Louis Althusser: Politics & History (1959-68)

"In interrogating the philosophy we have inherited, we can start from one simple observation: each great doctrine itself thinks itself in a specifically philosophical object and in its theoretical effects. For example: the Platonic Idea, Aristotelean Action, the Cartesian Cogito, the Kantian Transcendental Subjects, etc. These objects have no theoretical existence outside the domain of philosophy proper. Within Rousseau's doctrine, the Social Contract is a theoretical object of the same kind: elaborated and constructed by a philosophical reflection which draws from it certain definite theoretical effects." Another Verso collection of short Althusser pieces from different periods, this volume shows Althusser working close to the academic history of philosophy. The first selection, an early book from 1959 on Montesquieu, is hardly recognizable as Althusser's initially, but as the piece progresses small glimpses of Althusser's later problematic appear and the final chapter emerges into a full-blown critique of Montesquieu as a political ideologist. Althusser begins by praising Montesquieu as the "founder of political science" who, rather than extracting an essence from society and re-framing it as an Idea that society never perfectly embodies, acts like a scientist and immerses himself in the historical facts to discover the laws of society. In doing so, Montesquieu aims to correct mankind's false, unscientific, conception of the laws governing society. Though it is without reference to Marx and swamped in an academic argument, Althusser's later ideas are clearly operative when he summarizes Montesquieu: "It is a question of a correction of errant consciousness by well-founded science, of the unconscious consciousness by the scientific consciousness. Hence it is a question of transferring the acquisitions of science into political practice itself, correcting the errors and unconsciousness of that practice." The dialectic and the conception of society as a complex-structured totality also can be "discovered" in the book when Althusser emphasizes that for Montesquieu society is a totality composed of "nature" (the formal law) and "principle" ("the concrete form of existence of a society of men"). This nature/principle totality need not be harmonious and can take a contradictory form, with the two terms acting upon each other, and the nature of "this contradiction in the relation . . . decides the fate of the republic." That is to say, like Marx, Montesquieu has accounted for the "dynamic" of history in his conception of the totality of society. Montesquieu concedes that principle is in the end the "determinant term." At this point, one of Althusser's key conceptual concerns appears fully formed. He writes, "However hazardous a comparison it may be . . . the type of this determination in the last instance by the principle, determination which nevertheless farms out a whole zone of subordinate effectivity to the nature of the government, can be compared with the type of determination which Marx attributes in the last instance to the economy, a determination which nevertheless farms out a zone of subordinate effectivity to politics. In both cases it is a matter of a unity which may be harmonious or contradictory; in both cases this determination does nonetheless cede to the determined element a whole region of effectivity, but subordinate effectivity." Montesquieu writes before the theorization of political economy, so he does not address the economy and the development of productive forces. Yet in his explanation of society's principle, he is led into morals and manners that bring him close to discovering the concrete economic behaviors of men. Althusser, however, claims Montesquieu backs off from this discovery and turns away from science towards political ideology. Montesquieu asserts there are three species of government: the republic (which is limited to the classical past), despotism (which Montesquieu uses more as a myth of the end of politics), and monarchy (which Montesquieu promotes). Althusser argues that Montesquieu's goal is to show how a certain feudal regime can be maintained by creating an equilibrium between the monarchy, nobles, and mercantile bourgeoisie. Montesquieu remains an ideologist here because he thinks the conflict of power only through these three terms, and cannot speak of, nonetheless theorize, how it was the conflict between the feudal regime and the masses (who remained excluded from political and philosophical discourse) that was producing the history around him. The short piece on Rousseau and The Social Contact is less revelatory in the wake of the deconstructive fixation on Rousseau and theories of the performative nature of constitutions. Althusser argues that Rousseau's social contract draws from juridical concepts to appear as the contract between two parties (men and community), but that the latter in reality is constituted through the contract itself, so that the contract cannot be a contract. This theoretical "discrepancy" leads to a series of further theoretical discrepancies, each creating a solution that generates its own problem. These discrepancies eventually lead Rousseau back towards the discrepancy of his theory and the real (the latter being the real social inequality that is inadmissible in his theory), which causes Rousseau to abandon theory in favor of a literary solution in his later works. The final essay, "Marx's Relation to Hegel," is a short lecture Althusser presented to Jean Hyppolite's seminar in early 1968. It is mostly a concise summary of For Marx and Reading Capital (there are some nice diagrams included and a brief reference to Badiou), a simple introduction to those books. When Althusser explains how Marx transforms Hegel's dialectic and theorizes History as a process without a subject, Althusser does briefly turn for support to Derrida on the "erasure" of the origin.

Mauro Guillen: The Taylorized Beauty of the Mechanical (2006)

