in
which discourse is engendered and exchanged.7 And, since this a-​­, proto-​­, or
214 Christian Moraru

post-​­semiotic superficiality, quantifiable as it is, does not feature a topology,

it makes no provisions for a typology or principle of classification either, that
is, for a language, for a locus-​­minded logos; the face of the earth so conceived
is scarcely a site of meaning.

Turn of the Planet, Turn to the Planet

However, it may turn into one. After all, as several critics in this book remind
us, turning is what the earth does as a planetary body, in both senses. It
turns (planā, in Ancient Greek) to gyrate, concomitantly around other celes-
tial objects and its own axis. But, by the same movement quite literally, it
also turns to change, turning in order to change and thus into a changed
world order itself, the earth’s revolutions bound up with the twists and turns
in human history, revolutionary or less so. On one side, then, the earth’s
whirling through space as the planet physically revolves and evolves, and as
space on earth itself stretches out, shrinks, is redistributed, and is mapped
out in step with the systoles and diastoles of human civilization; on the
other side, our own pirouettes, swerves, and about-​­faces, marking how we
shuffle around the world, how we transform it, how we ourselves change
in the wake of worldly changes, and how the latter call on us to revisit our
Anschauungen of the spinning Welt and of ourselves in it: all these turns
matter a great deal. What is more, they do so together, for they have been
demonstrably intertwined through the ages. If geography—­the earth’s human
writing into cartographic as well as topo-​­material visibility, the planet’s life
within and without disciplines and human practices—­is subject to becoming,
then “the becoming” of such fields, discourses, and the culture they speak to
“is geographical” too according to Deleuze’s tribute to the “Superiority of
Anglo-​­American Literature.”8 On this ground, no anthropology or ethnog-
raphy without a geophysical chapter is ever complete; no cultural history or
paradigm shift account that overlooks the earth’s own motions, cycles, and
crises passes muster; no posthumanism still treating the planetary as inert
context or backdrop to the human text or figure fulfills its promise; and,
more broadly, no philosophy that does not operate “geophilosophically” is
worth its salt.9
As Deleuze and Guattari posit, not only is thought’s measure the abil-
ity to “create” its concepts, but this creation also requires an “earth or
deterritorialization” as its “foundation.”10 Note too that, for the two
thinkers, the earth and its historical de-​­, re-​­, and, we shall discover, under-​
­territorializing dynamics are mere figures of speech neither ontologically,
“out there” in the world, nor philosophically, inside the reasoning appa-
ratus of the “Geophilosophy” chapter of What Is Philosophy? Or they are
figures etymologically, as it were, inasmuch as they designate aspects in a
fairly palpable, phenomenological fashion, ways in which the earth and
Decompressing Culture 215

thought look and should be looked at, once again, correlatively, together.
Equally significant is that this togetherness, this mutuality of planetary com-
plexion and thought’s complexities, fluctuates across time. Thus, while the
illuminating codependence of the earthly and the philosophical has always
been in play, the post–­Cold War years have enhanced and foregrounded
it spectacularly. No other chapter in history, I contend, has literalized the
planet’s figure so extensively, making it so ineludible in its ubiquitous physi-
cal immediacy, so non-​­figurative in its concrete, geocultural presence, and
so productive conceptually, so consequential for how one thinks—­for how
“immanent” to thinking thinking with the planet has become of late across
disciplines.
This “immanence,” this philosophical instrumentality of the planet,
derives, as Deleuze and Guattari also comment on Martin Heidegger, from
a planetary turn, given that “by virtue of its structure,” Being “continually
turns away when it turns toward,” to the point that “the history of Being or
of the earth is the history of its turning away.”11 For one thing, this movement
is to no negligible degree trans-​­(and, some might add, post-​­) statal; arguably,
Henri Lefebvre has guessed wrong when, back in 1975, he assured his read-
ers that planetarity—­la mondialité—­would be a “planetary extension of the
State.”12 For another thing, this has been a turn away from, and accompanied
by the subsequent opening up of, territorial units, polities, policies, patri-
monies, and paradigms heretofore neatly circumscribed—­“territorialized” in
terms of administration, coverage, and meaning—­by national jurisdictions,
nationalist mythologies, and related epistemological claims and descriptive
models, or just so advertised. These complex turns trace the ambivalently
distancing or “deterritorializing” by which the planet de facto draws closer
to us, to the little places of our lives but also to that hub of human reflexivity
where it becomes effectively “immanent” to thought or becomes thought tout
court so as to involve thought itself in the “double becoming” that would
make it planet-​­ like—­“earth,” write Deleuze and Guattari—­ and thereby
transform it radically.13
In the multimillennial, interweaving histories of the world and thought,
we stand, as Kostas Axelos would probably alert us, at the decisive junc-
ture at which the coextension and co-​­ implication of planetary spatiality
and thought—­the “devenir-​­pensée du monde” and “devenir-​­monde de la
pensée”—­render how the world shapes representation and how representa-
tion plays out planetarily in scope, structure, and content two faces of the
same coin.14 For, if the planet turns away, it does so only to return, turning
back toward us ontologically and analytically, as existential grit and inter-
pretive grid, working itself into the everyday and its material heterologies at
the same time that it turns into the pivot or “plane” around which thought
and comprehension themselves gravitate. This way, the planet’s turn lays
out, still in Deleuze and Guattari’s lingo, a “plane of immanence.” “Clearly
not a program, design, end, or means,” this plane nonetheless “constitutes,”
216 Christian Moraru

today more than ever, “the absolute ground of philosophy,” the foundation
on which, in accord with the planet’s cycles, thought warrants re-​­founding.15
The sciences and the arts too, I suggest, are responding to these challenges,
making similar moves on their own thinking planes and in their discourse-​
­specific languages.16 Thus, the planet serves, increasingly and with historically
unrivaled force, as a level, matrix, or condition of possibility for a forma
mentis whose purview covers the conceptual (philosophical), the referential
(scientific), as well as the aesthetic (imaginative).
This is how the planet is turning to us to concern us all, thinkers and
artists, specialists and laypersons, irrespective of where and what we are, to
sponsor novel forms of world writing and reading, of imagining, figuring,
and figuring out the world-​­as-​­world. Otherwise put, this concern works both
ways. We are concerned, “looked at” by the planet as it is turning to us so we
can see the earth’s face, but this turn invites ours; we ourselves have to turn
to the planet. The earth has entered the picture as planet and, in the geocul-
tural dimension of planetarity, shows its face to us. This face is meaningful,
but it will not be readable—­it will remain fairly meaningless for us—­unless
we too face it. Because the turn of the planet subsumes thought itself, it calls
for an intellectual turn to the planet; the reciprocity of planetarization and
thought—­of thinking on the planet and of thinking of the planet as planet—­
presupposes apposite “concerns,” a certain planetary consideration on our
part. This is as much as saying that, besides the world cast variously identi-
fied as multitude (Antonio Negri), Crowd (Alain Badiou), “global soul” (Pico
Iyer), cosmopolitan (jet-​­setting or not), and, if somewhat disconcertingly,
“nowhere man” (Iyer, Alexandar Hemon), the planet affords itself a recep-
tive consciousness.17 In turning to the planetary spectacle of meaning, this
consciousness takes in the world homologically, availing itself of a methodol-
ogy germane to its planetary object, moment, and environment. In that, this
methodology is a geomethodology. In it, objective and subjective concerns,
context and text dovetail. Its major constitutive steps and tightly interrelated
thrusts are as follows:
The first is principally topological. As such, it latches onto planetarization
as spatialization of the world and of aesthetic routines alike.
The second is, in the main, structural or relational. It homes in on a
segment, locus, or facet of one or more artworks to tease out—­to “decom-
press” analytically—­their planetary inscription, namely, the “here”-​­“there,”
“we”-​­“they,” “part”-​­“whole” relatedness structure folded into them. This
“folding,” I submit, is the common denominator of emerging planetary cul-
ture. Otherwise, “planetary culture” is far more befitting because there is
no one-​­size-​­fits-​­all folding or compressing mechanism but only folding or
compressing codes, which differ a great deal from one cultural site, prac-
tice, or agent to another. In decoding cultures, in showing how “here” is
co-​­imagined—­pictured inside, alongside, and more broadly “with” “there,”
and vice versa—­geomethodology proceeds as a reverse engineering of sorts,
Decompressing Culture 217

characteristically activating a reading-​­with or a with-​­reading: it reads these

works and their subsequent topo-​­cultural “partialities” with the planetary
“whole.”
The third is predominantly ethical. Building on the previous two, it
reaches beyond the descriptive by retooling the “with” as a twofold critical-​
deontological “for”: geomethodology is not only geared toward tracing
­
symptoms of planetarity “in territory,” in this film or that novel; it also reads
for the planet, on its behalf. This is where planetary interpretation and plan-
etary stewardship become one and also where, at its most exhortative, my
intervention comes closest to the rhetorical vivacity of a manifesto.
Below, I walk us through these three geomethodological components in
this order.

The Space of Method

This methodology is a geomethodology first and foremost insofar as the

earth’s planetary becoming—­ the turn of the planet—­ is spatial. As Lefe-
bvre, David Harvey, and others have noticed, one way or the other,
planetarization works through, brings about, and, once more, “appears” as a
trans-​­territorialization—­dislocation, reallocation, and novel aggregation—­of
space and its meanings on earth. Felt by the planet, carved into the earth’s
body in the form of late twentieth and early twenty-​­first-​­century boundar-
ies, passageways, itineraries, and geopolitical units of exchange, discourse,
communality, and contestation, this turn cannot be thought of independently
from the planet’s geophysical shifts even though its logistics remain largely
anthropological. Seemingly a natural category, a given (to us, humans), space
has been, in reality, as Lefebvre would also insist, subject to well-​­defined pro-
duction technologies. Occurring in and through human history, the planet’s
turn is thus inseparable from our spatial footprint on earth.
As Westphal maintains in Le monde plausible, the historical scene of this
turn is postmodernity18 or, in my estimation, whatever postmodernity we
have left—­or, better still, whatever post-​­postmodernity may have arisen—­
after the Cold War. If the “spatial imagination”—­across the humanities as
well as across the world “out there”—­is older than postmodernism, the
“spatial turn” has undeniably and dramatically picked up speed during the
Cold War’s last years to culminate, inside the academy, with a “hyperspa-
tialization” of postmodern theory through interventions by topo-​­theorists,
ecocritics, and literary cartographers such as Michel Foucault, Harvey, Marc
Augé, Edward W. Soja, Lawrence Buell, Ursula K. Heise, Franco Moretti, and
Brian Jarvis, and, outside, with a planetary spatialization of the postmodern
paradigm itself.19 Postmodernism’s planetarization was a Pyrrhic victory: the
postmodern went places only to self-​­displace and eventually dissipate through
dissemination, creolization, and failure after failure to meet non-​­Western
218 Christian Moraru

