Month: March 2021

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Crossing the Tekeze

When Julius Caesar’s army crossed the Rubicon it marked a point of no return, triggering a civil war that eventually led to the establishment of his dictatorship in Rome. The Ethiopian government’s decision to invade Tigray is a similar moment. A civil war has begun, and Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has wagered that a victorious outcome will lead to the consolidation of his rule. By eliminating all traces of opposition, he hopes to extend his power over Ethiopia’s federal regions. Although the actual result may very well be the opposite, there can probably be no reversal of the process Abiy has initiated. Its ramifications for the region are likely to linger for generations, and it is possible that the viability of a united Ethiopia has now been fatally undermined.

Of Ethiopia’s ten regional states Tigray is the fifth largest, positioned in the far north of country, just beneath Eritrea. Its 7 million-strong population consists of several ethnic groups – the biggest of which are the Tigrayans, with their own language, Tigrinya. Nationally, Tigrayans make up 7% of the total population, while the predominant ethnicities, Oromo and Amhara, represent 35% and 28% respectively. Tensions between Abiy (an Oromo) and the Tigrayan regional government have been growing for several years now. Abiy was appointed prime minister in 2018 when he became chairman of the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). At that time, this umbrella organization included the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), the ruling body in Tigray region, which made Abiy the official representative of the Tigrayans. But while the TPLF had previously been the dominant constituent party in the EPRDF, Abiy began to sideline them once he came to power: systematically removing officials of Tigrayan descent, singling them out for arrest on corruption charges, and even broadcasting hostile documentaries about Tigrayans on Ethiopian state TV.

Alongside these actions came a political shift which further alienated the TPLF: Abiy moved away from the developmentalist model long endorsed by the EPRDF and toward a more investor-friendly economy. As a result, when the prime minister tried to incorporate the EPRDF into his new Prosperity Party in 2019, the TPLF opted out. Instead, they hoped to build an alliance with other federalist forces to contest the much-anticipated August 2020 elections. Fearing that the outcome of this vote might weaken his power, but using the fig leaf of the global pandemic, Abiy indefinitely postponed the ballot and imprisoned the full spectrum of opposition leaders on trumped-up charges. Tigray went ahead with its regional election anyway and declared that it no longer recognized the legitimacy of the central government, as its legal term-limit had expired. This was an act of insubordination that could not go unpunished. Almost immediately, Abiy began to amass troops along Tigray’s borders.

On the banks of the Tekeze River – which runs between Ethiopia’s Tigray region, Eritrea and Sudan – the mass movement of armies and refugees is now taking place. Eritrean president Isaias Afwerki has been aiding Abiy’s incursions, as the two leaders share an enemy in the TPLF. Isaias wishes to eliminate Tigray’s political autonomy and turn it back into Eritrea’s backwater, economically dependent on its larger neighbour. The Eritrean regime can live with any Ethiopian internal arrangement that serves this purpose. With that in mind, Isaias and Abiy, after formally ending the 1998-2000 border war, have pursued a ‘peace process’ built around their joint hostility to Tigray.

Whatever the casus belli, Ethiopian and Eritrean troops, as well as Amhara militias, had been readied for battle well in advance. As skirmishes broke out in early November 2020, federal Ethiopian and Eritrean troops crossed the Tekeze and began operations against Tigray’s regional forces. The assault was replicated further south, as the Ethiopian army joined with ethnic militias to push into Tigray from across the Angereb river – a Tekeze tributary that separates Tigray from the Amhara region. They were reportedly assisted by United Arab Emirates drones, operating from an Eritrean base, while the US – still in the dying days of the Trump era – offered its diplomatic support. For months, it appeared as if all the world’s ghouls had descended upon Tigray to wreak havoc.

Despite the banning of independent journalists and a communication shutdown in the whole Tigrayan region, the grim news managed to seep out. Mass executions of civilians have been reported almost daily. In the city of Axum alone, Eritrean troops systematically massacred several hundred civilians during two November days as Ethiopian forces looked on. The weaponized rape of civilians has become so common that even the Ethiopian government has been compelled to acknowledge it. A widespread famine now looms after humanitarian organizations were prevented from offering support. According to the World Peace Foundation’s Alex de Waal, the situation in Tigray amounts to ‘one of the most grievous mass atrocities of our era’.

Meanwhile, the Tigrean economy has been reduced to rubble. Organized looting is occurring, with the loot sometimes turning up in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, or abroad in Eritrea. Entire factories have been demolished. Universities, schools, hospitals and pharmacies have been plundered and sacked, prompting a public health emergency. Such indiscriminate violence has forced tens of thousands of refugees to wade and swim across the Tekeze toward refugee camps in neighbouring Sudan – still standing from the 1985 famine and Mengistu’s wars in the region. International headlines about this migration caused such embarrassment in Addis Ababa that the government decided to close the border. Further clashes have since broken out between Ethiopia and Sudan, threatening to spiral into a full regional war.

Having feted Abiy as a democratic reformer (and awarded him a Nobel Peace Prize), the Western states that doled out money and weaponry to the Ethiopian government in the lead-up to the assault have been reluctant to cut their losses amid the current wave of destruction. Western motives for embracing Abiy’s government vary: to pry Ethiopia away from its close relationship with China; to open up the country’s monopolies and protected sectors for foreign investment; and to reward Abiy for breaking with EPRDF’s developmental statist ideology and embracing international financial institutions. (These endeavours have been aided by the West’s regional allies: Israel, the UAE and Saudi Arabia.) Thus, the European Union initially said little about the war in Tigray, while the US openly supported it. But over the past months the shocking level of violence has shaken the West’s resolve. EU envoys are now speaking out against Addis Ababa’s humanitarian blockade in increasingly harsh terms, and the Biden administration has been making loud condemnations of its military campaign. Sensing this shifting rhetoric, in January the UAE began to dismantle its drone base in Eritrea.

But the narrative of the democratic reformer has always been a ruse. Abiy may have released political prisoners of the erstwhile regime when he came to power, but he soon refilled the prisons with his own opponents. Many high-profile assassinations have occurred without a plausible explanation from his government, and troops have repeatedly fired into civilian demonstrations. Though Abiy presents himself as a departure from his predecessors, it ought to be noted that he dutifully served as a minister and a security chief in the previous administration. No one should be feigning shock at his authoritarian manoeuvres. Although the EPRDF established federalism in Ethiopia after Mengistu’s regime was toppled in 1991, Abiy is now seeking to revive a centralised system. The country’s parliamentary model and devolution of powers – two core principles of the federal constitution – are obstacles to his grand design, as they entail checks and balances on executive power. Free elections also create the possibility that any regional states could be governed by an opposition party, making a major rehaul of the constitution an imperative for Abiy and his allies.

Yet if Abiy’s crossing of the Tekeze is an entirely predictable power-grab, there are also other interests at play. For Amhara nationalists, who have been lending their support to the assault on Tigray, the conflict is a continuation of the Ethiopian civil war. Until 1991 the Amhara had been the dominant ethnic group in Ethiopia, holding disproportionate power in all cities and regional administrations. This changed when the EPRDF came to power, instituting an ethnic federalism which made them a minority everywhere outside of the Amhara region and Addis Ababa. The aim of Amhara nationalists is to reverse this settlement and reclaim their position. As such, they are also looking to incorporate territory that is now part of Tigray – Raya, Welkaitand West Tigray – into the Amhara National Regional State. In some cases, a new Amhara administration has already been established in these areas, with ethnic Tigrayans forcibly removed. A US government report notes that what has occurred in regions under Amhara militia control constitutes ‘a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing’.

Both Abiy and the Amhara forces are thus fighting to reverse the outcome of the 1975–1991 civil war and replace the federal order with a more centralised form of government. (Although, for the Amhara, the current strategy of regional state irredentism is somewhat contradictory: why annex territory from one regional state to another, if the federation as a whole must be abolished in any case?) This ambition overlaps with that of pan-Ethiopian nationalists, who have always been opposed to the federal system on principled grounds – seeing it as a block on Ethiopian unity. That these forces should have come together alongside the Eritrean army is a historic irony, since it was the very same Amhara and pan-Ethiopian centralist coalition that the Eritreans were forced to fight – over the course of 30 years – to achieve national independence, and thus make the Tekeze an international border.