"The reconstruction of the architectural field along modernist lines was primarily undertaken by artists and architects trained in, or at least exposed to, engineering. Modernism first flourished after scientific management was reinterpreted in countries in which, early on, the emerging architecture profession developed linkages to engineering that were strong enough to allow for the creation of a differentiated body of technical and aesthetic knowledge about building but stopped short of subsuming architecture as an engineering specialty.” It seems undeniable and often has been noted that architectural modernism was influenced by scientific management and the machine age. Guillen's book conclusively demonstrates the relation and explores how scientific management might have been the key factor in the rise of architectural modernism. Guillen claims modernist architecture had different strains and developed differently in each national context, so he does not put forth his own substantive argument about the style of architectural modernism. In fact, a detailed analysis, or even description, of the features of modernist architecture is absent from the book except for references to its most general principles, such as "unity, order, purity." Even scientific management is treated only generally as concerned with standardization, order, and planning. Though the book's title seems to promise a careful account of a Taylorist architectural aesthetic or an extended comparison of the principles of scientific management and different modernist architectural projects, Guillen mostly limits himself to proving the strong relation between scientific management and architectural modernism. This is because Guillen, influenced by Bourdieu on the field of art and Paul Dimaggio on institutionalism, takes a sociological perspective on architectural modernism that remains attentive to but mostly "external" to the aesthetics of the architecture it examines. One of Guillen's primary goals is to examine the many theories that explain the rise of modernism through a general historical-cultural argument. Guillen divides these theories of modernism into those that see modernism: as the extension of industrialization and new industrial materials and practices; the response to sociopolitical upheaval; the product of class conflict and the binding or nonbinding of architecture to popular taste; the effect of state and/or industrial patronage. Rather than adhering to any one general theory from the start, Guillen investigates the institutional factors that made modernism appealing and able to succeed in a variety of different national contexts. The heart of the book traces how/when modernism appeared (and sometimes disappeared) in England, France, Germany, Italy, Soviet Union, Spain, Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina. These comparative case studies prove that none of the above theories of modernism can fully account for the spread of modernism in an international context (most are not sufficient causes by themselves and many are not even necessary causes). After surveying the different national fields, Guillen argues that the emergence of architectural modernism, while affected by the factors mentioned in the previous theories, was most strongly influenced by the introduction and acceptance of scientific management in each national context and by the influence of (Taylorized) engineering on the professionalization of architecture. That is, the presence of scientific management and a close relation between engineering and architecture strongly supported the creation of architectural modernism in a nation. For example, Britain led the world in industrialization, but its engineering profession was hostile to scientific management until the 1930s, so British architecture was actually slow in adopting modernism. Whereas Germany was quick to adopt scientific management and architectural training usually took place in technical schools alongside engineering, so German architecture, aided by strong state and industrial patronage, led the way in modernism. This is a fairly straightforward sociological explanation of architecture: modernist architecture was affected by its proximity to engineering institutions/professions that had incorporated scientific management. In the final chapter, Guillen points towards a far different kind of project, one to which I wish he would have devoted more of this book. Guillen argues that scientific management has had a great impact on society through modernist architecture (not just through its immediate object, work), and that modernist architecture reveals that scientific management is far "richer" than its narrow proponents or dismissive critics make it out to be. But given his general approach to both modernism and scientific management, that supposedly rich aesthetic is indexed but not analyzed in this book. He explains “organizational theories may have aesthetic as well as technical and ideological underpinnings and implications," and asks whether other organization theories could be studied as he has studied scientific management. In my own terms, this is to propose further study of how culture, from architecture to literature, participates in an "organizational aesthetic."

Katie Hafner & Matthew Lyon: Where Wizards Stay Up Late (1996)

"The computers themselves were extremely egocentric devices. The typical mainframe of the period behaved as it it were the only computer in the universe. . . . In those days a computer interacted with the devices that were attached to it, like a monarch communicating with his subjects. Everything connected to the main computer performed a specific task, and each peripheral device was presumed to be ready at all times for a fetch-my-slippers type of command. (In computer parlance, this relationship is known as master-slave communication.) Computers were strictly designed for this kind of interaction; they send instructions to subordinate card readers, terminals, and tape units, and they initiate all dialogues. But if another device in effect tapped the computer on the shoulder with a signal that said, 'Hi, I'm a computer, too,' the receiving machine would be stumped." Constrained by the genre of journalism and its publication just barely after the creation of the World Wide Web, this history of the Internet has largely been rendered obsolete by Janet Abbate's more scholarly Inventing the Internet (discussed in a blog last week). By neglecting both the complexities of the technologies and the social and economic factors involved in innovation, popular histories of technologies all tend to tell the same story. While this book aims to capture the unique personalities of the figures behind the Internet, it can't help but rely on a set of types that, as far as I can tell from other popular histories of technology, are fairly universal in the R&D world of elite institutions such as MIT. So we learn about the practical engineer, whose hands-on knowledge saves the project at the last moment; the cocky programmer who is able to produce impossibly lean code; and the theoretician who, after a mere minute of conversation, is able to come up with solutions to problems that entire teams have struggled with for months. The volume fails to demonstrate that individual idiosyncrasy greatly affected the development of the Internet, with the one possible exception of J.C.R. Licklider, who, as brief head of ARPA, initiated the project. The networking of different computer centers clearly conforms to Licklider's belief in (and promotion of) "man-computer symbiosis." Not mentioned in this book, however, is that Licklider believed such a symbiosis would only be a temporary state-of-affairs, and would soon be superseded by a weakening of human-computer interactions when artificial intelligences had reached a sufficient level. A glimpse of that arrangement is given when the authors describe an early experiment/joke with the ARPANET, in which a computer running the program Doctor, which was based on Joseph Weizenbaum's ELIZA program (which simulated Rogerian therapy to great effect), was placed in dialogue with another computer running the program PARRY, which "mimicked the belief system of a paranoid psychotic." Had Licklider viewed the conversation that followed, he might have been less optimistic about the future of computing, as the psychotic program gets caught in an aggravating loop with the computer therapist that keeps bouncing back questions on the subject the psychotic wants to avoid.

Lawrence Lessig: Code 2.0 (2006)

