Unlike typical political pamphlets, the Manifesto on Techno-Capitalism was a systematic essay, with a structure of numbered paragraphs in thematic sequences in the style of analytic philosophy. It had no rhetoric or belligerent demands; the author wrote more like an academic than a politician. “More like a professor than a prophet,” said Nina, paraphrasing her venerated Bertrand Russell. (“Aristotle,” Russell once said, “is the first to write like a professor… not an inspired prophet.”)
It had a clear conception of how to get a message to circulate in the present time (so discordant in its words and sounds). The leap into evil, the decision to kill was bound to the will to be heard. I’ll transcribe paragraph 96 (“Freedom of the Press”) from the manifesto here:
Anyone who has a little money can have something printed, or can distribute it on the Internet or in some such way, but what he has to say will be swamped by the vast volume of material put out by the media, hence it will have no practical effect. To make an impression on society with words is therefore almost impossible for most individuals and small groups. Take us (FC) for example. If we had never done anything violent and had submitted the present writings to a publisher, they probably would not have been accepted. If they had been accepted and published, they probably would not have attracted many readers, because it’s more fun to watch the entertainment put out by the media than to read a sober essay. Even if these writings had had many readers, most of these readers would soon have forgotten what they had read as their minds were flooded by the mass of material to which the media expose them. In order to get our message before the public with some chance of making a lasting impression, we’ve had to kill people.
“First time I’ve ever heard something like that,” said Nina. Killing “some people” to gain readers. It’s a terrifying paragraph. The terrorist as a modern writer, direct action as a deal with the Devil. I enact evil in its purest state in order to improve my thought and express ideas that call all of society into question. Its truth is guaranteed given that the author was able to infiltrate the system’s networks of control and repression and carry out dozens of attacks with homemade bombs for almost twenty years without ever being traced.
At the center of this dissertation lay the critique of capitalism, considered as a complex system with a great capacity for expansion and technological renewal. Without getting into sentimental descriptions of social inequity, the manifesto defined capitalism as a living organism that reproduced ceaselessly, a Darwinian Mutant, “no longer a phantom,” it claimed ironically, “but rather an alien,” which, in its technological transformation, announced the emergence of cultural forms that did not even follow the norms of the society that had produced them.
Capitalist production is, first of all, an expansion of new capitalist social relations. Therefore it is impossible for the system to improve or be reformed because it seeks only to reproduce the capitalist relation, renewed and expanded in scale. Financial markets collapse, economies burst like bubbles, and that’s how capital grows. It analyzed the failure of the USSR and its satellite states and the dominance of capital in China and old colonial territories in the East as a new phase in capitalism’s march in search of empty spaces. That territorial expansion (which the media calls the fall of the wall) unleashed new energies and allowed for a surprising scientific and technological mutation: immense areas were opened, and an army of consumers and reserve labor was put at the disposal of the market.
Capitalism, in its technological expansion, does not halt in face of any limit: not biological, not ethical, not economic, not social. The magnitude of development has been so great that it has radically affected our emotional certainties, and today society confronts its final frontier: its border—its no-man’s-land—which Recycler called “the psychological frontier.”
The capitalist system had adopted the New Man slogan from Ernesto “Che” Guevara and Mao Tse-tung. Genetic research, experiments in molecular biology and cognitive science, the possibility of cloning and artificial insemination, all are advancing on a trajectory to cross that new frontier. Scientists were the “engineers of the soul” that Stalin had spoken of: the new man, the ideal citizen, is the addict, devoid of convictions or principles, who only aspires to obtain his dose of the merchandise he craves. Technological society satisfies its subjects: it entertains them and drowns them in an ocean of fast, multiform information.
There were no options for opposing the capitalist corporation. The manifesto was not posing an alternative but calling attention to a world with no way out. “Capital,” it concluded, “has managed—like God—to impose a belief in its omnipotence and eternality; we are able to accept the end of the world, but no one seems able to conceive of the end of capitalism. We’ve ended up confusing the capitalist system with the solar system. We, like Prometheus, are prepared to accept the challenge and attack the sun.”
With that Greek metaphor, the manifesto, of which I’ve given scarcely a brief summary, came to an end. Its author wasn’t the first to have spoken in that way. Nina, who’d studied Tolstoy’s influence on Wittgenstein, recalled the position of the author of Tractatus: “It isn’t absurd, that is, to believe that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for humanity,” he wrote. “My type of thinking is not wanted in the present age. I have to swim so strongly against the tide. Perhaps in a hundred years people will really want what I am writing.”