Meanwhile, the Eritrean government is fighting to reverse the outcome of the 1998-2000 border war, seeking revenge for its embarrassing defeat at the hands of a Tigrayan-led Ethiopian army. What we have, then, are various interlocking marriages of convenience. The Ethiopian and Eritrean governments have made peace so that they can make war on Tigray together. The Prosperity Party has wedded itself to the Amhara nationalists and pan-Ethiopianists who opposed the EPRDF. And these nationalist forces have, in turn, allied with their longstanding Eritrean adversaries.  

In one sense, the core aim of pan-Ethiopian centralist forces is to remodel relations between centre and periphery back into a stark vertical shape. This project has been attempted and defeated before; and given the strength of opposition from Ethiopia’s most populous regions it is even less likely to succeed this time around. Federalism has given people an experience of limited but real self-administration that many are loath to surrender. The re-centralizing project, by contrast, represents the desire of a minority. Its execution already is requiring intense repression, and ultimately civil war.

Convincing the Tigrayan people that their future lies in a united Ethiopia will likewise be a tall order. Tigray has long borne the brunt of Ethiopian militarism. The first Woyanne rebellion in 1943 saw the British air force intervene on the side of the imperial Ethiopian army to crush it. During the 1975-1991 civil war (dubbed the second Woyanne rebellion in Tigray), the region was bombed relentlessly by Mengistu’s air force. Now, less than three decades after Mengistu’s defeat, the bombers have returned – and Tigrayans have few choices other than resistance or subjugation to a violent, centralised regime.

Tigray’s regional forces are far from defeated – and it is unlikely that they will ever be, given the unpopularity of the invading forces. The occupying armies, despite their superior armaments and resources, have primarily captured the main highways and a string of cities along them. Beyond that, they can do little but make occasional raids into an unfriendly hinterland. The invasion has moreover failed in its ostensible purpose: to capture the leaders of the regional government of Tigray, who are still at large and directing the resistance. Massacres of civilians, as repulsive as they are, can thus be read as a sign of weakness – reflecting the frustration of the invaders.

Since the 1990s, it was generally assumed that Ethiopia had turned the corner. Despite all the deficiencies in the implementation of federal order, the impression was that things had changed for good: the imperial ambitions of Addis Ababa had ebbed away; relations between Ethiopian nationalities were more equal and peaceful; and the state was ready to embed itself in a multilateral order. Such illusions have been dispelled by the brutal attack on Tigray. The Rubicon has been crossed, and there is no route back to the comforting myth that political or legal institutions can guarantee harmony between Ethiopian nationalities, or democratic autonomy for its states. Even if Tigray repels the invaders, what is there to guarantee that future rulers in Addis Ababa will not similarly run roughshod over popular aspirations, pit regions against one another, or call in the Eritreans to quash domestic dissent? The demons of the past have been unleashed on Ethiopia, and no constitutional arrangement will be enough to hold them back.

Read on: Alex De Waal, ‘Exploiting Slavery’, NLR I/227.

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Black Leaves

The German novelist Jenny Erpenbeck is used to living in pieces. Born in East Berlin in 1967, she came of age in a bifurcated city. But even after German reunification, in 1990, the country she inhabited struck her as clumsily cobbled together. When she meditated on reunification years later, she eschewed talk of repair and opted instead for the counter-intuitive imagery of breakage. ‘What was I doing the night the wall fell?’ she asks in her new book, Not a Novel: A Memoir in Pieces. ‘I slept. I literally slept through that moment of world history, and while I was asleep, the pot wasn’t just being stirred, it was being knocked over and smashed to bits.’ In many cases, the smashing was physical: the wall itself was torn down, while Erpenbeck’s erstwhile elementary school was reduced to rubble. But a form of life was also destroyed, and much of Not a Novel treats its author’s conviction that even now she remains riven, an occupant of both a place that no longer exists and its strange, shiny successor.

Though an uneasy inhabitant of present-day Germany, Erpenbeck is one of its most acclaimed authors. Thanks in large part to the efforts of Susan Bernofsky, the skilful translator of her five slim novels, she is now well on her way to prominence in the anglophone sphere as well. Not a Novel was released in Germany in 2019 as Kein Roman: Texte 1992 bis 2018 (literally, ‘Not a Novel: Writings from 1992–2018’). The translator Kurt Beals’s rendering of the book’s contents is elegant, but its original title might have been more accurate: it is in pieces, but it is not a memoir so much as a collection of essays. Alongside autobiographical sketches, there are lectures, prize acceptance speeches, literary critical musings, and feuilletons about everything from fairytales to the word ‘suction’. Though certain preoccupations (with ruins, with silence, with global injustice) emerge, what ties the disparate threads together is not their varied subjects but their common inflection. As in her fiction, Erpenbeck writes in an elegiac mode. Her sentences are long and sinuous, and she tends towards the incantatory repetition of phrases. She omits quotation marks and lapses into a present tense that smacks not of immediacy but of awareness that the past is eerily eternal, like a ghost flickering back to the site of its body’s death. Still, there are structural differences between Erpenbeck’s novels and her not-novel. Where the former are intricate contrapuntal constructions, the latter frays into straying strands.

In Erpenbeck’s The End of Days, which is very much a novel (and a good one at that), a woman in a nineteenth-century Galician village confesses to her husband that ‘as a child she had long been convinced the world was as flat as a palatschinke, and she herself—like all the other inhabitants of the border town she lived in—had been sprinkled on the outermost rim of this pancake like a grain of sugar’. When she neared the town’s outskirts, the woman recalls, she feared she would topple off into the abyss. Erpenbeck grew up as a grain of sugar on the edge of the East German pancake. Her family lived first in an apartment on a dead-end street cut off by the wall, later in a high-rise so close to the West that she could see its distinctive double-decker buses from her window. In Not a Novel she writes: ‘There is nothing better for a child than to grow up at the ends of the earth’, then repeats the sentence, then repeats it again. When the wall fell, she tumbled off. Her recollections reveal that she is still struggling to pick up the pieces.

* * *

All of Erpenbeck’s novels are, in some sense, in pieces. Indeed, as she explains in the preface to Not a Novel, she once crafted a college paper by chopping the pages up and reassembling them: ‘whenever I wanted to change some part of the text, I would take scissors and cut it up into individual paragraphs, shuffle them around on the floor until the collage was just right, and then reach for the glue’. Traces of this approach are palpable in her novels, all of which are made up of chunks of text separated by strips of space.

For the most part, each unit of an Erpenbeck novel – they might be best characterized as stanzas – is shorter than a traditional chapter but longer than the Tweet-adjacent blips that appear in contemporary ‘fragment novels’. Her stanzas are not stand-alone pronouncements so much as invocations of a clastic whole. Phrases and objects break away from their native contexts only to recur as refrains, and what seems at first like fragmentation later paves the way for more complex holism, as in operas in which strings of notes resurface as leitmotifs. Erpenbeck spent her college years studying to become an opera director, and she writes in Not a Novel that her training gave her an ‘education in the principle of collage’. In Don Giovanni, a key influence, ‘three different pieces of music, played by two small ensembles on stage and by the orchestra in the pit, begin to tumble into each other’.

Like strains of music that become intelligible only as they twine together, individual snatches of Erpenbeck’s novels are often confusing in isolation. In her first two books, the revelation of a central secret prompts both her characters and her readers to re-interpret everything that came before. The Old Child (1999) treats a mysterious and apparently amnesiac girl who turns out to be an adult in disguise, while The Book of Words (2004) follows a character who discovers that her seemingly loving father is in fact a torturer. In much of Erpenbeck’s fiction, the idea that the end can alter the beginning plays out not just at the level of substance but also at the level of form. In The End of Days, her fourth (and in my view, best) novel, the characters are not named but defined relationally, for instance as ‘the mother’ or ‘the grandmother’, so that they are not fully comprehensible until their children or grandchildren are introduced. The book opens with the burial of a baby, yet her death is presented as an obliteration of her future selves – as meaningful only in the context of the whole of her prospective life:

Three handfuls of dirt, and the little girl running off to school with her satchel on her back now lay there in the ground, her satchel bouncing up and down as she runs even farther; three handfuls of dirt, and the ten-year-old playing the piano with pale fingers lay there; three handfuls, and the adolescent girl whose bright coppery hair men turn to stare at as she passes was interred.