"[T]he invisible hand of cyberspace is building an architecture that is quite the opposite of its architecture at its birth. This invisible hand, pushed by government and by commerce, is constructing an architecture that will perfect control and make highly efficient regulation possible. The struggle in that world will not be government's. It will be to assure that essential liberties are preserved in this environment of perfect control." In this legal study of the Internet, Lessig contests the "cyberlibertarian" dogma that asserts the Internet is (and should be) essentially uncontrolled and uncontrollable. Lessig argues that the Internet has no "nature": it is what we make it, and we are quickly making it into something that is highly controlled (last week's NYTimes featured an article suggesting we need to build a new, more "secure," Internet). If we do not use our democratic institutions to influence how the "architecture" of the Internet is changed (that is, if we do not create appropriate legal "codes"), we will find the architecture that is developed to be excessively constraining (the technological "code" will be far worse than any governmental one). This argument conflicts with the libertarian ideology of many proponents of the Internet and, as Lessig admits, it will even appear dubious to most liberals, who have rightfully become skeptical of the capability of government institutions to pull off such an intervention. Lessig explains that "code is law," and a nearly omnipotent one. In the real world, codes (such as legal ones) are never perfect, and Lessig points out the U.S. constitution takes this into consideration. But codes in cyberspace can completely determine what a user can possibly do, and these codes often are implemented without explanation or notification. If a computer code prevents a certain behavior, unless one is a hacker, that behavior simply is no longer possible. Computer code can be introduced to achieve the goal of the legal code, but computer code's increasing capability to achieve perfect control creates or reveals ambiguities in that law. For example, copyright laws have always been admittedly imperfect, allowing a certain amount of illegal copying to occur as well as space for various "fair use" and private appropriations of copyrighted material. The law's ability to regulate behavior was limited, and that limitation guaranteed certain forms of liberty. But new intellectual property technologies promise to perfectly control copying, and therefore would eliminate this liberty. Lessig explains: "At one time we enjoyed a certain kind of liberty. But that liberty was not directly chosen; it was a liberty resulting from the high costs of control. . . . When costs of control fall, however, liberty is threatened. That threat requires a choice - do we allow the erosion of an earlier liberty, or do we erect other limits to re-create that original liberty?" Lessig argues that if we are passive and leave the evolution of the Internet to market forces or occasional government fixes, that liberty will simply disappear. Lessig teaches constitutional law at Stanford, so the argument throughout is centered on the ambiguities of interpreting the constitution. As the country changes over time, "latent ambiguities" in the constitution are revealed, situations appear that don't seem to fit the scope or framing of the original document. The constitution at such points can be "translated" to apply to the new context, or a choice can be made to change the law. As the example of copyright shows, merely trying to extend the law in a literal manner into the digital domain might eliminate some of the law's most important elements (such as contingent liberty). Lessig instead proposes that the law be changed in order to maintain those valuable elements, but remains openly pessimistic about such a project given the current political climate/culture. In effect, Lessig shows that the "force of law" is drastically different between the real world and the virtual world of the Internet. In the former, the law regulates behavior without having complete control. The law's inability to perfectly control behavior, however, is not a flaw, but one of its essential characteristics, though this is not always explictly articulated in the law itself. In the digital world the law, built into computer code, operates in a completely different manner, automatically achieving perfect control (as least hypothetically at the moment). Also, computer code that is not determined by the law (but by commercial interests, for example) more powerfully regulates behavior online than a law in the real world might (unless that law commands the creation of that computer code).

Tom Wolfe: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968)

"New York intellectuals have always looked for . . . another country, a fatherland of the mind, where it is all better and more philosophic and purer, gadget-free, and simpler and pedigreed: France or England, usually - oh, the art of living, in France, boys. The Learyites have done the same thing, only with them it's - India - the East - with all the ancient flap-doodle of Gautama Buddha or the Rig-Veda blowing in like mildew, and Leary calls for blue grass growing in the streets of New York, and. . . . Above all, keep quiet, for God's sake, hold it down, whisper, moan, mumble, meditate, and for chrissake, no gadgets - no tapes, video tapes, TV, movies, Hagstrom electric basses, variable lags, American flags, no neon, Buick Electras, mad moonstone-faced Servicenters, and no manic buses." In his first book-length piece of journalism, Tom Wolfe narrates the adventures of the novelist Ken Kesey from between 1959 to 1966. Kesey discovered LSD while living the bohemian life near Stanford and acted, at least according to Wolfe, as the first guru of the burgeoning psychedelic drug "religion." Living in San Francisco and in the countryside in the south Bay, Kesey quickly forges "The Merry Pranksters" from his close friends and druggie acquaintances. The Pranksters paint an old school bus in neon colors and drive to New York and back while doing numerous kinds of drugs and toying with the locals they meet on the way and filming everything they do. After returning to the Bay area, the Pranksters become the center of the early LSD scene, attracting acid "heads" from all over the country and forming an odd friendship with the Hell's Angels. LSD was legal at the time, so cops coming upon acid-heads often could do nothing. But they manage to arrest Kesey for possession of marijuana, so he flees to Mexico, where many of the Pranksters later catch up with him. He returns to San Francisco and shocks the psychedelic scene by claiming they must move beyond LSD, does half a year in prison on drug charges, and moves back to Oregon, where domestic tranquility apparently reigns. I have little interest in how Kesey created a bridge between the Beats and the hippies (best illustrated by the fact that Neil Cassady drives the Prankster bus) or in the evolution of drug subcultures. But as David Joselit has argued, Kesey should be recognized as an important innovator of critical media practices. Kesey began as a novelist, completing One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion early in the period Wolfe discusses (a press event for the publication of the latter book motivates The Pranksters' cross-country bus tour). But he stops writing novels and turns to combining technology and drugs (which is basically just a different form of technology) into media-saturated events. He buys a home in La Honda using the payment for one of his novels, and then wires it and the nearby forest with microphones and speakers so that everything can be recorded and played back anywhere else, and Kesey can intrude upon any space using his broadcast system. The Pranksters' neon bus also is wired with microphones and speakers, which they often use to create noise and terrorize the unsuspecting locals. Everything on the bus trip is filmed, and Kesey describes their activities as a "movie" that they position against the mainstream one. When the police stop them, which is fairly often, they pull out their film equipment and begin barraging the police with questions, forcing their "movie" on the cops and avoiding legal trouble, at least for a while. Tom Wolfe, adhering to the style of the New Journalism, avoids objective description, choosing instead "to re-create the mental atmosphere or subjective reality of it." Yet much of the book would be more accurately described not as a "subjective reality" but as a technical recording. Wolfe met Kesey only at the end of his LSD career, so Wolfe had to rely heavily on The Pranksters' film, tapes, and written documents. The endless pages of prose that attempt to simulate the consciousness or speech of the acid-heads could be read as (perhaps imaginary) transcriptions of technological recordings, transcriptions that are filled with the noise and nonsense captured by the film or tape Real. The subject of drugs provides an excuse or a cover for the written word's encounter with the noise generated by the expanded world of mediation made available to consumers in the 1960s.

