Amy J. Elias

Department of English
University of Tennessee
aelias2@utk.edu

Suzanne Keen. Romances of the Archive in Contemporary British Fiction. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2001.

“Understanding, which separates men from brutes,” writes Suzanne Keen of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, “amounts to an enumeration of debts” (69). This statement asserts that in Spenser’s narrative world, comprehension of a state of social reality is possible through something called “understanding”; that such understanding results from uniquely human processes of ratiocination; and that this understanding can be produced only through a comprehensive training of the intellect that includes the study of history, defined as knowledge of the wisdom and ethical questing of previous human generations who have shaped the present. Examining the importance of historical knowledge to Spenser’s work is hardly shocking in the context of Early Modern studies, but encountering a critic who takes Spenser’s position as a starting point for a study of the post-imperial moment in British fiction gives one whiplash. Keen’s Romances of the Archive in Contemporary British Fiction does just this: it asserts that Spenser’s romance begins a tradition that, despite postmodernist countercurrents, remains vigorous and has even gained cultural force in the novels of the last few decades.

This is a (sub)genre study: the genre is the novel, the subgenre is detective fiction (with traces of the historical novel), and the sub-subgenre is the “romance of the archive.” Keen defines seven characteristics of the romance of the archive: it contains character-researchers, endowed with the corporeality and round psychology of the realistic novel; romance adventure stories, in which research features as a kernel plot action, resulting in strong closure, with climactic discoveries and rewards; discomforts and inconveniences suffered in the service of knowledge; sex and physical pleasure gained as a result of questing; settings and locations containing collections of papers; material traces of the past revealing the truth; and evocation of history, looking back from a post-imperial context (63).

The book’s thesis is that there has been a resurgence of interest in sleuthing in contemporary British fiction, but that this sleuthing has taken a special form: academic and non-professional researchers (“questers”) are main characters of novels, and the goal of these characters is to investigate the past through archival research. Their objective is to arrive at some truth about the past, and more often than not, after doing investigative research in libraries or private collections, they do indeed find this previously hidden truth. These “romances of the archive” thus are a traditionalist narrative rejoinder to the proliferation of mid- and late twentieth-century postmodernist experimental fiction. Keen complicates this thesis by arguing that these books form a conservative sub-genre that reflects the need to assert British heritage in the face of England’s traumatic loss of imperial and colonialist status in the late twentieth century. The romance of these novels–their construction of the researcher as “questor” and their frequent assertion through plot construction that it is possible to “seek and find solid facts, incontrovertible evidence, and well-preserved memories of times past”–is what links them to the Spenserian tradition of romance, as well as to detective fiction, gothic fiction, and conspiracy thrillers (à la John Le Carré).

Keen approves of these novels; it is clear throughout the study that she is not sympathetic with postmodernism’s insistent interrogation of cultural metanarratives. She is also distrustful of much recent “theory”: this is not a book participating in the (increasingly self-referential) theoretical conversation about postcolonialism and globalization. In this book, Keen does not feel compelled to make sweeping claims about British culture or global capitalism. She focuses her analysis on specific novels, and while working out the whys and wherefores of this fiction, she keeps theoretical musings to a minimum. The book is tightly focused on literature itself, making claims about literary history and using historical context to reveal rationales for literary construction.

However, Keen avoids being hermetically sealed within a formalist method, for she historicizes this British fiction in the context of post-Suez and post-Falklands political anxiety, debates about the teaching of history in British schools, and the real-world attitudes of contemporary British writers toward their homeland, toward history, and toward narrative. In her analysis of Peter Ackroyd’s work, she quotes from his papers, housed at the Beinecke Library at Yale University; when making claims about British history as an area study today, she quotes from documents relating contemporary controversies in England concerning the National Curriculum for History. Her twenty-one page bibliography attests to her fastidious research. Clearly, Keen has the kind of archival sensibility that she identifies in her subject. Romances of the Archive is itself a “romance of the archive” in many ways, a tour de force of literary criticism that assumes that answers can be found through the practice of rational critical investigation.

Keen recognizes that “even the fluffiest romances of the archive” are freighted with “political visions of contemporary Britain and its relation to its past” (60). While novels such as Barry Unsworth’s Sugar and Rum and Sacred Hunger complicate and criticize the British past, novels such as Peter Ackroyd’s Chatterton reveal “a fundamental romanticism” about history that values connections between the present and the past. At the other side of the continuum, a novel such as A.S. Byatt’s Possession defends British heritage against a postmodern attack on history. Thus these romances of the archive run the gamut from postmodernist critique to neo-conservative assertion of nationalist history. These

romances of the archive...show fictional characters endeavouring to come to terms with a British past unexpurgated of its rough patches. Gravitating to the gaps in school history, revisiting glorious episodes with a critical eye, and attempting to recuperate heritage sensations from periods rendered inert or shameful by academicians, romancers of the archive enact and criticize their culture's fascination with the uses of the past. (109)

Yet in the final analysis, Keen asserts, many of these contemporary British novels are epistemologically traditionalist, overtly supporting modern humanist values and repudiating the supposed “crisis in history”: “they unabashedly interpret the past through its material traces; they build on a foundation of ‘documentarism,’ answering the postmodern critique of history with invented records full of hard facts” (3). In addition, these novels often are politically conservative, reviving a Whig interpretation of history and rebuilding a nationalist pride in Britishness. While she has sympathy with their support of modern rationalism, Keen is much more skeptical and critical of these novels’ defensiveness about the British national past. With touches of acerbic wit, she often points out their ideological contradictions. For example, when discussing Byatt’s Possession, which pits theory-sodden and status-seeking American academics against English amateur researchers in a race to find valuable historical documents, she notes that Byatt writes as if British heritage were at stake: the amateur British sleuths represent pure, disinterested research that will serve as the basis of true British history and autonomy, both threatened by American materialism and cultural imperialism. Byatt therefore “plays the heritage card in defence of literary history. When she invokes the competing literature of American and postcolonial writers, Byatt places Britain and British writing in the sympathetic role of underdog. The fact that British libraries and museums still contain treasure troves gathered from around the world lies concealed, for Byatt does not invite closer scrutiny of the imperial history of collecting and acquisition” (60).

Keen is right to note that the Right’s attitudes toward the “postmodernists” closely resemble those found in romances of the archive: that is, they construct a new arena for the ancients vs. the moderns debate, pitting postmodernism against the keepers of the culture (what Keen would call the heritage preservationists). While in the 1980s this conservative contingent railed against secular humanists in the academy, in the 1990s and later they tended to decry the ascendancy of the “postmoderns,” who strip secular humanism of its utopian social action agendas and even of its basic assumptions about human agency, reality, truth, and meaning.

What Keen doesn’t consider as deeply is that these novels critique and re-present not just a politically conservative need to assert British heritage over academic history, but also the turn toward history and archival research in academic theory since the 1970s. Great Britain played a large role in the genesis of this trend. Fueled by the events of 1968, the turn to history was indebted to an influx of ideas from outlets such as the New Left Review; the growth of cultural studies at the Birmingham Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies (founded in 1964) under the influence of, first, social science inquiry and then, later, the Marxist work of Louis Althusser and the cultural studies work of Stuart Hall; and the cultural materialist work of Raymond Williams. Combined with the development of New Historicism and neo-Marxist (or poststructuralist Marxist) theories in the U.S. and the general “crisis in history” perceived in all disciplines but especially in history, the post-1960s academy on both sides of the Atlantic has fueled ferocious debates about history and repeatedly advocated that we return to it as the wellspring of understanding. In its poststructuralist forms, this theoretical return to history has implied that we can get some “truth” about history from our archival research, even if that truth is the truth about historical contingency. For Marxist theorists, this is not an implication but an imperative: Fredric Jameson’s injunction to “Always historicize!” asserts that there is a point to historical research, that digging in the archives leads to some real revelation about the past that is provisional only in the sense that it may be incomplete. Keen is justifiably skeptical about the ultimate significance of what transpires in the arcane world of academic theory. But this turn to history in influential British academic centers such as the Birmingham Center clearly needs to be credited with a certain real impact, not only in Britain but in universities throughout the world. And it needs, as well, to be differentiated from the “postmodernist perspectives on history” that Keen constructs as the antithesis of archival romance.

As the notion of an acting self was increasingly attacked by the notion of the constructed subject in post-1960s linguistic and Foucauldian theories, Marxist and other social justice theories scrambled to find a way to repudiate or modify the idea of social determinism of the psyche without relinquishing the idea of the economic and/or cultural determinism of lived experience. As the century drew to a close, even the more linguistic or seemingly formalistic strains of poststructuralism had turned back to the problem of self and ethics, worrying the paradox of (historically situated) ethical action in the face of subject construction. The Left was turning to history with a vengeance and puzzling out its own theoretical self-contradictions as a result. The confusing result was often that both the Left and the Right attacked postmodernism as the bogeyman of history and social justice (the Left calling it fascist and the Right calling it nihilist). Postmodernist theory became the Other to both sides of the political spectrum in the “theory wars.” The relationships among the turn to a traditional belief in history in romances of the archive, the coterminous return to a belief in historical research in academic Leftist theory, and the demand for a return to history by the conservative Right on both sides of the Atlantic could be elucidated a good deal more clearly in this study.

Keen’s book, however, not only gives useful readings of specific works of fiction but also posits a social significance for the rise of this particular subgenre at this particular moment in British history. Keen discusses fiction by Julian Barnes, A.S. Byatt, Penelope Lively, Barry Unsworth, Peter Ackroyd, Kingsley Amis, Lindsay Clarke, Lawrence Norfolk, Nigel Williams, P.D. James, Robert Harris, Peter Dickinson, Margaret Drabble, Alan Hollinghurst, Adam Mars-Jones, Robert Goddard, Stevie Davies, Derek Walcott, Keri Hulme, Amitav Ghosh, and Bharati Mukherjee. A dual focus on technique and thematic subject leads her to interesting linkages. For example, she links detective fiction to romance through their shared “questing for truth,” a claim that runs counter to many studies of detective fiction that regard it as the genre most aligned with realism and modernity, particularly in its assumptions that deductive logic and humanist values can solve the puzzles of the universe. The romance of the archive incorporates detective fiction’s rationalist questing but adds to it romance’s “theological, political, and personal frames of reference for making moral and ethical judgments about human behaviour” (157). For example, in her chapter “Envisioning the Past,” Keen discusses novels that scrutinize the archival past to re-evaluate expectations of gender roles and sexual orientation and concludes that these novels tend toward the uncanny and a libidinal narrative experimentation. In the last chapter, “Postcolonial Rejoinders,” she unflinchingly discusses how English writers often display a “nostalgia, defensiveness, and anxiety” about British colonial history that includes “regret about Britain’s decline in global status and annoyance at the complaints of postcolonial subjects” (215). These writers, she believes, attempt to manage the anxieties of the post-Falklands decades by offering a “reassertion of British glory” (230).

