Greetings, travelers. I hope late winter finds you well.
If you enjoy what I am doing, please do tell your friends, networks, and so forth. I am trying to give work away, and build audiences – more on relations between author and audience, production and reception (and judgment) in due course.
I haven’t published much since the last newsletter, although quite a few things are in process. It has been a difficult time, and I am writing a lot, about sad topics and vicious responses, and there is lots of professional stuff, too, for what it is worth, which does not seem like much, in my present mood. I’m not sure what I want to share. I’m mulling that.
UNIVERSITY NOW
You might enjoy: The Telos Press Podcast: David A. Westbrook on the Role and Function of the University Today. It is an interview with me, about a recent essay, conducted by the editor of Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary, David Pan. Many of you are associated with universities; almost all of you have attended university. Ok, I’ve been told this one is also dark. Ah well – it gets a lot darker? This was the cheery version? See what you think.
EVERYMAN A SPY
Writing to distract myself, in the last Intermittent Signal I half-jokingly discussed some ways the concept of the spy – occasionally embodied, presumably, but ubiquitous as figure, even specter – seemed to be entailed in contemporary experience. [In my own experience, fantasies about spying ironically mirror my real struggles with writing. Cue laughter both mocking and forgiving.] Maybe each society gets the spies it deserves, I wrote. Sure enough, within a few hours LinkedIn, “based on my recent activity” [on a different platform!] suggested I connect with various individuals who advertised certain skills, former and current agents, and diverse security institutions. Perhaps they [or LinkedIn?] have a job in which I might be interested?
Less predictably, a reader from Central Europe responded at length. The following text has been lightly edited and redacted for obvious reasons, and is published with permission. He evidently wants some people to know.
* * *
You know, living in [Central European city] and dating, I had one woman actually ask me if I was a spy. Her father had been a head of the formerly state-run airline, and she herself was quite well known, a . . . celebrity . . . here, a guru of . . . (can’t write that though because this would ID her for sure). We were moving from social media to planning our first real date. But then she told me that her "friend" (gender unknown) said to her when she was talking about me, "He's probably a spy, they always have jobs like that." We had a conversation about it on WhatsApp; I took a business trip to New York (making a joke that I was going back on official spy business); and then within a few days of me going, she ghosted me. I asked her if I had offended her or done something wrong. She said "my life is complicated enough as it is" and she wasn’t going to meet up with me after all. So she stopped the conversation.
I do have a background in political activism and union organizing in the US, and as a researcher of organizing drives and labor negotiations, and I know that the US intelligence agencies have been known to use people like me to get to others in the broader constellation of activists in the US and abroad (i.e., via things like Cointelpro and other things). Also, as a college student, I lived in a house with people who were part of an environmental direct-action group (I wasn't a part of it) and I volunteered at an organization that was the home of the first "IndyMedia" website, focused on the WTO protests in Seattle. All of them were hyper-paranoid about phones being tapped by the FBI and such, and they even used pseudonyms in their relations with each other like "Lizard" etc. It was all just a big joke, and a game really to make themselves feel important, I think, but whatever. In any event, it nonetheless still rubbed off on me, the paranoia that is, knowing that even if I wasn't part of anything like that, that my mere proximity to such people would expose me to real person to person surveillance, which I found out that it did one time in the case of that IndyMedia place, when a young seemingly homeless guy took up residence there, and turned out to be an FBI agent.
Anyways, years later, I became [social scientist], traveled in Latin America to rebel zones (was actually not allowed to do research there because I wasn't "leftist" enough for them, no seriously). And now I live in ________. The specter of people spying on each other is everywhere. There is a common word that the Hungarians use to refer to such everyday spying – "tekla" which means "brick." The idea is that you should never reveal your true feelings or speak politically, even in your own home, because one of the bricks might be listening. But the “brick” doesn't refer to the wall itself, but to the people on the other side of the incredibly thin (for fuck’s sake, please neighbors shut the fuck up) walls, and you don't know if your neighbor is keeping a state-sponsored eye on you. At least, that is the heritage, now perhaps not so much.
But still, I have continued to have paranoia about girlfriends that I find on social media, like Tinder and Bumble, being actual spies, thinking that even though I'm not one, that someone nonetheless wants to keep an eye on me, and that suspicion is all the more heightened when women start asking me about things about the US, when they are not forthcoming about their lives as would be normal, etc. Here in ______, it's hard to tell whether that is cultural, because of what they have endured, and they are very slow to open up because of all the "teklas" of their society, or if in fact someone thinks I actually am a spy.
I often try to push my paranoia aside because actually I very much want real love, and with really beautiful women. I have told some of them also in a joking way, "Whoever sent you, tell them thanks" and "I don't know who you really are, but whoever this is that you are presenting to me, I like." It doesn't help that, since they are used to being spied on, they may play the game, too – say something that indicates that someone might be listening to our conversation, maybe via their cell phone, with a wry smile.
There was a woman, let’s call her E_______, with whom I ended up in what felt like a serious relationship. I fell in love, and we dated for half a year, but it seemed to me that she was not being honest in other ways. I broke up with her, but unfortunately I think I am still in love with her, and till this day wonder if she is a spy. She worked for a shadowy contracting organization that “remodels” [important government buildings] all over the world, and according to her, high level officials are always coming in and out of her office. From E_______ I got the sense that when she was a little girl in the 70s, that her speaking up about the injustices of something that was happening in her hometown got her father in trouble with the government or something. I feel like I could write a book about that relationship. The specter of her actually being a spy is honestly still lodged in my head . . . and yet, I ask myself, "what does that even matter if she actually is?" It wouldn't have worked anyway, given the different kind of lives that we want, but this is all to say that love is hard when you are [a social scientist], working for a foreign university, in a post-soviet country, living alone, are interested in reading Plato in your spare time in your own cave of an apartment with the shades drawn, so the neighbors can't see everything you are doing at all times.