Inaki Abalos & Juan Herreros: Tower & Office (2003)

“From a technical perspective, only a superficial analysis could view the contemporary building experience as consonant with the ideals formulated in the modern period. To do so would be to ignore the presence of new technical problems and to reduce them to a typological abstraction. For today neither the skyscraper’s constitution as a stack of repetitive floors, nor the form and arrangement of its mechanical equipment, nor the building depth retains a precise connection to the architectural prototypes of the former period, despite their parallel technical logic. Function – which, in its former association with technology, determined modernism’s ‘objective’ methodology – has become irrelevant to the structural and typological definition of the mechanized building, replaced by a preoccupation with mechanical and environmental equipment and demands for an isotropic distribution of energy. The mechanically serviced space has caused the architectural program to lose its specificity and, with this, has undercut the viability of typological classification.” This history of the skyscraper could be seen as a technical companion to Reinhold Martin's The Organizational Complex, but a companion that is much more sensitive to the complexities of historical and technological contingency than Martin's book and its adherence to a Deleuzian "control society" framework. Abalos and Herreros argue that technological and organizational developments over the last century have rendered the modernist conception of the skyscraper obsolete (but not the skyscraper itself). The “destruction of modern technical, typological, and urban paradigms is complete. Neither the translation of the technical into the figural, nor the skyscraper into a single-function ‘type object,’ nor the business center into the model envisaged by Le Corbusier . . . remains pertinent within the contemporary context.” They begin by examining the work of Le Corbusier, who serves as an example of architectural modernism's obsession with the development of building "types" based on a functional logic that transforms necessities into laws and requires a "purification" of form. In subsequent chapters, Abalos and Herreros present a rigorous and detailed survey of technical innovations in the construction of skyscrapers (be warned, there are more diagrams of wall-window joints than any non-practicing architect will want to see). The goal of this technical history is to show how the conception and construction of skyscrapers over the century has come to be guided less by modernist typological ideals than by new kinds of technical concerns. Throughout the book, they show how each technical solution to a problem of the modernist skyscraper leads to new problems and technical developments that become increasingly distant from modernism. They start with the uniform grid of the modernist "reticular structure," and show how the push for even taller skyscrapers led to research into wind-stress and the development of non-reticular, largely hollow, structures. An important side effect of this technical research was a transformation of the interior space of the building: "The reticulated configuration was thus surpassed by a new type of space with no structural presence, one that was completely diaphanous. The column-free space – a pervasive desideratum in all commercial American office space today – emerged precisely where construction conditions were extreme, pushing the structural problematic to its limit.” Abalos and Herreros then discuss the Miesian glass "curtain wall," perhaps the most famous element of office architecture. They show how new developments in heating and cooling technologies and materials research transformed the glass wall from a passive into an active, even interactive, element of architecture. Abbas and Herreros even give a technical account of the development of building floors. New building structures freed floors from many of their structural functions (they no longer necessarily held the building together) and innovations in glass walls, electric lights, and environmental control allowed deeper interiors and larger areas of floor space. The creation of deep "access floors" containing electrical wiring and subsystems that were added to the office building throughout the century allowed greater flexibility in the arrangement of large areas of office space. In a chapter on the history of office layouts, the authors show how changes in building structure, glass walls, and floors interacted with changes in the organization of white-collar work over the century. Whereas early office buildings were functionally arranged so that workers were close to natural light from the outside and spatially arranged by a rigid division of labor, postwar office buildings, no longer needing exterior light and having more open space, allowed for "open-plan offices" in which the minimum unit of the workstation served as the basis for modular rearrangements of the office. By the 1970s, the post-Fordist love-affair with flexibility led to the creation of "office landscapes" that removed even the workstation as the minimum unit of order, allowing often chaotic arrangements of office space based upon the flow of paperwork. Yet the office landscape was soon threatened by the computerization of the office in the 1980s, which allowed the networking of workers independently of their spatial arrangement. In a sense, the computerization of the office is the final blow to the modernist approach to the office building, as the building interior loses any semblance of functional necessity. Abalos and Herreros conclude by arguing that attention to these technical developments is more important for understanding the history of the skyscraper and for developing new architectural forms than the modernist typology of buildings and the postmodernist equation of architecture with "linguistic models and semiotic analogies."

Louis Althusser: On Ideology (1964-1973)

"For Marxist philosophy there can be no Subject as an Absolute Centre, as a Radical Origin, as a Unique Cause. . . . In reality Marxist philosophy thinks in and according to quite different categories: determination in the last instance - which is quite different from the Origin, Essence or Cause. . . -determination by Relations, contradiction, process, 'nodal points' (Lenin), etc.: in short, in quite a different configuration and according to quite different categories from classical idealist philosophy." This collection of essays today reads like a lesser work, an addendum to For Marx. The essay "Reply to John Lewis" largely repeats and clarifies that earlier book without its detailed readings of Hegel, Marx, Lenin, and Mao. Althusser demonstrates how many Marxists who criticize the "Stalinist deviation" unfortunately turn to humanism and economism. Althusser attacks Lewis (and a wide group of postwar Marxists) for (re)turning to a bourgeois ideology centered around the concept of man as a free Subject who makes History. For Althusser, this regression rejects Marx's "epistemological break" and repeats the errors of young Marx as well as thwarts the efforts of a Marxist "science." Lewis seems like an unremarkable target for Althusser's intellect, but a few references suggest that Sartre is the real target in the essay, especially when Althusser mockingly notes that "two thousand pages" into the Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre only manages to produce the thesis "it is man who makes history." Yet Althusser's justified suspicion of the primacy of the subject in Sartre's work perhaps blinds him from seeing in the Critique one of the period's most developed investigations of society as a complex structured totality, a project Althusser repeatedly promotes in his books yet one he never gets around to writing. In contrast to idealist philosophy, Althusser argues that "History is a process, and a process without a subject." Yet History does have "a motor," "the class struggle." After the nth Zizek book, Althusser's essay "Freud and Lacan" doesn't seem to serve much purpose beyond referring to the mirror stage in order to support the basic claim (to be developed elsewhere) that a "structure of misrecognition . . . is of particular concern for all investigations into ideology." So the main piece in this volume is "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," one of his principal essays on ideology. We get the famous theses: "Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence" (Lacan anyone?) and "Ideology has a material existence," or, "an ideology always exists in an apparatus, and its practice, or practices." Ideology involves a Subject who "interpellates" individuals as concrete subjects, and therefore supports the "reproduction of the conditions of production." The passage in which Althusser describes the individual interpellated by the policeman's "Hey, you there!" is brilliant and his original definition of ideology nearly redeems the over-used term. I remain dissatisfied with this volume less because of any substantial disagreement with Althusser on ideology than because of a suspicion that the essays on Ideology have tended to portray a limited image of Althusser and too-easily serve to help teachers imagine (i.e. delude themselves) they are subverting the dominant ideology in the classroom (at one moment, Althusser calls the resistant teacher "a kind of hero"). While ideology is a central part of Althusser's "problematic" throughout his career, I feel that today closer attention to Althusser's engagement with Lenin and Mao and more research (with Badiou as a guide) into overdetermination and contradiction might allow Althusser, after a certain eclipse of his reputation, to again take part in what he would call the production of scientific knowledge.

