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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
A pervasive sense has taken hold that any and all of us are under suspicion and surveillance, walking on a tightrope, a step away from erasure of rights or security. Nothing new for many long-targeted populations, it is now surfacing as a broad social sensibility, ramped up by environmental crisis and pandemic wreckage. We have come to live in proliferating dread, even of dread itself.
In this brilliant analysis of the nature, origins, and implications of this gnawing feeling, David Theo Goldberg exposes tracking-capitalism as the operating system at the root of dread. In contrast to surveillance, which requires labor-intensive analysis of people's actions and communications, tracking strips back to the fundamental mapping of our movements, networks, and all traces of our digitally mediated lives. A simultaneous tearing of the social fabric – festering culture wars, the erosion of truth, even "civil war" itself – frays the seams of the sociality and solidarity needed to thwart this transformation of people into harvestable, expendable data.
This searing commentary offers a critical apparatus for interrogating the politics of our time, arguing that we need not just a politics of refusal and resistance, but a creative politics to counter the social life of dread.
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Seitenzahl: 353
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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CONTENTS
Cover
Endorsement Page
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Preface and Acknowledgments
1 A World of Dread
2 Sensing Dread
3 Dread’s Operating System
4 Tracking-Capitalism: The Political Economy of Dread
5 Viral Dread
6 Ecoforming Dread
7 Civil War
8 De-Dreading
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Endorsement Page
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Preface and Acknowledgments
Begin Reading
References
Index
End User License Agreement
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“In this compelling new book, David Theo Goldberg seeks to understand the tenor and tone of our disorientation and anxiety in the world. Addressing a range of forces, globally distributed, Goldberg finds that a planetary dread has taken hold. Building upon Kierkegaard and Freud, he argues that, while fear knows its object, dread does not. This disorientation at the heart of dread characterizes, for Goldberg, a world in which epistemological and moral disorientation is the norm. He brilliantly shows that the technologies we now require to live are depriving us of the social lives required for survival. This searing impasse is at once revealed and countered in this incisive book. The hope Goldberg offers is to be found in a more profound understanding of the relational dimensions of our lives: a collective ecology of care and the social virtue of generosity in the name of what he calls ‘a sociality without end,’ a livable life on and with an enduring planet empowered to renew collective aspiration.”
Judith Butler, author ofThe Force of Nonviolence
“David Theo Goldberg has written yet another incisive, wellinformed, and theoretically rich book. Indeed, few concepts better describe our age than that of ‘dread.’ A leading voice in contemporary social theory, Goldberg astutely deploys the notion of dread to account for the dominant modes of encounter with the world in these troubled times. This most illuminating critique of our present enriches, stretches, and challenges our understanding of our potential futures.”
Achille Mbembe, author ofNecropolitics
Dedication
for allrefusingfutureless futures
Dread
Facing Futureless Futures
David Theo Goldberg
polity
Copyright © David Theo Goldberg 2021
The right of David Theo Goldberg to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2021 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4446-2
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Goldberg, David Theo, author.Title: Dread : facing futureless futures / David Theo Goldberg.Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “A brilliant diagnosis of the ubiquitous mood of our times”-- Provided by publisher.Identifiers: LCCN 2020052818 (print) | LCCN 2020052819 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509544448 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509544455 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509544462 (epub) | ISBN 9781509548699 (pdf)Subjects: LCSH: Risk--Sociological aspects. | Anxiety--Social aspects. | Civilization, Modern--Psychological aspects. | Future, The--Psychological aspects.Classification: LCC HM1101 .G65 2021 (print) | LCC HM1101 (ebook) | DDC 302/.12--dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020052818LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020052819
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Preface and Acknowledgments
As 2016 unfolded, a recognition gathered pace that the world was less settled than it had seemed. Syria had torn itself apart in a seemingly endless civil war, and fleeing refugees were overloading Lebanon and flowing into Europe. ISIS had maximized its power and territorial spread as the year opened, expanding beyond Iraq, controlling much of Northern Syria, and mobilizing in other Middle Eastern and North African countries while recruiting more broadly in Europe. A series of coordinated attacks in Paris in November 2015 had killed 130. Six months later, a supporter gunned down nearly fifty people in an Orlando nightclub catering to a largely gay clientele. Rather than liberating Afghanistan and Iraq, the sustained “securing” had extended the devastation and unsettlement. The June 2016 outcome of the Brexit referendum and Trump’s support, locally and globally, propelling him to election in November confounded the complacent. Sexual harassment and racist violence were openly proliferating. The planet surpassed the carbon threshold, global temperatures soared, the ice cap was melting at a record pace, storm systems became more devastating, and species were being wiped out.
