Putin’s Credo: Never Let Them See You Sweat

By STEVEN LEE MYERS NY TIMES

LONG ago, at the inception of his rise to power, Vladimir V. Putin recounted a memory of growing up in the late 1950s in a Soviet communal apartment in Leningrad, as St. Petersburg was then known. For kicks, he and his friends would chase rats in the building’s dismal hallways. It was what passed for a game until the time a cornered rat hurled himself at a surprised and frightened young Vladimir, who turned and ran away.

The anecdote, vivid as a nightmare, was meant to highlight the hardscrabble roots of Russia’s future president, but in the years since, self-effacing recollections like these have all but disappeared from Mr. Putin’s official biography.

Instead, Russians have ingested a regular diet of televised acts of leadership and machismo, from hectoring bureaucrats and oligarchs to excelling at sports, including his latest form of kicks, ice hockey, which he took up with remarkable determination when he was turning 60. It has made him a caricature of the man of action, of the benevolent but remote leader, of the steely patriot delivered by providence to restore Russia to its rightful destiny after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Yet the rat story, and its vanishing, echo a recurring theme in episodes through Mr. Putin’s childhood and his formative years as a minor officer in the K.G.B., during his unexpected ascent to the presidency in the 1990s and his steady consolidation of power since 2000: namely, his insecurity and fear of displaying weakness.

Although he liked to portray himself as a young tough raised in Leningrad, he took up martial arts as a slight boy, by his own account, to protect himself from courtyard bullies.

His most searing experience in the K.G.B. came in Ea

st Germany in 1989 when the sclerotic Soviet state proved, in his mind at least, irresolute in the face of the protests that brought down the Berlin Wall and ultimately the Iron Curtain. When a crowd of protesters reached the K.G.B.’s villa in Dresden, where he was stationed, he confronted them alone and unarmed and, without any orders from Moscow, warned that those inside would open fire. In his recollections the “mob” was terrifying, though it amounted to only a few dozen people.

In the wild 1990s, when a convulsion of violence and crime accompanied the advent of capitalism in the newly renamed St. Petersburg, he once sent his daughters out of the country for their safety. During the re-election campaign for his boss in St. Petersburg, Anatoly Sobchak, he took to carrying an air pistol — “It won’t save me,” he told a friend, “but it makes me feel calmer.”

“We demonstrated weakness,” Mr. Putin said in another context, “and the weak are beaten.” That was in 2004, following the terrorist siege of a school in the southern Russian town of Beslan, which ended after two and a half days with the deaths of 334 hostages, 186 of them schoolchildren. To him, the attack — which he insinuated, without evidence, had been orchestrated by Russia’s enemies abroad, not the Chechen terrorists who actually carried it out — and its aftermath signified neither resilience nor resolve but utter vulnerability.

He exploited the horror of the attack to tighten his control of the political system.

The fear of displaying weakness has become a shrewd pillar of Mr. Putin’s political identity. And to the dismay of the country’s democrats and world leaders with whom he interacts, it has made him extraordinarily popular and powerful, even though in moments of candor and, of course, in private, officials in Russia acknowledge the overwhelming problems the country faces.

On Monday, Mr. Putin will swagger through New York, delivering a speech at the United Nations for the first time in a decade, meeting with an evidently reluctant President Obama and seeking to regain the spot on the world stage he believes he has been unjustly denied by his rivals in the West. In Russia’s sycophantic official media, this is another triumph, of course, but even The Wall Street Journal’s editorial writers could not resist the schoolyard bravado, saying the Russian leader was “stealing Mr. Obama’s lunch money.”

Andrei Kolesnikov of the Carnegie Moscow Center recently noted that “rising from one’s knees” was a “distinctively Russian metaphor” for restoring dignity and national pride. And on their knees is where many Russians believe they spent the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union — until Mr. Putin single-handedly wrenched them back to their feet.

What Mr. Putin has succeeded in doing is persuading Russians that the hardships they now face — many of them a result of his own decisions — are evidence of efforts by Russia’s enemies to keep the nation weak.

“Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, many citizens felt humiliated by defeat in the Cold War,” Mr. Kolesnikov wrote in an essay published on the center’s website. The annexation of Crimea in 2014, the defiance of Western sanctions, and now even the exertion of Russian military power in Syria are all antidotes to the country’s ills. “These past humiliations have been obliterated by the construction of a besieged fortress within the country’s expanded borders.”

He concluded, as many have, that Mr. Putin’s tactics have been strong — often compared to his training in judo — but that he lacked a strategy. A year and a half after the occupation and annexation of Crimea, Mr. Putin has never been as isolated politically and diplomatically. He has few foreign allies and faces a withering economy at home, battered by the low price of oil and economic sanctions imposed in retaliation for the Kremlin’s involvement in the war in eastern Ukraine.

The latest intervention in Syria, more than four years after the war there began, signals a growing desperation about the fate of Bashar al-Assad’s government — and the Kremlin’s own concerns about what its fall might mean. And in part it may be a move to distract attention from Russia’s disastrous intervention in eastern Ukraine and looming questions over its culpability in the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in July 2014, which killed 298 people.

And yet as he has always done, he has responded to weakness by daringly ignoring it, even defying it. Throughout his 15 years at the center of Russian politics it has worked.

Steven Lee Myers is a Washington correspondent for The New York Times and the author of “The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin.”

Elements New Yorker

When Cops Choose Empathy

BY JAMIL ZAKI

Can a new method of police training quash the warrior mentality?

About four years ago, in a city park in western Washington State, Joe Winters encountered a woman in the throes of a psychotic episode. As he sat down next to her, she told him that she had purchased the bench that they now shared and that it was her home. “I didn’t buy the hallucinations, but I tried to validate the feelings underneath them,” Winters told me. His strategy resembled Rogerian psychotherapy—unconditionally accepting a patient’s experience, even when it is untethered from reality. But Winters is not a roving psychologist; he is a deputy in the King County Sheriff’s Office. He had been called to the scene in response to the woman’s behavior, which nearby residents deemed disruptive. After talking with Winters for several minutes, the woman left of her own volition, without Winters having to arrest her or resort to physical force.

Policing can seem like barren ground for empathy, the experience of understanding, sharing in, and caring about another’s emotions. According to the Web site Fatal Encounters, cops were involved in the deaths of twelve hundred and sixty-one people in the United States last year, an average of about three and a half each day. A recent string of brutal arrests by officers in Missouri, New York, Texas, South Carolina, Ohio, and elsewhere has helped to drive the public’s faith in law enforcement to a twenty-two-year low. National confidence in police officers’ racial impartiality has also fallen. But, for communities of color, incidents like these are nothing new; they often confirm a longstanding perception of police as antagonists.

Many theories, both old and new, hold that empathy is inevitable and automatic. When you witness someone suffer a severe bone fracture, it doesn’t take mental gymnastics to figure out how you feel; a wave of discomfort might wash over you, the emotional equivalent of a knee-jerk reflex. In fact, though, empathy is a fragile reaction, one that often fails when it is most needed. Conflicts between groups (racial, social, or competitive) can reduce its potency. So can stress, which limits the psychological space that people have for others, and power, which can numb those who possess it to the plight of those who don’t.

Each of these factors is common in policing. From their earliest days of training, many recruits are steeped in a so-called warrior mentality, in which routine patrols resemble combat and citizens pose a potentially mortal threat. Last year, the Santa Fe New Mexican obtained a draft of instructional materials from the state law-enforcement academy that offer a striking example of this philosophy. According to the proposed curriculum, cadets would be taught that, during traffic stops, they should “assume that … all the occupants in the vehicle are armed.” Expectations like these encourage a volatile mindset, and they play directly into the tendency to see weapons where there are none, especially in the hands of black men. The warrior mentality also instills chronic anxiety. Seth Stoughton, an assistant professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law and a former police officer, told me that such fear colors the way that cops treat civilians. “If I’m worried about never making it home again, I don’t really give a damn if I offend someone,” he said. “Whatever emotional toll my actions take on them, it will feel less important than my survival.”