“I think the ‘that is’ is marvelous,” said Nina.
Although it criticized technology, as had so many philosophers and thinkers (among them Lewis Mumford, whom it referenced), its proposed solution turned not to the utopia of a better world, following the socialist model, but rather to the anarchist tradition of the “good life.” Like Tolstoy, like the Russian Narodniki, according to Nina, the manifesto proposed a return to the small, pre-capitalist rural commune, with collective ownership of the land, where everyone lives on manual labor. This alternative was based upon the experiences of stateless societies—like the nomadic tribes of the American West and the Paraguayan Chaco—and upon primitive social formations and means of production that preceded the industrial revolution. There was something in it akin to the experiences of Thoreau, the Beat Generation, and Californian hippies, but taken to the extreme, to war. Its outlook was North American, but it lacked hope and aspired only to individual achievement: the need to live one’s own life according to the model of society that one aspired to.
With a certain resignation, it proposed the defense of nature and natural lifestyles, but it didn’t take the praxis of green societies too seriously, à la Walt Disney. As Marx rightly put it, it’s difficult to escape from Robinsonism, and yet, after the catastrophe of socialism and the struggles against colonialism, the illusion of the lone man rebuilding an ideal society on a desert island seemed like the only way out possible. The manifesto practiced the “critique of critical critique” and did not appear ready to imagine a social alternative. It was Tolstoyan in that respect. But the difference was its use of direct action. It justified the will to rebel in the spirit of Thoreau’s right to civil disobedience (which it indeed cited). But the leap toward evil, the decision to kill (or the right to kill?), was tied to the personal will to make oneself heard. At its extreme, terror guaranteed access to the public word.
As could have been expected, the manifesto had an enormous impact. It was immediately released by an independent publisher in California and had been distributed widely online in a matter of hours. The discussion became widespread, and all around the country there were statements and shows of support for the content of a declaration that seemed to express what many were thinking. At basketball stadiums during the NBA playoffs, activist groups distributed copies of the manifesto among the fans and players. One photo that circulated widely showed Larry Bird reading the essay against capitalist technology on the Celtics reserve bench.
When I arrived at the seminar, the students were discussing the events; there were differing opinions, but they were generally in agreement with the manifesto’s theories (except for John III, who considered them unconvincing), although no one defended the violent methods and all criticized terrorism, except for John III, who showed skepticism regarding moral judgments in the political arena. With a weary air, he asked leading questions. (“How many people once branded as terrorists went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize?” he asked rhetorically, listing the names himself after a theatrical pause: “Mandela, Begin, Arafat…”)
“Do not kill,” John III concluded, “is the slogan of those who have the power; it’s the victims who must obey that mandate, for the powerful don’t believe in generalizations.”
Mike responded that killing people at random, even for rational reasons, did not make the crimes rational.
“Sure,” said John III, “but the killings don’t seem to be random.”
Regardless, according to Rachel, choosing who is killed didn’t justify the act of killing, even if the crimes did form a coherent series.
“We need to know who the author is first,” Yho Lyn said. She maintained that a message isn’t the same if we don’t know who’s sent it.
Was the person who wrote the manifesto the same one who sent the bombs? But they’d confessed to it. Confessed? It was more like they considered it to be a condition of what they’d written. In the manifesto, reasoning was inverted. It was the scientists who, in the name of technological progress, legitimized the violence of the system with their biological and military experiments. It was their “techniques for practical knowledge” that violated ethics in the name of progress and science.
Nina, who was working on the third volume of her biography, was rightly trying to demonstrate how the Bolsheviks had erased Tolstoy’s pacifist political positions, reducing him—“if I may,” she said—to the image of the great novelist, the father of realism. Nevertheless, Tolstoy had attempted to create an alternative against revolutionary violence and against capitalist destruction. Not resisting evil.
“The great social fictions are those of the Adventurer (who expects everything from action) and the Dandy (who lives life as an art form); in the twenty-first century, the hero will be the Terrorist,” said Nina. A dandy and adventurer, considered, deep down, to be an exceptional individual.