By early 2017, many were waking each morning to wonder what disaster faced them, what sinister arrangements, what enclosures and exclusions, would be enacted by authoritarian leaders worldwide with smiling approval from their thrilled supporters. I couldn’t quite put my finger on the uncanny upset pouring from most everyone with whom I interacted, in person and virtually. That summer, the sensibility manifested more clearly for me. Dread had gripped life.
Over the ensuing year, the feeling grew. Others readily concurred. But it was also becoming apparent that the rising authoritarianism across a growing number of societies was symptomatic, as it invariably is, of a deeper set of structural forces, while exacerbating them. This book is an attempt to make sense as much of the range and proliferation of underlying prompts as of the sensibility itself. A great deal has, of course, been written about the impacts on our lives of the technological revolution, of climate change, and of racial conflagration. Over the past year, the COVID-19 pandemic quickly became the pressing subject of our time, perhaps understandably eclipsing most everything else. The experience produced not just an explosion of scientific literature but also a slew of writing on the experience, the racial and class differentiations, and compelling critical contributions on the turn to the empirical, detection, the immunological, and the right to breathe.
The pandemic, however, also prompted predictable critical accounts by notable public philosophers intent on fitting breaking events into their preconceived theories. Slavoj Žižek (2020), for one, focused, perhaps predictably, on the contorted political panics to which the pandemic inevitably gave rise, the improbably renewed prompting of socialism’s possibility as the driving viral fallout. Bernard-Henri Lévy (2020) dismissed everyone else’s stupidity in accepting thoughtlessly the curtailments of their freedoms. Mostly more nuanced, Giorgio Agamben (2020a, 2020b) stressed how readily governments – he was especially concerned with the Italian state response in the early days – elevated a “techno-medical despotism,” looking to the disciplinary technologies of delimiting liberties, the devaluation of human sociality underpinning these moves, and the fascistic reduction to “bare life.”
A tendency among some analysts to forgo a more subtle, relational, and intersectional account of social positioning prompted an occasional declaration that all members of a racial group, for example, would be subjected to the same deathly experience in an emergency room no matter what their class standing and professional networks. Dread takes hold of the unexpecting. The pandemic nevertheless neither materialized nor has operated in a social vacuum. It is implicated in and has magnified a compound of social factors, at once enabling or advancing novel modes of control while fracturing social forces in less containable fashion. This calls for a more interactively nuanced analysis of the social field than any reductively self-replicating and selfreinforcing account warrants (cf. Hartman 2020; and Cottom 2019 for a more subtle reading of the social field of health).
Dread, as I conceive it, has emerged as the driving social sensibility in our times. There has been a quiet uptick in the term’s popular usage, perhaps unsurprisingly. Yet there has been little theoretical analysis since Kierkegaard’s novel focus on the concept, Heidegger on “angst,” Sartre on “anguish,” and, more passingly, Freud’s later analyses of anxiety. Neel Ahuja (2016) speaks of “dread life” less as an analytic than as a shorthand for fear at the interface of race and species, architectures of power and security.
Dread, I will argue by contrast, is driven now by the socially specific interaction of currently impactful conditions. As the expressive manifestation of complex social fields, then, dread is a general index of contemporary specificities. The book is intended less as a comprehensive account than as a means of prompting a critical vocabulary and analytics for understanding what dread is, why it manifests as it does now, what its modes of articulation and expression are, what its implications are for the politics of our time. My starting point is the American context because dread has manifested so clearly in its shadow. The account, nevertheless, is intended to apply more generally, if variously, across wider contexts, as many examples drawn on will suggest.