exigencies. Noteworthy here is what made it possible—­what helped post-

modernism travel—­in the first place: its “place fixation” itself (if you indulge
the pun) or perhaps the opposite, that is, postmodernism’s bottomless appe-
tite for unfixing and loosening, for setting things adrift and for deferral, the
transgressive, intertextually digressive furor topologicus that bows to neither
center nor inside because the marginal and the outside, along with the “out-
side the text” (hors-​­texte), have lost their contours on its maps. In this light,
postmodernism’s anti-​­logocentrism is a “lococentrism”;20 a pleonastic yet
insatiable “fixation” on locus makes it, indeed, twice loco. But the postmod-
ern’s re-​­centering around space rests on a core-​­periphery dialectic redolent of
Pascal’s Pensées, where the stable, “rooted” center-​­circumference dichotomy
gives way to multiple, ubiquitous, shifty, and “rhizomic” spatialities. This
plural and fluid topology has been—­was, some might rejoin—­postmodern,
terminally postmodern perhaps, before becoming not only a theoretical-​
a­ esthetic but also a geocultural “dominant” of planetarity. In response to this
topology, authors from Don DeLillo, Andrei Codrescu, Paul Auster, Joseph
O’Neill, Iyer, Orhan Pamuk, Mircea Cărtărescu, Michel Houellebecq, and
Teju Cole to David Hollinger, Thomas L. Friedman, Jean-​­Luc Nancy, Masao
Miyoshi, Michael Hardt, and Negri—­all fiction writers, critics, and philoso-
phers representative of both paradigms or, more accurately, of the transition
from one to another—­dwell on the “disappearance of the outside” and of
those “hiding” places where territory-​­bounded and culturally “cloistered”
individuals and groups struggle to opt out of one of our time’s sea change
scenarios.21
Imperfectly accommodated by the spatial-​­discursive model of postmod-
ernism, new kinds of painting, moviemaking, writing, reading, and thinking
are made possible, and the world they conjure up becomes intellectually,
ethically, and aesthetically “plausible” once the planetary turn has been
completed or, more realistically for now, has reached a point of no return.
As I have expounded in my book on cosmodernism, in carrying us past
this moment the contemporary is taking us beyond the postmodern,22 for
it weaves the present and those present in it into a chronotopically novel
fabric. Marking the fast-​­evolving structure of presentness temporally, this
quasi-​­ecumenical fuite en avant, this rush forward of the world itself, shrinks
the playground of “now” also known as contemporaneousness down to a
more modest interval: the time lapsed since the end of the Cold War. Spatially,
one registers, at the same time, a compensatorily amplifying and juxtaposing
“positional” pathos that unpacks the historically discontinuous category of
“here” and the attendant notion of self so as to set forth the effective presence
“in our midst,” in the immediate proximity, or in the mediate, at-​­distance
propinquity of those once upon a time “out there,” not “from around here,”
or not like “us.”23 My point is not simply that Harvey’s “time-​­space compres-
sion” model covers just a slice of a more complex world reality subject to a
range of simultaneous, spatiotemporal contractions and expansions, but that
Decompressing Culture 219

what sets our epoch apart is a radical geosocialization of places and of place
generally. Even though its intensity and cultural markers shift from one place
to another, this process obtains on a scale as conspicuous as it is planetary.
In this respect, as a “trend,” the cosmodern is to the United States and most
Euro-​­Atlantic cultures what the planetary is to the entire world, including
the late postcolonial. Put differently, the Western cosmodernization of the
postmodern represents a world-​­fractal phenomenon, is part and parcel of a
development or turn of planetary proportions. This turn comes down to a
planetarization of world places.
Granted, there are exceptions to this phenomenon. But because what I
want to point up is the worldwide, documentably topocultural dominant, it
is worth stressing that this planetarization or planetary spatialization stands
out as a defining reality of the third millennium. What our hyperconnected
world has been “specializing” in, and also what distinguishes it, is worldly
spatialization itself, which bears on how we are in this world, what we do
in it, and what we make of it. A perennial attribute of Heidegger’s Da-​­sein,
being-​­in-​­the-​­world, with others, has been heightened by the accelerated “de-​
­distancing” of the world’s places, people, and cultural practices.24 Thus, as
previously disconnected or loosely connected regions have brought closer
together modernity’s world en miettes, the spatiality (Räumlichkeit) tied into
Being ab origine has now become planetary spatiality. Already instituted—­
rendered present—­by the Heideggerian Welt, presence sets itself off and is
legible in planetary co-​­presence.

Getting the Picture: Rationality and Relationality

Spatialization works by way of an ample repertoire of cultural sites, vec-

tors, and materials; planetary spatialization operates, via the same arenas
and socio-​­ aesthetic rites, planetarily. The ever-​­ expanding contiguity
and co-​­articulation on a planetary scale of formerly stand-​­ alone—­ or so
imagined—­ agents, discourses, and settings are hallmarks of our world-
ing world.25 But, to reemphasize, what “worlds” (weltet, in Heidegger) this
world, and what “welds” its “independent” statements and clauses into a
worldly syntax, is a world picture (Weltbild) that must be grasped both
objectively (empirically) and subjectively (cognitively). Reflective of the
world’s “worlded” form or “built,” this Weltbild facilitates reflection on this
world, helps us “get the picture” of the world. It is in this multiple sense that
the planet has entered the picture: topologically, as spatial extension of the
human; historically, as a certain point in time when the planetary picture
comes about—­the time of the planet or the Heideggerian “age of the world
picture”;26 and “spatiologically,” in Lefebvre’s terminology, or, in mine, geo-
methodologically—­as a planetarily minded approach in the humanities and
beyond.27
220 Christian Moraru

Critical of the interpretive arsenal and sociocultural aggregation model

of “methodological nationalism,” this approach cuts across traditionally
territorialized—­territorially bounded or pictured—­societies.28 Its algorithm
works out readings through strategies of semiotic spatialization, namely,
through telescoping, meaning-​­making associations that, besides the unavoid-
able if cautious at-​­distance ratiocinations, also venture, as I will momentarily,
semantically microscopic decompressions—­self-​­distancing interpreta-
tions—­of local and proximal spaces and of their aesthetic renditions. Not
completely unwarranted, the Heideggerian qualms about our attempts to
reterritorialize our purchases on particular places and occurrences therein
by bridging the distances and divides between them and otherwise trans-​
t­erritorializing their locations and significations do not capture our present
historical circumstances. What Heidegger did not factor in is a crucial muta-
tion distance as concept and world spatial habitus has undergone over the
last half a century: due to the planetary spatialization of places, distance itself
has been so thoroughly displaced and placed, territorialized, inside places,
territories, and cultural microdomains that dwelling on distance, on this kind
of structural or structure-​­embedded distance, no longer means throwing your
lot with globalist-​­totalist ideologies. To the contrary—­and on this ground—­
“distant” reading can play out as close reading, “thick description” of spatial
and aesthetic distance-​­laden sites. In “The Age of the World Picture” and
elsewhere, the German philosopher is taken aback by the anthropocentric
arrogance behind wide-​­sweeping, culturally-​­politically coopting, and tech-
nologically assisted “calculations” about remote objects, their positions,
meanings, and our physical-​­intellectual access to them. No doubt, thinks Hei-
degger, there is something to be said about the “gigantism” (“Americanist” or
not) of our “distant” topo-​­interpretive élans.29 But, as Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak and others have proposed, the planet and the reading model based
on it may override the “globe” and the globalist claims that assimilate the
far-​­flung and its others into the selfsameness makeup of the world’s political
and cultural centers.30 Where globality rationalizes to shrink the earth’s topo-​
e­ pistemological interspaces by a “top-​­heavy” comparison that “impos[es] the
same system of exchange everywhere,”31 planetarity relationalizes to link up
and read side by side, as well the worldly insides of, non-​­interchangeable
entities and thus allow for the Heideggerian “incalculable,” the aesthetically
immeasurable, and the culturally asymmetrical.32 Typically geomethodologi-
cal, this relational—­correlational and intrarelational—­move overcomes the
local-​­global “theoretical stalemate”—­and Spivak’s North-​­South antinomy
no less—­by crossing the gap of difference without annulling it; much like the
planetarity that makes it both “necessary” and “impossible,” the move delin-
eates an analytical back and forth between either spatially distinct, though
connectable, meaning units (works, genres, authors, movements) or from one
meaning level to another within the same unit or cluster of adjacent, partially
overlapping, or wholly coextensive units.33
Decompressing Culture 221

Not infrequently, critics who have taken the former road have assumed
that those units are not only external to each other but also organized into
a self-​­evident hierarchy of space (“centers” vs. “margins”), culture (“ori­
gins”/“originals”/“sources” vs. “imitations”/“replicas”/“echoes”), and power
(“capitals”/“metropolises” vs. “provinces”/“colonies”). Rearing its head even
in a more democratically run world republic of letters such as Pascale Casa-
nova’s, this geoaesthetic pecking order antedates the planetary turn.34 With
a long disciplinary history behind it, the modus operandi underpinning it
has yielded notoriously mixed results especially within the “influence stud-
ies” variety of comparative literature. Eminently driven by a “macro” kind
of logic—­in fact, excessively “macrological” at times—­it risks shortchanging
the micro; wielded from afar or above, and habitually from unacknowledged
hubs and heights of political and cultural capital, this panoramic view of the
faraway and the atypical provides for a “distant reading” where distance is
not only a “condition of knowledge” but also its stumbling block.35 If the
cavalier dismissal of “close reading” is license for playing fast and loose with
the idiomatic richness of the infinitesimal, then whatever planetary picture
the “distant” critical procedure paints may not differ significantly from the
“totalistic” brushstrokes of the globalist model.36

The Telescopic, the Microscopic, and the Planetary

More picturesque, planetarily speaking, is the latter road. Less traveled and
more recently cut, it is better marked not only with the usual road signs but
also with the planet’s lush and variegated ontosemiotics—­with meaningful
life. What with its high speed, uniformly designed ramps, exits, rest areas,
express tollgates, and lookout points over distant if awe-​­inspiring scenery,
the other road is an autobahn. The critical traffic it fosters remains geared
toward covering the distance physically rather than uncovering the geocul-
tural minutia of the in-​­between locales. The highway is just that, a high road
to—­at times even a bypass around—­the problematics of the planetary trivia,
the horizontal counterpart of a telescopy exclusively and unambiguously sold
on the ideology of tēle (“at distance,” in Ancient Greek). No less necessary, it
must be treaded carefully, as thinkers from Heidegger to Deleuze and Guattari
to Paul Virilio counsel. At the very least, planetary critics must supplement
it with the long-​­winded detour whose critical microscopy may help us better
descry the planet’s face—­the roar of the bigger world—­in the wrinkles of the
apparently isolated, in the cultural grimaces, historical modes, and stylistic
mood of unambitious, “cosmically” shy, or politically disenfranchised topog-
raphies. Thus, not only does this critical itinerary prove analytically safer
sometimes—­for we risk missing less as we stop by, look out the window, or
take pictures—­but it also is more emphatically ethical because it encourages
us to “relate” to those we meet along it. To continue in the same Frostian
222 Christian Moraru

vein, this road can literally make all the difference. Here, the journey pulls
the world together and draws out spatially and intellectually the planet’s
togetherness by zooming in on the different, the off-​­the-​­beaten path, and the
small. The distance is neither absent nor purely figurative. Its geographical
dimension is still in play. But this expanse has been encoded discursively as
the interstice between the work’s outer and deeper layers, and then critically,
as the scopic-​­interpretive gap between a first and second glance, between
what we have in sight as we turn to look and as our gaze caresses the work’s
surface, and what comes into clearer focus as we complete our turn and
inspect deeper, that is, the kind of planetary picture we might be able to come
away with as we develop, quasi-​­photographically, the cultural negative of the
novel or painting in question.
The highway, the astronaut, the satellite, the GPS, and their maps and
vistas are elevated both attitudinally and altitudinally. In their more mechani-
cal applications, they betray a twofold hauteur of standpoint, a perspectival
loftiness of geopositioning and topography as well as of judgment. Quite
high on their macro agenda is the barely disguised ambition to corral the infi-
nite into various distant readings, measurements, and conjectures, whereas
the back road is, less assumingly, a portal to the infinitesimal. A dromological
version of the microscope, this route runs more emphatically—­to paraphrase
Gregory Bateson—­through a geography of the mind before trekking across
the planet’s terraqueous body. In other words, it is predicated on a geoaes-
thetic order, on a homological, world and artwork model alike in which the
Stoic, macro universe of ever-​­expanding circles of belonging of the Stoic,
macro universe slide into one another and, together, into the particular, into
the “located” work, and into the micro as their generic category.
It is in this sense that the micro telescopes—­shrinks down to size to com-
press and encapsulate—­ the macro, which makes the opposition far less
cut-​­and-​­dried. For, in this sense too, the microscope is an epistemological
telescope, a sense-​­making machine. Harnessing its magnifying capabilities,
the microscopic reading technique subsequently decompresses meaning,
spreads out the world’s bigger canvas folded inside the little picture, holds up
to view the whole in the fragment, the planetary curled around or nestling
inside the omphalós of the indigenous, the dialectal, and the place-​­bound.
The idea behind this compression-​­ cum-​­
decompression reading optics is
not to abolish or transcend distance in order to annex the destination. As
noted earlier, the classical telescope—­a variety of the hegemonic, rationally
ordering “Enlightenment eye”—­skips over places to cover, in hopes of can-
celing out, great distances. Instead, the microscopic connects vastly separated
cultural dots by affirming and “working through” place after place, begin-
ning with that starting point into which worlds seem to have collapsed. In
tarrying with it diligently—­ in tracking the cultural specimen’s Brownian
motion closely—­the critical microscope pursues the planetary spatialization
of the geocultural sample under scrutiny, thus setting forth the “inherently
Decompressing Culture 223

