future. Whose future? Whose fantasies? Elliot Aguilar looks at the growing trend of genetic self-discovery and the myriad programs that offer consumers glimpses of their heritage in African nations or an- cient Rome. Aguilar untangles the threads of genetic identification, investigating the suitability of DNA evidence for creating families, tribes, and identities. But often, the choice is not ours. In the efforts to create clean streets and healthy families, somehow poor bodies are al- ways in the way. The legitimate fear of poor communities is that institutional racism will deny them families. In North Carolina, involuntary sterilization of poor women, mostly African American, ceased only in the 1970s. During India’s mid- 1970s state of emergency, as Kartik Nair details in “Temple of Womb,” underclass urban men were bribed and coerced into “THE MOST MERCIFUL thing that a “voluntary” sterilization programs. Ironi- family does to one of its infant members cally, the same cheap video technology is to kill it.” Thus wrote Margaret Sanger, that spread the boiling fear of underclass the mother of birth control and founder virility would also permit the uncontrol- of Planned Parenthood, in a 1922 pam- lable propagation of B movies and other phlet entitled “The Woman Rebel.” It entertainment regarded as subversive by has stayed with us as a popular bit of the state. anti-abortionist propaganda, illuminat- As Sophie Lewis notes in “Labor Pains,” ing the supposedly depraved underpin- Indian women are now contracted to serve nings of family planning. And yes, fam- as wombs for white Western children, be- ily planning was enlisted in quite a lot of coming entrepreneurial proprietors of their projects: not just women’s rights but also alienated reproductive function, undermin- “poverty reduction”—­eugenics for, in ing the possibility of a commons that might Sanger’s own words, “a cleaner race.” The unite women across geographical and class utopian aims of such projects were linked lines. Instead one group of women is made to heavy-handed efforts to control social to serve another, and must threaten self- “pollutants”—low IQs, too little money, harm and infanticide to mark their resis- too many people—through the disciplin- tance. How does one strike for better terms ing of the family. For a better world, let when the only way to halt work would be to the state help you make your family just destroy the body? the right size, shape, and color. In “Prescription Strike,” Ayesha A. Sid- In this issue, our writers consider fam- diqi explores another kind of Western oc- ily planning—the intersection of care and cupation and the distrust it engenders: social control, of love and fantasies of the the deployment of U.S. intelligence in ­Pakistan. Aid workers have been murdered tive labor and posits the figure of a mother- abroad for providing polio vaccinations ly Grown Woman as these Man-Children’s and some families reject aid altogether. dialectical counterpart. Why not, instead Siddiqi points out that popular percep- of irony and disavowal, a recognition of tions of aid workers are intertwined with the positive potential of social reproduc- perceptions of that other “for your own tion and care work; why not a Preliminary good” force: Western interventionism. Materials for a Theory of Motherhood? “The families refusing vaccines do so with Hannah Black, in her “Theory of the the logic that a country launching drones Hot Babe,” delineates the alternative, a with one hand, can’t be trusted offering subjectivity both blank and self-regarding, aid with the other.” incapable of conceiving or participating in A woman, wrote Sanger, “goes through a family, plastic and wombless. the vale of death alone, each time a babe In the reviews section, JW McCormack is born.” You would think family planning takes on book two of Karl Ove Knaus- would address the burden of her carrying gård’s epic autobiographical My Struggle, this risk alone. Yet behind much family- subtitled “A Man in Love.” Love and fam- planning intervention is not female em- ily are for him a freely chosen insanity. The powerment but the underlying assump- writer claims “we are most unalike as chil- tion that women can’t be trusted with dren and most similar when dead. In the something so momentous as reproduc- middle, love restores the madness we are tion. (In Monty Python’s The Meaning of born with and gradually cured of.” Life, a woman in contractions is wheeled But for younger people, family may be into a hospital room crowded with ma- an asylum in a more literal sense. Hikiko- chinery. “Doctor, what do I do?” “Nothing mori, regarded by its first diagnoser Saitō dear! You aren’t qualified.”) For this is- Tamaki as a “family disorder,” describes sue, Maya Gonzalez interviews filmmaker the severe withdrawal into homebound Irene Lusztig about The Motherhood Ar- silence by an epidemic number of young chives, an experimental documentary-in- Japanese people. Max Fox reviews Hikiko- progress exploring propaganda directed at mori: Adolescence Without End, published pregnant women. by Tamaki in 1998 and finally available Before a woman ever becomes pregnant, in English, exploring the connection of however, she is a Young-Girl. Is mother- hikikomori to the labor market and to the hood the cure? With misogynistic irony invention of adolescence. Have we all be- (or is it ironic misogyny) the Tiqqun col- come as disposable as a teen bagging gro- lective’s Preliminary Materials for a Theory ceries, as a teen sent to war? of the Young-Girl offers the Young-Girl as In the end, the family is less a haven in a the ideal consumer subject of neoliberal- heartless world than an arrangement that ism. Moira Weigel and Mal Ahern flip the has focused a hundred efforts at social im- manifesto on its head with “Further Ma- provement on the locus of relationships terias Materials Toward a Theory of the supposedly spun of love and affection. We Man-Child,” which likens Tiqqun to timid, take up only a handful of the resulting ten- indecisive male-graduate-student types sions and contradictions. It will take more who shy away from now mandatory affec- than a village to sort them out for good. n 7 The Birth of Motherhood

Irene Lusztig interviewed by Maya Gonzalez

It takes a lot of propaganda to make mothering seem natural

MAYA GONZALEZ: What is your project ­footage. It comes out of an archive of about exactly—The Motherhood Archives? a hundred and something training films that IRENE LUSZTIG: The Motherhood Archives I’ve found in different places. Some are from is a history of childbirth. I would call it an eBay; some are from real archives. And out ideological or institutional history of child- of that material I built a film that episodi- birth that repurposes a giant archive of ma- cally looks at certain moments in time where ternal education, maternal-training films, childbirth is discussed in a new way, or the industrial films, and medical-training films. pain of childbirth is discussed in a new way. These films are spaces of training and edu- cation for forming women as they become What was the reason you started this proj- mothers, and I try to look historically at these ect? What’s your background and how did it films. Who’s telling women how to give birth lead you to work on this archive? and how to be mothers and why? For me, it’s I got pregnant. I’m a filmmaker; I’ve worked a been a way to think about childbirth and ma- lot with propaganda and archives—my back- ternity using this deep history, to see it in a ground is in communist, post­communist much bigger context and trace the history of stuff, and my previous work is a trilogy of the language and the ideas that we use to talk films in China, Romania, and Russia that about these things. thinks through that set of historical ques- The film project is almost all found tions and engagements, a lot of it through

8 Maya Gonzalez and Irene Lusztig propaganda material. I’m very attuned to so for me I just found it hugely reassuring to propaganda. So when I was pregnant it be- ­understand that these things are completely came immediately, abundantly obvious to culturally bound, historically bound. There is me that almost everything I was reading or no wrong way to give birth. seeing or being exposed to was telling me It both is and isn’t a personal film in the how to give birth or how to be pregnant or end. The question of voice came up a lot in how to mother or look after my child. It was conversations. As I was showing the film as clear to me immediately that all of this is an a work in progress, at different points it was intense space of propaganda. more explicitly personal, in the first person, I have a very archival and historical and people would disengage from the film by turn of mind. I wanted to know, What’s the saying, “You must have had a really hard time history of these conversations? Where is with your pregnancy or your birth” or “You this coming from? Why is it such an intense must be trying to work through some prob- space of ideology? So I started buying films lem that you’re having.” I was really troubled on eBay. There’s a lot of weird stuff kicking by the “you, you, you” of that conversation, around on eBay. A lot of libraries now sell because this isn’t about me. off their 16mm educational collections. Af- ter a year or so of doing that, I started go- They don’t even know you have a child. ing into the archives, and it started feeling Right. Sure, I have a child, I’m part of this like it could be a real project rather than conversation, perhaps. But this isn’t a piece a strange hobby. But it came out of an at- of work about me. So I spent a lot of time tempt to think through that experience of struggling and puzzling through what kind of being pregnant and encountering spaces of voice the film has, and I ended up with a sort maternal training. of weird, transhistorical voice that the voice- over uses in the film. Did it change the way you perceived your own experience over those nine months? You Can you tell me about that? There are times were looking at things that are supposed to when you use the word “you,” and then educate you, often in an autodidactic way, there are times that you use “we.” I felt like but ... the “we” pertained to a “we who are being I guess I was sort of self-educating in a weird educated.” At the same time, the “we” was way. I just found it helpful and reassuring to speaking to a community of women po- think through the intense ideological space tentially “out there somewhere.” Yet “you” of “the right way to give birth,” “the right would be used to address an individual way to mother,” “the right way to do this or consumer—someone who might purchase a that with your child.” There’s a constant idea series of related commodities. The contrast that you’re failing, you’re doing it wrong— is striking: It’s like the individual “you” is

9 THE BIRTH OF MOTHERHOOD separating “us” from being a “we.” And still ies I found were histories of obstetrics and “we” is always problematic.­ obstetrical anesthesia. I was trying to think Yeah, yes. The “you” and the “we”—those through how we’ve thought about pain at films, the didactic films are constantly in the different points in time because that’s areally ­ “you”: “You” will experience this, “you” will fraught space. experience that. “You” will do this, “you” will And twilight sleep was probably the be in the hospital, “you” will meet “your” most interesting discovery of the project. doctor, “your” body can do this. So there are Twilight sleep is a moment in the teens a couple of points in the film where it rede- where internationally, wealthy women be- ploys the “you” voice, but most of the time gan traveling to Germany to a clinic where it’s this “we.” I did think of the “we” as like the there’s a drug protocol given to laboring woman who is being educated. It’s the voice women, an almost homeopathic dose of that responds to the “you” voice. morphine that doesn’t really take the pain The question of who’s included haunts away in any significant way, coupled with every conversation about feminism. It was scopolamine which induces amnesia. So the very deliberate to not use “I.” It’s not a film experience of laboring in twilight sleep may about me. I’m certain it’s about me on some be intensely painful, but the women forget level, or made for personal reasons, but the it as they’re experiencing it. The interest- voice of the film is not “my” voice. ing thing historically about twilight sleep is that it became a real activist cause in the What has making the film revealed, and U.S., and the activists who were support- what are the things that surprised you? ing and trying to bring it to the U.S. were The history of Lamaze surprised me. Lamaze all feminists and suffragettes. So the early is a very clear case study of how childbirth is 20th century history of women being really propagandized. It exposes how it’s so clearly strong advocates for medicalized childbirth, spoken about in a completely different way for hospital birth, for drugs, for anesthesia, as it moves from Soviet Russia to France to is an interesting forgotten history. the U.S. I was amazed to learn that there was this whole Marxist discourse of labor pain, What was the position for advocating twilight which I hadn’t known about. And as Lamaze sleep? Was it for equality, mainly? leaves this kind of Socialist-Marxist labor That the pain of labor is an abject experience system and moves to the U.S., that language of very intense pain. The language that’s used is completely erased—but it’s still the same in these books and articles that feminists techniques. It lays bare the way that these wrote advocating twilight sleep is basically things are undergirded by nationalist ideolo- human-rights discourse: Society has the gies, state ideologies. obligation to give us women this thing that I guess the most important discover- will take away this devastating pain that we

10 Maya Gonzalez and Irene Lusztig experience. It’s a human-rights discourse of sis, not experiencing it. In a social-historical equality for women in the form of pain re- way, this sort of loss can be re-­experienced as lief. Which is incredibly interesting set next repression that comes back. There seems to to ­today’s feminist conversation which is all be somewhat of a theme within the archive of about natural unmedicated childbirth being an attempt to repress that. the correct, feminist way of giving birth. For I think the opposite of that is the discourse of me that was a discovery. natural childbirth. That it’s empowering and self-actualizing for a woman to be fully present It seems like feminists had to deal with in that experience of pain, that that’s a really this antinomy between “we” as equals to desirable state. To me that’s really problematic. men in order to obtain equal rights, and at the same time “we” must also advocate Well, it’s punishing. for difference. Childbirth is something We’re talking about incredibly intense pain! that would clearly be a “difference” in this So I guess for me, one of the animating ques- regard and yet is a socially constructed dif- tions going into this project was, Is natural ference in relation to rights. I guess what childbirth really that great? Is it empower- I’m trying to say is that your film is really ing? Is it self-­actualizing? I don’t think wom- good at demonstrating that the seemingly en were always speaking that way about pain. natural is historical. And even that word is so problematic—that The film makes clear that it is not at all nat- there is a natural and therefore also an un- ural, the experience of pain. natural way of giving birth. That medication What pain is is also very mysterious. The is unnatural, that pain is natural. film starts where the history starts, It creates a whole structure of and it could’ve gone back much thinking. further in history. But I chose to start the film in the late 19th But also, that pain is un- century when anesthesia was natural—that if one were discovered. Anesthesia comes to accept a natural child- into fashion, and that’s the birth, one would not expe- first moment where there’s rience pain. a conversation about pain It’s very complicated. because suddenly pain can be taken away. Pain is no But there’s a number of dif- longer inevitable but some- ferent ways of opting out of thing you can choose to ex- pain or trauma, neutral- perience or choose not to izing it or through hypno- experience.

