Search

The poetry in Cathy Park Hong's Empire Engine (2012) is separated into three time-lines: the period of Westward Expansion in the United States, a contemporary story of fine art reproduction in China, and a futurist story of data workers in California These three sections are united in their interrogation of the role of ideology in creating and sustaining an empire I argue that the first timeline stages a representation of ideology in the traditional Althusserian sense, that the second timeline shows this representation as inadequate, and most importantly, that the final section suggests a new model for oppression The key for the new model presented in the third timeline lies in the job the workers have: they work with data The main argument is that the ruling class no longer maintains its power through the ownership of capital Instead, as McKenzie Wark maintains in Capital is Dead (2019), this ruling class »owns and controls infor-mation« (Wark 5) The owning and controlling of information is no longer capitalism, »but something worse« (29) Following on Wark, I argue that this use and abuse of data changes ideology in a fundamental manner Rather than having a world from which an individual can feel more or less estranged in an Althusserian sense, the new reign of data suggests that estrangement is the fundamental experience of the world In other words, there is no world to feel estranged from, thus leading to ideology;rather, the feeling of estrangement is already the fundamental experience of our data-driven reality While in Hong's book this new model is located in the future, the end of the essay argues that a similar state is brought about not only by our data-driven world, but also pandemics such as that caused by COVID-19, which are part of our time now © University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Arts All rights reserved

J.G. Ballard’s novel The Drought (1965) reimagines an ecological dystopia into a strategy for how to live through the catastrophe of the Anthropocene. We suggest the term “vacuum ecology” for a literary strategy which represents a way to live in our current ecological crisis. Ballard describes how a near-total emptiness of time and space is one way to respond to a global ecological catastrophe. Using Ballard’s novel as a guide, our concept of vacuum ecology is developed along with along with the work of Jason Moore, Roy Scranton and others. In The Drought, the concept of modulation is suggested as the mechanism for change. At the end of the essay, Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation (2014), along with Catherine Malabou’s notion of destructive plasticity, is seen as challenging the idea of modulation with a strategy of intermingling. In short, both texts foreground the possibility of new kinds of change when concepts of time and space are questioned. This has consequences for the different beings we must become in order to live in the Anthropocene.

Political thrillers often encourage the feeling that a mere individual has the power to make a difference on a large scale. Caught up in a chain of events they wished they had never uncovered, a protagonist can occupy a position in which their actions have far-reaching consequences, with the rookie CIA analyst accidentally bringing down a whole corrupt political system being only one example. Much of the critical attention these films have garnered falls under the rubric of detective work in that the protagonist is seen as exposing a web of corruption which would otherwise have gone on unnoticed. However, this paper is focused on how the scale of the individual comes into contact with other, larger scales of events. Points of contact between scales are important because they are where change can take place, thus allowing an individual to influence the supra-individual.

The concept of scale is becoming lodged within contemporary theories about reality, change and possibility. This assumption materialises as an increased interest in diverse forms of otherness on the one hand, and an almost fanatic insistence on the non-identity of objects on the other (Franco Moretti, Thomas Piketty, Graham Harman). Scale thus functions both as a medium through which difference can be understood and the absolute limit to which human reason can stretch, and never beyond. Works based on the Israeli– Palestinian conflict have a long history of grappling with the paradox of scale. Assaf Gavron’s novel CrocAttack! (2006) depicts diverse forms of otherness in a missed point of understanding between an Israeli and a Palestinian. Nathan Englander’s short story ‘Sister Hills’ (2012) highlights the limits of scale in characters which take the ‘as if’ of Jewish law at its word. The structure of this paradox of scale is read through Marshall McLuhan and Graham Harman in order to show how being confronted with the non-identity of scale actually encourages adaptation or change to take place. The metaphor developed from this reading is that of ‘the wall’, which is used in an interpretation of Palestinian director Elia Suleiman’s Divine Interventions (2002).

One way to advance in the world is to question it. The activity of questioning is the basis of scientific, philosophical and political thinking. However, this raises the issue of how a being can be distanced from the world enough to formulate a question about it. In other words, how can one be in the world which one questions? What is important here is not how we know that we know something, but rather, how we know that we do not know something (Mensch 2005: 1 ; Boyd 2009: 164). This problem of locating a profound relationship to one's world within the ability to question is found in how questions are formulated using the same symbolic code they are meant to investigate: language (Heidegger 1962: 19 ; Derrida 1991: 129- 136n6 ; Critchley 1993 ; Willems 2010: 78- 86). This essay aims to foreground ways in which the symbolic order is disturbed from within itself in order to open up moments of inquiry. In short this is done through strategies of resistance and withholding from within language itself. Put another way, fundamental questioning will be found in the refusal, stuttering and unnaming of things. In the literary domain, both T. S. Eliot and Graham Greene have created works which address this issue. Eliot's poem 'The Hollow Men' (1925) features a traumatic stuttering in the form of a repeatedly truncated question, while in Greene's novel The Power and the Glory (1940) a gap is opened by a refusal to name that which is welcomed into one's world. Both 'stuttering' and 'refusal' are considered essential in this analysis because they show how questions can be disruptive while still being lodged within the formulations of symbolic language, just as an answer is. To this end Jacques Lacan's use of 'The Hollow Men' in his essay 'The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis' (1953) will help develop a strategy for how to actually reside in such a traumatic moment of refusal, or what he calls the Real. This residing will take the form of a foregrounding of the 'stupidity' (Ronell 2002) of who we always already are.