According to her, Tolstoy had been the first to become aware of those triumphal fictions, and he tried to counter them with the epiphanic image of the starets, the holy man, the mystic wanderer: the practical realization of his sermon was Mahatma Gandhi, a direct disciple of Tolstoy’s. “But India didn’t turn out so well either,” I said. “In good novels, Emilio, nothing turns out well,” said Nina. We were in the living room at her house, among her books and papers. “Want some tea? Cookies? They’re Russian.”
The FBI had distributed the manifesto among literature professors with the aim of seeing whether they could detect any idiosyncrasies in its style that would allow it to be identified. They hoped that someone would recognize the writing of the culprit behind the attacks or at least provide some clue to his identification. Mary Goldman, an expert in psychoanalytic literary criticism and a disciple of Charles Mauron, was trying to decipher the psychology of the text’s author based on metaphors, adverbial forms, repetitions, and word families. Others were looking for traces of urban argots and linguistic peculiarities from rural areas in the United States, trying to narrow down the field of investigation.
“It wasn’t about discovering him but imagining him,” said Nina. Is it possible to know what a person is like based on the things he or she writes? Any professional accustomed to reading with precision—a translator, a style editor—would quickly recognize the author as an educated man, accustomed to logical constructions, with a language of great lexical breadth and considerable syntactical richness. His use of written English was too deliberate, with no traces of orality, although sometimes there did appear slight errors of the kind that might suggest a tendency toward the hypercorrection typical of the middlebrow; beyond that, unexpected grammatical deviations suggested that English might not be his mother tongue, or that, at any rate, the author had spent his childhood in an environment where his parents weren’t native speakers.
I discussed some of these theories with Nina, but after reading the manifesto, we realized—as often happens in literary criticism—that the things we’d been analyzing meticulously could be apprehended at once by any reader. The author was an academic, perhaps a mathematician or a specialist in logic, very intelligent, a solitary man, used to speaking on his own and referring to himself in the plural (“We will now go” or “We declare that” or “Shall we say”). A form of self-representation that was typical of individuals (generally men) who had spent many years in the army or revolutionary groups or closed academic communities.
Classes finished at the end of May: the students in my seminar turned in their monographs, all brilliant but predictable, except—of course—for Yho Lyn’s, which was astonishing and opaque. I never like to judge or evaluate, but I gave out three A’s, one B+, and two B’s, according to the anachronistic and affected use of the Greek alphabet (alpha, beta, etc.) for grades that is employed in North American universities. The majority of them had written about Hudson’s “plein-air autobiographies,” about his way of writing and narrating “in motion” (on horseback), and about his motley personal zoo, all except for Yho Lyn, who’d done a stunning project on the correspondence between Constance Garnett and Tolstoy concerning the rural commune and the English farmers—colonists—in New England, compared with Hudson’s experience on idyllic Argentine ranches in Far Away and Long Ago. For his part, John III showed that he was sophisticated and very gender studies, analyzing the connection between prairie life and homosexuality in Hudson’s work (“Oh, those little gauchos of the prairie”).
That Monday, when classes ended, I invited them for a drink at the pub opposite the plaza with the post office. John III, Mike, and Rachel had submitted their curricula vitae and applications for the open positions being offered in the fall, and they hoped to have their theses completed by the end-of-year MLA meeting. They had already ceased to be—or were ceasing to be—students, and they saw their first jobs as a reality at once desirable and destructive. Education was a parking lot for the young, and now they had to switch gears and learn the hard rules of traffic. Positions in remote places, teaching apathetic students, facing the conflicts among colleagues to find a position and survive there until tenure. (“The real artistes maudits of this era are the assistant professors, monitored by colleagues who hold the deciding power,” said John III.)
We said goodbye at dusk, convinced we might never see each other again. Today, aware as I am of their fates, I know that many triumphed and others foundered, but none forgot their years as graduate students, when life seems to pass like a long parenthesis before you confront the harsh winter of real experience.
I too was at a similar crossroads. I didn’t want to return to Argentina and kept going back and forth about the possibility of staying here to teach a bit longer. In California, a position was opening in the Creative Writing program at Berkeley. (“Faulkner and Fitzgerald drowned themselves in alcohol, I’ll drown myself in the university,” my friend, a poet from Santa Fe who taught in France, used to say.) In the next few days I decided to resume contact with my friends in Buenos Aires, especially Junior, whom I’d known since the days when we worked together at the newspaper El Mundo. He was still there, growing ever more cynical and bitter; he’d gone into exile in Mexico during the military era but then returned to Buenos Aires as though he’d never left, and they told me he’d gone to the newspaper office with a smug little smile and sat down at his desk as if he’d just been on leave for a few days. I found him strange when we spoke, more formal than usual—“what are you doing, Renzi, I called to give you the news from around here, but there’s never any news, just wicked lies, viejo, and you already know how time flies in countries on the path to development, and lucky you living in the heart of capitalism.” We joked around a bit, and the conversation left me with a strange sensation.
