 This book is the result of Ialenti's thirty-two month fieldwork with the members of the Finnish "Safety Case" project, who are tasked with the safe disposal of an underground nuclear waste repository. Their forecasts require them to think about long term futures, often going tens of thousands and even millions of years into the future. Ialenti shares some of their thinking and methods in the book, presenting them in a series of "Reckonings."
Ialenti writes the book to contribute to two related crises: 1. the ecological crisis and 2. the "deflation of expertise." Short-term thinking in politics, by businesses, and by individuals have led to the Anthropocene, while public trust in expertise has been degraded and has disempowered those who are most able to contribute to potential solutions. Ialenti hopes to encourage long term thinking by sharing some of the Safety Case project's methods and thinking, while reaffirming the importance of expertise and experts. The Reckonings are a bit simple and disappointing, although I understand that there are limits to what can be communicated; the Safety Case project team are experts with decades of experience in geology, hydrology, ecology, etc. and employ complex methods and models--that aspect cannot be transmitted to interested members of the public. Instead, what is communicated are relatively simple thinking exercises. The first set of Reckonings are centred on analogies. To determine possible future geological conditions on the nuclear waste repository, the Safety Case project team uses other geological formations as stand-in and uses analogies to determine if the repository's buffer material can withstand changes over time. Of course, no two situations can be completely analogous; analogies can be contested, can be supported, and can be used as learning opportunities even if they are insufficient. Sometimes, these disagreements can originate due to different theoretical and scientific perspectives; the Safety Case team made use of a methodologically omnivorous approach, using "multiple lines of reasoning," or "intentionally having many different teams of experts, each working with different disciplinary backgrounds and intellectual tendencies, working in parallel on the same long-sighted challenges" (p. 55). I think many will concur that this is good practice for all futures-related projects. Ialenti suggests the use of landscapes and urban areas (although not limited to these two) as "interscalar vehicles" (p. 57), or as devices to stimulate analogies and exercise futures oriented thinking--in his words, "long-termist intellectual calisthenics" (p. 59). How have the landscapes, material objects, cityscapes, etc. around you changed over the past decades, centuries, and millennia, and how could they change in the years to come? How could these be used to provoke the imagination, and how can these be used as analogies for understanding the futures of other things? Ialenti provokes these reflections. The second set of Reckonings are much weaker; Ialenti shows how basic thinking patterns and organizational structures created the multiple potential futures. These include basic if-then logical structures and input/output patterns, which weave together to form the work of the team, the work of a collective consciousness that is much greater than any one individual could comprehend. The third set of Reckonings advocate for the use of multiple perspectives for long-term futures thinking. By zooming in and out of multiple time frames, multiple scales, and different theoretical perspectives, one can obtain a better understanding of the details as well as an holistic image. The final set of Reckonings use the untimely death of Seppo, a key figure of the Safety Case project, to think about the preservation of vital expert knowledge and about effective knowledge transmission in organizations. Ialenti ends the book with suggestions for developing a society whose members are capable in long-termist thinking; there are some interesting suggestions, but I will not elaborate here.
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 Like Economics: The User's Guide, Ha-Joon Chang's 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism is a reader-friendly manual to economics. It provides its readers the tools to think critically about the economy and subverts the mystique of expert authority surrounding the field of economics.
