Dread: Facing Futureless Futures

by David Theo Goldberg

A pervasive sense has taken hold that any and all of us are under suspicion and surveillance, walking on a tightrope, a step away from erasure of rights or security. Nothing new for many long-targeted populations, it is now surfacing as a broad social sensibility, ramped up by environmental crisis and pandemic wreckage. We have come to live in proliferating dread, even of dread itself.

In this brilliant analysis of the nature, origins, and implications of this gnawing feeling, David Theo Goldberg exposes tracking capitalism as the operating system at the root of dread. In contrast to surveillance, which requires labor-intensive analysis of people's actions and communications, tracking strips back to the fundamental mapping of our movements, networks, and all traces of our digitally mediated lives. A simultaneous tearing of the social fabric - festering culture wars, the erosion of truth, even civil war itself - frays the seams of the sociality and solidarity needed to counter this transformation of people into harvestable, expendable data.

This searing commentary offers a critical apparatus for interrogating the politics of our time, arguing that we need not just a politics of refusal and resistance, but a creative politics to counter the social life of dread.

172 pages, Paperback

Published July 19, 2021

About the author

*Director of the University of California Humanities Research Institute, the University of California system-wide research facility for the human sciences and theoretical research in the arts.
*Professor of Comparative Literature and of Criminology, Law, and Society at the University of California, Irvine, where he is a Fellow of the UCI Critical Theory Institute

Reviews

[Ben Thurley · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked this up earlier in the year because its one word title evoked the dominant mental and emotional state that had captured me for a large part of our fateful 2020. Dread.

More than unease, and quite different to anger or upset, Goldberg highlights that "Dread is awe absent the possibility of identifying the source, rendering reconciliation irrelevant and redress impossible." Among the conditions of our dread-filled context, he highlights climate collapse, endemic and institutionalised racism, pandemics and surveilllance capitalism. We are all at the mercy of forces beyond us, although he notes well that some communities - such as people of colour, refugees, those housed in prisons and labour camps – have been habituated, trained, to dread more deeply and destructively than some others. These conditions of dread are both causeless and themselves the cause of further "dreadening" (my term, not his). Rendered insecure, immobile, we are depersonalised, desocialised, depoliticised.

In general, I found Goldberg's analysis of the tenor and techniques of our times pretty persuasive, though not all the chapters were equally strong and he does have a tendency to lapse (needlessly it seemed to me) into some fairly impenetrable jargon.

Coming to the last section, Goldberg does sound a note of hope. And I loved the sound of the vision for countering dread through co-creating ecologies of care that are inclusive and multivocal, attentive and responsive to the flourishing of its marginalised members. I would have loved to hear more about these communities of imagination and resistance, about the experiences of attempting to embody ecologies of care. Goldberg does nod in the direction of some existing social moments, such as Black Lives Matter, which embody such a vision. However, this section ultimately falls fast and hard past specificity, beyond practicality, through any attempt at visualisation, and into a morass of plausible-sounding, but jargon-laden, statements which range from the bromides of my progressive tribe to some hitherto un- or under-argued philosophical standpoints.

It's hard to say that I disagree with much of what Goldberg writes about the antidote to dread towards end of the book. It's also hard to say that I understand much of it, nor can imagine how it would be actualised in the world we currently inhabit. I know it's not the academic's place to propose every detail of the plan to counter the problems they have so capably, and at such length, exposed. But still...

Developing the counter to dread, Goldberg says,

is to imagine the possibility of a sociality without end, a non-teleological ethic, where constantly renewed aspiration refuses the repetitive social conditions of dread-making. Infrastructures of care offer a social ethic without grounds, foundations, or guarantees, with no fixed truths to fall back on. Such an ethic values multiplicities over singularity, pluriversals over universals, co-making through interacting. Imagining new worlds, our worlds anew, entails as their conditions of possibility renewably thinking and living without segregations, social purifications, securitized homogenizations. This Reconstruction 3.0 will necessitate undoing significant inequalities in opportunity, wealth, income, and political power, individually, collectively, globally. It requires undercutting, and waylaying, tracking-capitalism. It demands forgoing ethnoracially and gender-reproduced subjugations, debasements, inequities, and indignities. Enormous individuated wealth comes with inordinate social power undercutting any possibility of equitability.

[Aneta · Rating 2 out of 5]

I thought this book would analyse and systematise the issues that we are facing now. It does so in the most frustrating way - by providing chapters and chapters of everything that is wrong with the world. Towards the end of the book, you get some lukewarm advice on how to address these challenges.

I also had issues with how the author was writing - the sentences were so frustratingly complicated by their words and length. It was as if writing in the most philosophical, metaphor-ridden way was more important than conveying the meaning of words.

I do not recommend it unless you want your mind bent.

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

Embrace the secret prisons, embrace the secret tribunals with edicts no one can talk about, embrace military bases all over the World, embrace the Atomic Bomb, embrace the wars lead by the same State that feeds trolls like Goldberg and his PhD'ed horde of nieces and nephews.

It's the ”capitalism” you should fear. And while you care about Google making public the data you yourself gave away for free, the Government is going to buy more $10 000 toilet seats, and some new planes to protect the Democracy that never was in Syria.