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I want to take up Jordan’s suggestion that I Hate the Internet is a pretty typical (and maybe particularly shallow) left critique of internet culture that, unlike most novelistic versions of this critique, refuses “to pretend any longer about the efficacy of the novel.”

I think this is probably right, but I’m not sure we should take Kobek’s disavowal of literary efficacy at his word. Or, at least, we shouldn’t write off the possibility that this disavowal is what’s most political about the novel. The question of “escape” seems to be central to the novel, and it’s worth thinking about what Kobek’s escape hatches might be. McGurl, too, is interested in this question and  puts it specifically in terms of Amazon: “What does [Amazon’s role in literary production] say about the form and function of narrative fiction—about its role in symbolically managing, resisting, or perhaps simply ‘escaping’ the dominant sociopolitical and economic realities of our time?”

Kobek seems invested in escaping the exploitative digital hell he describes, even as his narrator performatively denies one’s ability ever to escape racialized/gendered/classed structures of exploitation. In a now-familiar gambit of the woker-than-thou Left, Kobek’s narrator insists that certain subject positions are all bad all the time and there’s no point trying to salvage them (i.e. “Men are the shit of the world”). This kind of denial (i.e. “I know I’m shitty and will never not be shitty”) is figured here and elsewhere as a kind of disavowal through  acceptance, or maybe expiation through confession, and is now a standard escape strategy in the discursive of game of the internet left, which Kobek disparages as content farming for digital platform owners. 

In a similar move, Kobek’s narrator claims to be writing a “bad novel.” Writing a bad novel is the narrator’s way of escaping the formal conventions of a literary style created by the CIA. Writing a bad novel seems like a viable means of escape precisely because it refuses to see itself as political: “The funding of good novels was based on an abandoned misapprehension that writers, being the apparent creators of culture, had some impact on contemporary international affairs. This was, of course, insane” (200). Kobek, of course, calls into question his commitment to this view by writing a novel that is not really that bad and which is clearly invested in, at a minimum, doing something in the world. Whether or not it succeeds in escaping complicity with capitalism/etc. by disavowing both literary quality and political import, the narrator’s claim to be writing a bad novel becomes metonymic for all compromised attempts to escape oppressive socio-political arrangements.  If everything of aesthetic or political value is already captured, the only truly artistic or political move is to deny that one’s work is artistic or political.  

It’s kind of a cheap trick, but it raises some questions: What does it mean for the refusal of legible aesthetic categories to be a symbol, or an act, of political (or maybe apolitical?) resistance? In a world where art is reduced to content, which is reduced to vehicles for advertisements, why continue to invest aesthetic production with political promise, even if this investment takes the form of a disavowal?  

Ultimately, I think Kobek is solidly ambivalent about the political promise of the satirical novel. That said, the novel presents itself as having been written after the collapse of American empire, so maybe the narrator is speaking to us from a neo-Maoist agrarian collective somewhere in the post-human future. Which would be cool. 

One more thing: I’m interested in how the novel asks us to think about recording and communicating history. The novel presents itself as a record of a past historical moment, intended for an imagined readership of future English speakers familiar enough with American culture to get its jokes, but not to know who, for instance, Lady Gaga was. The book, then, takes on an almost encyclopedic function — stable, definitive, true — that it implicitly opposes to digital media’s form of historical production. On the internet, content is enduring (as Ellen’s tragic story demonstrates), but perfectly incidental to the media apparatus it exists to sustain. Kobek doesn’t reflect much on the media specificity of the book, but the act of writing a book— and devoting, Rand-style, a big chunk of text to putting a super fine point on the book’s already completely unambiguous thesis — suggests some attachment to the form. It also suggests some faith in the ability of words to provoke thought, or, at the very least, do something other than make money for capitalists. McGurl, too, doesn’t totally give up on fiction, even as it he attends to the limitations of a medium that only sort of removes the reader from the time pressures of capitalist production: “If fiction promises to ‘resist’ the real-time regime, we will have to admit up front that it is for the most part a virtual resistance, more compensatory than revolutionary, although not necessarily unimportant on that score” (466).

Hannah B

I think Jordan’s main point – that I Hate the Internet doesn’t take the fullest step to the efficacy it signals, but does avoid a heartwarming liberal fantasy – is a good one from which to build from.