If you wanted to decrease recruits’ empathy, you could scarcely do better than to enshrine a warrior mentality. Recently, however, recruits in several cities—among them Cincinnati, Las Vegas, and Memphis—have begun to learn a different approach: command less, listen more. A strong example of such a program comes from Sue Rahr, the executive director of the Washington State Criminal Justice Training Commission. Rahr’s curriculum, which has produced about seven hundred and fifty graduates in the past two years, is designed to do away with the warrior mentality and encourage recruits to view themselves not as combatants within a community but as guardians of it. (President Obama’s Task Force on Twenty-First-Century Policing, whose final report Rahr helped shape, aims to do the same.)

One strategy that flows from Rahr’s philosophy is known as LEED, “listening and explaining with equity and dignity.” LEED teaches officers to insure that citizens feel heard and that they understand the reasons behind police behavior. This approach draws heavily from the psychology of procedural justice, which views fairness of treatment as being equally important as fairness of outcome; Rahr calls it “a Happy Meal version of a research smorgasbord.” It also looks a lot like the method that Joe Winters, one of Rahr’s trainers, used in his park-bench encounter. Rahr sees empathy as more than window dressing. “It’s a safety strategy that gives officers a tactical advantage,” she told me. “When you know why someone is acting a certain way, you also know how to best react.”

Rahr’s program supplements coursework with exercises that test recruits’ ability to communicate effectively. In one exercise, trainees arrive at a mock crime scene in which two men have assaulted a third. The victim asks for his hat, which is out of reach to him. Only if the recruit honors this request does the victim reveal that the assault is part of a gang initiation. In another exercise, recruits encounter a knife-wielding actor. If they flood the room and fixate on the weapon, the scenario escalates. If they focus on building rapport, it falls under control. The lesson: good policing requires slowing things down, listening, and meeting people where they are.

Because Rahr’s program is relatively new, its over-all effect on policing culture isn’t yet clear. She harbors no illusions, and emphasizes that she and her colleagues don’t expect to undo “two hundred years of history” overnight. Even if the program does change recruits’ hearts and minds, the changes might not last. As Rahr told me, some recruits leave the program, move to their new departments, and meet field-training officers who offer to help them “get past that touchy-feely bullshit and do real policing.”

Then there’s the scale of the problem. In Rahr’s ideal world, she said, “everyone who sees a police officer would have the initial reaction that ‘I’m safer.’ ” That world feels very distant from our own. Police violence does not reflect the failure of empathy alone, and empathy cannot overwrite racial bias and structural inequality. (The woman whom Joe Winters encountered in the park was white; if she had been black and another officer had taken the call, how might the interaction have gone?) In some cases, empathy may even make things worse. According to Steve Silverman, the founder of Flex Your Rights, an organization that helps people assert themselves during police encounters, “Officer Friendly tactics are good at getting citizens to voluntarily waive their Fourth Amendment rights.” He maintains that empathy training “must go hand in hand with respecting basic constitutional protections.”

Is it possible for an officer who starts out unempathetic to grow more caring? The knee-jerk theory suggests not. If people are helpless to stop themselves from feeling empathy, they might likewise be unable to stoke it. But the recruits in Rahr’s program provide a counterpoint; they build their empathic ability even in difficult circumstances. This jibes with the findings of a new movement in the scientific community. Some psychologists, myself included, argue that empathy is less a fixed trait, like height, than a learnable skill, like Scrabble. In one recent study, my colleagues and I found that people who believe this to be true put more work into identifying with members of other races, a tendency that would serve police officers well.

Another way to bolster caring is to emphasize empathy-positive norms, as the British psychologist Mark Tarrant found in a study in 2009. Tarrant and his colleagues told a group of college students about another student whose parents had died in a car accident. Participants felt more empathy when they believed that this victim attended their own university, as opposed to another school. Tarrant then ran his study again, but first told half the group that their own university was an unusually empathic place, high in “compassion, tenderness, and sympathy.” This simple prompt erased the empathy gap; students now expressed equal empathy for victims from their own and other schools. In the world of law enforcement, the city police department in Decatur, Georgia, seems to have adopted a similar empathic norm, as can be seen in the first seconds of its recruitment video—a stark contrast with more warrior-oriented messages offered elsewhere.

It is frustratingly difficult to draw a line between empathy-focussed police training, on the one hand, and concrete outcomes such as use of force, on the other. This is largely because police departments offer poorly structured or incomplete data about their behavior. Rahr and others are now engaged in long-term research to make up that disparity in knowledge. Still, even at this time of frayed relations between cops and communities, programs like Rahr’s offer the potential for both optimism and psychological insight, by furthering the idea that officers can learn to choose empathy more often.

London Review of Books

Death-Qualified

Gary Indiana

The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy by Masha Gessen

Riverhead, 273 pp, £18.45, April, ISBN 978 1 59463 264 8

On 24 June, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the younger of two Chechen-American brothers responsible for the Boston Marathon bombing on 15 April 2013, was sentenced to death in a Boston federal court. (His older brother, Tamerlan, died following a street battle with police in Watertown, Massachusetts several nights after the bombing.) The brothers had placed, and detonated by remote control, two explosive devices fashioned from pressure cookers stuffed with shrapnel; three people were killed in the blasts, and more than 260 others suffered serious, permanent injuries, including 16 who lost limbs.

Footage from multiple surveillance cameras overlooking the Boston Marathon dispelled any reasonable doubt that the Tsarnaev brothers had planted the bombs and set them off. At Tsarnaev’s trial, notwithstanding his ‘not guilty’ plea on thirty separate capital charges, his chief defence attorney told the court: ‘It was him.’ This effectively confined the defence case to the assertion that Dzhokhar had acted under the powerful influence of Tamerlan, and would not have carried out the bombing on his own, counting on character witnesses in the trial’s penalty phase to dramatise this idea to the jury. One witness testified that Dzhokhar had been ‘like a puppy following his brother’, a characterisation eerily illustrated by surveillance videos of Dzhokhar trailing Tamerlan by several metres on the pavement lining the marathon route.

The defence team’s sole objective was a life sentence for their client, an unlikely outcome from the outset, given that the court denied motions to change the trial venue from Boston itself to a town where jurors’ friends or families were less likely to have been affected by the bombing. In a non-death penalty state like Massachusetts a federal case in which execution is an option can still be heard so long as the jury is ‘death-qualified’ – i.e. all the jurors have declared themselves willing to deliver a death verdict. Since 80 per cent of Massachusetts residents specifically opposed execution in the Tsarnaev case, the jury was necessarily drawn from an unusually narrow pool, and was therefore disproportionately likely to impose capital punishment. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has since been moved to federal death row in Terre Haute, Indiana, since – although a non-death penalty state can deliver a death verdict – the executions themselves must be carried out in a state that has death penalty statutes. This risible scruple has a practical aspect: such states also have the requisite killing equipment on hand, and often seem to relish the chance to use it. (In recent Ohio, Arizona and Oklahoma executions, a European export embargo on lethal injection drugs has prompted mix’n’match improvisations with untested pharmaceuticals, with results Josef Mengele would consider plagiarism.) Timothy McVeigh, whose trial venue was shifted from Oklahoma City to Denver, Colorado, got transferred post-trial to the same death row in Terre Haute.

