Sounding Out!

Teach Me How To Dougie Like A Mediocre White Man

In the third episode of Twin Peaks: The Return (2017), we meet Dougie Jones, a new character who is, as an otherworldly being will tell him, “manufactured.” Dougie’s sonic presence on the show is primarily marked by repetition, as the majority of his dialogue involves him parroting those around him. Though Dougie has been received as a symbol of purity or a magical conduit for others’ best selves (14:53-19:00), a close listen to his repetitions suggests that he is instead what Sarah Hagi has dubbed the “mediocre white man.”

Hagi’s so-called prayer is a brilliantly concise instance of intersectional analysis that can also provide a framework for understanding Dougie Jones. In a few short words, she’s able to 1) demonstrate how white supremacist patriarchy makes her life more difficult, 2) call into question the achievements of those who hold so much power that it’s doled out to the most mediocre among them, and 3) situate the entire critique in a systemic framework. That is, though one possible reading of this tweet is that Hagi suffers from a shortcoming she is responsible to correct–a lack of confidence–the fact that she frames her critique as a prayer suggests that this confidence isn’t so much an inner belief in oneself as it is a privilege granted to some but not others. Twin Peaks: The Return offers, in the vocal interactions of Dougie, an extended meditation on the systemic mechanizations that produce the kind of mediocre white man Hagi laments.

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“Twin Peaks Returns to Television in 2016” by Flickr user BagoGames, CC BY 2.0.

For readers who aren’t Twin Peaks viewers, hang on: explaining the origin of Dougie Jones requires a few sentences that may read as something bordering on nonsense outside the show’s bizarre universe. Dougie is played by Kyle MacLachlan, who also plays the show’s main character, Agent Dale Cooper, as well as The Return’s Mr C, Cooper’s evil doppelganger who overcame Cooper in an extradimensional realm in the Season 2 finale and who has been living in the “real world” ever since, while Cooper is stuck in another dimension. The show implies that Mr C has only 25 years–roughly the amount of time since the show’s first run in the early 90s–before Cooper switches places with him (extradimensional bureaucracies, amiright?). As a ploy to stay in the real world, Mr C “manufactures” Dougie Jones so that when Cooper is finally released from extradimensional detention, he replaces Dougie, not Mr C. For the bulk of The Return, Mr C continues wreaking havoc across the Midwest and Western US, while Cooper, adversely affected by his transit across dimensions, is trapped in Dougie’s life, barely able to function beyond the level of a small child. Technically, then, the character called Dougie Jones is really Dale Cooper, but Cooper’s episodes-long inability to regain control of himself leads to an extended case of mistaken identity, where everyone in Dougie’s life believes Cooper to be Dougie.

Significantly, Dougie’s family and co-workers are barely phased by his ineptitude. At worst, like when he doesn’t know how to use the bathroom, people are annoyed by Dougie. But, more often than not, Dougie’s moments of silence and often erratic behavior — including befuddlement over how to feed or dress himself — are interpreted as quirky, humble, and endearing. More than that, Dougie’s boss believes him to be a courageous and principled whistle-blower whose cryptic drawings on insurance forms outs one of his co-workers for defrauding the company’s clients.

dougie elevator awkward

Screenshot of Twin Peaks: The Return

Dougie is beyond mediocre, yet over the course of the season, he falls into hundreds of thousands of dollars, a luxury car, a family life that seems to be fulfilling for his wife and son, and the respect and gratitude of his boss. Confidence isn’t something this mediocre white man possesses; rather, it’s a trait projected onto him by everyone around him. In riffing on the way people exist in systems of inequity, Sylvia Wynter notes in On Being Human As Praxis (2015) that we end up keeping “the reality of our own agency opaque by attributing that agency to extrahumanly mandating entities” (45). Put another way, the god who would grant us the confidence of a mediocre white man isn’t a deity but a system of patriarchal white supremacy that makes itself opaque behind the  rationale that a person like, say, Dougie Jones couldn’t possibly be as successful in his life if he hadn’t earned it.

The primary marker of the mechanization of Dougie’s confidence is a sonic one: we can hear his ascendence in moments of repetition. Twin Peaks is a show comprised of overlapping aural and visual loops, recurring sounds, and doubled and tripled characters, so keying in on the sound of Dougie’s repetition fits into the series’ aesthetic. Early in Dougie’s presence in the series, when Cooper is fresh from the other dimension, his repetition is delayed, partial, and generally out of synch with regular patterns of conversation; people react to this repetition with concern. The following scene occurs in the moments just after Cooper has replaced Dougie Jones; his scene partner, Jade, was in the shower when the switch happened.


This clip is cut so that the phrase “Jade give two rides” happens back-to-back, but in the episode, there’s over a minute of a screen time between Jade saying (a grammatically correct version of) it and Dougie repeating it. Dougie’s imprecise and ill-timed repetition suggests to Jade that something may be wrong with him, and she rightly advises him to find some help. A similar interaction occurs in Episode 6, which opens with Dougie standing outside his work at night, unaware of what people do when work is over. When a police officer tries to shoo him away, Dougie is able to repeat back information he had heard several days earlier, and his delayed reaction again elicits concern from the person he’s with. A few scenes later, “Jade gives two rides” returns.

As the season progresses, however, Dougie begins to repeat back exact phrases or words that have just been spoken to him. The effect is one of understated agreement or even prescience, as if he’s repeating something he’s known for some time and has been waiting for others to realize, too. Note the way Dougie responds in the following two videos. In the first, he’s asked a question, which rises in pitch in the final syllables, and Dougie repeats the phrase with a falling pitch figure, which his conversants interpret to be confirmation. In the second, he’s given advice, and he responds by repeating the last word in uptalk, which his conversants interpret as a hilarious joke rather than the limitations of a person whose interdimensional travel has left his verbal skills lacking.

 As Dougie’s repetition locks into a quicker, more immediate responsorial pattern, the people around him no longer worry about his well-being and, in fact, begin to project onto him a confidence he’s incapable of possessing. This repetition, the kind that immediately plays with or confirms what his boss or potential murderers say, suggests a couple different theoretical constructions of repetition. Butler, in describing the performativity of gender, notes that gender norms are “the stylized acts of repetition through time,” the rehearsed and rehashed ideas that we ascribe, in this case, to white men: well-timed humor on the one hand, and wise confirmation on the other (520). Sara Ahmed underscores a similar idea, noting that “compulsory heterosexuality” is “the accumulative effect of the repetition of the narrative of heterosexuality as an ideal coupling” (145). Here, Dougie’s white masculinity isn’t all that makes him the target of others’ projections of confidence and competence; his nuclear family also marks him as a productively repetitive person, a person capable of reproduction. To modify Hagi’s tweet a bit, the world projects onto Dougie the confidence of a mediocre, white, reproductive man.

Both Butler and Ahmed also gesture toward distinctly sonic phenomena present in Dougie’s repetitions. Repetition accumulating over time becomes not just distinct events happening in succession but a discrete, singular thing unto itself. When thinking in terms of systemic oppression like white supremacy or cisheteropatriarchy, the repetitive privileging of white masculinity congeals into a continuous power flow. In musical terms, we hear the accumulative, rapid retriggering of a sound as pitch rather than many distinct events. Timing matters here: if the repetition is delayed or metered just so, we can perceive instances of the same events as moving in concert either melodically or harmonically. The shift in Dougie’s repetitions over the course of The Return is the sound of institutional privilege tuning white masculinity, retriggering moments of repetition–which sounds like a rise in pitch as the repetitions move closer together, a literal ascent–until those around Dougie stop worrying about him and start believing that this mediocre white straight man must have earned the success he seemingly enjoys.

Though a perusal of Twin Peaks: The Return analyses and recaps demonstrates that viewers and critics have been far more interested in the archetypal Jekyll/Hyde duality of Dale Cooper and Mr C than they have been in the nature of Dougie Jones, Dougie’s relative lack of drive or desire offers the opportunity to hear how white male mediocrity is made. The Return checks in on Dougie regularly from his introduction in the third episode until he transforms back into Cooper, then is remanufactured and sent home to his family in the sixteenth and eighteenth episodes. What we’re privy to in that time is a different kind of manufacturing, where Dougie is constructed by his surroundings to be wise, caring, attentive, upright, and brave, though we know he’s none of those things. The slow burn of Twin Peaks: The Return means that we’re stripped of any easy excuses for Dougie’s upward momentum in the season beyond the obvious explanation that the gods of mediocre white men have gifted him with treasures out of reach for others. Dougie repeats what he hears, and what he hears is that his mediocrity is good enough.

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Featured image: Screenshot from “‘Dougie’ Cooper – All Phrases (Twin Peaks Compilation)” by Youtube user AKA.

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Justin Adams Burton is Assistant Professor of Music at Rider University. His research revolves around critical race and gender theory in hip hop and pop, and his book, Posthuman Rap, is available now. He is also co-editing the forthcoming (2018) Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Music Studies. You can catch him at justindburton.com and on Twitter @j_adams_burton. His favorite rapper is one or two of the Fat Boys.

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tape reel

REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:

DIANE… The Personal Voice Recorder in Twin Peaks-Tom McEnaney

Malcolm Gladwell’s Bad Aesthetics–Justin Burton

Listening to Sounds in Post-Feminist Pop Music-Robin James

Sounding Out!

In Search of Politics Itself, or What We Mean When We Say Music (and Music Writing) is “Too Political”

Music has become too political—this is what some observers said about the recent Grammy Awards. Following the broadcast last week, some argued that musicians and celebrities used the event as a platform for their own purposes, detracting from the occasion: celebration of music itself.  Nikki Haley, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, tweeted:

I don’t know for sure, but I imagine that the daily grind of a U.N. ambassador is filled with routine realities we refer to as “politics”: bureaucracy, budget planning, hectic meetings, and all kinds of disagreements. It makes some sense to me, then, that Haley would demand a realm of life that is untouched by politics—but why music in particular?

The fantasy of a space free from politics resembles other patterns of utopian thought, which often take the form of nostalgia. “There was a time when only a handful of people seemed to write politically about music,” said Chuck Klosterman, a novelist and critic of pop culture, in an interview in June 2017. He continued:

Now everybody does, so it’s never interesting. Now, to see someone only write about the music itself is refreshing. It’s not that I don’t think music writing should have a political aspect to it, but when it just becomes a way that everyone does  something, you see a lot of people forcing ideas upon art that actually detracts [sic] from the appreciation of that art. It’s never been worse than it is now.

He closed his interview by saying: “I do wonder if in 15 years people are going to look back at the art from this specific period and almost discover it in a completely new way because they’ll actually be consuming the content as opposed to figuring out how it could be made into a political idea.” Klosterman almost said it: make criticism great again.

Reminiscing about a time when music writing was free from politics, Klosterman suggests that critics can distinguish between pure content and mere politics—which is to say, whatever is incidental to the music, rather than central to it.  He offers an example, saying, “My appreciation of [Merle Haggard’s] ‘Workin’ Man Blues’ is not really any kind of extension of my life, or my experience, or even my values. […] I can’t describe why I like this song, I just like it.” If Klosterman, an accomplished critic, tried to describe the experiences that lead him to like this particular song, he probably could—but the point is that he doesn’t make explicit the relationship between personal identity and musical taste.

