Review of Yoko Tawada, Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel, translated by Susan Bernofsky (New York: New Directions, 2024).
In retrospect, “bowling alone” ain’t even the worst of it.[1] At least then one retains a modicum of public interaction, an immunity-community[2] formed through the public choreography of shared shoes, balls, lanes. The AppStore at this moment boasts several games flouting “Bowling” and “3D” in their title, a rather perverse inversion of the textures of reality and its flattening by the culture of the screen. The increasing digitization of our live has ravaged social capital and concentrated private capital at a scale far exceeding what even Robert Putnam had in mind. We are becoming increasingly aware of just how devastatingly effective the pandemic of social loneliness—precipitated to hitherto unknown extremes by the COVID-era lockdowns—is for fostering political polarization and right-wing extremism.[3] During the COVID-era, our societies insisted that we remain isolated from one virus, even if that meant exposing us to the ills of whatever goes viral. Four years later, we’re still paying the price for pandemic populism.
In March 2021, I learned the lesson the hard way. It was the centenary of Paul Celan’s birth, and Pierre Joris—gifted poet and translator—was set to speak on his recently completed masterwork, a weighty two-volume translation of Celan’s collected poetry, replete with commentary. Being the dark days of the yet unrelenting pandemic, the talk was naturally on Zoom. Celan’s face loomed on the shared Powerpoint as I introduced Joris. No sooner had he thanked the organizers than it began: the n-word scrawled across the screen; a shrill cartoonish scream invading the speakers; rancid GIFS with gobs of semen extruded on co-eds’ expectant faces; and then, there it was: line by line, the swastika drawn in red ink over Celan’s face. It was thus that I—along with Joris, the other discussants, and the 50 some-odd people present for the talk—were made privy to the phenomenon known as Zoombombing. A prank? A deliberate targeting fueled by anti-Semitic rancor? The swastika seemed to indicate so, though the n-word was, then, scarcely explainable.
Joris described it—rightly—as “[t]he usual fascist porno dreck,”[4] made to incite and hound unsuspecting Zoomies. It’s a fair bet that the shut-ins who get up to such deplorable shenanigans have no idea who Celan is and just how jarring it was for us all to see a swastika digitally etched into his brow. Network technologies—like Zoom and the internet more broadly—are particularly felicitous conduits for such senseless provocation. At a dinner table, in a seminar room, at the proverbial water cooler, in—to draw a naive distinction—the “real” public sphere, not the bastardized simulacrum of the Webosphere, only the most heinous would dare be seen drawing a swastika or scribbling the n-word or heard playing porn on full blast. But the internet allows each to settle into his or her (overwhelmingly his) private corner of rage and fetid indulgences. On the web, the stakes are nil: make an account, fake an account, make two or ten, Zoombomb with one of them, follow Musk on X, “like” the AfD’s flashy Facebook profile, share Orbán’s or Zemmour’s conspiracy theories, flip-flop from Sanders to Trump, rinse, retweet, repeat. All in all, the price is low, the affective satisfactions deep, and the kind of investments required in institution-building and civil dialogue (key to the “real” public sphere) nowhere to be seen.[5]
Celan was a victim of more than one fascist regime and witness to the postwar concrescence of their neofascist heirs. What would he have thought of the ease with which swastikas proliferate in the digital age? “What,” in other words, “would Paul Celan think of Zoombombing?”—asked the title of an article in The Forward covering the aborted event[6]—given that he was a
“German-language poet […] preoccupied by the difficulty of writing in a language that had been used for hate speech and propaganda, [and] cognizant of the lasting societal effects of fascism even when it led to accusations of paranoia.”
“A paranoid is a man who knows the facts,” responded Joris, quoting Burroughs.
And the question naturally follows: what facts exactly are those?
Yoko Tawada’s short novel Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel—recently published in Susan Bernofsky’s felicitous English translation–may, indeed, offer an answer to the question what Celan would’ve thought of Zoombombing. This 2020 work, written in the dead patrol of quarantined hours, centers on the psychic cost of swapping the “real” world with the digital one. Patrick—our protagonist, occasional narrator, and floundering Celan scholar—suffers from a paranoia reminiscent of Celan’s own. A too-close identification arises between him and his object of study. The borders of his self and Celan’s are only too quick to break down. Though social isolation has begin to thaw and he should really get to writing that conference paper, Patrick can scarcely bring himself to leave his apartment.