These various iterations of the baby survive in four extended re-imaginings of her biography (each succeeded by short sections that Erpenbeck, ever musical, calls ‘intermezzos’). In the second iteration of the story, the girl moves to Vienna with her family and survives to adolescence, only to kill herself during the Depression; in the third, she decides against suicide but perishes in a labour camp in the Soviet Union as a young adult; in the fourth, she makes it to middle age in East Germany but trips down the stairs and breaks her neck before the fall of the wall; and in the fifth, she dies peacefully in a nursing home after reunification. Locutions, images, and objects carry over from each of these parallel worlds to the next. A clock and the complete works of Goethe are lugged from one place to another, until at last they end up in a pawnshop in the final version of the story. When the adult son of the protagonist glimpses these heirlooms on the shelves, he does not even recognize them, for an object uprooted from its context is no more meaningful than a sentence torn out of a book or a note yanked out of an opera.

Erpenbeck is intent on preserving the connections that so often threaten to fade into invisibility, for which reason her novels are all in the business of demonstrating how the ostensibly disparate pieces in fact hang together. Visitation, her third novel, is about a lake house near Berlin that changes hands over and over, passing from an agrarian homesteader at the turn of the century to a Jewish family in the thirties to a Nazi architect during World War II, and so on and on until its demolition in the present day. Each chapter is devoted to one of the house’s visitors or inhabitants, and in each there is a slogan that is repeated.  (‘I-a-m-g-o-i-n-g-h-o-m-e’, types an East German writer over and over; ‘humour is when you laugh all the same’ is the motto of the architect’s jocular wife, at least until the Red Army closes in.) Only one character remains in the orbit of the property as the others rotate in and out: the subject of every other chapter is the quiet, unassuming gardener, who performs the same tasks in the employ of various owners. For decades, he ‘waters shrubs and flowers twice a day, once early in the morning and again when dusk arrives’. Every time he plants something new, he digs all the way down to the ‘blue clay found everywhere in this region’.

Like the gardener, Erpenbeck digs until she reaches the substratum that underlies the shifting surface. She is after ‘what remains’, as another East German writer, Christa Wolf, titled one of her novellas. In Visitation, what remains is a house and the gardener who tends to it; in The End of Days, what remains is the single character who thwarts death in four different ways. What, if anything, remains in Not a Novel?

* * *

‘Many different eras are collected in this volume’, the book begins. Like Erpenbeck’s harrowingly historical fiction, Not a Novel ranges over decades, gathering Erpenbeck’s reflections on her youth in East Germany, the baroque music and Romantic fairytales she loves, the recent death of her mother, and the ongoing refugee crisis. Its contents are arranged into sections titled ‘Life’, ‘Literature and Music’, and ‘Society’.

‘Life’ is the most memoirist, the least in pieces, and by far the best. Its contents examine lives and deaths with reference to the orphaned objects they leave in their wake. In ‘Open Bookkeeping’, Erpenbeck makes an unsentimental but never unfeeling inventory of the items she finds in her dead mother’s apartment: ‘I inherit hundreds of slides and 3 projectors, inherit 8 ashtrays, 3 cartons of cigarettes, 1 old cassette recorder, 2 mirrors…’ and so on and on.  She discovers ‘10 bottles of shampoo and 10 tubes of conditioner’, which she uses for ‘the next year and a half’. In a later piece, Erpenbeck takes her mother’s pressure cooker to her country house to bury it. She ends up using it to melt dirty snow into water hot enough to thaw the pipes. Her parting observation is bleakly and guttingly funny: ‘my mother’s pressure cooker has become a pot once again: I am cooking – a soup of black leaves’.

But most of what Erpenbeck mourns has not left such tangible traces. The landscape of the German Democratic Republic has been razed, and in ‘Homesick for Sadness’, probably the richest piece in Not a Novel, she grasps at the few remaining remnants of the country she grew up in and, despite everything, cannot help but miss. She glimpses the ‘small blue tiles that covered the girl’s bathroom’ in the pile of concrete that was once her elementary school and recollects ‘the mechanical pencils that we unscrewed to make blowguns for spitballs’.

These images are conjured with novelistic vividness, and indeed, devotees of Erpenbeck’s fiction will recognize many of the details that crop up in Not a Novel from her other books: she recalls ‘a lacquered wooden clock with golden numbers’ that ticked throughout her ‘entire childhood’, an artifact reminiscent of the clock in The End of Days; she notes that her father was enthralled by a catacomb unearthed beneath a Berlin church, a discovery that delights enthusiasts in both Visitation and her most recent book, Go, Went, Gone; she relates that a Red Army soldier shoved her infant mother through the window of a departing train when her family fled East Prussia, an anecdote also included, in slightly altered form, in Go, Went, Gone.

But Erpenbeck’s oracular register is much better suited to fiction and autobiography, with their necessary forays into material reality, than it is to flights of theoretical fancy, which can so easily bloat into phatic imprecision. Many of the more philosophical meditations in the ‘Literature and Music’ and ‘Society’ sections of Not a Novel lapse into cliché by way of rhetorical questions. In a lecture about The Book of Words, Erpenbeck muses, ‘Can we exchange our history for another? Discard it? Retract it? … Can we unlearn what we have learned, unfeel what we have felt?’ Later, she asks, ‘Is forgetting our only salvation? Or are our stories the only baggage that no one can take from us? Are we our stories?’

Questions so baggy are unanswerable, and Erpenbeck’s half-hearted attempts to answer them are predictably unsatisfying. ‘Time has the power to separate us, not only from others, but also from ourselves’, she ventures. Later, she reflects, ‘When we read – and when we write, too – we have to live with the fact that the world can’t be divided into good and evil, into wins and losses’. This is about as pat a commendation for complexity as I can imagine. But no matter: Erpenbeck defies her own injunction seventy pages later in a decidedly moralistic lecture about the plight of refugees in Europe (a topic treated with more nuance and less sanctimony in Go, Went, Gone, in which a retired professor becomes enraged by Germany’s unjust asylum policies when he befriends a number of displaced African men). That her largely leftist diagnosis of the situation is, by my lights, correct is not enough to reconcile me to maudlin and meaningless talk of how ‘much we can lose without losing ourselves’.

In the end, Not a Novel is worth reading more because it sheds light on Erpenbeck’s ornate novels than because it coheres in its own right. It does not do justice to Erpenbeck at her most majestic. Sometimes it is sharp, and sometimes it is cloying, but the shattered pieces never quite come together.

Read on: Perry Anderson, ‘A New Germany?’, NLR 57.

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Smarter Empire

In June 2019, candidate Joe Biden pledged to wealthy donors that ‘nothing would fundamentally change’ once he was elected. In Latin America at least, he is keeping that promise. The evidence so far suggests a continuity of policy objectives: promoting corporate profits, minimizing migration, maintaining alliances with repressive right-wing governments and marginalizing the left. But the Biden team intends to avoid the excesses of his predecessor, seen as ‘counterproductive’ in ruling circles.

The roster of appointees suggests a strong affinity with both the Clinton and Obama administrations. Most have passed through the revolving door once or twice, as their official bios and company websites boast. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s resume includes top roles in Washington and at private equity firm Pine Island Capital Partners. Roberta Jacobson, the National Security Council’s new ‘coordinator for the southwestern border’, worked in Obama’s State Department before joining consulting firm Albright Stonebridge Group, where she helped corporations reach ‘new target markets’. Juan González, the pick for Senior Director for the Western Hemisphere at the NSC, also served in the Obama administration before being hired by the Cohen Group, where he helped to ‘accomplish client business objectives’ in Latin America. The choice for Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, career diplomat Brian Nichols, has three decades of experience strengthening US ties with right-wing governments and ‘defending the rights of American investors’ in Peru, El Salvador, Mexico, Haiti and Colombia.

The public statements of these recent appointees give a flavour of the administration’s stance. Jacobson has praised NAFTA and expressed her relief that Trump’s NAFTA 2.0 preserves most of the original. González has meanwhile touted Biden’s pivotal role in the Clinton administration’s Plan Colombia, the programme that ultimately funnelled $7.5 billion to a regime dominated by far-right death-squads, bankrolling an assault on political opponents and human rights advocates. Thousands of civilians – and counting – were murdered as a result. (‘I was one of the architects of Plan Colombia’, Biden boasted to CNN in 2019.) He has also talked up the President’s support for pro-corporate deregulatory schemes like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, his commitment to the Pacific Alliance of rightist governments, and his past efforts at ‘increased border enforcement’ in the region.