The book is written in a particular context: the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. For Chang (as for many others), this is the result of free market ideology (or neo-liberalism or neo-classical economics) that has been dominant in university departments and in policy making since the 1980s. (From this perspective, I think it is important to note the failure of expertise in the economics profession in the current debates about the deflation of expertise, loss of trust in authority, and the rise of populism.) The 23 Things enumerated and elaborated upon in the book refute the self-evident "truths" that this branch of economics takes for granted. Free market ideology filters into public consciousness through language and frames the way that we think about the world (e.g. human motivations) and Chang provides a counterweight to these ideas in this very approachable book. Some of the more intriguing Things are the following: Thing 1. There is no such thing as a free market: there are always rules and boundaries in every market (e.g. slavery, child labour, food safety), and calls for a free market are always a political opinion, not an objective economic determination. Thing 4. The washing machine has changed the world more than the internet has: The washing machine and household appliances have allowed women to enter the work force and has led to massive social and economic transformations, much more so than ICT. Chang is being overly provocative in this Thing, but he makes the point that "our fascination with the latest, and our under-valuation of what has already become common " (p. 40) can lead us astray. Thing 7. Free-market policies rarely make poor countries rich: Growth in the developing world (e.g. Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa) was faster before they followed neo-liberal prescriptions. The largest success stories in recent times, India and China, did not follow neo-liberal prescriptions. Even developed countries advocating for free market developmental policies today (U.K. and U.S.) used state-led development for their development. Thing 13. Making rich people richer doesn't make the rest of us richer: Trickle down economics does not work; making the rich richer through tax cuts, incentives, etc. has not led to faster economic growth, especially as this has not led to more investment. It can be preferable to redistribute wealth downward, as those with lower incomes spend a higher proportion of their incomes. Thing 19. Despite the fall of communism, we are still living in planned economies: Governments in large capitalist economies are always planning. Additionally, a large part of the planned economy in capitalist economies is missing in these debates: the private sector. Large corporations are also planning their activities and dominate a large section of the economy; more of the global economy is coordinated and planned by these companies and not through market transactions between firms.  The Second Machine Age was written in 2014; I was worried that it'd be an outdated compilation of emerging technologies at the time. Fortunately, Brynjolfsson and McAfee offer more than that.
The first machine age refers to the technologies developed from the Industrial Revolution, which allowed human beings to harness mechanical power to overcome physical limitations. The second machine age will provoke a similar transformation for mental power. Key to Brynjolfsson and McAfee's thesis is the assumption of continued exponential growth in computing (Moore's Law)--whether processors, memory, or sensors--which has been a continued reality thus far. Exponential growth is starting to create the conditions for technologies that could not have been imagined previously, or as Brynjolfsson and McAfee write, "sometimes a difference in degree (in other words, more of the same) becomes a difference in kind (in other words, different than anything else)" (p. 56). The current digital economy is a particularly fruitful arena of innovation. According to certain theories of innovation, innovation is not about "coming up with something big and new, but instead recombining things that already exist" (p. 78), and for Brynjolfsson and McAfee, "digital innovation is recombinant innovation in its purest form" (p. 81). The characteristics of digital information facilitate recombinant innovation: digital information is non-rival (and not used up after consumption) and it has a close to zero marginal cost of reproduction. Digitization creates more and more permanent building blocks, and these are can be infinitely reused and recombined for innovation. The potentially infinite number of reconfigurations and recombinations require "more eyeballs and bigger computers" (p. 83) to test them out. AI technology represents a significant development for the latter. For the former, those who have the most interesting insights are those "marginal"--or "have education, training, and experience that [are]not obviously relevant for the problem" (p. 84). This speaks to the power of crowdsourcing and open innovation approaches, which are enhanced by the power of communication technology. The digital economy works by different rules of bounty and spread. While the the development of new technologies will bring more bounty, the spread (or distribution) of the bounty is uneven. Those who own the new technologies, the new products and services, capture all of the wealth; previous forms of production distributed the bounty by employing human labour. Only those whose labour complements technologies receive a small portion of the created value; those whose labour can be automated must participate in a race to the bottom, where their wages compete with the costs of robotics and machinery. (Of course, one must not succumb to fatalism; we can easily imagine a world where the public owns these new technologies, and where labour is not automated completely, but partially, and one can get paid the same amount or at a higher rate for doing less work instead of ending up jobless and destitute. These ideas are not discussed in the book.) Brynjolfsson and McAfee offer an interesting discussion on "stars and superstars," who benefit the most from the new economy. Through digitization and interconnected markets, the non-rival and close to zero marginal cost of reproduction digital goods and services have access to a larger consumer base. These are winner-take-all markets (Andrew Yang must have read this book), who benefit