Keeping her focus tightly trained on realist literature and British literary history, Keen observes the psychology of contemporary British writers often ignored by critics trained on avant-garde or postcolonial fiction. Keen offers a study of the British realist novel in a post-imperial age, a discussion of the mainstream center rather than the postcolonial border. Her book is written clearly (this is a critical study that undergraduate students could actually read and understand) and could be used as the basis for a special topics course on contemporary British fiction, particularly in this subgenre. Romances of the Archive is a nuanced account of contemporary British fiction that analyzes the way that romances of the archive are indeed romances, incorporating presentism, antiquarianism, and humanist (even theological) values. What Keen’s own archival and critical quest has revealed–essentially, a new mode of literary nationalism–certainly deserves our further attention.

 
 
Every issue of Postmodern Culture will carry notices of events, calls for papers, and other announcments, up to 250 words, free of charge. Advertisements will also be published on an exchange basis. Send anouncements and advertisements to: pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu
 

 
                    MLA SESSION ANNOUNCEMENT

     Special Session #344, Friday 28 December, 1:45-3:00 PM
     Grand Ballroom East, Hyatt Regency (1990 MLA
     Convention, Chicago, Illinois, 27-30 December 1990)

     "Canonicity and Hypertextuality: The Politics of
     Hypertext"

     Session leader: Terence Harpold, University of
          Pennsylvania
     Panelist 1: Ted Nelson, Autodesk, Inc.: "How Xanadu
          (Un)does the Canon"
     Panelist 2: Stuart Moulthrop, Univ. of Texas/Austin:
          "(Un)doing the Canon I: The Institutional Politics
          of Hypertext"
     Panelist 3: Jay David Bolter, UNC Chapel Hill:
          "(Un)doing the Canon II: Hypertext as Polis and
          Canon"

     For more information, contact:
          Terence Harpold
          420 Williams Hall
          University of Pennsylvania
          Philadelphia, PA 19104

          Bitnet:   
          Internet: 

     _______________________________________________________

                 VERSE: JOHN ASHBERY'S INFLUENCE

     Susan M. Schultz and Henry Hart invite submissions for
     a collection of essays on the subject of John Ashbery's
     influence on contemporary poetry.  Essays may address
     Ashbery's influence on particular poets or on the
     climate of contemporary poetry more generally (e.g.,
     his influence on the Language movement, New Formalism,
     etc.).  Two copies of abstracts are due 15 November;
     two copies of your essays by 15 December to Susan
     Schultz at the Department of English, University of
     Hawaii-Manoa, 1733 Donaghho Road, Honolulu, Hawaii
     96822.

     _______________________________________________________

                      THE CENTENNIAL REVIEW

                     Edited by R.K. Meiners

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                    Ethics in the Profession
                Volume XXXIV, No. 2, Spring 1990
                Guest Editor: Stephen L. Esquith

     Locating Professional Ethics         Stephen L. Esquith
       Politically
     Cases and Codes: Challenges for    Michael S. Pritchard
       Teaching Engineering Ethics
     Called to Profess: Religious and         David H. Smith
       Secular Theories of Vocation
     The Ethics Boom: A Philosopher's          Michael Davis
       History
     Pricing Human Life: The Moral          Leonard M. Fleck
       Costs of Medical Progress
     Faith and the Unbelieving Ethics           Judith Andre
       Teacher
     Professional Ethics, Ethos, and     William M. Sullivan
       the Integrity of the
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                     Announcing "MAGAZINE"
              An Electronic Hotline/Conference
                         moderated by
                  Professor David Abrahamson

     Interested individuals are invited to participate in an
     electronic conference, MAGAZINE Hotline, addressing the
     journalistic/communicative/economic/technological issues
     related to magazine publishing.  Though MAGAZINE's primary
     focus will be journalistic, it will also address other
     magazine-publishing matters of economic (management,
     marketing, circulation, production, research),
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     MAGAZINE will explore the history, current state and future
     prospects of the American Magazine.  Among the topics
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     the history of magazines; the role of magazines in social
     development; educational issues related to teaching magazine
     journalism; "laboratory" magazine-project concepts and
     resources; and studies and research exploring the issues
     above.
        The conference will be moderated by Professor David
     Abrahamson of New York University's Center for Publishing,
     where he teaches the editorial segments of the NYU
     Management Institute graduate Diploma Course in Magazine
     Publishing and the Executive Seminar in Magazine Editorial
     Management. He is also the author of two teaching texts,
     "The Magazine Writing Workbook" and "The Magazine Editing
     Workbook."

     The MAGAZINE Hotline is scheduled to begin October 1, 1990.
     Magazine publishing professionals, magazine journalism
     educators, scholars and students, and other individuals
     interested in magazine issues are encouraged to participate.
     The MAGAZINE Hotline is sponsored by New York University's
     Center for Publishing and Comserve (the online information
     and discussion service for the communication disciplines).

     Those interested in participating in MAGAZINE can subscribe
     free by:

     (1) From a Bitnet or Internet account, sending a one-line
     e-mail message to either COMSERVE@RPIECS or
     COMSERVE@VM.ECS.RPI.EDU with the following text:
          Join Magazine YourFirstName YourLastName
          [Example: Join Magazine Mary Smith]

     (2) From an MCI-Mail account, sending a message adressed as
     follows:
          [To:] COMSERVE (EMS)
          Internet
          COMSERVE@VM.ECS.RPI.EDU
          [No Subject]
          [Message text] Join Magazine YourFirstName YourLastName

     (3) From a Compuserve account, send the same one-line
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           [Note: Include the indicated ">".]

     Further information about the MAGAZINE Hotline will be sent
     to subscribers when the Hotline begins. However, if you have
     any immediate ideas, suggestions or questions about the
     Hotline, please contact David Abrahamson, at:
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     165 east 32, NY 10016.

     _______________________________________________________

     A Screaming comes across the wires--the list, PYNCHON.  Its
     purpose is the discussion of and exchange of information
     about Thomas Pynchon and his writing.  Appropriate topics
     range from serious critical discussion through esthetic
     opinions to apocryphal stories and unsubstantiated sightings
     (or non-sightings).

     Simon Fraser University does not have a LISTSERVER, so I
     have kludged together a group with remote addresses.  To
     join the list send a request to me (E-mail
     USERDOG1@SFU.BITNET  or  USERDOG1@CC.SFU.CA).  Because of
     the nature of the kludge, I need a name, or pseudonym if you
     prefer, as well as your Email address.  The list is
     unrestricted, its just that I have to add members
     manually.

     List address: PYNCHON@SFU.BITNET  or  PYNCHON@CC.SFU.CA

     Jody    USERDOG1@SFU.BITNET   or     USERDOG1@CC.SFU.CA

 
 
What follows is a written exchange among the editors about the contents of the first issue of Postmodern Culture. It is called a “postface” because it is meant to be read after the other items in the issue; we hope it will serve as a preface to discussion among other readers.

 
Eyal:
 
Several of the works in this issue imply that there is a dynamic relationship between the decentered individual or event generally celebrated by postmodernity and some governing ideal, a hidden ground that operates through these texts. Kipnis, for instance, argues finally not only that the body is a text, or that intellectual history has a body, but also that there are “moments in the social body”– intellectual constructs which organize history as an idea, more than just the sum of its parts. She shows an interest in “TRANSITION,” and not just in particulars, and those transitions–which are explicitly staged in her medium–imply some organizing principle.
 
Elaine:
 
I find it provocative to consider whose bodies, and what relationships between them, are represented in these essays. For example, Kipnis’s narrative movement back and forth from Marx to his maid Helene to late twentieth century teenage girls suggests, to me at least, a feminization of Marx’s body (feminists have argued that women’s bodies are sites for masculine writing, but here, Marx’s body, like the anorectic’s, occupies the position of tablet for cultural text)

John:
 
I’d agree that Kipnis is making a connection between particular male bodies and particular female bodies as “tablets for cultural text,” but I’m not sure the movement between particulars amounts to the projection of a “governing ideal, a hidden ground” that Eyal sees here. It strikes me that many of these writers (Acker, English, Kipnis, even Yudice) emphasize the rude eruptions and crude particulars of the body in a way that is anything but idealizing. And while I agree with the idea that Kipnis, and others in this issue, want to see history as having a meaning, I don’t think this necessarily involves each of these authors in a commitment to an “ideal,” or to a teleology. I think that Kipnis, Ross, hooks, and others try to establish a context, rather than a ground, for the particular.
 
Eyal:
 
That may be what they would say. It’s a popular position–and one that Larsen takes to task. He writes that Marxist thought criticizes Enlightenment values by offering “particular universals” (15): reason is time-bound, but it is universal at any point in time because of “the social universality of the proletariat” (6). Larsen uses this claim to indict postmodernism– which he reads much as you do here, John–as promoting contexts that are not grounds; he charges that postmodernists appeal to irrationalism instead of recognizing the claims of Marxist universals, and their irrationalism then allows them to deflect the charge against capitalism (7, 9).
 
Elaine:
 
As a feminist reader responding to these essays, I find myself struggling with the very tension we are talking about–between attention to the particular and a yearning, to use hooks’s word, for a transcending idea, a narrative which helps me evaluate what I read. hooks begins her essay by telling us that she is a black woman at a dinner party (which one other black person is attending). This is certainly a context, but in the end when she tells us about talking with other black people about postmodernism, context attains a kind of transcendence–hooks’s “authority of experience.” Likewise, Yudice’s focus on bulimia seems driven by a desire to understand the body’s participation in larger designs and meanings.
 
Eyal:
 
There is a similar impulse in several of these works. Yudice moves from class and gender to “the mystic” (5); hooks returns to “yearning” as the common condition (9); Schultz finds in Bernstein’s poem an “elegiac tone” (10); and Acker says that she is a romantic and projects that romanticism in her stand as artist- against-the-dead-world.
 
