Open World

Professor Saito shook his head, and I could see that he had enjoyed the story, that its strange and unhappy contours had amused him (and troubled him) in the same way they had me. People choose, he said, people choose, and they choose on behalf of others. And what about outside your work, what are you reading? Mostly medical journals, I said, and then many other interesting things that I begin and am somehow unable to finish. No sooner do I buy a new book that it reproaches me for leaving it unread. I don't read much either, he said, with the state my eyes are in; but I have enough tucked away up here. He motioned to his head. In fact, I'm full. We laughed, and just then Mary brought in the persimmons, in a porcelain saucer. I ate half of one; it was a little oversweet. I ate the other half, and thanked him.
- Teju Cole, Open City (2011)

I'll start by saying that this is not a review, since you won't get much out of it if you haven't read the book. Open City is great, and it's selling for a pittance, so you should go get a copy regardless of what I say here. Teju Cole has one of the most sensitive and thoughtful voices I've encountered in modern fiction, and unlike most of our most celebrated writers he doesn't resort to wearisome and easy satire or psychologized, claustrophobic narcissism. Open City is thought-provoking in the truest sense of the word: it inspires genuine thought in an original way without beating you over the head with its pretensions to profundity. (It's astonishing to think how many books that are typically considered  intellectual touchstones are just haphazardly assembled piles of Deep Thoughts woven together with sly winks and innuendo.)


To a great extent, I suspect that the reason I like the book is that the narrative style is so close to what I imagine my own interior monologue would be, were I smarter and more contemplative and so on. (Musil, though a classic example of the Deep Thoughts school, scratches the same itch.) Yet there is more to it than that. As several reviewers have already noticed, the real heart of the book is its strange anxiety about globalization, and it is this that sets it apart. Julius, our half-German, half-Nigerian protagonist, never lets us forget that we are living in a globalized world: he constantly encounters people who, just like himself, awkwardly straddle the boundaries between states and continents. Rough crossings of whatever kind are constantly on his mind.

That, in itself, is not very new. The Dilemma of Globalized Modern Man, in various forms, has been a literary staple since the eighteenth century, and in its peculiarly tormented form since the first half of the twentieth. Open City, paradoxically, is new precisely in the indifference of its portrayal. Its most "global" characters are not exoticized or meant to stand in for the particular troubles of their faraway ethnic group. They aren't hawking beads in the big multicultural world-music bazaar that '90s books so often ended up describing. Travel, immigration, and the Internet have made everyone in the book so familiar, in other words, that their "globalness" no longer functions as a substitute for characterization. This rings far truer to me as a depiction of the global world than any of the "encountering the Other" business that emerged several decades ago.

Cole. in short, globalizes the banal and banalizes the global. He is thereby left free to explore his real theme, which is self-justification. Almost every character in this book talks as if arguing before a hostile jury. There's always something in their past that they're uneasy about, and the neat and convenient stories they tell only emphasize this anxiety. (The book itself is, in fact, an exercise in self-justification.) What globalization allows them to do is displace the feelings of guilt, to embroider away their sense of responsibility. Not unexpectedly, Open City takes for granted the standard liberal depiction of the global world order as fundamentally grounded in guilt: about slavery, economic inequality, genocide, racism, war. This inborn corruption  becomes a fertile ground for self-justifying narratives which are only rendered more troubling by their plausibility.

We can, if we like, call Open City the first post-global novel. (At any rate, it's the first one I've read to which this tag could be adequately applied.) Cole is clearly trying to start a conversation with the reader, but the question he is asking is no longer "How is the global world changing us?" It's "How do we live with the global as a permanent part of our background?" I've long felt that the latter was much more interesting, and this is an admirable attempt at answering it.