Kobek’s disdain for traditional narrative – as invoked by the non-chapter chapter also reminded me of the beginning paragraph of Bellamy and Killian’s supplemental piece: “one the New Narrative did was tell and tell and tell without the cheap obscurantism of ‘showing’” (i). Indeed, the narrator of I Hate the Internet is hardly shy to tell. I think about 60% of the novel is the narrator telling recent historical events, often on tangents (which is later acknowledged). This, along with the formatting of the novel, short-snappy paragraphs widely spaced apart, can invoke a sort of twitter scroll. Kobek seems to be trying to not be read as a novel. The text can be skimmed, quite effectively at times (I tried). Much like the collaborative efforts of the New Narrative pointed out in the Bellamy and Kilian article, I do think some of this formatting has value.

What becomes abundantly clear, however, through some the form of the text is how impossible of a task this has become. Jordan notes that Kobek’s focus on language, his sights as “both ‘good novels’ and internet discourse’ is undoubtedly true, but two of his other objects are San Francisco and capitalism (which of course are not autonomous from the previous two). According to this guardian article (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/nov/20/jarett-kobek-internet-enormously-detrimental-i-hate-the-internet-interview_) Kobek was forced out of San Francisco due to the forces of Silicon Valley-driven gentrification. He moved to Los Angeles, set up his own small press, wrote a book, which, to no one’s surprise, can be bought on Amazon. I guess the question is somewhat open for debate is Kobek actually does or can escape the Age of Amazon by being “servant, server, and service provider, and the reader as consumer, yes, bot more precisely as customer” (453). My instinct, and I think Kobek would agree, at least for now, is that while this delineation of roles is not entirely inaccurate, Amazon does not get subsumed by this process. In fact, the reverse may be true, just as San Francisco itself has become subsumed by Silicon Valley.

Herein lies the merits of Kobek’s novel, which while not earth-shattering, reveal and painful and lasting truth of irreparable damage. Some of this may be compounded with the fact that Kobek seems to be nostalgic for an old San Francisco, one during which the New Narrative movement took place.

The fact that iPhones and iPads “changed everything” is thus far more than a question of the change in language. There are material effects, in which the body becomes so integrated with the technology (I actually found myself thinking through the discussions we had about wearable technologies while reading Snow Crash) and online technologies and personas can quite literally destroy a person’s life, furthering their lack of control. Of Ellen, the narrator writes:

“A person’s identity wasn’t just about what they wanted or how they lived or the choices they made. Life wasn’t made of self-determination. Life was the Chinese wage slave manacled to a factory line building iPhones…And thanks to the corporations headquartered in, around and near San Francisco, the capacity for that damage was infinite” (244-245).

This is all to say that now, the notion of identity is bound up in the Internet, whether people choose to be or not. And the Internet cannot be talked about without talking about Silicon Valley, and Silicon Valley cannot be talked about without talking about capitalism. Thus, comments like “the iPhone changed everything!” among countless others in the novel, which at times seem overly facetious, Kobek may just want to hammer into a felt reality.

I didn’t have quite the confidence to write something in as experimental a form as Jordan has and others have in the past, but this response is a bit fragmentary and half-baked. But I think in the context of this week’s readings, it’s ok.

I take Russell’s wariness of how he infrastructure and structure model “seems… a formulation that could be applied to basically any situation, which makes it very promising but also makes me a little suspicious of it” (Coldicutt) especially when he puts it into account with traditional Marxist critique through some compelling historicization and a dash of media theory. I look forward to poking at that potentially sore spot in class, but here I’d prefer to lean into the ability of Levine’s proposed methodology to swell to the size of the object and think about Americanah, literary realism, and literary fiction writ large in the same frame.

Levine, I think, makes a very persuasive case for the way in which realist fiction can defamiliarize our habituation to the invisible infrastructures. Levine’s argument allows for realist fiction to supersede its traditional categorization as fundamentally conservative / anti-progressive, a form that reifies social structures rather than upends them, as, say, an avant-garde Modernist novel might. Americanah, and realist fiction in general, then has the capacity not just to paint the structures as they are, but to call our attention to their very making when they are by definition almost impossible to actually comprehend in their totality. As Ian Baucom (quoted in Levine’s article on page 593) argues, “Americanah belongs squarely in the tradition of nineteenth-century realism,” and Levine makes a real case to revisit realist fiction for its inherent radical potential, rather than dismissing it. But there’s a major distinction between Adichie’s novel and the nineteenth-century realist novel, in that it was published in 2013.