The argument opens with two introductory chapters conceptualizing dread. Two chapters follow on the operative logics underlying contemporary dread, including digital automation and the driving technologies of contemporary capitalism, notably consumptive, political, and cultural tracking. A chapter each is then devoted to the looming devastations of the interlacing viral disasters of disease and climate change, as dread’s materializations. I close with two concluding chapters, one reflecting on civil war as contesting conceptions of how to be in the world; the other on the politics in which dread manifests, contrasting between the material infrastructure of racism and infrastructures of care. Instead of a specific chapter devoted to race and its repressions, I thread racial articulation throughout as it is repeatedly, renewably, and interactively constitutive of the conditions of the social, and dread-making especially.
*
No work is authored alone. This book has benefited from layers of interactions and conversations with colleagues, friends, authors long engaged with and newly discovered. A number of people were kind – or concerned – enough to review a full draft of the manuscript. Ackbar Abbas provided me with characteristically insightful and probing feedback. Anjali Prabhu offered suggestive revisions too. Extensive conversations with Anirban Gupta-Nigam throughout the writing process drew my attention to ideas and literature I otherwise too self-satisfiedly would have skated past. Achille Mbembe in Johannesburg kept pushing me further, as did Lisa Leung in Hong Kong. Jenna Ng nudged my thinking along over these years on algorithmic logic and being. My lifelong friend filmmaker and incomparable surf movie director Michael Oblowitz made me uncomfortable with the taken-for-granted (in this case, regarding dread), as he always does. Gaby Schwab arranged a conversation on the coronavirus chapter with members of the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI) residential research group she was convening on “Artificial Humanity.” The group prompted me to clarify and sharpen ideas key to that chapter’s analysis. A passing question about dread’s etymology from Sarah Farmer between our morning laps at the pool led to a little revision.
Early on in my thinking, the Los Angeles Review of Books published an outline version of my argument, causing me to extend my analysis. A shout-out to Brad Evans for opening that door and fueling me with invites throughout the book’s elaboration. A public discussion on civil war with Brad, Adom Getachew, Libby Anker, and Achille Mbembe prompted some tweaks to Chapter 7. The driving dynamic ideas central to this book were the subject of keynote presentations to the Postcolonial Studies Association in Manchester, a conference at Radbout University in Nijmegen, and a CEMFOR conference at the University of Uppsala. The ensuing discussions all extended my thinking significantly. Cheers respectively to Helen Cousins and David Firth, to Anya Topolski and Josias Tembo, and to Mattias Gardell and his colleagues Daniel Strand and Mehek Muftee for the engagements. My colleagues in the Asia Theory Network devoted meetings in Taipei, Seoul, and Tokyo to various ideas germane to the book. I am grateful to all the members of the group for their rich generation of insights and ideas, and to Li Hung-Chiung for his tireless and self-effacing organizational energy. Extensive exchanges with Sarah Nuttall, Yogita Goyal, Alex Taek-Gwang Lee, and Woosung Kang especially opened my eyes to different ways of seeing points in the book.
The folks at Polity, as always, have been a pleasure to work with. Jonathan Skerrett gently steered me towards clarity and creativity. Karina Jákupsdóttir reminded me of tasks and deadlines with the lightest of touch. Justin Dyer, an incomparable copy-editor, finds deft ways of making one sound so much better without changing one’s meaning; filling in missing or mis-stated detail without making one feel foolish. Cheers also to a number of anonymous reviewers who raised questions large and small in the spirit of producing a book both clearer and (hopefully) more compelling.
As always, the incomparable staff at UCHRI saw me and my colleagues through all the challenges of our time. Their tireless work and commitment, and their spirit of collective collaborative engagement, have always provided the possibility of thinking differently together and supporting sustained critical work. Wujun Ke, in particular, tirelessly compiled the concepts and names filling out the Index. The book would not have seen completion without their ceaseless engagement.
I have spent the past two-plus decades in constant conversation with Philomena Essed, between homes and continents, pleasures and social pains. The periods of pandemic and political turmoil throughout 2020 pressed us into more intense and sustained daily conversation, shaping my thinking on matters of the book and much else. Interlaced with humor and delight, her caring concern pushed me to be more caring too.
My son Gabriel’s world has been upended by worklessness, family illness, and ecological challenge. He has made his way through it all with spirit and creativity. This book is written with his and his generation’s futures in view.
