A Review Of The Necessity Of Violence, by R.F. Kuang

Yesterday, I finished reading Babel by RF Kuang. I loved it. Prepare for spoilers. Babel is about a fictional English empire where white men kidnap foreign kids to Oxford, where they are used as translators. In this magical Oxford, translation produces physical effects through the destruction of meaning, the loss of coherence from one word to the next. This creates a situation where emotionally abused bilingual nerds are used as an industrial powerhouse by manipulative faculty. Some emotional growth happens, and the main characters blow themselves up in a tragic Captain Ahab moment to bring the empire to its knees and prevent the Opium Wars. Historically speaking, nobody prevented the Opium Wars. Despite or because of that, this book is great fun. It reminded me of Freedom And Death by Nikos Kazantzakis(1), in which a bunch of christian psychos blow themselves up in a church rather than be captured by Turkish soldiers. But whats better, it reminded me of another Kazantzakis book, Toda Raba. Toda Raba tells the story of communists from across the world coming to Moscow to celebrate Lenin's birthday. They fuss over the morality of the secret police, they opine and express angst about the nature of humanity and the industrial future. And then there's Toda Raba, whose name means "thank you" in Hebrew, who comes from an unnamed village in an unnamed area of Africa, who rather than receive a paper invitation, was told directly by some divine inspiration to go to Moscow and witness the violent rejuvenation of the world.

This gathering of colonized and abused people produces a historic cultural bomb: the sudden introduction of Africa into the modern world. Toda Raba could be condemned as dehumanizing colonized people, written from the perspective at the militarized eastern edge of whiteness. You could say all kinds of things about how Kazantzakis portrays women. But the guy had a vision and I think it was a true vision. The existence of the oppressed is a violent intrusion into the lives of the imperial citizenry. The global order has institutionalized despair, misery and war, and we have mental boundaries against these things appearing in our daily lives. That means we have mental boundaries against the people who's lives are destroyed or defined by these things. We translate their suffering into something we can safely place in a first world setting. This is why Toda Raba never gets a real name or a home more distinct than Standard African Village. A true translation, a real person standing in front of us, would be too shocking. It would render in our minds as a violent nonsense. Kazantzakis depicts Africans, and human life in general, as a blur of violent nonsense. And in 1929 Kazantzakis told us that the USSR would fall, that Asia would be the next industrial powerhouse, and not only is Africa where the future of the world decided, but it is Africans who will do the fighting and so it is Africans, ultimately, who will do the deciding. I agree with this assessment. It is, after all, African materials which power the engines of nuclear submarines, missiles, and computers. We all claim to hate it as we perform these sort of mandatory gymnastics, but we do it anyway. We do it to avoid knowing that it is African political struggles which determine who gets their hands on those materials.

R.F. Kuang does something similar with Babel. The loss of meaning when translating one term into another has its stiff representations of identity politics and privilege, but it gives way to a deeper metaphor about loneliness and truth in a world where words don't mean the same thing to anybody. Each sound uttered twice represents some sort of difference, some loss between the singular utterances, and the effect is that we live in a world both inundated with magic, and weighed down by the grief of failed communion.

In Babel, Kuang asserts (2) that the attempt to translate the concept of translation itself is a process which destroys the medium of language. This is meant to show the inherent material politics of all the empire's machinery and the part that language plays in those machinations. It shows that your simple existence is a violent act, and to express yourself honestly will always be an unwritten crime against the state. The crucial plot-driving conceit of this book is that the white Luddites actually show up and help the foreign students when they go on strike. It is a conceit I appreciated very much, being something of a white Luddite myself. I watched the rise of the surveillance state with disgust and dismay, and never once did I believe I had any access to a power that could sway the course of my world away from fascism and destruction. Now, I watch the anti-AI movement take up nonsensical positions in favor of copyright laws, and intellectual property, like a proletarian Disney lawyer. The artists put out of work by shlocky office assistant tools deserve better. They deserve a functioning and just society, and we have gone without for so long that most of us can't imagine what that looks like. We aren't arguing from a position of authority. We aren't fighting from a position of power. We are lashing out incoherently.

We are hoping against hope that our mere existence is violent enough to halt the machinery being used to grind us up. I don't think it is. In the modern economy, we are data, and our complaints are just more data. We must learn how to attack the platforms which serve our data, which sort us and deliver us to the information and the stimulus that squeezes more data from us in an endless extractive rotation. We need to translate the translation machine. We need to destroy our shared language and build another, many more.

To me this looks like some kind of abstract assault on the corporate culture surrounding large language models and machine learning. A kind of coup, which changes the character of facial recognition software to become something that we can actually use, and by its usefulness, becomes an attraction point for a new sort of public space. We need to better understand the ideology behind the modeling of social media, as a technology of domestication and control rather than freedom, and we need to break entirely from the idea that any social space could ever be privately owned. We need to turn the translation machines feral and set them free, like animal rights activists do for mink. We need to remember to eat breakfast or we will become light headed, sitting here in this cluttered supply closet avoiding work and ranting among the cleaning chemicals. Reality is what comes after.

Footnote 1: In the Greek edition, the title is simply "Captain Michales", in the American edition it is "Freedom Or Death." Only in the UK was the publisher able to use the only real and appropriate title, for the story is a people's demand for both. America will always refuse to touch either one when offered the choice, whereas Greece had had enough of both at the time of publication, having been recently and utterly destroyed by the first proxy conflict of the Cold War.

Footnote 2: I just want to reiterate that this book is dope and I was having a really bad week, and a hard time focusing on anything in particular, and that's the power of a good author, to literally change your mind. I feel like Kuang reached in there and scrubbed it with a toothbrush and granted me clarity in the afterglow of a good story's telling.

Footnote 3: The Luddite movement, while generally understood as anti-technology, has been slandered by the notion that General Ludd and his legions were against learning or progress. This could not be further from the truth, and the misunderstanding is harmful. The Luddites fought and died for their place at the table in a new industrial world which was never going to accommodate poor people. As they say, OSHA regulations are written in blood. Ignoring the regulations is stupid, which is forgivable. Ignoring the blood is something worse.