In keeping with that record, Biden’s repudiation of Trump-era immigration policies has been much more limited than media fanfare would suggest. As Felipe De La Hoz has noted, while the executive orders on inauguration day ‘looked sweeping on the surface’, they actually kept in place many of the Trump administration’s ‘most consequential restrictions’. As a result, ‘immigrating to the United States from abroad remains functionally prohibited, and asylum seekers can be ejected from the country in as little as an hour.’ President Biden deported hundreds of people in just his first two weeks despite having the legal authority to avoid scheduling deportations. The new Biden immigration bill focuses mostly on granting legal status to migrants currently in the United States (most of them, anyway), and says little about those who will seek refuge here in years to come. Even raising the refugee ceiling to 125,000, as Biden promises to do by 2022, would leave it lower than it was under George H.W. Bush.

Biden’s pledge of $4 billion for addressing the ‘root causes of migration’ in Central America might sound positive, but there is a small problem: one of the major ‘root causes’ is US policy itself. US-funded military and police forces, which would receive some of Biden’s $4 billion, have contributed heavily to the violence that forces Latin Americans to flee. Meanwhile, NAFTA-style neoliberalism has amplified economic misery. By eroding social supports and state capacities, it has made the region extremely vulnerable to Covid-19, which has so far killed almost 700,000 Latin Americans and driven tens of millions more into poverty. The devastation of the pandemic has been further intensified by US zeal for ‘intellectual property rights’, which amount to private monopolies for taxpayer-subsidized drug companies. The US’s protection of those monopolies has long inhibited access to medicines in Latin America, including Covid-19 vaccines. Policies like these often cancel out any positive impact of US aid programmes.

In Honduras, for example, the Obama administration’s support for the 2009 military overthrow of a mildly progressive president inaugurated the human rights nightmare that persists today. Hundreds of peasants, Indigenous activists and environmentalists have been murdered. The coup regime also instituted economic reforms that increased poverty and inequality, both of which were previously trending downward. Addressing the ‘root causes’ of migration in a place like Honduras would require a fundamental reorientation of US foreign policy. Even then, the lasting impacts of hurricanes Eta and Iota – along with other capitalist climate disasters – could only be assuaged through long-term reparations, including a far more welcoming approach to refugee resettlement. So far, the signs from Biden’s team are not very encouraging.

Biden has embraced the other right-wing regimes supported by previous US presidents. When Brazil’s center-left leader Dilma Rousseff was ousted in 2016 based on farcical allegations of fiscal misconduct, the Obama administration welcomed her overthrow as ‘a decision made by the Brazilian people’. Rousseff’s removal brought the radical right to power, with devastating consequences for workers, Indigenous groups, the LGBTQ population, Black people and the environment. Biden has pledged continuity with the Obama-Trump policy. On 8 February White House press secretary Jen Psaki remarked that ‘we are by far the largest investor in Brazil’ and will ‘continue to strengthen our economic ties’. A similar policy is being applied in Haiti, where Biden has backed pro-corporate autocrat Jovenel Moïse’s refusal to leave the presidency after his term expired on 7 February.

The complement to these right-wing alliances will be continued US subversion in Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia. On Cuba, González advocates a return to the ‘Obama doctrine’, which reopened diplomatic channels and travel in the hope of undermining the government. In contrast to Trump’s brash refusal to engage, he calls for ‘a policy of subversion by engagement’. The administration must ‘play the long game with Cuba’, in the words of former Clinton NSC official Richard Feinberg. This means ‘stitching Cuba to the fabric of the global economy’ via admission to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Supporting ‘private entrepreneurship’ will ‘gradually erode the foundations of communism’, pushing the country toward ‘a more market-friendly version of socialism’ and eventually back into the capitalist model. Such changes will also tame Cuba’s foreign policy, restoring the island’s subordinate role in the ‘system of collaborating neighbour states in the Western Hemisphere, where the United States is the natural leader’. Early signs suggest this approach will hold sway. The Biden administration’s line is that ‘Americans, especially Cuban Americans, are the best ambassadors for freedom in Cuba’, a curious assertion given the history of US and Cuban–American terrorism against the island. There is no indication that Biden will seek to end the embargo’s six-decade-long collective punishment of Cubans, though he may carve out more exemptions for influential US businesses.

Subversion in Venezuela, by contrast, might not require as much ‘engagement’. In Cuba the government is stable and the opposition isolated. In Venezuela, by contrast, the Maduro government faces a deep economic crisis (dramatically and intentionally exacerbated by US sanctions) and major public discontent. Betting on Maduro’s vulnerability, Biden continues to recognize the self-appointed ‘president’ Juan Guaidó. Under Obama, Biden courted Guaidó ally Leopoldo López – a so-called political prisoner arrested for inciting violent protests that killed dozens of people – who is now calling for Biden to lead a renewed international effort to topple Maduro. US support for the far-right forces of Guaidó and López is intended to prevent a deal between Maduro and the more pragmatic elements of the opposition. Such a deal might alleviate Venezuela’s economic crisis, but it could leave Maduro in power and thus derail the US’s regime change agenda.

In late 2018 Biden complained that Trump’s ‘intensified sanctions on Venezuela have been clouded by sabre-rattling’ and ‘clunky sloganeering’. At that time, those intensified sanctions had already killed an estimated 40,000 civilians, with an unknown number of additional deaths after Trump imposed harsher measures in 2019. But the goal of regime change had not succeeded. Trump’s crime in Venezuela was not his lethal denial of food and medicine to the population, but rather his ‘faulty execution’ of the policy. This critique informs Biden’s current roadmap for Venezuela, which hinges on refining the sanctions to inflict maximum political damage. Secretary Blinken argues that sanctions must be honed ‘so that regime enablers really feel the pain’, while González favours a ‘smart’ use of ‘multilateral sanctions’ over Trump’s go-it-alone programme.

Any modifications to Latin America policy under Biden will stem from two sources. One is the feeling that Trump’s cavalier approach threatened corporate profits and imperilled US geopolitical control. Bipartisan voices have argued that the unilateral economic war on Venezuela jeopardizes both aims. As Bloomberg Businessweek recently warned, ‘US sanctions have now become so sprawling and complicated that they’re more difficult to enforce or manage without risking serious impact on the American economy’. The closure of foreign markets and heavy ‘industry exposure’ to legal penalties is simply not good for business. There is also consternation that ‘the overuse of financial sanctions’ and their unilateral application may ‘undermine the dollar’s primacy’ as the global reserve currency, which acts as an enormous subsidy to US business. The Biden administration will therefore likely grant industry’s demands for a relaxation of some of the sanctions. For the same reason it may pursue a new round of pro-corporate investment deals including the old Trans-Pacific Partnership. Such agreements benefit corporations while also strengthening alliances with pro-US governments. For Biden, one of Trump’s greatest sins was his ‘disengagement’ from those alliances, which forfeited the chance ‘to galvanize a regional agenda that corresponds with US interests’.

A second source of policy change will be domestic political pressures. So far, the left has exerted some influence on Biden in two areas relevant to Latin America: immigration and climate policy. In each case, popular pressures have dovetailed with the interests of elite sectors that stand to benefit from a policy shift. Relaxation of the most vicious anti-immigrant policies will be a response both to the immigrant rights movement and to the companies who require a steady stream of migrant labour to ‘meet their critical workforce needs’, as recently advocated by the Chamber of Commerce.

US climate policy has urgent implications for Latin American and Caribbean countries, which are paying for rich countries’ emissions in the form of droughts, floods, and hurricanes. Biden’s initial gestures on climate have been somewhat better than his past record would suggest, reflecting both the growth of the climate movement and a new interest among elites in confronting the emergency. This elite constituency includes multinational capitalists plus US military and diplomatic officials. These groups are anxious to reestablish ‘credibility’ with international allies, and fearful that climatic destabilization will lead to ‘global exoduses prompted by rising temperatures’ as well as other outcomes that would endanger the arrangements upon which US global dominance depends. Whether Biden’s climate policy brings major changes or just minor revisions will depend on the extent to which these elite interests demand real emission reductions, and on the ability of the climate movement to increase its capacity for disruption.

Minor revisions aren’t always trivial: admitting a few more refugees and taking some climate action will have positive impact on people’s lives. Unruly popular movements may force bigger changes to policy. Yet given the magnitude of the destruction that US governments have visited on Latin America and the Caribbean, what stands out is the vast gulf between what Biden is likely to do and what is owed to the people of the region, who deserve far more than just a smarter empire.

Read on: Juan Carlos Monedero, ‘Snipers in the Kitchen’, NLR 120.