Irvine, California,January 2021
1A World of Dread
The social screws have been turned, the social fabric has been torn apart.
In 2018, an academic colleague was returning to the United States from a work trip in Europe. Landing in Minneapolis, she passed through the Global Entry lane machine-expediting entry for US citizens into the country. Declaring no illicit materials, she was exiting through the baggage pick-up area when accosted by a Customs and Border Patrol agent. Rifling through her shoulder bag, the officer discovered an apple, illegal to import into the country. My colleague had carried the fruit onto the plane, intending to eat it in flight. The haze of long hours in the air dulled her into forgetting about it. Refusing any explanation, the officer accused her of lying on her entry form indicating she carried into the country no fruit or firearms. Reports of similar treatment were beginning to proliferate as increasingly intrusive Trumpian border management was ramping up. My colleague was spot-fined $500, and stripped of her Global Entry privileges for the foreseeable future. In Italy and Spain under pandemic lockdown, police fined people up to €1,000 for straying a couple of public meters beyond the prescribed limits. A steep cost for violating confinements or for forbidden fruit at the bottom of a bag.
Seth Harp, a Texan journalist, re-entered the United States at Austin airport in May 2019 following an exhausting investigative trip to Mexico City. He was “randomly selected” – in non-bureaucratic speech, picked out – for additional screening, his first in a lifetime of crossing the southern border. Harp was interrogated by a series of three Customs and Border Patrol officers about the story he was investigating – on weapons purchases by a drug cartel in Mexico – and then on his various war reporting contacts in Iraq and Syria. His computer and smart phone were taken from him without requesting permission, removed from his presence for hours. There followed a warrantless search of his digital footprint. It included social media postings, digital photograph albums, his browsing record, interactions with family and friends, including encrypted communications with informants in various parts of the world. It is quite likely his computer and smart phone contents were downloaded and stored by the government, though the officers denied doing so.
US law currently requires a warrant only if one is under arrest (now under legal challenge). Given that he had not yet legally been admitted into American territory, Harp was denied access to a lawyer. He was threatened with denial of entry if he didn’t cooperate, despite being a US citizen by birth. Whether any state to which he would be sent – likely Mexico – would accept him is an open question. This suggests that Trumpian America was committed not just to deporting the undocumented living in the country but also to rendering its own citizens completely stateless, literally with no country in which to land, if critical of the administration.
The officers denied having recorded Harp’s interrogation. A Homeland Security response to a later complaint filed by him, however, admitted that the “port director” had reviewed “the tape,” presumably of his interactions with the officers. Harp was released more than five hours later, the interrogation having turned up no illicit activity. Secondary screenings of American citizens returning from international trips were conducted more than 33,000 times in 2018. That’s nearly 100 per day across the country’s principal ports of entry (Harp 2019).
These are not new experiences, especially for members of targeted populations, racially and religiously defined. Muslims especially, and those with Arabic-sounding names, more often than not find themselves the objects of additional interrogation when seeking to enter nation states across the global north. Colleagues fitting this characterization have repeatedly told me they avoid transferring transnational flights in Paris as they will invariably face immigration interrogation. Shahram Khosravi (2011) has written movingly about the harrowing conditions to which a stateless refugee is subjected in seeking a safe place to land and live.
Migrants are confronted by increasing hostility no matter where they pass through or land. But in the past few years, the pervasive sense across the global north that any and all are under suspicion, surveillance, and but a step away from erasures of rights has ramped up significantly. In the United States, Latinos promised or in some cases granted citizenship for service in the US military have been stripped of citizenship and deported after completion of their service and having risked their lives in war zones. Even naturalized citizens with decades of US residency have been threatened with revocation of their citizenship for minor legal violations, especially if originally from countries considered non grata (Wright 2018). Similarly, Brexit has reified the insularity of British self-identification, placing in question the right of access and residency status of those perceived as not belonging. China’s insistence on its power to extradite Hong Kong citizens to the mainland for trials concerning political violations likewise blurs legal distinctions that were once more or less clear.