John:
 
Acker does sound like an idealist when she asks whether “matter moving through forms [is] dead or alive,” and she sounds romantic when she asserts that “they can’t kill the spirit.” But the transcendence she describes at the beginning of her narrative is transcendence within language: “when I write, I enter a world which has complex relations and is, perhaps, illimitable. This world both represents and is human history, public memories and private memories turned public, the records and actualizations of human intentions. This world is more than life and death, for here life and death conjoin.” Perhaps she fails in her stated desire not to have a voice (as Schultz argues the Language Poets do), but it seems to me that her piece is not only about “the artist against the world,” but also about the contact between the writer and the world–an unpleasant contact between a fragmented individual and the monolithic forces behind property law, involving a struggle over language, and the right to language.
 
Elaine:
 
Many of the writers here (Schultz, English, hooks, Beverley, Ross) illustrate the power of culture (rather than of the individual) to determine our use of language and the creation of texts. Schultz’s point about McGann’s classification of the contributors to Verse–that the difference between “Language writing, properly so called” and “language-centered writing” appears to be a matter of big names vs. lesser knowns– raises the issue of politics within academic writing (a criticism that may be relevant to the project of creating this journal). But what Schultz’s review accomplishes, and what Ross, Beverley, and hooks suggest we should attempt, is an interrogation of authorities. These writers believe such a practice can make a difference.John:I think Larsen would say that the interrogation of authority is not in itself the practice that will make a difference; he feels, as Eyal pointed out, that liberal critiques of authority ultimately serve the interests of authority by helping to “displace or pre-empt” revolutionary political practice. On the other hand, the authors you mention all aim at something beyond critique or interrogation. Ross, for example, argues directly against the idea (expressed in Larsen) that cultural authority is monolithic, because he wants to persuade us that change is possible: “capitalism is merely the site, and not the source, of the power that is often autonomously attributed to the owners and sponsors of technology” (37). Larsen’s rejoinder is to ask “Where has imperialism, and its attendant ‘scientific’ and cultural institutions, actually given way and not simply adapted to the ‘new social movements’ founded on ideals of alterity?” (29).
 
Eyal:
 
On the whole, the writers in the issue value those who, like themselves, oppose the authoritarian tendencies of society. Social power resides in architecture and we fight it with music (Beverley); political repression is enforced by manipulating our collective image of the body and we fight it with dietary negativity–obesity, bulimia, anorexia (Yudice); society uses “viral hysteria” and the “Computer Virus Eradication Act” to restrict access to technology and information, and we fight it with countercultural hacking (Ross); the publishing establishment enforces copyright and we fight it by acknowledging the intertextual transgression implicit in all artistic practice (Acker). These writers are looking for a place from which to criticize the impulses to power which they uncover in the social text–but then any critical position is bound within that text.
 
Elaine:
 
Critical positions may be bound within the social text, but as we said earlier, some of these writers appear to be in two places at once, positioned in a particular historical political struggle but casting their writing beyond the particular toward some larger claim or understanding. In any case, the difference in our readings of these writers suggests that postmodernism remains fertile territory within which writers can explore new positions, and I find this encouraging. We hoped that Postmodern Culture would provide a place for experimentation, for opening discussions, for dialogue. In some of our early explorations of what the journal could or should be (and do), we expressed a hope that we could dis-establish the practice of admitting only those who speak our language or who position themselves as we do. In fact, we hoped that the medium itself would encourage us to think of our writing as constituted both from the writer’s position and from the readers’. Such thinking (about writing and reading) can lead to further experimentation within the academy, in culture, and with/in those relationships fostered through Postmodern Culture. How much difference we make remains to be seen.
 

Jim English

University of Pennsylvania

Even to a fan like me, the Tour de France seems a pretty weird sporting event. By the standards of contemporary spectator sport, there is something almost laughable in a three-week-long bicycle race that is so elaborately staged and involves so much apparatus and so many people, yet offers so few moments of real excitement. Race organizers are aware of this, and have lately been attempting to bring the event better into line with the contemporary sporting scene. But to judge by this year’s Tour, which two friends and I followed during its final week through the Pyrenees, these attempts to improve or normalize the race are only making it stranger. While we certainly enjoyed the race as a race, we found ourselves enjoying it even more as a sort of comedy of cultural contradictions. The recent efforts to “modernize” what remains basically an old-world, pain-oriented, macho sport (its traditional off-season counterpart is boxing) have created some bizarre incongruities. The commercial packaging and the “look” of the Tour have been dramatically altered by the introduction of new technologies, but the mythology of the sport, along with the activity itself–the actual physical demands made on competitors–have scarcely changed since the turn of the century. More and more one is confronted with disconcerting asymmetries between the “modernized” Tour de France and a cycling culture whose material and mythological elements resist modernization.

One such material element is the bike rider’s derriere. For the second year in a row, an apparently secure victory was imperilled in the closing days by a saddle boil, reminding everyone that despite impressive recent developments in clothing and hygiene technologies, there has been little success in containing eruptions of the lower bodily stratum: a rider’s sore bottom can still become the focal point and the decisive factor of the whole colossal production. It’s easy to be misled in this regard by today’s aerodynamic, miracle-fiber uniforms, which have a cleaner, zippier look than the old suits and, with their shiny surfaces, make far more effective billboards for team sponsors. But the fact is that inside this state-of-the-art gear there is not only perspiration, blood, and puss but also sometimes urine and even diarrhea. Seven consecutive hours of racing will induce unhappy effects in even the best dressed of competitors.

Like the uniforms, the bikes too keep getting sleeker, more reliable, more specialized and rational in design. But this only accentuates the extreme unreliability of the riders, who this year seemed more than ever uncertain of their abilities and confused about their roles. Consider Claudio Chiappucci, a second-rank rider for the struggling Carrera Jeans team. Judged a non-contender, Chiappucci was permitted a substantial lead on the opening stage, and then spent the entire race losing time to rivals while hurling insults at them for lacking his “panache.” Yet this apparent mediocrity held on for an impressive second place and very nearly became the first rider in modern times to “steal” a Tour de France. Pre-race favorite Raul Alcala, a brilliant natural climber, was all bulked up this year to improve his strength on the flats. His weight training seemed to be paying off, and for the first week everyone was in awe of the new, more muscular Alcala. But as soon as the race hit the mountains, this aura of invincibility dissolved and, as one rider remarked at Mont Blanc, Alcala suddenly just seemed “big and slow like a dirigible.” The other rider who came to the race with a new and more robust physique was defending champion Greg LeMond. But in this case no one was intimidated by the extra poundage. With his cutting-edge aerodynamic equipment and flawless position on the bike, the blimp-like LeMond had been a comical sight all season, putting in performances that can only be described as embarrassing. “I worry more about my grandmother,” 1987 Tour winner Stephen Roche said at one point this spring. Yet LeMond proved against all evidence to be the fittest rider in the race, and produced a beautifully economical victory. As so often happens, the French cycling press was reduced in the end to explaining the race in terms of “miracles.” While technological developments have succeeded in virtually eliminating the wild card of mechanical failure, oddsmakers are still losing their shirts on the Tour and sportswriters are still narrativizing it as spiritual quest.

Of course this is, for many, the whole appeal of the event, that it forces riders past known limits, past the point of predictability. The cumulative strain of stage racing actually makes the riders ill; by the final week you can hear collective coughing and wheezing at the crest of quite modest inclines. Under these conditions a rider’s form is so fragile that even a proven champion can, as they say, “crack” or “explode” at a crucial moment. Indeed, such moments are for aficionados the race’s main attraction. “Suffering” is the established god term of the French cycling vernacular. For diehard Tour fans, the only spectacle that matters is that of the body in pain. (The male body, that is. Though a women’s race has been part of the Tour for a decade, few fans have accepted the idea of a woman stage racer. This year organizers finally gave up and, despite the near certainty of another French victory by the great Jeannie Longo, abolished the Tour Feminin.)

To take part in these pain-fests, fans are willing to suffer a bit themselves. To catch the finish of the decisive 16th stage at Luz-Ardiden in the Pyrenees we had to negotiate an enormous traffic jam at the base of the climb, hike fifteen kilometers uphill in near- record heat, wait three hours for the race, and then hike back down again through the exhaust fumes and honking horns of a traffic jam that now extended from the top of the mountain to the center of Lourdes, 35km away. All this to see a few small clusters of contenders shoot past, followed by perhaps a half hour’s worth of intermittent stragglers. It is difficult to explain to non-Tour fanatics why five hundred thousand people would put up with so much for so little, some of them actually camping out at the summit days in advance, staking their ground at Luz- Ardiden while the race was still in Marseilles. For Tour fans, the point is simply to be there, not just for social reasons (as is the case in small villages en route) but in order to share in some measure the lived space of the riders during their moments of suffering. Even to know the final outcome of the stage is not as important as experiencing simultaneously with the riders themselves the terrain, the weather, the exact force of the obstacles that must be overcome. A particularly difficult stretch of road two or three kilometers from the summit, or an haute-categorie climb at some much earlier point in the race–any spot where a key contender is likely to “crack”–will attract nearly as many fans as the finish area itself.

But this determination simply to be there at all costs is not really what Tour organizers desire in a spectator, and the fans who made the trek up to Luz- Ardiden–variously French, Bearnaise-French, Basque, and Spanish, but overwhelmingly low-income farmers and laborers–do not represent an ideal mix from the standpoint of prospective sponsors. The predominance of “peasants” is one bottom-line disadvantage to the sport’s old-world ethic of suffering. Another is that high levels of sickness and pain in the Tour can only be secured by long (sometimes week-long) stretches of utterly routine, and in themselves uninteresting, softening-up stages. And while it’s true that a body at the breaking point has a certain marketability, in the grand calculus of advertising a 22-day sporting event configured around two or three moments of extreme anguish (for which, moreover, there can be no charge of admission) leaves plenty of room for commercial adjustments.

Hence the recent efforts to “modernize” the Tour, of which the increasing emphasis on equipment innovation and technological advantage is just one sign. Another and more telling sign was the giant “television” (actually a collapsible scoreboard-type screen mounted in a mock-TV cabinet) that was perched at the very summit of the Luz-Ardiden climb. The mountain is so barren, and rises so steeply to such a sharp peak, that this mammoth symbol of the “new” Tour de France was clearly visible four and five kilometers down the road. As the riders made their way over the fearsome col de Tourmalet, the last hurdle before the Luz, all eyes, binoculars, and telescopic camera lenses were trained on this impressive publicity gimmick from Antenne 2, the official channel of the Tour. It was quite a sight: half a million people clustered densely together atop a magnificent mountain in the Pyrenees, all watching TV. From our naked-eye perspective at the 2km mark, the screen itself looked blank: the scene resembled nothing so much as pilgrims come to make sacrifice before some great and impassive idol, their TV-God. But the real moment of truth arrived when the first of the riders came charging past. With the actual race now taking place before their eyes, many people continued to watch the simulation. And who can blame them? If we had been closer, or had brought binoculars, we would have done the same. A bike race on a TV screen is far more “watchable” by the measure of contemporary sports entertainment than is the erratic parade of men in pain that constitutes a bike race on a mountain side.