Around that time, I also spoke to my ex-wife (a phrase that infuriated her, of course). She was fine, living in the apartment in Congreso that still contained all of my books. We’d had some problems, the usual kind, the ones that all people have after living together for so many years, but both of us were more understanding now, and maybe that’s why I told her I was considering an offer from Berkeley to spend some time in California. There was a pause on the other end. “You wouldn’t want to come and stay with me,” I said. I heard a laugh, the laugh she had whenever she was furious. “But Emilio, what’s wrong with you, is your head up in the clouds, don’t you know that I’m living with Junior?” But how could that be, I didn’t know anything, not with that tarado, that halfwit. I was the last one to find out, obviously.
It meant that everything was going on just the same in Buenos Aires. I knew that merry-go-round well; endogamy was the only kind of autonomy enjoyed by Argentine literature. Clara had been married to Pepe Sanz, who was with me all the way through college in La Plata, and with whom I’d put together several magazines in the sixties; when he separated from Clara, Pepe married Junior’s ex-wife, and now Junior was with Clara. I felt this matter with Clara like a betrayal. Was Junior living in my house? Was he sleeping in my bed? Reading my edition of The Death of Virgil?
I left my office and went out into the street. Orion was still sitting on the bench under the trees, and I walked over to him. He was tracing smaller and smaller circles and squares on a piece of paper. While he made his drawings, I started talking to him about my problems. I wasn’t especially happy that Junior had gotten together with her, but what I really hated was the idea of him poking around among my books and papers. “Monsieur,” said Orion, “it’s better to have nothing.”
In the middle of June, when the academic year ended, the department held the traditional gathering prior to summer vacation. We met in Palmer House, a large Henry James-style mansion surrounded by gardens, its entrance on the corner where Ida had met with death. I went along the tree-lined paths, and the stone wall quickly blocked the traffic light and the curve from Nassau Street toward Bayard Lane. That was where her abandoned car had been found; I thought about how she must have stared at that wall before she died; cardiac arrest, that was the diagnosis, an attempted robbery or something she saw in the street had provoked the violent emotion that caused the heart attack. And her scorched hand? Maybe it was a spark from the electrical system, or the engine overheated. There was no sign of a bomb, they reported, although her mail was on the floor of the car. It was impossible to know if there was another letter that had been destroyed in the explosion. There was no trace left, no metal plate with the initials FC. The police version was another way to handle the imaginary reconstruction of one possible situation. The witnesses, the signs, the clues allowed it to be presumed an accident. As for the possibility of a bomb, there wasn’t sufficient evidence for the case to be described as an attack.
As I entered Palmer House I could hear the buzz of voices and laughter coming down from the meeting. The second-floor room was brightly lit and opened onto a glass terrace above the trees of the park. There were dishes of food on a central table and to one side a bar where drinks were being served. Everyone was talking at the same time while holding plates and cups and trying to eat as best they could, standing and leaning against the walls or sitting in the low, plush red armchairs that surrounded the room. I helped myself to a glass of white wine and a plate of smoked salmon and rice. My colleagues were there, and so were the graduate students. I saw Rachel and Mike but not John III. I went out onto the balcony, and D’Amato came over to talk, as if he’d been waiting for me. According to him, whoever wrote the manifesto wasn’t the same one who’d sent the bombs. “They’re two incompatible personalities,” he said. “Sending a bomb suggests a robotic mentality that identifies with clockwork mechanisms.” He knew it well, because in Korea they’d selected the groups that were tasked with arming and disarming mines and booby-trap bombs based on a variety of psychological and emotional tests. The people who worked with timed-charge explosives were always quiet, rather schizoid types, with the mindset of compulsive gamblers and the fingers of a pianist. “I met a sergeant,” he told me, “who could arm and disarm a blast grenade with his eyes closed. He used to take bets on the nights of ceasefire between one conflict and the next. They’d blindfold him and he’d sneak outside the guard post to the edge of the jungle and then win their bets when he made it back alive. If it exploded, he used to joke, it wouldn’t harm anyone. He came back as though nothing had happened but feeling very fired up, eager to get in a fight or repeat the game. By contrast, in order to write a text like this one you’d need a peaceful and obsessive intelligence, similar to our own. I, because I was walking around thinking about the Elizabethan rhythms of Melville’s prose, stepped on the bomb that blew off my leg.” They were two different modes of psychological concentration, two species of humanity. It’s impossible to write and also set bombs, just as it’s impossible to be a good boxer and a chess master. We looked out at the night in the garden like two old drinking buddies who’ve been with the same woman. “I don’t think they’ll find anything,” he said. “Poor thing. You knew her as I knew her; she was sincere and had integrity. The best ones always die.” So she must have told him we were seeing each other and sleeping together? Had she taken that peg-legged patán into her confidence? These questions distracted me, and I was slow to hear the questions that the bastard was muttering with his customary euphoria.