The abrupt arrival of a global pandemic ramified all of this. If the fluidity of global movements was already coming under some stress, COVID-19 brought the world to all but a screeching halt. In February 2020, almost three months after the first case was recorded in Wuhan, China, a party of thirteen Californians boarded a plane for France. All healthy and fit men in their thirties and forties, they competed in a team sporting event. Upon completion, they flew to the Italian Alps for a day of helicopter skiing. Upon arrival, one of the party was feeling under the weather but soldiered through the day they had all excitedly anticipated. By day’s end, he was hospitalized, had tested positive for the coronavirus, and was in a critical condition. His team members returned to the United States via JFK in New York. At immigration, they were asked whether they had visited China, and were waved through when indicating they had not. By then, the Trump administration had restricted non-US residents’ travel directly from China. Within a week of return to California, nearly all the team members had come down with the virus, half of whom landed in local hospitals.
A virus seeming to take hold first in provincial China had consumed much of Italy and its neighbors, spiking the global spread pretty much in all directions. Limited travel restrictions for a subset of those coming from a single source failed completely to comprehend or care about the dynamics of global circulation and viral spread. The world was about to clam up.
*
It has been a struggle to put a collective finger on the feeling, the broad social sensibility, to which rampant experiences like these are currently giving rise. The gnawing sensibility that seems to have been eating at us collectively of late is represented by this range of border-crossing experiences grown customary. The micro-experiences are joined by larger threats to the disruption of life meant to signal a warning to all engaged in critical political action. These events assume broader and deeper significance once connected to the culture wars festering into what even national legislators across political divides in a wide variety of national contexts are characterizing as “civil war.”
The escalating conflicts are the expression of contested conceptions of how to live and be in the world today, and the everyday border, policing, and rhetorical violence conducted in the name of the nation and its supposed protection. Heightened anxiety in the face of these seemingly discrete events is made more concrete by the surge across the globe in dictatorial authority and authoritarian assertion, both petty and pervasive. This, as I will argue, is not so much a civil war in the conventional sense as a war against civil society itself.
There are, accordingly, numerous other factors, including structural shifts, that have unsettled social sensibilities of late. Remunerated work has become increasingly individualized, more self-producing and self-sustaining. Over the past thirty years, unevenly across different societies, people have been rendered more individually responsible for costs of health insurance, retirement savings, even public education, as the viral lockdowns globally have made overwhelmingly evident. A greater range of work functions are being automated, threatened with robotification. Even the contrasts between work, home, and recreation have been blurred.
Work now is not so much the anchor of dignity, something many aspired to and worked to realize as central to non-alienated life. Rather, recreation itself has become something to work at. Work, too, has become more widely a work-out: staff hiring contracts for desk jobs often inquire whether one can squat, lift, climb, and stretch. Intrusive employer surveillance of work computers and productivity has become more widespread, further blurring the line between material working conditions and private communications, records, and lives. Ubiquitous artificial intelligence has transformed the very culture of work.
The lines dividing human from technological being accordingly are quickly blurring. We no longer just wear technology; it is increasingly inserted into us, a feature rather than an appendage. This technology generates reams of data about our physical and mental makeup, our momentary location, habits, patterns of consumption, and indeed individual desires. While designed to inform individual wellbeing, the data produced require constant vigilance regarding their potential to abuse privacy or be exercised against one’s best interests.
The flood of information deluging our lives has exacerbated the concerns. The next news cycle begins before the last one has ended. Every lead item is tagged as “breaking news.” The election of reality TV personalities, sitcom characters, and comedians to leadership positions across the world, including major political economies, has grounded both fascination and anxiety. More or less local concerns make waves globally, just as the rumble of globally significant events may shake the ground instantaneously beneath one’s feet at home. Daily reports of child abuse at US border facilities concentrating infant and adolescent kids into unsanitary disappearance camps have been punctuated with chilling images of the dead bodies of those refused safe passage or appropriate asylum procedures floating face down in a Texas border stream or across the central Mediterranean. Large structural arrangements such as Brexit or repeated foreign interference in local elections reshuffles the economic and political deck. Mass shootings and mass bombings mar everyday life with alarming frequency.
The stories about forbidden fruit, names, and travels with which I started have proved enormously unsettling. We wake each day to questions about serial events and structures made event-like: what’s the next episode, what horror is facing us now? In fact, they turn out at a deeper level to be the same question.