Whether Tsarnaev will, as McVeigh did, forego the often decades-long appeals process to hasten his end is an open question. While hiding from police inside a boat in a backyard in Watertown, Dzhokhar managed to write a rather long note on the boat’s hull that began: ‘I’m jealous of my brother who ha [bullet hole] ceived the reward of jannutul Firdaus (inshallah) before me.’ (‘Jannatul Firdous’ is a name for ‘the highest paradise’ in Arabic, as well as a line of speciality fragrances available online from Givaudan Roure, ‘the oldest perfumery house in the Arabian Gulf’.) For all we know, Dzhokhar’s jealousy may already have cooled. If so, ample grounds for appeal exist. There is the venue issue. Then too, US District Judge George O’Toole Jr refused to give the standard jury instruction, which says that a single holdout juror can avert a death sentence permanently – that is, without the penalty phase of the trial being repeated until a unanimous verdict is reached. The grotesqueness of executing a 22-year-old is not considered grounds for appeal: the death-qualifying age, so to speak, is 18.

Unlike several recent books on the marathon bombing, Masha Gessen’s The Brothers is uninflected by consoling homilies, Manichean narrative framing or civic propaganda. Gessen’s is a superlative work of reporting that locates the Boston atrocity and the Tsarnaevs in the queasy context of the modern world, where atrocities happen every day, in places presumed to be ‘safe’ as well as those beset by civil war. The Brothers provides essential Soviet and post-Soviet geopolitical background, charting the Tsarnaev family’s peregrinations from Kyrgyzstan (to where Stalin brutally transplanted the entire Chechen population in 1944) to Novosibirsk in south central Russia, where the brothers’ parents, Anzor and Zubeidat, met (he was finishing his Soviet military service, she seeking her eldest brother’s permission to move to Moscow). They later moved to Kalmykia, the Soviet republic where Tamerlan was born; back to Kyrgyzstan, where two daughters, Bella and Ailina, were added to the family; then to Chiry-Yurt in Chechnya, Dzhokhar’s birthplace.

From Chechnya they returned again to Kyrgyzstan to escape the 1994 Russian bombing of Grozny. In 2000, they moved to Makhachkala in Dagestan, where the second Chechen war was spilling over the border. Wahhabi fundamentalism had spread through the Caucasus, its suspected adherents a target for Russian troops and local police. As Gessen writes:

Makhachkala and much of the rest of Dagestan became a battleground … This was the Dagestan to which Anzor and Zubeidat brought their four children, including Tamerlan, who at 14 was on the verge of becoming that most endangered and most dangerous of human beings: a young Dagestani man. [They] had to move again, to save their children – again.

They would go to America after all.

The Tsarnaevs weren’t always fleeing incipient war zones. Sometimes they just rolled elsewhere in search of a better deal. More often than not, his mother, Zubeidat, the more willful and ambitious of the parents, decided where they would go. Bad timing, bad luck and defective reality-testing all feature prominently in the story Gessen tells; so do seemingly minuscule ethnic and religious distinctions that caused the Tsarnaevs to feel out of place wherever they lived. They were Chechens outside Chechnya, Muslims in only the nominal sense that their ethnic codes reflected a vaguely Islamic influence.

Things didn’t work out in America. The Tsarnaevs arrived soon after 9/11, when Muslims began to replace communists as objects of fear for the media demonisation industry. Chechens, who had once been welcomed as refugees from Russian aggression, became suspect after Russia and the US began collaborating in the ‘war on terror’. (The US ignored Russian atrocities in Chechnya in exchange for air bases in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.) While it’s unclear whether the Tsarnaevs experienced egregious anti-Muslim, anti-Chechen or other discrimination in the US (they didn’t wear Islamic dress, and one daughter successfully copped a Latina identity for a while), their ethnicity and religion complicated the legal status of some family members, and they must have seen themselves as part of a despised, if nebulous, minority.

The travails of the Tsarnaev clan are almost too numerous and tangled to itemise. The new life in America started with the thorny process of asylum-seeking, scrambling for housing and off-the-books work (asylum applicants are prohibited from employment or collecting benefits for a year), finding schools for the children, and trying to decipher local conditions. The Tsarnaevs landed in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which was a mixed blessing: a liberal enclave of top-notch universities and rapidly gentrifying neighbourhoods, its contiguous working-class areas a Hogarthian reminder of the destiny awaiting failure. A well-educated, Russian-speaking, guardian angel landlady, Joanna Herlihy, entered their lives at a propitious moment. Herlihy, who ‘for most of her adult life … had been trying to save the world’, can be viewed retrospectively as a mixed blessing too. Untiringly helpful in practical matters, she sheltered her new tenants behind a baffle of contentious idealism, ratifying their feelings of persecution when wishes didn’t come true. The stellar expectations of the Tsarnaevs eroded in increments. Within a few years, they collected grievances like baseball cards.

Gessen writes that kids in newly arrived families ‘stop being kids, because the adults have lost their bearings … they go through a period of intense suffering and dislocation made all the more painful for being forced and unexpected. But at the other end of the pain, they locate their roles and settle into them, claiming their places in the new world.’ Most of the Tsarnaev children, however, did less and less well as time went on. The family pattern had been set by their parents: when troubles piled up after every fresh start, they just moved somewhere else. Gessen’s narrative makes the Tsarnaevs palpable enough, but unworldliness mists the atmosphere around them; Anzor and Zubeidat sound too narcissistic, too skilled in extracting sympathy and favours from new acquaintances, to compromise much with American reality. No one in the family stuck to any ambitious plan long enough to realise it. Anzor, whose bogus claim to have been a prosecutor’s assistant in Kyrgyzstan got him nowhere, took up his previous trade as a freelance car mechanic; Zubeidat, after thwarted efforts to translate documents for human rights groups, became a home care worker, later a beautician. With the exception of Dzhohkar, the undoubtedly bright children began to stumble in their new surroundings.

Zubeidat, who believed Tamerlan ‘perfect’ and ‘destined for greatness’, no doubt instilled a great deal of self-belief in him. But, as Gessen writes, ‘he had lived in seven cities and attended an even greater number of schools,’ entering tenth grade in Cambridge at 17. He struggled for good grades and to learn English, but as the oldest child was also the most wrongfooted by repeated dislocation. Hopes for him shifted to a career in boxing or music. Catnip to women, he dressed like a gigolo and kept himself gym-solid shapely. He played keyboards, and thought of becoming a music star, but never really pursued it. After dropping out of community college, he delivered pizzas and sold weed. He married, and fathered a child. He won some impressive boxing matches and an amateur Golden Gloves trophy, but was afterwards barred from title contests because he wasn’t a US citizen; his application was held up after he was arrested for smacking his wife. At the time of the bombings, he was living on benefits and dealing drugs.

The daughters, Bella and Ailina, despite some early promise, scuttled their educations; they married Chechen men (a cultural ukase), had children, divorced, got busted for passing on counterfeit banknotes and selling weed. Nothing reachy was expected of them in the first place and they soon seemed fated for a life of welfare and sporadic work in service industries. Their designated roles were to marry within the clan, have babies to continue the bloodline, and embrace domestic servitude, as per the will of Allah. They were independent enough to get out of bad marriages and free enough to keep their own children (in the old country children were a husband’s property), but otherwise their American road turned into a dead end.