And of course this is what is really at stake in “modernizing” the Tour; altering patterns of consumption, reshaping the practice of spectatorship. The new parameters of the route, to which fans are already growing accustomed–fewer ultra-high-mileage days, fewer marathon climbing stages, more half-stages, more intermediate sprints for bonus points, etc.–are not just increasing the proportion of watchable to unwatchable moments, but re-presenting the whole race as something you watch rather than something you do. Persuading mountaintop spectators to keep their eyes on the box rather than the road is only an incidental step in this process of modernization. The main thing is to persuade a new and more “contemporary” audience, the chic boutique owners in the Marais, for example, or the yuppies who are buying condos out at La Villette (French for Silicon Valley)–all those upscale Parisians whose only contact with the race is the annoying jam of tourists along the Champs Elysees during the ceremonial final stage–that the Tour de France is for them, too. That it’s fun to watch!

Whether this marketing strategy can ever really succeed with a “peasant sport” so strikingly ill-suited to the demands of commercial television is not at all certain. When the Tour rolled through the Alps this year there was a stylish young Parisian in the lead, yet organizers were unable to translate this into anything remotely resembling “Tour fever” in Paris. And their inability to sell the Tour Feminin, perhaps the boldest modernizing step of all, is another sign that their effectivity is far from unlimited. Nonetheless, that giant TV screen atop Luz Ardiden did represent genuine change. The Tour de France is already being practiced differently by its fans, and the transformation of cycling culture is likely to continue even if it doesn’t pay off in the end for the sponsors. And although there’s nothing to regret in the Tour’s shedding of its pseudo-spiritual, macho- masochistic character, we can hardly celebrate the emergence of one more frameable, watchable sports- entertainment package. Personally, I take heart from the Tour’s caricatural American twin–perhaps the first truly postmodern bicycle race–the Tour de Trump. Even a thoroughly banalized Tour de France can still exceed the organizers’ intentions and leave space for some saving cultural comedy.

Susan M. Schultz

University of Hawaii-Manoa

“Postmodern Poetries: Jerome J. McGann Guest -Edits an Anthology of Language Poets From North America and the United Kingdom,”Verse 7:1 (Spring, 1990): 6-73.

Postmodern poetry, especially Language poetry, is coming in from the cold. Not so long ago, postmodern poets published their work exclusively in small journals and disseminated it through small presses. Their radical differences from members of the Deep Image, Confessional, New York, and New Formalist schools probably condemned them to the margins of the publishing and the teaching worlds. But so, it seems, did their desire not to take part in (or to be co-opted by) that world. The climate is changing, however; a poetic greenhouse effect has lured well-known Language poets, among them Bob Perelman and Charles Bernstein, into the academy. Susan Howe has a book forthcoming from the well-established Wesleyan University Press. And the generally conservative pages ofVerse, a journal published in Great Britain and the United States, have opened to their “neonew” (the word is Perelman’s) attack on traditional versifying. The shepherd for this latest assault is Jerome McGann, long a lobbyist (or apologist, depending on your sympathies) for Language poetry.

Language writing is at once post-structuralist and interested in history, power, and leftist ideology. Language poetry bears an acknowledged debt to the Modernists’ style, if not their substance; it also shores fragments against ruins, although it means to revel in that fragmentation. This issue ofVerse seems geared more toward the demands of the initiated than toward those of the merely curious; as McGann notes in his introduction, no anthology of postmodernist poetry is complete without postmodernist prose (these writers, like the Modernists, are poet- critics). The lack of a critical background hurts, as does McGann’s teasing introduction. I will dwell a bit on the introduction, because its paradoxes seem to me central to the movement that McGann describes in it.

If editors are a species of literary parent, McGann is a benevolent father who neither instructs his progeny nor leaves them to fend entirely for themselves. His introduction takes the middle ground between these options, hinting at purpose, yet refusing at all turns to name it. And a tenuous middle ground it is, at least for readers not already privy to postmodernism’s concerns–and perhaps also for those who are. For McGann does not so much mediate between the reader and the texts that follow as write an introduction that consistently fails to introduce. His various indeterminacies would not be so frustrating were he not to promise something more specific. “[T]he aim here is to give a more catholic view of the radical change which poetry has undergone since the Vietnam War” (6). “From a social and historical point of view, this collection aims to show certain features of the contemporary avant-garde poetry scene which are not apparent in [other collections]” (7). McGann never makes clear what he means by “radical change” and the “certain features” that distinguish his anthology from those that come before (Ron Silliman’sIn the American Tree and Douglas Messerli’s 1987,Language Poetries, An Anthology).

McGann’s prose imitates the postmodern poetries he has chosen, and begins to define them by unravelling the kinds of definitions that we still like to believe govern the selection-process for any anthology. Curiously, however, McGann subscribes to his own set of definitions. According to McGann, these are not just Language poems, though “all the writing here is language-centered, whether the work in question is ‘Language Writing’ properly so-called (e.g., the selections from Hejinian, Bernstein, and McCaffery) or whether it is not (e.g., the selections from Howe, Bromige, or D.S. Marriott).” The secret to the difference between Language writing and language-centered writing lies, one assumes, in the names here mentioned. Rather than witness the move from the “authority” of Blake and Shelley to the nonauthoritative postmodernist realm of language, we move from one set of Big Names to another. The proclaimed gulf between “vision” and “language,” the Romantics and the postmoderns, is not so wide after all.

McGann’s introduction, then, for all its principle of uncertainty, violates its own code. For McGann describes postmodern poetry as poetry in which “The [decentered] I is engulphed in the writing; not an authority, it becomes instead a witness, for and against” (6). This jibes with Charles Bernstein’s attack on poetic voice in “Stray Straws and Straw Men,” inThe L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book: “‘The voice of the poet’ is an easy way of contextualizing poetry so that it can be more readily understood . . . as listening to someone talk in their distinctive manner” (LB 41). This emphasis on voice “has the tendency to reduce the body of a poet’s work to little more than personality.” And finally, “Voice is a possibility for poetry not an essence” (42). Several of the poets in this issue go to fascinating lengths to disrupt our expectation that we will be hearing poetic voices. Their strategies are often formal; the disjunction between form and content has become as much a critical standard these days as the New Critical junction was some forty years ago.

The most dramatic attempt to deflect us into language, away from the poet, is by Tina Darragh, in her sequence, “Bunch-Ups.” Darragh gives us four rectangular boxes in which she has drawn long pipe-shaped lines; it’s as if the reader looked at what she knew was the page of a book, but found that the lines were empty of words. At the bottom right section of each page, the lines “bunch-up”; below them one sees the portions of several lines of what looks like the OED: a number here, the beginning of a Latin term there, parts and wholes of English words. The piece effectively dramatizes the way in which the reader of a dictionary becomes–at random–the writer of an incomplete text. As she has written elsewhere, “Reading the definitions is like reading a foreign language developed specifically for English” (LB 108). And yet readers suspicious that nothing any writer sets down is, in truth, random will note that the seemingly haphazard glimpses from a dictionary that she gives us are in fact fragments about the self, about a network, a definition that includes a reference to “sense,” and one that reads “post in a statio” and is the 17th, archaic sense of a word. She makes connections, in other words, between dictionaries and selves, between networks of language and of people; her final fragment also suggests historical depth, even as it argues against the possibility of understanding history.

There are other notable attempts to foreground language and downplay the author, instances when, as Bernstein puts it, “the writing itself is seen as an instance of reality / fantasy / experience / event” (LB 41). Christopher Dewdney, for example, whose “source text” is a museum catalogue, describes his method as follows: “InThe Beach,The City,The Theatre Party andThe Self Portrait source lines alternate with interference lines which are generally permutations of the adjacent source lines. The permutation lines echo the line before at the same time as they preview the line after them. This profoundly skews the semantic valences of most of the reading subsequent to the first interference line (which is the second line in these four poems) [two of which are printed here]” (21). The two poems printed here reminded me very much of John Ashbery’s “Finnish Rhapsody” (fromApril Galleons), which Ashbery based on the repetitive style of theKalevala. But Dewdney’s procedure is, in its way, more radical; where Ashbery writes, and then rewrites his own text, Dewdney’s contribution to a pre-existing text is his “interference” in it.

Bob Perelman’s poem “Neonew” experiments with stanzas, the shapes of which are reflexive of the shape of history. Each section, until the end of the poem, is numbered “1,” which reminds us that history exists always in the present. In the second section “1” Perelman writes about the way in which a change in spelling affected the “poor Tatars.”

backwards into the body into the body of the poor
the body of the poor Tatars
body of the poor Tatars Roman
of the poor Tatars Roman history
the poor Tatars Roman history intercalated an
alphabetic letter
Tatars Roman history intercalated an alphabetic
letter they continue Tartars
Roman history intercalated an alphabetic letter
they continue Tartars of fell
Tartarean nature to this day (41)

Political power does not just give the victors the power to rewrite history; it also governs the empire’s spelling books. As Foucault knew, power operates everywhere, even when its effects seem accidental. Perelman’s limited text is also an open one, because it eschews poetic “voice” in favor of “writing” (like Derrida, Language poets reverse the traditional narrative, according to which voice precedes writing). In his talk, “The Rejection of Closure,” Perelman notes that, “The open text often emphasizes or foregrounds process, either the process of the original composition or of subsequent compositions by readers, and thus resists the cultural tendencies that seek to identify and fix material, turn it into a product; that is, it resists reduction and commodification” (quoted in Hartley, 38). This conception of the text is radically utopian; are we not able to describe the passage about “poor Tatars” in story-form? Can we not “interpret” this poem as we do “closed” texts? I suspect that we can, and that what Perelman–like any good poet–gives us is a new style in which to say what we already know. That the style is impersonal–that it does not reflect back on a subjective “I”–aligns it with the Modernism of T.S. Eliot and Marianne Moore. That this impersonal style works in the service of leftist politics does distinguish Perelman and his cohorts from the “great Modernists.” Thus, the line: “‘polis is eyes’ ‘O say can you see’ ‘police is eyes’,” conveys the sweep of history from the Greek polis to the United States, and joins them through the connection of sight and authority.