and cement their status through network effects. In this market, some superstars benefit by proxy (e.g. lawyers who represent these large and rich superstars). I noticed that the spread and bounty narrative that Brynjolfsson and McAfee present is strangely apolitical and very unsatisfactory (no mention of neo-liberal economic policies, for example). For example, they write on page 133 that "in the past couple of decades, we've seen changes in tax policy, greater overseas competition, ongoing government waste, and Wall Street shenanigans. But when we look at the data and research, we conclude that none of these are the primary driver of growing inequality. Instead the main driver is ... the technology that undergirds our economic system" (p. 133). To substantiate this huge claim, they compare growing inequality in Sweden, Finland, and Germany as proof. Very unsatisfactory. Brynjolfsson and McAfee end the book with some recommendations for individuals and policy-makers. I will not go into this in the review.  Part 1 of the book examines the formation and basic logics of surveillance capitalism. Part 2 is appropriately entitled "The Advance of Surveillance Capitalism." Zuboff begins with surveillance capitalism's second economic imperative--this is the "prediction imperative." In order to foretell future behaviour, surveillance capitalists need better quality of prediction products, which is accomplished by "economies of scope" and "economies of action" (p. 199). Economies of scope refer to the necessity of varied types of behavioural surplus (i.e. not just clicks on Facebook) and the dimension of depth, or data "from intimate patterns of the self" (p. 199). Economies of action refers to something more insidious. It describes the processes involved in shaping behaviour, which is the best way to predict behaviour. Surveillance capitalists actively intervene and "nudge, tune, herd, manipulate, and modify behaviour" (p. 200) for certain outcomes. In order to achieve economies of scale and economies of action, Zuboff notes that a new era of "surveillance commerce" is initiated: she calls this "the reality business" (p. 200). This is the collection of "machine-based extraction architecture" (e.g. IoT) in the real world that constantly renders behaviour into data and predictions, and through which surveillance capitalists produce guaranteed outcomes. The imperatives of surveillance capitalism fit perfectly with the ideals of ubiquitous computing; through the texts of key figures in the field, Zuboff describes a world where technologies disappear and blend into the fabric of everyday life and an apparatus of ubiquitous sensing produces a digital omniscience. Zuboff details some of the technologies and methods that are being developed to render our interior selves into raw material by surveillance capitalist firms. Facebook user likes can "automatically and accurately estimate" personal attributes like "sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious and political views, personality traits, intelligence, happiness, use of addictive substances, parental separation, age, and gender" (p. 273). "Affective computing" (p. 281) targets unconscious emotional expressions in the form of facial expressions, vocal tonality, and other such signals to extract higher quality behavioural data. The transformation to this real world extraction architecture is not just an abstract idea--it comes with concrete consequences. Zuboff delineates three different categories in economies of action, these are tuning, herding, and conditioning. Tuning refers to the use of "subliminal cues designed to subtly shape the flow of behaviour" or can come in the form of manipulations in the "choice architecture" (p. 293) through the "nudge." Herding involves controlling individual behaviour by modifying the environment in which human actions take place. Ubiquitous computing is not only an apparatus for sensing, but also for controlling outcomes. Finally, conditioning refers to Skinner's work in operant conditioning, in which subjects are put under a system of "schedule of reinforcements" (rewards, recognition, praise) to produce certain behaviours reliably. Zuboff returns extensively to Skinner's work in Part 3. One of the examples fhat Zuboff provides is auto insurance. Auto insurers can use the constant flow of data about driving behaviours, our feelings, what we are saying, etc. to price premiums by the millisecond. They are also able to control driving behaviour by using behavioural data and an incentive structure, promoting certain driving behaviours while discouraging others. At the very worst, surveillance capitalists have complete control and can completely shut down vehicular systems, leaving the driver stranded and helpless. As Zuboff repeatedly states throughout the book, surveillance capitalism and the current application of technologies is the result of a series of choices--they were not inevitable. The technology and research could have easily been applied to help people and for the betterment of society. Affective computing was originally designed for a medical setting, for the challenges of autistic children (p. 287). The Aware Home project, which was a collaboration of computer scientists and engineers at Georgia Tech, was the source of the original image of the smart home. In this image, behavioural data from ubiquitous computing would be reinvested into the home as a closed loop to improve the lives of the occupants, instead of being sold on behavioural futures markets. Economies of scope and economies of action have implications for human subjectivity. Zuboff identifies the "assertion of freedom of will" as an assertion of "the right to the future tense as a condition of a fully human life" (p. 331). While uncertainty is a precondition to human freedom, surveillance capitalists and their techniques of human modification eliminate uncertainty for a world of guaranteed outcomes. Zuboff succintly sums up the development of surveillance capitalism: "... this decade-and-a-half trajectory has taken us from automating information flows about you to automating you" (p. 339). A lot of commentators in the West stoke fear about the dystopian potential of the Chinese social credit system without casting the same critical gaze at the systems being constructed by the profit-driven surveillance capitalists in their own living room.  A great, comprehensive introduction to future studies by Yale University sociologist Wendell Bell.