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The Mojibake

The Morkum Printing Teletype

It is a truism that one only notices certain things when they break. An encounter with some error can expose momentarily the chaotic technical manifold that lies hidden below the surface when our devices function smoothly, and a little investigation reveals social forces at work in that manifold. For the history of capitalist society is caked in the layers of its technical infrastructure, and one need only scratch the surface of the most banal of technologies to discover that in them are fossilized the actions and decisions of institutions and individuals, companies and states. If our everyday interactions are quietly mediated by thousands of technical protocols, each of these had to be painstakingly constructed and negotiated by the sorts of interested parties that predominate in a world of capital accumulation and inter-state rivalry. Many persist as the outcome of survival struggles with others that proved less ‘fit’, or less fortunate, and which represent paths not taken in technical history.

In this sense, technical interrogation can cross over into a certain kind of social demystification; if the reader will tolerate a little technical excursus, we will thus find our way to terrain more comfortable to NLR readers. A string of apparently meaningless characters which render nonsensical an author’s name is the clue that will lead us here towards the social history of technology. That name bears a very normal character – an apostrophe – but it appears here as &039;. Why? In the ASCII text-encoding standard, the apostrophe is the 39th character. On the web, the enclosure of a string of characters between an ampersand and a semicolon is a very explicit way of using some characters to encode another if you aren’t confident that the latter will be interpreted correctly; it’s called an ‘HTML entity’ – thus &039; is a sort of technically explicit way of specifying a “‘”.

Until relatively recently there was a babel of distinct text encodings competing on the web and beyond, and text frequently ended up being read in error according to an encoding other than that by which it was written, which could have the effect of garbling characters outside the narrow Anglo-centric set defined by ASCII (roughly those that you would find on a standard keyboard in an Anglophone country). There is a technical term for such unwitting mutations: mojibake, from the Japanese 文字化け (文字: ‘character’; 化け: ‘transformation’). In an attempt to pre-empt this sort of problem, or to represent characters beyond the scope of the encoding standard in which they are working, platforms and authors of web content sometimes encode certain characters explicitly as entities. But this can have an unintended consequence: if that ampersand is read as an ampersand, rather than the beginning of a representation of another character, the apparatus of encodings again peeps through the surface of the text, confronting the reader with gibberish.

In large part such problems can be traced back to the limitations of ASCII – the American Standard Code for Information Interchange. This in turn has roots that predate electronic computation; indeed, it is best understood in the context of the longer arc of electrical telecommunications. These have always been premised on encoding and decoding processes which reduce text down to a form more readily transmissible and manipulable by machine. While theoretically possible, direct transmission of individual alphabetic characters, numerals and punctuation marks would have involved contrivances of such complexity they would probably not have passed the prototype stage – somewhat like the early computers that used decimal rather than binary arithmetic.

In the first decades of electrical telegraphy, when Samuel Morse’s code was the reigning standard, skilled manual labour was required both to send and receive, and solidarities formed between far-flung operators – many of whom were women – as 19th Century on-line communities flourished, with workers taking time to chat over the wires when paid-for or official traffic was low. Morse could ebb and flow, speed up and slow down, and vary in fluency and voice just like speech. But in the years after the Franco-Prussian War, French telegrapher Émile Baudot formulated a new text encoding standard which he combined with innovations allowing several telegraph machines to share a single line by forcibly regimenting the telegraphers’ flow into fixed-length intervals – arguably the first digital telecommunications system.

Though Baudot code was taken up by the French Telegraph Administration as early as 1875, it was not put to use so readily elsewhere. In the United States, the telegraphers were still gradually forming into powerful unions, and in 1907 telecommunications across the whole of North America were interrupted by strikes targeting Western Union, which included demands over unequal pay for women and sexual harassment. A year later, the Morkrum Company’s first Printing Telegraph appeared, automating the encoding and decoding of Baudot code via a typewriter-like interface. Whereas Morse had demanded dexterity and fluency in human operators, Baudot’s system of fixed intervals was more easily translated into the operations of a machine, and it was now becoming a de facto global standard.

‘Girl telegraph operators’ or ‘Western Union men’ striking in 1907.
The Morkrum Company rolled out its first completely automatic telegraphy machines in 1908, during the peak years of telegrapher militancy.

In 1924, Western Union’s Baudot-derived system was enshrined by the International Telegraph Union as the basis of a new standard, International Telegraph Alphabet No. 2, which would reign throughout mid-century (ITA1 was the name given retrospectively to the first generation of Baudot code). Though Baudot was easier than Morse to handle automatically, only a limited number of characters could be represented by its five bits, hence the uppercase roman letters that characterized the Western telegraphy of that moment.1 The European version allowed for É – a character that would remain absent from the core Anglo-American standards into the era of the web – but still lacked many of the other characters of European languages. There were some provisions for punctuation using special ‘shift’ characters which – like the shift key of a typewriter – would move the teletype machine into a different character set or encoding. But this shifting between modes was laborious, costly, and error-prone – for if a shift was missed the text would be mangled – pushing cautious senders towards simple use of the roman alphabet, in a way that is still being echoed in the era of the web. A 1928 guide, How to Write Telegrams Properly explained:

This word ‘stop’ may have perplexed you the first time you encountered it in a message. Use of this word in telegraphic communications was greatly increased during the World War, when the Government employed it widely as a precaution against having messages garbled or misunderstood, as a result of the misplacement or emission of the tiny dot or period. Officials felt that the vital orders of the Government must be definite and clear cut, and they therefore used not only the word ‘stop’, to indicate a period, but also adopted the practice of spelling out ‘comma’, ‘colon’, and ‘semi-colon’. The word ‘query’ often was used to indicate a question mark. Of all these, however, ‘stop’ has come into most widespread use, and vaudeville artists and columnists have employed it with humorous effect, certain that the public would understand the allusion in connection with telegrams. It is interesting to note, too, that although the word is obviously English it has come into general use in all languages that are used in telegraphing or cabling.

A 1930 telegram demonstrating the use of the reliable all caps, with no punctuation and minimal use of numbers.

The Cyrillic alphabet had its own version of Baudot code, but depended on use of a compatible teletype, making for a basic incompatibility with the Anglo-centric international standard. The vast number of Chinese characters of course ruled out direct encoding in such a narrow system; instead numeric codes identifying individual characters would be telegraphed, requiring them to be manually looked up at either end. Japanese was telegraphed using one of its phonetic syllabaries, katakana, though even these 48 characters were more than Baudot could represent in a single character set. Thus technical limitation reinforced the effects of geopolitical hegemony to channel the world’s telecommunications through a system whose first language would always be English.

Morkrum’s printing teletypes came to dominate American telecommunications, and after a name change to the Teletype Corporation, in a 1930s acquisition the company was subsumed into the giant Bell monopoly – which itself was to become practically an extension of the 20th Century American state, intimately involved in such things as Cold War missile defence systems. Having partly automated away the work of the telegraphers, in the early 1930s Teletype were already boasting in the business press of their role in facilitating lean production in the auto industry, replacing human messengers with direct communications to the assembly line – managerial missives telecommunicated in all caps, facilitating a tighter control over production.

Teletype Corporation ad, November 1931, showing a surprisingly early conception of ICTs as facilitating ‘lean production’.

With the propensity of telegraphic text to end up garbled, particularly when straying beyond the roman alphabet, the authority of those managerial all caps must sometimes have been lost in a blizzard of mojibakes. Communications across national borders – as in business and diplomatic traffic, for example – were always error-prone, and an incorrect character might mess up a stock market transaction. The limitations of Baudot code thus led to various initiatives for the formation of a new standard.

In the early 1960s, Teletype Corporation and IBM, among others, negotiated a new seven-bit standard, which could handle lower case letters and the standard punctuation marks of English. And before these components of the English language, the codes inserted into the beginning of this standard – with its space for a luxurious 127 characters – had a lot to do with the physical operation of particular bits of office equipment which Bell was marketing at the time via its Western Electric subsidiary. Thus while ASCII would carry codes to command a machine to ring a physical bell or control a feed of paper, it had no means of representing the few accented characters of French or Italian. The market unified by such acts of standardization was firstly national and secondarily Anglophone; the characters of other languages were a relatively distant concern.

Alongside these developments in existing telecoms, early computing struggled through its own babble of incompatible encodings. By the early 1960s, as computer networks began to spread beyond their earliest military uses, and with teletype machines now being called upon to act as input/output devices for computers, such problems were becoming more pressing. American ‘tech’ was in large part being driven directly by the Cold War state, and in 1968 it was Lyndon Johnson who made ASCII a national standard, signing a memorandum dictating its use by Federal agencies and departments.

