Absent Rebels: Criticism and Network Power in 21st Century Dystopian Fiction. Annika Gonnermann

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СКАЧАТЬ destabilising power of the company, thereby drawing also on the symbolism of a liquid economic system as introduced by Zygmunt Bauman in his Liquid Modernity (2000):6 TruYou, for instance, one of the programmes the company sells successfully to the public, is described as a “tidal wave” that “crushed all meaningful opposition” (TC 22). Furthermore, the company’s power and influence are expressed by different sea creatures. Most often, the Circle is equated to a whale, alluding to its sheer size and importance in the economic pecking order. Other, smaller companies, hoping that they might be bought by the company, are measured accordingly: “[i]t’s plankton-inspection time. […] You know, little startups hoping the big whale—that’s us—will find them tasty enough to eat” (ibid. 28). Initiating a discourse of consumption, the simile reduces the corporate world to an almost Darwinian state of ‘eat or be eaten.’7 While the metaphor of the whale triggers associations of a peaceful, slow giant benignly ruling the sea, the shark Stenton brings back from his voyages to the Marianas Trench highlights the Darwinian associations: “[i]t was a bizarre creature, ghostlike, vaguely menacing and never still, but no one who stood before it could look away. […] It was certainly a shark, it had its distinctive shape, its malevolent stare, but this was a new species, omnivorous and blind” (ibid. 309). Interestingly, the animal is “omnivorous and blind,” thereby foreshadowing the Circle’s exorbitant hunger, with which it is about to incorporate everyone and everything into its system. The novel introduces an obvious symbolism, conceptualising the Circle as this omnivorous shark (thereby altering the associations connected to the company rather drastically), by commenting on the obvious link between Stenton and his new pet established by gazes:

      Stenton was staring at the shark, […]. The shark’s nose was deep in the coral now, attacking it with a brutal force. […] The coral soon split open and the shark plunged in, coming away, instantaneously, with the octopus, which it dragged into the open area of the tank, as if to give everyone – Mae and her watchers and the Wise Men – a better view as it tore the animal apart. […] The shark ripped off an arm, then seemed to get a mouthful of the octopus’s head, only to find, seconds later, that the octopus was still alive and largely intact, behind him. But not for long. […] The shark took the rest of it in two snatches of its mouth, and the octopus was no more. […] Then like a machine going about its work, the shark circled and stabbed until he had devoured the thousand [baby seahorses], and the seaweed, and the coral, and the anemones. It ate everything […]. (ibid. 480f., my emphases)

      The explicit language of this quotation mirrors the brutal proceedings inside the tank. “Circling” inside the aquarium (cf. ibid. 319, my emphasis), the omnivore rips apart other animals, creating a metaphorical template of the Circle’s own business model; no creature survives the encounter with the shark, but ends up as ash-grey “flakes that fell ponderously to the aquarium floor, joining, and indistinguishable from, those that had come before” (ibid. 320). Moreover, Stenton, initially characterised as an aggressive wolf, finds a further animal equal in the omnivorous shark, a creature that mercilessly incorporates – in the literal sense of the word – everything into its system. The Circle has become “[t]he fucking shark that eats the world” (ibid. 484). The company’s success is presented as an impersonal force of nature that literally washes away “all meaningful opposition” such as human protestors and legal barriers.

      2. “Don’t You See That It’s All Connected?”– The Company and Network Standards

      By stating, “[d]espotism we can understand” (History 495), Gregory Claeys summarises our familiarity with totalitarian regimes and their practices. The ability to have agent B do what agent A wants her to do – even against her will – constitutes a prime example for a simple action-reaction pattern based on the asymmetry of influence and power. This process is easily observable, and familiar to us, as it is this ability most people commonly associate with Foucault’s juridico-political form of power. According to Grewal, Steven Lukes defines this mode of power by its ability to “overcome[…] resistance” (in Grewal 123), making it the first step of his three dimension model of power. Lukes hints at the fact that the one-dimensional understanding of power is probably the one most easily observed and identified “because its exercise affects someone” (ibid.). After generations of scholars theorising on sovereign power, following Machiavelli’s notion that power is the ability to rule over territory and subjects (cf. King and Kendall 217), most people, among them Eggers’ protagonist, are able to identify the action-reaction schema of power: Mae “left her hand resting across [Francis’] lap. [His pulse] quickly rose to 134. She thrilled at her power, the proof of it, right before her and measurable. He was at 136” (TC 203, my emphasis). Mae is excited about her influence on Francis, her co-worker and love affair, since one move of her hand causes an observable effect (pulse rate to 136), granting her satisfaction and a feeling of superiority. Modern technology and its gadgets, in this case, a heart rate tracker, display ‘proof’ of her effectiveness, bolstering Mae’s self-esteem.

      While Mae might find one-dimensional power a thrilling ingredient of a satisfactory sex life, The Circle demonstrates the extent to which people have learnt to mistrust direct forms of power on a political level since WWII, most notably in the form of authoritarian rule. In theory, Mae and her fellow Circlers can be seen as enlightened individuals, wary of totalitarian structures and concomitant power apparatuses, and are eager to challenge juridico-political abuses of power in the form of anti-democratic and oppressive regimes, such as the reign of terror exercised by a paramilitary group in Guatemala. Initiating an online campaign, the Circlers are passionately engaged in political activism:

      There was a paramilitary group in Guatemala, some resurrection of the terrorizing forces of the eighties, and they had been attacking villages and taking women captive. One woman, Ana María Herrera, had escaped and told of ritual rapes, of teenage girls being made concubines, and the murders of those who would not cooperate. Mae’s friend Tania, never an activist in school, said she had been compelled to action by these atrocities […]. (TC 244)

      Although “never an activist in school” and decidedly abstinent from political activism, Tania feels “compelled to action” by the clear abuse of juridico-political power. She thus stands pars pro toto for those raised in the belief of the importance of democratic institutions, having learnt the lesson of the 20^th century and the totalitarian regimes in parts of Europe and Russia. Compelled to do something and with the opportunities arising from advanced information and communication technology, the Circlers promote an online campaign that sends messages of support to Ana María and, “[j]ust as important, [sends] a message to the paramilitaries that we denounce their actions” (ibid., emphasis in the original). Doubts regarding the effectiveness of this method aside (readers might justifiably question the relevance of this online petition, since the novel makes it blatantly obvious that the Circlers’ ‘political activism’ translates directly into a painfully irrelevant, naïve idealism the characters in the novel nevertheless seemingly exhibit a strong tie to democracy and egalitarian ideals.

      While the characters are intellectually equipped to identify abusive forms of juridico-political forms of power, which take the form of (sexual) abuse, oppression and torture, they are nevertheless unable to correctly assess equally destructive, yet less obvious forms of coercion and power. They fail substantially to identify network structures of power, which ‘force’ the individuals to make free, albeit involuntary choices. Since network power and its standards are more difficult to identify because the decisions resulting in or from network power appear to be free decisions by mature and responsible individuals (cf. Bernard), The Circle constitutes an exercise in reading this form of power, enabling its readers to broaden their perspective and to differentiate between modes of power dissimilar in method, yet similar in effect: to restrain voluntariness. By demonstrating that the promises of neoliberalism regarding freedom and their reality are mutually exclusive, the novel criticises the former immanently, relying on the depiction of coercive power structures.

      Eggers’ novel makes the differences in conceptions of power explicit, requiring СКАЧАТЬ