Everywhere around him, “the city looks two-dimensional” (13). Distances collapse as the immersive immediacy of the screen replaces the textures of our 3-D world (cf. 56). But true to its original meaning the “screen” also appears to defend him from the threats of the exterior world.[7] The digital opera performances that he compulsively attends provide a refuge from the panoply of crises outside: the pandemic, the conspiratorial denial of the pandemic, the feckless plait of atrophied state services and heavy-handed state restrictions, the reactionary rise that accompanies these in turn. [8]The forms of social isolation encouraged by the daily culture of the screen—which the COVID era simply exacerbated—produces an acute sense of alienation. Yet Patrick seems well aware that the political neuroses from which he flees to his laptop or TV are themselves generated by the culture of the screen and its at once literal and metaphoric flattening of reality.[9] The global rise of the far-Right, notably Germany’s AfD-style populism, send him into nervous fits.[10] Neofascism is a bit too close to home: he hallucinates(?) an estranged brother who turned to the Right, likely a phantasmatic doublet of our narrator who, we are told from the very first page, “always turns left when he leaves the house” (1).
In recent years, an increasingly sophisticated body of scholarship has helped us understand how the digital sphere is a hothouse in which political hate-speech, racism, misogyny, and conspiracy is encouraged to fester and spread.[11] The viral metaphor is deliberately chosen and is, implicitly, Tawada’s. Thanks to the internet, far-right ideologies have “gone viral” in a manner reminiscent of COVID. The algorithms that govern social media trade in the business of blustery rhetoric, since political provocation circulates (and thus generates profit) at rates far exceeding other content. Affects are the raw putty in the hands of a new class of increasingly right-wing tech billionaires. And thus, to parrot one of the novel’s great lessons: “You can’t build a democracy on authentic feelings alone” (30). The monetization of platforms feeds directly into the rise of ethnonationalism, while the radical inequality produced by the information economy forms the crisis-ridden seedbed out of which far-right reaction grows.[12] Patrick devolves into psychic chaos when asked, on a form for the Celan conference, what his nationality is so that the requisite country can handle the fees. So it is the link between finance and nationalism that renders him paranoid.[13] And rightly so! (As an academic, I can only surmise that the prospect of languishing in the panel colony offers further grounds for jettisoning the conference invite.)
The bulk of Patrick’s actions and musings read as both symptom and diagnosis. The protective screen that shields him in the (2-d) proscenial womb of opera performances precipitates the very flattening of reality from which both his and the populists’ political paranoia is born. Though the opera houses have reopened, the patient finds himself unable to return to such public spaces. In the meanwhile, space has come to take on warped dimensions. “The door is the plastic case of the DVD” (9), while he’s lost the ability to commute with public transport because “[e]ven the steps leading down to the platform are problematic” (12). Hear the lexical resonance of platform as a flat form (cf. plat– from Greek πλατύς, “flat”), coupled with its contemporary resonances in the era of platform capitalism. The platforms that connect millions through public transport cede to the simulacrum-voyage that private internet platforms make possible. Psycho-social dissociations are the cost. Being a “citizen,” the patient tells us, is reduced to “the right to leave reality behind at any moment” (12), while the social collective is reduced to “the public that lives inside the digital disc” (63).
The choice of opera is hardly arbitrary. Tawada taps into a central vein in the history of German aesthetics which ascribes a deeply political force to the totalizing Gesamtkunstwerk vision. Fascist spectacle found a kindred spirit in Wagner’s synesthetic liturgy, while Friedrich Kittler, Pope infallible of German media theory, found in Wagner a prefiguration of the full gamut of “technical media” that structure the culture industry from Hollywood to Hulu.[14] Bayreuth anticipates the multimedia system of the “immersive view”[15] that we are now familiar with from IMAX. Its protocinematic quality stems, not least, from the collapsed distance between viewer and viewed. By 2020, infantile fixation on the lit backdrop of the laptop spells psychosis for virtual operagoer Patrick, as his body becomes a cyborg-like assemblage of human and medium from the “the fragile glass pane of his forehead” (15) to his palm which he “stares at […] as if it were the screen of a cell phone” (41).