The 1968 memorandum signed by Lyndon Johnson, effecting the adoption of ASCII as a national standard.

ASCII would remain the dominant standard well into the next century, reflecting American preeminence within both telecoms and computation, and on the global stage more generally (even within the Soviet Union, computing devices tended to be knock-offs of American models – in a nominally bipolar world, one pole was setting the standards for communications and computation). To work around the limitations of ASCII, various ‘national’ variants were developed, with some characters of the American version swapped for others more important in a given context, such as accented characters or local currency symbols. But this reproduced some of the problems of the ways that Baudot had been extended: certain characters became ‘unsafe’, prone to garbling, while the core roman alphabet remained reliable.

Consider the narrow set of characters one still sees in website domains and email addresses: though some provisions have been made for internationalization on this level, even now, for the most part only characters covered by American ASCII are considered safe to use. Others risk provoking some technical upset, for the deep infrastructural layers laid down by capital and state at the peak of American dominance are just as monoglot as most English-speakers. Like the shift-based extensions to Baudot, over time, various so-called ‘extended ASCII’ standards were developed, which added an extra bit to provide for the characters of other languages – but always with the English set as the core, and still reproducing the same risk of errors if one of these extended variants was mistaken for another. It was these standards in particular which could easily get mixed up in the first decades of the web, leading to frequent mojibakes when one strayed into the precarious terrain of non-English text.

Still, reflecting the increasing over-growth of American tech companies from the national to the global market in the 1980s, an initiative was launched in 1988 by researchers from Xerox and Apple to bring about a ‘unique, unified, universal’ standard which could accommodate all language scripts within its 16 bits and thus, effectively, solve these encoding problems once and for all. If one now retrieves from archive.org the first press release for the Unicode Consortium, which was established to codify the new standard, it is littered with mojibakes, having apparently endured an erroneous transition between encodings at some point.

The first press release for the Unicode Consortium itself displays encoding errors.

The Consortium assembled leading computing companies who were eyeing global markets; its membership roster since then is a fairly accurate index of the rising and falling fortunes of American technology companies: Apple, Microsoft and IBM have remained throughout; NeXT, DEC and Xerox were present at the outset but dropped out early on; Google and Adobe have been consistent members closer to the present. But cold capitalist calculation was at least leavened by some scholarly enthusiasm and humanistic sensibility as academic linguists and others became involved in the task of systematizing the world’s scripts in a form that could be interpreted easily by computers; starting from the millennium, various Indian state authorities, for example, became voting members of the consortium as it set about encoding the many scripts of India’s huge number of languages.

Over time, Unicode would even absorb the scripts of ancient, long-dead languages – hence it is now possible to tweet, in its original script, text which was originally transcribed in the early Bronze Age if one should so desire, such as this roughly 4,400 year old line of ancient Sumerian: ‘? ??? ???? ? ?? ????? ??’ (Ush, ruler of Umma, acted unspeakably). It must surely be one of the great achievements of capitalist technology that it has at least partially offset the steamrollering of the world’s linguistic wealth by the few languages of the dominant powers, by increasingly enabling the speakers of rare, threatened languages to communicate in their own scripts; it is conceivable that this could save some from extinction. Yet, as edifying as this sounds, it is worth keeping in mind that, since Unicode absorbed ASCII as its first component part, its eighth character () will forevermore be a signal to make a bell ring on an obsolete teletype terminal produced by AT&T in the early 1960s. Thus the 20th Century dominance of the American Bell system remains encoded in global standards for the foreseeable future, as a sort of permanent archaeological layer, while the English language remains the base of all attempts at internationalization.

Closer to the present, the desire of US tech companies to penetrate the Japanese market compelled further additions to Unicode which, while not as useless as the Teletype bell character, certainly lack the unequivocal value of the world’s endangered scripts. Japan had established a culture of widespread mobile phone use quite early on, with its own specificities – in particular the ubiquitous use of ideogrammatic emoji (絵文字: ‘picture character’; this is the same ‘moji’ as that of mojibake). A capacity to handle emoji was thus a prerequisite for any mobile device or operating system entering the market, if it was to compete with local incumbents like Docomo, which had first developed the emoji around the millennium. Since Docomo hadn’t been able to secure a copyright on its designs, other companies could copy them, and if rival operators were not to deprive their customers of the capacity to communicate via emoji with people on other networks, some standardization was necessary. Thus emoji were to be absorbed into the Unicode standard, placing an arbitrary mass of puerile images on the same level as the characters of Devanagari or Arabic, again presumably for posterity. So while the world still struggles fully to localize the scripts of websites and email addresses, and even boring characters like apostrophes can be caught up in encoding hiccups, people around the world can at least communicate fairly reliably with Unicode character 1F365 FISH CAKE WITH SWIRL DESIGN (?). The most universalistic moments of capitalist technology are actualized in a trash pile of meaningless particulars.

1 Bit: a contraction of ‘binary digit’; the smallest unit of information in Claude Shannon’s foundational information theory, representing a single unit of difference. This is typically, but not necessarily, represented numerically as the distinction between 0 and 1, presumably in part because of Shannon’s use of George Boole’s work in mathematical logic, and the mathematical focus of early computers. But the common idea that specifically numeric binary code lies at the heart of electrical telecoms and electronic computation is something of a distortion: bits or combinations of elementary units of difference can encode any information, numerical or other. The predominant social use of computing devices would of course prove to be in communications, not merely the kinds of calculations that gave the world ‘Little Boy’, and this use is not merely overlaid on some mathematical substratum. The word ‘bit’ might seem an anachronism here, since Baudot’s code preceded Shannon’s work by decades, but the terms of information theory are nonetheless still appropriate: Baudot used combinations of 5 elementary differences to represent all characters, hence it is 5-bit. This meant that it could encode only 31 characters in total: if a single bit encodes a single difference, represented numerically as 0 or 1, each added bit multiplies by 2 the informational capacity of the code; thus 25 = 32, though we are effectively counting from 0 here, hence 31. Historically, extensions to the scope of encoding systems have largely involved the addition of extra bits.

Read on: Rob Lucas, ‘The Surveillance Business’, NLR 121.

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How Does It Feel

The second best thing that happened to me in 2001 was spending an hour with Destiny’s Child in the basement of the Civic Centre in Peoria, Illinois. The best thing was driving to that arena in a rental car, doing 80 MPH on this flat earth and listening to Daft Punk’s Discovery for the first time. All of that land speed record fury road hogwash came true as I melted in their slipstream. The engine of Discovery moves like techno, but the frame is made of soul and disco samples from the Seventies. The singing is another thing altogether, filtered and transformed into mechanical birdsong, low on meaning and high on sentiment. With the Chrysler PT Cruiser’s built-in CD player working at its limits, I rode eternal with Daft Punk, shiny and chrome.

Later, the battery died because I left on the headlights and had to wait three hours for AAA. Such is the fall from machine grace. Daft Punk made it worth the wait, though, and thinking of them being gone leads me to some basic questions. How good were they? Almost impossibly. Is this breakup a stunt? Hopefully. Were they scammers? In a way, though only in the tradition of popular music’s cannibal contract.

Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo formed a vector; their direction only corresponded to positive developments in popular music and their magnitude was considerable. Some of that can be easily seen in their production of other artists, work they were picky about. They’re responsible for the acrid fry of Kanye West’s 2013 album, Yeezus, producing its four most important tracks, including the bug-zapping opener ‘On Sight’. Daft Punk worked on two hits from The Weeknd’s 2016 album, Starboy, while Bangalter produced a chunk of the 2017 Arcade Fire album, Everything Now. Why they decided to break up in 2021 – eight years after releasing an album they never toured – is a mystery as of now. The band has made no statement other than posting a clip from their 2006 film, Electroma, in which one robot self-destructs and the other walks into the sunset.

Go back to the band’s beginning, in 1992, and you’ll find the rapid reinventions of their twenty-nine year career visible in the first five. The teenage Bangalter and Homem-Christo first record as a rock trio named Darlin’ and release two songs on a compilation put out by Stereolab’s label, Duophonic, in 1993. They are unremarkable, tame versions of Stereolab’s German backbeat and guitar ostinatos. In May of 1993, Dave Jennings of Melody Maker calls the single a ‘daft punky thrash’. Discouraged but still very much eighteen, Bangalter attends his first rave on top of the Pompidou Centre in the Beaubourg. (If that doesn’t read, culturally, imagine attending your first rave on the roof of The Whitney.) There, he hears a Chicago house classic – Phortune’s ‘Can You Feel The Bass?’ – and nothing is ever the same. Long into the band’s career, Daft Punk cite Chicago house as their inspiration (and later recite the names of 40-odd house and rap producers on a track called ‘Teachers’).