11 THE BIRTH OF MOTHERHOOD

That brings up all these ­really big ques- incredibly Christian and misogynist argu- tions about pain: Where does it come from? ment about women’s bodies. What does it mean? Is it wrong to take it away? There’s an argument in 19th century The film also tells a narrative about the medical discourse against anesthesia that commodification and marketization of says if you amputate a limb without anes- of childbirth, culminating in these birth- thesia and a patient screams, that’s really ing centers. You say that in these centers valuable information for a surgeon. Intense “the messiness of birth is excised from pain is important information for a doctor, this perfectly appointed home away from and getting rid of it is a huge problem for home. The image of the cache of medical medical practice. supplies behind the domestic facade is the We’ve all moved very far away from that image of an era in conflict; an unresolved moment, but it’s the first moment where historical moment suspended between two there can be this conversation. If you can ideas.” What is that unresolved historical take pain away, what is the point of it? moment? The film doesn’t go into this that The birth center is this phenomenon that’s much, but this early conversation about on the rise where hospitals are building pain is a very Christian conversation. this kind of—it looks like a Super 8 Mo- There’s centuries and centuries of thinking tel or something. I first saw a birth center and writing about labor pain, which is that when I was on a hospital tour. I was preg- it originates with God’s punishment of Eve. nant and it immediately struck me as this Grantly Dick-Read is the British obstetri- incredibly weird unresolved, compromised cian who coined the term natural child- space that’s trying to be home, but it’s not birth and wrote the first books about it. home. It’s homey, and homey is signified His writing is a very by chintz bedspread explicitly Christian and floral art. So it’s appeal to the experi- not a home birth, it’s ence of being inside a home-like birth. the pain as a form The space feminists They have all this fur- of spirituality. It’s a now occupy is a niture where they’ve Christian thing to redeployment of this hidden equipment do. That history has Christian and misogynist behind mirrors and also been erased. It’s argument about picture frames. kind of ironic that The effort to the space feminists women’s bodies erase the trace of the occupy now is a re- medical, erase the deployment of this idea of pain ... it’s

12 Maya Gonzalez and Irene Lusztig this kind of neutral hotel-like space, but the Joseph DeLee, who was a big obstetri- whole thing is that it’s in a hospital, or it’s cian in Chicago in the 1920s and ’30s—he next to the hospital, so you can go to the uses the word. His basic position is that hospital if you have an emergency. It’s a childbirth is pathological, it’s a medical situ- very ­uneasy space of negotiating these two ation, it’s one that requires intervention, it’s different ideologies or discourses around one that requires doctors. That position is re- childbirth. It does feel like a space that’s ally rejected now, especially in this pro-nat- very uncomfortable,­ where all the emer- ural childbirth space, but it’s complicated. gency equipment is there, but it’s behind a There are still women who die in childbirth, picture of Monet’s water lilies. there are still things that happen that require medical intervention; the birth center is There was something so right about that im- straddling the precise intersection of that re- age as saying something in particular about ally uneasy in-between space of not wanting the way in which the home is brought with- to be aware of the medical, but it’s still there in this unnatural sterilized space and then hidden. It’s true that there are also a lot of ­renaturalized. unnecessary C-sections. I don’t know what It’s such an unnatural home, right? Nobody’s the statistics are, but there’s probably equal home actually looks like that. numbers of medical C-s­ections that save ba- bies and save mothers, so I think disavow- You continue in that passage, “The archive ing this completely in a conversation about tells us that childbirth is both natural and childbirth is problematic. pathological: two opposite things inside of one that intertwine through history.” It was interesting to me also as a luxury ex- People have asked me about the word path- perience. ological. People think of that as a very bad Well, class is the other thing that we haven’t word, but it comes directly out of earlier talked about, but all of this is incredibly class- writings about childbirth. There’s a huge bound. body of writing from the mid-20th century that precisely describes childbirth as patho- I think it’s class-bound, and it’s to give this logical or a pathological process, a destruc- middle-class experience. You bring out the tive process. It comes out of doctors strug- normative fantasy: It’s not exactly just for gling with incredibly high maternal mor- the middle class, and at the same time it’s— tality rates and high infant-mortality rates, It’s an aspirational experience. incredibly high rates of vaginal tearing and bad maternal side-effects from birth, pro- Yeah, or like a honeymoon experience. lapse and all these things that still happen, You give birth, and you have the celebration actually. meal afterward! n

13 14 Further Materials Toward a Theory of the Man-Child

by Moira Weigel and Mal Ahern

Theory’s response to the feminization of work has been to cry for mommy

VIRGINIA WOOLF POINTED out in A and dissolved after the 9/11 attacks, the Room of One’s Own that, for most of history, French journal of radical philosophy attract- if a piece of writing was signed “Anonymous,” ed media attention when one of its founders, its author was usually a woman. Recently, Julien Coupat, was arrested in November however, we have noticed that more and 2008 in connection with plans to sabotage more unsigned publications coming from the TGV train lines. the left are written in what sounds like a male Semiotext(e) published translations of voice. From the boy bandit aesthetics of the Tiqqun’s The Coming Insurrection, Introduc- anarchist magazine Rolling Thunder to the tion to Civil War, and This is Not a Program Guy Fawkes masks and Internet vigilantism between 2009 and 2011, and the anar- of the hacker collective Anonymous, the chist press Little Black Cart books distrib- protagonist of contemporary radical politics uted Tiqqun 1 and Theory of Bloom in 2011 styles himself as a him. and 2012. Though their cops-and-robbers In some cases, anonymity itself, which bombast sometimes raised our eyebrows, was supposed to express solidarity, abets sex- we read these with interest. Then, late last ism. Take Tiqqun. Founded in the late 1990s year, Semiotext(e) put out its next Tiqqun

15 Theory of the man-child

­installment. Enclosed in a bright pink cover, governed social reproduction, i.e., had and and bookended with what looked like low- raised kids. grade xerox collages of glossy magazine ads The majority of what follows consists of a and soft porn,Preliminary Materials for a Situationist-ish collage that, in a series of vac- Theory of the Young-Girl confirmed all that we illating typefaces and font sizes, presents the had begun to suspect. Young-Girl as a scapegoat as much as a victim. Theory of the Young-Girl opens with a 10-page excursus sketching the “total war” Deep down inside, the Young-Girl has the that contemporary capitalism wages against personality of a tampon: she exemplifies all of the appropriate indifference, all of anyone who dares oppose it. Echoing the the necessary coldness demanded by the work of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, conditions of metropolitan life. Tiqqun argues that capitalism compels indi- In love more than anywhere else, the viduals to internalize its imperatives to live Young-Girl behaves like an accountant. (and thus consume) in certain ways. Because the entire conflict is invisible, Tiqqun pro- There isn’t room for two in the body of a fesses that “rethinking the offensive for our Young-Girl. side is a matter of making the battlefield man- It appears that all the concreteness of the ifest,” revealing the processes by which con- world has taken refuge in the ass of the temporary society compels us to commodify Young-Girl. even our intimate lives. Where can they best There are beings that give you the desire expose the front lines where capitalism is to die slowly before their eyes, but the waging its invisible war? The “Young-Girl,” a Young-Girl only excites the desire to van- figure Tiqqun invents to play both the exem- quish her, to take advantage of her. plary subject of and the agent reproducing this system. Like the nice guy from your grad-school Tiqqun claims it has lady members and program who tries to cover up his hurt feel- seems eager to reassure us that it does not ings by concocting a general theory that ex- hate us. “Listen,” Tiqqun writes. “The Young- plains why he never got a text after his one- Girl is obviously not a gendered concept ... night stand, the book portrays the Young-Girl The Young-Girl is simply themodel citizen as as vain, frivolous, and acquisitive. She serves redefined by consumer society.” When early the traditional female role of reproducing the 20th century capitalism realized that, to re- population and social order, but here, the so- produce itself, it would have to colonize so- cial order is corrupt. Therefore, Tiqqun sug- cial life, it particularly targeted the spheres gests, their intervention requires an ironic per- of “youth” and “femininity”: the young, formance of misogyny. The question remains: because they needed and wanted things, Why is misogyny their only option? And why and did not yet work; women, because they are so many thoughtful­ people ready to accept

16 Moira Weigel and Mal Ahern that a layer of irony suffices to turns hateful he would not call out a sexist or racist language into the basis of a sound critique? joke, for fear of sounding too earnest. Ironically, the Man-Child lives up to a We believe that Tiqqun has mistaken its stereotype about the men from the rom- object. The real enigma of our age is not the coms he holds in contempt: he has a fear Young-Girl, who, we submit, has been pun- of commitment. ished enough already for how commodity The Man-Child won’t break up with you, culture exploits her. It is, rather, her boyish but will simply stop calling. He doesn’t critic. Forms of crypto- and not-so-crypto want to seem like an asshole. misogyny have proved startlingly persistent He tells you he would break up with his not just within the radical left but also in the girlfriend, but they share a lease. bourgeois-left spheres of cultural produc- tion: the publishing world, the museum, and The Man-Child breaks up with you even though the two of you are not in a rela- the humanities departments of liberal-arts tionship. He cites his fear of settling down. universities. We propose that a particular You don’t want marriage, at least not type is responsible for perpetuating such bad with him, but he never thought to ask you. behavior. Call him the Man-Child. The Man-Child can’t even commit to saying no. IT IS NOT that we cannot talk Tiqqun talk. Look: Why are you crying? The Man-Child is just trying to be reasonable. This is his calm voice. The Man-Child has two moods: indeci- sion, and entitlement to this indecisiveness. The Man-Child isn’t a player. Many a Man-Child lacks throw-down. He puts The Man-Child tells a racist joke. It is not on a movie and never makes a move. funny. It is the fact that the Man-Child said something racist that is. Is Hamlet the original Man-Child? No: the Romantics made him one. The Man-Child wants you to know that you should not take him too seriously, Just as not all men are Man-Children, except when you should. At any given ­neither are all Man-Children men. moment, he wants to you to take him only as seriously as he wants to be taken. When Lena Dunham may be living proof that he offends you, he was kidding. When he the Man-Child is now equal opportunity. means it, he means it. What he says goes. That is, the character she plays on Girls is. A real man-child would never get it to- The Man-Child thinks the meaning of his gether to get an HBO show. As we watch statement inheres in his intentions, not in Hannah Horvath pull a splinter out of the effects of his language. He knows that her ass, we wonder: Is this second-wave speech-act theory is passé. feminism? Or fourth? It is no accident that Judd Apatow wrote the scene. The The Man-Child’s irony may be a part of mesh tank Dunham wears over bare tits a generational aversion to political risk: is isomorphic with the dick joke.

17 theory of the man-child

The hipster and the douchebag may be as pitiful, contrasting him with women who subspecies of the genus Man-Child. are well-adjusted and adult. But it rarely ac- knowledges the real question that this odd If the Man-Child could use his ironic sexism to build a new world, would you couple raises. Namely, are women better want to live in it? Would anyone? suited to the new economy because they are easier to exploit? WE COULD GO on like this. Others have. In the mid-1970s, Italian Marxist femi- Since Theory of the Young-Girl appeared in nists attempted to integrate an account of France in the late 1990s, the Man-Child “immaterial labor” into their critique of capi- has wandered far afield from the barricades, talist society. They argued that when a shop turning up more and more often in the main- attendant smiles for a customer, or a teacher stream liberal press. When Hanna Rosin worries too much about her students, or a published her widely discussed Atlantic essay parent does housework, they perform real and subsequent book, The End of Men, pro- labor. No accident that their examples came posing that “modern, postindustrial society from spheres traditionally occupied by wom- is just better suited to women,” she inaugu- en. Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt later rated a genre. A spate of articles lamented used the phrase “affective labor” to describe how the “mancession” was discouraging even the emotional exertion that white-collar jobs nice boys from fulfilling the roles tradition- increasingly require. Employers in economi- ally expected of them—holding a job, taking cally dominant countries now primarily de- girls on dinner dates, eventually choosing mand “education, attitude, character, and one to marry, outearn, beget kids with, etc. ‘prosocial’ behavior.” When job listings ask “The End of Courtship,” which theNew for “a worker with a good attitude,” what they York Times ran in January, is exemplary. “It is want, say Hardt and Negri, is a smile. not uncommon to walk into the hottest new In the culture sector, economic precar- West Village bistro on a Saturday night and ity constantly reminds employees of their find five smartly dressed young women din- expendability and, therefore, the importance ing together—the nearest man the waiter,” its of their investing affect in their workplace. author concludes. “Income equality, or supe- To gain even an unpaid internship or a bare- riority, for women muddles the old, male- ly paid entry-level position in journalism, dominated dating structure.” Meanwhile, an publishing, museums, or higher education, online panic-mongering industry thrives by dedication is a must. Many jobs that used to offering more or less reactionary advice to be meal tickets for starving artists are now female page-viewers about how to turn what- considered covetable and require “love.” A ever romantic temp work comes their way college freshman recently told us: “I have a into a long-term contract. passion for marketing.” A journalist friend Mancession Lit portrays the Man-Child recounts how, when she was still in college,

18 Moira Weigel and Mal Ahern a magazine editor approached her at a party stitutions have pretended is a kind of person- with the line: “Yo, you should be my intern.” al service outside capital so that they do not We imagine her smiling, as if to flatter his de- have to pay for it. When affective relation- lusion that there were any print-media jobs ships become part of work, we overinvest still worth sleeping your way into; in any our economic life with erotic value. Hence, case, she did get a gig there. “passion for marketing.” Hence, “Like” after Women’s long history of performing “Like” button letting you volunteer your time work without its even being acknowledged to help Facebook sell your information to ad- as work, much less compensated fairly, may vertisers with ever greater precision. account for their relative success in today’s In the postindustrial era, work and lei- white-collar economy. This is, at least, the sure grow increasingly indistinguishable: story of the heroine that the new Mancession We are all shop girls now. From this “femi- Lit has created. Call her the Grown Woman. nization of the world,” Tiqqun writes, “one A perpetual-motion machine of uncom- can only expect the cunning promotion of plaining labor, shuttling between her job and all manner of servitudes.” At times, Tiqqun household tasks, the Grown Woman could speaks of this exploitation sympathetically. not be more different from either fat-year More often, however, they blame the Young- brats like Carrie Bradshaw, or Judd Apatow’s Girl for opening the floodgates by comply- lady Man-Children. The Grown Woman ing with her own exploitation, thus making holds down her job and pays for her own din- it easier for control capitalism to make her ner. The Grown Woman feels like a bad mom attitude compulsory for everyone. when she sees the crafts and organic snacks Though its anxieties are of the moment, that other moms are posting on Pinterest. Tiqqun lifts its language from a long intel- She wonders whether feminism lied to her, lectual tradition that uses “woman” as short- but knows she will inherit the earth. Could hand. You can trace this line to Goethe’s this be because she is better than the Man- Faust and the “eternal feminine” or Fried- Child at performing what current economic rich Schiller’s “Veiled Statue at Sais,” where conditions demand? She is certainly more “a youth, impelled by a burning thirst for practiced. Who among us hasn’t faked it, if knowledge,” pokes around Egypt looking for only to make him stop asking? a busty sculpture of Isis that he calls “Truth.” Nietzsche continues using “woman” as a TIQQUN KNOWS AND says what the metaphor for the metaphysical essence that Lifestyle section does or cannot: Today the philosophers looked for beneath the surface economy is feminizing everyone. That is, it of mere existence. But he borrows the lan- puts more and more people of both genders guage of his predecessors only to show how in the traditionally female position of under- their quest failed—proposing, for instance, taking work that traditionally ­patriarchal in- in Human, All Too Human that “women,