Dzhokhar, having spent his whole childhood in Cambridge, was the most assimilated of the family, and the last to stumble. A sweet, smart boy loved by all, he graduated with honours from high school (Cambridge Rindge and Latin, alma mater of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck), despite spending much of it stoned out of his mind. He also was dealing, like Tamerlan. While he couldn’t have afforded a prestige university, Dzhokhar’s choice of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth – in Gessen’s generous description, ‘the least academically challenging’ of the schools he was admitted to – reflects a dazed, amiable passivity. The Tsarnaevs were a ‘tight-knit family’ in the most ruinous sense that family alone provided each member’s sense of identity and direction. If one ran awry, eventually they all would.

All the descriptions of Dzhokhar, Gessen writes,

that have emerged from conversations with people who knew him, including people who cared for him deeply, are spectacular in their flatness. Those who watched him from a distance describe him as a social superstar. To those who thought they got closer, he was charming. Indeed, charm appears to have been his sole distinguishing personality trait. Teachers thought he was bright but uninterested in thinking for himself.

In his sophomore year at Dartmouth he began failing subjects, stepped up his marijuana sales and narrowed his social circle to a small band of other immigrant Dartmouth students – Dias Kadyrbayev and Azamat Tazhayakov from Kazakhstan, and Robel Phillipos, an Ethiopian with US citizenship – and their occasional girlfriends. He tweeted, he facebooked. He spent much of his time away from his dorm room, at a New Bedford apartment the Kazakhs rented:

The group spent three or four evenings a week on that sofa, getting stoned, watching movies and eating. The boys played FIFA, a soccer video game; the girls talked about which of the boys might be the hottest lovers, though it does not appear that anyone but Dias was getting much action.

In 2009, Tamerlan and his mother ‘began studying the Koran’. Tamerlan also began studying The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, ever popular in Russia and the bible of anti-Semites everywhere. One of Zubeidat’s home care clients, a loose screw called Donald Larking, passed along conspiracist libertarian newspapers and magazines. The internet provided even more enticing forms of inflammatory propaganda – lectures by the al-Qaida recruiter Anwar al-Awlaki and the like – and the opportunity to share festering resentments with thinkalikes all over the planet. Relatedly or not, Dzhokhar, a whizz at languages, opened an account on vk.com, ‘a Facebook clone site on which most Russians his age maintained their social media lives’. By this time, evidently, everyone realised that America had been a wrong move.

Anzor, despite a few drunken fights and scrapes with neighbours, was an essentially passive, Soviet-made working stiff, svelte and athletic in his youth, gaunt and ailing by middle age, indifferent to Islamist manias and 9/11 conspiracy lore, resigned to getting by fixing cars. His health deteriorated, and his marriage to Zubeidat, who had taken to wearing a burqa, fell apart. They divorced in 2011; in 2012, Anzor left the country for Dagestan. Meanwhile, after ten years, Herlihy got fed up with her rebarbative tenants and their increasingly cracked views. She asked them to leave, but gave them several months to do so.

Here, more or less, is where the train goes into the tunnel. More finely sifted details of all the above can be found in Gessen’s extraordinary book. It’s worth noting here that Zubeidat was arrested for shoplifting from the Cambridge branch of the department store Lord & Taylor in 2012; she then took off for Dagestan, two weeks after Tamerlan returned from a seven-month visit. With both parents gone, Tamerlan was, by custom, now the head of the family in America, though Bella and Ailina, haphazardly in and out of Cambridge with their children, were living erratic lives of their own. Dzhokhar shambled back and forth in a cloud of smoke between Cambridge and New Bedford. ‘There was an understanding in the family now: Dagestan was the place to live.’ Dzhokhar spoke of moving there next summer. Tamerlan was only waiting until he could get a US passport – a valuable commodity in a pinch.

*

At the time of the bombings, Tamerlan was 26, Dzhokhar 19. They had no known accomplices, though the bombs were far from simple to make, and no traces of their assembly were discovered anywhere. It’s also unclear when the idea of bombing the marathon first occurred to either brother. In the months before the bombing, the brothers were rarely in the same place at the same time. It’s easy to suppose they created a gang of two through phone calls and text messages, and fortified their sense of mission with YouTube jihadist videos and al-Qaida’s online magazine, Inspire, which ran a DIY article entitled ‘Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom’. Had they held off for a year, Isis might have attracted the brothers to Syria, but the Isis brand hadn’t yet overtaken al-Qaida’s outside the Middle East and the Caucasus. It was widely reported that Tamerlan had been ‘radicalised’ during his visit to Dagestan in 2012. Gessen thinks this an exaggeration, having tracked his activities there very closely. He hung out with young Salafi Muslims belonging to the Union of the Just, ‘allied with Hizb ut-Tahrir, one of the largest Islamic organisations in the world. Hizb ut-Tahrir proclaims the goal of creating a caliphate that would unite the Muslim lands of the world … by peaceful means, through political and philosophical struggle only.’ Gessen notes that some analysts consider Hizb ut-Tahrir ‘a gateway organisation that facilitates young Muslims’ passage from peaceful civilians to jihadis’, but all the same, Tamerlan did nothing much in Dagestan besides talk the Islamist talk and show off his fancy clothes.

Retrospective suspicion that Tamerlan had murdered three drug dealers in Waltham, Massachusetts in 2011, by slitting their throats, insinuates the possibility that Tamerlan had killed people before visiting Dagestan, and was already disinhibited about inflicting lethal violence. However, we don’t know, and we probably never will; the only purported witness/accomplice to the Waltham murders, a gym-mate called Ibragim Todashev, was shot seven times and killed by an FBI agent in Orlando, Florida, a month after the bombing. According to the FBI, Todashev ‘became aggressive’ while writing out a confession implicating Tamerlan, the uncompleted text of which was inconsistent with the Waltham crime scene.

This sort of obscurity is everywhere in the Tsarnaev saga. Why was a bevy of federal agents buzzing around the MIT area in Cambridge several hours before the Tsarnaevs shot an MIT security cop? Had the FBI, at the instigation of the Russian FSB, not just interviewed Tamerlan as a suspected extremist several times in 2011, but tried to recruit him as an informant? An informant who ‘went rogue’? If this were the case, could the FBI have hoped to take him out before he could spill, if the police caught him alive?

Gessen has taken flak from the New York Times for merely asking such questions, in a ponderous review by Janet Napolitano, director of the Department of Homeland Security at the time of the marathon bombing. A figure much loved by America’s spy networks, Napolitano dismissed the book’s descriptions of FBI malfeasance, abuses of the deportation laws and draconian prosecutions on accessory charges as ‘conspiracy theory’. This seems quite unfair to Gessen, who tries for several pages to imagine a plausible scenario in which the FBI agent who shot Todashev seven times could have been acting in ‘self-defence’. That she is unable really to do so is hardly her fault. The FBI itself issued several different versions of what happened before settling on something remotely credible.

Well before the Tsarnaev brothers were identified as suspects, tabloid TV and print media launched a free-ranging witch hunt targeting Muslims, people who looked like Muslims, and unaccountable others, picked out of footage of the marathon crowd, or out of nowhere; at one strange moment, even the actress Zooey Deschanel was identified as a bombing suspect on a news broadcast, perhaps because of the slightly unusual spelling of her name. After the police shoot-out (in which Tamerlan’s nearly dead body was recovered, Dzhokhar having run over it in an SUV), authorities asked residents of the Boston area to ‘shelter in place’, putting an entire American city under lockdown.