Screen Capture of Merle Haggard singing “Workin’ Man Blues,” Live from Austin, Texas, 1978

The heart of Klosterman’s concern is that critics project too many of their own problems and interests onto musicians. Musician and music writer Greg Tate recently made a similar suggestion: when reviewing Jay-Z’s album 4:44, Tate focuses on how celebrities become attached to public affects. In his July 2017 review, “The Politicization of Jay-Z,” he writes:

In the rudderless free fall of this post-Obama void […] all eyes being on Bey-Z, Kendrick, and Solange makes perfect agitpop sense. All four have become our default stand-ins until the next grassroots groundswell […] Bey-Z in particular have become the ready-made meme targets of everything our online punditry considers positive or abhorrent about Blackfolk in the 21st century.

Jay and Bey perform live in 2013, by Flickr user sashimomura,(CC BY 2.0)

He suggests that critics politicize musicians, turning them into repositories of various projections about the culture-at-large. Although writing from a very different place than Klosterman, Tate shares the sense that most music criticism is not really about music at all. But whereas Klosterman implies that criticism resembles ideological propaganda too much, Tate implies that criticism is a mere “stand-in” for actual politics, written at the expense of actual political organizing. In other words, music criticism is not political enough.

In 1926, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote about this problem, the status of art as politics. In his essay “Criteria of Negro Art,” he dissects what he perceives to be the hypocrisy of any demand for pure art, abstracted from politics; he defends art that many others would dismiss as propagandistic—a dismissal revealed to be highly racialized. He writes:

Thus all Art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for  any art that is not used for propaganda. But I do care when propaganda is confined to one side while the other is stripped and silent.

Du Bois’s ideas would be engaged extensively by later authors, including Amiri Baraka. In his 1963 essay “Jazz and the White Critic,” he addresses politics in terms of “attitude.” Then-contemporary white critics misunderstood black styles, he argued, because they failed to fully apprehend the attitudes that produced them. They were busy trying, and failing, to appreciate the sound of bebop “itself,” but without considering why bebop was made in the first place.

Dizzy Gillespie, one of BeBop’s key players, in Paris, 1952, Image courtesy of Flickr User Kristen, (CC BY 2.0)

As Baraka presents it, white critics were only able to ignore black musicians’ politics and focus on the music because the white critics’ own attitudes had already been assumed to be superior, and therefore rendered irrelevant. Only because their middle-brow identities had been so thoroughly elevated in history could these middle-brow critics get away with defining the object of their appreciation as “pure” music. Interestingly, as Baraka concludes, it was their ignorance of context that ultimately served to “obfuscate what has been happening with the music itself.” It’s not that the music itself doesn’t matter; it’s that music’s context makes it matter.

In response to morerecent concerns about the politicization of popular music, Robin James has analyzed the case of Beyoncé’s Lemonade. She performs a close reading of two reviews, by Carl Wilson and by Kevin Fallon, both of whom expressly seek the album’s “music itself,” writing against the many critical approaches that politicize it. James suggests that these critics can appeal to “music itself” only because their own identities have been falsely universalized and made invisible. They try to divorce music from politics precisely because this approach, in her words, “lets white men pop critics have authority over black feminist music,” a quest for authority that James considers a form of epistemic violence.

That said, James goes on to conclude that the question these critics ask—“what about the music?”—can also be a helpful starting point, from which we can start to make explicit some types of knowledge that have previously remained latent. The mere presence of the desire for a space free from politics and identity, however problematic, tells us something important.

Our contemporary curiosity about identity—identity being our metonym for “politics” more broadly—extends back at least to the 1990s, when music’s political status was widely debated in terms of it. For example, in a 1991 issue of the queercore zine Outpunk, editor Matt Wobensmith describes what he perceived to be limitations of thinking about music within his scene. He laments what he calls “musical purism,” a simplistic mindset by which “you are what you listen to.” Here, he capitalizes his points of tension:

Suddenly, your taste in music equates you with working class politics and a movement of the disenfranchised. Your IDENTITY is based on how music SOUNDS. How odd that people equate musical chops with how tough or revolutionary you may be! Music is a powerful language of its own. But the music-as-identity idea is a complete fiction. It makes no sense and it defies logic. Will someone please debunk this myth?

Wobensmith suggests that a person’s “musical chops,” their technical skills, have little to do with their personal identity. Working from the intersection of Klosterman and Tate, Wobensmith imagines a scenario in which the abstract language of music transcends the identities of the people who make it. Like them, Wobensmith seems worried that musical judgments too often unfold as critiques of a musician’s personality or character, rather than their work. Critics project themselves onto music, and listeners also get defined by the music they like, which he finds unsettling.

That same year, in an interview published in the 1991 issue of the zine Bikini Kill, musicians Kathleen Hanna and Jean Smith addressed a similar binary as Wobensmith, that of content and technique. But they take a different view: in fact, they emphasize the fallacy of this dualism in the first place. “You just can’t separate it out,” said Hanna, questioning the possibility of distinguishing between content—the “music itself”—and technique on audio recordings.

Female-fronted bands of this era were sometimes criticized for their lack of technique, even as terrible male punk bands were widely admired for their cavalier disregard of musical rules. Further still, disparagement of women’s poor technique often overlooked the reasons why it suffered: many women had been systematically discouraged from musical participation in these scenes. Either way, as Tamra Lucid has argued, it is the enforcement of “specific canons of theory and technique,” inevitably along the lines of identity, that cause harm if left unexamined.

All of these thinkers show that various binaries in circulation—sound and identity, personality and technique, music and politics—are gendered in insidious ways, an observation arrived at by the same logic that led Du Bois to reveal the moniker of “propaganda” to be racialized. As Hanna puts it, too many people assumed that “male artists are gonna place more importance on technique and female artists’ll place more on content.” She insists that these two concepts can’t be separated in order to elevate aspects of experience that had been implicitly degraded as feminine: the expression of righteous anger, or recollection of awkward intimacy.

Bikini Kill at Gilman Street, Berkeley, CA, 1990s, Image by Flickr User John Eikleberry, CC BY-NC 2.0

Punk had never pretended not to be political, making it a powerful site for internal critique. Since the 1970s, punk had been a form in which grievances about systemic problems and social inequality could be openly, overtly aired. The riot grrrls, by politicizing confessional, femme, and deeply private forms of expression within punk, demonstrated that even the purest musical politics resemble art more than is sometimes thought: “politics itself” is necessarily performative, personal, and highly expressive, involving artifice.

Even the act of playing music can be considered a form of political action, regardless of how critics interpret it. In another punk zine from c. 1990, for example, an anonymous author asks:

What impact can music have? You could say that it’s always political, because a really good pop song, even when it hasn’t got political words, is always about how much human beings can do with the little bag of resources, the limited set of playing pieces and moves and words, available […] Greil Marcus calls it ‘the vanity of believing that cheap music is potent enough to take on nothingness,’ and it may be cool in some places to mock him but here he’s dead-on right.

But music is never only political—that is, not in the elections-and-petitions sense of the word. And music is always an action, always something done to listeners, by musicians (singers, songwriters, producers, hissy stereo systems)—but it’s never only that, when it’s any good: no more than you, reader, are the social roles you play.

The author persuades us that music is political, even as they insist that it’s something more. Music as “pure sound,” as a “universal language” seems to have the most potential to be political, but also to transcend politics’ limitations—the trash, the propaganda. Given this potential, some listeners find themselves frustrated with music’s consistent failure to rise to their occasion, to give them what they desire: to be apolitical.

Kelly Clarkson performed at The Chelsea on July 27, 2012, image by Flickr User The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas, CC BY-NC 2.0

In an interview during the recent Grammys broadcast, pop singer Kelly Clarkson said, “I’m political when I feel like I need to be.” It’s refreshing to imagine politics this way, like a light we turn on and off–and it’s a sign of political privilege to be able to do so. But politics are, unfortunately, inextricable from our lives and therefore inescapable: the places we go, the exchanges we pursue, the relationships we develop, the ways we can be in the world. Thinking with Robin James, it seems that our collective desire for a world free from all this reveals a deeper knowledge, which music helps make explicit: we wish things were different.

I wonder if those who lament the “contamination” of the Grammys with politics might be concerned that their own politics are unfounded or irrelevant, requiring revision, just as many white people who are allergic to identity politics are, in fact, aware that our own identity has been, and continues to be, unduly elevated. When Chuck Klosterman refuses to describe the reason why he likes “Workin’ Man Blues,” claiming that he “just does,” does he fear, as I sometimes do, not that there is no reason, but that this reason isn’t good enough?

Fortunately, there are many critics today who do the difficult work of examining music’s politics. Take Liz Pelly, for example, whose research about the backend of streaming playlists reminds us of music’s material basis. Or what about the astute criticism of Tim Barker, Judy Berman, Shuja Haider, Max Nelson, and others for whom musical thought and action are so thoroughly intertwined? Finally, I think of many music writers at Tiny Mix Tapes, such as Frank Falisi, Hydroyoga, C Monster, or Cookcook, for whom creation is a way of life—and whose creative practices themselves are potent enough to “take on nothingness.”

“Music is never only political,” as the anonymous ‘zine article author argues above, but it is always political, at least a little bit. As musicians and critics, our endeavor should not be to transcend this fact, but to affirm it with increasing nuance and care. During a recent lecture, Alexander Weheliye challenged us in a lecture given in January 2018 at New York University, when listening, “To really think: what does this art reflect?” Call it music or call it politics: the best of both will change somebody’s mind for real, and for the better.

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Featured Image: Screen Capture from Kendrick Lamar’s video for “HUMBLE,” winner of the 2018 Grammy for “Best Music Video.”

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Elizabeth Newton is a doctoral candidate in musicology. She has written for The New Inquiry, Tiny Mix Tapes, Real Life Magazine, the Quietus, and Leonardo Music Journal. Her research interests include musico-poetics, fidelity and reproduction, and affective histories of musical media. Her dissertation, in progress, is about “affective fidelity” in audio and print culture of the 1990s.

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tape reelREWIND!…If you liked this post, you may also dig:

SO! Reads: Jace Clayton’s Uproot–Elizabeth Newton

Re: Chuck Klosterman – “Tomorrow Rarely Knows”–Aaron Trammell

This is What It Sounds Like . . . . . . . . On Prince (1958-2016) and Interpretive Freedom–Ben Tausig

Janneke Adema

Growing bulbs of intellectual freedom from academic libraries

Re-blog from: https://moananddrone.github.io/bag-of-onions

by Kevin Sanders (moananddrone)

As many of us are increasingly aware, data pertaining to our online behaviour- when and where we have been, what we did whilst occupying that space, etc.- have become increasingly valuable to a range of stakeholders and bad actors, including unethical hackers, commercial organisations, and the state. The weaknesses inherent across various web infrastructures, their deployment, and their ubiquitous, multipurpose uses are routinely exploited to capture the private data and information of individuals and entire communities.

For many librarians, this technological and cultural problem has been increasingly acknowledged as part of a wider political concern that is directly relevant to our professional requirement to protect the right to intellectual privacy (Fister, 2015; Smith, 2018).

