David Theo Goldberg
My dear friend and colleague, Gabriele Schwab, has written a beautiful memoriam for our dearest friend and colleague, Ackbar Abbas. I will not rehearse what she has covered. Here I complement her account with a reflection on a set of practices and ideas emerging from those practices that those of us close to Ackbar came to see as central to his being in the world. These practices he barely mentioned publicly. But he came over time to reflect on ideas which their social economies made clearer to him in a way, arguably, he took to be a central feature of post-1980s social life and political economy more generally.
It was not uncommon for our generation to collect music—vinyl, then tapes, and cds. Those in our line of work collect(ed) books. Streaming made the former less visible, tablets the latter. Ackbar too was a keen collector. But his interests, in addition to less common books of our trade, wandered elsewhere. They were focused from his earlyish adulthood on more or less high-end designed instruments of modern socio-cultural relation. He started with pipes, initiated by his own smoking habits at the time, then pens and wrist-watches. He was fascinated by the objects, to be sure, by funky pipes, fine scripting almost calligraphic ink pens, unusual watches. His fascination deepened, from the beauty of the unusual, the strange, even the perverse, to the seamless functioning of the instrument. He began researching the workings of pipes, pens, and watches, the specific design of this or that line of product, along with their most notable and creative designers. He disassembled much of his collection. This served as much to figure out the different mechanisms enabling the consistent flow of smoke, ink, and watch-works defining and maintaining persistently “accurate” timekeeping as to keep each clean. A prolific purchaser, he owned more than 300 pens and watches each, an early adopter of eBay burgeoning his collections. Friends would receive gifts for notable occasions, matching what Ackbar thought best fit us personally.
His collections grew, and with them his knowledge of mechanisms and their respective histories deepened. As a result, Ackbar’s thinking characteristically assumed new directions. An itinerant connoisseur, the distinctions between original and copy began looming larger in his mind. The copy, however, became for Ackbar more interesting than the original. How accurate, what improvements, who the notable copiers, who licenses the fake as original, how to discern the difference. The fake began to assume in his thinking a more pressing role in contemporary political economy. He saw it increasingly as the driving culture of our time. His earlier thinking on “disappearance” bloomed into more capacious thinking about “dis-appearance,” the re-appearing of the disappeared elsewhere and otherwise. “The urinal” and “This is not a pipe” were his implicit touchpoints. Deepening conversations with Ackbar along these lines led to the development of a line of thinking increasingly central to my own work. Social fabrication and make-believe, I argue, have become constitutive features of our social being today (from fake memoirs to crypto and AI compositions).
Ackbar conceives of fakes not as disdained discardables but to be valued on their own terms as revealing of the unseen. Fakes appear(ed) increasingly important as once marginal economies began breaking into capitalist practice. He had especially China and Africa in mind here. Fakes first fed voracious consumption and then became central to production both as cheap labor and the sites of necessary commodity components. (Consider the role of rare earth metals in contemporary commodities or parts now crucial to our political economy of social life). Ackbar’s thinking on fakes, then, gave rise to his late focus on volatility as a feature not just of the economic today but of our language, culture, and the arts more generally. Drawing on the likes of Blake, Borges, and Benjamin but also Cioran and Pessoa, Ackbar understands disruption and turbulence to challenge conventional understandings of time, space, and language. He was accordingly unsurprised by the return of interest in quantum theory and the rush to advance quantum computing.
A prolific note-maker, filling reams of notebooks with barely legible inked script, Ackbar was less concerned with formal publishing. He resisted typing, writing everything in longhand. The night before talks would be spent with scissors and tape or glue cutting up sentences and half-sentences into a more or less coherent text. Burroughs cut ups had birthed its offspring, if not met its match. We were pulled into transcribing the written into the printed, friends, colleagues, students, publishers all. The payoff was seeing the work on the printed page.
A final personal reflection. Upon his arrival in Irvine, Ackbar and I began engaging in what would become an endless series of co-developing ideas on what we collectively should be thinking about as key to our times. This in turn led to organizing workshops, for example, on poor theory as a theory about theory, not as one silly if notable critic dismissed us as offering a vapid and immoral account “of the poor.” There followed workshops in South Africa, principally with WISER and the then Johannesburg Workshop on Theory and Criticism, led at their end by Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall, along with the Comaroffs, on what emerged out of these meetings as ”theory from the South.” Ackbar arranged exchanges in Hong Kong initially with Hong Kong University and then with City University, and a series with Lingnan University. It was on one of these trips that Ackbar urged me to go with him to Taipei to start a conversation with Li Hung-Chiung at National Taiwan University. This led over the following couple of years to the formal development of the Asia Theories Network co-directed by Hung-Chiung and me. Since 2018 we have held at least two workshops a year, often leading to publication in the online ATN journal, in sites including Irvine, Taipei, Seoul, Manila, Tokyo, and Yogyakarta. Ackbar was key here in articulating the interface of Euro-American and Asian critical theory. At UCHRI from 2002 onwards, I had started a two-week summer institute in “experimental critical theory” (the first organized with UCLA’s Ken Reinhard on “politics and psychoanalysis”). In 2007 Ackbar and I started an extended conversation about a summer seminar in China. We focused on “design” as Ackbar’s ideas about fakes and Chinese political economy were deepening. We roped in Liu Sola. On numerous trips to Shanghai we struck a partnership with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Sola leaned on pretty much all of her notable artist friends in Beijing and Shanghai, ranging from Xu Bing, Liu Dan, Ning Ying (an assistant director to Bertolucci), to Ai WeiWei, among others. The result was an extraordinary two weeks for the 100 or so global participants who joined us. None of this would have been possible but for Ackbar’s commitment and Sola’s support.
Those knowing Ackbar attest to his enormous generosity. He read everything I gave him and responded with the same depth of analysis and suggestion he provided students with whom he worked. Numerous notable global colleagues with whom he engaged have commented on conversations with him that have been key to developing their own thinking. But he was generous also materially, with friends, students, even strangers. Ackbar had joined a summer institute I co-organized in Beirut with Saree Makdisi and others in 2012. We spent an afternoon walking through Sabra, one of the major refugee project developments whose Palestinian and Shia inhabitants were massacred with Israel’s collusion in 1982. The cramped apartments now serve also as the stepping-stone out of, or into, unhousedness for exploited and abandoned migrant labor from South Asia serving the Lebanese wealthy and middle class. Towards the end of the walk we stopped at the solitary UN medical clinic whose director offered wrenching stories of the service conditions under which they provided medical care to residents. As members of our group took leave, Ackbar pulled out his wallet, removing a couple of $100 bills (not fakes!) which he donated without fanfare to the clinic. The director indicated that this was considerably more than any single visitor had provided them to date.
Ackbar did not do this to appease his own conscience or for the credit he might get from colleagues. He did it in the shadows of a slipping afternoon because he could, and because it was the right thing to do.
Our Ackbar. Missing you deeply. Even as you are with us, always.
Written by David Theo Goldberg.