II
From the 1890s onward, the German cultural theorist and art historian Aby Warburg offered a transformative account of cultural practices. Symbolic action, Warburg argued, allows humans to take reprieve from the onslaught of the outside world. Secure distance (Zwischenraum [in-between space] or Denkraum [thought-space] in Warburg-ese) and the self attains the rational clarity necessary to cope with the natural and social world. Collapse that distance and the self drowns in headlong submission to outside forces. By the 1920s, Warburg considered this collapse of space and ensuing psychosis the pathological core of fascism. A Jew in the German-speaking world, he, like Celan, suffered from crippling paranoia produced in no small part by anti-Semitism. Warburg had spent much of his life studying the collapse of distance brought about by astrological fatalism in premodern societies. But by the 1920s, he was most troubled by the havoc that new telecommunicative technologies wrought on the social world:
Telegram and telephone are destroying the cosmos. Mythical and symbolic thinking, as they struggle to establish a spiritualized bond between humans and the environment, create space as devotion-space (Andachtsraum) or thought-space (Denkraum), which the instantaneous electric connection deprives them of — unless a disciplined humanity restores the inhibition of conscience (die Hemmung des Gewissens).[16]
History, and the orgy of privately-controlled, privately-financed internet technologies that have swept our civilization, have confirmed Warburg’s prophetic verdict, announced in a lecture delivered at the sanatorium where he was committed for paranoia.
The guiding conceit of Tawada’s novel proves to be the warped afterlife of premodern doctrines of astrological influence in today’s age of influencers—and the forms of political regression that result. No sooner has Patrick’s palm morphed into a cell phone screen than the narrator treats us to an excursus on Kabbalah. Patrick proves, naturally, to be a reader of (what Celan read of) Gershom Scholem, the great scholar of Jewish mysticism. What attracts him in particular is a mythologeme present throughout Kabbalistic teaching that assigns twelve letters to the organs of the body. Like the astrological tenets to which it is indebted, Kabbalistic tradition links the microcosm of our bodies to the celestial macrocosm through forms of spiritual influence.[17] The letters employed by God during the Divine Creation mediate between the human body and the heavenly spheres. In this mystical imaginary, language fulfills the Cratylean dream of perfect correspondence between word and thing, signification and efficacy. But whereas premodern cosmogonies envisioned mediators in the form of angels, spirits, the soul, or the starry flux, in our postmodern world, “[w]hat appears to connect everything with everything nowadays isn’t the soul — it’s a digital network” (42). The liturgical, even magical function of God’s four-letter name, the “Tetragrammaton,” yields—by a litteral shuffle—to the medial technology of the “telegram” (ibid.)
The seeming aside on Kabbalah is followed by the re-appearance of the phantom right-wing brother. We learn of the radicalized group to which he belongs, the “attack at a mosque or synagogue” (43)—unheeded by the police—which they are planning, and the online “Library of Hate” (ibid.) that fuels their mania. Like the Kabbalist doctrine of correspondences, internet technologies collapse distances, flatten middle grounds. Their screens offer an illusion of immediacy by eliding the complex media infrastructures responsible for the hot-spot-connected devices in our hands. The idée fixe of connectivity unleashes a pandemic of paranoia. But paranoia is itself an idée fixe of (secret) connections. Patrick believes himself to be followed by secret agents, recorded by hidden microphones, surrounded by prime numbers. Postmodern paranoia and premodern influence: “A person who devotes his undivided attention to letters and numbers will sooner or later traverse the entire order of stars and organs” (125).
Patrick invokes Kabbalah so as to note how closely it jibes with the idea, central to Chinese medicine, of “meridians,” the twelve channels that run along the body and serve as conduits for the vital force known as qi. Much of the novel revolves around Patrick’s encounter with Leo-Eric, a man of “trans-Tibetan” (the word is Celan’s) appearance, who introduces Patrick to the concept of the “meridian.” Readers of Celan will immediately recognize the echo of his 1960 “Meridian Address,” the Darmstadt speech delivered in ambivalent acceptance of the Büchner Prize, one of Germany’s highest literary honors. His rebarbative poetological credo forms one of the most searing attempts to reckon with the uniquely though not exclusively German quandary of whether poetry was possible after Auschwitz. The meridian for Celan sketches an ambit of encounter. Ambit is a beautiful word that denotes both an expanse and its limits. Celan held on to the hope that a poetry of capacious address could serve as rejoinder to the barbarities of the camps. But he was well-aware of the limits of this hope in a never fully denazified Germany. What happens, the novel asks, when the meridians of Celan and Leo-Eric are replaced with “networks within the body” (39)?[18] For the fascist fusion is, like, technology, premised on collapsed distance, the submersion of the individual body in the collective.