After Dzhokhar’s arrest, various provisions of the US Patriot Act permitted authorities to question the gravely wounded suspect, a US citizen, for hours before he was read his Miranda rights; in the days and months that followed, almost anyone in the United States with the faintest connection to the Tsarnaevs was either harassed, deported or prosecuted for minor, even unconscious infractions that, if shoved under the umbrella of ‘terrorism’, can be magnified by federal prosecutors into major felonies. Dias Kadyrbayev, Azamat Tazhayakov and Robel Phillipos, who removed some of Dzhokhar’s belongings from his dorm room in a stoned panic, are currently doing long stretches in federal prison; another friend who deleted the search history on his own computer has been in custody for two years awaiting trial. The charges brought against these people presumed deliberate obstruction of the bombing investigation, or of making ‘materially false, fictitious and fraudulent statements’ to police and the FBI, when in any reasonable view, nothing they did, or told or didn’t tell authorities, had any effect on the investigation whatsoever. They had no knowledge of the bombing before it happened, and were in an even greater state of confusion afterwards than anyone else in Boston, simply because they happened to know the Tsarnaevs.

What passed between the brothers in the ten months after Zubeidat’s departure to Dagestan is terra incognita. The chances are no specific event or Svengali-like radicalisation inspired the Tsarnaev brothers to blow up the Boston Marathon. As a policeman in Yasmina Khadra’s 2006 novel The Attack puts it: ‘I think even the most seasoned terrorists really have no idea what has happened to them. And it can happen to anyone. Something clicks somewhere in their subconscious, and they’re off … Either it falls on your head like a roof tile or it attaches itself to your insides like a tapeworm. Afterwards, you no longer see the world in the same way.’ The media fantasy that Tamerlan was schizophrenic and ‘heard voices’ is highly improbable. The consensus among terrorism experts is that terrorists are normal people. ‘He was a perfectly nice guy.’ ‘The last person I’d imagine doing something like this.’ After the fact, neighbours, friends and co-workers invariably say the same things about terrorists as they say about serial killers. It’s worth noting that there isn’t a single provable instance of the legendary FBI profiling unit in Quantico, Virginia actually instigating the capture of a serial killer: it tends to be when someone is stopped for driving with a broken tail light that the dead body in the trunk is discovered. It’s only afterwards that we’re told they ‘fit the FBI profile’.

*

Why did they do it? How could they? In the world we live in now, the better questions are: why not? Why wouldn’t they? To quote Khadra’s novel again, on suicide bombers: ‘The only way to get back what you’ve lost or to fix what you’ve screwed up – in other words, the only way to make something of your life – is to end it with a flourish: turn yourself into a giant firecracker in the middle of a school bus or launch yourself like a torpedo against an enemy tank.’ Everything the US has done to prevent terrorism has been the best advertising terrorism could possibly have. The ‘war on terror’ has degenerated since its ugly inception in Afghanistan and Iraq into a two-pronged war against the US domestic population’s civil rights and the infrastructures of Muslim nations; every cynical episode of this endless war has inched America closer to a police state, and turned people minding their own business in other countries into jihadists and suicide bombers. If the United States were at all interested in preventing terrorism, it would first have to acknowledge that the country belongs to the citizens its economic policies have impoverished, and get rid of emergency laws that violate their rights on the pretext of ensuring their safety. This would involve dismantling the surveillance state apparatus that inflates its criminally gigantic budgets with phony terrorism warnings and a veritable industry of theatrical FBI sting operations. And then the country would have to address the systemic social problems that have been allowed to metastasise ever since the presidency of Ronald Reagan. As everyday existence becomes more punitive for all but the monied few, more and more frustrated, volatile individuals will seek each other out online, aggravate whatever lethal fairy tale suits their pathology, and, ultimately, transfer their rage from the screen world to the real one.

In Hyperspace

Fredric Jameson London Review of Books

• Time Travel: The Popular Philosophy of Narrative by David Wittenberg
  Fordham, 288 pp, £18.99, March 2013, ISBN 978 0 8232 4997 8

It is probably not immediately obvious what interest a new theoretical study of science fiction holds for the mainstream adepts of literary theory; and no doubt it is just as perplexing to SF scholars, for whom this particular subgenre of the subgenre, the time-travel narrative, is as exceptional among and uncharacteristic of their major texts as SF itself is with regard to official Literature. To be sure, so-called alternative or counterfactual histories have gained popularity and a certain respectability; my personal favourite is Terry Bisson’s Fire on the Mountain, in which John Brown’s raid succeeds and a black socialist republic emerges in the South, as prosperous and superior in relation to its shrunken rust-belt northern neighbour as West Germany was to the East in the old days. And there remains the lingering mystery of what would have happened had the time traveller not stepped on the butterfly: this is from Ray Bradbury’s immortal ‘Sound of Thunder’, but the idea is adaptable to any number of wistful daydreams – had Lincoln not been assassinated, or Bobby Kennedy – or more sombre fantasies, like Philip K. Dick’s Man in the High Castle, in which Germany and Japan win the Second World War and divide the US between them. But these historical variants are not genuine time-travel narratives on the order of H.G. Wells’s Time Machine (1895), which inaugurates the standard narrative of the history of science fiction, to the detriment of Jules Verne or that other increasingly popular recent candidate, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein(1818).

But where did the genre come from? My own hypothesis is a very general one: namely, that the late 19th-century invention of SF correlates to Walter Scott’s invention of the modern historical novel in Waverley (1814), marking the emergence of a second – industrial – stage of historical consciousness after that first dawning sense of the historicity of society so rudely awakened by the French Revolution. David Wittenberg does much better than this, but his remarkable hypothesis is only one of the conceptual breakthroughs in this stimulating contribution to literary theory. I will dwell mainly on the three that interest me the most: the relationship of SF to modernism in the arts; the historical periodisation of the genre; and the dramatic challenge to narratology as a field, with implications for the theory of ideology as well as for the analysis of narrative structure itself (of which the time-travel story, with all its ineradicable paradoxes, suddenly becomes the fundamental paradigm). Nor is philosophy itself untouched by the fallout from these dramatic revisions: after all, the phenomenological ego is a temporal matter, and time itself one of its fundamental paradoxes, which neither Husserl nor Heidegger ever laid to rest.

Science fiction is not the only mass-cultural genre (or subgenre) whose relationship to ‘high literature’ and to modernism in particular presents problems. It is as easy to feel that James and Wells are incompatible as it is to reject the notion that Dostoevsky (let alone Oedipus Rex) has any family relationship with the detective story. When we come to Orlando or Pynchon, the conviction of incompatibility remains firm, but the arguments become more difficult to sustain, or even to articulate. Experimental literature ought to share generic features with its more popular cousins, but it doesn’t; Cormac McCarthy and Jonathan Lethem are not of the same genre as Philip K. Dick, however long Margaret Atwood managed to ‘pass’. Indeed, the solution may actually be a rather simple one, namely that modernism is not a genre, while SF emphatically is – and this opens up questions of an appeal to different reading publics, as well as their respective quotients of Bourdieusian ‘distinction’.

Wittenberg’s proposal begins modestly enough, with an emphasis on SF’s bias towards visuality: witness Wells’s first time traveller, who observes the passage of worlds and time as so many streams of flux, ‘melting and flowing under my eyes’ – ‘le film des événements’ indeed. The shorthand of visuality will then mark mass culture as ‘degraded’ (in the language of culture pessimists like Adorno and Horkheimer) by comparison with the anti-visuality, the anti-representational convictions, of the various high modernisms. But it will also open up immense new possibilities such as the emergent medium of film.

Is it then simply visuality which accounts for the appeal of mass culture and its genres over the obscurities of the hermetic arts? One may recall Hegel’s judgment on ‘picture-thinking’ (seemingly the standard translation of Kant’s Vorstellung) and the empirical categories of the thinking of daily life (Verstand or ‘understanding’), whose cultural elaboration he saw in art and religion. His famous (or infamous) pronouncement on the ‘end of art’ was motivated by his conviction that the deficiencies of Verstand needed to be replaced by the Concept (Begriffor ‘notion’), by a philosophy no longer obliged to rely on picture-thinking for its solutions.