What were my plans? Was I going to stay with them (“with us”) for another year? I had an offer from Berkeley, I told him, and I might possibly go to California for a while. Well, you should have consulted with us. At the department, they’d been thinking I wanted to stay when they started the slow preparations for the search to fill Ida’s position. Ida. As her name was uttered, something like a secret current of rivalry and confidence came up between us. Both of us knew what it was like to be with her in an impersonal hotel room. I swiftly cut short that mutual understanding. I told him I wasn’t sure what I was going to do, but I would keep them informed as to my plans.
I went over to the corner where Rachel and Mike were talking with two young colleagues from Film Studies. They were discussing Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. In the film, according to them, there appeared the figure of the extreme rebel, the nihilist in love with a prostitute, capable of acting without regard for any social preconceptions. Dostoevsky’s whore had transformed into Jodie Foster’s bad girl. I walked away as they switched to talking about The Deer Hunter and Robert De Niro’s ability to portray psychopathic characters. And Nicholson? “I imagine Recycler with Jack Nicholson’s face,” said Mike.
I made a few circuits around the room, talking aimlessly with acquaintances, and after a while D’Amato asked for silence. He was going to say a few words to send off the academic year as it came to a close. He spoke of the sad loss we had suffered. The department had created the Ida Brown Prize for the best thesis project every year. There was applause. “We’re living through difficult times in our country,” he said. “We know what terrorism is, and it remains a paradox that now, when email is burying the old forms of correspondence, it is letter bombs that are ravaging our universities. Epistolary forms define culture; they’re present in the Bible and in the philosophical tradition and in political and cultural history. The Persian letters, open letters, Roman epistles, Letter to His Father, anonymous letters, love letters. Will our forms of expression disappear, destroyed by violence?” He paused. “These latest tragic events have made me think,” said Don, “about the undeliverable letters from the dead that led Bartleby to insanity and desperation. We too, with our archaic knowledge, are readers of the writings and letters of the dead.” Then, as though delivering a requiem (and we all thought of different people whom it could be dedicated to), he recalled the ending of Melville’s story: “Bartleby,” he said, “had been a subordinate clerk in the Dead Letter Office at Washington,” and in closing he read a paragraph from the story.
“Dead letters! does it not sound like dead men?… For by the cart-load they are annually burned. Sometimes from out the folded paper the pale clerk takes a ring:—the finger it was meant for, perhaps, molders in the grave; a bank-note sent in swiftest charity:—he whom it would relieve, nor eats nor hungers any more.” And in a tone of great emotion, the intense D’Amato concluded his discourse with the litany of Bartleby’s narrator: “Pardon for those who died despairing; hope for those who died unhoping; good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved calamities.” He was a bit deranged, D’Amato, and would recite passages from Melville in any situation (in that respect he was like any of us gathered there, a sad group of readers who went on thinking about the enchanting quality of literary texts).
That night, when I finally left the party and walked across the garden of Palmer House toward the street, the place where Ida Brown’s accident had occurred, I saw John III, leaning in the exit doorway, standing there as if waiting for me, very dapper, almost in costume as an Ivy League alumnus, with a white linen suit and a bow tie and the excessive self-confidence that he’d shown all the way through the course. He greeted me with a friendly gesture to show that our relationship was no longer that of professor-student but rather that of colleagues, and before I could say anything he gave me the news that everyone had been waiting for.
“They arrested him. It was a Harvard alumnus.”