19 theory of the man-child however you may search them, prove to have to ­power could not really hate women. The no content but are purely masks.” Nietzsche’s prestige of the theoretical vocabulary that point is that the woman called Truth was al- Tiqqun’s members have mastered bolsters ways already a cocktease: Nothing except their credibility. existence exists. At the same time, Theory of the Young-Girl Tiqqun offers an edgy update to such adopts a playful pose that prevents real Young- misogynist metaphors deployed for the pur- Girls, or any Grown Women who might find poses of demystification. At times, it speaks time to read books published by Semiotext(e), longingly of women who have not been ut- from calling them out. Because Tiqqun’s col- terly corrupted by capitalism. But when it lage does not attribute sources, we can read learns what it knew all along—there is no any given passage in disavowing quotation outside; all human relationships have be- marks, as a lightning bolt of original insight, come reified—its disappointment at finding or as both. Publishing anonymously is only no one authentic to grow old with intensifies a backup measure for evading responsibility. its vitriol. “It wasn’t until the Young-Girl ap- Lift out any one line to object to it—“Wait a peared that one could concretely experience minute, how has all the concreteness of the what it means to ‘fuck,’ that is, to fuck some- world taken refuge in my ass?”—and you one without fucking anyone in particular. would be sure to look foolish, even if you did Because to fuck a being that is really so ab- know whom to ask. stract, so utterly interchangeable, is to fuck Theory of the Young-Girl shares a rhe- in the absolute.” Tiqqun’s language may be torical strategy with texts that have been far obscene, but its point is nothing new. The more widely diffused and discussed. Their failure to see women as “anyone in particu- quips about tampons and Young-Girls’ lar,” or as subjects endowed with their own body parts, which they insist are “not gen- ends, has allowed men to fuck women over dered,” resemble the cringe-inducing song for centuries. about seeing actresses’ “boobs” that Seth MacFarlane wrote for the Oscars and Dan- TIQQUN CAN INSIST, despite all the evi- iel Tosh’s much-­discussed off-the-cuff rape dence to the contrary, that the Young-Girl joke. In each case, a speaker insists that he is “obviously not a gendered concept” be- is not saying what he says. If we accept a cause it knows that we know that it knows standard definition of verbal irony as say- this. Tiqqun uses works of Continental phi- ing one thing while meaning another, the losophy in the same way that schoolyard comedians and Tiqqun both appeal to their bullies use in-jokes: as passwords that grant identities to control the contexts in which access to a protected inner circle. Tiqqun as- they are understood. Claiming that its mas- sumes that readers will assume that writers tery of the misogynist philosophical tradi- so well versed in texts that have spoken truth tion entitles it to do this, Tiqqun steps into

20 Moira Weigel and Mal Ahern what looks a lot like an old-­fashioned patri- housework of gathering sources while he archal role. takes credit for the conceptual heavy lift- Even when adopted by radical theory, ing. (Even his verb choice—“do”—makes it this knowing posture is conservative. Know- sound like this was a hobby, like tourism, as ingness is the attitude that allows sexism to if we just happened to get off on playing with persist in progressive institutions that you textbooks.) When the co-organizer of an ex- would expect to know better,precisely be- hibition calls to ask, on a few hours notice, cause you would. When casual sexism per- whether he can borrow sheets for the futon vades leftist theory, one assumes it is ironic; on which he volunteered weeks ago to put when progressive institutions ignore gender up a visiting artist—it was just coincidence politics, one assumes this is because struggles that he called us and not Patrick or Andrew, for equality have already been won, or must right? We want to believe this. And yet, we be deferred so we can attend to more press- look at the female faculty who seem to par- ing political needs. Intellectuals tend to show ticipate in every committee and conference class allegiance, bracketing or ignoring casual and supervise over half the dissertations in sexism in their own circles. They project mi- their departments, and we feel afraid. sogyny outward, onto Middle America mega- The figures that Mancession Lit presents churches and racialized others, or onto the as adversaries are in fact symbiotic. In institu- powerful men that pander to those masses. tions that reward competence with more un- When we look at the comment sections paid labor, the Man-Child needs the Grown where men fantasize about violating and Woman to take care of him, and she needs decapitating female bloggers, or OkCupid­ him to need her. Man-Child attitudes, of the diaries where they rant about dates who kind Tiqqun adopts, perpetuate the “femi- spurned their sexual advances, we recognize nization of the world” in the places where immediately that the Nice Guy doth protest we most ardently hoped to find alternatives. too much. Typos make it easy to call a sad- Even the messy style of Theory of the Young- sack sociopath a sociopath. But we imagine Girl ends up creating more unacknowledged that our male colleagues at cultural institu- labor: the exegesis it requires. In his glamor- tions are aware of how women have been ex- ous obscurantism, the Man-Child cries for a ploited historically. dutiful interpreter to come and tidy up. So when one asks whether we would like to co-author a paper, undertaking all IN MANY RADICAL political groups the translation for it because he does not in the 20th century, sex and gender were “do languages,” we try to shake it off. He treated as issues for “after the revolution.” cannot ­really imagine that we spent years of Tiqqun regards matters of “personal iden- our adult lives mastering foreign words and tity” as secondary to a generalized process grammar just so we could do the tedious by which capital shapes individuals. When

21 theory of the man-child we accept the knowingness that the Man- or just impersonating someone sexist in or- Child trades in, we put off thinking about der to make its point. The trait that everyone how differences of gender, sex, and sexu- has recognized as endemic among men, and ality operate in diverse lives. That sort of many young women, of our generation is thinking takes work, work that many of us indecision­ . would often rather avoid. Because utopia Both postures spring from a fearful re- never arrives, this labor gets passed on to fusal to take a position, to make a choice the exploited, who do not have the choice among alternatives that feel compromised. of temporarily ignoring the question. In The bourgeois Man-Child who refuses to many workplaces, including academic de- “grow up,” refuses to mate, and refuses do- partments, this means that race becomes mestic labor resembles the radical who the “job” of people of color; sexual politics wants to bide his time until capitalism col- the “job” of people who are female and/or lapses from within. Perhaps the most ex- queer and/or transgendered. treme example of Man-Child politics is the We cannot refuse the hard work of Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, thinking about difference, nor can we step which proposes that doing nothing might be into the Grown Woman role that late capi- the only way left to save the world. And yet, talism has devised for us. We cannot finally it is hard not to see these apocalyptic scenar- embrace the Man-Child; he is inertia itself. ios as cop-outs, typical of the compensatory But we can look for new figures. Perhaps iro- fantasies of a disorganized left that, having ny felt like a vehicle for radical critique in the given up on actually existing politics, day- late 1990s when Tiqqun was writing. Then, dreams about nature’s taking over where it bullish readers who were confident that the left off. West had reached the end of history needed Doing so, Man-Children overlook the to be shown all the shortcomings and hy- fact that social reproduction—the work of pocrisies of their golden age. Now, translated having and raising kids—is not mere rep- for the postcrash era in which everyone sees lication. It can be creative. That is, it might how badly our social contract has been bro- offer opportunities for social transforma- ken, the gesture feels like a cliché designed to tion. What would Preliminary Materials for help its speaker avoid responsibility and risk. a Theory of Motherhood look like? Maybe in- Tiqqun resembles the mainstream Man- stead of more smarter-than-thou critiques, Child to the extent that everything that it we need more imagination, more courage. does is a delaying tactic, a way of putting off In place of obscurantism, clarity and orga- the future. The rhetorical strategy ofTheory nization. In place of indecision and irony, a of the Young-Girl is to remain undecidable: praise song and a program. Tiqqun is at the Its self-ironizing speaker refuses to settle the tail end of a radical tradition that has largely question of whether the book is in fact ­sexist exhausted its usefulness. n

22 23 Theory of the Hot Babe

by Hannah Black

The Hot Babe is no one in particular, and neither are you

LET’S SAY THE Hot Babe is the fully hu- to those who see in the poor the swarming of man being of the future, apparently lacking rats, but only insofar as misogyny goes un- all interiority, super-connected, ultra-con- noticed even where other forms of division temporary, without guilt or grief. Self-as- fail. In any case, the ecstatic machine and the semblance (the Hot Babe) is the objective swarming rats are more beautiful than those subjectivity that has yet to find its true social who condemn them. form. Her deauthenticated body is not emp- Today the “authentic” self of ideology tied or washed clean of subjectivity; it is sub- requires a surplus made up of selves that are jectivity’s historical precondition. not perceived as “authentic”—among them The Hot Babe is a gendered concept.She is the Hot Babe. is a radical (non-)subjectivity, thrown out of Many feminisms have theorized objecti- the wage relation only to reappear at the mar- fication as the commodification of women. In ket’s core. Those who look at her and see only a different sense of making-object, commu- a machine are the machine of her becoming. nism, as promise, proposes to make human Polemically: those who see in the limbs of life objective to itself. Let’s conflate these two women the pistons of the factory are superior­ forms of objectification for the purposes of

24 Hannah Black taking the Hot Babe’s claims about herself She “maintains her image,” but not seriously: She objectifies herself “for herself” any particular image. The condition of the (“I do it for myself because I enjoy fashion, it Hot Babe is invisibility or (the same thing) makes me feel like me”—Beyoncé), but also pure contentless visibility. Her image is the “for all women” (“I think that women feel appearance of what cannot appear. Image, akin to me in a way because I’m so incredibly which is impossible, is itself a taboo on the honest about who I am as a person”—Jenna impossible. All impossibilities (image, love, Jameson), and evidently for all men (“…”). desire, sex) must be played out as possibili- The image of her being describes the con- ties: The Hot Babe volunteers to perform tours of the life we may not live long enough this necessary self-abasement. The Hot Babe to live. But, as with all prophets, no one be- is the embodiment of the flatness and empti- lieves her. ness of the image, but the very flatness and Who is she? No one. Her characterless emptiness of the image, any image, is its un- character drinks desire like a matte surface re- canny fullness. (If I write a sentence the Hot pudiates light or stores it for a later date. Like Babe wouldn’t have the patience to read, I’m on a hot day the asphalt stores the heat and at fault and not her.) radiates it at dusk—but what does the Hot In the era of the Hot Babe, under the Babe care for these fragments of childhood emancipatory sign of the Hot Babe, all art memory? She walked two inches above the will be obsolete or generalized into non­ asphalt, buoyed on the current of the gen- existence: “That’s hot, that’s hot, that’s hot”. eral desire. Who? No one. She has no traits, The humans of the future reject your messy but her essence becomes an image and with- and in-grown subjectivities, or, like the hero draws itself from sight. of Chris Marker’s La Jetée, you reject them, Public services are privatized and pri- you cannot bear their terrible perfection. vate life is public. Once, only the profes- The Hot Babe is not good or rational sional Hot Babe adorned all major media political praxis, or does not seem to point to outlets; now social media makes of everyone any current ideas of good or rational prax- a Hot Babe, should they be willing. What is is—“organization,” “demands”—yet she is private, secret, is not the detail of the life but the image of the desire of the object of that the disappearance at its core. I mean some- praxis, as a class. thing that is always in the process of disap- Looking down on the Hot Babe should pearing. That’s what the Hot Babe feels like give you vertigo: All qualities dissolve in to touch, although you are not strictly per- her. In the end it’s you who disappears in mitted to touch her; it would only be two the hard blue of her eyes, which are always nothingnesses touching, nothing touching blue, even if the Hot Babe’s particular eyes nothing. The Hot Babe is no one in particu- are green or brown. Tell yourself the eyes of lar, and neither are you. the Hot Babe are merely their color, flat and

25 Theory of the Hot babe doll-like, to avoid the penetrating judgment Babe has any interiority, you must of her stare: She does not care for you, your penetrate her, although nothing is threadbare autobiography, although always proved there either; you have to the faint promise that in other circumstances reach for Bataillean excesses, a blue her sympathy would be infinite. eye winking from a pussy, an eye- Neither productive nor reproductive, ball rolling in the gutter of a thigh, where the Hot Babe does not successfully and the question is still undecided. embody transience, she must stand for de- In her love’s impossible origin struction. For patriarchy woman is womb all origins are rendered impossible, but the Hot Babe is wombless; she does not especially her own—the beauty of cook, she does not “love children.” She is the the Hot Babe, on which her very exis- much-vaunted machine that comes to re- tence as such is founded, is itself based place the mother. on this absolute ban: that she never, ever, Yes, it could be that no new form of so- fully requite the desire she is given as always cial organization will solve the problem of already unrequited. Does the Hot Babe ask desire, the gap between desire and its object, for love? No, nor in her specificity does she the irreducible constitutive gap—but we can get it. It is not possible to “care for her.” She make some observations about how desire pares sexual relations down to their barest is put to work right now, about the surplus bones and ends up with forms of vio- suffering, the surplus enjoyment presently lence; her laughter rings out in extracted from desire. In personifying desire this reliquary, over the orgi- without assimilating it (“My boyfriends tell astic clacking of bone on me I’m sexy but not sexual”—Paris Hilton), bone, and at this extreme, the Hot Babe heroically attempts to reconcile it is only her laughter that the imageless and unimaginable future with stands for “more life.” the desire for futurity. The Hot Babe will not an- The Hot Babe’s actions appear as only swer questions of love; the forms of rec- the appearance of action; from the point of onciliation she offers are impermanent view of ideology, she “does nothing,” though and thin, like the two-story fronts on one- in fact she articulates the present state of de- story houses in frontier towns in the old sire—articulation, not as in speech but as in ­wilderness-defeating west. It is not that the movement of a joint. When she speaks, Photoshop or cosmetic surgery augments the Hot Babe’s speech extends her silence. her, but that her “true” “self” is concentrated Collectivity: connection must of neces- in these augmentations. Under anaesthetic, sity be joyful and mutually assured destruc- she dies and comes back with her contempt tion. The Hot Babe is her own self-abolition. for life and death reinforced. To ascertain whether or not the Hot Her “I” is generalized; although appar-