*
Social sophistication has failed in part to keep pace with technological prowess. War machines increasingly came to drive the economy of twentieth-century modernity. The world went between global wars from machine weaponry and automobility to long-distance bombers and aircraft carriers, nuclear destructiveness threatening sustaining environments and existence alike. A new generation of military machines has now emerged. As before, their impacts pervade everyday life: automatic weapons, drones, GPS, driverless vehicles, handheld facial recognition devices, stealth technology, and so on. The once seemingly clear lines between military and civilian cultures have blurred.
Today, war – like work – is becoming increasingly roboticized. Drones are the first step. AI-driven warfare involves the managing of, strategizing about, and increasingly execution of war. Machinic warfare is fast developing to the point of autonomy, of algorithmic self-definition. Like automobiles and financial transactions, war machines are in the process of operating themselves, making auto-generated decisions on the basis of data inputs and reiteratively calculating formulae. Technological instrumentalization wedded to producing only instantaneous satisfaction has pushed aside more nuanced affective responses. The latter are increasingly nowhere to be found.
Omer Fast’s remarkable video 5000 Feet is the Best (2011) offers telling insight into these tensions. US military drone operators based in Las Vegas target for killing at a distance mostly anonymous people on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan. Operator emotions are formulaically squeezed out. Five thousand feet, it turns out, is best for target determination, the height from which a brand of cigarette or make of shoes is most readily determined. But then buried emotions return to haunt. “The nightmares began,” confesses the drone operator central to the video. A sinking feeling inched up on him as he stealthily crept up from on high, from worlds away, on his unsuspecting target-turned-enemy. The growing grip, taking hold vise-like, refuses to leave the stricken “technologist” any peace.
The movie Eye in the Sky (2015), directed by Gavin Hood, grappled with the psychological and moral dilemmas gripping the executioners of military violence from a bird’s-eye view. Video wargames may train their players in technicalities such as response time and accuracy. They fail dismally to prepare them for the draining psychic demands of actual war violence. Anonymity, counter-intuitively, breeds unconscious remorse. There is emerging neurological evidence that first-person shooter games and prolific use of GPS in place of physical maps contract users’ hippocampus, permanently diminishing brain function over time. The irony is that increased auto-repetitiveness may dangerously diminish functionality over the long haul (Edwards 2010; O’Connor 2018).
The algorithmic furnishes the logic running this new generation of technology. It is quickly becoming the mode not just of production but of sociality. Its operating logic deepens the increasing inscrutability of the logics of economic production and social relation. By extension, this imperceptibly curtains off the loss of control as both sensed condition and factual outcome. Hence the contemporary concerns about transparency, self-determination, and sovereignty.
The triangulation of unpiloted technological targeting, acceleration (e.g. in nuclear capacity), and relative loss of control in this proliferation intensifies the incipient unease taking hold worldwide. The benefits of contemporary warring machines consume our everyday functionality now, further blurring the distinctions. Much of common technological prowess has roots in military R&D, from automobiles to computing technologies, energy efficiencies to clothing. There are now likely more privately owned assault weapons in the United States than there are in the American military. We can speak today with some accuracy of “warpeace” proliferating to the point of indiscernible low-intensity wars or microaggressions, law enforcement, warlike border policing, even recreation. Games of war and war games are not so readily distinguishable. Slow violence, and not only of the ecological kind (though that too), pervades everyday life.
Life proceeds now not simply in a time of constant states of war, but in the shadow of more or less undiminished and continual anxiety at their prospect, spread, or intensification. This includes anxiety about their outbreak, conduct, violence, effects, and costs. About war as such, conventionally comprehended, but more generalizably about a war (the indiscernibility of the indefinite article indicative of the proliferated insecurity) on everything: on poverty, on drugs, on crime, on the environment/nature/the climate, on neighbors, on immigrants, migrants, and refugees, on terror fought with terrorizing ferocity. Before global economic activity was decimated overnight by declaration of a war on “the Virus,” it was dominated by trade wars. Public places throughout the world had become targets of mass violence, from places of religious worship to places of consumption such as malls, fairs, markets, clubs, bars, and sites of learning such as schools and universities. We have come to live, then, in proliferating dread, even of dread itself.