Through both my professional and voluntary labour with the Library Freedom Project and the Radical Librarians Collective, I have been trying to directly offer support for individuals in their attempt to protect their privacy through their behaviours and the digital tools they choose to make use of. However, consistently weaving intellectual privacy throughout my professional praxis is a significant challenge.

Peeling back the layers of libraries and the scholarly commons

I am currently employed as the Research Support Manager for Library Services at the University of West London (UWL). A significant aspect of my role is to manage and administrate the UWL Repository, which is the institution’s repository of research outputs. The repository makes these outputs discoverable and accessible through what is known as green open access.

The collection, storage, management, and sharing of information demonstrated in the administration of a repository are all core elements of library work. However, this specific aspect of library work directly contributes towards the development and maintenance of the scholarly commons as an accessible body of work that “admit[s] the curious, rather than [only] the orthodox, to the alchemist’s vault” (Illich, 1973), and to allow people to re-use the research for their own purposes.

In all areas of library work, ensuring that the personal data and information of our user communities is stored securely is very important for the preservation of intellectual privacy. However, in the contemporary environment, libraries’ digital connections to external sources and services can make this challenging. Libraries are reliant on services that are served externally, and as such libraries lack the ability to control how these services share data required for the use of these services.

As the University have control over the repository through an agreement with a hosting service, it has been easy enough to enable some security enhancements. As such, from January 2018, the UWL Repository has been wrapped in HTTPS to respect our user communities’ information security by ensuring that all connections to it are encrypted.

Unfortunately, the scholarly commons is only as accessible as it is permitted to be on the clear-net, as there are many powerful stakeholders that have the ability to suppress access and thus censor scholars and other publics from accessing the published results of academic research and scholarship.

Onions don’t grow on trees; environmental ethics and the scholarly commons

Some popular online services and networks for scholars, such as Sci-Hub, ResearchGate, academia.edu, also offer users the option to share their scholarly and research outputs gratis. The latter two are capital venture funded, commercial services. Part of their business operations include providing data around research that can, it is claimed, offer insights into its ‘impact’. However, these services do not take responsibility for the frequent breaches of licences that help to calcify the commodification of scholarly knowledge (Lawson et al., 2015,). Many of these services also have vested interests in the data stored and created through the use of their services.

For the scholarly commons, publishing via open access (through both gold open access publishers and via institutional and subject repositories) and making use of appropriate Creative Commons licences is a significantly more effective and ethical way to share and access research and scholarly outputs. Institutional repositories are commonly sustained by institutional funding (i.e. they serve not-for-profit functions), for instance, and they also commonly run on free (libre) and open source software such as EPrintssoftware, which is licensed under GPL v3.0.

Here, we can see that libraries actively support a libre approach to free, online access to scholarly information.

Layering up for intellectual privacy, access, and the scholarly commons

As referred to above, various fields of informational labour hold a broad consensus view around users’ right and need for intellectual privacy (Richards, 2015). In this context, ensuring that the research and scholarly outputs are accessible in ways that allow users to retain their privacy seems essential.

As such, I have made the UWL Repository accessible from within the Tor network as an onion service.

I briefly consulted Library Services’ director, Andrew Preater, prior to undertaking this work, but I was able to make use of Enterprise Onion Toolkit (EOTK) to create a proxy of the repository without requiring root access to the webserver of the clear-net site, and without having to make copies of the files held on that server. As a proof-of-concept, it is now accessible via https://6dtdxvvrug3v6g6d.onion, but may be moved to a more permanent .onion address in the future, subject to institutional support. (Please note that an exception has to be granted to access the onion service due to some of the complexities of HTTPS over onion services. This is something that I would hope to resolve with institutional support. Please see Murray’s post for further details).

This provision allows global access to the UWL Repository and its accessible content in a form that allows users to protect their right to intellectual privacy; neither their ISP nor UWL, as a service provider, will be able to identify their personal use of UWL Repository when using https://6dtdxvvrug3v6g6d.onion/.

Having repositories available as onion services is of significant benefit for those accessing the material from, for instance, oppressive geopolitical contexts. Onion services offer not only enhanced privacy for users, but also help to circumvent censorship. Some governments and regimes routinely deny access to clear-net websites deemed obscene or a threat to national security. Providing an onion service of the repository not only protects those that may suffer enhanced digital surveillance for challenging social constructs or social relations (which can have a severely chilling effect on intellectual freedom), but also on entire geographical areas that are locked out of accessing publicly accessible content on the clear-net.

The expansion of intellectual privacy for the scholarly commons is bringing tears to my eyes

Although this is a small step for the scholarly commons, it is an important one. In our politically fragile world, marginalised communities often suffer disproportionate risks, and taking this simple step helps to reinstate somesafety into this digital space (Barron et al., 2017). As Ganghadharan (2012) notes, “[u]ntil policy–makers begin a frank discussion of how to account for benefits and harms of experiencing online worlds and to confront the need to protect collective and individual privacy online, oppressive practices will continue”.

I hope that other library and information workers, repository administrators, open access publishers, and their associated indexing services will take inspiration from the step that I have taken and help us to lead a collective charge that places intellectual privacy at the centre of both the scholarly commons and digital library services.

Acknowledgements:

I would like to thank Murray Royston-Ward and Simon Barron for their technical support (if you do not have access to a server, Murray has written a guide to trialling a Tor mirror of services via Google’s Cloud Engine), Alec Muffett for his development of EOTK, Alison Macrina and the Library Freedom Project for their advocacy of digital rights within libraries, the Radical Librarians Collective for providing spaces to support my professional development and practical skills, and to all those involved in the Tor Project that support and provide tools that allow us to make good on our right to digital privacy.

References:

Barron, S., Regnault, C., and Sanders, K. (2017). Library privacy. Carnegie UK. [Retrieved from: https://www.carnegieuktrust.org.uk/uncategorized/library-privacy/]

Fister, B. (2015). Big Data or Big Brother? Data, ethics, and academic libraries. Library Issues: Briefings for Faculty and Administrators. [Retrieved from: https://barberafister.net/LIbigdata.pdf]

Gangadharan, S. P. (2012). Digital inclusion and data profiling. First Monday, 17(5)

Illich, I. (1973). Tools for conviviality. [Retrieved from: http://web.media.mit.edu/~calla/web_comunidad/Reading-En/Illichhapters1_2_3.pdf]

Lawson, S., Sanders, K., and Smith, L. (2015). Commodification of the information profession: A critique of higher education under neoliberalism. Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication, 3 (1). [Retrieved from: http://dx.doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.1182]

Richards, N. (2015). Intellectual privacy: Rethinking civil liberties in the digital age. Oxford University Press, USA

Smith, L. (2018). Surveillance, privacy, and the ethics of librarianship. Cambridge Libraries Conference, 11/01,2018. [Retrieved from: https://www.slideshare.net/laurensmith/surveillance-privacy-and-the-ehtics-of-librarianship

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Minor Compositions

Situating Ourselves in Displacement

Situating Ourselves in Displacement. Conditions, experiences and subjectivity across neoliberalism and precarity Edited by Paula Cobo Guevara and Manuela Zechner (Murmurae) and Marc Herbst (Journal of Aesthetics & Protest) Displacement is a key paradigm of our time, for who can afford not to move, to shift, to change, to develop and improve – or to be moved, shifted, displaced? Situatedness … Continue reading →
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The Idea (of an Idea) of North (Of the North): Glenn Gould’s Piece at 50

AMBIENCE

On December 28, 1967, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation debuted a radio piece by famed pianist Glenn Gould, titled The Idea of North. Opaque yet spacious, this experiment would become the first in a trio of ambient documentaries to be produced over the next decade. Each episode explores the theme of solitude from a different geographical vantage, co-implicating form and content; for, as Gould demonstrates, telegraphy had long since complicated isolation as a lifestyle. But Gould’s obsessive pursuit of this ideal produces a multiperspectival portrait of settler consciousness, at the same time as it thematizes and intervenes in its medium as a technical means of colonial expansion.

With an ear to Europe, these radio pieces were assembled after the fashion of major postwar developments in tape music and collage. Stylistically, The Idea of North seems conspicuously stricken with an anxiety of influence befitting of an incipient nationalism; for it was clearly Gould’s intent to furnish his avant-garde composition a local character. As to whether Gould meant to modernize Canadian content, or to Canadianize modern form, his approach presumes ambiguity, to make strange a standard broadcast format. In Gould’s hourlong intervention, the soothing probity of the professional narrator’s voice is edged out by so much overlapping and uncertain talk. While certain formal precedents for this collaged approach de-emphasize semantics in favour of timbral and or ‘purely musical’ characteristics of source sounds, Gould’s regionalist reply preserves the referentiality of each sound as recorded; if only to sublate them altogether in a narrative tapestry.

Would it have been uncomfortable for general interest listeners—a postulate from which proceeds the mandate of national radio, but who actually identifies with this mean temperament?—to encounter The Idea of North in 1967? At the time of the original broadcast, it had been more than three years since Gould’s last public performance, during which hiatus he had come to champion recording as a frontier, commending radio to his purposes. But where these compositions are concerned, Gould’s method of assembly sought to bewilder certain basic expectations of the medium, and moreover, the idiom, of public radio. In North of Empire (2009), Jody Berland extols the eclectic texture of a favourite radio drama; yet even as she praises its narrator for imbuing each of his characters with individual depth, her attention, she tells us, remains fixed on a voice “replete with storytelling pleasures and the sonic signature of the CBC.” The voice of radio itself is most salient; a guarantor of sense and place.

THE UNSOLITARY SETTLER

Gould’s Solitude Trilogy evokes three differently isolated places; the Northern territories, a Newfoundland fishing village, and a Mennonite community on the prairies. The first-person accounts of each terrain that Gould collects are often contradictory, and left alone; for any commentary would thwart the sought-after intimacy of the vignette. Each is a sample—yet none an apt synecdoche—of a nebulous “Canadian” identity. For this reason, Mark Kingwell suggests in his biography of Gould (2009) that Gould’s evocation of the fugue is a red herring, for his radio works defy the expectation of resolution that defines the form. As Kingwell notes, Gould himself uses a critical alter-ego to offer that “the real counterpoint is ideological, between the exercise of individual freedom and the ‘tremendously tyrannical force’” of the social, which one must overcome in order to gain from solitude. (131)

The Idea of North enacts a tussle with a landscape too variously vast to be interiorized as home. This fact appears an obstacle to any attempt to forge or describe a monolithic Canadian identity; so it is encouraging that Kingwell finds in Gould’s radio work a not-so-covert theme of hospitality, an openness to the “novelty of the unknown person” thrust upon one in an unknown clime. Even so, the North, cast as a contiguous and unfathomable neighbour-threshold, exists for the southerner Gould “to dream about, to spin tall tales about, and in the end, avoid.” In this regard, a reactive refusal of hospitality is geographized so as to obscure the political stakes.