Yet McGann’s reliance on names to define postmodern poetries is revealing–not for anything it tells us of McGann, but for what it tells us about this –and other–anthologies of postmodern verse. Many of these poets do have recognizable styles. In that sense, to paraphrase Stevens, every disorder depends on there being an ordering consciousness in the background. If not voices, then, these poets have idiosyncratic ways of placing words on the page, individual means to distort syntax and to break “the basic assumptions of bourgeois subjectivity,” as George Hartley phrases it in his cogent book on the Language poets (34). As Bernstein writes, “The best of the writing that gets called automatic issues from a series of choices as deliberate & reflected as can be” (43). Or, one might add, the best of postmodern writing issues through the filter of a mind that makes choices.

Charles Bernstein and Lyn Hejinian, identified by McGann as “proper” Language poets, and Susan Howe, an “improper” Language poet, all write with a lyricism that argues against the “decentered I”–or at least works in tension with it. Bernstein’s “Debris of Shock/Shock of Debris” is a collage of mixed cliches (like mixed metaphors) that engages political concerns:

   Never
burglarize a house with a standing army,
nor take the garbage to an unauthorized
junket. (69)

He satirizes the capitalist’s conflation of art with money, authority with seductiveness, as well as his “style,” which formalizes capitalist politics:

Yet it is the virile voice of authority, the
condescending
smugness in tone, that is thrilling. What
does it matter that he hasn’t any . . .
“Creative
goals and financial goals are identical: we
just
have different approaches on how to research
those goals, and we have different
definitions
of risk.” (71)

Yet the comedy of pastiche that Bernstein creates melts into a lyricism that recalls John Ashbery’s “Soonest Mended,” where that poet moves abruptly from talk of brushing one’s teeth to a lush Keatsian conclusion. We move from satire to a sense of loss:

   The salt
of the earth is the tears
of God, torn for
penitence at having created this plenitude
of sufferance. So we dismember (disremember)
in homage to our maker, foraging
in fits, forgiving in
forests, spearing what we take
to be our sustenance: belittling to rein things
in to human scale. A holy land parched
with grief & dulled
envy. The land is soil
& will not stain; such
hope as we may rise from. (73)

Here lyricism operates against what we think of as lyrical vision; this is a post-apocalyptic, post-Romantic vision. It is not Bernstein’s only register, and yet the elegiac tone of the poem–the poet’s grief for a wasted earth–suggests a new direction for postmodern poetry. Such poetry might acknowledge more fully its double desire to be jarring and lyrical, iconoclastic and reverential, skeptical and faithful to what land we have left. It might at least tease us with the possibility of an integrated self, even as it testifies to its loss, and the dangers of our nostalgia for it.

Let me add that there are moments of good fun in this anthology. After all, the deconstruction of established canons and styles is more often Dionysian than Apollonian. Consider David Bromige’s “Romantic Traces,” which proclaims its purpose in empurpled Keatsisms:

It is time I pledge some vows,
apart from those, that is, I’ve taken to the
lyre,
to be as true to it as chainsaw is to boughs
ready to make a widow the next forest fire–
and suddenly I hear I’m to be retired
for failing to accumulate sufficient fans
and denied a seat with the Olympians
because I sang and wrote when by democracy
inspired! (51)

Now that poets like Bromige and his fellow postmoderns are “accumulating sufficient fans,” anthologies such as this one should provide an important link between poets and whatever “common readers” remain.

Works Cited

• Andrews, Bruce and Charles Bernstein, eds. The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book.  Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1984.
• Hartley, George.Textual Politics and the Language Poets. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989.

Neil Larsen

Northeastern University

My remarks here¹ concern the following topics of critical discussion and debate: 1) the ideological character of postmodernism as both a philosophical standpoint and as a set of political objectives and strategies; 2) the development within a broadly postmodernist theoretical framework of a trend advocating a critique of certain postmodern tenets from the standpoint of anti-imperialism; and 3) the influence of this trend on both the theory and practice of oppositional culture in Latin America. So as to eliminate the need for second-guessing my own standpoint in what follows, let me state clearly at the outset that I will adhere to what I understand to be both a Marxist and a Leninist position as concerns both epistemology and the social and historical primacy of class contradiction. In matters philosophical, then, I will be advancing and defending dialectical materialist arguments. Regarding questions of culture and aesthetics, as well as those of revolutionary strategy under existing conditions–areas in which Marxist and Leninist theory have either remained relatively speculative or have found it necessary to re-think older positions–my own thinking may or may not merit the attribution of ‘orthodoxy,’ depending on how that term is currently to be understood.

(1)

One typically appeals to the term ‘postmodern’ to characterize a broad and ever-widening range of aesthetic and cultural practices and artifacts. But the concept itself, however diffuse and contested, has also come to designate a very definite current of philosophy as well as a theoretical approach to politics. Postmodern philosophy–or simply postmodern ‘theory,’ if we are to accept Jameson’s somewhat ingenuous observation that it “marks the end of philosophy”²–arguably includes the now standard work of poststructuralist thinkers such as Derrida and Foucault as well as the more recent work by ex-post- Althusserian theorists such a Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, academic philosophical converts such as Richard Rorty and the perennial vanguardist Stanley Aronowitz. The latter elaborate and re-articulate an increasingly withered poststructuralism, re-deploying the grandly dogmatic and quasi-mystical “critique of the metaphysics of presence” as a critical refusal of the “foundationalism” and “essentialism” of the philosophy of the Enlightenment. These two assignations–which now come to replace the baneful Derridean charge of “metaphysics”–refer respectively to the Enlightenment practice of seeking to ground all claims regarding either truth or value in terms of a self-evidencing standard of Reason; and to the ontological fixation upon being as essence, rather than as relationality or ‘difference.’

Postmodern philosophy for the most part adopts its “anti-essentialism” directly from Derrida and company, adding little if anything to accepted (or attenuated) post-structuralist doctrine. Where postmodernism contributes more significantly to the honing down and re-tooling of poststructuralism is, I propose, in its indictment of foundationalism–in place of the vaguer abstractions of “presence” or “identity”–as the adversarial doctrine. It is not all “Western” modes of thought and being which must now be discarded, but more precisely their Enlightenment or modern modalities, founded on the concept of reason. Indeed, even the charge of “foundationalism” perhaps functions as a minor subterfuge here. What postmodern philosophy intends is, to cite Aronowitz’s forthright observation, a “rejection of reason as a foundation for human affairs.”³ Postmodernism is thus a form, albeit an unconventional one, of irrationalism.

To be sure, important caveats can be raised here. Postmodernist theoreticians often carefully stipulate that a rejection of reason as foundation does not imply or require a rejection of all narrowly ‘reasonable’ procedures. Postmodernity is not to be equated with an anti-modernity. Aronowitz, for example, has written that “postmodern movements” (e.g., ecology and “Solidarity” type labor groups) “borrow freely the terms and programs of modernity but place them in new discursive contexts” (UA 61). Chantal Mouffe insists that “radical democracy”–according to her, the political and social project of postmodernity–aims to “defend the political project [of Enlightenment] while abandoning the notion that it must be based on a specific form of rationality.”⁴ Ernesto Laclau makes an even nicer distinction by suggesting that “it is precisely the ontological status of the central categories of the discourses of modernity and not their content, that is at stake. . . . Postmodernity does not imply a change in the values of Enlightenment modernity but rather a particular weakening of their absolutist character.”⁵ And a similarly conservative gesture within the grander irrationalist impulse can, of course, be followed in Lyotard’s characterization of “paralogy” as those practices legitimating themselves exclusively within their own “small narrative” contexts, rather than within the macro-frames of modernist meta-narratives of Reason, Progress, History, etc.⁶

Two counter-objections are necessary here, however. The first is that any thoughtful consideration of claims to locate the attributes of reason within supposedly local or non-totalizable contexts immediately begs the question of what, then, acts to set the limits to any particular instance of “paralogy,” etc.? How does the mere adding of the predicate “local” or “specific” or “weakened” serve to dispense with the logic of an external ground or foundation? Cannot, for example, the ecology movement be shown to be grounded in a social and political context outside and ‘larger’ than it is, whatever the movement may think of itself? If reason is present (or absent) in the fragment, does not this presence/absence necessarily connect with the whole on some level? If, as one might say, postmodernism wants to proclaim a rationality of means entirely removed from a rationality of ends, does it not thereby sacrifice the very “means/ends” logic it wants to invoke, the very logical framework in which one speaks of “contexts”? I suggest it would be more precise to describe the measured, non-foundationalist ‘rationalism’ of postmodernism as simply an evasive maneuver designed to immunize from critique the real object here: that is to preserve “Enlightenment” as merely an outward and superficial guise for irrationalist content, to reduce “Enlightenment,” as an actual set of principles designed to govern consciously thought and action, to merely the specific mythology needed to inform the project of a “new radical imaginary” (Laclau,UA 77).

Clearly, there is a complete failure–or refusal– of dialectical reasoning incurred in postmodernism’s attempted retention of an Enlightenment ‘micro’- rationality. And this brings up the second rejoinder: postmodern philosophy’s practiced avoidance on this same score of the Marxist, dialectical materialist critique of Enlightenment. Postmodern theory, virtually without exception, consigns something it calls “Marxism” to the foul Enlightenment brew of “foundationalism.th” Marxism is, in effect, collapsed back into Hegelianism, the materialist dialectic into the idealist dialectic–or, as Aronowitz somewhat puzzlingly puts it, the “form of Marxism is retained while its categories are not” (UA 52). But in no instance that I know of has a postmodern theorist systematically confronted the contention first developed by Marx and Engels that “this realm of reason was nothing more than the idealized realm of the bourgeoisie.”⁷ I think perhaps it needs to be remembered that the Marxist project was not and is not the simple replacement of one “universal reason” with another, but the practical and material transformation of reason to be attained in classless society; and that this attainment would not mean the culmination of reason on earth a la Hegel but a raising of reason to a higher level through its very de-“idealization.” Reason, then, comes to be grasped as a time-bound, relative principle which nevertheless attains an historical universality through the social universality of the proletariat (gendered and multi-ethnic) as they/we who–to quote a famous lyric–“shall be the human race.”

But again, postmodern irrationalism systematically evades confrontation with this critique of Enlightenment. It typically manages this through a variety of fundamentally dogmatic maneuvers, epitomized in the work of Laclau and Mouffe–who, as Ellen Meiksins Wood has shown,⁸ consistently and falsely reduce Marxism to a “closed system” of pure economic determinism.

