The End of Ideology
The Poetry of Cathy Park Hong
Abstract
The poetry in Cathy Park Hong's Empire Engine (2012) is separated into three timelines: the period of Westward Expansion in the United States, a contemporary story of fine art reproduction in China, and a futurist story of data workers in California. These three sections are united in their interrogation of the role of ideology in creating and sustaining an empire. I argue that the first timeline stages a representation of ideology in the traditional Althusserian sense, that the second timeline shows this representation as inadequate, and most importantly, that the final section suggests a new model for oppression. The key for the new model presented in the third timeline lies in the job the workers have: they work with data. The main argument is that the ruling class no longer maintains its power through the ownership of capital. Instead, as McKenzie Wark maintains in Capital is Dead (2019), this ruling class »owns and controls information« (Wark 5). The owning and controlling of information is no longer capitalism, »but something worse« (29). Following on Wark, I argue that this use and abuse of data changes ideology in a fundamental manner. Rather than having a world from which an individual can feel more or less estranged in an Althusserian sense, the new reign of data suggests that estrangement is the fundamental experience of the world. In other words, there is no world to feel estranged from, thus leading to ideology; rather, the feeling of estrangement is already the fundamental experience of our data-driven reality. While in Hong's book this new model is located in the future, the end of the essay argues that a similar state is brought about not only by our data-driven world, but also pandemics such as that caused by COVID-19, which are part of our time now.
Downloads
References
Alessandrelli, Jeff. »Engine Empire by Cathy Park Hong.« Prairie Schooner, vol. 86, no. 3 (2012): 177-179.
Althusser, Louis. On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State
Apparatuses. London: Verso, 2014.
Barth, J. Robert. The Symbolic Imagination: Coleridge and the Romantic Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977.
Bryant, Levi. »A World is Ending.« Identities, April 3, 2020. Internet: https://identitiesjournal.edu.mk/index.php/IJPGC/announcement/view/21?fbclid=IwAR3Mce3ny1uoYptruUjRhgiob-ql-zvdke3sGqPqJt62MGNaMECTwkemoCQ.
Chan, Hok-Lam. »Exorcising the Dragon: A Legend About the Building of the Mongolian Upper Capital (Shangdu).« Central Asiatic Journal, vol. 55, no. 1 (2011): 1-32.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Anima Poetae. Ed. E.H. Coleridge. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1895.
Easterling, Keller. Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space. London: Verso, 2016.
Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Ropley, UK: Zero Books, 2009.
Gottlieb, Evan. Romantic Realities: Speculative Realism and British Romanticism. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2016, 60-98.
Grant, Andrew. »Hyperbuilding the Civilized City: Ethnicity and Marginalization in Eastern Tibet.« Critical Asian Studies, vol. 50 (2018): 573-555.
Hollister, Susannah. »Dance Dance Revolution by Cathy Park Hong; Engine Empire by Cathy
Park Hong.« Chicago Review, vol. 57, nos. 1/2 (2012): 259-266.
Hong, Kathy Park. Dance Dance Revolution. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2007.
---. Translating Mo'um. Brooklyn: Hanging Loose Press, 2002.
---. Engine Empire. New York; London: W.W. Norton & Co., 2012.
---. Minor Feelings: A Reckoning on Race and the Asian Condition. London: Profile Books, 2020.
Horsman, Reginald. Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism. Cambridge; London: Harvard University Press, 1981.
James-Chakraborty, Kathleen. Architecture Since 1400. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.
Jameson, Fredric. »Future City.« New Left Review, 21, 2003, 65–79.
Ma, Ling. Severance. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018.
Mingye, Li. »Evolution of Chines Ghost Cities: Opportunity for a Paradigm Shift? The Case of Changzhou.« China Perspectives (2017): 69-78.
Moreno, Gean. »Introduction.« In In the Mind but Not From There: Real Abstraction and Contemporary Art, ed. Gean Moreno. London: Verso, 2019, 1-15.
Noble, Safiya Umoja. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York: NYU Press, 2018.
O'Neil, Cathy. Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. New York: Broadway Books, 2016.
Perez, Caroline Criado. Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men. New York, Random House, 2019.
Phillis, Jen Hedler. Poems of the American Empire: The Lyric Form in the Long Twentieth Century. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2019.
Richards, I.A. Coleridge on Imagination. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962.
Shaviro, Steven. »Accelerationist Aesthetics: Necessary Inefficiency in Times of Real Subsumption.« e-flux journal, 46, 2018, http://worker01.e-Jflux.com/pdf/article_8969650.pdf.
Shepard, Wade. Ghost Cities of China: The Story of Cities Without People in the World's Most Populated Country. London: ZED Books, 2015.
Sohn-Rethel, Alfred. Intellectual and Manual Labor: A Critique of Epistemology. London: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1978.
Toer, Pramoedya Ananta. This Earth of Mankind. London: Penguin Books, 1996.
Wark, McKenzie. Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse? New York: Verso, 2019.
Willems, Brian. »Automating Economic Revolution: Robert Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.« In Economic Science Fictions. Ed. Will Davies. London: Goldsmiths Press; Cambridge: MIT Press, 2018, 73-92.
---. Shooting the Moon. Ropley, UK: Zero Books, 2015.
---. Speculative Realism and Science Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017.
Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the Frontier of Power. New York: PublicAffairs, 2019.
Copyright (c) 2020 Brian Willems
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors are confirming that they are the authors of the submitting article, which will be published (print and online) in journal Acta Neophilologica by Znanstvena založba Filozofske fakultete Univerze v Ljubljani (University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Arts, Aškerčeva 2, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia). Author’s name will be evident in the article in journal. All decisions regarding layout and distribution of the work are in hands of the publisher.
- Authors guarantee that the work is their own original creation and does not infringe any statutory or common-law copyright or any proprietary right of any third party. In case of claims by third parties, authors commit their self to defend the interests of the publisher, and shall cover any potential costs.
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work.