We have spent a great deal of time this semester talking about the ways in which literary fiction has responded to the rise of digital media and how this incorporation refigures our conception of genre, canonicity, epistemology, even the form of narrative itself. With a great reading of Americanah that deploys the same moves made in Lupton’s article, Russell points out the way in which the novel, through Ifemulu’s blog posts, points to itself as a book-y book that’s nonetheless part of the broader networked system of blog culture, but I don’t think the blogs themselves do much to really radically destabilize the novel form like Book From the Ground does (sorry, already looked ahead on the syllabus). Blog culture in the novel is mundane, because blog culture has become mundane in the culture – it’s how Ifemulu makes her money, and her role as a blogger is less akin to the liminal hacker of Snow Crash than it is to the itinerant writer or disillusioned shop-keeper of La Comédie humaine.[1] So when we see something like Americanah, it just seems so… old, so nineteenth-century.

But if we take Levine’s advice to pay more attention to the ways in which we’re habituated to avoid seeing infrastructure, perhaps Americanah’s nineteenth-century-ness is what’s really doing the defamiliarization in the first place. Against the crowded subfield of literary fiction working as hard as it possibly can to understand, respond and incorporate the rise of digitality in our contemporary world, Americanah stands out in its refusal to fall into the Modernist trap of “roughened verbal textures and often startling juxtapositions,” in order to “inject a sense of strangeness and surprise into its portrayal of the most commonplace phenomena” (Butler in Levine 596), while nonetheless dealing with the internet all along. The novel treats that which other works on our syllabus have found strange – digitality itself – and renders it commonplace.

Ifemulu drags her boyfriend Curt past racks of magazines to point out the all-too-often ignored system of racialized discrimination embedded in mass-market magazine production. Perhaps we as readers metaphorically walking past racks of review pages and syllabi and nice Barnes & Noble’s tables at the front of the store should see Americanah itself as the defamiliarizing rock in our shoe that knocks us out of our own habits of turning to novels that appear more transparently destabilized in the Modernist sense as the only sites of that radical politics in literature.

[1] Sorry for the near-constant references this semester to Balzac. Perhaps the conservative, anti-progressive realist in this story was me all along.

Hannah Borenstein

Like Maggie, I also found myself a bit surprised both at the size of the task that Brock, Kvasny, and Kayla Hales set to take on in their paper. The permutations of their analyses – using cultural capital, technical capital, and Black feminist theory discourses – alongside three different forms – seemed limiting in such a small space. Deep readings and extrapolations to other instances, not just in response to the discourse following the Helena Andrew’s article, felt like there was much left to be desired. I do think they opened up an important door to thinking about the emergent spaces in which the deficit models of minority information are upset is an important intervention. However, what I would have liked to have seen them grapple with more, is what happens when stock characters are created, and when capitalist forms of ICT cloud subaltern struggles.

Americannah is the perfect text to explore these questions because, firstly, it engages the question of opening up online spaces for shared experiences through Ifemelu, but also, because Chimamnda Ngozi Adichie, has become such an essential in both literary and popular discourse.

To the first point, I think the importance of online spaces that support Brock, et al’s claim, that “articulation of cultural touchpoints promoting a more diverse set of beliefs will raise ICT participation rates” (1057) is extremely well-exemplified when Ifemelu tries to fix her hair falling out. Curt doesn’t understand or take her sadness seriously, and so she texts Wambui. “Wambui’s reply came minutes later: Go online. HappilyKinkyNappy.com It’s this natural hair community. You’ll find inspiration” (259). What’s telling about this passage is not just what we learn a few pages later – that Wambui is right, and that this website has, for Ifemelu conversations, ideas, recommendations, etc., on how to think about and cope with her hair – but the swiftness of Wambui’s response. Not only does this online world of conversational productivity exist for women unrepresented in mainstream beauty magazines, but Wambui’s ready knowledge and sharing of it indicates that this is a space in which these conversations are already established. Of course Curt, and pretty much all white people, would have no idea that conversations related to black women’s hair would exist, undercutting the notion that various underserved populations are accessing the virtues of the open web (Brock, et al 1041).

However, as Maggie points out, Ifemelu, who we know participates in this online world, passes up an opportunity to make money from her blogging. Because this online world has become so embedded in the spirit of capitalism – when bloggers get a certain amount of visits, or action on their websites, they can turn a profit – we also have to consider how capital can be diverted.