States and Societies, II

Hometownsmen liked money as much as anybody else, and maybe more than most, but their circumstances and their neighbors kept them from getting very much, and they fiercely resented anybody who did get very much. Guilds were conscious and recognized institutions for maintaining a satisfactory degree of equality, by penalizing or excluding the pushy whether rich or poor, and by the mutual agreements among the membership that restrained expansion and that promised security. The civic constitutions and the rights of membership they embodied were instruments of a democracy among members no less fraudulent than those which many polities with more democratic affectations have had. But hometown equality and hometown democracy meant the subjugation of everybody in the community to everybody, to limits set by the whole community. Hometownsmen were neither political theorists nor ideologues, and for the equality and democracy that existed among them the motives were no doubt a shared jealousy of the stronger and richer and a shared contempt for the weaker and poorer. Their communities—guilds, constitutions, and all—were the kind of polities such motives sustained; and very strong and stable polities they were. An important source of their coherence may have been the suppression within the community of anxiety about standing and place that modern ideas of equality  and democracy, which leave the stability out and do not have the hometownsmen's walls, are sometimes thought to have created: hometownsmen directed that against outsiders. Where community sanctions prevailed there was little reason for that kind of uncertainty becaue there could be little change one way or another. Membership resided securely there. If modern class and racial hostility have developed, underground so to speak, as ways of asserting status and location in legally open and egalitarian societies, then such phenomena were unlikely to appear where status and location were immediately recognizable by familiarity or law; inside the community, that is, while the alien was outside. While each community's walls held, such resentments and anxieties were directed against people who did not belong, and so strengthened rather than dividing the society where membership was primarily located. Even rules on what clothing who might wear did not actively assert rank and place so much as accept their existence and inhibit the race after status by the display of wealth. "Presumption in clothing not only causes waste," wrote Christian Wolff, "it also arouses the jealousy of others, from which hatred and enmity follow." Presumption can mean either pretending to belong when you don't, or pretending not to belong when you do. Hometown egalitarianism and democracy punished both kinds of presumption.

- Mack Walker, German Home Towns: Community, State, and General Estate, 1648-1871

I've been an anarchist for probably as long as I've been thinking about politics in any coherent way. I like to think I'm past the point of "growing out" of it (can any phrase be more condescending?), in the sense that the problems with the other available alternatives continue to seem insurmountable even when looked at as objectively as possible. Lately, however, I've been coming to the realization that anarchism is not something I've successfully been able to defend to myself either; rather, it seems increasingly like a final shoal on the route to complete indifference. Like so many other strands of critical thought, in other words, it works well as a via negativa but offers little in return.

Part of the problem is that political discussions that involve anarchists are rarely tilted in the direction of subtlety. The debate is invariably predicated on some kind of consensus that out there is a big, malevolent System with a monopoly on violence and a will to crush good communitarian values. Discussions of coercion inevitably circle back to the consensus bad guys, and when the issue of power within noncoercive communities comes up, it is waved away with bland assurances that everything will be all right as long as we work together. (The David Graeber approach seems to substitute "we'll put in safeguards that make our societies harder to coopt" for "let's all work together," but this curiously liberal twist is not really any more convincing.)

But at least "the tyranny of structurelessness" is an acknowledged phenomenon. Much more difficult to deal with is the idea that power in state-dominated societies stretches beyond the limits of sovereignty, political economy, or institutions. (My point here is distinct from the more typical arguments that the state interpenetrates with society or Foucauldian variations on the same.) In other words, we are far too eager to assume that any observable injustice is in some way traceable to an institution or a state-legitimated form of oppression, and will accordingly disappear once the revolution comes. It does not help that opponents of anarchism rely so heavily on specious evo-psych or other arguments about "human nature."

Reading Mack Walker's excellent book German Home Towns really brought home to me the limitations of such an approach. Walker constantly counterposes the localist and blinkered worldview of these little cities to the rationalizing productivism of the eighteenth-century state. At first, this was irritating: after all, these are states too, and they represent organized violence as well as any Prussian regiment! As I read further, however, it became clear to me that the forms of power at work in these communities were not in any significant degree dependent on a formal monopoly on violence. These towns, in fact, were more or less what you would expect an anarchist community to look like after a few centuries of contented stability. Formal restrictions may have existed on paper, but power was exercised through personal authority and communal respect. More importantly, the social order was rendered almost entirely consensual and egalitarian through the strategic redefinition of the parties to the consensus.

Walker makes it hard to see this as anything but a nightmare. The fetishization of continuity, the tribalist xenophobia, and the narrow horizons open to the towns' residents all make state domination look like an appealing alternative. It would be possible for an anarchist to object, of course: the presence of organized violence itself has a corrupting effect even if it is not extensively relied upon; people in real anarchist communities will have a more productive set of shared values; xenophobia would prove maladaptive for a civilization which depends on multilateral horizontal cooperation.

All true enough, and it may well be that if the magical anarchist utopia finally strikes it will have a much greater preponderance of truly open and pleasant communities. It is a reasonable assumption, however, that some significant number will follow the hometown model. But what is a citizen of a hometown-style community empowered to do if he finds it too constricting? After all, he cannot claim to represent the will of a majority; he has no coherent institutions to oppose; he has no model of power relations to substitute for the informal Gemeinschaft, since Gemeinschaft would seem to be at the heart of the anarchist value system.

