Happy May Day, beloved!
I'm just back in London from my second trip to the States this month, this one a quick few days in San Diego and Los Angeles courtesy of my buddy Babak Rahimi at UCSD, who invited me over to join Benjamin Bratton in a discussion of the latter’s recentish book The Revenge of the Real: Politics for a Post-Pandemic World. (Los Angeles was a side-quest to see old friends, make the pilgrimage to Glenn Danzig’s decrepit bungalow and snarf a cheeky pre-departure taquito from Cielito Lindo in Olvera Street.)
The Bratton book is, frankly, one of the oddest rhetorical objects I’ve ever encountered — a perverse double helix in which a set of arguments that start from premises I share completely, and reach conclusions I utterly reject, coil around arguments founded in premises I find repellent, but neverless reach conclusions I share. What’s up with that?
Bratton’s fundamental point is that the circumstances of global respiratory pandemic represent a “revenge of the real” in which the fatuity of our public discourse and the inadequacies of our reigning models of governance are laid bare, in a way that functions usefully as a preview of the way in which our societies will deal with climate change. In his words: “The most difficult lessons to be learned are those that come when reality — in the form of a virus, of our vulnerability to it, of our inadequate governing responses to it — crashes through comforting illusions and ideologies.” (This is the “premise I share completely” bit, and indeed I make much the same point in my pamphlet “At The End of The World, Plant A Tree” and the parts of my new book that are derived from it.) From here, he proceeds to argue that the weaponized narcissism and spectacular inanity of our society prevent us from dealing competently with the actuality of COVID, and that in order to reckon with that actuality, what we need is to adopt an “epidemiological view of society” and selfhood in which individuals are figured not so much as subjects with desires, interests or rights but as nodes and links in a global chain of transmission. And I’m OK with this, too, at least in part.
It’s where he takes the argument next that I really peel away from him, though. Bratton calls for a “positive biopolitics” forthrightly based on centralization, verticality, control and “rationality,” in which the data derived from a ubiquitous “sensing layer” is used to feed processes of “planetary-scale computation,” resulting in “realist” policy, targeted intervention and ultimately competent and effective governance. And of course I find this monstrous — or rather, I would find it monstrous if I thought that it had the slightest chance of coming to pass.
Let’s, briefly, recount the problems with this line of thought. Firstly, it’s not so much that I find the hardcore materialism of regarding myself as biomass, vector and hyperoceanic environment for nonhuman organisms offensive. I don’t, at all, and I am completely on board with the idea that effective public health policy has to construct me in just this way at least part of the time in order to work at all. But if I fully expect epidemiologists to propose public postures and policies based on an understanding that I am meat, I’m not at all sure it’s necessary, or healthy, for anyone proposing to govern me to do so on that basis. That way clearly lies 14f13 and its notable sequelae. (This is one of those rare instances in which the reductio ad Hitlerum is entirely valid.) And indeed if the political system you’re touting isn’t capable of encompassing the truth that each of us is simultaneously bare biomass and a subject with needs and desires and an economic actor with interests and a citizen with rights, all laminated together in what we might call (ahem) a “biopolitical stack” — well then, that system doesn’t seem to me like it’s much of an improvement at all on the status quo, and maybe a few steps back toward the Foucauldian sovereignty that always seems to be lurking somewhere beneath the surface of nominally more genteel forms of the stewardship of populations.
Beyond that — if, indeed, you can get beyond it, though there’s no particular reason you have to — Bratton is here prepared to wave a hand at issues he’s far too sophisticated to have mischaracterized in ignorance. He knows full well that “sensing” isn’t done by some reified “layer” composed of networked electromechanical sensors in globally distributed array, but by assemblages of such sensors with institutions and procedures and people. But in a book that’s largely about “planetary-scale” governance driven by sensed data, he never says a word about the governance of the institutions involved. (Just who is it that holds the data garnered by the “sensing layer”? What, whose regulations and laws govern its acquisition, its retention and storage, its dispersal, its eventual erasure? What recourse do I have if I do not like the way this data is being used?) He commits the even greater error of first describing human society, correctly, as a “complex adaptive system,” and then insisting that the global evolution of such a system can be purposively steered from within, by some conscious subset of its elements. (Thus the rationality, verticality and control bit.) That none of this quite seems to cohere or survive even a basic common-sense test for decency is something he passes over in silence. It’s infuriating.