Screen Capture from the CBC television adaptation of The Idea of North

To rethink Canadian identity on the model of hospitality is to name an obvious standard by which to flunk the extant state. Following the work of Toula Nicolacopoulos and George Vassilacopoulos in Indigenous Sovereignty and the Being of the Occupier (2014), one might suggest that hospitality requires a frank response to the question “where do you come from?” Any such self-accounting is specifically repressed in the conscience of the settler, and the romantic conception of North America as a vast wilderness, untrammelled and unpeopled prior to European influence, is an outcome and requirement of this repression. It is possible, and moreover desirable, to think the contrapuntal weft of voices comprising Gould’s radio play as a practice of hospitality; but first one must acknowledge the degree to which, after the means of its realization, this open narrative remains a one-sided overture.

According to Avital Ronell’s The Telephone Book (1989), what operates behind the radio in its appeal to “a tremendous national ear” is an obscure sense of the absolute priority of the other to oneself. (21) As seen above, a latent dialogue haunts every monovocal broadcast. However, one should complicate the too-readily metaphysicalized trope of the other with reference to the specific preoccupancy of a specific space by specific people, rather than fetishize otherness as a philosophico-poetic model for the production of pleasurable moral quandaries. Gould’s radio play would suggest as much, if negatively.

COMPOSING THE NATION-STATE

The fascinating effect of radio, R. Murray Schafer observes in The Soundscape (1994), has to do with the manner in which “broadcasting is separated into independent information channels so that the confusion of simultaneity, so often present in the soundscape at large, is absent.” (234) This facilitates the “deliberate attempt to regulate the flow of information according to human responses and information-processing capabilities.” (ibid) In short, radio functions as a half-conversation, an analysis turned in on itself, facilitating fanaticism and transference. Its domineering guise is the voice on which Berland fixates above, a sonic signature eliding content.

Glenn Gould publicity photo for The Idea of North, courtesy of Canada’s BiblioArchives/ LibraryArchives

Gould bewilders this unitary vision, insisting upon crowded conditions, interruption and subjective chafe. In this regard, his programme is not only contrapuntal, as argued by Kingwell, but enacts a spatial intervention directly analogous to those undertaken in modern music. Schafer explains that the radio technician must account for perspective. The technician, he writes, conceives of the sound-scene in three main parts—the Immediate, the Support, and the Background—the interaction of which permits the listener to hierarchicalize and excerpt information. “The three-stage plan of the radio technician corresponds precisely to the classical layout of the orchestral score with soloist, concertino group and tutti accompaniment.” (234) Gould, after the fashion of his maverick performances, which involved a kind of escalating competition between the orchestra and the soloist, revels in conditions of uncertainty as to which features of the soundscape are ground and which are figure. At crowded moments, the determination of semantic signal and ambient support, is at the listener’s discretion.

“I was fascinated by the country as such,” The Idea of North begins; and this abstraction collapses back into the desire that it originates, for the speaker’s geographical cathexis manifests a country from above, a mottled sublime: “I felt that I was almost part of that country, part of that peaceful surrounding, and I wished that it would never end.” The “almost” of this encounter is Gould’s theme. One speaker contradicts himself in tracing the evasiveness of an imaginary terrain: “I can’t conceive of anyone being in close touch with the North, whether he lived there all the time or simply traveled it month after month, year after year. I can’t conceive of such a person being really untouched by the North for the rest of his life.” By this conflicted account, one can neither touch, nor remain untouched by, this terrain. That the idea of the North will never coincide with any terrain seems logically apparent; for the object under discussion is designated by a cardinal direction, an expression of spatial relation. One must be south of North to perceive it as such: the idea would be necessarily southern.

Gould frequently qualified his vantage over the course of his life: his composition was ineluctably nostalgic, shaped by southern biases, and so on. This modesty is itself a token of mandatory modernity, mediated by professional politesse. But the work largely concerns the composer’s own difficulty before intransigent material. “It’s not da gold, it’s de finding da gold,” one speaker quotes in order to affirm his own designs upon the landscape, and the phatic article before the questing verb suggests a more salient problem of definition: “I think the North is process,” the ruminant continues, without specifying the (innocent or sordid) processes in which one’s fantasy may be enrolled. “North is multiple, shifting, elastic,” Sherrill Grace writes in her book, Canada and the Idea of North (2007), suggesting that Canadians can change their ideas of this destination, in spite, or because, of their unseemly and persistent attachment to myriad partial representations. (17)

Screen Capture from the CBC television adaptation of The Idea of North

In 1967, however, Gould’s panel reproduces a paternalistic depiction of the territories and their denizens. “Considering a place romantic means that one doesn’t know too much about it,” our first speaker opines, professing helplessness before communities she had intended to rescue. At this telling point in the collaged “discussion,” which evades a certain burden of representation by evacuating the narrative center, a pointed racism crests, albeit in a version intended to ambiguate pernicious stereotypes by distributing them across so many unreliable voices. But the denominator of this chorus is all too Canadian. However multiple, the voices that were selected to depict a democratic and multi-perspectival clamor did not have the least moral difficulty ruling upon the communities that they encountered in pursuit of their own obscure desires.

TALKING BACK

Grace titles the penultimate section of her book “The North Writes Back,” attempting a theory of Northern discourse to broadly refute colonial description. The voices presented here run counter to the documentary attempts of Glenn Gould, Pierre Berton, and so many others outlined in the first chapter, “Representing North.” Inuit artist Alootook Ipellie furnishes an epigram: “Let us put, without hesitation, a voice in the mouth of our silent mind.” (227) This rebukes the repeat characterization of (the idea of) North as a state of silence, vacancy, or isolation; and the secondhand zen of the willfully itinerant settler, determined to meditate unto epiphany upon any unassimilable strangeness. The silencing conditions to which Ipellie addresses himself may well be the din of interlopers and their presumptions, rather than the manifold soundscape of their common destination. To place voice in the mouth of mind is to reply to silencing conditions: the operative distinction between voice and mouth evokes a talk-back capacity implicit in receipt, if unrealized.

Artist and DJ Geronimo Inutiq’s 2015 work, ARCTICNOISE, commissioned by curators Britt Gallpen and Yasmin Nurming-Por, responds directly to Gould’s radio play. A multilingual, multimedia portrait of the sovereign voices of an irreducible North, Inutiq’s installation extends the discursive counterpoint of Gould’s composition, spanning platforms as well as perspectives. As Sydney Hart remarks in his essay, Reading Contrapuntally (2016), Inutiq’s formal extrapolation of Gould’s structure resonates with Edward Said’s musical thoughts on postcolonial literature and its plurality of voices. Contrapuntal reading entails a “simultaneous awareness both of the metropolitan history that is narrated and of those other histories against which (and together with which) the dominating discourse acts.” (62)

“ARCTICNOISE” Still from 2015 Installation, image by Trinity Square Video and imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival

In Inutiq’s installation, multiple video projections appear at cross-rhythms to each other, abstract digital art contrasting documentary interviews and archival footage. This juxtaposition aptly demonstrates the uneven contours of international development, mapped over the immersive course of Inutiq’s multipanoramic presentation. The context is combined and contradictory: resource extractive projects impelling settlers North, technological and military expansion into contested space during the Cold War, and a gallery-backed effort to create and claim Inuit artistic production, ready to market, as a national treasure, all play a part. These angles on the North are strategic abstractions, too; but to map them in simultaneity allows for a concerted, and concrete, critique.

Grace’s attempt to consolidate a “Northern” reply to a southern settler’s imaginary stalls upon qualification, as her ungrounded anthropology finds an innocuous “topographical and meteorological diversity” recapitulated at the highly localized level of attendant practice. By comparison, Inutiq’s ARCTICNOISE foregrounds interference in its very name. To call the multidiscursive clamour of the landscape ‘noise,’ an antecedent backing of any strong signal, is a totalizing gesture in the negative; at least where the transmissibility of identity to the state is concerned. In As We Have Always Done (2017), Nishinaabeg scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson cites nêhiyaw (Plains Cree) and Dene Suline scholar and artist Jarrett Martineau, describing Indigenous artistic practice as “noise to colonialism’s signal.” (198) This work, Simpson says, operates at an “elegant level of protection and disruption,” declining any susceptibility to a settler’s interception or interpretation, such as I cannot render here.

“ARCTICNOISE” Still from 2015 Installation, image by Trinity Square Video and imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival

This complicates the philosophical trope of counterpoint, which requires the horizontal elaboration of two or more mutually dependent themes, as well as their vertical separation in space for clarity. Settler colonialism and capitalism alike oversee any number of encroachments, such that this meaningful categorical distinction lapses into convolution. If Gould’s ideal is a melodically assured phraseology, each soloist empowered to give a self-account, Inutiq’s challenge restores a prerequisite space to the arrangement of voices. The additive model of liberal civics—the progressivist notion that we only need for more diversity of talk-for-trade—swaps the necessity of a collaborative space for more and greater time, in which span all will be forgiven. To visually recompose Gould’s ad hoc townhall, with greater geographical and cultural specificity, is a powerful reminder that the purposes of any settler-artist’s pilgrimage may coincide with a place of their choosing, but never essentially.

PROGRAMME MUSIC

What does the radio voice shore in a Canadian context? Gould’s selective chorus is a demonstration of certain normative commitments, formally reiterative of an impasse of representation. The difficulties implicit in broadcast cannot simply be addressed at the level of more and authoritative voices, for it is not the radio voice that is the problem here so much as the body from which it is presumed to emanate.

Screen Capture from the CBC television adaptation of The Idea of North

“I am indeed a Northern listener then,” the Virgilian surveyor McLean proclaims late in the broadcast, “and the pity of it all is that I’m not always able to select what I want to hear. I hear what other people inflict upon me. You know, the noise, the noise of civilization and its discontents.” In this vulgarized Freudian remark, the speaker identifies ‘noise’ as a claustrophobic condition, from which one might escape. While Freud’s text details the aversive attempt by an individual ego to differentiate itself over-against bracing reality, Gould’s soloist attempts identification with a synthetic perspective straddling this opposition: “I do believe able to reflect on that selection makes you more than the mere analyst that most of us claim we are [. . .] in detaching and in reflecting and in listening I suppose I’m able to synthesize, to have these different rails meet in the infinity that is our conscious hope.” However multiply determined, this identification—of transportation infrastructure with a vastly collective desire—remains laudably materialist, emphasizing the production of heretofore unheardof proximities in space.

In heavy handed analogy to symphonic form, The Idea of North ends more or less where it began, generically elsewhere. The metaphorical journey by train concludes with the armchair philosophical pontifications of panelist W. V. MacLean, backed with a defamiliarized recording of Sibelius’ fifth symphony, which threatens at moments to swallow MacLean’s climactic speech. Paraphrasing William James, MacLean posits struggle against provisional alterity as a psychological necessity and subjective virtue. Today, he posits brazenly, “the moral equivalent of war is going North.” Gould concludes the piece with this bon mot, a surprise analogy that relies for its effect on the presumption that Canadian designs in this direction are more often peaceable than not. This is far from certain, and Gould’s finale reminds the listener that the vehicle of this idea is itself susceptible to weaponization, as radio develops in periods of conflict and conquest. Then the least technologically contingent aspect of Gould’s epochal docudrama would appear the most bizarre today—the desire to test one’s conflictual mettle in flight.