relational” constitution of that place or locus as intersectional communality

or trans-​­communitarian locus communis.37 An aesthetic site where “here”
and “ours” are spatialized into “distant kinship” with “there” and “theirs,”
this place and its cultural haecceity—­this individual place or aesthetic locus
and their this-​­ness—­are no longer opposed to planetarity but apposite to it,
a scaled-​­down with-​­world.38 Characteristically, this site cites (“telescopes”)
the planet spatially and intertextually, “sites” (situates) and quotes—­with
one word, embodies—­worldly relationality in ways that may or may not be
right away noticeable. Watermarked with the planet’s figure, this “sitational,”
textual-​­spatial formation lends itself, accordingly, to a reading with this fig-
ure, across the panoply of local figurations serving as the figure’s cypher and
vehicle. This reading is, to invoke Westphal again, a lecture du monde in
the strong sense of the world as worlded or relational mundus, in short, a
with-​­reading poised to face and shed light on the “with-​­ness” makeup of this
world.39 To that effect, planetary reading turns to the latter’s relational struc-
ture—­to the planet’s “mondiality”—­microscopically, scanning the micro for
signs of the macro.
If the close reading handed down to us by the New Critics all too often ​­
purports to “resolve” the contradictory by simplifying the complex, plan-
etary close (or micro)reading seeks to complicate the illusorily simple.
More to the point, this kind of interpretation does the planet’s bidding
epistemologically—­ and thus instantiates what Axelos pinpointed as the
planet’s “thought-​­becoming”—­by spotting the worldly multiplicity of place,
time, and discourse in the deceptively monistic, the distant relatives, the
exogenous, and the incoherent genealogies placed under erasure by institu-
tionalized culture and officially endorsed by the nation-​­state’s endogenous
fantasies. In this form, culture is a cover-​­up operation. Therefore, simulation
is hardly the issue here, Jean Baudrillard’s variously rehearsed case notwith-
standing; to the contrary, dissimulation is the problem. “Streamlined” culture
does not so much simulate as it dissimulates, conceals, disregards, or short-​
s­hrifts the many that have gone into the cobbling together of the one, of
the same, of the nation, and the like. Countercultural because cross-​­cultural,
reading with the planet exposes, first, the compilation itself, the outsourc-
ing of nativist mythologies, and the heteroclite underbelly of the putatively
all-​­of-​­a-​­piece, and second, the worldliness of the bricolage. Whistleblowers
of sorts, planetary critics leak culturally classified information about the
recycled material’s planetary provenance or, conversely, about the worldly
affiliation of presumably discrete traditions and autonomous identities by
laying bare the worldly relationality the fast-​­expanding planetary imaginary
has threaded into descriptions of allegedly self-​­subsistent singularities. What
these critics enact, then, is a protocol of perusal driven by a fractal logic. They
look, that is, for the totum in parte, contemplate the “all”’s face in filigree, in
that which seems to be facing no one else but itself. Does this mean that they
rely too much on a reading against the grain? Not quite. In practice, their
224 Christian Moraru

reading is also one with the grain. What is more, this reading often fleshes
out the insights of worldliness turning up in U.S. and other literatures with
symptomatically increased frequency since the late 1980s. Post–­Cold War
narrative stages so insistently the retraining of the gaze on the planetary all
carved into the apparently second-​­fiddle, minuscule, cloistral, ingrown, and
otherwise unworldly that some of the most emblematic fictions of our time
can be read as geomethodological blueprints.

Intimations of Cosmallogy

Mircea Cărtărescu’s oeuvre is a case in point. If Hungarian author George

Konrád confesses in his 1984 book Antipolitics that “the world is one; and
it is more interesting than Budapest,”40 the Romanian writer feels, around
the same time and a few hundred miles east of Konrád’s Budapest, the pull
of worldly oneness in situ: not only does this oneness exist, but it can be
lived out locally, in and as his hometown. “I truly love my world, the world
of Bucharest,” he declares elsewhere, “yet I am fully aware that Bucharest is
concomitantly all, the Aleph.”41 To get a grip on the many-​­sided Borgesian
allusion, it is important to remember that, at the time, the regime was seeking
to expunge Romania’s capital from the world’s cultural and political script
and turn it, along with the rest of the country, into what the dissidents were
calling “internal exile.” Pushing back against this agenda, the “cultural resis-
tance” movement (rezistenţa prin cultură) of the Romanian 1980s marked
one of the most cosmopolitan periods in East European history.
In the vanguard of this struggle, Cărtărescu fights off the twin incarcera-
tion of his beloved city and of himself in it by opening it out onto what his
1985 poetry volume calls the “All” (Totul).42 Drawing from this and other
earlier works, his 1993 novel Nostalgia sketches an astoundingly holistic
vision of planetarity.43 Forlorn and dilapidated, plagued by shortages and
blackouts, late Cold-​­War Bucharest is, literally and allegorically, written by
the book back into the wider world and thereby made “interesting,” into a
site of and argument for worldly belonging. In Cărtărescu’s work, the city and
its people reclaim their seat in the bigger world. They are, we gather, part and
parcel of this world; they spend their lives in its nurturing embrace, although
not out in the open, for politics and policies of cultural lockdown have all but
deterritorialized the greater outside—­or, more exactly, have underterritorial-
ized it. But, from beneath the defaced surface of Ceaușescu’s “golden-​­age”
Bucharest, the writer summons strange faces and the very face of worldly
strangeness: the face of the planet, the figure of that incoherent and raucous
oneness, of the planetary being-​­with or worldly Mitsein fractured by the Ber-
lin Wall, by the country’s heavily militarized borders, and more generally by
the disjunctive geopolitics of the Cold War. From within the maze of con-
crete housing projects, the author conjures up cosmic panoramas by bridging
Decompressing Culture 225

physical and metaphysical gaps. In dialogue with E. T. A. Hoffmann, Franz

Kafka, Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges, Thomas Pynchon, and
other modern and postmodern masters of the fantastic, the absurd, and magi-
cal realism, Cărtărescu unearths a maimed metropolis whose heart throbs in
the world’s wider body and whose idiosyncratic mix of squalor and “Paris
of the Balkans” charm he flips over to display unsuspected depths and gate-
ways into the hidden, the elsewhere, and the otherwise—­into the world’s
larger assemblage. Where the Western mindset relegates his city to an alien
geography overrun by strays and ruled by vampiric dictators razing entire
neighborhoods to make room for their sepulchral headquarters, Cărtărescu
unfolds a borderless dreamland.
The oneiric politics of Nostalgia’s urban imaginary was lost on
Cărtărescu’s readers neither when the book first came out in spring 1989,
under the title Visul (The Dream) and butchered by censorship, nor a few
years later, when it was reissued in unabridged form. Its staggeringly world-​
r­elational toposophy went head-​­ on against officially upheld “tradition,”
an exceptionalist-​­ solipsistic notion redolent of early twentieth-​­ century,
agrarian-​­Orthodox and nationalist-​­chauvinist doctrines, on which the Com-
munist Party was falling back in the late 1980s to ward off perestroika. The
novel symbolically liberates the city’s body politic by linking it with other
urban bodies and bodies of work, with other places, topoi, styles, texts, and
contexts. An other to the city and its officially sanctioned corporeality thus
coalesces beyond the closed-​­off self, community, and place, an other into
whose capaciously agglutinating texture Nostalgia’s main first-​­person narra-
tor weaves himself and his kin.
The weaving spider is, in fact, Cărtărescu’s signature mise en abyme. A
motif in the story, it also designates, metafictionally, the novel’s multiply inter-
textual fabric and, inside it, the web of Kabbalah-​­like copulas between stages
and layers of existence where the individual brain is plugged into other brains
and their projections into other worlds and the worlds behind those, ad infi-
nitum. As in one of the novel’s sections, the narrating writer-​­in-​­the-​­novel
plays the spider sliding up and down the threads of various plot lines. He gets
in and out of the minds of his dramatis personae, transforming into his char-
acters while telling us about their own changes into others. At the same time,
he shows how the phylogeny of these metamorphoses (another Cărtărescu
trademark) rehearses cosmic ontogeny by recapping a whole cosmology—­an
entire cosmallogy. Indeed, what he ultimately puts up is a planetary spectacle
of the All and of those without whom this whole’s wholeness would fall
short, a performance of self and—­and as necessarily with—­others (álloi in
Ancient Greek).44
People’s bodies; Bucharest’s crumbling body; the nation’s hyperterritorial-
ized bulk; and the world’s geocultural corpus: these are Nostalgia’s concentric
circles, the network-​­mundus. Whatever takes place in this planetary web
must take place first topologically and, we will see before long, ethically, to
226 Christian Moraru

wit, must take its place from another place and place-​­giver “not here.” For,
explains Giorgio Agamben, no matter where it happens, what ontological
seat in the planetary amphitheater gets assigned to it, this place-​­taking occurs
as one “eases” into a place, into a residential “easement” that is both one’s
own lawfully and “always-​­already” an adjacency within the private property
in which the proprietorial and the exclusive are consequently premised on an
other’s presence, on the shared, and the communal right-​­of-​­way. Owners and
the finite space where their ownership is exercised are founded, as Emmanuel
Levinas and Jacques Derrida press home ever so often, on hospitality, its
guests (others), and the luminous infinity bathing the face-​­to-​­face of hosting.
Innately ek-​­static, beings thus depend on—­rest on and have “always-​­already”
internalized—­a literally vital outside. Their realm and modality is a horizon-
tally as well as vertically spatialized relation. A priorily adjacent, traversed by
visible and invisible “easements,” here-​­ness only apparently takes hold just
“here,” on one level of existence.45 What happens on one level unfolds or can
unfold Kabbalistically on the rest as a drama of All-​­ness, of quasi-​­mystical
partaking of the All. Everything—­this very All—­is a matter of scale, scope,
and perspective. Matter itself is no exception because what defines it is exten-
sion and “situation” in a space where all locations communicate and so make
up a continuum. How and what things are hinges on where they are, but
they can mutate abruptly because their places are (or are not) theirs insofar
as these are spliced together or border on other places across, near, inside,
beneath, or above them.
Ontology is topology, then; position, an inherently relational spatial coor-
dinate, ultimately turns into an ontological category while ontology too
becomes, as Soja would say, spatialized.46 Therefore, one can shuttle back
and forth between different levels of life. One can “overcome” ontologi-
cal difference, run the whole gamut of being and thus be in “other” ways
and worlds topologically: here, one changes by simply changing one’s place,
status, or classification. By the same token, this ontology is political. Nostal-
gia’s planetary imagination marshals beings polemically by reshuffling the
segregationist-​­insular biogeography of Cold War Romania along the lines
of flight of a two-​­pronged onto-​­spatial rhetoric. On one side, this rheto-
ric is metonymic; it sets people and objects next to people and objects in
whose vicinity they have neither been nor are supposed to be. On the other
side, it is synecdochic. Treating individuals and locales as subsets of greater
units stretching above and athwart the Party-​­State’s immediate, totalitar-
ian totality and ossified taxonomies, this pars pro toto planetary figuration
only reformulates, from the vantage point of the part, the totum in parte of
fractal reading. Thus, either way, Cărtărescu’s characters act out a drama
of being—­they are—­as they are in relation to others, thence de-​­termined,
at the same time bounded and freed by the proximity to others and their
modes of being. Propinquity, the terminus that both limits and assigns the self
a contiguous meaning, also liberates it, brings it forth and across. Political
Decompressing Culture 227