Wittenberg reminds us that it was not only mass culture – cartoons, illustrated dime novels, early cinema – that ignored Hegel’s judgment: so did the scientists, and however unthinkable infinity may be, Einstein’s thought experiments are nothing if not triumphs of picture-thinking, redolent with trains and clocks, elevators and measuring rods, the tangible bric-à-brac of daily life pressed into service to make the unthinkable thinkable. This is certainly a visual procedure, but I would characterise it as a kind of literality too, for reasons that will become apparent in a moment.

I want to reinsert this problem into a philosophical context of far greater consequence, which is that of representation as such. Increasingly, in the late 19th century, writers became aware that the world of newly emergent capitalism was an unrepresentable totality which it was nonetheless their duty and vocation to represent. The great moderns – Mallarmé, Joyce, Musil et al – achieved this impossible and double-binding imperative by representing their inability to represent. They earned their right to sublimity by using ‘picture-thinking’ against itself, and for them failure was success. The postmoderns seem to have renounced this agonising mission by taking the impossibility of representation for granted and revelling in it (you will say that by now we know what the totality of capitalism is anyhow, representation or no representation).

But science fiction was not crippled by such representational doubts and scruples; or rather, it emerged as a genre at the very moment in which the representational dilemma began to make inroads into literature, and it was able to do so owing to its possession of a representational instrument rather different from those faltering in the hands of traditional realists. Kant distinguished between two kinds of non-conceptual language: the symbol and the schema. Traditional literature cleaved to the symbol and its ‘picture-thinking’ (thereby allowing Hegel to pronounce its supercession by philosophy as such, in his theory of the ‘end of art’). But science fiction had the schema; and it is what we have been calling literality, the use of visual materials not to represent the world but to represent our thoughts about the world. It is no accident that Deleuze celebrated Foucault’s work in terms of its schematism, something which in his own writing he called ‘the image of thought’ – as opposed, clearly, to its referential content. Virtually everything designated as structuralism and poststructuralism is marked, in its so-called spatial turn – indeed, in its synchronic tendencies – by schematism. This is a kind of ‘picture-thinking’ very different from what Hegel understood asVorstellung; nor does it fall under the anathema of representation since it does not represent.

This is why science fiction, despite appearances, cannot be said simply to carry on the traditional narrative methods of ‘old-fashioned realism’, merely applying it to fantastic or at least non-realistic content. Rather, it enlists the visual literality of Einstein’s thought experiments to convey conceptions often more outlandish than his own (and this is no doubt the moment to disabuse the sceptical reader of the still widespread opinion that science fiction is always about ‘science’). For Einstein’s ‘experiments’ were very far from being the laboratory experiments and falsification devices in terms of which the history of ‘hard science’ is so often written (it took a good deal of ingenuity to invent a ‘real experiment’ – the solar measurements of 1919 – to confirm his ‘scientific’ theories). Rather, Einstein’s demonstrations were pedagogical, texts more closely related to children’s books than to applications for a grant. Yet these ‘examples’ are not to be understood as mere rhetoric: they pioneered a form of schematism which authorised the early writers of science fiction to take their cosmological fantasies literally and to re-enact in a visual (or later on a cinematographic) mode the dynamics of worlds either too large or too small to be conveyed by human language (perhaps, then, as Badiou’s work has been reminding us, mathematics is one of the ultimate – and alternative – forms of such literality or schematisation).

At this point, returning to our narrative of the history and emergence of science fiction, Wittenberg rather brutally shifts gears, from what look like the linguistic dilemmas of the scientific text, to political history. He does so not in the usual fashion of outlining some more general social ‘context’, but rather by way of the generic problems of political, indeed utopian thought.

This generic problem is also a political one, and this identity is what I take Hegel to have meant by his immense sentence, ‘Defectiveness of form results from defectiveness of content.’ (The larger version of this symptomal relationship between literature and the sociopolitical situation will also account for the crisis in cognitive mapping I referred to earlier as the modernist representational dilemma.) The political problem turns on 19th-century conceptions of the future of capitalist development and the possibility of its revolutionary transformation into another, more satisfactory and humane system, which is to say a radically different ‘mode of production’ (a concept initially theorised by Adam Ferguson and then developed by Marx). The ‘representational’ problem does not lie in the revolutionary upheavals themselves, theorised from the Jacobins to Lenin; but rather in how to think and represent the transition from one mode of production into another, radically distinct one. The experience of defeat of the various revolutionary movements in this period has a paradoxical consequence: it does not discourage its followers theoretically, but rather intensifies their attempts to conceptualise that mysterious historical moment which is the passage from one system to another.

To limit ourselves to the United States – the home of the bulk of pulp fiction dealing with time travel – we witness in the late 19th century the defeat of an immense radical political movement called populism, which is followed by the sublimations of the so-called progressive movement, but also by Edward Bellamy’s remarkable third-party mass movement, one of the most successful in American history, in the form of the Nationalist Clubs and the People’s Party. The causes of the movement’s defeat are less relevant here than its manifesto, which projected a vision of a radically different future in the form of a novel, Looking Backward 2ooo-1887 (1888) – and this is the point at which we rejoin the history of the time-travel narrative. For although Bellamy’s novel was not the first time-travel narrative, its immense success was political as well as literary, and drew attention to a seemingly secondary defect, shared by William Morris’s reply in News from Nowhere (1890), which lay precisely in the way that ‘transition’ was imagined (or not imagined) by both authors: in each case, the narrator falls into a magnetic sleep, only to awaken a century later in Utopia. This failure of imagination is the same, I want to argue, as that of the political revolutions designed to achieve the same transition in real life: the absence of a third term between the two systems, the absence of a mechanism.

Wells’s formal innovation, on the other hand, lay in his shifting of the reader’s attention to a technological substitute for the missing historical transition, namely the time machine. (We might argue that the party was Lenin’s analogous innovation in the realm of political strategy.) With the insertion of this technological third term, the hitherto merely notional fantasy of time travel had become a full-blown genre, capable of standing on its own and developing its history autonomously according to its own now semi-autonomous formal laws and structural problems.

Wittenberg’s is thus a theory of autonomisation (or, as Niklas Luhmann termed it, differentiation), and of its internalisation of what mandarin scholars used to call extrinsic factors (social issues, content of various kinds, the non-literary or extra-poetic). To be sure, the shift can still be interpreted in terms of the public’s waning belief in political change, and its subsequent shift of attention from the perfunctory ‘cause’ of the passage to another kind of society (the blow on the head in Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, for example) to a newly awakened interest in the technological and the scientific, at least of the Popular Mechanics variety (in that case, the rise of a technological studies discipline would constitute a parallel spin-off and an analogous example of autonomisation). Such interpretations place a literary or formal development in a larger historiographical and even philosophical context, the struggle between identity and difference, the alternation between breaks and continuities. If the new mode of production is grasped as evolving within the framework of the old one, as Marx thought, then the passage of one to the other, however violent its restructuration, can be figured as a kind of continuity. If on the other hand the society to come is radically different from our own, as in utopian thought or even some anthropological traditions, then the question of the break becomes more pressing and often seems to be abandoned to accident and contingency, as in Foucault’s metaphor of the passage between epistemes as a kind of convulsive shift in tectonic plates. Lenin thought he had invented a mechanism to organise and direct this third-term mediation or transition; unable to imagine one, people today sometimes imagine there is some structural permanence to capitalism (its identity threatened only by the ‘extrinsic factor’ of nature itself). At a time when utopias like Bellamy’s no longer preoccupy public opinion, it may nonetheless be claimed that the evolution of the time-travel narrative still harbours a faint trace of that utopian impulse in its feeble counterfactual daydreams.