*
Even before the pandemic lockdown, more than half of high school students in the United States were reporting stress and anxiety, much of it racially and gender driven. This was a dramatic increase from just 7 percent in the years prior to the presidency of Donald Trump, and the social aggression his unruliness licensed. The viral lockdown has increased trauma for children, from Spain to Lebanon, much as youth across war-torn landscapes have experienced. The agitation is intensified, even exaggerated, by the proliferating threat of gun violence, as much from within the expected safety of the home and school as from without. It is ramped up, in turn, by the incessant violent social media engagements making up everyday life, and in the case of youth much of their waking moments. COVID-19 has exacerbated rather than alleviated political intensity, across a wide swath of societies.
Societies find themselves slipping into civil war when within or between them they are wrought by irreconcilably contesting conceptions of life. For the state’s inhabitants, living is largely made unbearable. Those at least nominally controlling the state apparatus insist on obedience and deference to its way of being, on pain of erasure or disappearance for refusal or resistance. Fights over the impacts on everyday life of climate conditions, from Brazil’s Amazonia to the Maldives, from the coal-based economy of Australia to Zimbabwe’s recovery-defying droughts, reveal the intensifying political fallout. Civil wars more broadly conceived become struggles over competing ways of being in the world. They are struggles over their underlying conceptions, ways of living, and over control of the state and its apparatuses to materialize and advance these commitments.
Colonial existence, as postcolonial theorist Achille Mbembe (2016) has noted, riffing off anticolonial philosopher Frantz Fanon, is a permanent state of agitation, a state of constant alarm. This is a constitutive condition of coloniality, not just a by-product or occasional affective state in colonial societies. The sovereignty of colonized states was always in question. Globalization has updated and heightened this alarm by blurring anew boundaries between states, drawing into question the absoluteness of even metropolitan state sovereignty. As state sovereignty has frayed at the edges, if not eroded altogether, social conflict has gripped state culture, within and between states. The escalating tensions within and across the European Union, between the EU and Brexitannia, and within states offer a range of driving examples. State force is readily invoked, insisted upon even, where sovereignty is deemed under duress, for example in the wake of waves of ongoing migration crises. Where politics is indistinguishable from civil war, dread has become its leakage.
Ionesco once famously quipped that “God is dead, Marx is dead, and I don’t feel too well myself.” If religious experience once purported to be about spiritual enchantment, the implication of Ionesco’s pithy insight is that today the politics of religion seems driven by disenchanted resentment, more often taking on an apocalyptic articulation. Post-apocalyptic survival looms as large in this cultural imaginary and its commercial materialization as post-life ascendancy, from survival training and entertainment programs to exobiological investigations and cryogenics. The pandemic expression of this, perhaps, is that in the interest of survival we have all become virologists.
In a world with no more transcendental gods and the unleashing of generalized uncertainty, race can be characterized as the secularization of the religious (Goldberg 2015: 8–10). As religion had previously led in doing, race offers an artifice, a narrative, of common and distinct group origins, a projection of kinship and belonging, a set of protocols for social life and interaction, genealogical inheritance and generational reproduction. Social warrings, whether cultural or weaponized, are invariably about insisting on the maintenance of these boundaries to the exclusion of the projected non-belonging and non-committal. They cut off renewal, closing down the possibility of regeneration and reconstruction.
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Feeding and feeding off these developments is the exploding culture of fabrication and a politics predicated upon the ballooning sociality of make-believe. Fabrication emerges out of these contemporary social and technological developments, while in turn interactively exacerbating them. The culture of fabrication and aggrandizing self-fabulation is enabled by technologies that readily sponsor making things, manufacturing them virtually. The virtually made are represented as readily existent, as the real. 3D printing is an obvious example. Maker culture has quickly licensed the emergence of make-believe culture.
The resulting product is double-sided. On the one hand, there has readily emerged the circulation of alternative realities, of alternative truths. These are made-up accounts of events, conditions, states of affairs. They may include strands of the actual and existing but twisted into fabricated accounts not or not fully reflecting the real. Our equation of the fabricated with the real has translated quickly into tolerance of the fabricated. The recent emergence of “deepfakes” exemplifies this trend. But it has a deeper history, as exemplified by the slew of fake memoirs, of misrepresented or fabricated credentials, of accounts of events that did not take place or at which the storyteller falsely claimed to be present. On the flip side are constant dismissals, sometimes weaponized, of the real as fake: fake reality, fake news, the produced by design as mere happenstance.