through and through, topological and cultural relatedness is thus Nostal-

gia’s modus essendi. Bucharest’s “little context”’ reflects the shape of bigger
places and units or feeds into them without warning. Unlike the more jejune
constructions of “local” and “global,” the micro and macro worlds are simi-
larly built but neither repetitious nor opposed. In broader bodies, venues,
and sequences, the self does not run into versions of itself but into others. An
ontological alloy—­made of álloi—­the All’s structure is non-​­allergic, cosmal-
logic. This constitution features others and calls upon the self to acknowledge
them both outside and inside itself. Further, if the All is indeed the Alpha and
Omega of “little” existential forms and, further, if these forms mirror the
whole’s own form, then they are its microcosm; further still, because the lev-
els of this ontology interface and overlap, the microcosm is not only isoform
and juxtaposed to the macrocosm but also a portal to it, an Aleph.

“Mondializing” the City: Blueprints and Constellations

In calling the small, the finite, the shut-​­in, the incarcerated, the city and its
bodies Alephs, the Romanian writer also calls out to Borges, interpellates
and interpolates his “Aleph.” Another homology comes into play here via
the Argentine author’s holistic (“Allistic”) model of intertextuality: the Babel
Library. In it, literature and place are limitless in number and extent and so
coextensive, one. Therefore, the universal library and the universe overlap
too. In “The Library of Babel,” “The Book of Sand,” “The Total Library,”
and other Borgesian ficciones, the library, the book, and the textual show off
the universe qualitatively, best illustrate its fabric, its “textile” makeup. Con-
versely, they also hint that, if the cosmos is like a book, all books are infinite.
That means that every book holds the rest of the holdings, is an Aleph, “one
of the points in space that contains all points.”47 What de-​­fines “bookness” is
in-​­finitude as well as inter-​­textuality, cosmic boundlessness and/inside bound-
edness. Underlying the latter is, fundamentally, otherness, the others and their
books’ presence in a particular book. This book, which Nostalgia emulates,
does not only “put up” with a “parasitic” other to it within itself; the book
simply cannot have a self, an identity, cannot be “original,” in short, cannot
be what it is without that “alien” presence inside it, without having its roots,
its origin, somewhere else, in another text. It follows that the Aleph is not
just unlimited and intertextual—­and intertextual because unlimited, trans-
gressive, liable to cross over to the other side time and time again—­but also
“alterial,” a repository of alterity. It is being that is while also being what it is
not, its other, much like the Aleph includes its “counterpart,” the Zahir, and
everything else between the A (Alpha) and Z (Omega) of existential, cultural,
and political “alternatives.”48
Borges’s “Aleph” is not only the novel’s primary intertextual ingredient
but also the Kabbalistic-​­cosmological trope and cultural stratagem through
228 Christian Moraru

which Cărtărescu reveals his cosmology as cosmallogy and Bucharest as an

Aleph, a site of astonishing otherness and size locked inside the nation-​­state’s
paranoically policed borders.49 A carceral space, the Romanian capital is also
“une ville devenue monde,”50 a city made into world—­“mondialized”—­by
the writer’s planetary imaginary. Describing Los Angeles as the “epitomizing
world-​­city” and utmost sample of postmodern urban geography, Soja notices
that the metropolis is a cosmopolis because it “reproduc[es] in situ the cus-
tomary colours and confrontations of a hundred different homelands.” A
microcosm of the illimitable and itself without limit, bursting with “fulsome”
heterogeneity, Soja’s LA is, in his own formulation, a Borgesian “LA-​­leph,”
at once “everywhere” and “the only place on earth where all places are.” And
they are there because, as the critic implies apropos, again, of Borges, the
Aleph is a “radical[ly] open,” “all-​­inclusive simultaneity” sheltering a whole
panoply of otherness.51 This makes the Californian Aleph so mind-​­bogglingly
“global” that it defies critical survey.52 Instead, Cărtărescu’s Aleph stimulates
and entices, leading on and out of the all-​­too-​­limited. Not the Balkans’ Paris
any more, Bucharest has yet to become their LA. The stakes of its plane-
tary projections are different. If in Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 Oedipa
Maas follows real roads, signs, and maps to famously “project a world,” 53
in Cărtărescu the geoimaginary blueprint of Bucharest is jarringly at odds
with the plans drawn by the city’s rulers. De facto, their world picture does
not include Bucharest, and, truth be told, there is no world picture to speak
of either. Not so in Nostalgia’s camera obscura. Here, a world picture slowly
forms, one in which Bucharest registers.
More memorable yet is the other image, which the writer develops “micro-
scopically” from the city’s negative: the world’s own face across and amidst
the faces, facets, and petals on Bucharest’s wet, black bough. But this is not
just the by now banal view from above. Nor is it the view from nowhere, as
critics of “universalist” cosmopolitanism might quip. A view from within,
inside, or underneath a temporally and spatially anchored locale, this is a
“consideration” of place that takes in and honors this place as “situated”
or placed planetarity, an effort to account for the world relationality intrin-
sic to place and subsequently to do away with the pseudo-​­disjunctions of
place and planet, micro and macro, and so forth. For, as Tariq Jazeel echoes
Doreen Massey, “place is not opposed to the planet. It is instead an ongo-
ing assemblage, constellation, and agonistic coming together of narratives
and trajectories that are in themselves insufficiently conceptualized as either
local or global.” Thus, “the spatialization of place, in this sense, provides the
sphere of the possibility of existence of multiplicity. . . . The negotiation of
difference in place is always a process of, and invitation to, reconstellate the
‘we,’ and place’s geographical challenge thought this way is precisely that
it is never closeable.”54 To “reconstellate” this “we”—­the spatialized com-
munality of the polis—­the critic must look not only around and over the
nation-​­state’s fences, horizontally, but, as Robert T. Tally Jr. acknowledges
Decompressing Culture 229

in his Planetary Turn essay, also over the horizon, up, where the constella-
tions turn and the earth itself turns into Earth by trading its topographical
surfaciality for geosemiotic voluminousity. A triangulation of place in the
micro mode susceptible to withstand parochial, clannish, and authoritar-
ian attempts at cordoning off cultural sites, the critical maneuver likely to
redraw, à la David Hollinger, the Theophrastian circle of “we”55 for the
twenty-​­first century actually depends on macro (“Apollonian”) vistas and
their “mondial” mental pictures. To be more exact, this dependence is an
interdependence. For the macro itself collapses, Aleph-​­like, into the micro,
but, upon geomethodological “decompression,” it becomes readable in the
culture’s “small print” as much as the Stoics’ innermost circles of selfhood
and family present themselves as ripple or butterfly effect—­outer circles—­of
far-​­off, incongruous, and “eccentric” “we”-​­constellations.

Snowflakes: The Imagination as Geopositioning Technology

Amplifying exponentially across the post–­Cold War novel, the thematization

of the dialectic of micro and macro world pictures becomes more transpar-
ently political in Cărtărescu’s later work (Orbitor [Blinding]), but also in
DeLillo (Underworld, Cosmopolis, Falling Man, and Point Omega), Chang-​
r­ ae Lee (Native Speaker, A Gesture Life, Aloft, and The Surrendered), Cole
(Open City), Gish Jen (World and Town), Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely
Loud and Incredibly Close), Nicole Krauss (The History of Love), Hemon
(Nowhere Man), Gary Shteyngart (The Russian Debutante’s Handbook and
Absurdistan), Bharati Mukherjee (The Holder of the World, Desirable Daugh-
ters, and Miss New India), Jhumpa Lahiri (Namesake), Colum McCann (Let
the Great World Spin), O’Neill (Netherland), Ondaatje (The English Patient),
Houellebecq (Les particules élémentaires [The Elementary Particles], Plate-
forme [Platform], La possibilité d’une île [The Possibility of an Island], and
La carte et le territoire [The Map and the Territory]), Alexandru Muşina
(Nepotul lui Dracula [Dracula’s Nephew]), Zadie Smith (White Teeth, On
Beauty, and NW), Ian McEwan (Saturday), Dubravka Ugrešić (The Ministry
of Pain), Christos Tsiolkas (Dead Europe), Brian Chickwava (Harare North),
and Orhan Pamuk (Kar [Snow]), to list only a few of the Romanian writer’s
kindred spirits.
In Pamuk’s 2002 novel, for example, contemporary Istanbul, a mere three
hundred miles south of Cărtărescu’s Bucharest, then, farther away, eastern
Anatolia’s town of Kars, and entire Turkey with them claim “accessions” to
wider geopolitical aggregates such as EU and are simultaneously reclaimed by
forces of religious, regional, and separatist entrenchment dead set on rescind-
ing Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s secularist legacy. Historically between a rock
and a hard place, Pamuk’s country finds itself trapped between incompatible
options: the greater world of NATO (since 1951) and Europe (an increasingly
230 Christian Moraru

conflicted aspiration), for which the Young Turks’ modernity-​­bent reform-

ism had paved the way, and, pulling in the opposite direction, Iran-​­backed
Islamists and, yet in another, radical Kurdish autonomists (PKK). Turkey’s
predicament, Pamuk hints, lies in what might be called the extraneous fal-
lacy: the assumption that, first, such options, positions, affiliations, and the
cultural-​­religious models derived from or attributed to them are indomitably
external to each other, following as they allegedly do distinct trajectories in
space and time; and second, that they are mutually exclusive as a matter of
course. Nowhere is this antinomic worldview more ingeniously refuted than
in the “telescoping” episode where Ka, the protagonist, tells us about “All
Humanity and the Stars,” the “constellating” poem he composes in reaction
to his companion’s comment that “the history of the small city [of Kars] has
become as one with the history of the world.”56 “In the notes he made after-
ward,” we learn, “Ka described [the poem’s] subject”

as the sadness of a city forgotten by the outside world and banished

from history; the first lines followed a sequence recalling the opening
scenes of the Hollywood films he had so loved as a child. As the titles
rolled past, there was a faraway image of the earth turning slowly;
as the camera came in closer and closer, the sphere grew and grew,
until suddenly all you could see was one country, and of course—­just
as in the imaginary films Ka had been watching in his head since
childhood—­this country was Turkey; now the blue waters of the Sea
of Marmara and the Bosphorus and the Black Sea and the Nişantaş
of Ka’s childhood, with the traffic policeman on Teşvikiye Avenue, the
street of Niğar [sic] the poetess, and trees and rooftops (how lovely
they looked from above!); then came a slow pan across the laundry
hanging on the line, the billboard advertising Tamek canned goods,
the rusty gutters and the pitch-​­covered sidewalks, before the pause at
Ka’s bedroom window. Then a long tracking shot through the win-
dow of rooms packed with books, dusty furniture, and carpets, to
Ka at a desk facing the other window; panning over his shoulder,
the camera revealed a piece of paper on the desk and, following the
fountain pen, came finally to rest on the last letters of the message he
was writing, thus inviting us to read:

address on the day of my entrance

into the history of poetry: poet ka,
16/8 nigâr the poetess street,
nișantaș, istanbul, turkey