26 Hannah Black

ently totally individu- crack in the present state of things. ated, without a shred And yet even this is not sufficient to de- of interest in collec- scribe her. tive life, the Hot Babe The counterpart to the slave who has is always plural. The flesh but no body (Wilderson), she has no particular Hot Babe flesh, only a body. Her body is not made of is always passing out flesh: It is a collection of parts, a collage, a se- of existence (age, ries of images. In her, functions of the flesh weight gain, depres- disappear and reappear as erotic or repul- sion, death), only to sive absurdities: two girls, one cup; 2 million be renewed in gen- girls, one body. eral, in another effec- The Hot Babe is both universally avail- tively identical body. able and entirely unattainable. She accepts When she says, “I”, love, hatred, envy, or jealousy without interest she means, regally, or comment: they have no meaning but nor “we”—with this fail- are they fully meaningless; for the Hot Babe, ing or achievement surface and meaning are arranged horizontal- she launches her at- ly on a flat and apparently infinite plane. tack on ideological On the high street the plate-glass win- subjectivities; some- dow is the perfect transparency through thing opens up at the which the commodity appears in all its ap- center, a bloodless parent availability. Plate glass, the closest wound, a point of thing to no barrier at all, appears as if it has contact. She will ad- already vanished. The commodity offers -it mit to no emotions self to you, through the glass. It is yours on beyond the automatic— condition that you do not take it, it is fully “suffering” apparently leaves her yours on condition that it is not yours. The as cold as “pleasure,” but this is a hot babe is not commodity but the glass: tactical retreat: Why should she “First you break the window, then you be- construct authentic being in her come it.” No, the hot babe is not the glass but spare time to satisfy those who the moment of glass breaking, a splintering have deprived her of the condi- YES, a fracturing NO: “Whatever.” tions for it? The Hot Babe, thus The commodity is “hot,” permanently hermetically self-vindicated, is available; the commodity is “hot,” stolen a blank field on which you can goods. The hotness of the Hot Babe is frozen, read the inscription or instruc- cold, zero degrees. The Hot Babe is the red tion or warning, WOMAN—the cross marked on every door. n

27 28 Temple of Womb

by KARTIK NAIR

India’s mid-1970s state of emergency and its ghoulish “family planning camps” inadvertently spawned an uncontrollable technology of dissemination

ON OCTOBER 31, 1984, Indira Gandhi marishly, the Emergency featured a “volun- was shot and killed by her bodyguards, end- tary” sterilization campaign, which offered ing one of the most controversial careers the urban poor money, land, and trinkets in in modern Indian politics. Today, Gandhi exchange for their fertility. is remembered as the only woman to have Eclipsed in memory by Indira Gandhi’s served as Prime Minister. Less prominent is bloody assassination and its aftermath, the her role as the only Prime Minister to have mass violence of the Emergency has never suspended India’s democratic process. On figured prominently in histories of India. Its June 26, 1975, she imposed a state of emer- traumatic effects can still be traced, howev- gency on the country, a 21-month period of er, in a legacy of black-market video parlors exception in the world’s largest democracy. and B-grade horror films. These remained an Dissidents were jailed, the press was heavily outgrowth of the grotesque visions of fam- censored, and the poor were subjected to vi- ily planning and cinematic control enacted olent developmentalist fantasies concocted through state violence. A residue of the in- by the political elite, including mass demo- frastructure for a new way of seeing stayed in lition drives and resettlements. Most night- place after the Emergency ended.Audiences ­

29 temple of womb the state had created to imbibe propaganda gasp of truly centralized state control, the cli- now demanded more video, and the tech- max of Big Government, the paroxysm of the nologies deployed to teach them were re- plan—with the poor at the receiving end. purposed to avoid the film censors’ decency Among the many technologies unveiled regulations.” In this climate, the new genre of during the Emergency were “family planning low-budget horror film resonated with dis- camps” across India. Here, citizens (mostly possessed audiences, linking the Emergency lower class, mostly male) were encouraged, “plan” with the era of unplanned emergence pressured, and often forced to undergo va- that followed. sectomies. This coercion—the preferred Less than two weeks before Gandhi was term was “motivation”—occurred in more killed, Purana Mandir (“Ancient Temple”) than one way: Sometimes whole villages by Shyam and Tulsi Ramsay opened in cin- were rounded up and hauled to these camps; ema halls in Delhi and Bombay. In Purana other times, men were offered “gifts” in -ex Mandir, a monster curses an aristocratic change for sterilization. family: Every woman descended of this fam- In cities, family planning dovetailed with ily will suffer a horrible death in the process slum demolition. The poor were promised of giving birth, her body doomed to lacerat- plots of land if they agreed to move out of the ing, instantaneous implosion. Will the latest slum and submit to “voluntary” sterilization. inheritor of the curse overcome it? How will In the paper trail of official documents left be- she and her lover vanquish the monster? As hind by this black market, Emma Tarlo, in her audiences lined up to find out,Purana Man- Unsettling Memories: Narratives of the Emer- dir unexpectedly became one of the biggest gency in Delhi, finds “documents in which hits of the 1980s and threatened to bring ‘family planning’ is defined as ‘sterilization’ the traumatic moment of the Emergency and ‘sterilization’ is defined as voluntary even back to the forefront of Indian life. But the before the person has begun to fill out the film, its makers, and its audience are lost in form. What we find in this small piece of pa- the shadows of Bollywood’s big-budget star- per is a fragment of the dominant Emergency driven melodramas. narrative—a token of official family-planning In the summer of 1975, faced with in- euphemisms in action at a local level.” tensifying opposition from trade, student, Families would vacate their slum dwell- and government unions—and the stench of a ings, which would be razed by bulldozers court conviction over electoral misconduct—­ roving the city. Fathers and young men Gandhi had a state of “internal emergency” from these families would enter makeshift declared. In middle-class memory, the next tents to have their tubes tied up and leave 21 months are recalled as that rare time in with pieces of paper in hand. Often the very postcolonial India when the streets stayed poor would sell these promissory notes to clean and trains ran on time. It was the last interested parties in exchange for cash once

30 KARTIK NAIR outside the tent. It has been estimated that ernment loosened its restrictive trade re- millions of men were drawn into this urban gime, the first VCRs reached early adopters black market. through the region’s black-market network. Meanwhile, different technologies were They were status symbols, signaling afflu- being operationalized for use on the rural ence to one’s guests and neighbors, and poor. During the Emergency, the Satellite In- predictably sparked a ­middle-class rush for structional Television Experiment (or SITE) VCRs from whatever source possible. Even- began using satellite technology to dissemi- tually, local manufacturing would enable a nate rural-development programming to domestic supply of machines at lower prices, thousands of television sets in villages across but VCRs remained out of reach for the ma- the country. While television had been around jority. For the poor there were video parlors, since the late 1950s, the small number of ter- small rooms outfitted with a VCR, a projec- restrial transmitters had limited the reach and tor and a screen, with 30 or 45 seats at two range of TV signals to Delhi and its surround- rupees a show. By some estimates, Bombay ings. SITE’s success positioned television alone had 50,000 video parlors by 1985, all as a tool for uninterrupted mass schooling, of them illegal. literally and figuratively from above. Long India’s mass market for video from its after the Emergency, Gandhi’s government beginnings was a black market. VCRs and was keen on furthering its pedagogic agenda; videocassettes were assembled using supplies in the early 1980s, it championed the intro- smuggled from Southeast Asia or made by duction of video­cassette technology into the unlicensed local manufacturers. Video par- country as a cheap and easily reproducible lors, along with video vans, video coaches, medium through which to synchronize rural video clubs, video coffeehouses, and video education. The state was the one to detonate snack bars, operated in a zone unmapped by the information bomb of copyright law, censor- the 1980s, but it couldn’t ship, municipal authori- control the force of the ties, or the technocratic explosion or see past the The state was the elite. The state had long smoke of its own grand administered its hostil- plans. one to detonate the ity to popular cinema Consumer video information bomb, but by censoring films be- became internationally it couldn’t control the fore exhibition and tax- available the same year force of the explosion ing them after. Video’s as the declaration of or see past the smoke contraband images ir- emergency, 1975. Be- ritated the state, which tween then and 1982, had officially introduced when the Indian gov- the technology into the

31 temple of womb country but was now watching it unspool wood and its song-and-dance melodramas into a zone of untaxed, uncensored, and of love, marriage, and family ritual. ­unmonitored sensation. This was a B-cinema not only in Neither, for that matter, its subject matter but also in the did the cinema hall seem to be circuits it travelled, address- able to compete with the plea- ing the masses who were sures of the video parlor. In big previously trapped within cities, inflation and price gouging technocratic fantasies. The were driving audiences to video. Ramsay brothers were In small towns, which had been pioneers of this B-cinema at the bottom of the traditional circuit—seven siblings who film-distribution pyramid and rose to prominence writing, di- were often years behind in the recting, lensing, and financing a series fare they screened, video par- of inexpensive horror films. In their big- lors replaced movie theaters. In gest hit, the Ramsays took audiences back to smaller villages still, video created an ancient curse—and the recent past—of audiences where theaters were yet to arrive. unplanned families. Video moved into India’s temples, factories, In Purana Mandir, the monster Sam- restaurants, hotels, homes—and slums: at ri is about to be executed by royal decree least 30 video parlors were sighted in Bom- when he makes a makes a vow to return bay’s Dharavi slums in 1984. to life once again and curses the King’s fe- Ordinances and amendments were male heirs with horrible deaths incurred in enacted to manage the images, bodies and childbirth. Centuries pass. The latest de- monies set into motion by video. Failing scendant in the royal line is an attractive girl these measures, there was always the handy of college age, Suman (Arti Gupta), in love battery of police raids, assaults, and confis- with the strapping, poor Sanjay (Mohnish cations to try and maintain state control. Bahl). The two can barely keep their hands But it was too late. Video had broken the off each other, which sets alarm bells ring- state’s monopoly over what, when, and how ing for Suman’s father, the Thakur. At first India consumed moving images, and cul- he feigns objection to Sanjay’s lower class tivated a new appetite for unchecked cin- status and his “sheher key kisi naali”, his “in- ematic sensation. a-city-sewer” origins. Failing to break them Almost as a reflex, the 1980s witnessed up, the Thakur reveals theshraap, or curse, the rampant growth of B-grade cinema in that has followed their family. the Bombay film industry. Action thrillers In a pivotal moment in Purana Man- and horror films retailed sex and violence dir, the Thakur revisits the horrific night of not usually associated with the idea of Bolly- Suman’s birth, flashing back to the hospital

32 KARTIK NAIR

where his wife has gone into labor. As he pac- the rural backwoods. Here, they encounter es the hall outside the emergency ward, nurs- and overpower the living corpse of Samri; in es and doctors come running out. Presum- short order, Sanjay burns the monster at the ably horrified by what they have seen, they stake, the shraap is lifted, the couple is mar- suggest the Thakur go have a look for himself. ried, the film ends. He discovers his wife in a state of postpartum It ends! Purana Mandir doesn’t close pustulation, oozing warts and all. She lum- with the joyous birth of a child but with bers out of the bed and towards him, then Suman’s marriage to Sanjay. Strange, be- collapses and dies, leaving him a baby. This cause the shraap never prevented the lovers monstrous (double) birthing is the traumatic from wedding in the first place. The curse past of the film. But convinced that the curse presiding over Suman’s womb is effectively is nothing they can’t overcome or explain, revealed as a euphemism for the true hor- Sanjay and Suman leave the city to return to ror: Sanjay’s seed, which threatens to divert

33 temple of womb the aristocratic bloodline into a city sewer. with the rudimentary technology being used In ­displacing his agency from the realm of for exhibition. The film had already been cer- heterosexual productivity, Purana Mandir tified “Adult” by the Central Board for Film ventilates the Emergency-era imagination Certification, so imagine the surprise of the of the urban-­underclass male as a figure of police when they entered the parlor to find threatening virility that must be checked. that “many children were seeing the film at In classic ideological fashion, the film gives the time of the raid.” The state may be out him an action-hero narrative and a villain to “save” our families, but the unsupervised to emasculate. But it also confusingly recir- child of the slum emerges alongside the un- culates the figure of the urban-underclass planned copy of the film. Like the journey male as traumatized by the technologies of into the Emergency Ward, the raid on the the Emergency. Bombay video parlor uncovered a horrific The curse is utterly contemporary; right scene of unseemly reproduction. next to where it says “Emergency Ward” hangs Purana Mandir was packing audiences a calendar. The flashback to monstrous birth into theaters and video parlors across the is not remote: The year is 1984. In the years country when, four days later, Indira Gandhi following the Emergency, the promises of land was assassinated on her front lawn in Delhi. often came to naught for the men who had Tulsi Ramsay, the director of Purana Man- been sterilized; many were left childless and dir, was in the city when it happened: “There homeless, their futures emptied out. Once he was a hold on film exhibition. But on Friday has vanquished the monster, Sanjay gains a the film resumed. By then the city was burn- family. “I’m proud of you, my son,” the Thakur ing. But I was ignorant, I was happy with my sniffs, as he marries them off.Purana Mandir success.” Purana Mandir would end the year recovers the promise of as the second-highest spawn from the curse of grossing film nationally, sterility as it elliptically an accomplishment that projects fertility beyond barely figures as a foot- the end credits. In the years following note in ’80s history. But And proliferates the Emergency, the in its onscreen and off- off screen. So popular screen itineraries—its was Purana Mandir that promises of land many virtual and mate- it was diverted to the often came to naught rial reproductions, its black market the week for the men who had unplanned family—one of its release. Police re- been sterilized can discern a perverse covered copies in a raid pulse for profusion at on a video parlor in a odds with the State’s ster- Bombay slum, along ile imagination. n