Still, the emergence of a full-blown new genre or subgenre constitutes an indubitable fact, a symptom of some more general historical displacement. Wittenberg is able to document this emergence by way of a three-stage process: first, the stage I have just examined, the initial impetus of speculation as to the means of accession to some future utopia; second, the new possibilities of uneven simultaneities inspired by Einsteinian relativity and the elasticity of time with which it now endows narrative; third, the translation of the multiple subject positions projected by relativity into a full-blown theory of multiple worlds or universes existing simultaneously, a new cosmological concept which not only inspires a new generation of philosophising but returns us to our starting point in a spatial rather than a temporal way, where the utopian (or non or anti-utopian) other lies, not in the future, but in a present side-by-side with our own even though accessible to it.

That Einstein’s theory of relativity should usher in the second period of time-travel emplotment is scarcely a surprise: it left its mark on a wide variety of popular discourses; and we may take Sigfried Giedion’s enormous manifesto on modern architecture, Space, Time and Architecture (1941), as evidence of the analogies it spawned in other disciplines. That it also inspired two of the true jewels and masterworks of science fiction’s ‘Golden Age’ – Robert A. Heinlein’s stories ‘By His Bootstraps’ (1941) and ‘All You Zombies’ (1959) – may be less well known. In these stories the protagonist, travelling into the past (and having to do so repeatedly in order to try to correct the damage wreaked by previous visits), not only meets his other selves but begins to entertain multiple relations with them: the classic situation. Wittenberg shows that much the same structure is at work in the film Back to the Future(1985), but the Heinlein stories have the advantage of being untarnished by the trappings of cinematographic realism. One can much more clearly recognise in their pulp format the literalisation of characteristic themes of high modernist literature, such as the relativity of phenomenological time and its multiple selves from various periods of individual life. Here, however, memory has vanished as an experience and become an objectified narrative technique, with the consequence that ‘By His Bootstraps’ is literally more narratological than those modern works we figuratively designate as self-conscious or reflexive: ‘Hearing himself refer to himself as Joe slapped him in the face with the realisation that this was not simply a similar scene, but the same scene he had lived through once before – save that he was living through it from a different viewpoint.’ (The main character is a student writing his thesis on the impossibility of time travel.)

It gradually becomes clear that the spiral which – as it explores the paradoxes of temporality, memory and personal identity, generates ever more selves out of what was presumed to have been the original one – is centripetal rather than centrifugal, turning in on itself narrowly in an ever more claustrophobic way, so that the ultimate and even stereotypical consummation of the narrative logic of the time-travel tale turns out to be the realisation that I am alone in the world and am therefore logically enough my own ancestor: at which point the temporal and historical universe becomes a solipsistic prison devoid not only of other people but of otherness as such. The ideological consequences of such a form – its ideological content as it were – are as obvious as they are toxic and multiple: an endogamy which transforms all of history into the stasis of Parmenidean Being, the past as eternity, the invention of an unassailable identity for ruling conquerors who have come out of nowhere.

But it will not do to omit the ideological implications of Wittenberg’s analysis of the time-travel narrative, which concludes with the discovery that this non or post-subjective form is in and of itself an interpellation. Back to the Future is not only a prime illustration of a new narrative genre, it is also a commercial event and a narrative commodity constructed at a uniquely regressive moment in American history, very much entertaining a nostalgic revival of that earlier conservative period that was the American 1950s. Something in the time-travel narrative seems pre-eminently suitable for its use in ideological interpellation, in ways that the high literary narrative, itself scarcely exempt from ideological investment, is nonetheless formally intent on eschewing. Literature also has its equivalent of the philosophical distinction between episteme and doxa, knowledge and opinion – which does not mean that its versions of ‘knowledge’ are any less ideological at some deeper level. In Back to the Futurewe find a kind of Freudo-Marxian perspective in which the various social and ultimately political connotations are managed by way of an Oedipal situation (the protagonist returns to the moment of his own parents’ courtship, which he is, in effect, able to arrange). The 1980s family is thereby restored (and even improved) by this excursion to the Eisenhower era, at the same time as the anxious apprenticeship of the neo-conservatism of the Reagan era is assuaged and reassured by the emergent consumer culture of the earlier period.

From this outcome, Wittenberg’s third stage of the time-travel narrative now rescues us just in time, reviving a genre on the point of reaching ultimate sterility for all kinds of new uses. This third period depends on the idea of multiple or parallel worlds, now currently renamed the ‘multiverse’, a word and theory credited to an obscure PhD thesis of 1957 by Hugh Everett III; unlike the thunderclap of Einstein’s little article of 1905, this idea seems to have made its way through mass culture and into high philosophical speculation in a relatively inconspicuous way, which may well entitle us to ask some questions about its origin. Nonetheless, it has the advantage of reopening the claustrophobic second stage of the time-travel narrative by turning its multiple selves into multiple worlds, and re-identifying subjective and narcissistic isolation with a multiplicity of objective situations and alternate spaces.

My own suspicion is that the multiverse is to be grasped schematically, as a distorted (and visual, literal, pictorial) symptom and expression of the rather different anxiety of the explosion of subjects under decolonisation and globalisation, which no longer finds psychological containment in concepts of nation, race, class and the like. The existence of the other, Sartre taught us long ago, is a primordial trauma for the biological individual: how much the more traumatic may not be the unrepresentable, inconceivable multiplicity of others – singular and collective – in the current human world? The multiverse – a new global version of Leibniz’s system of monads? – can serve to organise those anxieties, however imperfectly, at the same time as its possibilities of mutual intervention and contamination open up the sealed world of the earlier generic moment and offer counterfactual release from the tyranny of a fixed past and a collective destiny foretold. Science fiction has become the salvational fantasy of counterfactuality.

*

But even counterfactuality and alternate worlds play out their solutions by way of a shuffling of a limited number of tokens given in advance: we must know what did happen in order to enjoy the consolation of modifying it; Lincoln remains a known quantity whether he lives or dies. This is therefore the moment to move on to the other great topic of Wittenberg’s book, namely its narratological proposals. On the face of it, they seem familiar enough, and take their point of departure in Shklovskian (and even Aristotelian) orthodoxy: fabula versus syuzhet, myth and its emplotments, the chronological facts as against the order of their telling – an opposition foregrounded in the detective story, but which, among the multiple narratives available to science fiction, is realised almost solely in time travel.

It is my opinion that it is precisely this opposition – between the initial data, or raw materials, of the story and the unique form the storyteller chooses to tell it in – which resurfaces in modern linguistics in the form of the all too familiar opposition between the signified and the signifier, the énoncé and the énonciation etc, not to speak of their reappropriation by narratologists (as histoire versus discours and the like). But the earlier version of this linguistic opposition in fact involved three terms rather than two: alongside the signifier and signified there was thought to be that mysterious thing, the referent – the object in the reality outside the mind, where its merely mental image is registered. Lacan slyly reinserts the referent in the form of that Kantian Ding-an-sich which is the Real (in its Lacanian acceptation, inaccessible to language or conscious thought). But the vast majority of structuralist and poststructuralist thinkers wage an implacable war on the ‘referent’ and its supposedly ideological conception of a ‘real’ reality out there (of which truth is the accurate reflection, etc). Yet in this process, in which the old tripartite linguistic scheme is whittled down to the simple opposition of signifier to signified, some of the opprobrium that hitherto attached to the referent now comes to contaminate the second term, the signified, which seems to have more or less taken its place. Thus the primacy of the signifier begins, and the fundamental dogma of textuality – ‘il n’y a pas de hors-texte’ – induces a profound philosophical reorganisation in which the signifier not only determines the signified, but in its temporal version, the effect determines the cause and the present the past. It is in the light of this omnipresent doxa that Wittenberg’s Shklovskian proposal must be grasped.