As the narrator adds in a reference to the snowflake-​­shaped cosmic dia-

gram he comes across in one of Ka’s notebooks, “discerning readers will
already have guessed” that Ka’s address “is located on the Reason axis but
Decompressing Culture 231

positioned to suggest the power of the imagination.”57 Intersecting Reason

and Memory,58 the Imagination re-​­or geo(-​­)positions Ka(r[s])—­the artist, the
place, and Turkey with them—­planetarily, across worlds, rationalities, and
individual-​­collective memories. By a mix of zoom-​­in and zoom-​­out scenes,
Pamuk and his authorial alter ego both locate their places in the outside
worlds and make out these worlds in the Turkish quotidian, lying inside one
another like so many Chinese boxes, overlapping, or crisscrossing each other
to weave the Alephic fractality—­the “snowflake”—­of planetarity. Ka does
not have to invent the “little things” that his compatriots live and die for, for
these things are already there, in the Universal Studio picture of the turning
planet. But he needs to turn to the picture an eye trained for this kind of
planetary “detail.” The magnifying-​­glass workings of the microanalysis also
makes possible the macroanalytic flip side, which helps him detect the world’s
multitudinal footprints in snowy Kars. It is, arguably, all a matter of scale, of
a revisionary scalarity no longer wedded to national-​­linguistic territoriality
but willing to take the risk of another mapping. Both imaginary and real, so
vivid in Kars’s Turkish-​­Kurdish-​­Iranian-​­Armenian-​­Russian-​­West-​­European
urban potpourri and so subtly reinforced by Pamuk’s Brechtian-​­Pirandellian
intertextual games, this is a complex cartography in which place, affect, faith,
gender, ethnicity, and governance “crystalyze” to gel, snowflake-​­like, into
aggregates of culture inside, outside, and astride statal and sectarian turfs.

“Where the print is finest”

One of the more heartening points O’Neill drives home in his 2009 Pen/
Faulkner Award-​­winning Netherland is that this cultural meteorology might
bring about social climate change in the post-​­9/11 United States by way of
everyday community practices as leisurely and unassumingly plebeian as
sports.59 For cricket, the Turkish-​­Irish-​­American author teaches us through
his Dutch protagonist Hans van der Broeck and especially Hans’s West Indian
friend, Chuck Ramkissoon, is more than a pastime. It is not in the past either.
Its time has not passed. Or, if it has, so has the exceptionalist-​­autonomist
temporality in which American communality has sometimes pictured itself.
As a community, Chuck believes, the United States still has to pass the geopo-
litical and cultural-​­demographic test of the planetary present. Popular with
Americans since the early eighteenth century but gradually elbowed aside by
baseball’s modern “hegemony,” the game of cricket is thus more than a trope
or fictional ploy. It is a concrete, athletically embodied modality of presentify-
ing or updating an America that, in the September 11, 2001 aftermath, must
reconstellate itself as community so as to work through the meanings of not
only the World Trade Center tragedy but also of the planetarization without
which the traumatic event would remain meaningless. A community driven
to the limit by the violently worlding world, the United States cannot afford
232 Christian Moraru

not to use its new, liminal position to think through its communal cultural-​
e­thical limits and spatio-​­political limitations. Cricket, implies Faruk Patel,
one of the rumored financial backers of Chuck’s New York Cricket Club
project, uniquely brings together liminality, Americanness, and understand-
ing, or, less redundantly, simply brings together. Chuck’s basic idea was to
build a team, a field and its facilities, and socialize with teammates, oppo-
nents, fans, and the cricketers’ families, in a nutshell, to deploy cricket as a
twenty-​­first-​­century ritual of American togetherness. There may be, as Faruk
opines, “a limit to what Americans understand,” and that “limit” may well
be, as he goes on, “cricket” itself. But if that is true, then the game ceases
to be trivial. Instead, it takes on a sociocultural and, we shall see, political
“consequentiality” beyond the inconsequentially ludic because it opens up
the agonistic venue where Americans might recontest practically the meaning
of being in the world.60 Accordingly, in this space, they may not limit them-
selves to theoretical de-​­and re-​­limitations of territory, culture, and identity
inside somewhat less rigid boundaries and categories, to mere reconceptual-
izations of what it means to be in the world; here, they may and in a sense
must also “experiment” with worldliness, that is, with being-​­in-​­the-world as
a community-​­fostering modality of being.
Hans and others are aware of the “laboratory experiment” underway.61
But the laboratory, Chuck maintains, is not limited to the cricket field because
the latter’s liminal condition necessarily marks and unmarks this terrain as a
strict enclosure, ad quem limit or terminus. Thus, the field and surrounding
grounds set themselves up as an American microcosm. Or, with another met-
aphor pressed into service by my geomethodological reading, the laboratory
is also a photo lab—­better yet, a socio-​­photo lab. In it, not only “developers”
like Chuck but also Americans at large, players, crowds, and the whole body
of socii give themselves another chance to learn or relearn how to develop,
from the ludic negative of the cricket community, a new picture of the United
States and of the world inside and outside the country.
“The bigger you think, the crappier it looks.  .  .  . So this is going to be
my motto—­think small,” Theo announces in McEwan’s 2005 novel Saturday
as the world’s “big things” are encroaching on his private world and con-
cerns.62 “My motto is, Think fantastic,” Chuck lets Hans know with one of
the novel’s frequent nods at The Great Gatsby.63 As logicians might note, this
is a one-​­way contradiction because Chuck’s plan is not to import, from the
outside, worldly “bigness” into cricket-​­reconstellated American smallness.
He just does not envision worldliness as an outside; not an optional, flavor-​
­enhancing additive to the American melting pot, the world is neither external
nor supplemental to the United States. He has two goals. The first is to flesh
out the big already tightly packed within the small, the history burrowed
inside our seemingly ahistorical contemporaneity, the potential future with
which the flat present is thus interleaved, the macro within the micro. The
second is to help Americans visualize this multilayered structure, picture their
Decompressing Culture 233

home as, with, and of the world and the world as and deep inside it, in brief,
turn to the planet by turning meaningfully, self-​­analytically and ethically, to
each other, their country, and its renewed hospitality. As he tells Hans, if
“you ask people to agree to complicated rules and regulations,” the sport
might just be the answer because, in spite of its colonial history, it has served
and can serve again as a “crash course in democracy. Plus—­and this is key—­
the game forced [players from the warring tribes of Papua New Guinea] to
share a field for days with their enemies, forced them to provide hospitality
and places to sleep.” “Hans,” he carries on, “that kind of closeness changes
the way you think about somebody. No other sport makes this happen.”64
When Hans wonders if his friend thinks of Americans as “savages,” Chuck
rejects the implication by bolstering not only his “fantastic” vision’s import
as a world-​­communal picture but also the planetary relationality over whose
filigree, specifically and deliberately, the world picture is laid palimpsest-​­like.
“I’m saying,” he elaborates, “that people, all people, Americans, whoever, are
at their most civilized when they’re playing cricket. What’s the first thing that
happens when Pakistan and India make peace? They play a cricket match.
Cricket is instructive, Hans. It has a moral angle. I really believe this. Every-
body who plays the game benefits from it. So I say, why not Americans?” The
question is timely because, as the 9/11 attacks proved to Chuck and others,
“Americans cannot really see the world. They think they can, but they can’t.
I don’t need to tell you that. Look at the problems we’re having. It’s a mess,
and it’s going to get worse. I say, we want to have something in common
with Hindus and Muslims? Chuck Ramkissoon is going to make it happen.
With the New York Cricket Club, we could start a whole new chapter in U.S.
history. Why not? Why not say so if it’s true? Why hold back? I’m going to
open our eyes.”65
To open our American eyes in order to see and “get” the world picture is
thus to “fulfill [our] destiny,”66 in other words, to re-​­become the hospitable
community for which cricket can provide a model morally urgent, practical,
and plausible. This plausibility is to be taken once again in Westphal’s sense
and, beyond it, in the sense in which, as Deleuze and Guattari postulate, “the
other is a possible world as it exists in a face that expresses it and takes shape
in a language that gives it a reality.”67 The community, what it is and can pos-
sibly be, in its present or plausible future, shines through the faces of others.
The only “white man [he] saw on the cricket fields of New York,” Hans is
surrounded by “teammates” who “variously originated from Trinidad, Guy-
ana, Jamaica, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka,” with “Hindus, Christians, a
Sikh, and four Muslims” drawing together “into a circle for prayer” before
the match.68 In this circle of “we,” a new communality becomes readable at
long last. “I’ve heard,” Hans confesses,

that social scientists like to explain such a scene—­a patch of America

sprinkled with the foreign-​­born strangely in play—­in terms of the
234 Christian Moraru

immigrant quest for subcommunities. How true this is: we’re all far
away from Tipperary, and clubbing together mitigates this unfair
fact. But surely everyone can also testify to another, less reckonable
kind of homesickness, one having to do with unsettlements that can-
not be located in spaces of geography or history, and accordingly
it’s my belief that the communal, contractual phenomenon of New
York cricket is underwritten, there where the print is finest, by the
same agglomeration of unspeakable individual longings that under-
writes cricket played anywhere—­longings concerned with horizons
and potentials sighted or hallucinated and in any event lost long ago,
tantalisms that touch on the undoing of losses too private and repre-
hensible to be acknowledged to oneself, let alone to others. I cannot
be the first to wonder if what we see, when we see men in white
take to a cricket field, is men imagining an environment of justice.
(italics added)69

The passage draws the fine distinction between immigrant “subcommuni-

ties” and communities that could be called planetary—­sodalities in which
planetarization can be “experienced” and witnessed socially, but also experi-
enced with, observed as if under a microscope. Typical of earlier, postcolonial
diasporas, the former cohere around ethnos, more specifically, around effec-
tively or imaginarily separate and competing ēthne, where “competition”
tends to be disjunctive and topoculturally exclusionary, further prying the
competing bodies apart and spacing them out literally or figuratively across
intervals of territory, faith, feeling, belonging, and cultural practice. What
matters is ethnos-​­as-​­gamesmanship; the communality game is played on a
field athletically and socially finite, limited as to what the players might do
and mean together. Gathering around one, trans-​­ethnical ethos—­the ethos
of cricket—­the latter group category is cross-​­or supra-​­communal, integra-
tive. In its finitude of time, space, skill, and membership, an infinite, because
infinitely definable, communality awaits.70 An agonistic protocol of together-
ness, its ludus is multiply ethical, in fact: it relies on cricket’s civic behavior
injunction and play-​­by-​­the-​­rules principle; it works as a language conveying
“others,” playfully, quasi-​­ineffable emotional states (“tantalisms”) that, by
the same movement, can be either sublated or “mined” for bonding purposes;
and, since it is inclusive of winners and losers, hosts and guests, Americans
and “foreigners,” main actors and family extras alike, it is also, if not already
just, then a template for justice. At premium in this playful zone is ethics-​­as-​
s­ portsmanship; here, the contest is not primarily a face-off but a face-​­to-​­face
preamble. While the tiny relational community of cricket is not and cannot
substitute itself to the world, this world’s face is legible in Chuck’s contrac-
tual vision, where the contract’s “print is finest”—­where, in making sense of
the Van Cortland Park cricket “picture” (“it looks like a Brueghel,” exclaims
Hans’s wife), one makes sense of the planet.71
Decompressing Culture 235