As an introductory manual on the field, I found that there was nothing too surprising written in the book. Bell's research goes through the history of the discipline from its roots in nation-state planning, think tanks like RAND, and key works and key figures. He discusses the purpose of future studies--"the purpose of future studies are to discover or invent, examine and evaluate, and propose possible, probable, and preferable futures" (p. 73)--and delineates nine major tasks for the discipline. He articulates the key assumptions of the discipline and provides an overview of the various methodologies that futurists have created to study the future. The book is good reference material (albeit outdated) for research done in the field, especially for the section on methodology. I was able to discover academic anthropologists other than Robert Textor who have engaged with future studies. The most interesting section is probably Bell's section on epistemology. He discusses three theories of knowledge, which are positivism, postpositivism, and critical realism. He notes the influence of postpositivism and post-modernism on the field of future studies, critiques these influences, tries to re-orient the discipline around the epistemological framework of critical realism. Very briefly speaking, critical realism assumes the existence of an objective external world but admits the role of individual biases in the process of scientific discoveries. However, it assumes that intersubjective evaluation can overcome these limitations. Bell seems to frame critical realism as the best of both worlds: it holds onto the positivism's optimism of the progression of human knowledge, while incorporating legitimate postpositivist critiques on positivism. After establishing the critical realist framework, Bell introduces some terms that are good to think with. He distinguishes between presumptively true/false predictions and terminally true/false predictions. Presumptively true/false predictions are made before the event and are taken as such when they withstand the attempts to refute them. Terminally true/false predictions are assessments of phenomena after the event. These two need not align, obviously, especially since presumptively true/false predictions can alter the course of the future (e.g. research on climate change). Future studies truly benefits from an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary spirit--futurists should not be researchers of methodologies and mere technicians. I found something else interesting while reading Foundations of Future Studies--there seems to have been a great deal of interest in future studies in the past, perhaps more so than in the present. According to Bell, the World Future Society, which was founded in 1966, peaked at 60,000 members in 1979, hit a low of 22,500 in 1985 and rose to 1994 in 30,000. It would not be accurate to measure interest in the field using membership numbers for this single organization (perhaps there's been a splintering in the field or bad management, I am a current member and I do not find the World Future Society very compelling), after all, Bell expresses a general optimism for the field. However, I cannot help but think that perhaps the future was a far more exciting topic for the public imagination than it is now. In the 1960s, there was the space race, there was Star Trek, there was the Jetsons, and human beings actually landed and walked on the moon (it's strange that thinking about this can be so strange--it was over 50 years ago!). Our cultural images of the future now are mostly in the form of dystopias, stories of environmental collapse, the extinction of all human life--basically, images of the future where the future ceases to exist. Instead of working on flying cars and life-changing technologies, our best and brightest technical minds are doing A/B tests for Facebook and Google; instead of leading lives of leisure, where we can explore our true passions, we are forced into more work, and this is precarious labour that barely sustains life. Meanwhile, everything is done to appease the all-mighty shareholder. With the idea of shareholder value maximization, the "future" is violently and artificially tranched and comes in the form of quarterly shareholder reports. In the contemporary political imagination, neo-classical economics seems to have colonized the social under the rubric of the economic. Why have a whole field of future studies when a priesthood of neo-classical economists can calculate the future?  Probably one of the most important books of the decade. Zuboff lays out the basic concepts and the framework to understand surveillance capitalism. In the first part (of three parts) of the book, Zuboff acts as a journalist and traces the mutation of capitalism into surveillance capitalism, and of the discovery of behavioural surplus.
