Spaces of Empire by Layla Nova Forrest-White a Dissertation

Spaces of Empire By Layla Nova Forrest-White A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in Charge: Professor Anne-Lise Francois, Chair Professor Kathleen McCarthy Professor Chana Kronfeld Spring 2017 Abstract Spaces of Empire by Layla Nova Forrest-White Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature University of California, Berkeley Professor Anne-Lise Francois, Chair This project is an attempt to offer a genealogy of Empire from a different perspective, with different possibilities for resemblance and familiarity, to seek an order not in sequence in an effort to destabalize long-held causal narratives of empire(s). Beginning with the Romans, I am interested in an “experiential” historicism that wants to articulate what historical subjects thought they were doing as empire as a social and political construct was coming into being. To such an end, I examine distinct imperial Roman building practices—their devices to tell the time, their cities both at home and abroad, their roads, and their maps—as well as the metaphorical language surrounding them. Jumping ahead to the British imperial novel, both early and late, I trace the evolution and devolution of these edifices and metaphors in order to show the ways in which empire abstracts and aestheticizes itself both conceptually and in practice. Finally, I use a combination of the concrete and metaphorized world of empire under the Romans, and its abstraction and aestheticization under the British, to argue for the current manifestation of imperial “space” in the digital realm, which was envisioned early on through imperial metaphors and practices. In this way, I argue against conceptions of the digital as a “new” space, free from the overarching logic of Empire, and eventually seek to find a road out towards political and imaginative alternatives. 1 Acknowledgements Thank you to my committee, in particular Professor Kathleen McCarthy and her illuminating feedback, as well as Professor Jill Stoner. Thank you Sandy Richmond; you are all benevolence, no despotism. Thank you: Gabby Miller for reminiscing about our AOL girlhoods; Jane Gregory for showing me the only version of academia that has made sense; Pooks Lanphier, simpatico aeterno; Elliot Naidus, personal saint; Maya Kronfeld, my Proust & Woolf at the same damn time; & Kukoc for beating me in basketball most (!) days for six years, and then showing me how to compile PDFs. Most of all thanks to my Dad, for everything ever as always. i Contents Introduction 3 Shadows 23 Cities 57 Roads 91 Maps 123 Ghosts & Other Partial Endings 153 Bibliography 165 ii Spaces of Empire Layla Nova Forrest-White 1 2 INTRODUCTION In many ways, this work is directly concerned with the same intersection of points and motivations behind Hardt and Negri's 2000 Empire. Like them, I am most concerned with clarifying that I am not using empire, nor their Empire, as any kind of metaphor, and thus tool for excavating and illuminating resemblances or discords between \x phe- nomena" and previous empires, but instead, as they say, as a concept, \which calls primarily for a theoretical approach."1 This theoretical approach, then, is heavily de- pendent upon a strong operating concept of empire, and here, too, I defer to Hardt and Negri, though with some serious caveats. My first caveat is that Hardt and Negri's concept of Empire is in juxtaposition with imperialism, which they define as a by-gone form of European colonialism and economic expansion: \the territorial boundaries of the nation delimited the center of power from which rule was exerted over external for- eign territories through a system of channels and barriers that alternately facilitated and obstructed the flows of productions and circulation."2 Secondly, they argue that the United States and its Jeffersonian constitution of \expanding frontiers" and \power [...] effectively distributed in networks"3 is the current generator of this new, conceptual practice of Empire. I disagree with both of these fundamental assertions in that to so delineate and demarcate Empire versus empire versus imperialism versus European colonialism, etc. undermines their most basic conceptual tenet concerning Empire, namely, that \Empire is characterized fundamentally by a lack of boundaries: Empire's rule has no limits."4 I am in absolute agreement with Hardt and Negri on this point. Empire's rule has no limits, and this is nowhere clearer than on the conceptual level. As an idea, it has spawned itself repeatedly throughout, for my interests, Western history, and my intention is to follow its genealogy, as it always already holds its own logic of a globe without limits and time without end. Finally, before returning to Hardt and Negri's definition of Empire, suffice it to say that I differ from them most drastically in this dissertation's overarching argument, which is that the Internet is the latest \space" to be understood through the unshakable concept of Empire, and not, as the two argue in 2004's Multitiude, the networked path to a truly democratic state (of mind, even).5 Turning to their clear and concise concept of Empire, Hardt and Negri define it thus: The concept of Empire is characterized fundamentally by a lack of boundaries: Empire's 1Hardt & Negri. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000, xiv. 2Ibid. p. xii. 3p. xiv. 4Ibid. 5Hardt & Negri. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin Books, 2004. 3 rule has no limits. First and foremost, then, the concept of Empire posits a regime that effectively encompasses the spatial totality, or reality that rules over the entire \civilized" world. No territorial boundaries limit its reign. Second, the concept of Empire presents itself not as a historical regime originating in conquest, but rather as an order that effectively suspends history and thereby fixes the existing state of affairs for eternity. From the perspective of Empire, this is the way things will always be and the way they are always meant to be. In other words, Empire presents its rule not as a transitory moment in the movement of history, but as a regime with no temporal boundaries and in this sense outside of history or at the end of history. Third, the rule of Empire operates on all registers of the social order extending down to the depths of the social world. Empire not only manages a territory and a population but also creates the very world it inhabits. It not only regulates human interactions but also seeks directly to rule over human nature. [...] Finally, although the practice of Empire is continuously bathed in blood, the concept of Empire is always dedicated to peace|a perpetual and universal peace outside of history.6 Besides the importance of the definition itself, to which I will continuously refer, is the distinction there at the very end, between the \practice of Empire" and the \concept of Empire". For my purposes, particularly when looking at the early Roman Empire as the origin for and of this concept, it is not at all easy to separate the concept from the practice, as the two were far more murkily combined, helping, along the way, to mutually solidify the other's status as such. In other words, at this early stage, it is perhaps more clear to say that the Empire's practice, at least at home at Rome, was to create its concept, both internally, and externally as a quasi-participatory/inclusive form of social and political dominance. My desires in better articulating what constituted this concept and practice of empire in the ancient sense are to thus be able to extrapolate to other practices of empire, be they self-evident (as with the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British novel), or not (as with the conceptual and architectural structures underlying the Internet and digital practices). This work is an attempt to offer a genealogy of empire from a different perspective, with different possibilities for resemblance and familiarity. Such language leads to the undoubtedly Foucauldian nature of this project. Many of my foundational assumptions and later theoretical backings would not be possible without Foucault's work in many different areas. To begin with, the structural conceit of my argument| that there is a form of analysis or \bringing to light" concerned not with a knowledge form's \rational value" or \objective form," but instead with that knowledge's ongoing \conditions of possibility"7|is what Foucault has called in many places \not so much a history [...] as an archaeology."8 Following this, how to go about conducting such an archaeological study is also taken from Foucault, in that \consider[ing] the very historicity of forms of experience"9 is my main goal in attempting to offer not a history of Empire, but rather an archaeology of its continuously evolving conditions of possibility, and, thus, of forms of experience under imperial order(s). Finally, the overall motivation for such a project is also Foucauldian, in that looking to establish an \order among things"|especially when those things are themselves being 6Empire. pp. xiv-v. 7Foucault. Preface to The Order of Things. New York: Vintage Books, 1994, p. xxii. 8Ibid. 9Foucault. Preface to The Uses of Pleasure, in The Foucault Reader. New York: Pantheon, 1984, p. 334. 4 examined for aspects of the political / social order of which they are a part|is not the sequential, historical mode of \linking consequences," but instead an effort at \grouping and isolating."10 Following the visual metaphor his archaeological mode of inquiry has given him, Foucault ends the preface to The Order of Things thus: \[i]n attempting to uncover the deepest strata of Western culture, I am restoring to our silent and apparently immobile soil its rifts, its instabilities, its flaws; and it is the same ground that is once more stirring under our feet."11 Though with far less grand ambitions, my desire is the same in that I am most interested in an inquiry into imperial forms and spaces which does not presuppose its own findings, but instead seeks an order not in sequence, in an effort to destabilize the long-held causal narratives of empires.

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