A few months into 1994, Homem-Christo and Bangalter take a hard turn from Darlin’ and create the first three Daft Punk songs – ‘The New Wave’, ‘Assault’, and ‘Alive’ – for Dave Clarke’s SOMA label. The angry saw-tooth waveforms that show up twenty years later in Yeezus are there in ‘The New Wave’. There’s no melody of any kind but plenty of sweet agitation in the sounds. Produced in Bangalter’s bedroom, it comes across as entirely professional.

Homework, the first Daft Punk album, is released on Virgin in January of 1997, and the duo make two decisions: to tour steadily for the year and never be photographed without their masks. One live recording from that tour is released in 2001 as Alive 1997, and you can easily find a clip of their LA performance of ‘Rollin and Scratchin’. This is Daft Punk 1.0, working with a manually connected system, drum machines controlling the synthesize patterns via leads. At one point, Bangalter turns the knobs on a Doepfer filter and the music becomes harsh and asthmatic before dropping back into a comfortable, woody midrange. This method is part of ‘French touch’, a brief genre which matches these electronic sweeps with big, juicy samples of old disco records. That filtering move, which removes the spatial aspect of the music only to bring it back double, became the ‘drop’ of EDM and still plays a part in the structure of variously affiliated dance songs. The disco sample reached its apex with Daft Punk themselves and had mostly faded by 2005.

An instrumental called ‘Da Funk’, first released in 1995, becomes the duo’s first American single in 1997. Spike Jonze uses it to score a real shaggy dog story. Jonze films an actor wearing an enormous dog mask limping around New York on crutches, blasting the Daft Punk song from a boombox. The squelch on ‘Da Funk’ is slower than the Daft Punk average tempo, and the rhythm is built from two Seventies funk tracks by Barry White and Vaughn Mason. At the time, Bangalter revealed that the pair had been listening to Warren G’s ‘Regulate’, but critics were shy about tying the act to hip-hop. (Somehow, even though hip-hop is built from records played in discos, hip-hop is never allowed to coincide with disco.) Daft Punk ignore this, slowly compiling everybody’s best strategies, like dance consultants.

What they compile is an impeccable mille-feuille. The electric sugar of old soul and disco records forms the first layer, over which they stack deft keyboard melodies and electronically filtered singing. (Find the ‘Daft Punk Medley’, a brief piano rendition by Chilly Gonzalez, and you’ll hear how durable their themes are.) The third stratum is a family-friendly nostalgia, more Star Wars than Blade Runner. There is very little sex in Daft Punk’s world, no violence, and no explicitly stated politics. We are always returning, never arriving.

Michel Gondry directed the video for their next single, ‘Around The World’. There are no samples in this song, and the duo does beautifully without them. The song has only three words – around the world – sung into a vocoder, gently tootling as a bass line circles the keyboard figure. In the video, breakdancing men and swim-suited women move precisely, going upstairs and downstairs in sync with the bassline. There are skeletons and robots, too, but no sign of the band.

After Homework, the band refines their mission by working on a side project, Stardust. ‘Music Sounds Better With You’, the only song under the Stardust name, becomes a worldwide hit in the summer of 1998 and remains the central song of French touch. The track uses a bright burst of Chaka Khan’s 1981 song, ‘Fate’: three keyboard chords and a sharp, high guitar figure. Over this, Benjamin Diamond sings, ‘I feel like the music sounds better with you, love might bring us both together, I feel right’. Those are also the only lyrics, and the song repeats and rolls like a disco holding pattern. The clip introduces a tendency seen in many Daft Punk videos. The three men of Stardust are painted silver, playing keyboards and guitars on a cloud. In Stardust’s case, nobody played any guitar on anything at all, and this is where a benevolent deception enters.

In 2001, having become fully helmeted robots as a result of the Y2K bug (their story) Daft Punk launch deep into popularity with the best album they ever produce, Discovery. (Disco? Very.) In the 2015 documentary, ‘Daft Punk: Unchained’, you hear Les Inrocks founding editor Jean-Daniel Beauvallet describe Discovery as ‘one of the first post-sample albums, which builds music out of other sounds. Sampling means taking parts of a song, looping it over and over until it becomes music. But they changed them so much that samples became unrecognizable’. This reorganization of fragments was old hat for producers like DJ Premier and J. Dilla, who routinely atomized records and assigned those bits to the pads of an Akai MPC and created songs that bore no resemblance to their sources. Apart from the fact that nobody says ‘post-sample’, Beauvallet’s distinction can only be working to distinguish Daft Punk’s work from that of these Black American producers, who got there way before them. In light of this, and the fact that Black Americans supplied most of the samples on Discovery, Daft Punk’s elevation can be a slightly queasy affair, even for those of us who adore them.

Discovery is a patchwork of samples, just as much as Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique or The Avalanches’ Since I Left You or Jay-Z’s The Takeover. The band turns everything up here, including the contradictions. They use other people’s records more than ever – huge chunks of Edwin Birdsong and George Duke records power big songs – while also creating their most expansive melodies. Discovery is also where they solidify their fourth and most powerful layer – joy. Daft Punk are the least cynical pop act of the 21st century. They provide the emotionally moist sweep of rock without rock, the thrill of victory without the burden of a self, and the plush comforts of nostalgia without the indignity of aging. Daft Punk are a psychological car bomb that drives into your garage on a silver disco E-ZPass.

Discovery allows the assembly line to slow down for the first time. ‘Something About Us’ is a quiet storm R&B song, crooned through machines. It may be uncanny to have the robot singing a winelight love song, but not so uncanny it doesn’t work. ‘Nightvision’ is a placid instrumental that could be a NASA rewrite of Billy Joel’s ‘Just The Way You Are’, and its air-conditioned detention cell vibe may have inspired the movie Drive. (Homem-Christo went on to co-write and co-produce Kavinsky’s ‘Nightcall’ for that soundtrack.) But check your files – the duo cut up this very same Billy Joel song on Homework’s ‘High Fidelity’. The plan was always there. Not DJ big – Billy Joel big.

The success of Discovery rattles them, though, and they follow it up with Human After All in 2005, openly describing it as a reaction to Discovery’s painstaking construction. Created in a few weeks and only lightly edited, Human After All sounds like Daft Punk 1.0 with higher production values and more guitars. It’s harsh and claustrophobic, and they quickly move on to Electroma, in 2006. Like everything they produce, the movie looks exquisite but it’s atypically dull, a too-long riff on two robots hoping to become human. The robots (not played by Daft Punk themselves) commit suicide in the film, so it isn’t unfair to suspect that the band saw the end in sight long before this year’s announcement.

The negation of Human After All and Electroma leads to the synthesis of Alive 2007, the peak (and summary) of Daft Punk 2.0. The band toured the world in 2006 and 2007, some of it documented in vaguely legit videos available on YouTube, and on a live album released by the band. A recently uploaded set filmed in Chicago’s Grant Park in August of 2007 shows our boys at the top of a pyramid frame inside a larger triangle, all of it fitted with LED lights, screens, or both. To say this light show worked is to undersell a genuine miracle of cheap tricks and expensive gear. The show is a ninety-minute mastermix of their career, possibly recorded beforehand, possibly created in the moment. It hardly matters. Daft Punk managed to bottle the energy of a club night and unfold it in a setting no different in scope than a Van Halen show. You can hear this on the Alive 2007 album, where the band closes with an ecstatic blend of ‘One More Time’ and the instrumental track of ‘Music Sounds Better With You’, an almost too-pleasing combination of triggers. The music dissolves into a tumble of crackling electronic embers, dying back into brute sound genesis.

The two retreat and re-emerge to do a passable job on the Tron: Legacy soundtrack in 2010, their first experience with a string section and a professional studio. This pushes them towards their 2013 album, Random Access Memories, a radical detente between decades of affect and sound and strategy; and the first and last Daft Punk album made in an actual studio. Rather than ape Chic and Michael Jackson records, they hired the musicians who made them: Nile Rodgers, Paul Jackson, Jr. and John J.R. Robinson, amongst others. Paul Williams and Giorgio Moroder are also on here, being their most Seventies selves. Williams sings a saccharine monstrosity called ‘Touch’ and Moroder talks for nine minutes about his importance as an early synth adopter, a very strange choice for a track three slot.