Make-believe operates in two registers. First, there is the operation of making things up, of fabricating them, of giving a fully or partially fictionalized account. Michel Foucault (1980–1/2017: 34fn) characterizes “biopoetics” as “personal fabrication of one’s own life,” presumptively for self-advancement. Second, there is the compulsive in the operations of make-believe, compelling others by force of will, control of technologies of mediation, or sheer threat to believe (in) the account.
This unsettling of the given, the real, the true and false, the believable and incorrigible has further tightened the knot in the social stomach. It frays the seams of sociality, leaving nothing but quicksand, all the way down.
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Political depression is too common to capture this gnawing sensibility seeping across all aspects of social life, like a pit bull with jaws clamped around one’s leg, tightly locked, not letting go. One gets politically depressed in the face of losing an election or vote, say. But that tends to pass more readily when one re-commits to the political process or struggle to ensure a better outcome next time. There has been some of that currently, to be sure, but this lingering sense seems deeper. It is not a momentary presence of a political candidate, burning issue, or world-historical caricature with whose commitments one basically disagrees. Political depression may cut more sharply in one cycle or another, depending what side of the issues one occupies. Nor is it simply the inconvenience of an unfortunate more or less random experience. There is something else at work now, responding to larger, more tectonic, shifts. Dread and its mutations act as a symptom, pointing to something not yet quite discernible or understandable, an uneasy sense of the anticipatory.
Indistinction has become generalized. It has become much more difficult to distinguish between war and peace; illness and wellness; everyday practice and corruption; desire and demand (or command); interest or preference and internet feed; truth and fabrication; even a beautiful and a “killer” sunset. As borne out by the experiences of those with whose stories I began, authority is often giving way to petty authoritarianisms. The latter morphs in a discretionary moment and policies into more despotic intrusions, often legally defying or bending. Consider the terrible conditions imposed upon women, men, and children migrants in the hundreds of invisible refugee camps across Europe, or on Nauru and Manus islands off Australia, or in the disappearance camps at the southern border of the United States. There is a reach for absoluteness as all evidence points to the contingent and conditional. The next ecological disaster or pathogenic virus occurs with greater frequency and ferocity. As, too, do the not so random searches and attacks on streets, in schools, at work. No matter how much security technologies are proliferated, or guns purchased in supposed self-defense, we start each day feeling less safe, more socially insecure.
In the wake of all of this, dread has become the driving affect best characterizing the palpable anxieties of our time. Where meaning can be identified, there is little room for dread. Dread operates in the space of indiscernibility. Outrageous racist expressions are known to be wrong, but the transgressing exhilaration of their assertion delays or buries otherwise certain dread. Similarly, everyone in China knows the Cultural Revolution was awful. But they at least can claim to comprehend it, hence the nostalgia for it at a time of proliferating uncertainty. These otherwise outrageous transgressions offset or displace the generalized uncertainty now.
Prolonged dread, then, is the mark of this moment, of its seeming inscrutability, its illegibility, where the improbable has become likely. Repeated raging hurricanes, the quaking earth, indeed pandemics, are rationalized as acts of nature. But like famines, floods, and fires, the destruction they manifest is invariably anthropocenic. They merge politics and culture with nature, ideology standing in the way of science, politics refusing to own up to the facts. They are prompted and enabled by human shortsightedness, inaction, overaction and overreaction, or immediate instrumentalizing intervention parading as “nature.”
There is little recognition, if not often outright denial, of the long-term conditions giving rise to these repeated upheavals. Random screening and interrogation have become prolific, though not quite indiscriminate. Race still determines likelihood, as borne out by secondary screening data at ports of entry and less formal “stop and frisk” or updated “sus law” policing practices on city streets, as well as viral infection and mortality rates. The quick uptake of racist expression as an instrument of political blame and advancement is as revealing about the disturbing latencies of the populations moved by such expression across global polities as it is about the leaders committed to such racist instrumentalization. Dread drips from the pervasive sense that incomprehensible and indecipherable extinction or disappearance could strike in a blinding second.