Janet Abbate: Inventing the Internet (1999)

"Before the advent of computer networks, a person who wanted to transfer information between computers usually had to carry some physical storage medium, such as a reel of magnetic tape or a stack of punch cards, from one machine to the other. Modems had been introduced in the late 1950s, but setting up a telephone connection between two machines could be an expensive and error-prone undertaking, and incompatibilities between computers compounded the difficulty of establishing such communications. A scientist who needed to use a distant computer might find it easier to get on a plane and fly to the machine's location to use it in person." This scholarly history of the Internet (as opposed to the many journalistic ones) de-emphasizes the individual personalities that influenced its invention and focuses on the historical-cultural factors that affected its shape and success. Abbate begins with Paul Baran's invention in the early 1960s of packet-switching, the breaking up of digital messages into fixed sized units called message blocks with addressing and control information attached. Instead of sending entire messages, which could vary greatly in length, messages would be broken up, transmitted in pieces, and then reassembled on the destination end. Although packet switching was more complex and difficult to implement than sending complete messages, it appealed to Baran, who was working on a distributed military network for the RAND corporation, because it satisfied the military demand for "survivability": the potential of a communications networks to successfully operate after a nuclear strike. Fragmenting messages would make eavesdropping/spying more difficult, and the multiple packets of the message could be sent down different paths depending upon path efficiency or availability. Packet switching was almost simultaneously invented by Donald Davies in England, but since Davies developed it outside of a Cold War mindset, his conception of packet switching was completely different. England in the mid-1960s was pushing technological innovation as a solution to its weak economy, so Davies imagined packet switching as enouraging computer time-sharing and interactive computing because it made computers easier to link together and because network access would be more equal (you wouldn't have to wait for someone else's long message to be completed since everyone's messages were broken up into equally sized message blocks). The Internet itself arguably begins with the creation of the ARPANET. The Department of Defense-managed Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) was created in 1958 in response to Sputnik in order to promote advanced military research and development projects. ARPA created a special dvision, the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) to promote computer science, and IPTO provided large grants to a select group of universities, resulting in an elite but dispersed set of computing research centers. The ARPANET began to be developed in 1966 as a means to connect these research centers and allow the sharing of computing resources and research ideas. Each of the research centers had differing projects, ideas, and computing hardware, so the ARPANET had to be capable of linking "heterogeneous systems." A "general-purpose set of rules for handling a network connection, which they called the 'message protocol,'" was developed to overcome the computer incompatibilities. The ARPANET was based upon the idea of packet switching, and divided network tasks into a series of layers. The ARPANET was activated in 1969 with modifications and improvements added over the following years, most notably the addition of email around 1972. Due to the military determinism that is common these days, it is often claimed that the internet was invented as a military response to the threat of nuclear war. This is only partially true: packet switching definitely was invented with "survival" in mind, but the ARPANET arguably was invented to save funds and share ideas, and ARPA's managers have claimed that they positioned the ARPANET as a military instrument only after the fact and in order to acquire funds. ARPANET had strict rules about its use - no commercial or personal activities were allowed - but ARPA tended not to enforce these rules, partially because increased use of any kind allowed further research on the network and justified its funding. The popularity of email was completely unforeseen, and eventually resulted in people seeing "the ARPANET not as a computing system but rather as a communications system." The Internet, as a network of networks, would be created by the linking of the ARPANET with the other networks being developed around it. The initial difficulty was that each network tended to have its own set of protocols, which limited the permeability of the boundaries between networks. Programs could be invented to "translate" the protocols of one network into those of another, but this would require a huge investment of time and money and would slow the transmission of data. Instead, ARPA investigated in the last half of the 1970s the creation of a single protocol that all networks would adopt. In 1978, the TCP/IP internetwork protocol was proposed. TCP/IP has remained the primary protocol for the Internet, and recently Alexander Galloway has highlighted the political implications of TCP/IP's ability to allow the continuation of control in a decentralized network. TCP/IP became universal by decree: all ARPANET hosts were required to switch over to it by 1983 or be completely cut off from the ARPANET. Up to 1983, the ARPANET served military and academic users, with the latter often being subjected to the security concerns of the former. But in 1983, it was split into two networks: the ARPANET (for academic and research purposes) and the MILNET (for military functions). This was a key step in freeing the internet for its personal and commercial development in the 1980s, but the disappearance of the MILNET from Abbate's book and the popular consciousness is rather disturbing, as the story of the capitalization of the internet blots out the military's continued obsession with networks and security. As more and more networks were added to the Internet, the ARPANET, as a kind of "backbone" for the Internet, was beginning to show its age and technical limitations, so around 1989 its functions were transferred over to the NSFNET (a National Science Foundation network) and the original ARPANET was dismantled in 1990 (for Internet users, there was no visible change). As a government agency, the National Science Foundation (NSF) did not allow its network to be used for commercial purposes, so a number of commercial networks were developed in the early 1990s that placed no restrictions on the type of traffic. With these commercial networks in place, the NSF was able to completely privatize the Internet in 1994, passing all of its NSFNET functions on to commercial Internet Service Providers (ISPs). The combination of privatization and the invention of the hypertext and graphic browsers of the World Wide Web allowed the swift evolution of the Internet into its current state. Fortunately, Abbate's book provides enough historical and political context to prevent the current success of the Internet from standing as proof of neoliberal economic policies. Abbate discusses the international disagreements over the TCP/IP protocol and the dubious politics of assigning web domains and altering Internet standards, and her mention of France's Minitel system leaves open the argument that what the Internet needed was not to be privatized but to be freed from a peculiarly American hypocrisy about keeping government agencies free of direct involvement in cultural and commercial concerns (despite the fact that the government has always intervened in those concerns on others levels).