34 35 Labor Pains

by Sophie Lewis

When Western women rent other women’s wombs to carry their children, it undermines the unifying potential of the reproductive commons

THERE WERE ONCE two New Jersey implanted with Dr. Bill Stern’s sperm in doctors named Stern, one of whom—a 1986 to “give the gift of life” in exchange for ­biochemist—lost his family to the Holo- $10,000 ($21,000 today, adjusted for infla- caust and desperately wished to procreate. tion). She needed the money to keep her two But the other, his pediatrician wife, could pubescent children clothed and fed, as her not safely conceive. This, at least, is the sce- husband’s work as a garbage collector hardly nario laid out in the 1989 ABC TV true-life constituted a “family wage.” docudrama, Baby M, a sensationalized re- TheM in Baby M, the first surrogacy court counting of the Sterns’ employment of high case to thrill the nation, stood for Melissa, the school dropout Mary Beth Whitehead. In name the Sterns gave to the baby. Whitehead, what is now called a traditional surrogacy for her part, “kidnapped” the baby back short- agreement, Whitehead, a working-class ly after birth and had the child baptized with a woman from Brick Township, New Jersey, different name, Sara Whitehead. signed up to be the genetic mother of the The surrogate had absconded, had Sterns’ child. changed her mind about relinquish- Whitehead agreed to have her womb ing Baby M, or S, to its IPs—“intended

36 Sophie Lewis parents” in ­surrogacy-industry lingo. That, right now, is more important than an Whitehead had resorted to cold-calling IQ of 180.” the Sterns with suicidal and infanticidal By the time Mary Beth asks herself for threats. Soon, there was a warrant out for whom she is working, it’s too late: A job she her arrest, heralding a full-blown woman cannot halt, nor sabotage without hurting hunt. Whitehead and her husband’s as- herself, has been initiated. sets were frozen. The baby was counter- kidnapped—­reappropriated—by the FBI, For Mary Beth Whitehead in 1986, and after a years-long court battle, White- surrogacy had proved self-annihilating; the head got only very limited visitation rights. worker’s relation to the fetus intensified These state interventions earned White- through workplace rebellion. On screen, head considerable, albeit two-faced, sup- history’s first notable commercial surro- port from the media. The French transla- gate exceeded the gynophobic discipline tion for the TV movie was L’Instinct d’une of the witch hunt. Whitehead cannily de- mère (“A Mother’s Instinct”), a phrase that ployed maternity’s mystique of being more must have been particularly galling for the than a contract against the liberal patriar- real-life Betsy Stern, whom the film depicts chy’s judicial righteousness and invoked a moping over a fully kitted-out bourgeois necro-political kind of counterpower. At baby bedroom. Headlines included: house- the melodramatic apex of Baby M, a shad- wife rejects $10,000, wants daughter owy Mary Beth whispers down the phone: instead (Washington Post); baby m tests “I gave her life. I can take her life away. fight between love and law (Sunday That’s what I’m going to do, Bill ... Why do Times); plea by baby m’s mother is re- you keep saying ‘my’, ‘my’, ‘my’, ‘my’? She’s called (New York Times); just wanted my our baby. Say it. Our baby!” child, surrogate mother says (Washing- Whatever one may think of Whitehead ton Post); birth changed my mind, says as hammily fictionalized terrorist, her asser- surrogate mother (­Courier-Mail); and tion of control over her living product deft- giving up baby like losing arm (Sydney ly exposes the stakes of reproductive labor- Morning Herald). ers’ oppression. It is a grim political field in In Baby M, Mary Beth is shown learn- which babies are bargained or blackmailed ing about the idea of surrogacy from her TV with seeming inevitability. After all, for sur- screen. She hears a woman in an advertise- rogates to withdraw labor, to suspend pro- ment gushing: “There are people who walk duction is to kill. The life-or-death entan- on the moon or discover a cure for some glements of conception, birth, and kinship disease or get elected to Congress. I can’t are thus a partially­ unenclosed commons, a do any of those things. But I am a woman. source of joy yet to be penetrated fully by And I’m healthy. And I can carry a baby. the market, and the very building blocks of

37 labor pains private property and the work ethic. So forget the hysteric Mary Beth White- But that commons is under assault. To- head! $10,000 to $50,000 now “buys” some- day, surrogacies in the U.S. are managed by one who is pretty, professionally inert, grate- profitable “voluntary” clinic-agencies speak- ful for economic opportunity, stringently ing the language of the “gift.” The labor (no surveilled, and contractually guaranteed not pun intended) that commercial surrogates to smoke, drink, or have sex with her (man- perform in the U.S. is not legally recognized datory) husband—nor run around after her as work but as volunteerism, though sur- (mandatory) pre-existing kids—throughout rogacies cost at least four times the 1986 the nine-month job. Unlike the traditional sum—whether they be traditional, in which surrogate of yore who “gave up” the baby, the the surrogate is impregnated with a client’s commercial gestational surrogate biologically sperm, or, as is increasingly the case, gesta- abdicates claims to the child. tional, in which an in-vitro-­fertilized embryo Blogs proliferate with personal surro- is transferred to the surrogate’s womb. Strict gacy accounts, mostly couples, plus a few means-testing is used to assess a surrogate’s single fathers: Chai Baby, Baby Masala, She independent wealth, purporting to check Wasn’t the Mother, She was Just the Stork, for authentic “voluntariness.” This effectively Our Journey to India, and so on. A gay cou- bars working-class American women from ple in Seattle tweeted a montaged video of entering surrogacy agreements. The U.S. sur- their journey to Delhi to meet their new- rogacy industry prefers to cast surrogacy as born twins, in which the birth mother was akin to basket-weaving or amateur pottery, neither figured nor alluded to. The Switzers, not assembly-line­ factory work. a middle-class Texas couple in the docu- In India, the reverse is true. There are mentary Made in India (Haimowitz and upwards of 3,500 so-called womb farms in Sinha, 2010), receive a sonogram by email the country, in which conscripted wom- and erupt in tearful jubilation. en offer the vital force of black flesh con- Made in India makes much of the charm- sidered untouchable at home to incubate ingly ingenuous, veiled, illiterate Aasia, a pro- white children destined to be shipped back spective slum surrogate, who initially laughs to Denmark, Israel, or the U.S. It’s a “purely at the Switzers’ proxy proposition, perhaps economic arrangement” with a “mere ves- because, as in most Indian surrogacy con- sel,” explains Dominic and Octavia Orchard tracts, the money her body’s fertility would of Oxfordshire, UK, a commissioning cou- earn her ($7,000) would in fact keep her at ple featured in the Daily Mail in 2012. To the poverty line in the medium term. But couples like these, surrogates are presented her breathless discovery of science’s miracles as transnational reproductive-service work- form part of her accession to self-­responsible ers, their job description posted online and entrepreneurship and neoliberal ­subjectivity. accompanied by detailed terms of service. “I didn’t believe … ! A child without …

38 sophie lewis

[back-and-forth hand gestures] a man!? How chies inherent to the original sexual division could a child be conceived…?” The subtitles of labor. for Aasia’s speech convey her profound hap- The divisiveness of surrogacy is masked piness at the opportunity to sacrifice for her with social tropes lauding the entrepreneur- own children’s better tomorrow—the same ial “creativity” of the practice as nothing less motive Whitehead had. than a sisterly form of practiced feminism. A notable number of surrogates cite their In the U.S., surrogates can rate in online fo- own kids as their direct motivation for enter- rums the experience of commercially gestat- ing surrogacy agreements. In what Silvia Fed- ing a particular individual’s sperm (or given erici has dubbed the new international divi- couple’s zygote). Can you recommend acting sion of labor, we thus find reproductive labor as “surro-mama” to the Duchamps, or can’t you? within reproductive labor, kids born under What was donor so-and-so’s sperm like, how did multi­million-dollar ­medical scrutiny so that the child turn out? Yet marketized in this way, other kids, born as a populational “surplus,” all gestators become strangely un-creative: may barely live. discursively degraded as undifferentiated or machinic. Be it one womb or another that is The new international division of fed with a given informational blueprint, the labor describes the redistribution of reproduc- industry assures customers that the result will tive work that has divided potential gendered be the same. allies by conscripting migrant and subaltern The surrogacy industry in the West trades classes of women in the service of metropoli- on a well-worn and powerfully gendering tan, citizen, and bourgeois women. dyad, the idea of “doing it for love” rather than Assistive reproductive work as it’s regu- “for money.” For example, the Center for Sur- lated today appears to be not only outside rogate Parenting showcases videos of “Bree- women’s control but actively corrosive to the na, Maine” or “Rebecca, California” insisting possibility of surrogate mother–midwife sol- beatifically that “I enjoy being pregnant.” “It’s idarity: Each role becomes professionalized a calling in life.” “I feel blessed that as a couple and narrowed, preclud- you would trust me to ing alliances and shared take care of something so responsibilities that un- precious,” and so on. But dergird gender as a form For surrogates to most tellingly, the script of class-consciousness. withdraw labor, to now ­emphasizes: “I’m The redistribution of suspend production, not giving anything away: baby-carrying creates after all, is to kill I’m giving something new and deeper divi- back that they were so sions among women, gracious as to allow me strengthening hierar- to spend nine months

39 labor pains with.” For love, not money, then, insofar as it’s to the maternity ward or the newborn’s body. Breena instead of Aasia. In forcing the father to say “our” instead of Yet at the same time, this is love co- “my,” the surrogate confronts­ the proprietary cooned in a contract and so, it whispers re- character of the haloed liberal nuclear fam- assuringly, it operates for money, too—not ily with the idea of a reproductive commons love. Surrogacy breaks those boundaries en- from below. tirely, commoditizing affective labor that for- Because women’s bodies are squatted by merly belonged to the commons, and render- biocapital in fetal form, women’s struggles ing real love—particularly between women for freedom will, heartbreakingly, come into separated by social class and geography—all conflict with the lives of infants, as they did in but impossible. Baby M. While Shulamith Firestone saw the Sadly, the “reproductive commons from oppression of women and children as linked below”—the revolutionary collective recla- and analogous, it is worth reflecting, too, on mation of life’s labors to which Federici calls her decisive pessimism about the gendered us—cannot be announced and sustained reproductive condition as a whole—that is, simply through the recognition of a tiny sin- the social arrangement of pregnancy, vis-à- gularity in the fetus, or through the mere vis our hopes for authentic feminist eman- belief that a utopian nonpossessive web of cipation. In an age of assisted reproductive nurture ought to spring up spontaneously technology, Firestone’s call for the universal- around it. The truth was that the Sterns and ization of randomized test-tube gestations Whiteheads would not freely associate af- is too swiftly mocked by modern feminists. ter the birth. They could not agree on who With the feminism of the familial sitting stag- it was they were even fighting for. And out- nant, it’s time to ask ourselves what a com- sourcing gestation across oceans makes any mercial surrogate strike would look like. n sort of continual association over a child near impossible.

Just as “wages for housework” is a struggle against both housework and the wage relation, disobedient surrogacy implies the valuation of the vital embodied processes of child bearing and then, necessarily, a revolt against value itself. In Baby M, Whitehead’s words—“That’s what I’m going to do, Bill”— open the question of whether well-worn la- bor strategies of striking and organizing can be transposed from the office or factory floor

40 41 Prescription Strike

by Ayesha A. Siddiqi

The CIA’s use of vaccine programs as cover for covert operations in Pakistan has endangered aid workers and undermined the fight against polio

“We went into a camp to inoculate some children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn’t see. We went back there, and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms. And I remember ... I ... I ... I cried, I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out; I didn’t know what I wanted to do! And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it ... I never want to forget. And then I realized... like I was shot... like I was shot with a diamond ... a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought, my God... the genius of that! The genius! The will to do that! Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we, because they could stand that these were not monsters, these were men ...” —Walter E. Kurtz, Apocalypse Now

THE FATAL ATTACKS on health workers But you would have to be an almost vaccinating against polio push the limits of quaintly classic racist to believe these attacks even the most ungenerous vision of a “bar- are simply the violence inherent to brown baric” Pakistan. Understandably provoking men with long beards rather than the prod- disgust and awe, headlines announcing the uct of a specific set of circumstances. With murders reinforce faith in the sound judg- the discovery of a covert CIA war operat- ment of Western intervention. ing behind their back, rural Pakistanis are