Screen Capture from the CBC television adaptation of The Idea of North

CODA

How these examples speak to today’s post-broadcast episteme would require another survey altogether. Surely today’s ideological counterpoint would sound far more dissonant, a disputatious and often collaborative din. But this idealized polyvocality may itself manifest a one-sided desire, a dialogic fantasy of which agenda national radio is but one diagram. Practical matters, of land and its capture, are obscured by this restaging of the stakes of colonialism as a conversation rather than an occupation.

A key theme of The Idea of North would be the practice and depiction of utopia for loners, but a counter-message sounds as clearly: that wherever one travels to find oneself, one is forever destined to find other people in their place. There are no definitive arrivals, and everything depends upon what happens next—on hospitality contra the arrogance of occupation. One historical staging of this quandary has been named “Canada,” and Gould’s mythopoetic play for voices is a crucial document of its becoming, flaws and all. As with any broadcast, it is up to each listener to imagine a possible reply.

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Featured Image:Screen Capture from the CBC television adaptation of The Idea of North

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CAM SCOTT is a poet, critic, and improvising non-musician from Winnipeg, Canada, Treaty One territory. He performs under the name Cold-catcher and writes in and out of Brooklyn. His visual suite, WRESTLERS, was released by Greying Ghost in 2017. 

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James Tlsty is a Junior studying English and Philosophy, Politics and Law (PPL) at Binghamton University. James draws from literature and philosophy for pragmatic applications in social policy and activism. James is an active champion of the arts, as evidenced by his work with on-campus art initiative OPEN, a hybrid art gallery and open mic. He is also the resident Pop Music Department Director and an E-Board member at WHRW, where he is a registered radio engineer and programmer.

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Limn

Deep Diagnostics

The women waited on the prickly grass, their babies hanging from nearby trees in brightly coloured string bags, too-quiet children on their laps. One by one they ascended the veranda steps to the blue Formica table, where the nurse asked them the questions they had heard many times before. “Skin hat?,” “kai kai?,” “Pek pek wara?” “Kus?” Do they have a fever? Have they eaten? Do they have loose stools? Do they have a cough? The women sat rigid on the hard bench and whispered barely audible replies. A thermometer was placed delicately under an armpit. The nurse listened to a child’s breathing with a stethoscope. A clinic book, detailing a child’s previous visits to the clinic was cursorily examined.

What were the options here? Pneumonia, malaria, diarrhea, hopefully not tuberculosis. The nurse was so familiar with the symptoms and the treatment possibilities that she rarely opened the small standard treatment book that sat on the neatly organized table next to her. Most of the children were given antimalarials (chloroquine with Fansidar), antibiotics (amoxicillin) and panadol. The mothers of the very sick ones (bikpela sik) were asked to come back if their child did not improve. They walked away in the blinding sun, carrying their children in their arms and their babies, parceled in their woven string bags, on their heads.

In 2004, when I visited Begasin Health Centre in Usino Bundi district, Papua New Guinea, diagnosis at a rural health clinic meant aligning a patient’s symptoms with available treatments. Some rudimentary diagnostic tools were available: a stethoscope, a thermometer, a sphygmomanometer. But most community health workers and nurses depended on a combination of clinical judgment and syndromic algorithms from standard treatment books to undertake what medical practitioners call “empirical diagnosis.” When the prescribed treatment did not work and patients returned to the health center sicker than when they had left, the health workers would scour the standard treatment book for other possibilities: tuberculosis, meningitis, dengue. There was no laboratory here, no way to test for these diseases, and very sick patients were referred to the general hospital in the coastal capital, several hours walk and a long bus journey away.

There was a microscope at Begasin health centre—possibly a remainder from earlier attempts to extend microscopy services into rural areas, or perhaps a one-off donation from a development agency or NGO—but no one knew how long it had been there or how to use it, and no one had the key to the wooden cabinet in which it was kept. Inside the clinic, a surplus box of microscope slides propped the window open, providing welcome ventilation to the humid, tin-roofed room.

The routine medical protocols I observed on the verandah of Begasin Health Centre in 2004 were a far remove from laboratory-based gold standards for medical diagnosis, yet they did comply with the standards for rural primary health care in low and middle-income countries. At the time, the WHO recommended that anyone presenting with fever in a malaria-endemic area with no access to microscopy services should be treated presumptively with anti-malarials. Empirical diagnosis based on clinical judgement was considered the only way for curative medicine to proceed in places where a lack of technical and transportation infrastructure and expertise precluded the extension of laboratory services.

Yet even as I observed the routine dispensing of antibiotics and antimalarials at Begasn Health Centre, elsewhere the norms for basic care in resource-limited settings were changing. Growing antimicrobial resistance to first-line drugs, such as those for malaria and tuberculosis, and the heightened cost of new drugs were drawing attention to the human and economic cost of empirical diagnosis and the overtreatment it generates. Nonetheless, the technology and expertise necessary for more accurate laboratory diagnosis simply wasn’t present in primary health care settings in many low- and middle-income countries, where the transportation, electrification, communication, and sanitation infrastructure that laboratories depend on did not reach.

A novel solution to this dilemma emerged in the late 1990s, with the development and release to market of a handful of malaria rapid diagnostic tests (MRDTs). These lateral-flow immunochromatographic tests used isolated antibodies to bind with malaria parasite antigens present in a blood sample. A positive test resulted in the appearance of a thin line in the test window where the antigen-antibody interaction occurred. MRDTs were not as accurate as laboratory based microscopy and, as the number of tests available on the market proliferated, concerns about disparity in the quality of devices and a lack of regulation in many low- and middle-income countries also grew. Nonetheless, these small devices had a significant advantage over laboratory-based assays: they were mobile.

Malaria rapid diagnostic test kits were transportable to places with limited road access. They compressed the time between test and result and therefore reduced the risk of losing patients to follow-up. They were affordable (with prices at around $1-$2 per testing kit) and easy to use, meaning they did not require a laboratory technician to read them. MRDTs extended the reach of laboratory medicine in two directions. First, they revealed the presence of pathogens hidden deep in the recesses of the diseased body. Second, they were designed to penetrate the farthest edges of the health system. Global health had entered the age of deep diagnostics.

Public Needs, Private Goods

The excitement that surrounded point-of-care diagnostic devices following the arrival of the MRDT turned on their potential to make the physical extension of laboratory infrastructure unnecessary. But the shift from laboratory to test also brought a wholly different—and equally problematic—infrastructure into view: the market.

The development of MRDTs by biotechnology brought the absence of comparable point-of-care testing devices for other treatable infectious diseases in low-income countries into sharp relief and spurred demands for their development. In 2006, for example, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) marked World TB day by calling for the “urgent need for ‘a simple test which yields results almost instantly and can be used by any laboratory technician, nurse or health workers even when far away from a laboratory.’” Campaign groups and public health experts made similar calls for diagnostics for neglected tropical diseases, such as trypanosomiasis and visceral leishmaniosis. Diagnostic devices are commodities, and their nonexistence was explained through the frame of market failure. The WHO focused on disincentives for industry to invest in the technology, including prohibitive R&D costs, a lack of regulation, uncertainty about market size, and concern about the ability of governments to pay for tests (AMS 2009: 9; WHO 2006). They discussed the need “to stimulate and facilitate the diagnostics industry to adapt available technologies to develop new diagnostics” (WHO 1998:2), and to call for partnership and engagement between the public sector and industry. In 1997, in an innovative move, the WHO organized a joint convention with industry to identify feasible TB tests for development. The premise of the convention was that public health experts could identify the tests that were needed, while industry representatives could help identify those that were most feasible (WHO 1997).

Emphasis on partnership gained momentum in the early 2000s, when the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation entered the fray, adding diagnostics to its focus on drugs and vaccines within its mission to find technical solutions to global health challenges. The Gates Foundation already had invested in the establishment of novel public-private partnership arrangements for the development of life-saving drugs (DNDi) and vaccines (Gavi). In 2003, they donated $30 million to establish FIND, a nonprofit organization based in Geneva and often referred to as a “product development partnership,” with a remit of helping promising diagnostic developers to overcome development, regulatory, and market challenges. They also gave significant sums to PATH, a Seattle based nonprofit that develops new diagnostic tests, undertakes market research, and builds partnerships with industrial manufacturers.

By the middle of the decade, the global health community widely accepted that “strategic efforts to build laboratory capacity must be pursued urgently by partnerships between public (national and international), private and commercial sectors to address this health care crisis” (Petti et al. 2006: 380). With the articulation of a need for diagnosis segueing into the need for point-of-care diagnostics, work to improve the diagnosis of treatable diseases in resource-limited settings became concomitant with the work of “stimulating” and “shaping” markets for global health. These efforts to incentivize diagnostic development led to the creation of a whole array of market-making techniques, methods and devices, designed to align the necessary with the feasible, which are ancillary to the diagnostic device itself.

Market Devices

So the world needs diagnostics—but which diagnostics? Not only are there multiple candidate diseases for which diagnostics might be developed, there are also multiple possible ways to test for any single disease, from rapid antigen-based assays to molecular-level PCR. Depending on where a test is embedded in a patient care pathway, its infrastructural requirements, what kind of sample is obtained and how (finger-prick, intra-venous blood, saliva, vaginal swab, sputum, urine), and what the test seeks to detect (antigens, antibodies, biomarkers, pathogens) all determine what kind of information a test generates, how accurate that information is, and what can be done with it.

For example, a simple, affordable and easy-to-use test for tuberculosis with high sensitivity (ability to capture positive cases) and low specificity (ability to exclude negative cases) could be used at a peripheral health care setting to triage patients but not to make treatment decisions. Positive cases would need to be sent for confirmatory testing to ensure people are not treated with highly toxic drugs unnecessarily. A point-of-care non-sputum-based biomarker test with high sensitivity and specificity may enable positive diagnosis, but will not necessarily enlighten health workers about drug resistance or susceptibility.

For every disease, a multitude of tests with different performance characteristics are possible. How should diagnostic developers decide in which tests to invest their time and resources? Market logic demands that, if investors are going to invest in diagnostics, and developers are going to embark on lengthy R&D programs, they need to know there will be demand for the end product. Identifying which tests are “needed”—and therefore which tests future customers (bilateral agencies, philanthropic foundations such as the Clinton Foundation, and international organizations such as the Global Fund) are most likely to buy—has therefore become a crucial step in fostering markets for diagnostic devices.

A range of market-making techniques, methods, and devices has been developed or borrowed to help define diagnostic needs and align them with industry-led solutions. Here are three of them:

1. Forecasting

In 2004, in collaboration with the RAND corporation, the Gates Foundation established the Global Diagnostics Forum, an interdisciplinary research group with the goal of identifying which diagnostic tests are likely to have the most health impact and to stimulate interest in such tests among the global health community. As Deborah C.Hay Burgess explained in the forum’s subsequent special supplement of Nature, “An initial step in developing a rational strategy for creating diagnostic technologies for global health is to determine the need for, and the health impact of, potential new tests” (Hay Burgess et al. 2006: 2).

The forum used mathematical modeling techniques to predict the impact (measured in lives saved and disability-adjusted life years [DALYS]) for hypothetical tests in six disease areas (acute lower-respiratory infections, HIV/AIDS, diarrheal diseases, malaria, tuberculosis, and sexually transmitted infections). The GDF models quantified the difference between the status quo—in which empirical diagnosis is the norm in peripheral areas—and a future populated with rapid point-of-care tests.