The lead single, ‘Get Lucky’, co-written by Pharrell Williams, was a success and deservedly so. Williams plays the good-smelling lech of disco, staying ‘up all night to get lucky’, the closest to a sexual phrase Daft Punk gets. The rest of Random Access Memories is gorgeous audio best experienced without the lyric sheet. Daft Punk 2.0 was everything about Daft Punk that worked, torqued as far as the material allowed. Daft Punk 3.0 was the band facing off with its heroes and hitting an Oedipal block. How do you kill your idols when you’ve hired them? The strong parts of Random Access Memories stand next to the records they sampled but what makes the album work is also what kills it. Daft Punk lyrics were, from the start, little more than chanted encouragement cribbed from the psychic clipboard of the Eighties: good times, celebrations, togetherness, music and music and music. On Random Access Memories, the band conducts a group therapy session with lyrics that flicker between mutual soothing and despair. ‘I am lost, I can’t even remember my name’, ‘Where do I belong?’, ‘We will never be alone again’, ‘We’ve come too far to give up who we are’. They announce their self-destruct sequence throughout the album, choosing to end themselves rather than their elders. Random Access Memories is too nice to be great but it’s way too much fun to be bad.

The confusion around musical labour obtains once again in the video for ‘Get Lucky’, where the robots appear behind Rodgers and Williams, playing bass and drums. But Bangalter doesn’t play bass on the song – Nathan East does. And Homem-Christo didn’t play the drums – that’s Omar Hakim. This long-running misdirection around physical activity and instrumentation is obviously not accidental, another variation on Oedipal anxiety, more than a little childish. We’re just as good as the bands that play their own instruments, right? Look!

Daft Punk 3.0 ultimately feels most like Stardust, a successful one-off that spread rapidly and atomized. The band’s career makes the most sense if you see the 2007 tour as a goodbye, and all of the subsequent productions and creations as contract gigs. It’s a good way to find their philosophy. You don’t need any remixes of Daft Punk done by people outside the band, but you do need every remix and production Daft Punk did under their own name. The inhuman part was how consistent they were, but much of that came from relentlessly applying a sensibility – as human a strategy as there is.

Read on: Simon Hammond, K-Punk At Large, NLR 118.

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Eco-Investing?

Larry Fink’s annual letter to CEOs has become something of a cult event. In recent years these documents, ostensibly written by the Chief Executive of BlackRock – the world’s largest investment management firm with more than $8 trillion in assets – have emphasized the existential risk of climate change and the importance of ‘investing with purpose’: rhetoric that has met with solemn agreement from the press and even cautious optimism from some of the major environmental NGOs. In his 2021 letter, Fink championed the virtues of so-called ‘ESG’ (Environmental, Social, Governance) investing: a once cottage industry in which financial products are designed according to certain ‘ethical’ criteria, including environmental sustainability, social impact and corporate governance factors. ESG investors and financial products buy shares in companies (or their bonds) based on metrics purporting to measure their carbon emissions intensity, equitable labour practices, transparency, the diversity of their executive boards and so on.

Fink is not alone in his enthusiasm. In November, Rishi Sunak touted the prospect of a booming ‘green finance’ industry which could remake the UK after Brexit, while Davos heavy-hitters from Mark Carney to Kristalina Georgieva have been stressing the need to leverage private finance to drive the green transition. Given these changing tides, the ESG industry has enjoyed an incredible surge over the course of the pandemic, with record inflows and soaring asset prices. To some, the sector’s remarkable growth suggests that Covid-19 has driven home the danger of ‘systemic risks’, such as political crises or climate change, for asset-holders. Commentators have also noted the cultural shift among younger investors, for whom it is no longer enough to simply make returns; the industry must also contend with the latter’s growing expectation that investments should align with their values and contribute to sustainable initiatives.

For Fink and his followers this is cause for optimism. The financial system, they assert, is adapting to provide much-needed investment in rapid decarbonisation. But the reality is somewhat different. To date, the ESG industry has established no rules for what counts as ‘sustainable’ or ‘ethical’. The EU has taken some steps towards creating a ‘taxonomy’ of green corporate activities, but its current guidelines contain countless loopholes – the result of disagreement between member states and effective industry lobbying. In recent research I undertook for Common Wealth thinktank, I found that of the UK’s ‘climate-themed’ ESG funds, a third hold stakes in fossil fuel companies, with several invested in Exxon. The ‘social’ practices of companies lauded by the ESG hierarchy are no better. Fashion retailer Boohoo received one of the highest possible ESG ratings from the American multinational MSCI, just weeks before it emerged that its supply-chain workers were paid only £3.50 per hour.

ESG funds also funnel millions into big financial firms, pharmaceutical conglomerates and the tech giants. For the flagship ESG fund of the prominent US investment advisor Vanguard, the top five holdings are Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Google, with Tesla eking out the sixth spot. One study found that, among a large sample of ESG funds, the single strongest variable which differentiated their portfolios from mainstream funds was companies with no employees – the implication being: no labour equals no labour disputes, which equals ethical value for money. If this is ESG’s idea of socially conscious investing, it is a uniquely dystopian one.

These findings are a reminder that finance will invariably approach environmental crises as a ‘risk factor’, rather than a consequence of investment decisions. In other words: ‘Ask not what finance can do for the climate, but what the climate will do to finance’. This framework ensures that returns remain the ultimate horizon of eco-consciousness; the latter must be flexible enough to serve the former. This understanding also casts a new light on the impressive returns of ESG funds during the pandemic. Rather than reflecting a market-driven and enduring decline of unsustainable firms, the returns on ESG products tended to derive from their tendency to overweight the pandemic’s biggest winners, from Facebook to Pfizer, who aren’t excluded by the often narrowly defined ESG criteria, while underweighting the pandemic’s losers, like fracking firms hit by the lockdown-induced slump in fossil fuel demand. Thus, the criteria by which ESG distinguishes virtue from vice are consistent not necessarily with social or environmental impact, but with profitability.

Between greenwashing and gorging on Big Tech, then, it seems sustainable investing has little time left for the initiatives required to build a sustainable society. But even if ESG funds were interested in financing green industries, their capacity for productive investment is questionable. Indeed, ESG is less an opportunity to invest in the construction of a sustainable future than to bet on its likelihood. As Doug Henwood noted regarding the recent GameStop controversy, very little productive capital is raised on the stock market. The value of share issuance and IPOs is dwarfed by that of stock buybacks, underscoring the fact that stock exchange activity is, by definition, secondary, with cash and stock largely changing hands between those placing the bets, while the companies who issue the stock spend much of their time on the side-lines.

Moving investors away from the most egregiously destructive (or ‘risky’) firms may still have a modest impact on companies’ share prices and capital allocation decisions; and as such, clear regulation of what does and does not constitute a ‘sustainable asset’ remains necessary to eliminate greenwashing. The issuance of ‘green bonds’ and other instruments tied to green projects could also, in theory, overcome the issue of ‘additionality’ raised above, but to date these instruments have been plagued by questions of inconsistency and inefficacy, and stocks remain the primary fodder of ESG investors. More fundamentally, the emerging political consensus around the merits of a private finance-led approach to decarbonisation must be resisted. The widespread praise for ‘sustainable’ finance risks simulating a green transition where one is not occurring – an illusion that could undermine our ability to enact the large-scale transformation necessary to confront environmental breakdown.

The climate and ecological crises are fundamentally problems of inequality, in both their origins and consequences. Yawning wealth disparities within and between countries, along with ongoing colonial legacies, have created a global economy in which the affluent consume and emit on a scale that dwarfs the environmental impact of the majority. Meanwhile, the uneven distribution of political power prevents those on the frontline of the climate catastrophe from taking measures to slow its advance. This entrenches the self-reinforcing impression that climate politics is an elite preserve, best dealt with by experts at multilateral summits or BlackRock board meetings.  

The rise of ESG promises to exacerbate this issue, swelling the portfolios of asset-owners and concentrating political influence among technocrats at investment firms. As governments forecast a green recovery from the Covid-19 downturn, ‘ethical finance’ will be among its key components. But the transition to a sustainable economy should not be seen as an investment opportunity for the asset-rich; rather, it should be understood as an urgent opportunity to rectify the forces of inequality and injustice driving environmental crisis.

Read on: Nancy Fraser, Climates of Capital, NLR 127.