So, these were two cases when the specter of the spy was present.
I push all of these feelings of the falseness of representational thinking aside, hoping that perhaps meditation will save me, bring me back to the world in itself, and alas, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle just remind me that to achieve apprehension of the world of sensory experience is merely to experience the shadows on the cave wall. And I'm even worse off than that, because most of my thinking is through books, movies, articles, dreams in my head, tweets, etc. – the shadow of the shadow. Is there even a way to live life in an experience of the formal structure of the world – in the timeless forms of which we can form true knowledge? Even those guys think that to live like that would be impractical, and that there should be a mix of looking at the shadows on the cave wall, and contemplation of the timeless forms, when possible.
Anyways, love as a misapprehended professional is tough, and I'm not sure it's really possible here for an academic trying to find his way out of the cave.
. . . yes, post it anonymously, but maybe informally tell a few folks so I’m not still living in total anonymity.
* * *
To overshare a bit, as a writer, I’m a little jealous. It’s a tour de force, a kind of Notes from Underground for our day. Yes, yes, denial suggests confession, and further insistence does no good.
At the end of the Cold War, Václav Havel, the Czech playwright and politician, spoke of the moral, but more existential, imperative of “living in truth” – the opposite of spying. Living in truth is hard, often impossible, to do under authoritarian regimes, for reasons explored by Orwell. In fact, the impossibility of allowing others an authentic existence is one way to begin understanding, with some specificity, what is wrong with authoritarian regimes, and especially the violence they habitually require. In this light, one might be forgiven for thinking that the fall of authoritarian regimes would render the figure of the spy obsolete, that the citizenry might adopt more authentic lives, to echo the young Marx in a different key.
But it turns out that living in truth is really hard to do, not only under authoritarian conditions ("tekla"), but also under digital conditions ("Tinder"). For historical reasons, we imagine spying to result from the conflicting interests of nation states, playing the great game, as Kipling has it. Fair enough. The nation state has been and is still a dominant way to organize and understand political life, and the great game remains important. But the condition of the spy does not depend on national interests. Start with the phrase “on her majesty’s secret service,” which reaches back before the modern state, to the person of the sovereign, and more generally, personal understandings of power, loyalty, agency, secrets, and betrayals. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead. We see this today, and people remain fascinated by it, in mafia dons, drug lords, and countless movies about loyalty, betrayal, and violence. Or consider industrial espionage, too, spying amongst institutions organized for profit, mostly.
What the text above suggests, what I’m trying to suggest, is that the [always suspected] condition of spying, and the related plague of con artists, may now be understood to be loose in the world, rather unmoored from political structures, be they modern or feudal. Or maybe it is better to say that our politics has changed, and our spies have evolved accordingly. A long time ago, in my biggest and perhaps best book, I argued that globalized capitalism was itself a form of political life, with its own strengths and weaknesses. City of Gold: An Apology for Global Capitalism in a Time of Discontent. Among the weaknesses was a sense of disconnection, a traditional critique of marketplace life, exacerbated by great scale. But disconnection cuts both ways. The globalized individual is not just lonely, he is unmoored, untrustworthy. Why should you believe what she says? Who vouches for the man from underground, the woman who may or may not be, who may not trust us to be . . . or so we fear, and they presumably fear of us. And as with crime, a little distrust goes a long way to changing our experience of our milieu, our world. We get the spies we deserve.
Less violence, at least so far, and that’s something.
* * *
SOFT COLORS
In these newsletters, I often use images to illustrate the text, at least further the mood. This particular newsletter, however, is an exercise in counterpoint, i.e., the images and the text, at least the foregoing text, are at odds. The foregoing passage is about the impossibility, or at least the difficulty, of living in truth, which also implies the difficulty of believable representations, the sneaking spread of suspicion. The pictures, in contrast, explore some possibilities for expression, and thus cut the other way. Half empty/half full.
As an aside, I try to restrict myself to pictures taken by me, and within the month or so since the last newsletter. This time around, however, I’ve broken my soft rule and included an image captured by someone else, and a photograph I took years ago.
For years after the emergence of color film, artistic photography tended to be done in black and white. Photographs can be many things: documents, advertisements, mementos, records, pornography, and so forth. It is not always obvious how to read a photograph. Black and white film, high resolution, large format, fancy paper, and the like can signal a viewer that this particular image is intended to be “art,” and appreciated as such. You know the look. Maybe it is an exaggeration to say black and white was required of photographers who wanted to be taken seriously as artists, but . . .
I imagine such photographers fantasizing about color, its expressive potential, as a kind of forbidden fruit. They must have hallucinated late Matisse, nearing death, cutting into papers soaked in color, suffused, dripping. Be my daydreams as they may, in the fullness of time art photography came to be done in color. And, as often happens when an inhibition falls, the reluctance to use color for “serious” photography fell a long way. Photographs became (intentionally, joyously, unfortunately?) saturated, even lurid. While hardly a character in this story, I too am guilty of this color-drunkenness. See, for example, Flowers, Thoughts: a photo essay.
This month, winter generally, is often photographed in this fashion: dazzling white, deep dark green, electric blue, strong greys into black. Strong, bold. I get it, have done it, but what I have been trying to suggest with the images in this newsletter is that winter may be approached in another way. Lower light, less light, affords the emergence of subtle colors, worthy of our attention. Of slowing down and looking, contemplating.
More anon. Again, please help me give it away.
Be well.
David