The chief finding was that higher-accuracy tests, requiring more advanced infrastructure, would have a lower overall impact on disease burden than less-accurate tests that could be used in more peripheral facilities and therefore reach a greater number of people. For instance, a syphilis test requiring minimal laboratory infrastructure was calculated to prevent more than 138,000 congenital syphilis cases and more than 148,000 stillbirths annually. A test that could be performed with no laboratory infrastructure could prevent more than 201,000 congenital syphilis cases and 215,000 stillbirths annually (Urdea et al. 2006: 75; Keeler et al. 2006). Deeper penetration of the health system trumped the scientific penetration of biological matter. The impact of point-of-care diagnostic tests could be greater than that of gold-standard laboratory testing, so long as they were ambitiously distributed.

The scientific calculations that the GDF put forward made a forceful case for global health funders to invest in the development and procurement of rapid, portable, point-of-care diagnostic devices. Yet for all their apparent numerical objectivity, the GDF forecasts also depended on the construction of a compelling story about what global health “impact” looks like.

First, the GDF focused on the potential for point-of-care diagnostics to bring about some improvement, however minimal, for populations with inadequate access to diagnostic technologies: “We consider a new test to represent an improvement if it saves more adjusted lives than would be saved in the status quo” (Girosi et al. 2006: 6). This humanitarian calculus side-stepped tricky ethical questions about global health inequity; including whether it is acceptable for patients at peripheral facilities in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) to receive a less-accurate diagnostic test than patients with access to laboratory services in wealthier countries or regions (see also Moran, this issue).

Second, the GDF forecasts implicitly abandoned older developmental visions of large-scale infrastructure development, accepting that the electrification and transportation infrastructures necessary for laboratories were unlikely to be extended uniformly across LMICs. In the GDF forecasts, the health centers where point-of-care tests were used would all remain disconnected from centralized electrification, transportation, sanitation, and communication infrastructures into the future. This was acknowledged in an aside made in one of the publications resulting from the project:

Although it is outside the scope of this paper, another method for improving health outcomes that could be approached in parallel to improving diagnostic tests would be enhancing the infrastructure and staffing available at these health-care settings. This approach would, in turn, allow the facilities to adopt better tests that might be available today or in the future. For instance, improving infrastructure and staffing could allow nucleic-acid-based tests for STIs to be adopted in more health-care settings” (Girosi et al., 2006: 8).

The GDF forecasts included calculations about the likely availability and success of treatment at different levels of health facility in different countries, but tenuous links between diagnostic test and treatment were, for the most part, glossed over. For example, the forecasts made no mention of the complexities of rolling out smooth medical supply systems, health-worker training, and treatment protocols in health settings lacking basic infrastructure. As critical global health scholars have shown, whether a test is used, how it is interpreted, and how it is acted on each depend on local institutional histories, relationships and expectations (e.g. Beisel et al. 2016; Chandler et al. 2011). The conflation of test availability with treatment created the impression that diagnostic devices have a direct impact on disease itself, occluding the many contingent steps in the diagnostic process, and focusing attention on the device itself as a worthy investment for global health funders.

Last, the GDF forecasts generated a vision of universal access to point-of-care testing that was, in some respects, no less grand than older developmental schemes. This was a vision in which there are tests for everything and tests everywhere. These tests would not be as accurate as laboratory tests that require carefully calibrated machines, refrigerated reagents, and highly trained technicians, but through sheer ubiquity they would save more lives than the best laboratory tests. This was a vision for a health infrastructure that is modest in quality but ambitious in reach.

Ultimately, the “success” of the GDF forecasts depended less on their scientific accuracy in predicting the future, than on their capacity to convince funders and developers that diagnostics have humanitarian, public health and economic value. The objective was to “articulate the acute need for diagnostic tools” and “encourage technology developers in the public and private sectors to do more to accelerate the development and delivery of new diagnostic solutions” (Hay Burgess et al. 2006: 2).

2. Consensus making

The GDF harnessed mathematical modeling techniques to evidence the need for specific diagnostics and incentivize funders and industry. However, time and again, the accuracy of mathematical forecasting has been shown to vary wildly. In 1967, the RAND Corporation published an influential paper outlining a new forecasting method, based on the generation of consensus among a community of experts. Ultimately, the author stated, mathematical models are only as good as the experts who provide the input values, so why not make this dependence on experts explicit and refine the process? The solution outlined in that paper, called the Delphi method, was first developed to forecast the impact of technological change on warfare. It was underpinned by the idea that groups are better at predicting the future than individuals, and anonymity will encourage flexibility and safeguard against status-based influence. A questionnaire was sent out to selected experts in the field. Their answers were anonymously summarized by a facilitator, who laid out common and conflicting viewpoints and reasoning and asked participants to revise their answers to the questionnaires in these responses. Over several rounds, the group was expected to move towards a consensus about what is most likely to happen.

Since the mid-20th century, the Delphi method has metamorphosed into a facilitation tool for the management of multi-stakeholder projects and is especially popular in global health. In the context of global diagnostics, it is not used to reconcile the predictions of different stakeholders, but to establish which futures—in the form of specific tests—are most desirable. In 2014, for example, the Global TB Programme of the World Health Organisation employed the Delphi method to identify priority diagnostic tests for tuberculosis (WHO 2014). The “experts” consulted in the Delphi Process included 24 participants from technical agencies and researchers (all but one based in the northern hemisphere); seven participants from funding organisations; five participants from supranational TB reference laboratories; five implementers and clinicians (all but one from institutions in the Northern hemisphere); and six representatives from countries with a high burden of TB. The process resulted in agreement on three diagnostic priorities: (i) a point-of care, biomarker-based, non-sputum-based test to detect TB; (ii) a point-of-care test that could be used for triage; (iii) a point-of-care sputum-based test that could be used as a replacement for smear microscopy. These were taken forward to a subsequent meeting with industry, where product profiles for the tests were agreed on.

The use of the Delphi method in this context raises questions about who is included and excluded from processes of defining global health needs. As one WHO representative put it to me, “The process works if you have the right experts.” But who are the “right” experts? Some lines of exclusion were explicit: for example, WHO rules designed to safeguard against the influence of commercial interests dictated that industry representatives were excluded from the process. Others were more opaque: the group was dominated by academics and public-health professionals from funders and global health organizations based in Europe and North America. In an indication of the extent to which the process of identifying needs was driven by market logic, these experts were also key individuals likely to influence their organization’s future procurement policies. Overall, out of 46 invited participants in the Delphi method, twelve were based at institutions in low- and middle-income countries with a high burden of tuberculosis.

3. Profiling

Needs must be met with solutions, and while it is sometimes deemed appropriate to exclude industry representatives from the definition of global health needs, their participation in the finding of solutions is presumed to be crucial if those solutions are going to be feasible. In 2014, following the use of the Delphi method to ascertain priority needs, the WHO hosted a meeting in Geneva where industry representatives were invited to help develop performance specifications (sensitivity, specificity, shelf life, infrastructure requirements, cost) for the priority tests. The final specifications were subsequently published in the form of four target product profiles (TPPs).

The TPP was a device originally designed by the FDA in the late 1990s to improve communication with the pharmaceutical industry during the drug-development process. Over the past decade, the TPP has found a new home among global health initiatives as a technique for reconciling needs with solutions, demand with supply. A TPP that has had input from funders, regulators, users, and industry not only describes a goal, in the form of a diagnostic test, but is intended to make its achievement more likely. TPPs, as one WHO representative explained to me, “are aspirational.” They are guidance for the manufacturer on what kind of tests agencies are willing to procure. At the same time, the role of industry in defining those characteristics means they are more likely to be met.

At the 2014 meeting, the writing of TPPs involved negotiations between advocacy groups and industry over the correct pricing of the tests, and between users and industry about the kind of temperature stability that would be required. The TPP convention of recording “minimum” and “optimum” specifications for each of these items meant that some degree of difference between stakeholders could be tolerated in the final profile. The TPP brought the desirable within touching distance of the possible.

Conclusion

The arrival of the malaria rapid diagnostic test fundamentally changed ideas about what kind of medicine was feasible and desirable at the periphery. It became possible to imagine that microbes, parasites, or viruses, which are imperceptible to the human eye, could be identified in bodily fluids by a health worker with basic training in a health facility with no running water, electricity, or laboratory equipment. In changing what was technically possible, the rapid diagnostic test kit also transformed expectations for everyday medicine in resource-limited settings. The human cost of misdiagnosis and unnecessary treatment, which previously had been accepted as the necessary cost of universal access to health care in places without a laboratory, now became an aberration demanding action.

The arrival of mobile point-of-care diagnostics also presaged a shift in the problematization of diagnosis in global health, from how to extend laboratory infrastructure to how to stimulate markets for mobile devices. Once the need for diagnosis in peripheral primary-care settings became commensurate with the need for diagnostic devices, the substantial problem-solving apparatus of global health institutions in Europe and the United States was focused on overcoming the challenge of market failure.

Ironically, given that the “need” for diagnostics in global health was framed as the motivation behind these activities, they also were aimed at specifying those needs. Once identified, needs also had to be articulated with feasible solutions—that is, small, portable, marketable diagnostic devices. The alignment of public needs with private solutions required a fine-tuned array of techniques, methods, and devices that would align the desirable with the feasible at the same time as they kept public and private interests distinct. Whether this has had any impact on the care provided at Begasin Health Centre in Papua New Guinea is another story.

Alice Street is a Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh, where she currently holds a European Research Council Starting Grant for “Investigating the Design and Use of Diagnostic Devices in Global Health” (DiaDev). Her research focuses on hospital ethnography, health systems research, global health interventions and medical innovation. She has carried out ethnographic research in Papua New Guinea and India and is the author of Biomedicine in an Unstable Place: Infrastructure and Personhood in a Papua New Guinean Hospital.

Acknowledgements

This essay is based on research supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 715450.

References

Academy of Medical Sciences. 2009. “Global health diagnostics: research, development and regulation. Workshop Report.” Available at: link.

Beisel, Uli.; René Umlauf; Eleanor Hutchinson; and Clare I.R. Chandler. 2016. “The complexities of simple technologies: Re-imagining the role of rapid diagnostic tests in malaria control efforts.” Malaria Journal, 15(1): 64.

Chandler, Clare I. R.; Rachel Hall-Clifford; Turinde Asaph; Magnussen Pascal; Siân Clarke; and Anthony K. Mbonye. 2011. “Introducing malaria rapid diagnostic tests at registered drug shops in Uganda: limitations of diagnostic testing in the reality of diagnosis. Social Science & Medicine (1982), 72(6): 937-44.

Girosi, Federico et al. 2006. “Developing and interpreting models to improve diagnostics in developing countries.” Nature, 444: 3-8.

Hay Burgess, Deborah C.; Jeffrey Wasserman; and Carol A. Dahl. 2006. “Global health diagnostics.” Nature, 444: 1-2.

Keeler, Emett.; Perkins, Mark D.; Small, Peter.; and Hanson, Christy. (2006). Reducing the global burden of tuberculosis: the contribution of improved diagnostics. Nature, 444: 49-57

Petti, Cathy A., Polage, Christopher R., Quinn, Thomas C., Ronald, Allan R., & Sande, Merle A. 2006. Laboratory Medicine in Africa: A Barrier to Effective Health Care. Clinical Infectious Diseases, 42(3): 377–382.