Her story of surveillance capitalism begins with the "second modernity" (I am not familiar with this categorization, but the "first modernity" refers to Ford, mass production, and the creation of mass consumers), where individuals shook off the last chains of feudal society and began to feel "entitlement to self-determination" (p. 35). Neo-liberal economics fed on the energies of the "second modernity" (I think Michel Houellebecq would agree here; read Atomized) and became the dominant ideological framework for society. Apple, and its "fusion of capitalism and the digital" (p. 46) resulted in the promise of a third modernity. The third modernity was appropriated by surveillance capitalism instead as large companies claimed ownership of the virtual world. The current set of circumstances is also the result of historical contingency, to a certain effect, as surveillance capabilities was intensified by the events of September 11, 2001, which set the stage for a collaboration between the government and surveillance capitalists. It was Google that discovered behavioral surplus. Zuboff tells an interesting narrative here. Founded in 1998, Google originally "embodied the promise of information capitalism as a liberating and democratic social force" (p. 67)--I smell the trope of the idealistic tech nerd and the internet as a space for democratic freedom--all of the data that was produced by users was reinvested to improving the product. Zuboff calls this the "behavioral value reinvestment cycle" (p. 69). This changed as Google faced growing pressures from investors. Behavioural surplus, or the traces of data left behind by users, started to be used for predictions on user behaviour, the efficacy of which was measured by click-through rates of ads. Advertising transformed from an art to a science. The combination of "behavioural surplus, data science, material infrastructure, computational power, algorithmic systems, and automated platforms" (p. 83) formed the basis of Google's unprecedented model of capitalism: surveillance capitalism. The logics of surveillance capitalism require the extraction of behavioural data--users are the raw materials for surveillance capitalists, while advertisers are the customers. For Zuboff, this is the moment when Google broke off the reciprocities that existed in previous forms of capitalism--this is generalizable to other surveillance capitalists. Zuboff also dedicates a large amount of space to an analysis of the strategies that surveillance capitalists used to slowly whittle down our rights to privacy. She makes it clear that the current status quo is due to human decisions. It is not the result of the autonomous and unstoppable logics of technological development. I forgo this section in the review. Zuboff is a Harvard Business School professor. Ideologically, Zuboff is not a hardcore leftist. She speaks of the "first modernity" in which the capitalist system had "reciprocities" (as opposed to a relationship of exploitation) with the social order. She supplements this with Durkheim. In her reading, the sociologist wrote about "the perennial human quest to live effectively in our 'conditions of existence' as the invisible causal power that summons the division of labor, technologies, work organization, capitalism, and ultimately civilization itself" (p. 32). Put in a way that is distasteful for some, she seems to be saying that the needs and wants of the consumer drives societal changes (consumer utility as autonomous agent of history). Put in another way, she is saying that the search for better material conditions motivates human beings, which seems more reasonable. Base and superstructure are flipped around in this formulation. I think the fact that Zuboff goes on media like Democracy Now shows how dire the current historical conjuncture really is: alliances are formed between people with such different ideological perspectives.  A great, quick-and-easy read. Peter Frase takes the "specters of ecological catastrophe and automation" (p. 1) as the motivation for his four futures. These futures are "deliberately hyperbolic, sketching out simplified ideal types to illustrate fundamental principles" (p. 9). (Interestingly, I used the words "hyperbolic" and "ideal types" to describe my own project on the future of migration.) His contribution to the debate is "politics, and specifically class struggle" (p. 21). This is a perspective that I welcome, given the oddly apolitical discussions of automation (reskilling, upskilling, etc. is completely absent of discussions of ownership and worker power).
Frase assumes, for the purposes of the exercise, that automation will completely do away with the need for human labour; "automation is the constant, ecological crisis and class power are the variables" (p. 28). With these variables Frase creates a two-by-two grid, with Abundance and Scarcity (ecological crisis) on the one side and Equality and Hierarchy (Class Power) on the other. Frase calls the combination of equality and abundance "Communism." In this world, everyone is free from the compulsion of meaningless work, and "labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want" (p.41). Frase has an interesting discussion on how this world (under his assumptions of abundance) could be created. Going beyond the dichotomy of reform or revolution, he talks about "non-reformist reforms," which would gradually subvert the power relations in the system. One example of a non-reformist reform is Universal Basic Income. If a Universal Basic Income program is designed so that it would free people from meaningless work, it would drive wages up for meaningless