Perhaps I think this through Adichie as a figure because of an article that popped up, of course, on my twitter account just a few days ago. In April Sisonke Msimang’s post on Africa is a Country entitled “All your faves are problematic: A brief history of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, stanning and the trap of #blackgirlmagic” (http://africasacountry.com/2017/04/all-your-faves-are-problematic-a-brief-history-of-chimamanda-ngozi-adichie-stanning-and-the-trap-of-blackgirlmagic/)

The post is basically about Adichie’s rise to extreme fame and the implications of when one person gains such a high level of (cultural and technical) capital that they stand in to be overly representative. Adichie has become, many argue, something of a spokesperson on issues regarding race, feminism, and conceptions of Africa, throughout the years, despite having what many agree are some problematic views (particularly surrounding an issue of an insensitive statement she made about trans-women. While of course alternative online spaces proliferate around such a figure, question of subaltern status must emerge here. This may be a bit controversial and I’ll just leave this here but I do think Adichie is a very particular figure, undoubtedly the most famous we’ve read this semester, but we should be thinking about what gaining a certain level of cultural, technical and economical capital means in the context of this week’s readings.

Microaggressions: Straightforward or Oblique?

Caroline Levine’s article on Americanah presents Ifemelu and Obinze as two characters who learn to defamiliarize themselves from the dishonest and hypocritical social (infra)structures around them. What I’m wondering about, though, is how our own reading practices of a novel like Americanah may prevent us from fully engaging with the de-familiarizing experiences of Ifemelu and Obinze, especially if we haven’t shared those experiences ourselves.

In the first half of the book, Ifemelu experiences a number of disconcerting microaggressions in America. A white guy with dreadlocks tells her on the train that race no longer matters as a social issue; Ifemelu’s first roommates give her snide racialized comments about Africa; the carpet cleaner is hostile when he thinks Ifemelu is the owner of the house she’s babysitting at. In our previous class we talked about the perceived dubiousness or unreliability of microaggressions (i.e. the recipient of a microaggression casting doubt on their own perception), but the point of these racial incidents in Americanah seems to be that they are actually rather egregious: a liberal, reasonably socially aware reader of these passages is in some ways prompted to feel a kind of “shock” or at least a disapproval of what happened, seeing the incident ‘through Ifemelu’s eyes’ as opposed to the oblivious microaggressor. Might the white liberal reader who never experiences microaggressions be trained through this reading experience into a kind of defamiliarization? Or does this reader, in keeping with the unreliable perception of microaggressions, rather cast doubt on Ifemelu’s perception or on perhaps the reliability of the novel itself? I can see a situation where the reader thinks, “These microaggressions are so stereotypical that of course Adichie would put them all into the life of one person so that she can make her point; but we also think it is improbable for someone to experience this level or amount of microaggression within the given time span”).

This kind of reading casts doubt precisely on the “plain language” Adichie uses for her descriptions, associating straightforwardness with a “selectivity” of realist information that distributes attention and resources unequally, in line with Susan Stewart’s critique of realism (Levine, 4). I suppose the suspicion of microaggression could work in line with a Eurocentric modernist reading practice that eschews plain language but likewise fails to defamiliarize readers from deadening habits of ‘color-blind’ perception.

I do realize that I may be invoking this counter-reading without basis, but I also think it is worth bringing up because Adichie’s realism feels in some ways so familiar to us that, from the perspective of modernism, “stereotypes” like microaggressions abound, and as ‘modernist readers’ we are supposed to recognize this stereotypicality and either “make something new” from it (in the traditional modernist sense) or make a performance of it (a la Flarf and conceptual poetry, for example).

Like Maggie, I am also intrigued by Ifemelu’s “automatic blogging impulse“. “>And what seems interesting to me is that, Ifemelu’s blog-writing is, like that of most bloggers on the internet, an audience-oriented activity. That is to say, she writes with anticipation of provocative/inspiring/ amusing effects that her article may generate among her audience, and cares about the comments, so much so that she can clearly recall the number of comments one of her article once received. She is concerned with the readers of her blog, who “had always frightened and exhilarated her”(5). As Rettberge says in his essay, nowadays “the authority of blogs might not to be tie simply to who can write them, but also to who can read them”(48). And Ifmelu’s “automatic blogging impulse” seems to me like an automatic impulse to impress, or even to please.