Even in a scenario in which it is victorious, then, anarchism does not give us enough of a language of opposition to cover even a predictable scenario such as this one. In that way it resembles the inchoate liberalism of the pre-French Revolution period. Perhaps the only way to get around this issue is to assume such a language will be worked out in practice, as it inevitably must. But isn't that the coward's way out?

States and Societies, I

The local reforms of the 1780s multiplied the number of posts, subdividing—perhaps unwittingly—the civilian apparatus between appointed members engaged in collecting funds and keeping accounts on the one hand and those elected to take charge of police and justice on the other. A survey of several provinces in 1822 reveals that the internal structure of the army had been transplanted into the provincial administration, with marshals, judges, captains, and sheriffs representing the "line" (stroi), the civilian treasurers and accountants, the noncombatants (nestroevoi). The importance of military training and values thus remained very great among those who policed and punished the dependent population and demanded from it the obedience to which army life had accustomed them.

The rigidity and severity of this command structure, however, were mitigated by the pervasive influence of patronage networks. These networks are characteristic of political systems in the process of state formation; in eighteenth-century Russia it was still impossible to speak of a Russian state in the sense of a complex of abstractions representing interests extending beyond those of the Romanov house and the ruling class. They provided the only access to career mobility until the imposition, and above all the observance, of formal criteria of selection and promotion divorced from the candidates' social origins.

... The existence of a national network of families and client systems made a mockery of the rigid hierarchy established by legislative texts in a constant search for administrative order and "regularity." It explained why the Russian government, more than any other, was a government of men and not of laws. The consolidation of the political infrastructure during the reign of Catherine also marked the completion of this national network and its transformation into an imperial one. This achievement went a long way in explaining the success of Catherine's policies and guaranteed the legitimacy of the autocracy for another century.

- John LeDonne, Absolutism and Ruling Class: The Formation of the Russian Political Order, 1700-1825

Whenever John LeDonne shows up to one of our historians' workshops, he makes the same point: "What exactly do you mean by 'the state'?" Although this is often among the most insightful questions that get asked at these events, it says much more about us as historians than it does about LeDonne. Why are we so enamored of "the state"? I can think of a few reasons, but they aren't very good ones. First, we're still trapped in the pseudo-critical post-'60s moment in which passing yourself off as a radical is something of a badge of legitimacy-and thus we end up in a weird situation in which almost nobody is an actual anarchist but almost everybody is prepared at any given moment to rattle off the ways in which the state colonizes and invidiously rationalizes its hapless population. The second explanation is a mirror of the first. For all our critical fantasies, we are still heirs of a nineteenth-century disciplinary tradition that saw the nation-state as the fount of all goods and the apex of all explanations—and so is it any wonder that a reified state emerges to fill in the gaps in other stories?

More than likely, of course, the reality is a mixture of the two. We work in state-funded archives using state-centered methodologies, and so when we look for sexy topics (vaguely critical, bizarrely enough, can still count as sexy) the state emerges as an obvious candidate for study. All around us, we see powerful and many-tentacled state apparatuses and people who want to find out how they got that way. Since most archives are set up to make it easier to study the state than anything else, we're in a position to answer their questions (even if in practice we rarely do). And, as I've constantly complained on this blog, this is a problem that affects marginal fields much more than central ones.

What LeDonne's work helps us do is disentangle the various meanings of the word "state," which are often most confused precisely when the state is most central to the narrative. To begin with, there is "the state" as a collection of ideologically-neutral institutions supported in one way or another by coercion; then there is "the state" as an ideologized body bent on asserting its claims at the expense of other corporate groupings such as localities and churches (it is usually this kind of state that is referred to in "state formation"); and finally—and crucially-there is the state as a rhetorical and ideological entity.

It is indeed impossible, as LeDonne says, to speak of a state in Russia—and it is especially impossible in this third sense: there wasn't a large enough constituency willing to trot out the ideological panoply of statism in the pursuit of its goals. For LeDonne, the elements of this panoply are essentially the core beliefs of Prussian bureaucrats: meritocracy, professional equality, impersonal norms, legality, and so on. Naturally, these values are in fact closely linked to the more material sides of the state-formation phenomenon, since a state that doesn't claim to have anything to offer is not a viable player in political contestation.