work, leading to automation by capitalists, leading to abundance and the eventual disappearance of the money economy. Frase does not believe that status hierarchies will disappear. He likens the capital relation as "a kind of social magnet, with capital on one end and labor at the other, that tends to align all other social hierarchies with the master hierarchy based on money" (p. 59). In this world, "a hundred status hierarchies [will] bloom." The combination of abundance and hierarchy leads to the scenario of "Rentism," where capitalists own the means to producing abundance (patents and copyrights). The key to understanding this scenario are the laws of intellectual property, which "dictates not only rights to the possession of physical objects but also over the copying of patterns" (p. 71). In this world, the economic system has changed from production of commodities (capitalism) to extraction of rents. In this world, automation will have rendered people useless as labour, but necessary as consumers. The only jobs that might exist are creators (of IP), lawyers, marketers (as there is a limited number of consumers to buy IP), and guards (to protect owners of IP), and all of these jobs could be rendered superfluous as well. The next two scenarios take into account the climate crisis, which will impose a condition of scarcity and limits on consumption. Socialism is what Frase calls the scenario with equality and scarcity. This scenario will require a radical rethinking between the relationship between human beings and nature. Frase comments that this will involve more human interference with nature instead of the opposite; there is no pure and pristine state of nature in balance, nature just is, and humans are a part of it. This scenario is called socialism because a state will be necessary to organize the large transformations in infrastructure and energy systems, and because wealth equality will ensure that all people survive through climate change, not just the most wealthy. This does not mean that economic activity will rely solely on central planning: the state can use production targets and let market mechanisms go to work to determine an efficient outcome. Finally, the scenario Exterminism combines hierarchy and scarcity. In this scenario, only a small privileged few are able to enjoy a high standard of living (so this is a situation of communism for the few) and automation has made the poor masses superfluous as producers of economic value, but potentially dangerous for the rich. The "solution" for the elite class? Extermination of the masses. Frase discusses the trends that are already happening, there is our heavily militarized society, the militarization of the police, walled off enclaves for the rich, the surveillance state, and a prison system that, in the United States, "now incarcerates 2 million people" (p. 135). Like the other scenarios, there are already signals that point to a possible emergence of elements of this scenario. Frase is completely ignorant of foresight and future studies--he does reference about "futurism," which he describes as works "that attempt to directly predict the future" (p.26) and puts himself in the lineage of world building and speculative fiction instead. However, this book was one of the best and most provocative futures-related works I've read this year. (Perhaps it is because he also speaks the language of the social sciences?) I think that his example shows the importance of multidisciplinarity, good scholarship, and good thinking in the space. Futurists need to be more than mere technicians or technology geeks--futurists need to be thinkers.  My friend Aaron's first "novel," although it might be more accurate to call it a collection of stories. The stories follow the unnamed first person protagonist ("I") and his unnamed girlfriend, who is always referred to in second person ("you"). The couple travels to various locations all over the world--they are rootless, transnational subjects--and talk about stories and books, this and that. The dialogue between the pair and the exploratory freedom with which the book is written reminded me a little bit of Diderot's Jacques the Fatalist and His Master.
The book begins with the anxiety of separation; there is the reference of the thirty cans of pineapple in Chungking Express: "I am a can of pineapple. Cop 223 is as well. We're watching Chungking Express. On April 1, Cop 223's girlfriend, May, leaves him" (p.9). This is one of the only consistent themes throughout. It serves as a weak connection for all of the stories and adds a latent tension. This theme is returned to in the concluding story, "Kafka's Guide to Love," as a way of wrapping up the book. Some of the stories lacked connective tissue to such an extent that I wondered if this was deliberate. The story "Snow in June" ends with "I wake up the next morning and you are not next to me. You don't leave a note, nor do you answer the phone... Maybe you'll be gone for a while" (p. 83). The next story, "Grocery Shopping in the Desert," begins with "We are naked" (p.85): an ellipsis... Perhaps Aaron is attempting to subvert Western novelistic narrative conventions? The writing is quite experimental. Different writing conventions are used: some stories are sub-divided using numbers (a la Milan Kundera in Aaron's own admission, although it was used differently than Kundera; Kundera modeled his novels after the structure of musical compositions, and used numbers to control the "tempo" of his sections); some stories use screenwriting conventions to mark dialogue (e.g. "You: Your eyes are brown"); in the chapter the "Kitchen God," Aaron