Reading for the Planet: Criticism and Stewardship

Face the world’s face. This is what Chuck urges us, if not in so many words.
Let us do so. Popping up among the players’ faces, the planet’s Arcimboldian
face also shows itself in all its confounding hodgepodge, unflagging shifti-
ness, and self-​­contradictory mien around Cărtărescu’s Bucharest, Ugrešić’s
Amsterdam, Foer’s New York, Houellebecq’s Paris, and Zadie Smith’s north-
west London, as well as in Muşina’s Braşov, Pamuk’s Kars, and Mukherjee’s
Gauripur—­in the world, its cities, its less glamorous towns, and everywhere
in between them; indeed, this face has become a “world and town” staple,
as Jen suggests in her 2010 Chinese-​­Cambodian-​­New Englander Riverlake
saga.
Ubiquitous as this enigmatic profile may be, it is also a fragile one,
anguished, unstable, precariously balanced. O’Neill has no illusions about
it. His take on things, American and otherwise, is hardly Pollyannish. As we
seek and perhaps recognize this face, let us remember that Chuck’s hand-
cuffed body gets dumped in the Gowanus Canal. The inevitable question,
then, is whether his vision ends up in the same place. My answer is that,
although Hans leaves New York to join his family in the United Kingdom,
the reunion with his son Jake, his estranged British wife Rachel, her parents
and his former colleagues, Londoners, strangers, and even with his own past
and long-​­passed mother, farther and farther away spatially, temporally, and
empathically from the inner circle of “we,” enacts what Chuck describes as
cricket’s “lesson in civility.”72
This lesson is important. But no less important is this: as in Cărtărescu,
whose characters keep climbing up on the roofs of their apartment com-
plexes to hug the world, or in Jen, whose small town has its own observation
(“twin”) towers, or in Lee’s vol d’oiseau surveys from Aloft, the at-​­distance,
macro pedagogy of aerial-​­theoretical planetary togetherness and empathy
can only do so much. But what it does do, the onto-​­scopic opening that it
marks, matters. Its distant self-​­positioning sows, dialectically, the perspec-
tival “micro” seeds of nearness, closeness, intimacy, and being-​­with. We shoot
up and above in space to draw near and see our place anew, but then we
pull back to come back, enlightened: with Cole, McCann, and the later Pyn-
chon (Against the Day), we uncover the world, rise to bask in the planet’s
aura above cities, above the horizon, so we can recover our humanness on
the ground and in ways that may also reground us; with DeLillo’s earlier
“Human Moments in World War III” story, we ascend to our “orbital” sta-
tions to reconceptualize the big things, to de-​­and re-​­think them so we can
“talk about small things, routine things”;73 with Lee’s Hector (The Sur-
rendered), we screen, from such intellectual altitudes, “tumultuous world
history” for also small but intensely private moments;74 we temporarily and
tactically decouple so we can recouple, rejoin, regroup and “reunite,” relate
and endure in our relations. True, with McCann, we get reports that the
236 Christian Moraru

“ontological glue” is thin up there. But this is why that is where we must
walk first, alone on our tightropes, in our Skylabs, in our space suits, or, with
Joseph McElroy’s cyborg hero Imp Plus (Plus), in our hi-​­tech space bodies:
so we can fight the gravity-​­like pull of trite notions and navel-​­gazing whims
and walk the earth with others again, “feel” what it truly takes to be a couple,
with the loved ones and family, but also with those who are not relatives, not
from “around here” and yet related to us.75
As Houellebecq jokes in The Map and the Territory, the “satellite image”
may not be God’s viewpoint. To be sure, the reasons to doubt the picture’s
divine provenance abound.76 Think only about how the world’s spatial
technology-​­enhanced visual availability has led to increased vulnerability
to surveillance, control, space weaponization, and military “targeting.”77
Authors like O’Neill do want us to think about the world panopticon. So let
us do this too. But they also push us to envisage a world demotikón, a world
of multitudes. They prompt us to follow the dialectical ontology of the macro
and micro all the way to its ethical end, where the world’s face turns—­and
turns us as well—­to the faces of those around us and to the problematic of
care “in” or, better still, across “territory,” to a responsibility idea and prac-
tice notionally and nationally reterritorialized, extended conceptually and
physically to other spaces and people. This is where the geomethodology
dramatized by planetary fiction should take us: to the point at which reading
with the planet turns itself into reading for the planet and criticism into a
“moral” enterprise, into planetary stewardship. “Decompressed” along these
lines, Netherland’s final pages decline to work like Deleuzian-​­Guattarian
uniformity-​­inducing, picture-​­“ruining,” “bad”-​­infinity-​­keyed telescopy.78
If they telescope the world, they do so in the term’s opulent, fundamental
amphibology. That is, they simultaneously condense and enlarge a world.
They bring it closer and spread it out so we can contemplate its dazzling gal-
lery of faces.
The romantic sublime of at-​­distance contemplation bounced the aloof
gaze back to itself. This is what happens to Caspar David Friedrich’s solitary
hero in the 1818 canvas Chalk Cliffs on Rügen, and this is what Friedrich
Nietzsche fancies we see as we stare into the famous abyss of Beyond Good
and Evil: the depths reflecting our look straight back to us.79 Instead, the
planetary sublime is refractive rather than sterilely reflective. If the planetary
gaze comes back to its origin, it does so ethically, not by reinforcing the self-
same’s epistemological cocoon through a scopically self-​­centered, repetitive
pantomime, but through a detour. The “alternative” route is just that: an
alternate trajectory optically and ethically, an itinerary across alterity that
acknowledges others and their faces. It may start out in a telescopically dis-
tancing mode, as does one of the “Google scenes” in O’Neill’s book, with the
“satellite image” of the earth’s a-​­semiotic crust, on which “a human move-
ment is a barely intelligible thing  .  .  . no signs of nations, no sense of the
work of man.”80 Or it may begin, also in a classically telescopic fashion, up
Decompressing Culture 237

in a gondola of the befittingly named London Eye, where Hans, Jake, Rachel,
and their German and Lithuanian companions—­the world’s ambassadors to
Hans’s private moment—­climb higher and higher to the zenith so that once
again the city and the world of humans with it “becom[e] . . . less recogniz-
able.” But the episode is part of an act that comprises a second scene, which
the novel’s ending both directs (builds, shapes theatrically) and directs us to
it, “denudes” and places under the microscope for us.
Thematically and structurally, the stage for this scene is laid by another
“telescopy,” that of the human dramas stratified in the season’s texture. “The
English summer,” writes O’Neill on the previous page, “is actually a Russian
dolls of summers, the largest of which is the summer of unambiguous disas-
ter in Iraq, which immediately contains the destruction of Lebanon, which
itself holds a series of ever-​­smaller summers that led to the summer of Monty
Panesar and, smallest perhaps, the summer of Wayne Rooney’s foot.”81 And
so, inside the Ferris Wheel ride lies, in other time and space, another (Staten
Island) ferry ride, which Hans took with his mother one September evening
years before. On the deck, after admiring the “world lighting up” in front
of them as the Manhattan sunset was “concentrating” that “world” in the
“lilac acres of two amazing high towers going up above all others,” Hans
and his mother instinctively turned their smiling faces to each other. Back
on the Ferris following this quick flashback and after his capsule “reach[es]
the top of our celestial circuit  .  .  . to a point where [we] can see horizons
previously unseen, and the old earth reveals itself,” Hans “come[s] to face
his family with the same smile” while “Lithuanian ladies” ask about London
landmarks and Jake “befriends a six-​­year-​­old boy who speaks not a word of
English.”82
This instant is, as Deleuze and Guattari would probably call it, aesthetic
in that it ultimately “create[s] the finite,” the little situation, the tiniest “Rus-
sian doll” of human life, or the infinitesimal that “rediscovers,” “restores,”
and shows off the “infinite.”83 Neither the infinite nor the infinitesimal is
anterior/posterior or superior/inferior to the other, and, one more time, this
non-​­hierarchical chronology and axiology is anything but the centerpiece of
the local-​­global debate. “The town,” the philosophers stress, “does not come
after the house, nor does the cosmos after the territory. The universe does
not come after the figure, and the figure is an aptitude of the universe.”84
They are telescoped inside each other, available—­reluctantly perhaps—­to our
geomethodological microscopy. The figure figures a universe because there is
a universe to be figured and figured out, and the universe itself is a figure, a
representation and a face of many faces, all alongside one another and often-
times all in one or in one place.
Let us be mindful of this because it sums up geomethodology’s basic tenet,
from which the decompressing technique of reading follows. It is the kind
of distancing-​­cum-​­de-​­distancing technology Levinas welcomed in his “Hei-
degger, Gagarin, and Us” essay against Heidegger’s apprehensions about the
238 Christian Moraru

fast-​­growing human capabilities of “measuring and executing, for the pur-

pose of gaining mastery over that which is as a whole.”85 As Michael Lang
explains in a 2003 essay on Heidegger’s “planetary discourse,” for the Ger-
man thinker the new, de-​­distancing technologies wind up supplanting human
relationships. The only relationships left are technological or, in the more
extreme, Pynchonian formulation from Gravity’s Rainbow, téchne’s relation
to itself. In the Heidegger-​­Harvey line of thought, Lang demonstrates, this
de-​­distantiaton is tantamount to circumventing the human and its under-
girding relatedness. Eventually, this leads to a “compression,” congealing,
and preordaining of everything in this world, including the material texture
and the meanings of the post-​­Enlightenment West and of the whole globe
with it, now seized mechanically and “totalistically” as a passive reflection
(“globalization”) of the Western model.86 Not only does Heideggerian tech-
nology de-​­spatialize; it does so unethically. The resulting Weltbild globalizes
the planet and its understandings.
What Levinas admires in the astronaut’s “feat” is a completely different
technology. This technology spatializes ethically. It “redistricts” place planet-​
w
­ ide to help both the comfortably placed and the displaced to relate and
come together in potentially countless ways. Less “dangerous than the spirits
[génies] of the Place” that, throughout history, have placed so as to include,
shelter, and help thrive, but also to exclude, control, and enslave by “split-
ting . . . humanity into native and strangers,” this is a distancing technology
liable to renew the earth as a common home. “What counts most of all,
Levinas says, is that [Gagarin] left the Place,” the Earth as Place. In Levinas’s
assessment, the Soviet cosmonaut rose “beyond any horizon” but only to
open up new horizons, within which the planet’s mystery, its many facets, and
the faces and relations in which they are all necessarily entangled in the world
at large and in the world’s Kars and Riverlakes are reaffirmed and cared for
rather than fatuously mastered.87
Or, perhaps a mastery of sorts is in play here, after all. It is the more sub-
dued mastery of the mystery that fleetingly brushes our faces when we turn
to the planet’s face and to the countless faces glued together, mosaic-​­like, in
neighborhoods, cantinas, and playgrounds, at bar mitzvahs, in Ferris wheel
cabins, and in other little places. Advancing critically on the trail blazed by
this technological breakthrough, geomethodology allows that this mystery,
the enigma of the planet’s others, may—­and in effect must—­persist as such,
in plain sight and undefaced, protected by the very “nudity” of the face in
which it comes forth. As Levinas never tires of reminding us, we are with
those others in the world so that we ourselves can be. This is the core precept
of his ethics-​­before-​­ontology argument and also the reason reading with the
planet is or ought to be not only an analytical scenario but also a model of
exemplary sociability. For, if we turn to the planet’s face right, “with” follows
suit, turning into “for.”88
Decompressing Culture 239