Why this evasion? Surely there is more than a casual connection here with the fact that the typical postmodern theorist probably never got any closer to Marxism or Leninism than Althusser’s left-wing structuralism and Lacanianism. One can readily understand how the one time advocate of a self-enclosed “theoretical practice” might elicit postmodern suspicions of closure and ‘scientism.’ Indeed, Althusser’s ‘Marxism’ can fairly be accused of having pre-programmed, in its flight from the class struggles of its time and into methodologism, the subsequent turn-about in which even the residual category of “theoretical practice” is deemed “foundationalist.”

But this is secondary. What I would propose is that postmodernism’s hostility towards a “foundationalist” parody of Marxism, combined with the elision of Marxism’s genuinely dialectical and materialist content, flows not from a simple misunderstanding but, objectively, from the consistent need of an ideologically embattled capitalism to seek displacement and pre-emption of Marxism through the formulation of radical-sounding “third paths.” That postmodern philosophy normally refrains from open anti- communism, preferring to pay lip service to “socialism” even while making the necessary obeisances to the demonologies of “Stalin” may make it appear as some sort of a “left” option. But is there really anything “left”? The most crucial problem for Marxism today– how to extend and put into practice a critique from the left of retreating “socialism” at the moment of the old communist movement’s complete transformation into its opposite–remains safely beyond postmodernist conceptual horizons.

Postmodernist philosophy’s oblique but hostile relation to Marxism largely duplicates that of Nietzsche. And the classical analysis here belongs to Lukacs’ critique of Nietzschean irrationalism inThe Destruction of Reason, a work largely ignored by contemporary theory since being anathematized by Althusserianism two decades ago. Lukacs identifies in Nietzsche’s radically anti-systemic and counter- cultural thinking a consistent drive to attack and discredit the socialist ideals of his time. But against these Nietzsche proposes nothing with any better claim to social rationality. Any remaining link between reason and the emancipatory is refused. It is, according to Lukacs, this very antagonism towards socialism–a movement of whose most advanced theoretical expression Nietzsche remained fundamentally ignorant–which supplies to Nietzschean philosophy its point of departure and its principal unifying “ground” as such. “It is material from ‘enemy territory,’ problems and questions imposed by the class enemy which ultimately determine the content of his philosophy.”⁹ Unlike his more typical fellow reactionaries, however, Nietzsche perceived the fact of bourgeois decadence and the consequent need to formulate an intellectual creed which could give the appearance of overcoming it. In this he anticipates the later, more explicit “anti- bourgeois” anti-communisms of the coming imperialist epoch–most obviously fascism. This defense of a decadent bourgeois order, based on the partial acknowledgement of its defects and its urgent need for cultural renewal, and pointing to a “third path” “beyond” the domain of reason,¹⁰ Lukacs terms an “indirect apologetic.”

Postmodern philosophy receives Nietzsche through the filters of Deleuze, Foucault and Derrida, blending him with similarly mediated versions of Heidegger and William James into a new irrationalist hybrid. But the terms of Lukacs’ Nietzsche-critique on the whole remain no less appropriate. Whereas, on the one hand, postmodernist philosophy’s aversion for orthodox fascism is so far not to be seriously questioned, its basic content continues, I would argue, to be “dictated by the adversary.” And this adversary–revolutionary communism as both a theory and a practice–assumes an even sharper identity today than in Nietzsche’s epoch. Let it be said that Lukacs, writing forty years ago, posits an adversarial Marxism-Leninism more free of the critical tensions and errors than we know it to have been then or to be now. If, from our own present standpoint,The Destruction of Reason has a serious flaw, then it is surely this failure to anticipate or express openly the struggles and uncertainties within communist orthodoxy itself. (Lukacs’ subsequent allegiance to Krushchevite positions–by then, perhaps, inevitable–marks his decisive move to the right on these issues.) But the fact that postmodern philosophy arises in a conjuncture marked by capitalist restoration throughout the “socialist” bloc and the consequent extreme crisis and disarray within the theoretical discourse of Marxism, while it may explain the relative freedom from genuinely contestatory Marxist critique enjoyed by postmodern theorists, in no way alters the essence of this ideological development as a reprise of pseudo-dialectical, Nietzschean “indirect apologetics.”

This becomes fully apparent when one turns to post-modernism’s more explicit formulations as a politics. I am thinking here mainly of Laclau and Mouffe’sHegemony and Socialist Strategy, a work which, though it remains strongly controversial, has attained in recent years a virtually manifesto-like standing among many intellectuals predisposed to poststructuralist theory.Hegemony and Socialist Strategy proposes to free the Gramscian politics linked to the concept of “hegemony” (the so-called “war of position,” as opposed to “war of maneuver”) from its residual Marxian ‘foundationalism’ in recognition of what is held to be the primary efficacy of discourse itself and its “articulating” agents in forming hegemonic subjects. And it turns out of course that “socialist strategy” means dumping socialism altogether for a “radical democracy” which more adequately conforms to the “indeterminacy” of a “society” whose concept is modeled directly on the poststructuralist critique of the sign.

The key arguments ofHegemony and Socialist Strategy–as, in addition, the serious objections they have elicited–have become sufficiently well known to avoid lengthy repetitions here. What Mouffe and Laclau promise to deliver is, in the end, a revolutionary or at least emancipatory political strategy shorn of ‘foundationalist’ ballast. In effect, however, they merely succeed in shifting the locus of political and social agency from “essentialist” categories of class and party to a discursive agency of “articulation.”¹¹ And when it comes time to specify concretely the actual articulating subjects themselves,Hegemony and Socialist Strategy resorts to a battery of argumentative circularities and subterfuges which simply relegate the articulatory agency to “other discourses.”¹²

Ellen Meiksins Wood has shown the inevitable collapse ofHegemony and Socialist Strategy into its own illogic as an argument with any pretense to denote political or social realities–a collapse which, because of its very considerable synthetic ambitions and conceptual clarity perhaps marks the conclusive failure of poststructuralism to produce a viable political theory. But the failure of argument has interfered little with the capacity of this theoretical tract to supply potentially anti-capitalist intellectuals with a powerful dose of “indirect apologetics.” The fact that the “third path” calls itself “radical democracy,” draping itself in the “ethics” if not the epistemology of Enlightenment, the fact that it outwardly resists the “fixity” of any one privileged subject, makes it, in a sense, the more perfect “radical” argument for a capitalist politics of pure irrationalist spontaneity. And we know who wins on the battlefield of the spontaneous.¹³ While the oppressed are fed on the myths of their own “hegemony”–and why not, since “on the threshold of postmodernity” humanity is “for the first time the creator and constructor of its own history”? (Laclau, UA 79-80)–those already in a position to “articulate” the myths for us only strengthen their hold on power.

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In my remarks so far I have emphasized how contemporary postmodern philosophy’s blanket hostility towards the universalisms of Enlightenment thought might merely work to pre-empt Marxism’s carefully directed critique of that particular universal which is present-day capitalist ideology and power. Does not the merely theoretical refusal of the (ideal) ground serve in fact to strengthen the real foundations of real oppression by rendering all putative knowledge of the latter illicit? When Peter Dews criticizes Foucault for his attempt to equate the “plural” with the emancipatory, the remark applies to more recent postmodern theory with equal force: “the deep naivety of this conception lies in the assumption that once the aspiration to universality is abandoned what will be left is a harmonious plurality of unmediated perspectives.”¹⁴ In light of this perverse blindness to particular universals, postmodernism’s seemingly general skepticism towards Marxism as one possible instance of ‘foundationalism’ would be better grasped as a specific and determining antagonism. Is there an extant, living–i.e., practiced–philosophy other than Marxism which any longer purports to ground rational praxis in universal (but in this case also practical-material) categories? We are saying, then, that postmodern philosophy and political theory becomes objectively, albeit perhaps obliquely, a variation of anti-communism.

It might, however, be objected at this point that postmodernism encompasses not only this demonstrably right-wing tendency but also a certain ‘left’ which, like Marxism, aims at an actual transcendence of oppressive totalities but which diverges from Marxism in its precise identification of the oppressor and of the social agent charged with its opposition and overthrow. Under this more “practical” aegis, the axis of postmodern antagonism shifts from the universal versus the particular to the more politically charged tension between the “center” and the “margin.” Such a shift has, for example, been adumbrated by Cornel West as representing a particularly American inflection of the postmodern. “For Americans,” says West,

are politically always already in a condition of postmodern fragmentation and heterogeneity in a way that Europeans have not been; and the revolt against the center by those constituted as marginals is an oppositional difference in a way that poststructuralist notions of difference are not. These American attacks on universality in the name of difference, these 'postmodern' issues of otherness (Afro-Americans, Native Americans, women, gays) are in fact an implicit critique of certain French postmodern discourses about otherness that really serve to hide and conceal the power of the voices and movements of Others.¹⁵

Among instances of a “left” postmodernism we might then include certain of contemporary feminisms and the theoretical opposition to homophobia as well as the cultural nationalisms of ethnic minority groups. The category of the “marginal” scarcely exhausts itself here, however. Arrayed against the “center” even as also “concealed” by its discourses and “disciplines” are, in this conception, also the millions who inhabit the neocolonial societies of the ‘third world.’ Hence there might be a definite logic in describing the contemporary anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements of the periphery as in their own way also “postmodern.”

It is this “marginal” and “anti-imperialist” claim to postmodernity which I now wish to assess in some depth. In particular I propose to challenge the idea that such a “left” movement within postmodernism really succeeds in freeing itself from the right-wing apologetic strain within the postmodern philosophy of the “center.”

The basic outlines of this “left” position are as follows: both post-structuralism and postmodernism, as discourses emergent in the “center,” have failed to give adequate theoretical consideration to the international division of labor and to what is in fact the uneven and oppressive relation of metropolitan knowledge and its institutions to the “life-world” of the periphery. Both metropolitan knowledge as well as metropolitan systems of ethics constitute themselves upon a prior exclusion of peripheral reality. They therefore become themselves falsely ‘universal’ and as such ideological rather than genuinely critical. The remedy to such false consciousness is not to be sought in the mere abstract insistence on “difference” (or “unfixity,” the “heterogeneous,” etc.), but in the direct practical intervention of those who are different, those flesh and blood “others” whom, as West observes, the very conceptual appeal to alterity has ironically excluded. As a corollary, it is then implied that a definite epistemological priority, together with a kind of ethical exemplariness, adheres to those subjects and practices marginalized by imperialist institutions of knowledge and culture.