So if we persist in seeing the state as a pregiven historical phenomenon constantly on the verge of bursting free from its feudal coccoon, we're actually confusing a number of related but distinct issues. It is strange that the state is often the only entity left untouched by the parade of recent studies that claim to demonstrate the contingency and arbitrariness of historical phenomena. Its triumph may well have been foretold—but the circumstances under which ideology, rhetoric, and institutions become molded into a coherent force called "statism" are a lot murkier, especially in Russia, than we like to assume. For LeDonne, the most powerful demonstration are the institutions of eighteenth-century Russia. Perhaps never in the history of the region had there been such a flowering of institutions accompanied by such a lack of confidence in the state. No wonder it's so hard for historians to understand.

Double Standards

Underlying this book has been a different assumption, and hence a different kind of history. It is time, therefore, to confront one of the more radical implications of the historicist view of technology I have been developing: the possibility that a technology (even a technology accounted "superior") can be rejected, discontinued, and forgotten. In Tokugawa Japan, it should be remembered, all knowledge of firearms was systematically exorcised. Similarly, the ideal of interchangeable parts production pioneered in late-eighteenth-century France was repudiated in the nineteenth century. That repudiation was sufficiently thorough that today we know this method of production as the "American system of manufactures." Disbelief and ridicule greeted those manufacturers who tried to interest the French state in interchangeable gun manufacture in the 1850s. At a time when the British were importing an entire panoply of American machine tools to outfit their Enfield arsenal, the French only half-heartedly integrated a few more machines into their existing armories. Only late in the nineteenth century did the French arms industry become the nexus of an indigenous machine-tool trade (as had been the case in America for several decades). This chronology of discovery and its subsequent fifty-year erasure violates several of our most basic assumptions about the "natural" history of technology--at least as it is supposed to have unfolded in the heroic age of the industrializing West. Why was interchangeable parts manufacturing, with its promise of efficiency and gain, repudiated in France? What can explain this strange "technological amnesia"?
- Ken Alder, Engineering the Revolution: Arms and Enlightenment in France, 1763-1815

 Engineering the Revolution is a fascinating book, not because it overturns our assumptions about the American origins of interchangeable parts (I honestly don't care all that much) but because of what it says about interactions between technical elites and other kinds of interest groups. In brief, Alder's argument is that ancien regime France possessed a very recognizable elite of engineers in the form of professional artillerists. In the decades immediately preceding the Revolution, a faction of these engineers attempted to institute standardization and objective standards in arms manufacturing, a project which failed in the face of opposition from the private gunsmiths who were actually responsible for producing muskets. Although an experimental attempt at a interchangeable-parts-based gun workshop proved resoundingly successful, during the Napoleonic era it was abandoned as a failure because of competition from other factions in the artillery.

All this is fairly uninteresting to anyone not specifically involved with the French Revolution or the history of technology. But Alder makes a key point (adapting a line of reasoning from Ted Porter) in the course of developing his argument, and it is one that needs to be taken seriously as an analytical principle: objective standards, in particular those which are measured using concrete physical objects like gauges and calipers, do not come about naturally in the course of nebulous developments such as "rationalization" or "technological progress." Rather, they are the outcome of failed negotiations over trust, authority, and verification.

Alder's most prominent example are go and no-go gauges. A go gauge, in its simplest form, would be something like a metal circle of determinate size through which a cannonball must fit in order to be judged "standards-compliant," while a no-go gauge establishes a similar lower bound for size (the cannonball must not be able to fit through it). These seem like elementary improvements to the production process: what ordnance-maker wouldn't want to have some way of verifying the quality of his finished product?

In fact things are rather less simple. The adoption of a gauge system totally reconfigures the power relationship between the various players involved in arms manufacturing. The craftsman who makes the balls no longer has the authority to judge his product, while the engineer entrusted with developing and deploying the gauges suddenly has a bird's eye view of the production process. The state stops being a customer and starts being an overseer; suddenly the implicit tolerances and instinctive calculations involved in production need to be made explicit and accessible to outside management.

Obviously lots of different stories can be told about these sorts of situations: we can call them "scientific management" or we can call them "dehumanization." But what happens to the gauge in all this? After it's introduced to the context of contestation, we forget about it completely, as if the decision to create a standard and decide on a tolerance were totally separate from that context. It becomes a unit of measurement, safe from any epistemological challenge precisely because of its arbitrariness.

Phrasing this point explicitly seems in itself to suggest that all standards are false or suspect or something. That isn't what it means at all. Since standards derive their authority from some form of mutual consent, they by definition cannot be "false." But they do, like Marx's famous table-shaking commodity, concretize and thereby conceal a whole web of individual desires and goals. For any historically-minded person, this unlocks a whole way of thinking about the world. All around us are the material and solid records of any number of battles won or lost; we've just never heard of most of them. These gauges, it turned out, was part of a losing system.