Notes

1. Mary Louise Pratt, “Planetary Longings: Sitting in the Light of the Great
Solar TV,” in World Writing: Poetics, Ethics, Globalization, ed. Mary Gallagher
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 211.
2. Before providing the title of Frédéric Beigbeder’s novel (Paris: Grasset,
2003), Windows on the World was a restaurant on the top floor of the North
World Trade Center Tower. The English version of the French original came out
in 2004 in Frank Wayne’s translation (New York: Hyperion, 2004).
3. In his article “Spatializing Difference beyond Cosmopolitanism: Rethinking
Planetary Futures” (Theory, Culture & Society 28, no. 5 [2011]), Tariq Jazeel
relies on Denis Cosgrove’s 2001 book Apollo’s Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy
of the Earth in the Western Imagination to claim that photos of the Earth such
as those taken by Apollo 17 in 1972 attest to an “Apollonian gaze” (81), which,
Jazeel would have us believe, betrays an imperial, culturecentric, and totalizing
“reverie” redolent of cosmopolitanism’s “one-​­worldist” thrust (87). As it turned
out, NASA pictures are no different from those taken since the 1970s by hun-
dreds of other space missions, shuttles, orbiting stations, and satellites belonging
to a steadily growing number of countries, Western and non-​­Western. While the
meaning of these images has shifted somewhat in the post–­Cold War era, it would
be safe to say that even back in the 1970s they meant and suggested much more
than what Cosgrove and others thought or think they did. Equally reductive is
Jazeel’s grasp of cosmopolitanism. Finally, the scalar synergy of the macro and
micro categories also plays out in the argument Wai Chee Dimock makes in her
own Planetary Turn essay.
4. On the “event” as discontinuous and ambiguous occurrence, see Alain
Badiou’s Handbook of Inaesthetics, trans. Alberto Toscano (Stanford, Calif.:
Stanford University Press, 2004), 118, 132.
5. Where “there is no expression,” the face is “asleep,” writes Michael Ondaatje
in The English Patient (New York: Vintage, 1993), 28.
6. See, in this collection, Bertrand Westphal’s essay “The White Globe and
the Paradoxical Cartography of Berger & Berger: A Meditation on Deceptive
Evidence.”
7. Youri Lotman, La sémiosphère, trans. Anka Ledenko (Limoges, France:
Presses Universitaires de Limoges, 1999), 9–­20.
8. Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and
Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 37.
9. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tom-
linson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 95.
10. Ibid., 41.
11. Ibid., 95.
12. Henri Lefebvre, State, Space, World: Selected Essays, ed. Neil Brenner and
Stuart Elden, trans. Gerald Moore, Neil Brenner, and Stuart Elden (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 96.
13. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? 109.
14. Kostas Axelos, Vers la pensée planétaire: Le devenir-​­pensée du monde et le
devenir-​­monde de la pensée (Paris: Minuit, 1984), 29–­31.
240 Christian Moraru

15. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? 41.

16. In their essay on Deleuze and Guattari’s “plan d’immanence” from Le
vocabulaire de Gilles Deleuze edited by Robert Sasso and Arnaud Villani (Nice,
France: Les Cahiers de Noesis, 2003), Maurice Élie and Arnaud Villani observe
that “distinct from the plane of reference, which characterizes science, consists of
‘actuals’ [actuels], and gives up on the infinite, and also distinct from the plane of
consistence, which characterizes art, consists of affects and percepts, and brings
about the finite so as to regain the infinite, the plane of immanence consists of
concepts and recovers the infinite [directly]” (272) (my translation).
17. On “multitude,” see Antonio Negri, Art and Multitude: Nine Letters on
Art, Followed by Metamorphoses: Art and Immaterial Labour, trans. Ed Emery
(Cambridge, Eng.: Polity, 2011), 7, 75; on “Crowd,” Badiou’s Handbook of
Inaesthetics, 31–­32. See also Pico Iyer, The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls,
and the Search for Home (New York: Random House, 2000) and “The Nowhere
Man,” Prospect 30, no. 3 (February 1997): 30–­33; and Alexandar Hemon’s novel
Nowhere Man (New York: Random House, 2002). Also, as pointed out in the
introduction to this collection, Masao Miyoshi was among the first to draw atten-
tion to, but also to argue for, a turn to the planet in a sense that he determined as
enabling culturally, politically, and otherwise. On this topic, see, one more time,
his article “Turn to the Planet: Literature, Diversity, and Totality,” in Comparative
Literature 53, no. 4 (Fall 2001): 283–­97.
18. Bertrand Westphal, Le monde plausible: Espace, lieu, carte (Paris: Minuit,
2011), 12–­15.
19. On postmodernism’s “spatial imagination,” see also Julian Murphet, “Post-
modernism and Space,” in The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism, ed.
Steven Connor (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 116–­35.
20. On “lococentrism,” see the “Place” chapter in Lawrence Buell’s The
Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of
American Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 1995), 252–­79.
21. “Out is over,” variously proclaims, among others, Thomas L. Friedman
in Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World after September 11 (New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 22, and elsewhere in his books. On the
disappearance of the planet’s traditional “hiding places,” see David Hollinger,
Cosmopolitanism and Solidarity: Studies in Ethnoracial, Religious, and Profes-
sional Affiliation in the United States (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
2006), xxii.
22. Christian Moraru, Cosmodernism: American Narrative, Late Globaliza-
tion, and the New Cultural Imaginary (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
2011), 2.
23. Ibid., 307–­16.
24. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany, N.Y.:
SUNY Press, 1996), 97.
25. For the evolving meaning of “world” as verb (welten) in Heidegger, with
particular emphasis on the philosopher’s early work, see Françoise Dastur, “Hei-
degger’s Freiburg Version of the Origin of the Work of Art,” in Heidegger toward
the Turn: Essays on the Work of the 1930s, ed. James Risser (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY
Press, 1999), 129, 140.
Decompressing Culture 241

26. Martin Heidegger, The Question concerning Technology and Other Essays,
trans. and with an introduction by William Lovitt (New York: Garland, 1977),
129.
27. Lefebvre, State, Space, World, 196.
28. Ulrich Beck, “Toward a New Critical Theory with a Cosmopolitan Intent,”
Constellations 10, no. 4 (2003): 453.
29. Heidegger, The Question concerning Technology, 135.
30. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2003), 72.
31. Ibid., 30, 72.
32. Heidegger, The Question concerning Technology, 135.
33. Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 82, 92. On the local-​­global “theoretical stale-
mate,” see Ursula K. Heise’s groundbreaking Sense of Place and Sense of Planet:
The Environmental Imagination of the Planet (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2008), 7–­13. Heise’s “eco-​­cosmopolitan” solution to the impasse is to look, in
contemporary culture and thinking, for “ways of imagining the global that frame
localism from a globalist environmental perspective” (9). While sticking to my
stronger distinctions between the global and the planetary, I am sympathetic to
the critic’s attempt to salvage at least some of the global paradigm’s terminol-
ogy and content. I also second her plea “for an increased emphasis on a sense
of planet” (59). A major contribution to ecocriticism, Heise’s argument reads,
repeatedly and proficiently, local manifestations of culture against the backdrop
of the global scenarios in which they are “imbricated” (59). At least during its
initial stages, the cultural telescopy on which my own argument rests tends to do
the opposite by X-​­raying the local for planetary “engravings.”
34. See Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B.
DeBevoise (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004).
35. On “distant reading” and its problematic procedure, see Franco Moretti,
“Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review 1 (January-​­February
2000): 56–­58.
36. Moretti also makes his rather unpersuasive and, to my mind, unnecessary
case against close reading in “Conjectures on World Literature,” 57. N. Katherine
Hayles has recently argued, in a different context, for an integration of close and
distant reading into a synthetic model apropos of Foer’s experimentalism (“Com-
bining Close and Distant Reading: Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes and the
Aesthetic of Bookishness,” PMLA 128, no. 1 [January 2013]: 226–­31).
37. On the relationality of place and the need to “work through” the latter, see
Jazeel, “Spatializing Difference beyond Cosmopolitanism,” 92. On the “Enlight-
enment project” in terms of time, space, and their “collapse,” see David Harvey,
The Condition of Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change
(Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1990), 240–59.
38. On distant kinship, see Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents:
American Literature across Deep Time (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 2009), 144–­45.
39. Westphal uses the phrase “world reading” (lecture du monde) in Le monde
plausible, 15.
40. George Konrád, Antipolitics: An Essay, trans. from the Hungarian by Rich-
ard E. Allen (San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), 179.
242 Christian Moraru

41. Mircea Cărtărescu, “Realismul poeziei tinere” (“Young Poets’ Realism”),

in Competiţia continuă: Generaţia 80 in texte teoretice (The Race Goes On:
Theoretical Texts on the 1980s Generation), ed. Gheorghe Crăciun, 183 (Piteşti,
Romania: Editura Vlasie, 1994).
42. Mircea Cărtărescu, Totul (All) (Bucharest: Cartea Românească, 1985).
43. Visul (Bucharest: Cartea Românească, 1989) was republished in complete
form in 1993 (Bucharest: Humanitas) and has been translated into a number
of languages. For the English version, see Nostalgia, trans., with an afterword,
from the Romanian by Julian Semilian, introduction by Andrei Codrescu (New
York: New Directions, 2005). Later prose works such as novels like Travesti
(Disguise) (Bucharest: Humanitas, 1994), the Orbitor (Blinding) three-​­volume
series (Bucharest: Humanitas, 1996–­2007), and the short pieces gathered in the
best seller De ce iubim femeile (Why We Love Women) (Bucharest: Humanitas,
2005) detail Nostalgia’s description of Bucharest.
44. Állos (masculine plural álloi) is “another” in Ancient Greek. It may des-
ignate either another like the self (by and large an other of the same sort) or an
other to this self, in which case its meaning is closer to héteros. “The other of
two,” the latter marks the other’s otherness more emphatically. In Latin, alius and
alter enact roughly the same distinction. While unquestionably significant, the
difference between állos and héteros is not instrumental to my argument.
45. On the spatial ethics of taking place and the ek-​­static outside, see Giorgio
Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press, 2009), 13–­15, 23–­25, and 67–­68.
46. Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in
Critical Social Theory (New York: Verso, 1989), 131–­37.
47. Jorge Luis Borges, “The Aleph,” in Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hur-
ley (New York: Penguin, 1999), 280.
48. On the Zahir as “an unbearable symbol of the infinite, painful circularity,
an[d] obsessive counterpart of the elusive Aleph,” see Matei Calinescu’s Reread-
ing (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993), 12, 11–­16.
49. On Borges, the Aleph, the Kabbalah, and Judaic tradition in general, see
Jaime Alazraki, Borges and the Kabbalah and Other Essays on His Fiction and
Poetry (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Edna Aizenberg, The
Aleph Weaver: Biblical, Kabbalistic and Judaic Elements in Borges (Potomac,
Md.: Scripta Humanistica, 1984). In Edna Aizenberg, ed., Borges and His Suc-
cessors: The Borgesian Impact on Literature and the Arts (Columbia, Mo.:
University of Missouri Press, 1990), see especially its fifth section, “Hebraism and
Poetic Influence,” 249–­84, which features two lectures by Borges on the Book of
Job and Spinoza, respectively. Worth mentioning is also Evelyn Fishburn’s article
“Reflections on the Jewish Imaginary in the Fictions of Borges,” in Variaciones
Borges: Journal of the Jorge Luis Borges Center for Studies and Documentation
5 (1998): 145–­56. On Borges’s own thoughts on the Kabbalah, see “The Kab-
balah,” in Seven Nights, trans. Eliot Weinberger, introduction by Alasdair Reid
(New York: New Directions, 1984), 99.
50. Soja, Postmodern Geographies, 223.
51. Edward W. Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-​­and-​
­Imagined Places (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996), 54–­57.
52. Soja, Postmodern Geographies, 222–­23.
Decompressing Culture 243