Among ‘first world’ theorists who have put forward this kind of criticism perhaps the best known is Fredric Jameson. In his essay “Third World Literature in the Era of Multi-national Capitalism” Jameson argues that “third world texts necessarily project a political dimension in the form of national allegory: the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third world culture and society.”¹⁶ Third world texts, then–and by extension those who produce them and their primary public–retain what the culture of postmodernism in the ‘first world’ is unable to provide, according to another of Jameson’s well-known arguments: a “cognitive map”¹⁷ equipped to project the private onto the public sphere. As such, these peripheral practices of signification consciously represent a political bedrock reality which for the contemporary postmodern metropole remains on the level of the political unconscious. (It should be pointed out of course that Jameson’s schema is largely indifferent in this respect to the modernism/postmodernism divide.) What enables this is the fact that the third world subject, like Hegel’s slave, exhibits a “situational consciousness” (Jameson’s preferred substitute term for materialism). As “master,” however, the metropolitan consciousness becomes enthralled to the fetishes which symbolize its dominance.

An analogous but weaker theory of the marginal as epistemologically privileged is to be found in the writings of Edward Said. InThe World, the Text and the Critic, for example, Said chastises contemporary critical theory, especially poststructuralism, for its lack of “worldliness”–by which he evidently means much the same thing designated by Jameson’s “situational consciousness.” What is needed, according to Said, is “a sort of spatial sense, a sort of measuring faculty for locating or situating theory”¹⁸ which Said denotes simply as “critical consciousness.”The World, the Text and the Critic ultimately disappoints in its own failure to historically or “spatially” situate such “critical consciousness,” but given Said’s public commitment to Palestinian nationalism it wouldn’t seem unreasonable to identify in his call for “worldliness” a prescription for “third-worldliness.”

Both Jameson and Said–the former far more openly and forthrightly than the latter–violate central tenets of postmodernism, of course, insofar as they posit the existence of a marginal consciousness imbued with “presence” and “self-identity.” That is, they appear to justify an orthodox postmodernist counter-accusation of “essentialism.” Lest this should be thought to constitute a final incompatibility of postmodernism for an anti-imperialist, post-colonial standpoint, however, it is imperative to mention here the work of Gayatry Chakravorty Spivak. Foreseeing this difficulty, Spivak has (in her critical reading of the work of a radical collective of Indian historians known as the “subaltern studies group”) sought to justify such “essentialism” as a strategic necessity, despite its supposed epistemological falsity. The radical, third world historian, writes Spivak, “must remain committed to the subaltern as the subject of his history. As they choose this strategy, they reveal the limits of the critique of humanism as produced in the west.”¹⁹ Spivak, that is to say, poses the necessity for an exceptionalism: a conceptual reliance on the “subject of history,” which as a poststructuralist she would condemn as reactionary and “humanist,” is allowed on “strategical” grounds within the terrain of the “subaltern.” It begins to sound ironically like the old pro-colonialist condescension to the “native’s” need for myths that the educated metropolitan city- dweller has now dispensed with–but more on this below.

Even if the “marginal” cannot be proved to enjoy an epistemological advantage, however, its very reality as a ‘situation’ requiring direct action against oppression can be appealed to as politically and ethically exemplary. Thus, in her very poignant essay entitled “Feminism: the Political Conscience of Postmodernism?” (UA 149-166) the critic and video artist Laura Kipnis proposes that feminism, seemingly entrapped between the “textualist” (i.e., modernist) aestheticism of French poststructuralist critics on the order of Cixous, Irigaray, etc., and North American liberal reformism (another case of “essentialism”), adopt “a theory of women not as class or caste but as colony” (UA 161). The efforts of a Rorty or a Laclau to salvage “Enlightenment” by ridding it of foundationalism and leaving only its “pragmatic” procedures would, in this view, be too little too late. For Kipnis, as for Craig Owens,²⁰ postmodernism denotes what is really the definitive decline of the “West” and its colonial systems of power. If those marginalized within the center itself, e.g., women, are to rescue themselves from this sinking ship they must model their opposition on the practice of non-Western anti-colonial rebels. Referring to the 1986 bombing of Libya, Kipnis writes: “When retaliation is taken, as has been announced, for ‘American arrogance,’ this is the postmodern critique of Enlightenment; it is, in fact, a decentering, it is the margin, the absence, the periphery rewriting the rules from its own interest” (UA 163).

An analogous proposal for third world revolt within the conceptual terrain of postmodernism has been issued by George Yudice. Against the postmodern ‘ethics’ formulated by Foucault as an “aesthetics of existence”–manifesting itself, e.g., in the liberal comforts of pluralism–Yudice suggests finding an ethical standard “among the dominated and oppressed peoples of the ‘peripheral’ or underdeveloped countries.”²¹ As a mere “aesthetic” the postmodern “explores the marginal, yet is incapable of any solidarity with it” (UA 224). Yudice terms this marginal ethic an “ethic of survival” and points to the example set by Rigoberta Menchu, a Guatemalan Mayan woman who has recorded her experiences as an organizer for the Christian base community movement against genocidal repression.²² “Menchu, in fact, has turned her very identity into a ‘poetics of defense.’ Her oppression and that of her people have opened them to an unfixity delimited by the unboundedness of struggle” (UA 229). In Menchu’s ethical example we thus have, so to speak, the subversive promise of “unfixity” a la Mouffe-Laclau made flesh.

Yudice is not the first to attempt this particular inflection with specific reference to Latin America. The “liberation theology” which guides Menchu’s practice as a militant might itself lay some claim to represent an indigenously Latin American postmodernism–“avant la lettre” insofar as Foucault and his followers are concerned. The philosophical implications of liberation theology have been worked out by the so-called “Philosophy of Liberation,” a intellectual current which developed in Argentina in the early 1970s. As recounted recently by Horacio Cerutti-Guldberg,²³ “Philosophy of Liberation” set out explicitly to formulate a uniquely Latin American doctrine of liberation which would be “neither a liberal individualism nor a Marxist collectivism” (LAP 47). Rather, it would set itself the goal of “philosophizing out of the social demands of the most needy, the marginalized and despised sectors of the population” (LAP 44). This in turn requires, according to exponent Enrique Dussel, a new philosophical method–known as “analectics”–based on the logical priority or “anteriority” of the exterior (i.e., the marginal, the Other) over totality.²⁴ “Analectics” are to supplant the “Eurocentric” method of dialectics. As Cerutti-Guldberg observes:

Dialectics (it doesn't matter whether Hegelian or Marxist, since analectical philosophy identifies them) could never exceed "intra-systematicity." It would be incapable of capturing the requirements of "alterity" expressed in the "face" of the "poor" that demands justice. In this sense, it would appear necessary to postulate a method that would go beyond (ana-) and not merely through (dia-) the totality. This is the "analectical" method which works with the central notion of analogy. In this way, analectical philosophy would develop the "essential" thinking longed for by Heidegger. Such thinking would be made possible when it emerges out of the cultural, anthropological "alterative" Latin American space. This space is postulated as "preliminary in the order of Being" and "posterior in the order of knowledge" with respect to the "ontological totality." It is constituted by the poor of the "third world." (LAP 50)

In Dussel’sPhilosophy of Liberation the logic of going “beyond” the totality ultimately leads to explicit theology and mysticism. “What reason can never embrace–the mystery of the other as other–only faith can penetrate” (Dussel 93). But the “analectical” method has received other, non- theological formulations in Latin America, most notably in the case of the Cuban critic Roberto Fernandez Retamar, whose theoretical writings of the early 1970s²⁵ were aimed at refuting the possibility that a “universal” theory of literature could truthfully reflect the radical alterity of “Nuestra America.” This is argued to be so not only as a result of the unequal, exploitative relation of imperial metropolis to periphery–a relation which is historically evolved and determined and thus subject to transformation–but because all notions of universality (e.g., Goethe’s, and Marx and Engels’ idea of aWeltliteratur) are fictions masking the reality of radical diversity and alterity.

One should point out here that Retamar’s philosophical authority is Jose Marti and certainly not Derrida, Deleuze or Foucault, whom, had he been aware of them at the time, Retamar would almost surely have regarded with skeptical hostility. Dussel and the various Latin American philosophers associated with “Philosophy of Liberation” have obvious debts to European phenomenology and existentialism, especially Heidegger and Levinas. But here, too, a philosophical trend in which we can now recognize the idea of postmodernity as a radical break with Enlightenment develops out of what is perceived at least as a direct social and political demand for theory to adequately reflect the life-world of those who are, as it were, both “marginal” and the “subject of history” at once. One can sympathize with the general impatience of Latin American critics and theorists who see in the category of the “postmodern” what appears to be yet another neo- colonial attempt to impose alien cultural models. (Such would probably be Retamar’s conscious sentiments.) But the example of the “analectical” critiques of Dussel and Retamar shows, in fact, that the intellectual and cultural gulf is overdrawn and that all roads to postmodernism do not lead through French poststructuralism.

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Do we then find a Latin American culture of postmodernism linked to these particular conceptual trends? I would argue–and have argued elsewhere²⁶— that the recent proliferation in Latin America of so- called “testimonial” narratives like that of Rigoberta Menchu, as well as the fictional and quasi-fictional texts which adopt the perspective of the marginalized (see,inter alia, the works of Elena Poniatowska, Eduardo Galeano and Manlio Argueta), give some evidence of postmodernity insofar as they look for ways of “giving voice” to alterity. Significant here is their implicit opposition to the more traditional (and modernist) approach of “magical realism” in which the marginal becomes a kind of aesthetic mode of access to the ground of national or regional unity and identity. One could include here as well the general wave of interest in Latin American popular and “barrio” culture as an embodiment of ‘resistance.’

But our direct concern here is with the ideological character of the conceptual trend as such. Does the move to, as it were, found post-modernism’s anti-foundationalism in the rebellious consciousness of those marginalized by modernity alter orthodox postmodernism’s reactionary character?

I submit that it does not. Basing themselves on what is, to be sure, the decisive historical and political reality of unequal development and the undeniably imperialist and neo-colonialist bias of much metropolitan-based theory, the “left” postmodernists we have surveyed here all, to one degree or another, proceed to distort this reality into a new irrationalist and spontaneist myth. Marginality is postulated as a condition which, purely by virtue of its objective situation, spontaneously gives rise to the subversive particularity upon which postmodern politics pins its hopes. But where has this been shown actually to occur? Where has imperialism, and its attendant “scientific” and cultural institutions, actually given way and not simply adapted to the “new social movements” founded on ideals of alterity?