Jean-Paul Sartre: Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions (1939)

An emotion "is a transformation of the world. When the paths before us become too difficult, or when we cannot see our way, we can no longer put up with such an exacting and difficult world. All ways are barred and nevertheless we must act. So then we try to change the world; that is, to live it as though the relation between things and their potentialities were not governed by deterministic processes but by magic." Sartre begins his experiment in phenomenological psychology with a critique of William James and the "peripheric theory of the emotions," which treats emotion as the secondary reaction to (or projection of) physiological disturbances. Sartre argues that such a theory cannot account for the emotion's "organized and describable structure" (that is, there is a gap between the physiological disorder and the meaningfulness of the emotion in consciousness). He then attacks Janet's behavioral theory, which treats emotion as a behavior that has been defeated and had its psychic energy transferred to another path of "lesser psychic tension." Sartre points out that although this theory is attractive, it remains mechanistic, with energy being shifted from one path to another without accounting for how emotion, as a psychic activity, is directed towards an end. Sartre then turns to the work of Dembo, which argues that a defeated behavior leads the individual to act upon himself and emotionally transform himself into being able to accept an inferior situation. Sartre is sympathetic to this view, but claims that its account of a "transformation of the form" of the problem requires, but fails to account for, the positing of consciousness. Psychoanalysis would seem well suited to explain how a thwarted or prohibited desire is emotionally transformed into something quite different and more achievable or acceptable. Yet Sartre assaults psychoanalysis and the idea of the unconscious. For Sartre, psychoanalysis explains the phenomenon of consciousness through something that is outside consciousness, that is, the unconscious. This is completely unacceptable for Sartre, who adheres here to the idea of the self-sufficiency of the Cartesian cogito, consciousness' irreducibility. Moving to his own theory, Sartre claims that "emotion is a complete modification of the 'being-in-world' according to the very particular laws of magic." When a particular behavior/path becomes too difficult, consciousness "transforms itself in order to transform the object" it is oriented towards. Consciousness directs the body to change its relationship with the world and therefore change the qualities of the object. By emotionally changing itself, consciousness "magically" is able to transform the object and the world: consciousness doesn't attempt to act on the world, it magically attributes new qualities to the world. If emotions aren't exactly "effectual," they are "functional" and serve a purpose. They therefore are of "infinite variety" because of the infinite experiences that might produce a need for them. Needless to say, Sartre's experiment is vulnerable to the deconstructive confrontation with Cartesianism (and Husserlian phenomenology of the kind Sartre practices here) and neuroscientific research that posits consciousness as a secondary epiphenomenon of neural processes. Sartre's argument also could be revised by Luhmann's systems theory (which also draws on Husserl), in which auto-affectivity is simply how an organism always acts once it has closed itself off from its environment. In the final pages of the book, Sartre produces a Heideggerian argument (Sartre earlier describes it as a pragmatic intuition), that in everyday life the world appears as composed of "utilizable things," tools that are the only means to modify the world. We turn to emotions when the objects in the world are not ready-at-hand or we impatiently desire to transform the world without the infinite mediation of instruments. It is tempting to argue emotions might then be another name for poiesis, and magic another name for a non-instrumentalized world, but since Sartre provides a "functional" theory of the emotions, the emotional turn away from instrumental reason is already enframed within instrumentality.

Roberto Bolano: The Savage Detectives (1998 [2007])

"There are books for when you're bored. Plenty of them. There are books for when you're calm. The best kind, in my opinion. There are also books for when you're sad. And there are books for when you're happy. There are books for when you're thirsty for knowledge. And there are books for when you're desperate. The latter are the kind of books Ulises Lima and Belano wanted to write. A serious mistake, as we'll soon see. . . . I don't mean that once someone has become a cool-headed reader he no longer reads books written for desperate readers. Of course he reads them! Especially if they're good or decent or recommended by a friend. But ultimately, they bore him! Ultimately, that literature of resentment, full of sharp instruments and lynched messiahs, doesn't pierce his heart the way a calm page, a carefully thought-out page, a technically perfect page does. I told them so. I warned them. I showed them the technically perfect page. I alerted them to the dangers. Don't exhaust the vein! Humility!" Bolano's breakthrough novel describes the tragicomic adventures of the literary avant-garde in Mexico City in the 1970s. Much of the book draws from Bolano's experience as the founder of the "Infrarealist" movement in Mexico City, with Bolano and his friend Mario Santiago being represented by, respectively, Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, leaders of the "visceral realists" in the novel. Visceral realism, which is never really explained, appears to be a bastard Latin American offspring of surrealism that attempts to dissolve any border between literature and life. Bolano himself doesn't seem to take the movement too seriously, avoiding all discussion of what its members' poetry is like in favor of humorous descriptions of their obsessive hatred of the literary establishment, Octavio Paz in particular. Belano and Lima sell drugs to make a living and are regularly described as looking like bums, and at one point they begin a "purge" of the movement simply as a joke. Everyone in the book seems to be a poet or knows one. In most metafictional (and MFA) literature, this would result in a narrow, narcissistic, even solipsistic world of little interest. Yet in Bolano's novel, the ubiquity of poets is more generous, a way of expressing how all of his characters attempt to live their lives with a certain amount of intensity, to do more than simply exist (I'm tempted but absolutely refuse to describe this as "giving meaning to their lives"), which is replicated by the famous breathlessness of Bolano's style. Fortunately, this novel about literature in many ways feels post-literary. The blurring of literature and life does less to "elevate" life than to drag literature down into the entropic and unrefined elements of life without completely eliminating its distinction (these poets would be noble if they weren't such absolute fools). The first section, "Mexicans Lost in Mexico," is narrated through the diary kept during 1975 by the teenage visceral realist Juan Garcia Madero, a young poet on the edge of the literary scene who is quickly acquiring sexual experience. For the first 120 or so pages of the novel, the characters are so continously fucking that the reader may get the sense that Bolano is also just fucking around (typical passage: "Today Rosario and I had sex from midnight until four-thirty in the morning. . . She came ten times, I came twice."). But Madero's casual philandering suddenly comes to a halt when a vengeful pimp sends Madero, Lima, Belano, and a prostitute fleeing Mexico City in an old Impala. In retrospect, the section feels carefully crafted in its indirection and subtle introduction of characters and situations that crystallize into a narrative trajectory in its last few pages. The second, largest section, "The Savage Detectives," is narrated through nearly 50 different characters who appear to be interviewed about their encounters with Belano and Lima between the mid-1970s and mid-1990s. Bolano traces Belano and Lima's trips to Spain, France, Israel, Vienna, and Africa as well as their many (failed) love affairs. But the multiple narrators, all of whom are selfishly more concerned with themselves than Belano or Lima, and Bolano's virtuosic narrative inventiveness, which simply has to be labeled genius, prevents this section from taking the form of a linear travel narrative. Although the testimony of the narrators positions the reader as a detective pursuing Belano and Lima, the accumulation of the narrators' individual experiences pushes Belano and Lima to the margins of the book (or rather the bookends), making them figures that seem to continuously retreat into the horizon. The amassment of heartbreaks, madnesses, diseases, and deaths (most of the visceral realists end up dead by the novel's conclusion) plays counterpoint to the often picturesque events and characters, revealing that decay and disappearance (but not quite pessimism) rule Bolano's world. Because the narrative follows in the wake of Belano and Lima's movements, life is portrayed not as an adventure but as the dwindling trace of a vitality that was never present in the first place (it might not be a stretch to position the novel as a narrative of finitude - both of individuals and literature). The short final section, "The Sonora Desert," returns to 1975 and picks up where the first section ended. Belano, Lima, Madero, and the prostitute Lupe search in the Mexican countryside for the forgotten poet Cesarea Tinajero, whose work has been completely lost by history (her only existing poem is actually a graph). Here Belano and Lima become savage detectives searching for this ancestor of their own literary movement, but their success is cut short by the pimp following them (at this point, Bolano's toying with the detective genre becomes less ironic). As seems to be the case with many readers, I spent most of my time feeling respectful but impatient while reading, just wishing I was finished with the novel. The passage I quote above seemed to be an admission by Bolano that many readers like myself would find this "desperate" literature boring. But that passage and its categorization of literature is disingenuous. Bolano's novel is technically perfect and contains all of those kinds of books (something that can't be said of so many other "great" novels, which would clearly fall into one of Bolano's categories). As one reads the novel, dissatisfaction slowly dissipates because of Bolano's ability to convince the reader that this novel is actually the novel (s)he wants, something which paradoxically can only be achieved near the end of the book.