42 ayesha a. siddiqi

­increasingly wary of any kind of Western assume that there must be some hidden presence, including medicine. The real threat interest of the West in the polio campaign to Pakistan’s anti-polio campaign is a lack of because it is killing us through the drones immunity to the War on Terror. and … giving us the vaccine on the pretext There was a time when Pakistan’s mis- of eradicating polio.” sion to eradicate polio was thriving. In 2007, Both the vaccinations and the drones opposition to the vaccine declined in western are foreign intrusions, and the violence of Pakistan, home to the highest rates of polio. the latter undermines faith in the former. That year, a government-coordinated cam- Last summer, Mullah Nazir, a Taliban com- paign, working with local religious leaders mander in South Waziristan famous for sign- to inform locals about the vaccine, reached ing a peace pact with the Pakistani military, more than 30 million children. Compared issued a pamphlet declaring, “Polio and oth- with the 2006 immunization, recorded refus- er ­foreign-funded vaccination drives in Wana als were down almost 20 percent in North- subdivision will not be allowed until U.S. West Frontier province. And in the Federally drone operations in the agency are stopped.” Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), nearly The pamphlet cited 2011’s CIA fake vaccina- 50 percent of parents who had initially re- tion plot as evidence that “infidel forces are fused the vaccine opted to allow it. using media, education, and development as Now, vaccine refusal is once again chron- a tool to gag Muslims.” Many other Taliban ically high. For rural regions already skeptical Shuras, or councils, issued similar bans on of outsiders offering free medicine, U.S. for- anti-polio programs conditioned on the end eign policy shrouds Western aid in suspicion. of drone strikes. The pamphlet stated, “In the America is engaged in one war in Afghanistan, garb of these vaccination campaigns, the U.S. one in Iraq, and in a drone war in Pakistan. It and its allies are running their spying net- regularly threatens a war in Iran and is home works in FATA which has brought death and to a network of Islamophobia so potent, it in- destruction on them in the form of drone spired a massacre in Norway. It isn’t so sur- strikes.” In January, a drone strike killed Mul- prising, then, that medicine even tangentially lah Nazir. related to the U.S. is often assumed to be yet Both the World Health Organization another American effort to kill Muslims. and the United Nations have halted vaccine At a recent conference on “Polio erad- campaigns after a series of fatal attacks on ication in the light of Islam” hosted by the volunteers. Killed under suspicion of being International Islamic University, Islamabad, covert operatives for the U.S., they’re victims and designed to dispel anxiety over the vac- of a precedent set by the CIA. cine, scholar Samiul Haq told the crowd, The vaccination plot Nazir referenced in “People of Pakistan, especially in the KP his pamphlet was an intelligence-­gathering [Khyber Pakhtunkhwa] and tribal ­areas, mission under the guise of a hepatitis B

43 prescription strike

­vaccine campaign that ended up being nei- ings found him guilty, and the U.S. Senate ther. In the poorer part of Abbottabad, chil- responded by cutting $33 million in aid to dren were given only one of the required three Pakistan—$1 million for every year of Af- doses before workers were directed to move ridi’s sentence. closer to Osama bin Laden’s compound. At U.S. Congressman Dana Rohrabacher this point the CIA already knew Osama bin introduced a bipartisan resolution in the Laden’s whereabouts but wanted to confirm House of Representatives to declare Afridi a his DNA. If and how the CIA managed to hero, saying, “he paid a terrible price at the procure DNA samples through the adminis- hands of our so-called allies—the Pakistani tration of vaccines isn’t clear. government.” Afridi became proof of every- The CIA mission for bin Laden used thing Americans suspected about Pakistan’s Pakistani faces at every level of the plot except loyalty and everything Pakistanis suspected the actual kill. Shakil Afridi, a health official about America’s honesty. in the tribal area bordering Afghanistan, was paid to spearhead the hoax. He spread word of The fallout has been ongoing. More the campaign with posters advertising a Paki- than 30 health workers have died trying to stani medicine manufacturer. He bought the administer polio vaccines in Pakistan since cooperation of local government health work- the CIA’s field trip into Abbottabad. ers. He trained Pakistani nurses to administer Javed Akhter is the executive director of the vaccines. These nurses promptly lost their Support With Working Solutions (SWWS), jobs after Pakistan’s investigation into the Osa- a Pakistani aid group dedicated to improv- ma bin Laden raid revealed the hoax. Defense ing conditions for women and the poor. In Secretary Leon Panetta said that Afridi “was January, his team of seven was shot down not in any way doing anything that would have on their way back from working in Sher Af- undermined Pakistan.” After all, Pakistanis zal Banda, a village in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa have never been a priority in America’s war on where SWWS had built a clinic and a school. terror; they’re the collateral damage. SWWS had been a presence in the region The U.S., desperate for closure, cel- since 2010, and their list of successful social, ebrated the death that supposedly justified economic, and educational projects is formi- two wars, and the Pakistani government dable. When I asked Akhter if he thought the bristled at yet another unilateral U.S. mis- attack was precipitated by the CIA’s covert sion conducted without Pakistan’s consent war, he said “Yes, absolutely.” or knowledge. To convict Afridi of treason In Pakistan, America’s War on Terror isn’t would have meant calling the U.S. the enemy. an abstraction for stump speeches, but a dead- Instead, Afridi was quietly charged under a ly reality. In the FATA province health work- tribal code for providing supplies to the mili- ers find themselves in an undeclared war zone, tant group Lashkar-e-Islam. Secret proceed- one between “the Pakistan army, CIA, and

44 Ayesha A. Siddiqi over a dozen militant groups (some of which such a relationship­ without resistance. are at odds with one another),” says Middle When Pakistan was founded in 1947, East Institute scholar Arif Rafiq. “There is the tribes in the region now known as the FATA fundamental absence of trust. Suspected CIA province pledged loyalty to the state on the and ISI [Inter-Services Intelligence, condition that they would maintain Pakistan’s intlligence service] spies their autonomy. “The Pakistan are executed in the streets.” army entered the area for the first The paranoia isn’t unwar- time ever after 9/11, under ranted. In January 2011 the pretext of combating al- CIA contrac- Qaeda,” Rafiq tor Raymond explains. “The Davis killed traditional sys- two allegedly tem governing armed Paki- FATA was re- stani men in liant on tribal Lahore. When leaders. It has he phoned been obliter- for backup, ated by over a the American decade of con- Consulate sent flict. FATA is an SUV that in disarray. Hun- then sped the wrong dreds of thousands of way down a one-way street, killed locals in FATA have been dis- another Pakistani man, and drove off. placed by conflict. Some have fled to Immediately preceding the capture of nearby districts or have migrated all the way Osama bin Laden, the Davis scandal con- south to Karachi.” firmed what many Pakistanis were afraid of: Rafiq goes on to say that “attacks on polio that the U.S. had filled the country with co- workers have risen after former CIA director vert operatives for dubious reasons, and they Leon Panetta admitted on60 Minutes in Janu- didn’t care if Pakistanis died. Pakistan’s alliance ary 2012 that Dr. Shakil Afridi worked for the with the U.S. has meant tolerating a proxy war agency … These attacks take place in Pash- within its borders. Simultaneously, U.S. politi- tun-populated areas throughout the country, cians and pundits have voiced constant skep- and so it is in the context of the war on terror ticism about Pakistan’s status as an ally. It’s in which these workers are targeted.” tempting to think America’s misgivings about The stateside reports on the mounting Pakistan are at least partially rooted in the deaths of health workers provide the number­ knowledge no other country would ­accede to killed, with the cursory reference to the Taliban­

45 prescription strike or local militants as likely perpetrators, and fear exhibited in Pakistan’s autonomous Western readers shake their heads in contempt. areas are understandable for a region that But what could the shadowed violence of a U.S. found itself the unwitting host of a foreign presence in Pakistan encourage besides more war. Families refusing vaccines logically chaos, more violence? The attitude that Paki- conclude that a country launching drones stani lives are expendable—Obama has yet to with one hand can’t be trusted to offer aid apologize for the hundreds of children killed by with the other. President George W. Bush drone strikes—leaves Pakistanis resisting with has said, “You’re either with us or against the only targets available to them: health work- us.” Rural Pakistanis can do little else but ers that symbolize Western money. acknowledge they are not us and want noth- Each of the three countries left with ing to do with us. endemic polio—Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Identity is the primary resource in a ­Nigeria—endure sustained U.S. involve- war against an idea. The distrust “they” in ment. For each, security is the top challenge Pakistan have for “us” reflects the distrust to humanitarian aid, and for each, myths “we” have for “them.” How many drone at- about the goals of polio vaccines persist. tacks, CIA scandals, and covert operations Chief among these myths is the idea of does it take to cast vaccine workers as for- vaccines as a method of sterilization. Belief in eign threats? How many terrorist attacks did such a conspiracy is encouraged by the U.N.’s it take to warrant the search of every brown keen and vocal interest in slowing Pakistan’s man at the airport, the spying on Muslim population growth, expressed most recently Americans, the launching of two separate in Capturing the Demographic Dividend in wars? We conflate large swaths of Asia into a Pakistan, a book launched last month at an single Muslim enemy that lurks in deserts and event organized by the caves; we retroactively U.N. Population Fund. label every “military age” As much as Pakistani male killed by drone a health workers try to militant. They conflate convince families of the In Pakistan, all Western initiatives vaccine’s benefits, their NGOs are often into a single operation efforts are undermined bent on their demise, ev- by the perception that viewed as nothing ery health worker a po- the program may be U.S. more than support tential spy. Meanwhile, funded. NGOs are often infrastructure for Pakistani children die viewed as nothing more foreign agents of polio and Americans than support infrastruc- ask, “Why do Pakistanis ture for foreign agents. hate us? We’re only try- The skepticism and ing to save them.” n

46 47 Selling Roots

by ELLIOT AGUILAR

Can DNA tests really tell us anything about our ethnic identity?

IN A SHORT film on the website of African offers perkily. The Latino man explains that Ancestry, a “genetic genealogy” company his relatives are Mexican. Another man tells that targets a primarily African-American us that his family is “mostly from India.” The clientele, actors respond to a series of ques- black characters, however, are vexed by the tions asked by an off-screen narrator. In these question. Most make diffident admissions of staged man-on-the-street interviews, we ignorance. The desultory answer of a school- meet a fair-skinned white woman stretching age boy: “Somewhere in Africa, I guess.” before a run, a Latino man sawing wood at African Ancestry, which provides mi- a carpentry bench, and an African-American tochondrial and Y-chromosome DNA tests barber, among a handful of others. Asked that provide information about maternal and where they’re from, the characters answer paternal lines of descent, respectively, claims with the cities and states in which they were to have “freed” more than 30,000 families born. Then the narrator asks about their with the results of these tests. Among the deeper origins: “But what about your fam- numerous advertised benefits are the op- ily, your ancestors—where are they from?” portunities to finally learn which country “They’re from Ireland,” the white woman in Africa your family “comes from” and to

48 ELLIOT AGUILAR

­establish “a cultural identity for you and your his net into a sea of ancestors, dragging in kids.” The insinuation is that because of slav- however many grandparents, great-grand- ery, blacks know less about their ancestors. parents, and so on. As long as the sea is large, Yet few people of any race know much about it isn’t likely that any two fisherman’s nets their forebears. It’s unlikely, for example, that will become entangled. But as we travel fur- the “Irish” girl in the video would be able to ther back in time to more remote ancestors, name a single ancestor from Ireland. Never the sea dries up until all that is left is a small mind: If she could, the company suggests, pool, narrower than the breadth of each net. she would be saying something important— Now every fisherman is casting into the something fundamental—about herself. same pool, dragging up the same ancestors. And so the video’s deeper implication is that What’s more, that sea dries up rather quickly. we can answer the complex, emotional ques- In fact, there is likely a point in time within tion of personal and ethnic identity—who the past 10,000 years when some fraction am I—with an empirical test describing who of the population comprised the ancestors our ancestors are. of everyone alive today, and the remaining This, at least, is the information the tests fraction left no descendants in the present. appear to give. What they actually provide Go back far enough, and all our family trees is something far more limited: the specu- completely overlap. lative origin of only a small portion of our Yet even though we all have the same genetic material. It is the nature of genealo- ancestors if you reach deep enough into the gies, after all, to continually branch—that is past—even though the story our DNA tells the very reason we refer to them as family is ultimately one of ­inclusion—genealogies “trees.” As you count your forebears further tend to get used as a means of creating exclu- back in time, the number doubles at each sive group identities, for example by demon- generation: You have two parents who each strating a connection to a single individual or had two parents and so on. Go back 10 gen- tribe. These group identities presume a level erations (roughly the year 500 B.C.) and the of similarity among the members. We can number of your ancestors is larger than the learn something about ourselves, the think- population of the planet. One fact reins in ing goes, by identifying the group we belong this exponential growth. Further in the past, to. But what we really learn from genealogies the world’s population was smaller. Because is that there is no such group. Our genomes the number of our ancestors can’t exceed the are made of long strings of molecules tangled number of people who have ever lived, some into structures called chromosomes. They individuals make multiple appearances in are physical objects that take up space, that our family trees. And those individuals must can be weighed. They are finite. There is only also appear in everyone else’s family trees. It so much room in a genome for the contribu- is as though each of us is a fisherman­casting tions of all our ancestors. The further back

49 selling roots we go in time, the less any single one of our for many, the inheritance of wealth and status­ ancestors is likely to have contributed to our along these lines has been significant in de- genomes. What’s more, the genetic contribu- termining the circumstances of their lives. tion a single ancestor has made to any one of These privileged lines are also a primary ba- us will vary widely. sis for constructing individual or national A true accounting of our genealogy, identities, as the African Ancestry video then, would record not only all of our ances- suggests. But simply because we’ve singled tors but what genetic material, if any, we’ve them out doesn’t mean they bear particularly inherited from each of them. While this is more weight. A child may carry her father’s impossible for the whole genome, some surname, but it is unlikely that she considers forms of DNA are special. Unlike the rest herself any less her mother’s daughter. of our genome that resides in the nucleus of every cell, mitochondrial DNA is held in the H.L. MENCKEN ONCE wrote that the mitochondria, the organelles that provide “quasi-science of genealogy” was “directed energy for the cell. When sperm and egg join almost exclusively toward the establish- at fertilization, the sperm’s mitochondria are ing of aristocratic descents for nobodies.” chemically tagged for destruction. As a result, Across the pond, genetic-ancestry compa- you inherit this form of DNA only from your nies seem happy to provide just this service. mother, who received it from her mother and A trio of related companies, BritainsDNA™, so on. Similarly, the Y-chromosome, which is ­ScotlandsDNA™, and IrelandsDNA™, found- found only in men, is inherited exclusively ed by the historian Allistair Moffat under the from the father. scientific direction of Jim Wilson, a geneti- Thanks to the sex-specific inheritance of cist at the University of Edinburgh, aims to these parts of the genome, we can learn more achieve “a new understanding of … a people’s readily about the matrilineal and patrilineal history.” To date, they’ve been better known lines of our ancestry than any other lines. for discovering exotic genealogical connec- Because of this, these lines represent “privi- tions. In 2012 they reported that actor Tom leged” lines of ancestry in modern gene- Conti was a relative of Napoleon Bonaparte. based genealogical research. Yet they are only Later Moffat claimed to have identified Brit- two of the vast number that exist. Consider, ish descendants of the Queen of Sheba. In for example, your mother’s father’s mother’s the 2013 televised documentary Meet the Iz- father’s mother’s line: Who knows what in- zards, comedian Eddie Izzard was told that fluence this great-great-great-grandmother he is a descendant of Viking invaders to the may have had on who you are today? British Isles. Giving priority to particular lineages in But there are no genes that uniquely our ancestry is nothing new. Surnames simi- identify specific populations of humans. The larly privilege a specific line of ancestors, and most we can do is locate certain variants of