And then there’s the book’s other helical strand, the material that starts in ill-founded swipes against self-organization and the horizontal current Bratton joins Srnicek and Williams in dismissing as “folk politics,” and yet winds up in places I have no problem co-signing in full. One example of this is Bratton’s treatment of the unfortunate Giorgio Agamben, who in a histrionic and shameful series of early-pandemic essays lit a bonfire that consumed his reputation, credibility and chances of informing the worldview of scholars yet to appear on the scene; Agamben’s precipitous, self-inflicted fall from intellectual grace might certainly be considered its own punishment, but it’s nevertheless a genuine pleasure watching Bratton lay into him.
So this is the book: a seriously-meant call for seriously troubling measures that never quite lays out how the serious-minded are intended to seriously implement them (possibly because it began life as a blurst of topical essays, and was whipped into its present form in something like four weeks). When Babak invited me to discuss it with Bratton himself, onstage, it felt like a rare opportunity to engage a line of thought I find wildly problematic in a respectful and collegial way, under the auspices of a host I trust implicitly. So somewhat atypically, I did my homework — I submitted Revenge of the Real to a close reading, took something like 15,000 words of notes on it, and showed up in San Diego ready to discuss it in whatever depth and detail we’d be able to get into in the course of ninety minutes.
You’ll have to judge for yourself how that conversation went. I’m not sure we ever really got into the meat of things, as it were, but I found the whole experience extraordinarily useful, if for no other reason than that it both primed me to expect what a real conversation about a book might be like, and forced me to sharpen my arguments on behalf of a distributed, largely horizontal response to the same set of facts against which Bratton arrays his “planetary-scale,” “positive biopolitics.”
§ I want to take a moment here to commemorate the life and work of the great George Dyer, who died on the 28th of March. I was first introduced to George by my friend Suzi Hall, who’d come across his tailor shop in the Walworth Road in the course of her ethnography of Southwark labor, and knew on the spot I’d have to have him cut a bespoke suit for me, no matter how long it took to save up the necessary dosh.
George was the last living link to the tradition of sharp London tailoring that saw any self-respecting Modernist properly suited and booted in bespoke kit, and to the lineage of East End Jewish tailors from which it emerged. Though I’m certain he could have held his own against Savile Row’s finest, he dedicated his craft instead to upholding the principles of a Modernist sartorial style best understood as the encounter of West Indian rudeboy verve with fine Italian fabrics and the headlong acceleration in British standards of living that set in around 1963-1964. (That verve was central; though as you know, I personally remain a sworn monochromist, George’s offhand description of Brixton dandies as “sporting some particularly powerful shirts” permanently reframed the way I understood the use of bright color in men’s fashion.)
But beyond all this, he was an absolute sweetheart. I’ll never forget the excitement with which he’d show me some clever detail on a suit he was working on — frogmouth pockets just so, or an extra (working) button on the sleeve — or the way his face would light up when he saw that it was us ringing his buzzer. To step off the Walworth Road, beneath the corny sign and into the faintly lemony embrace of his shop was to enter a place where you yourself were seen and valued in all your idiosyncracy, and your appreciation of obscurely signifying details an occasion for sustained and entirely mutual delight. I miss George already, I know just how much poorer London is for his loss, and I will cherish the suit he made for me for the rest of my days on Earth.
§ At the moment I'm reading my way through a towering stack of backed-up LRBs; listening to a dreamy Southland soundtrack of the Beach Boys and Jan & Dean; and watching Season 2 of Russian Doll, which makes some great musical choices but is leaving me wondering otherwise why I ever found Season 1 endearing.
Until next dispatch: please do remember to take care of yourself and those who need you, and to let yourself be taken care of. You have, as ever,
all my faith
ag
ldn
This is Dispatch from London No. 118 of Sunday, 1 May 2022, offered to you under the terms of a Peer Production License. You are free to reuse this content, but must acknowledge Adam Greenfield as its author. ◊