One of the most interesting scenes I found in Americanah is when Ifemelu glances at a stranger, “surprised, mildly offended, and though it a perfect blog” and she would file it under the tag ‘race, gender and body size (6). I don’t think, according to the story about her life in Nigeria, that “gender”, “race” or “body size” are issues in the culture where she grows up, at least not in the same way Americans speak of them; and as she admits in her blogs, she learns to be sensitive to racism only after she has come to the United States. And what I see here is that Ifemelu is dissecting her experience into something that her audience in America, who are familiar with “issues”, can easily grasp. She may have been accustomed to taking race or gender or body size as lenses to view her life, given her 13 years in America, but still it seems to me that by doing that she is making personal experience into something her audience will be trilled to talk about.

I can’t tell what makes Ifemelu’s blog popular, but I sense in her narrative an emphasis on her identity as a “non-American”. It is actually demonstrated in the title of her blog: “Various Observations about American Blacks by a Non-American Blacks.” And when she says “to my fellow non-American black”(265), it seems to me that she’s not so much addressing her fellow blacks as demonstrating her own identity as a non-American black. And I suspect this is the commercial value that the Letter Magazine sees in Ifemelu’s blog: a foreigner’s perspective. I doubt her blog would be as popular if it was not about observations of the America society. Here’s my imagination of how her blog is read: for American readers, Ifemelu’s blog satisfies their curiosity of how foreigner think of them(“do they envy us?”), or resonates with their dissatisfaction toward the society, and for non-Americans, Ifemelu’s blog speaks for them. But in both cases Ifemelu seems to be reduced to only a perspective, through which people view their lives. And though as a non-American I emphasize a lot with Ifemelu, I feel it kind of frustrating that to be visible and to be heard, you may need to emphasize on your position as an outsider.

Thank you, Abigail, for starting this week’s discussion. I too, found the relationship between the text and the video very interesting. And in my opinion, the situations videos function to enhance a feeling of continuity that Rankine’s lyric evokes. In Citizen, Rankine discusses not scenes or moments of the experience with racism, but the becoming of the experience.

I thought of Henri Bergson’s theory of cinematographic mechanism when I watched the slow motion video of Zidane headbutting Materazzi and saw the instills of it inserted in the printed book.  According to Bergson, the way we perceive the world is similar to the mechanism of a motion picture. That is, we divides the reality into a series of static moments (or concepts), just in the way cinematographers divide movements into a series of pictures. We then splice the moments together and regard the product as a representation of the reality. Bergson argues that this cinematographic approach would not enable us to fully grasp the reality, and we should instead, use our intuition to understand the object of perception.

Though I don’t totally agree with Bergson’s claim that motion pictures are just collections of still pictures, I found his theory inspiring to my reading of Rankine’s Citizen. It seems to me that Rankine is concerned with describing not only the experience with racism, but the continuity of such experience. She tells the whole story of the everyday racism, how it is encountered by black people day by day, instead of depicting the most “racist’ scenes. And in her narrative there is no distinct difference between “racist” acts and “non-racist” acts; racism is a continuity, instead of moments and events that can be seperated from everyday life. For example, she goes to painstaking length to describe Serena’s experience throughout her career, her restraints of rage or the outburst of it, and she points out that “Serena’s behavior, on this particular Sunday afternoon, suggests that all the injustice she has played through all the years of her illustrious career flashes before her and she decides finally to respond to all of it with a string of invectives.” The experience with racism is a continuous process, not one moment or one event. Rankins also says in an interview that  “In the essay on Serena Williams, one of the things I loved about her is that she wasn’t always right. Sometimes she was wrong but it didn’t matter. What was controlling her behaviour was a history of transgressions against her.”  Rankine’ lyrics help us to perceive the experience with racism as something that made up of a memory of the past, a impulse in the present, and a prediction of the future.

And I think this sense of continuity is enhanced more in the situation videos, rather than the disjunctive stills in the printed book. When watching the slow motion of Zidane headbutting Materazzi we can have a feeling that every moment’s experience is connected to that of the next moment and the previous moment. The way Rankin perceive with racism is not to treat it as a concept, but to emphasize (and she encourages people to do so by her use of second person)with the those who experience racism, with intuition. And I think video serve as a good medium to evoke this sympathy and the sense of continuity.