Urdea, Mickey et al. 2006. “Requirements for high impact diagnostics in the developing world.” Nature, 444: 73-79.

World Health Organization. 1997. Workshop report. “WHO tuberculosis diagnostics workshop: Product development guidelines.” Available at: link.

World Health Organization. 1998. “Global tuberculosis programme: The tuberculosis diagnostics initiative.” Available at: link.

World Health Organization. 2006. “Diagnostics for tuberculosis: Global demand and market potential.” Available at: link.

World Health Organization. 2014. Meeting report. “High-priority target product profiles for new tuberculosis diagnostics: Report of a consensus meeting.” Available at: link.

Christopher Kelty

On Band-Aids and Magic Bullets

“Suppose you have a cut on your finger. Cut a piece of Band-Aid from the strip, pull off the face-cloth and put the bandage over the wound. That’s all there is to it. The bandage will stay right where you place it without tying. Can you imagine anything handier for the household or shop?” — The Red Cross Messenger[1]
“New situations demand new magic.”
(Evans-Pritchard 1937: 513)

The origin of the humble Band-Aid offers enticing material for corporate legend. In 1920, Earle Dickson was a cotton buyer for the medical supply company known as Johnson & Johnson in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Dickson, the story goes, had an accident-prone young wife named Josephine. Concerned about her tendency to acquire small injuries in the course of daily routines, he created an ingenious solution: a prepared set of strips combining sterile gauze, surgical tape and a crinoline fabric cover to keep it clean until use. Now, when his wife needed a dressing, she could simply take a strip, cut it to length, peel off the fabric and apply it herself. Minor wound care moved into the domain of self-treatment, a selling point that eventually convinced Dickson’s employer to begin marketing it the following year. After a slow start, the new bandage caught on. The company displayed enough marketing imagination to distribute it for free to Boy Scout troops across the country, and by 1924 had begun to offer machine-cut Band-Aids in multiple sizes.

BAND-AID® Brand Adhesive Bandage ad from 1920, showing the product as Earle Dickson invented it. Image: Johnson & Johnson Archives.

BAND-AID® Brand Adhesive Bandage ad from 1920, showing the product as Earle Dickson invented it. Image: Johnson & Johnson Archives.

At the time of Dickson’s innovation, Johnson & Johnson was already a well-established and innovative enterprise. The company derived from the labors of three industrious brothers of that name, the eldest of whom, Robert Wood, had trained as an apothecary. Inspired by the surgeon Joseph Lister’s crusade for the merits of sterile surgery, he had gone into business with a fellow hygiene enthusiast, George Seabury, to create medical plasters and surgical dressings. In 1885 he joined his brothers in manufacturing ready-to-use dressings, and what came to be known as first-aid kits. By 1888, their product list included “accident and emergency cases” for antiseptic treatment, available in several sizes. After surveying railway surgeons across the country about their needs, the company launched a “railway station and factory supply case” containing a set of equipment that would enable station agents to respond to emergencies. In 1898 Johnson & Johnson supplied a “first aid packet” for soldiers fighting for the United States in the Spanish-American War, and in 1901 began producing first-aid instruction manuals. The range of kits on offer only would continue to grow with new transport inventions, like the automobile and airplane.[2] War was good to Johnson & Johnson. If not yet a fully transnational behemoth, it found ample opportunity in the mass suffering of European trenches even before the United States joined the First World War. At the close of the conflict, the company stood poised for new things, and the migration of bandages from battlefield to kitchen offered an expanding domestic front.[3]

Johnson and Johnson Band-Aid™ products.

Johnson and Johnson Band-Aid® products.

A deeper history of wound care might complicate this story, adding rival accounts and antecedents of packaged dressings and plasters, as well as shifting conceptions of risk. (See Tarr and Tebeau 1997 for more on concern about “accidents” in early 20th-century America.) Likewise, a wider account of the rise of mass consumption and marketing might situate this particular story within a broad pattern of commodity domestication, such as campaigns to put cigarettes into the hands of women (Brandt 1996). Nonetheless, the corporate arc leading to the trademarked product officially known as the Band-Aid provides key elements for analysis. A simple but ingenious innovation, the adhesive bandage enabled the most ordinary and clumsy citizens to treat minor cuts and abrasions quickly and reliably wherever they found themselves. The early 20th century housewife and shop operator each gained new assurance in their mechanized environments, freed from worrying about minor hazards contained in the tools of their trade. Standardized and pre-sterilized, the new strip was mobile while packaged and stable once applied. It was easy to use, durable in action and boasted a long shelf-life. A box of them anticipated future accidents and stood prepared for the next minor emergency. An icon of middle-class safety and hygiene was born: children would grow up receiving quick treatment for mishaps, in increasingly colorful forms. The Band-Aid fits neatly into the first-aid kit, a larger and more capacious assemblage of items with similar intent. Deposited around the landscape of everyday industrial life—houses, cars, boats, offices, airplanes—such kits provided a small cache of prepared supplies available for any need that might suddenly arise. Beyond a lucrative business opportunity for corporations like Johnson & Johnson, these little packets enabled a new norm of quick response. One might even describe them as a minor form of medicalization, redefining small problems through anticipated care. At the very moment cries and finger-pointing might begin, a solution now was already at hand, just awaiting application.

1970s Band-Aid Advertisement.

1970s Band-Aid® Advertisement.

In and of itself, it is hard to argue with a Band-Aid. As anyone who has used one knows, this little strip of adhesive tape and gauze offers an enchantingly simple and reliable response to a small cut, abrasion, blister, or splinter. Once sealed and padded, a minor injury can heal without further interference, causing less distress. If not fully therapeutic, or particularly effective at keeping a wound moist and sterile, the adhesive bandage would at least offer the advantage of protection as well as palliation. (Current medical consensus favors keeping wounds hydrated and covered; see Sood et al. 2014.) Here, at least, it would seem the overflow of 19th-century military and industrial production offered some small benefits to civilian society.

Yet the Oxford English Dictionary records a second entry for the term, describing “a temporary or makeshift solution to a problem,” a merely palliative rather than properly curative result.[4] The connotation of this secondary usage is clearly negative, implying insufficiency and disappointment. Whatever the value of palliation for patient comfort, it does not address underlying causes and can appear unsatisfactory from a therapeutic perspective. Ultimately, a Band-Aid is a modest form of care, one that provides minor relief and minimal hygiene. It offers a poor substitute for a health clinic staffed by experts. No one would, or should, mistake it for a hospital. Moreover, a bandage placed over a poorly cleaned wound risks infection, ultimately concealing a festering sore. This second meaning of the term, then, introduces a dimension of critical distance into what would otherwise appear an innocuous, if not irreproachable good. Is a Band-Aid the right tool for the task? Is it enough? Or might it mask a deeper problem while providing false security?

This second, critical meaning of the term features prominently in discussions of international aid projects, which include a long history of things that appear superficially beneficial but quickly prove inadequate. Indeed, an entire approach in development and global health might appear cynically insufficient, the smallest palliation in the face of serious need. Such critical, suspicious use of the term invites interrogation, however, given its literal referent in a small, inoffensive adhesive bandage. At what point, and under what conditions, might a Band-Aid transmute from a modest improvement into a deceptive response? When does the inflection shift, from doing “a little good” to “little good”?

To help frame an answer, consider a second metaphorical referent. Like the Band-Aid, the phrase “magic bullet” appears with some frequency in contemporary discussions related to international aid and global health (e.g. Cueto 2013). Frequently, the use in this context is both metaphorical and pejorative, indicating a misguided faith in a would-be technical solution to a socially complex problem. It implies that belief in technology can itself turn into magical thinking, misapprehending the nature of the problem and forgetting larger truths in a quest for simple answers. Indeed, the phrase clearly references European folk tradition, in which a silver bullet might slay a monster such as a werewolf.[5] The silver bullet suggests a fetish of the classic sort, an object thought to possess extraordinary powers by those who believe in it and congealed mystification by those who do not (e.g. Latour 2010; Scott-Smith 2013). At moments of duress, facing a grave threat and the apparent failure of ordinary objects to meet it, magical thinking grows attractive. Surely someone should still act, and “do something”— even when confronting an apparently intractable challenge. The self-appointed task of any critic would then be to dispel fairy tales, unveiling illusions and exposing the false promises of an idol suffused with ontological and epistemological distortions. This is obviously easier to do when occupying a position of certainty and offering an alternative means to deal with whatever lurks beyond the door.

<em>Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet</em>, 1940. Directed by William Dieterle.

Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet, 1940. Directed by William Dieterle.

However, in medical history the magic bullet also signals another, positive framing, as a pharmaceutical concept introduced at the outset of the 20th century by the German Jewish scientist Paul Ehrlich of “drugs that go straight to their intended cell-structural targets” (Strebhardt and Ullrich 2008: 1). Ehrlich’s vision of a charmed projectile suggests an alternative basis for allure: the capacity for specific targeting, as demonstrated by the synthetic drug Salvarsan against syphilis. Although anyone familiar with chemotherapy might recognize shortfalls in the current application of this concept in cancer treatment, an updated, genetically informed version of his dream remains very much alive. Targeting enables a different sort of magic — that of altering scale. Narrowing scope reduces the field of reference from macro to micro, permitting tangible, immediate action within a delimited space of encounter. Targeting nonetheless retains a degree of grand ambition. If the right projectile dispatches its werewolf anywhere, at any time, then a path to universality runs precisely through heightened specificity. Targeting also implies a reduction of waste and a minimization of unintended consequences. The objects it creates lend themselves to regimes of audit, testing, and recursive experimentation, while requiring neither mass labor mobilization nor state-level regulatory systems such as prior development regimes. A specific remedy shines brightly with the promise of efficiency. More might be accomplished with less, simply by concentrating the connection between problem and intervention. The contemporary magic bullet, then, may indeed be a fetish but one whose specific qualities of enchantment exemplify the historical moment. For tangibility clearly inspires those working on humanitarian objects and attracts the interest of influential publics. Rather than abstractly “doing good,” it suggests the possibility of making a specific, located, and measurable difference (Good and Good 2012).

When does a Band-Aid appear deceptive? The question correlates directly with the imagined parameters and scale of expectations that surround it. Scale is an inherently relational concept: a response appears small and attenuated when problems loom large and long. An adhesive bandage might work wonderfully for a superficial cut or abrasion but not a deeper wound. Yet as the legacy of the magic bullet recalls, a delimited scope also could signify precision: the hope that something small might produce a desired effect with fewer secondary consequences. This magic might prove illusory. It might inflate expectations and promise more than it could ever deliver or provide cynical cover for inaction. Nonetheless, the fact of its failure should not wholly displace inadequacy onto the object itself.