Oliver Feltham: Alain Badiou, Live Theory (2008)

Badiou, from the brief interview that concludes the book: "Junior high school should be abolished: between eleven and fifteen years old all young people without exception should be integrated into productive work, with perhaps half the time spent studying, or a quarter. They will come back to full-time study once they are sixteen years old, having all acquired a tenacious 'worker' configuration. These later studies will not decide their future but provide an initiation to truth procedures. After which, work should be organized in such a manner that is be multi-form, that each and everyone be a 'polyvalent' worker. In actual fact, this is the communist programme." Feltham's short book, while nominally an introduction to Badiou, is a dense periodizing of Badiou's ideas. It can't really compete with Peter Hallward's stellar Subject to Truth, but it succeeds in producing bold comparisons between terms and mathematical arguments from quite different parts of Badiou’s oeuvre (though this necessarily results in a certain amount of conceptual fuzziness/imprecision, evident in Badiou’s resistance in the four page interview at the book’s end to some of Feltham’s proposals). Feltham divides Badiou’s work into three periods: "the early period of materialist epistemology, the Maoist period of the historical dialectic, the current period of philosophy and its conditions." The first chapter discusses "the Althusserian years" and proves that a close reading of Althusser's For Marx and Reading Capital is essential for understanding the problematic and concepts Badiou grapples with at the beginning of his career, what Feltham terms Badiou's "reconstruction of Althusser." The starting point is Althusser’s replacement of a Hegelian general dialectic (such as the teleology of economism) with an account of society as a complex structured totality with multiple overdetermined contradictions (see my blog on For Marx below). Feltham argues that, for Badiou, Althusser fails to develop a “concept of the totality of social practices”: he fails to think the space in which the multiplicity of social contradictions are placed. It is here that Badiou makes his first use of mathematics in order to think the consistency and hierarchy of Althusser’s complex structure. “Badiou uses the mathematical concept of function to order a set of ‘instances’ where each is an articulation of two practices: a practice placing another practice.” This “relational” construction allows change while reducing change to being merely “the reshuffling of the same practices into a different order” (as opposed to the evental emergence of novelty in his later work). At this point, Badiou hasn’t yet entered into a critique of totality that would allow him to think a “full-scale transformation” of the situation. But by the 1968 essay, “Subversion Infinitesimale,” Badiou, drawing from Lacan on the real, has clearly developed “a concept of a transformative naming of the impossible” reliant on the belief that “the initial point of change has to be in a position of internal exclusion, a practice present in the structure but not represented.” Feltham concludes that this notion of “internal exclusion” becomes a tendency that runs through all of Badiou’s subsequent work. The second chapter discusses Badiou's Maoist period, noting that the mathematical investigations of the previous period now are rejected as ideological or take the form of analogies (but eventually are "rehabilitated" with Being & Event). In the 1970s, Badiou drops the Althusserian "science of history" in favor of "the systematization of the militant experience of class struggle" (that is, Badiou’s Marxism subjects itself to the Maoist axiom of “the primacy of practice”). But rather than simply promoting the Leninist conception of a central party, Badiou subjects the question of political organization to logic (showing the continued relevance of mathematics to his thought), claiming "the proletariat is a logical force" or "the proletarian organization is the body of a new logic." After briefly summarizing some of Badiou's uncredited Maoist publications, Feltham turns to an extended analysis of Theory of the Subject (whose English translation should arrive in a few months). In that book, the structural dialectic is replaced by a "historical dialectic, capable of thinking qualitative change by means of a concept of the subject as the torsion of structure." In this "materialist theory of the subject," "The subject is conceived as a moment of change that closes one dialectical sequence of political history and opens another. . . . Badiou’s argument promises no less than a theory of history as a discontinuous multiplicity of discrete sequences, linked only by contingent events." Here we can see a resemblance to Ranciere, as the torsion of structure results “in the dissolution of the order of places,” which requires of thought a “topology of destruction” and the recognition (which becomes central to Badiou’s later work) that “all truth is new.” Badiou's book continually develops ideas only to drop them or completely transform them, and Feltham's summary gets lost in the chaos of the original text. Readers wanting a more clear and systematic account of Badiou's argument will be motivated to go to the original (as Feltham himself suggests at points), but Feltham at least isolates the key elements that later become important in Being & Event. Feltham positions Theory of the Subject as a transitional work, or, what Feltham terms using Badiou's own ideas, a work that "periodizes" Badiou's ouevre, finishing one period and opening the next one. Badiou begins to use set theory in Theory of the Subject, but according to Feltham he uses it primarily "for thinking immanent heterogeneity in structure" through the idea of a generic subset of a set. Set theory provides a "topology of incompletion" whose full implications aren’t developed. Feltham concludes, Theory of the Subject “contains almost all of Being and Event in germ form: set-theory ontology, the event and the intervention, the generic set, forcing, and Badiou’s favorite instances of the four conditions: poetry, psychoanalysis, mathematics and revolutions.” The final chapter on Being & Event is the least revelatory, at least because that period is best known to Anglophone readers. Badiou's essays in Infinite Thought still provide the most accessible condensation of the ideas of Being & Event. Feltham claims that between Theory of the Subject and Being & Event, Badiou "subtracts" from his work the Marxist framework and terminology while "multiplying" Maoism (which is never publicly denounced or rejected by Badiou) by extending the "primacy of change and division" into non-political realms, such as art, science and love. Feltham argues that Badiou performs his claim that philosophy is now conditioned by set theory when Badiou has to give up the radical hope for the end of the state, since the state in set theory is a ubiquitous representation of the multiples presented in the situation. Badiou therefore develops the idea of a "counter-state," though he risks what Feltham terms "Right-Badiousianism," in which the necessity of a counter-state replacing another state might allow current political institutions (such as parliamentary democracy) to be justified as the consequence of an event.