53. “Shall I project a world?” asks Pynchon’s Oedipa Maas in The Crying of
Lot 49 (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), 64.
54. Jazeel, “Spatializing Difference beyond Cosmopolitanism,” 92.
55. David Hollinger, Cosmopolitanism and Solidarity, 73, 36.
56. Orhan Pamuk, Snow, translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely (New
York: Vintage, 2005), 306.
57. Ibid., 306–­7.
58. See Ka’s cosmic “snowflake” in Pamuk, Snow, 283.
59. I thank Jeffrey J. Williams and John McGowan for pointing out to me
the divergent readings to which O’Neill’s Netherland lends itself. Williams
touches on this issue briefly in his article “The Plutocratic Imagination,” which
came out in Dissent (Winter 2013), http://​www​.-​­dissentmagazine​.org/article/
the-​­plutocratic-​­imagination.
60. O’Neill has also broached the unapparent and multiple relevance of the
game in his review of C. L. R. James’s 1963 cricket book Beyond a Boundary,
“Bowling Alone,” published in The Atlantic Monthly on September 11, 2007,
http://​www​.powells​.com/review/2007_09_11. I thank John Protevi for mention-
ing O’Neill’s piece to me.
61. Joseph O’Neill, Netherland (New York: Vintage, 2009), 12.
62. Ian McEwan, Saturday (New York: Random House, 2005), 35.
63. O’Neill, Netherland, 80.
64. Ibid., 211.
65. Ibid.
66. Ibid., 210.
67. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? 17.
68. O’Neill, Netherland, 10–­11.
69. Ibid., 120–­21.
70. Jean-​­Luc Nancy, Verité de la démocratie (Paris: Galilée, 2008), 30–­32.
71. O’Neill, Netherland, 10. My comments on this place in Netherland also
allude to Heise’s Sense of Place and Sense of Planet.
72. O’Neill, 15.
73. Don DeLillo, The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories (New York: Scribner,
2011), 25, 29.
74. Chang-​­rae Lee, The Surrendered (New York: Riverhead, 2010), 102.
75. Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin (New York: Random House,
2009), 325.
76. Michel Houellebecq, The Map and the Territory (New York: Knopf, 2012),
46–­47.
77. Rey Chow, The Age of World Target: Self-​­Referentiality in War, Theory,
and Comparative Work (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006), 31, 41.
78. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? 189.
79. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy,
trans. R. J. Hollingdale, with an introduction by Michael Tanner (London: Pen-
guin, 1990), 102.
80. O’Neill, Netherland, 252.
81. Ibid., 252–­53.
82. Ibid., 254–­56.
83. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? 197.
244 Christian Moraru

84. Ibid., 196.

85. Heidegger, The Question concerning Technology and Other Essays, 132.
86. Michael Lang, “Mapping Globalization or Globalizing the Map?: Hei-
degger and Planetary Discourse,” Genre 36 (Fall/Winter 2003): 239–­44.
87. Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. Seán
Hand (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 233–­ 34. On the
complex interplay of the Levinasian face and technology, see the entire issue of
Transformations, no. 18 (2010).
88. On relational art as a “model of sociability,” see Nicholas Bourriaud,
Relational Aesthetics (Dijon, France: Les Presses du réel; New York: Idea Books,
2002), 109.
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 Contributors

Hester Blum is an associate professor of English at the Pennsylvania State

University. Her work on nineteenth-​­ century American literature, oceanic
studies, and print culture has been published in PMLA, American Litera-
ture, J19, and Early American Studies, as well as in multiple collections. She
is a founder of C19: The Society of Nineteenth-​­Century Americanists. Her
book The View from the Masthead: Maritime Imagination and Antebel-
lum American Sea Narratives (2008) received the John Gardner Maritime
Research Award; her critical edition of Horrors of Slavery, William Ray’s
1808 Barbary captivity narrative, appeared in 2008. Blum is completing a
book entitled The News at the Ends of the Earth: Oceanic Studies and the
Print Culture of Polar Exploration.

Wai Chee Dimock is William Lampson Professor of English and American

Studies at Yale University. Her recent publications include Through Other
Continents: American Literature across Deep Time (2006) and a collaborative
volume, Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature (2007).
She has coedited special issues of journals such as PMLA (“Remapping
Genre,” coedited with Bruce Robbins in 1997); American Literary History
(“Transnational Citizenship and the Humanities,” coedited with Gordon Hut-
ner in 2006); ESQ (“American Literary Globalism,” coedited with Lawrence
Buell in 2006); and American Literature (“Literature and Science,” coedited
with Priscilla Wald in 2002). She now writes movie reviews for the Los Ange-
les Review of Books and works on two books, Weak Theory and Low Epic
and a web-​­and-​­print anthology, part of an online teaching initiative, American
Literature in the World, at http://​amlitintheworld​.commons.yale​.edu/.

Laurie Edson is a professor of comparative literature and French at San Diego

State University. Her research interests include nineteenth-​­and twentieth-​
c­entury French and comparative literature and theory, postcolonial and
African literatures, relations between literature and visual art, and gender,
transnational, and postcolonial theory. Her most recent book on inter-​­arts
relations is Reading Relationally: Postmodern Perspectives on Literature and
Art (2000). In addition to her monograph on the poet and painter Henri
Michaux (Henri Michaux and the Poetics of Movement, 1985), she is the edi-
tor of Conjunctions: Verbal-​­Visual Relations (1996); Contemporary Feminist
Writing in French: A Multicultural Perspective, a special issue of Studies in

269
270 Contributors

Twentieth-​­Century Literature (1993); and Henri Michaux, a special issue of

L’Esprit Créateur (1986). She is also the translator of Mother Death (1988;
Jeanne Hyvrard’s Mère la mort).

Amy J. Elias is a professor of English at the University of Tennessee, Knox-

ville. She has published numerous articles and book chapters concerning
contemporary literature and cultural theory, narrative theory, and history
and time studies, and she is the founding president of ASAP: The Association
for the Study of the Arts of the Present, hosted its launch conference, and
is founding coeditor of its scholarly publication, ASAP/Journal. Her books
include the award-​­winning Sublime Desire: History and Post-​­1960s Fiction
(2002). She is completing a monograph titled Dialogue at the End of the
World: Art and the Commons.

Raoul Eshelman is a lecturer in Slavic languages at the Ludwig-​­Maximilians-​

U
­ niversität in Munich. His main research interest during the last ten years
has been to define the transition from postmodernism to post-​­postmodernism
in terms of cultural and literary history. He is the author of numerous books
and articles on Russian and Czech modernism and postmodernism and has
written extensively on the epoch of post-​­postmodernism, or on what he calls
“performatism.” His most recent monograph is Performatism, or the End of
Postmodernism (2008).

Paul Giles is Challis Professor of English at the University of Sydney, Austra-

lia. His books include Antipodean America: Australasia and the Constitution
of U.S. Literature (2013); The Global Remapping of American Literature
(2011); Transnationalism in Practice: Essays on American Studies, Literature
and Religion (2010); Atlantic Republic: The American Tradition in English
Literature (2006); Virtual Americas: Transnational Fictions and the Transat-
lantic Imaginary (2002); Transatlantic Insurrections: British Culture and the
Formation of American Literature, 1730–­1860 (2001); American Catholic
Arts and Fictions: Culture, Ideology, Aesthetics (1992); and Hart Crane: The
Contexts of “The Bridge” (1986).

Alan Kirby is an independent scholar who holds degrees from Oxford Univer-
sity and the Sorbonne and has completed a Ph.D. on British fiction at Exeter
University. Of late, his research has focused on contemporary cultural recon-
figurations under the impact of the digitization of the text in the aftermath
of postmodernism. His work includes a monograph, Digimodernism (2009),
the polemical essay “The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond” (2006), arti-
cles including “Endgames: Some Versions of the Passing of Postmodernism,”
as well as essays on writers such as John Fowles, Stephen Poliakoff, and
Ian McEwan. He is currently at work on a monograph reconsidering the
Contributors 271

narrative contexts of textual reflexivity from the altered cultural perspective

of the present.

Christian Moraru is a professor of English at the University of North Carolina,

Greensboro. He specializes in contemporary American literature, narrative,
literary-​­cultural theory, and comparative studies with emphasis on the mod-
ern history of ideas, as well as on postmodernism and the evolving relations
among culture, ethics, and the imagination in the globalizing world. He is the
author of numerous volumes and articles in English and other languages. His
latest books include monographs such as Rewriting: Postmodern Narrative
and Cultural Critique in the Age of Cloning (2001); Memorious Discourse:
Reprise and Representation in Postmodernism (2005); and Cosmodernism:
American Narrative, Late Globalization, and the New Cultural Imaginary
(2011), as well as the edited collection Postcommunism, Postmodernism, and
the Global Imagination (2009). His forthcoming monograph is titled Read-
ing for the Planet: Toward a Geomethodology.

John D. Pizer is a professor of German and comparative literature, and chair

of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, at Louisiana State
University. His research interests include eighteenth-​­to twenty-​­first-​­century
German literature and thought, comparative literature, and the theory and
practice of world literature. He has been the recipient of a Fulbright Scholars
Award. His books include Imagining the Age of Goethe in German Literature,
1970–­2010 (2011); The Idea of World Literature: History and Pedagogical
Practice (2006); Ego-​­Alter Ego: Double and/as Other in the Age of German
Poetic Realism (1998); and Toward a Theory of Radical Origin: Essays on
Modern German Thought (1995).

Terry Smith is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art History

and Theory in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the
University of Pittsburgh and Distinguished Visiting Professor, National Insti-
tute for Experimental Arts, College of Fine Arts, University of New South
Wales, Sydney. In 2010 he received the Mather Award for Art Criticism (Col-
lege Art Association, U.S.) and the Australia Council Visual Arts Laureate
Award (Australia). He was a member of the Art & Language group (New
York) and a founder of Union Media Services (Sydney). He is the author of
Making the Modern: Industry, Art, and Design in America (1993); Trans-
formations in Australian Art (2002); The Architecture of Aftermath (2006);
What Is Contemporary Art? (2009); Contemporary Art: World Currents
(2011); and Thinking Contemporary Curating (2012).

Robert T. Tally Jr. is an associate professor of English at Texas State Uni-

versity, where he teaches American and world literature, literary theory, and
272 Contributors

the history of criticism. He is the author of Fredric Jameson: The Project

of Dialectical Criticism (2014); Poe and the Subversion of American Litera-
ture: Satire, Fantasy, Critique (2014); Spatiality (2013); Utopia in the Age of
Globalization: Space, Representation, and the World System (2013); Kurt
Vonnegut and the American Novel: A Postmodern Iconography (2011); and
Melville, Mapping, and Globalization: Literary Cartography in the American
Baroque Writer (2009). The translator of Bertrand Westphal’s Geocriti-
cism: Real and Fictional Spaces (2011), Tally is also the editor of Geocritical
Explorations: Space, Place, and Mapping in Literary and Cultural Studies
(2011) and Kurt Vonnegut: Critical Insights (2013).

Bertrand Westphal is a professor of comparative literature at the University

of Limoges, where he leads the research team “Espaces Humains et Interac-
tions Culturelles” (“Human Spaces and Cultural Interactions”). His work
is interdisciplinary, and he regularly collaborates with designers, architects,
and geographers. A leading geocritic, he is the author of numerous works
on geocriticism, Austrian literature, the Mediterranean, and the theory of
the novel, such as L’oeil de la Méditerranée: Une odyssée littéraire (2005);
Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces (translated into English by Robert T.
Tally in 2011); and The Plausible World: A Geocritical Approach to Spaces,
Places, and Maps (translated into English by Amy D. Wells).