Even a cursory historical sketch of Band-Aids and magic bullets, then, can serve to complicate dismissals of small responses to large problems. My intent is not to discount the critical impulse behind these offhand references, which all too often prove painfully accurate about the demonstrable inadequacy of a given intervention, or the exaggerated claims attached to it. Rather, I seek to reorient this critical frame slightly and attend to the assumptions it carries in the moment of its deployment. Is there not another kind of enchantment involved in criticizing interventions with generic demands for “structural change,” whether those voicing the call are critical social scientists, activists, NGO practitioners, or even government ministers? For how is such change imagined? Does this imply the dream of a giant magic bomb, as it were, recalling political movements and revolutions past that upended norms in a complete and satisfyingly ambitious fashion. Or are these visions of expansive modernist planning and the kind of massive projects intent on sweeping, epochal shifts: dams and waterworks, electrical grids, splitting the atom, the dawn of a new age. In their small and flawed utility, little devices can at least open larger questions that otherwise might remain foreclosed. If a welfare state now appears the lost guarantor of security, then how might it be reconceived to include more than a national population? If industrial capitalism ultimately lies at the root of contemporary concerns over inequality and environmental degradation, then what might alternatives to its material norms look like in technical terms?

Recognizing that the problem with Band-Aids is primarily one of scale and application, it follows that a critical response should not simply expose such deficiencies but also explore them in relation to any desired alternative. The concept of scale is complex, suggesting dimensions of both size and level, for which reason some geographers have advocated dispensing with the term and adopting a flatter spatial vocabulary (Marston et al. 2005). But even a less-hierarchal theoretical frame would need to attend to scope and connection, as well as to the sense of a future that Reinhart Koselleck (2004) terms the “horizon of expectation.” Small and delimited interventions seem most inadequate when identified with neglect, cynical calculation or withered ambition. In other words, Band-Aids are most disturbing precisely when another response appears not just more desirable but also fully achievable. Conversely, it is the absence of faith in more comprehensive efforts, or fear of their side effects, that renders the tangibility of a targeted interventions singularly attractive. At moments when modernist utopian projects lose their grip on collective imagination, a cult of micro-interventions grows stronger, and in turn inspires critical nostalgia.

Easy dismissals of “micro” devices simply in terms of their meager size or likely failure, then, run the risk of trading one fetish for another: assuming that the real path to the future always lies in familiar “macro” technologies and planning. In an instant, the very industrial forms that might elicit ridicule from an ecological perspective (if not outright prophecies of doom, when framed by climate change and the Anthropocene), re-emerge as guarantors of social justice. Problems associated with actually existing welfare states and national infrastructural grids vanish—like rabbits from a hat—with the suffering identified in their retreat and inadequate coverage.  Somewhere between such oscillating fantasies lies the harder work of negotiating ambitions around development devices both large and small, and recognizing the significance of older forms without simply projecting them forward.

The Peepoo system. A packet contains a month's worth of bags. Photo by Peter Redfield.

The Peepoo system. A packet contains a month’s worth of bags. Photo by Peter Redfield.

By way of illustration, let’s leapfrog from Dickson’s Band-Aid and domestic self-care in early 20th-century America to a contemporary little device, and trace its uncertain career as a magic bullet in international aid. The Peepoo is a “personal single-use toilet” designed for use in poor urban settings and under emergency conditions. Created by a Swedish architect, and subsequently developed and distributed by a small Swedish social enterprise known as the Peepoople, it offers a simple means to dispose of human waste, neutralize its pathogens, and transform it into fertilizer, all in one go. Modeled on the “flying toilet” method of using plastic bags—an all-too real phenomenon of urban slum life—the Peepoo consists of a double-layered sack of biodegradable plastic with a small pouch of urea inside. As explained on the Peepoople website, the addition of this common fertilizer effects a magical transformation:

When the urea in Peepoo comes into contact with feces or urine, a breakdown into ammonia and carbonate takes place, driven by enzymes that naturally occur in feces. As the urea is broken down, the pH-value of the material increases and sanitization begins. Disease-causing microorganisms are inactivated after four weeks. Because dangerous bacteria are inactivated, there is no methane gas development from the feces inside Peepoo.[6]

Since the bag itself is fully biodegradable (“a mixture of aromatic co-polyesters and polylactic acid … with small additives of wax and lime”) and urea is a non-hazardous chemical, the eventual result is a safe and valuable bundle of nutrients for farming. In a miracle of modern alchemy, the Peepoo transforms waste into a potential commodity. Accepting the addition of fluid or toilet paper, it can handle the product of both “washers” and “wipers” equally.

Pee Poo instructions on the back. Photo by Peter Redfield.

However minimalist, it thus holds an eco-utopian promise of closing a circle even as it fulfills a humanitarian ambition of satisfying a vital human need. If incorporated into a micro-enterprise of fertilizer production, it might even offer possibilities for income and a modest means for economic development. At the same time, it requires neither water nor permanent space; it is fully mobile and can adjust to circumstances. The Peepoo is not simply a better plastic bag, then, but a serious engagement with a set of nested problems. Intended as both a humanitarian good and a development device—a caring commodity that also promises improvement—it additionally recognizes ecological concerns about human waste in urban settings. Carefully targeted, it would appear a very magic bullet indeed.

As with many such would-be solutions, however, the Peepoo has struggled to gain traction in practice. Even this admirably simple concept required considerable testing to produce the right technical variation and eventually a set of accompanying accessories. The size of the bag proved a balancing act, since the goal was to be just large enough for a single use; in addition to wasting material and adding to expense, a too-large container might invite reuse, which would counteract its hygienic ambitions. Scale is also a magical concept in market terms, here affecting both manufacture and distribution of everything from the biodegradable material to the potential fertilizer product. Only when amplified to mass production, with offsets of potential revenue, could the Peepoo ever hope to compete with ordinary plastic receptacles. Until then it would require subvention of some sort or another or an extensive marketing campaign to convince potential consumers of its superiority. Moreover, the very logic of its materials gave the Peepoo a relatively short shelf life; since biodegradable material is sensitive and deteriorates by design, the bag requires more durable outer packaging to last even two years. In other words, this product cannot sit and bide its time. To properly function and fulfill its promise, it demands regular use, in sufficient volume.

Fostering a reliable population of Peepoo users has proved elusive, particularly when pursuing Peepoople’s ambition of commercial sustainability. Although potentially valuable in emergency settings (in floods, for example, when sanitation systems are disrupted and it is hard to build latrines), the uncertain frequency of such demand made it hard to translate this potential into a stable consumer base. A set of field trials and experiments in a number of sites, including Bangladesh, Haiti, and Pakistan, finally yielded a couple of community projects in Kenya. But these efforts too soon encountered friction. Sanitation, of course, is more than a technical matter, as it involves an array of intimate and often sensitive social relations and cultural concerns. As a Peepoople representative told me in 2014, “It’s easy to sit from afar and say, ‘Oh, I have a great idea,’ without listening to people or considering the cultural aspect. Once you do then you realize it’s more complicated.” Although encouraged by studies that showed “high user acceptability,” the company still struggled to create durable demand between price, on the one hand, and preference, on the other.  Even a better plastic bag was not the most coveted sanitation device. As the same representative explained, “It’s a product that requires a lot of explanation and so comes with a lot of explanation. It’s not like a mobile phone that everybody wants, no questions asked, but rather needs social marketing for people to understand why this is important.” At the same time Peepoople’s efforts to market human fertilizer ran into cultural resistance and fears over contaminating food. To avoid the stigma of perceived pollution the company refocused on marketing it to tree farmers.

The gate at PeePoople, Kenya. Photo by Peter Redfield.

The gate at PeePoople, Kenya. Photo by Peter Redfield.

Production likewise proved a problem. After beginning as an enterprise in Kenya with semi-manual production, the Peepoople then sought to automate and lower costs by shifting manufacture to Germany, since the requisite materials were not available in Kenya and costly to import.  They also experimented with automated machinery, built by a German company that made diaper machines. Subsequently they moved production to Sweden to consolidate near their headquarters. But the actual demand never reached a level sufficient to justify the enterprise, and in late 2015 the Swedish office closed. The Nairobi branch remained open, if relatively somnolent when I visited in the following year, and the experiment appeared to have stalled awaiting resumption of local manufacture. However, in October 2016 a Stockholm-based Christian NGO called International Aid Services (IAS) acquired the Peepoople brand, vowing to keep the dream alive. At the time the user base consisted of some 20,000 people living in the Kibera slum in Nairobi, a market subvented by charitable donations.

The Peepoo, then, would seem a classic magic bullet, its earnest charms wavering while seeking an imagined target. From a critical perspective it appears a mere Band-Aid, a minimal improvement that fails to address the underlying factors that might drive someone to resort to a plastic bag in the first place. Some people I’ve discussed this with find the very concept offensive, and many raise trenchant concerns about its viability as a development device.[7] Such evaluations, however, should not overlook larger questions exposed by this simple sack with eco-utopian sensibilities. For the flush toilet, whether enveloped in middle class privacy or arrayed in a public block, may itself not offer a viable alternative, particularly when viewed from arid settings or at a planetary scale (Redfield and Robins 2016). An environmental perspective would suggest that water-based sanitation begs for reinvention, not further mass diffusion. In its own, humble way, the Peepoo opens this urban norm, calls attention to an exceptional violation—the plastic bag—and serves as a reminder of the deeper problem of waste. In this light, its shortcomings might yield not the end of the story but rather another beginning.

Peter Redfield is Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, currently collecting conceptual Band-Aids.

References

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Evans-Pritchard, E.E. 1937. Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande. Oxford: Claredon Press.

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Redfield, Peter and Steven Robins. 2016. “An Index of Waste: Humanitarian Design, ‘Dignified Living’ and the Politics of Infrastructure in Cape Town.” Anthropology Southern Africa, 39(2): 145-162.

Scott-Smith, Tom. 2013. “The Fetishism of Humanitarian Objects and the Management of Malnutrition in Emergencies.” Third World Quarterly 34(5): 913-928.

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Strebhardt, Klaus and Axel Ullrich. 2008. “Paul Ehrlich’s magic bullet concept: 100 years of progress.” Nature Reviews Cancer 8(6): 473-480.

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[1] Quoted in http://www.kilmerhouse.com/2008/09/how-to-use-a-Band-Aid-brand-adhesive-bandage/

[2] http://www.kilmerhouse.com/2013/06/from-1888-to-2013-celebrating-the-125th-birthday-of-the-first-aid-kit/

and http://www.kilmerhouse.com/2011/05/how-a-conversation-led-to-first-aid-kits/

[3] http://www.kilmerhouse.com/2014/08/world-war-i-centennial-how-the-great-war-changed-johnson-johnson/

[4] See OED entries under “Band-Aid” and “sticking plaster”; whereas the first only dates this secondary meaning to 1968, the latter traces it back to 1877. Since the generic term “plaster” describes a shifting lineage of therapeutic devices, from medicated pastes to industrial plastics, this secondary sense of inadequate treatment appears to well predate Dickson’s iconic product.

[5] A belief that obviously post-dates the invention and diffusion of firearms. See http://www.jurn.org/ejournal/Wettstein-Werewolf.pdf

[6] http://www.peepoople.com/information/faq/

[7] for commentary see, e.g. https://saniblog.org/2010/04/30/the-peepoo-bag-system-top-or-flop/

Feature Image: The werewolves of Ossory. A priest administers the Eucharist to the dying wife of a werewolf he meets in the woods.