Martin Hagglund: Radical Atheism (2008)

"[T]he openness to the other cannot be an ethical principle since it is not a matter of choice. Openness to the other answers to the openness to the unpredictable coming of time and is thus the condition for whatever there is. . . . Furthermore, nothing can guarantee that it is better to be more open than to be less open to the other (or vice versa). . . . The decision concerning how one should relate to the other can therefore not be dictated by an ethical injunction, but must be reinvented from time to time. Far from providing an ethical ground, the deconstructive thinking of alterity thus politicizes even the most elementary relation to the other." In this explosive little book on Derrida, Martin Hagglund rejects the appropriation over the last twenty years of deconstruction as an ethical, political, or religious project. He denies that there is an "ethical turn" in Derrida's thought (usually located around the publication of Specters of Marx), arguing Derrida's work is informed by a single logic from start to end. Similar to how Graham Harman interprets Heidegger in Tool-Being, Hagglund extracts and explicates what he claims is the core idea of Derrida's work, writing without the piousness, esoterism, or obliqueness that has critically imprisoned his subject. Despite the religious terminology adopted in Derrida's later books (most notably the notion of messianicity), Hagglund claims Derrida's work is informed by a "radical atheism," a finite thinking that rejects the desire for an infinite fullness, immortality, or eternity. In radical atheism, the temporal, finite individual rejects the desire for God's infinity or immortality because their existence would negate the very possibility of the atheist's own finite being (in other words, God is death).
In a rather controversial move, Hagglund attributes a rather simple and straightforward ontology to Derrida, an ontology best summed up as "time is différance." Since the "temporal can never be in itself but is always divided between being no longer and being not yet," alterity is always already inscribed in the "present." To be is therefore to be temporally finite, to "survive" by remaining after a past and by opening up to a future that has yet to be. Différance is a "negative infinity of finitude," a "process of displacement without end."
Hagglund attacks the ethical/religious/political readers of Derrida for wanting to "ascribe a normative dimension to Derrida's argument. The ultratranscendental description of why we must be open to the other is conflated with an ethical prescription that we ought to be open to the other." Due to différance everything always already is open to the other and an undecidable future. Ontology therefore makes (this specific kind of) ethics redundant. In fact, to desire (as those who search for an ethics in deconstruction do) an impossible Kantian regulative Idea, a non-violent relation to the Other, a messianism that brings about the eternal, or a perfected democracy is to desire an end to différance and finitude (which according to radical atheism, is to desire death).
Hagglund's refutation of the idea of an ethical turn in deconstruction is definitive and his association of Derrida's thought with radical atheism is compelling. Other aspects of the book, however, remain more problematic, if not incoherent. Nathan Brown points out in his forthcoming review of the book in Radical Philosophy that Hagglund slips between différance as an ultratranscendental condition for every being and différance as an ultratranscendental condition for living beings, so that the notion of temporal survival tends to be reduced to that of mortality and the spacing of time often is conceptualized through attributes that would only apply to living beings. Hagglund's inability to distinguish those differences is symptomatic of the repetitiveness of the book's argument. It could be said that this monotony reveals the narrowness of Derrida's thinking, a narrowness that was hidden by his style and close reading of other authors, but which has been revealed through Hagglund's schematization. But it seems equally likely to be the product of Hagglund's non-deconstructive account of deconstruction, his description of différance that ignores the effect of différance on itself. Hagglund is surely aware of what he is doing since in the book he describes a similar dilemma regarding Derrida's attempt in Circumfession to exceed Geoffrey Bennington's "formalization of the logical matrix of deconstruction" in Derridabase. There is no need here to go back over the well-trodden aporias of the deconstruction of deconstruction or the easy objections that différance (or its synonyms, arche-writing, arche-trace, spacing) cannot be a concept (or serve as the basis for an ontology), but it would have been helpful to see deconstruction "negotiated" more throughout the book, at least so this radically atheist version of the philosophy, which has such rigid constraints on what can be desired and thought, can perform the survival of Derrida's thought.