In one of the novel’s most chilling moments, we are told of a rectangular burn mark on Leo-Eric’s arm. Our horizon of expectation prepares us for rectangular clothes-patches from the concentration camps or the identifying tattoos of Auschwitz. But we find out that it is instead a barcode, that emblem of commercial automation and its ability to flatten a three-dimensional object into a senseless one-dimensional pattern. The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has made a strong case as to where such reduction of people to their data will lead, or rather, revert:
As the deportees to Auschwitz no longer had either a name or a nationality, and were by then only the number that had been tattooed on their arms, so the contemporary citizens, lost in an anonymous mass and reduced to the level of potential criminals, are defined by nothing other than their biometric data […].[19]
Patrick perceives the Kabbalistic doctrine of letters and influence morphing into “the cage of countable letters” (113), a way of figuring the quantitative leveling of the textures of our social world.
In the final instance, it is in the poetry of Celan that the relationship between the “Meridian” and new information technologies is given its most important expression. Patrick and Leo-Eric interpret (38) Celan’s poem “Umweg- | Karten” (“Detour- | maps”) as an explicit reference to the Chinese doctrine of “meridians”:
[…]
Folie à deux,
erwacht
im Geierschatten,
in der siebzehnten Leber, am Fuß
des stotternden
Informationsmasts.
[folie à deux,
wake up
in the vultureshadow,
in the seventeenth liver, at the foot
of the stuttering
information mast.]
Extending the allusion here to the lines of energy that (according to acupuncture) run through liver and foot brings the talk of meridional distances in line with channels of telecommunications broadcasting. For the “stuttering | information-mast” of the final lines must refer to a Funkmast or Antennenmast (radio mast, antenna mast), the towers used to transmit and receive radio signals…and madness. Folie à deux, the originally French term for a shared delusion or psychosis, well captures how a world governed by instrumental rationality and its attendant technologies is also responsible for the generation of the collective psychic dissociations that feed political disarray.
In its technical sense, folie à deux names the moment when madness transfers from person to person in a manner reminiscent of physical contagion; in today’s world, such transmission takes the form of a network effect. Tawada’s novel brings us to the zero-point where “going-viral” can hardly be reduced to a metaphor.
……….
Notes
[1] Famously: Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).
[2] The interplay between communitas and immunitas is most thoroughly traced in Roberto Esposito’s Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community, trans. Timothy Campbell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009).
[3] https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/countering-radical-right/pandemic-isolation-pushing-people-towards-extremism/
[4] https://x.com/pjoris/status/1377374494168207360
[5] On this point, see Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment: The Left after the Great Recession (London: Verso, 2023).
[6] https://forward.com/culture/467041/what-would-paul-celan-think-of-zoombombing/
[7] On this point, see Francesco Casetti, Screening Fears: On Protective Media (New York: Zone Books, 2023).
[8] For the most recent theoretical account of conspiracy theories, see Alenka Zupančič,
Disavowal (London: Polity Press, 2024).
[9] For the German case, see Maik Fielitz and Holger Marcks, Digitaler Faschismus: Die sozialen Medien als Motor des Rechtsextremismus (Berlin: Dudenverlag, 2020).
[10] On the role of social media in the AfD’s rise see https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-german-voters-afd/
[11] See, most importantly, Joseph Vogl, Capital and Ressentiment: A Brief Theory of the Present (London: Polity, 2023).
[12] See Manuel Funke et al., “Going to extremes: Politics after financial crises, 1870-2014,” European Economic Review 88 (2016), 227-260.
[13] The topic of Fabien Muniesa’s recent book Paranoid Finance (London: Polity Press, 2024).
[14] See Friedrich Kittler, “World-Breath: On Wagner’s Media Technology,” in The Truth of the Technological World: Essays on the Genealogy of Presence, trans. Erik Butler (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), 122-37 and Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 104. For a Kittler-inspired attempt to study the technical, medial grounds of Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk vision, see Gundula Kreuzer, Curtain, Gong, Steam: Wagnerian Technologies of Nineteenth-Century Opera (University of California Press: 2018).
[15] Alison Griffiths, Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View (Columbia University Press: 2013).
[16] Aby Warburg, “Bilder aus dem Gebiet der Pueblo-Indianer in Nord-America” in Uwe Fleckner (ed.), Gesammelte Schriften, vol. III.2. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018).
[17] On Kabbalah and astrology see Moshe Halbertal, Concealment and Revelation: Esotericism in Jewish Thought and its Philosophical Implications, trans. Jackie Feldman, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); and on astrology and the history of Jewish thought through to Warburg and Scholem, see Moshe Idel, Saturn’s Jews: On the Witches’Sabbat and Sabbateanism (London/New York: Continuum, 2011).
[18] On the politics of “networked outrage” see Moira Weigel and Adina Gitomer, “Hate-sharing: A case study of its prevalence and impact on Gab,” New Media and Society (2024), 1-23.
[19] Giorgio Agamben, Nudities (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), p. 52