experiments with a summative triplet at the end of the sub-sections. Various texts are referenced in all of the stories. These texts modulate and actively shape the stories by providing a new frame of reference with which to understand the story, (e.g references to Goethe and Barthes in "I Am the One Who Waits") and by seeping into the writing itself (the first chapter, "Do You Like Pineapples?" is a good example). Whether as homage or play, Aaron subtly references images, characters, and scenes from other writers in the book. "I notice a little mole on your lower back" (p. 12) (Murakami), man in a baseball hat in Macao (felt like some of Murakami's male characters), "you" smokes Virginia Slims (Wind-Up Bird Chronicles), "Is it you?" (p. 113) (Yoko Tawada's "The Bath"), the lunch meeting serving as an interpreter for a rich Asian couple (Yoko Tawada's "The Bath"). I noticed mostly references to Murakami and Yoko Tawada, although I am sure there are others. I thought that the best story is "I Am Writing about a Hole," which was nominated for the 2018 Pushcart Prize for nonfiction. Aaron writes that "When the hole is present, the part of you that wants to speak vanishes and you lose the desire to say anything..." (p. 134). The hole is tangentially connected to racism and Orientalist discourses. Aaron uses the films of Clint Eastwood, an essay by Salman Rushdie, Lost in Translation, and more to try to better understand the hole. He decides "to look for ways to deal with such issues without getting angry" (p. 143). Through Mo Yan, Haruki Murakami, and Yoko Tawada (all non-Western writers), he learns how to deal with the hole. And as he writes about the hole, the hole disappears--a Nietzschean move of overcoming through art.  A relatively quick, light, and interesting read. Not a serious academic study, even though Rybczynski is a professor at McGill University. No citations or theoretically abstruse language, although I could tell that the book required some academic research.
Rybczynski begins his study with Vivaldi's The Four Seasons--the weekend is an artificial construct in comparison to the cadences of the natural world. Does the weekend mark the shift from the pastoral to the industrial? Interestingly, according to Rybczynski's research, the 7-day week has remained fairly consistent for centuries, despite various official attempts to change it; Rybczynski concludes tentatively thay "it is certainly within the realm if possibility that the seven-day week is an instinctive attempt to establish a social calendar that more or less corresponds to an internal biological fluctuation" (p.49). While there were prescribed days of rest (e.g. Sabbath), leisure and the modern weekend was another development. Rybczynski traces its development to the formation of the middle-class consumer and, interestingly, commercial interests. He notes that the novel--a definitive leisurely pursuit--"was, from the first, a commercial venture" (p. 92). As activities of leisure became widespread, it increasingly became a public concern, especially as taverns, pubs, and gaming houses became popular locations of leisure. This contributed to the development of institutions of public leisure like the library. As for the modern weekend, it emerged as a combination of various factors, like the concession between capital and labour and the humanitarian efforts of the Early Closing Association, whose members were horrified at the working conditions in factories. Rybczynski goes on with his study into our contemporary forms of leisure, into leisure in some other societies, and more, but I will stop my study here. Read this off and on over a period of a couple of months; I cannot remember my varied impressions.  A virile fantasy--the novel follows George Duroy, who, penniless at the start of the novel, ends up as one of the crème de la crème in Parisian high society.
Women are the conduit through which he achieves his great success. He seduces them through his youth, his beauty, and his moustache. (In one of Maupassant's short stories, a couple of Parisian women fantasize about the moustache; the moustache is a signifier of masculinity.) One by one, they name him as he ascends the hierarchy of Parisian society: he is baptized Bel Ami by the daughter of a lover, and from humble George Duroy he becomes George du Roy de Cantel; at the end of the novel, the premonition of his family name is realized as he reaches the top of the secular world (and figuratively becomes du roi). Through the unlikely personage of George Duroy, was the masculine Maupassant displacing some of his own manly desires? Philippe Bonnefis in the Introduction remarks on the figure of Duroy that he is "le comble de la virilité. Armé d'un sexe à soulever les montagnes. Baguette magique [lol] des contes de notre enfance, le sexe de Duroy, tout simplement, accomplit des miracles." As noted above, the narrative reads like a fantasy, a myth, a Frenchman's wet dream; French high society succombs to the virility (i.e. magic baguette) of Duroy. It is a myth that promises unlimited social mobility. The ideology of social mobility that the novel demonstrates interests me. The story was written almost 100 years after the fall of Louis XVI, the last king of France. There are rich parvenus and nouveau riches that socialize with the old landed gentry in the novel; Duroy names himself Baron of Cantel at some point, suggesting the plasticity of these titles. The Paris depicted in the novel seems to have transitioned well past these former feudal arrangements; Duroy originally comes to Paris to "faire fortune." |
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