In a sense the philosophical revision I am describing was always, after Aristotle, the deeper conviction of the aesthetic. Shklovsky himself always implied a kind of convergence between signified and referent: the fabula – the mythic raw materials – was in that sense both all at once and constituted the facts, so to speak, but had no original and definitive textual origin or version. The various versions were all forms of the syuzhet: the poesis or making, the telling of a tale whose original existed nowhere, but which could always somehow be reconstructed. At this point, it is appropriate to enlist History in the debate, and to introduce Hayden White, whose scandal for orthodox historians consisted in his denial of the historical fact as such and his insistence on the primacy of historical ‘emplotment’ (his term, borrowed later on by Ricoeur).

History is then also a text, and we are its readers. But to introduce the reader at this point will have even more momentous consequences. Wittenberg, now following Shklovsky closely, has done what none of the currently fashionable celebrants of ‘reading’ have dared to do: he has theorised its structure, which consists in the positing (as Hegel might say) of fabula over syuzhet, that is, in the necessity of some prior ‘belief’ in the fabula which can alone enable our reception of the syuzhet. ‘Reading for the referent’, the structuralists contemptuously called this; but it is surely true, and a better way of saying it than ‘suspension of disbelief’ or other ingenious attempts to ensure the difference of fiction from fact, to hold on to the old conventional notion of reality while ensuring a momentary grace period for the consumption of literary narrative. But if everything is narrative, as we seem nowadays to believe, then this division no longer holds; and as for belief or disbelief, Rodney Needham long ago demonstrated the incoherence of this pseudo-concept in Belief, Language and Experience(1973) – though nobody believed him. If, however, you like the word, let’s keep it (if only provisionally): so the new Wittenberg/ Shklovsky doctrine maintains the priority of a ‘belief’ in the fabula over the syuzhet (which nobody believes, it is nothing but literature). Reading then involves what Wittenberg (following Kant’s example) will ingeniously and pertinently call ‘the fabula a priori’. Even when reading those patently false narratives called novels, we still believe in something, namely the fabula; and this holds, as he demonstrates, for the so-called experimental or modernist novel fully as much as for the allegedly traditional kind. But in that case, there is at least one term we can get rid of for good, and that is the word ‘fiction’: fiction is a fiction, if you prefer, and in a world where everything is narrative, we can eliminate it. ‘Fiction’ was the now discarded theory that the fabula could be either true or false; whereas, if you want to put it that way, the fabula is always true.

This leaves us with the enraged historians who, having pursued Hayden White for so long, must now once again try to save the facts and the truth in the face of such scepticism and relativism. For is not history, among other things, simply a quarrel of interpretations? And are not interpretations on the order of the syuzhet so many versions and textualisations, so many divergent narratives, which have to be tested against the bedrock of the facts, namely the fabula itself? Surely not all those versions can be accepted (something the concept of fiction allowed us to do for literature); surely there are true and false ones, objective ones, interested ones, prejudiced ones, conspiratorial versions or outright lies? Surely, to take just one obvious example, Holocaust deniers are not to be granted even literary licence, and if nothing else, the word fiction ought to be preserved for them.

So what we thought could be confined to the self-evidently restricted field of literature, and a highly specialised and improbable type of literature at that – the time-travel narrative – now spills over into one of the great quasi-religious debates of our time, the so-called postmodern debate, whose ravages are to be observed even more starkly in the field of science than in the related social sciences. My own modest proposal will be that all these quarrels are not the same, nor do they express or emplot the same fabula. Historiographical decisions about the relative participation of Hitler, Heydrich or Himmler in the construction of the death camps: those divergent emplotments share a common fabula, a common set of ‘facts’, which is to say, narrative raw materials. But quarrels with the Holocaust deniers turn on a quite different fabula, which is the enunciative act of liars, ideologues or obsessives: here the ‘facts’ are not those of the camps, but those of the pseudo-historians who write books to ‘disprove’ their existence, get fired from their universities and invited to radical right-wing, proto-Nazi rallies. It is an altogether different story that is being told here, and as soon as that is admitted, the philosophical problem of historical facts turns out to have been a false problem and vanishes into the history of ideas.

Another significant problem raises its ugly head the moment we mention the reader: the more strictly narratological problem of the observer and of so-called ‘point of view’ in the narrative. This problem too involves philosophical or pseudo-philosophical issues, namely those associated with identity and the self – not Heinlein’s multiple selves, exactly, but rather our own. I have talked a good deal about visuality and literality: but could my self, that phenomenological subject I call myself, my own rather impersonal consciousness, also be treated literally or visually? Let’s mention that Kant filed personal consciousness (and all the other concepts connected to it; he lumped them all together as the ‘soul’) under the category of the Ding-an-sich, the thing-in-itself inaccessible to empirical observation and thereby to rational thought, a transcendental object of some kind that we cannot even conceive. But that’s philosophy: how would ordinary Verstand, garden-variety picture-thinking, imagine it? The eyes are of course its windows; thinking goes on behind them somewhere, presumably; but we can never really see the back of our heads (except in mirror ‘reflection’, which is of course to say, philosophy). The problem, then, involves the observer, the source of the ‘point of view’. In a story the second self observes the first one, and so on ad infinitum: but who observes the final one? The reader, no doubt: but who reads the reader? The paradox is even sharper when we try to find our place in the multiverse: the privileged position of the observer can only be such in virtue of occupying one more alternate universe, which someone has to be observing in turn (if God is not available).

But as we are desperately attempting to think all this while remaining within picture-thinking, then the ultimate observer’s place must be in a space beyond space, a kind of hyperspace, as Wittenberg calls it, citing the narrator of a Fritz Leiber story about a war between time-travellers: ‘The place outside the cosmos where I and my pals do our nursing job I simply call the Place.’ This is how the empirical consciousness tries to imagine (empirically) the non-empirical (or Kant’s transcendental).

What time-travel stories demonstrate is: first, the transcendental necessity of a superspace in any narrative rendering of time; second, the fundamentally visual character of that superspace, underscored by the descriptive normality of its spacetime and the sense in which we merely occupy it like any other narrative scenery; and third, the precedence of popular, rather than experimental, narrative in positing this quasi-transcendental spacetime as a realmilieu of the reader, the interworld of his or her perspective. The time-travel story literally depicts the physical conditions of ‘the Place’ where the ‘points’ from which we ‘view’ plots unfolding must be presumed to abide.

But modernity has in fact invented such a hyperspace from which to observe the observer: it is called the camera. And film becomes the logical extension of the time-travel narrative in that paradoxical sense in which, as Stanley Cavell so memorably put it, the world is viewed without myself. This is, then, how the structural/poststructural search for the decentred subject ended up, not with some impossible ‘death of the subject’, but rather in film theory, with the camera apparatus as that ultimate subject without subjectivity, that ultimate literal and visual embodiment of the ultimate observer of the ultimate self and of the literalisation of James’s literary ‘point of view’. The transcendental hyperspace in which such a transcendental observer finds itself is then simply the infinite regress of point of view, the nothingness on which the attempt to think time and temporality, to think the past and the present, to think the difference between my multiple selves, is founded. Temporality is then nothing but a time-travel narrative.

Vol. 37 No. 17 · 10 September 2015 » Fredric Jameson » In Hyperspace

pages 17-22 | 5647 words

ISSN 0260-9592 Copyright © LRB Limited 2015

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