50 ELLIOT AGUILAR genes that are more or less common, or even family’s immediate roots are in colonial back- absent, in groups that have historically inter- waters—tranquil, obscure places far from the bred very little. When two populations show clamor of European history. But my maternal similar frequencies for variants of a gene, it grandmother was born a Tranch. Her father, might reasonably be inferred that there has born in 1895 in a far-flung corner of the Brit- been interbreeding between those popula- ish Empire, was a patrilineal descendant of tions at some point. pious Frederic. We have almost nothing in If we observe a gene variant in a popu- common, but a not-so-winding genealogical lation, and we know from recorded history path leads you directly from Monsieur de la that this population was once invaded by Tranche to me. another group of people among whom that All of us have similarly improbable an- gene variant is very common, we might in- cestors. The Vikings who pillaged Britain fer that this variant entered the population shared ancestors in common with today’s in numbers with the invaders. The more Khoisan of the Kalahari. The young black boy samples we have, the stronger we can make in the African Ancestry ad has ancestors who these kinds of claims. While the prevalence were peasants in Roman Gaul. The branches of genetic similarities between populations of all our family trees eventually tangle. is reasonable evidence for historical con- Yet genealogies as we imagine them tell nections, telling any one person the story of us something like the opposite. They con- how they inherited particular genes is nearly firm our fantasies of tribal identity, promis- impossible. What looks like Viking ancestry ing a relation to particular individuals who may as well be a forgotten Norwegian great- have somehow bestowed upon us through great-grandfather. the ages the attributes which set us apart My own family history offers an ex- from others. These imagined clans have little ample. In 1574, amid the Wars of Religion, basis in reality, and like the mythic genealo- a Huguenot nobleman named Frederic de la gies once drawn for ancient kings, they are Tranche, “finding he must renounce either his not intended to accurately represent his- conscience or his station,” fled war-­ravaged tory. To the extent that any of us belong to France for the relative safety of Protestant racial or cultural groups, these are transient England. He settled in Northumberland, identifications. Migration, the happenstance where over time his descendants—with the of history, and the gene shuffling of sexual anglicized surname of Trench—rose to “the reproduction will create new groups, new highest rank among the noblest in their land peoples, just as has been the case for the past of adoption.” I was born in Brooklyn some 200,000 of our species. 400 years later, to a father who had emigrated In DNA USA, a recent book by Brian from Belize and a mother whose parents had Sykes, the founder of Oxford Ancestors™ emigrated from Belize and Suriname. My and a geneticist, the author relates the

51 selling roots story of a disgruntled customer who con- people desire­ that evidence to reveal. But he tested the results of a test he’d ordered. The might also have told the customer that the man’s Y-chromosome haplotype indicated man is neither a Viking nor a Celt but a resi- supposed “Viking” ancestry. The customer, dent of the British Isles whose ancestry is in- on the other hand, was sure he was a Celt, cludes all kinds of people who arrived there due to his dark hair and small stature. He in the past. He might have made clearer the insisted that the results were wrong and difficulty of connecting genetic sequences to demanded his money back. After some the linguistic or cultural groups we’ve identi- discussion, Sykes finally relented. “DNA fied in history. We inherit genes, not identi- always struggles to reverse the deepest of ties. Culture is not contained in the double psychological perceptions or identity asso- helix but arises from our interactions with ciations,” he explains. others. If we want to know who we really are Sykes is right to note that there is often we’ll have to look beyond our chromosomes a clash between genetic evidence and what to the company we keep. n

52 Fjordian Slip

By JW McCormack

WARNING: ANY CONCLUSIONS that follow are premature. That’s because The second volume of Karl Ove it is currently only possible for English-­ language readers, along with most of the Knausgård’s epic exploration non-Nordic world, to enjoy a maximum of the everyday, in all its of 1,003 pages of Karl Ove Knausgård’s glorious meaninglessness six-volume novel My Struggle—and yet, after finishing the second installment of Don Bartlett’s translation from the Nor- wegian, I am very close to believing that the complete work will not only match sales in Norway, where the total cop- ies sold equal a tenth of the population, but also become the sort of thing you see old people reading on the subway, fresh- men using to bookend their dorm-room shelves, and house husbands discussing at the laundromat. Should this come to pass, Knausgård would not only become one of the most famous Norwegians in history—joining the Asgard of Hamsun, Munch, and the man who discovered lep- rosy—but, given the confessional nature of his project, one of the individuals we know the most about overall, certainly more than any other living author, quite possibly more than we know about our Karl Ove Knausgård parents’ childhoods, the inner lives of our My Struggle: Book Two friends, the day-to-day of our husbands Archipelago and wives. If by some chance I happen to be in

53 Fjordian Slip the ballpark regarding My Struggle’s unusual am you and you are everyone, we come from the same and are going to the crossover potential, a big part of its appeal same, and on the way we hear the same will rest upon Knausgård’s willingness to on the radio, see the same on TV, read do many things one is not supposed to do, the same in the press … Even if you sit in a tiny town hundreds of kilometers among them write long prosaic sentences, from the center of the world and don’t emphasize commonplace objects and un- meet a single soul, their hell is your remarkable events from the existence of a hell, their heaven is your heaven, you not-untypical middle-aged writer, and name have to burst the balloon that is the world and let everything in it spill over his book after Hitler’s. And yet the “contro- the sides. versy” mentioned in every account of My Struggle’s original reception appears to have There is much spillage in this second vol- more to do with a frank exhibitionism that ume, even compared with the first, which ef- is at odds with Norwegian standards of pri- fectively consisted of two extended set pieces vacy but which, given the ubiquity of reality bookended in youth and death: first, a forma- television and tell-all memoir in the States, tive New Year’s party from the author’s youth hardly strikes an American reader as scandal- in the country and then his coming to terms, ous. What’s more provocative is the form this as an adult, with his father’s death from alco- autobiography takes, a mélange of personal holism. It’s harder to bind the content of Book essay, first-rate storytelling, and compulsive Two to any given theme, though it is subtitled philosophy that winds up feeling truer and A Man in Love and spans roughly the period more artful, if you can believe it, than even of six years during which Karl Ove meets his the finest these capacious genres have to of- second wife, a poet named Linda, relocates to fer. Nor does this tension between the banal Stockholm, has two children, writes his second and sublime elude Knausgård, who through- novel (A Time For Everything), and retreats to out My Struggle’s second book returns to ar- the smaller city of Malmö. But each milestone tifice’s role in shaping a consensual reality. is embedded in dozens of episodes—a chil- It’s not always an uplifting thought. Norway dren’s birthday party, occasional brushes with may enjoy a high standard of living, but the a cranky Russian woman who lives in the same other side of social harmony is stultifying ­building—so commonplace that I hesitate to ­gridlock—and what, Knausgård seems to even call them scenes. Here, swathed in rumi- wonder, is the point of producing art if we’re nation, speculation, and conversation, much all feeding from the same trough? of which is with Karl Ove’s intellectual friend Geir, these minor incidents add up to some- We have access not only to our own thing unlike a book and more like a hypnoti- lives but to almost all the other lives in our cultural circle, access not only to cally sustained feeling: a sprawling sleepwalk our own memories but to the memories that takes us deeper the more it creeps into the of the whole of our damn culture, for I borders of Karl Ove’s consciousness.

54 JW McCormack

Perhaps naturally for a writer, who is without some self-admonishment. “So why obliged to give a great deal of thought to what not just write fiction?” he wonders, “The he does and does not aspire to, Knausgård’s truth did not, of course, have a one-to-one characteristically lucid insights often emerge relationship with reality. Good arguments, out of aesthetic judgments. He also seems but that didn’t help, just the thought of fic- to be taking instruction, as much of what he tion, just the thought of a fabricated char- says of Monet or Dostoevsky can be said of acter in a fabricated plot made me feel nau- My Struggle. In the sparse domestic dramas seous, I reacted in a physical way.” of Ibsen (somehow neglected in my earlier Here is where Knausgård differs from list of famous Norsemen), he observes that “a Proust, whose mention has been compul- kind of boundlessness arose, something wild sory in the advance reviews of My Struggle. and reckless. Into it disappeared plot and Knausgård is less interested in memory in space, what was left was emotion … the very itself than he is in how objects incubate cer- nucleus of life, and thus you found yourself in tain moments in time and language deter- a place where it no longer mattered what was mines environments. This trust that every- actually happening.” He praises Tartovsky’s day life most reveals the forms that wear us films with their all-seeing eye down and, by and by, transfigure us explains Knausgård’s comprehensive approach. Take which changed the world into a kind of a scene late in the book when, jostled on the terrarium, where everything trickled metro, he drops his phone and only realizes and ran, floated and drifted, where all after the fact that it had fallen into a wom- the characters could melt away from the picture and only coffee cups on a table an’s open purse. His friend Geir suggests he were left, filling slowly with the falling send a text to the lost phone, which is found rain, against a backdrop of intense, by the woman’s fiancé, who agrees, after an almost menacing green vegetation, only slightly suspicious phone call, to return yes—then the eye would also be able to see the same wild, existential depths it. The encounter is certainly thematic, as the unfold in everyday life. adjacency of strangers comes up again and again in Book Two. But let’s get real: Not only Most of all, Karl Ove returns to paint- is the cell-phone situation laughably extrane- ing, art without words, “an area that was ous and pretty much devoid of obvious narra- completely devoid of intelligence, which I tive purpose, it’s also told all the way through had difficulty acknowledging or accepting, twice verbatim, just as, if it happened to you, yet which perhaps was the most important you’d probably tell the story before you for- single element of what I wanted to do.” The got all about it. But to leave it out would be to novelist’s usual pathways into our sympa- surrender to the petrified standards of mod- thies seem closed off for the late-30s Knaus- ern literature: “When the movements art gård, though this realization does not come cultivated became static that was what you

55 fjordian slip had to avoid and ignore. Not because it was scientist, Newton, all still unsurpassed in modern, in tune with our times, but because their fields, and how can it be that this pe- it wasn’t moving, it was dead.” riod achieved this wealth?” Perhaps because If My Struggle is a world removed from “death was closer.” For Knausgård, it’s death, Proust, it resembles traditional memoir even not democracy or humanism, that is the con- less, where one’s experiences are massaged tract that both unites us and makes the past into the shape of a guiding narrative. Instead, a foreign language. Meanwhile, the present Knausgård takes himself as representative of is meaningless. Accustomed to nearly every both modernity and the welfare state, without possible experience, we no longer ascribe to giving in to the illusion that either is respon- things the same significance as in our past, sible for identity or can account for the dif- when they were new. In Book One, the differ- ferences between human beings. No, to find ence between a child’s reality and an adult’s the cracks of difference along which our op- was sharply delineated by the quenching of pressive similarities are arranged, everything youth’s sensitivity “with the taste of salt that must be weighed and considered, everything could fill your summer days to saturation, must be placed in its correlative relationship now it was just salt, end of story.” But in Book with regard to everything else, for “it is not Two, it’s not the end of the story—when he the case that we are born equal and that the kisses Linda, he catches the taste of salt on conditions of life make our lives unequal, it her lips. is the opposite, we are born unequal, and the If it is death, and the knowledge of death, conditions of life make our lives more equal.” that renders us undifferentiated and eventu- Improbably, Karl Ove comes across in this ally indifferent, love is what sets us apart and six-volume collection of encyclopedic auto- individualizes—to a point, at least. Linda biography as almost indifferent to himself, and Karl Ove’s early days trace often destruc- making note of his reactions and desires as tive highs and lows. Early on, he slashes his though transcribing readouts from a kind of face with a broken glass after she briefly re- phenomenological existing-machine. jects him; in Stockholm, Linda threatens to As for the past, Knausgård confesses to leave over small matters while Karl Ove navi- being less interested in his own than in the gates his separation from his first wife. They past, history itself, with the 16th and 17th behave, in other words, like children. And centuries being particular fixations: “Admit- still, the world is a changed place that lives tedly, that world was rough and wretched, again with the intensity of childhood: filthy and ravaged with sickness, drunken and ignorant, full of pain, low life expec- If someone had spoken to me then about a lack of meaning, I would have tancy and rampant superstition, but it pro- laughed out loud, for I was free and the duced the greatest writer, Shakespeare, the world lay at my feet, open, packed with greatest painter, Rembrandt, the greatest meaning, from the gleaming, futuristic

56 JW McCormack

trains that streaked across Slussen ­attempt to be, simply and calmly. Knausgård beneath my flat, to the sun coloring the church spires in Riddarholmen red in doesn’t, as the cliché goes, wring meaning the nineteenth-century-style, sinisterly out of everyday life, he frees everyday life beautiful sunsets I witnessed every from the responsibility of having to seem evening for all those months, from the aroma of freshly picked basil and the meaningful. It is what it is. That isn’t to say taste of ripe tomatoes to the sound of that he doesn’t go some ways toward satis- clacking heels on the cobbled slope fying our craving for conflict and resolution down to the Hilton Hotel late one (“Will Karl Ove finally lose his patience night when we sat on a bench holding hands and knowing that it would be us with the old Russian in his building?”). But two now and forever ... the concerns of narrative or art or identity fall away in the moment, and the moment is Of course, love too can be a matter of what Knausgård is after. After a canon built pragmatic routines—it too is subject to the on thinking and feeling, here is an authentic sublimating undertones of modern life. But 21st century masterpiece dedicated to ex- the love that surrounds even the most de- isting, existence being perhaps the briefest basing rituals of family life in Book Two (I’m state of all and therefore the one hardest to thinking of a “Rhythm Time” class Karl Ove be exhaustive about, even given six books to is obliged to participate in with his daugh- say, in essence, “there I was.” ter) makes this volume more uplifting than the first, where the realities of death were the There I was, walking through the crowds beneath the darkening sky, main concern. In love, Karl Ove is “cast back through falling snowflakes, past shop to the time when my feelings swung from after shop with illuminated interiors, wild elation to a wild fury … and the intensi- alone in my new town, without a ty was so great that sometimes life felt almost thought as to how things would be here, because that made no difference, unlivable, and when nothing could give me it really didn’t make any difference, all any peace of mind except books with their I was thinking about was that I had to different places, different times and different get through this. ‘This’ was life. Getting through it, that was what I was doing. n people, where I was no one and no one was me. That was when I was young and had no options.” Knausgård argues that we are most unalike as children and most similar when dead. In the middle, love restores the mad- ness we are born with and gradually cured of. Life is not literature, for nothing lies be- neath it. Knausgård’s struggle is not a search for meaning or lost time, nor is it even ­really the story of his journey as a writer. It is an

57 An Infantile Disorder

By MAX FOX

THERE IS NOTHING more desirable than a dead teenager. As soon as teenage- If jobs mean maturity, not hood was defined as distinct around the everyone gets to grow up turn of the past century, nations devel- oped industrial techniques to kill them on a mass scale. In boy form, the dead teen- ager is still the defense industry’s flagship domestic product. Fashion houses and magazines stalk it as a girl. And why not? Teenagers established themselves as a class by negotiating a confluence of un- employment crises, consumer-­society- building, and war. What could anyone do with this pool of spillover at the entrance to the labor market? Their consumptive bodies, with uncurbed capacity to work, lay just this side of receiving a wage. Dead, they are demand without demands. But some teenagers don’t die. In Ja- pan in the early 1990s, a young psychia- trist named Saitō Tamaki began seeing pa- tients with a cluster of strange symptoms. Actually, he barely saw them at all; more often than not, other family members would approach him about a brother or a son who was afflicted with an unfamil- iar state. Mostly men on the threshold of Saitō Tamaki adulthood, they were retreating to their Hikikomori: Adolescence Without End rooms, shrinking from all social contact University of Minnesota Press, 208 pages or communication, and closing off into themselves, often for periods of a year

58 max fox or more. Not wanting to kill themselves but all emerged in some way through the Japa- unable to live in society, these youths folded nese social order, there was nothing intrin- inward in an attempt to fit themselves away. sically Japanese about the phenomenon. In Saitō began calling them hikikomori sainen, fact, he had coined the term hikikomori to “withdrawn young men,” and in 1998 pub- translate work that an American psycholo- lished a book with his findings calledShakai - gist had done on similar cases of acute social teki hikikomori—Owaranai Shishunki, or So- withdrawal and later joined it up with the cial Withdrawal—Adolescence Without End. sociological category of NEETs (not in edu- Saitō ventured a count: There were cation, employment, or training) in Britain. 1 million people in a state of withdrawal or His internationalism slyly made room for an hikikomori, about one percent of the Japa- astonishing claim: The structure of age itself nese population. Eighty percent of them was beginning to break down. Japan might were men; 90 percent were over 18. “Social have been early to the trend, but it was an ef- withdrawal is not some sort of ‘fad’ that will fect of the market, not any particular culture. just fade away,” Saitō wrote. It is “a symptom, Age is the most generic attribute a per- not the name of an illness,” and “there has son can have, but each age is also irreducibly been no sign that the number of cases will personal. Every 35-year-old has been 16, but decrease.” His book became a best seller in no one has ever been 16 in exactly the same weeks. Hikikomori joined otaku (a person way. No surprise: The experience is deeply with obsessive interests) and karoshi (death striated by gender, race, and class, and then from overwork) as a loan word in English again by the most intimate hazards of family to describe a new social phenomenon that history and endocrinology. Even so, matura- at first appeared uniquely Japanese. A few tion feels so natural it’s hard to think about American authors have picked up on it as an the work that it takes or that it could go any enigmatic or convenient trope (in books like other way. But how you feel old is a histori- Shutting Out the Sun: How Japan Created Its cally recent development, embedded so Own Lost Generation by Michael Zielenziger close to our core we take it as synonymous and Hikikomori and the Rental Sister by Jeff with our selves. Backhaus, most recently). But only now has The global spread of the teenager shows Saitō’s original work been translated, by Jef- this. When the Sphinx had Oedipus solve the frey Angles, published by University of Min- riddle of aging on his way to establishing the nesota Press in March. neurotic family, there were only three ages Culturally bound psychological phe- you could be in life: a child, adult, or old. But nomena always fascinate the press because by the time the post-1945 social order was in they excite the categories of racism through a place, the teenager stood apart, ready at hand veneer of scientificity. But Saitō was explicit to the market. Without a household of their on this point: Though his patients’ ­symptoms own, they would consume and be thrown in

59 An infantile disorder or out of work as the business cycle demanded steps for worried parents to follow. Without it. The unique teenage consciousness that ac- pathologizing withdrawn teens, Saitō sug- companied this economic development gives gested that the parents were equally impli- away the tight integration of age in the struc- cated through their relationship with their tures that govern our lives and teach us how to child in what he called the “hikikomori sys- understand ourselves. Being a teenager is not tem,” a self-reinforcing state of disconnec- about how old you are. Age is a social form at- tion between child, family, and society. “As tuned to the market. And though it’s uneven- the individual takes shelter from the social ly distributed, it operates super­nationally. body, it holds both the individual and the Still, Saitō was curious. With touching ex- family in its grasp,” he says. But even though citement about the new possibilities opened elective solitary confinement seems like it up by the Internet (this was back in the late must stem from extreme trauma if not psy- 1990s), he contacted colleagues abroad to chosis, Saitō insists that there is no mental see if they were seeing the same thing. Ko- illness involved. Instead, he links it to our reans wrote back: Yes, they said, and their “era of adolescence” and concludes that “‘so- compulsory military service had no effect cial withdrawal’ is the pathology that best on the spread of hikikomori. One French re- symbolizes our moment in time.” spondent wrote, No, his society would never At base, the problem is one of mount- produce withdrawal like that; another anony- ing surplus populations. This is not the eu- mously replied that it absolutely did but that genicist fever dream of overpopulation but a in France, these people become homeless, concept that Karl Marx developed alongside not homebound. Jeffrey Angles chimes in a critique of Thomas Malthus. Essentially, too. In the translator’s note to the American since the working day can only be extended edition, he shares the story of a student of so far, increases in productivity happen only his who went through a period of hikikomori, through labor-saving innovation. Extended dropping out of high school in his senior year. across time and populations, this means fewer With therapy he was later able to pull himself and fewer people must be employed to make back into society and to college, but without a profit. More and more people become not a name for his experience, he had no explana- only unnecessary but an impediment to fleet, tion for what made him lose that time. A Thai low-cost production.1 Like excess inventory, psychiatrist wondered, “What do people in 1. In Capital Vol. 1, Marx argues: “The degree to withdrawal do about their living expenses?” which the means of production are means of em- It was a reasonable question. Saitō found that ployment for the workers lessens progressively as those means become more extensive, more concen- their parents cover them. trated and technically more efficient ... The working Saitō’s book was otherwise modest in population therefore produces both the accumu- lation of capital and the means by which it is itself scope. It aimed to establish a working defini- made relatively superfluous; and it does this to an tion of the condition and provide practical extent which is always increasing.”

60 max fox their labor power cannot be sold, so it must like they belong.” But it’s also where some- be written off or destroyed. one will feed them. (It’s not uncommon for Certain populations are written off a pri- hikikomori to hole up in a kitchen. The par- ori. For old people who can’t work anymore, ents will sometimes construct a new one.) acute social withdrawal is not just expected, Because Saitō refuses a psychogenic explana- it’s imposed. If they’ve been lucky, retirees tion for the behavior, and because exclusion will have savings to draw from, so they can from society is taken as a given, the hikikomo- keep consuming until they die. But bowing ri phenomenon appears in his book primar- out from society isn’t seen as illness or family ily as a disorder of the home. shame. Likewise, a labor participation rate of But a disorder of the home, however pri- 50 percent for Japanese women means that vate, is still an economic disorder. The word “people are less likely to see a woman with- economy derives from the Greek for slave drawing into the house as problematic be- owner’s household, and household wealth, havior,” Saitō offers. And childhood was not not individual net worth, remains the metric always a time of nonwork—it was a labor vic- for evaluating national economic well-being. tory. Like the weekend, it had to be fought Though we understand ourselves to be a for to wrest it from bosses as time off. Child market society, the naturalness of the exclu- labor laws were the worker’s movement’s ear- sion of some people from the labor market— liest wins, though they were conceded in ex- some women, children, and the elderly—de- change for compulsory schooling. pends on their staying close to home. (Their The problem, Saitō says, is that the evil counterparts, people who don’t work or hikikomori patient is not exempt, but still work the wrong way, are then understood has no place in society. It’s certainly not for as either homeless or from bad homes.) So discrimination or lack of qualifications: the if the social pathology that best sums up demographic profile is our moment in time is overwhelmingly first- coming from inside the born sons, often aca- house, it’s because the demically well-seated. It’s not uncommon economy put it there. But in their understand- That’s because ing, they don’t, and they for hikikomori to these are still people; drop out of school; they hole up in a kitchen. they have to eat and can’t hold jobs; they The parents will sleep somewhere. What have no friends; they of- sometimes construct do they do? Saitō notes ten stop speaking. They a new one. that even when mute, take refuge in the home the person in withdraw- because “the household al pays extremely close is the only place they feel attention to what his

61 an infantile disorder

­family is ­saying. Well, the from castigating their adult market speaks, too: You’re children as lazy, Saitō does better dead.Hikikomori at one point identify a emerges as one response to cause: “The reason that the the threat of destruction. It child goes into withdrawal is the nightmare edge of the is not because he or she trend, more and more prev- does not want to work, but alent across the advanced because he or she is unable capitalist core, which in- to work, even though he or spires so many identical she wants to.” Since a job think pieces on millennials signals adulthood, being and their infuriating ways. barred from one deranges Kids these days—they live the normal course of mat- with their parents for so long! uration, and manifests as They don’t make major pur- psychic distress. chases or form households! The family was the Yeah, well. One 30-year home of age. You arrived mortgage ago, the labor at your job already mature, market was fundamentally supposedly, and left before different. The markers of a messy senescence. But aging that corresponded with the entire category to a programmatic course of work in crisis and fam- through it no longer hold. ily formation in terminal The adolescent condition of decline, age too is revealed labor is generalizing. to have been left open to Saito calls hikikomori “a the whims and ravages of pathology of adolescence,” the market. Hikikomori is not adolescents. Teendom a glimpse of the new mo- is spreading beyond its ments in the life cycle whol- original cohort. The peo- ly integrated into a system ple who catch it may be in that breaks itself down as it their 20s or 30s, but they’re grows. It’s not a particular- stuck with a teen’s relation ly heroic response to being to the market, always at called into being as surplus. the entrance. Though he But if it is pathological, it is spends far more time cau- so only in having decided tioning parents to refrain­ not to die. n

62 LATELY I’VE BEEN noticing an insidious worry I’m losing my linger, no longer taking efficiency leaking into my days and into my the time to tarry. I don’t see the point of fi- ways and altering my otherwise devil-may- nally getting round to things if I have to lose care lifestyle—by which I mean not “heed- my dawdle skills. less of caution” but rather “jovial and rakish Being too alert or hyperaware can not in manner.” only slow you down, but worse, it will limit The overpowering desire for produc- your possibilities. We need to adopt more tivity and the overvaluing of organization of a sleepish attitude to life. There is a reck- in our society enables us to ignore the ob- less and rollicking abandon in our sleep time vious evils of efficiency. I now find myself that we must try and bring into our waking cutting corners and opting for the quickest hours. Our minds and our bodies do what route to my destinations. I’m getting to more they will without constraints when we enter places and I’m getting more accomplished, the land of nod, and that is exactly how we but what am I giving up? I think too much. I want to walk the world till the end of days.

63 Think of yourself as a sphincter and just try to be the best Chris Brown he can be, and it’s and unclench—life with all its possibilities all my fault. I don’t think I even have to point will surely begin to flow. out that this is bad, bad thinking—bad for But there is no magic bullet to get you to me, bad for you, and bad for society at large that special state of vigorous languor that will and certainly not worthy of an unsolicited bring out the best in you. You cannot achieve advisor for the end of time or any time. this state by simply cutting back on your So I’m pledging to you now to be a bet- snooze time. Everyone needs their sleep. Let ter me and stay on the right path through me now remind you of what the great writ- what’s left of our time together, and I hope I er Thomas Wolfe’s mother said: “You can’t can help you to find your particular passage. make up for lost sleep.” So even if you can go That’s the ticket. We all have our own paths, home again, you must go right to your old and we need our own maps to find them, and room and have all 40 of your winks. this is one map Google can’t help you with. Along with this creeping competence When you think you don’t know right that has threatened my way of life, I’ve no- from wrong, trust that you do, and if it ticed something else trying to stick itself into turns out you don’t, then try and get it my spokes. A sort of misplaced morality is right next time. But through it all, you’ve starting to worm its way into my brain. The got to believe that a little fog will always other night I had what is commonly known help clear things up. n as a sex dream. I am not usually a sex- ual slumberer, but when it does hap- pen, it is always quick and aborted. This night of reverie was different: It involved a free and easy yet protract- ed night of sex with Rihanna, and I’m happy to say that everyone went home satisfied. After this erotic gift from Morpheus I should have wo- ken up with that cat-who-swallowed- the-canary smile, thinking “the old boy still has it.” Instead I’m worried about Chris Brown and what he’ll think about it all. The horrible part is that I’m not worried about him hurting me or, worse, hurting her. No, I’m concerned about him getting sad, about him no longer being able

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