Jameson, whose argument for a third-world cognitive advantage points openly to an anti- imperialist nationalism as the road to both political and cultural redemption from postmodern psychic and social pathologies, speaks to us of Ousmane Sembene and Lu Hsun, but leaves out the larger question of where strategies of all-class national liberation have ultimately led Africa and China–of whether, in fact, nationalism, even the radical nationalism of cultural alterity, can be said to have succeeded as a strategy of anti-imperialism. As Aijaz Ahmad remarked in his well-taken critique of Jameson’s essay, Jameson’s retention of a “three worlds” theoretical framework imposes a view of neo-colonial society as free of class contradictions.²⁷

Spivak’s move to characterize the “subaltern” as what might be termed “deconstruction with a human face” only leads us further into a spontaneist thicket– although the logic here is more consistent than in Jameson and Said, since the transition from colonial to independent status itself is reduced to a “displacement of function between sign systems” (Spivak, 198).

Kipnis, whose attempt to implicate both textualist and reformist feminisms in a politics of elitism and quietism has real merits, can in the end offer up as models for an “anti-colonial” feminism little more than the vague threat of anti-Western counter-terror from radical third-world nationalists such as Muammar Khadafy. We recall here Lenin’s dialectical insight inWhat is to be Done? regarding the internal link between spontaneism and an advocacy of terrorism. Yudice’s counter-posing of a third world “ethic of survival” to a postmodern ethic of “self- formation” possesses real force as itself an ethical judgement and one can only concur in arguing the superior moral example of a Rigoberta Menchu. But where does this lead us politically? Those super- exploited and oppressed at the periphery thus become pegged with a sort of sub-political consciousness, as if they couldn’t or needn’t see beyond the sheer fact of “survival.”

Are these lapses into the most threadbare sorts of political myths and fetishes simply the result of ignorance or bad faith on the part of sympathetic first world theorists? Not at all, I would suggest. Regarding current political reality in Latin America, at least, such retreats into spontaneism and the overall sub-estimation of the conscious element in the waging of political struggle merely reflect in a general way the continuing and indeed increasing reliance of much of the autochthonous anti-imperialist left on a similar mix of romantic faith in exemplary violence and in the eventual spontaneous uprising of the “people,” whether with bullets or with ballots. Although bothfoquismo and the strategy of a “peaceful road to socialism” based on populist alliances are recognized on one level to have failed, the conclusions drawn from this by the mainstream left have on the whole only led to an even more thorough- going abandonment of Marxist and Leninist political strategies in favor of a “democratic” politics of consensus. The strategic watchword seems to be “hegemony”–as derived, so far, from Gramsci, although who can say whether Laclau and Mouffe might not stage a rapid conquest of the Latin American left intelligentsia the way Althusser did two decades ago? If the left is to reverse the disastrous consequences of praetorian fascism in the Southern Cone and Brazil, for example–a reversal now basically limited to the regaining of a “lost” bourgeois “democracy”–this will supposedly require a less “sectarian” approach in which such slogans as “democracy” and “national sovereignty” are given a “popular” rather than an “elite” content. The matter of ideology–the question of whether, for example, “democracy,” “national sovereignty,” etc., are the political ideas through which the masses of exploited Latin Americans are to attain true emancipation–is now generally dropped. (Another case of “essentialism.”) What is needed is to wage a “war of position” fought by a left-hegemonized “popular bloc” and not by a movement of workers and class-allies organized in a revolutionary party.

This is not to say that the Gramscian political strategy associated with “hegemony” is necessarily tied to spontaneism; for Gramsci, at least, the “hegemony” required could only be the result of conscious political organizing and guidance by a working-class party itself led by its own “organic intellectuals.” (To what extent this accords or diverges from the Leninist strategy of democratic centralism is a matter we cannot go into here.) In its currently general acceptation in Latin America, however–linked as it is to purely reformist ends–“hegemony” implies a need to substitute a form of organization based on spontaneously arising social and cultural ideologies and practices for the “older” one of party-based, consciousness-raising agitation and recruitment. The almost unanimous move of the mainstream left to embrace liberation theology and the Catholic Church-led Christian base-community movement (or at least to refrain from open polemics with it) is the most significant example of a politics of “hegemony” over one of ideology.

I think this entire political trend within Latin America can be correctly grasped only as a consequence of the failure of Marxists, in particular the established Communist Parties and allied organizations, to carry out a self-criticism from the left, and of the resulting shift rightward into political positions which merely compound the errors of the past. The response of traditional Latin American Marxism to the evident failure of populism (with or without afoco component) as a variation on the orthodox “two-stage” model (democratic capitalism first, then socialism) has typically been to jettison the second stage entirely. One could argue with a certain justice that this collapse was inevitable, given the political mistakes already embedded in the older line. As Adolfo Sanchez Vasquez has recently pointed out,²⁸ Latin Americans inherited the Marxism of the Second International, the Marxism which regarded revolution in the Western centers of capitalism as the necessary precondition for even national liberation, much less socialism or communism on the periphery. The Marx who, after studying British colonialism in Ireland, concluded that the liberation of Irish workers from imperialism was key to the political advance of an increasingly reformist and conservative British working class; the Marx who speculated that peasant communes in Russia might make feasible a direct transition to socialism: this Marx was largely unknown in Latin America. Thus when the Communism of the Third International adopted the “two stage” model for neocolonial countries, Latin American revolutionaries had scarcely any theoretical basis upon which to dissent. (This, according to Sanchez Vasquez, held true even for so original a Marxist thinker as Mariategui, who, perhaps because he had to go outside Marxism for theories sensitive to factors of unequal development, was ultimately led in the direction of the irrationalism of Bergson and Sorel.) Latin America is in no way unique in this, needless to say. Everywhere the dominant trend is to compound past errors with even greater ones, thus reaching the point of renouncing the very core of Marxism as such in preference for liberal anachronisms and worse.

I dwell on this because I think a truly critical assessment of an “anti-imperialist” postmodernism, as of orthodox postmodernism, requires a prior recognition of the essentially parasitical dependence of such thinking on Marxism and particularly on the crisis within Marxism–a dependence which, as we have repeatedly observed, postmodernism must systematically seek to erase. The very insistence on a politics of spontaneism and myth, on the tacit abandonment of conscious and scientific revolutionary strategy and organization, is, I am suggesting, the derivative effect of developments within Marxism itself, of what amounts to the conscious political decision to give up the principle of revolution as a scientifically grounded activity, as a praxis with a rational foundation. The contemporary emphasis on “cultural politics” which one finds throughout intellectual and radical discourse in Latin America as well as in the metropolis, while useful and positive to the degree that it opens up new areas for genuinely political analysis and critique, is symptomatic, in my view, of this theoretical surrender, and more often than not simply ratifies the non-strategy of spontaneism. One might almost speak these days of a “culturalism” occupying the ideological space once held by the “economism” of the Second International revisionists. To adopt the “postmodern” sensibility means, in this sense, to regard the “culturalization” of the political as somehow simply in accordance with the current nature of things–to so minimize the role of political determination as to eliminate it altogether. And yet, this sensibility itself is politically determined.

Spontaneism, however it may drape itself in populist slogans and admiration for the people’s day to day struggle for survival, etc., rests on an intellectual distrust of the masses, a view of the mass as beyond the reach of reason and hence to be guided by myth. The Latin American masses have a long history of being stigmatized in this way by both imperial and creole elites. This elitism begins to lose its hold on the intelligentsia in the writings of genuine “radical democrats” such as Marti and is still further overcome in the discourses of revolutionary intellectuals such as Mariategui and Guevara, although even here vestiges of the old viewpoint remain. (Mariategui, who saw the Quechua-speaking indigenous peasants of Peru as beings with full historical and political subjecthood, maintained ridiculously archaic and racist views regarding Peru’s blacks.) And, of course, sexism has been and remains a serious and deadly obstacle.

But in the era of ‘postmodernity’ we are being urged, in exchange for a cult of alterity, to relinquish this conception of the masses as the rational agents of social and historical change, as the bearers of progress. Given the increasing prevalence of such aristocratism, however it may devise radical credentials for itself, it becomes possible to fall short of this truly democratic vision, to be seduced by the false Nietzschean regard for the masses as capable only of an unconscious, instinctual political agency.

Ultimately, it may be only revolutionary practice, the activity of strategy and organization, that can successfully trouble the political reveries of postmodernism. But just the sheer history of such practice, particularly in Latin America, makes risible any theory which considers politics (in the Leninist sense) to be either too abstract to matter, or–in what finally amounts to the same thing–to be “self- produced,” as Aronowitz has phrased it.

Perhaps the most eloquent refutation of spontaneist faith in “new social movements” is recorded in Roque Dalton’s “testimonial classic”Miguel Marmol, in which the legendary Salvadoran revolutionary named in the title recounts a life as a communist militant in Central America. It is impossible to do justice to the combined practical wisdom and theoretical profundity of this narrative by citing excerpts–but one in particular speaks poignantly to the question at hand: In the third chapter of the text, Marmol discusses his return in 1930, shortly before he participates in founding the Salvadoran Communist Party, to his home town of Ilopango. His task is to organize a union of rural workers. At first, as he tells it, the workers reject him, suspicious of his being anti-Catholic. He is led to recall the failure of previous union organizing efforts carried out by a local teacher and a railroad engineer. “However, we suspected they had always worked outside reality, that they hadn’t based their organizing work on the actual problems of people and, on the contrary, had created an impenetrable barrier between their ‘enlightenment’ and the ‘backwardness’ they ascribed to the people.”²⁹

Marmol, however, persists in “finding out what the people thought” (M 119)–that is, he refuses to take their initially backward reaction (defense of the church) to mean that they lack “enlightenment.” Meetings are called, and as the people begin to talk about working conditions, Marmol recalls, “it wasn’t hard to hear, over and over again, concepts that sounded to me just like the ‘class struggle,’ the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat,’ etc.” (M 136-136). Marmol’s task, then, is not that of “enlightening” the “backward” masses, nor is it simply to acknowledge “what the people thought” as sovereign. Rather, it is to collect these isolated concepts, to articulate them, and to draw the logically necessary conclusions.

Here, in so many words, Marmol demonstrates his profound, dialectical grasp of the essential, contradictory relation of theory to practice, of concept to reality, of the conscious to the spontaneous, of the “from without” to the “from within.” Postmodernism, meanwhile, even at its most “left,” political and self-critical, remains cut-off from the dialectical truths discovered in the practice of Marmol and of the millions of others in Latin America and across the planet who preceded and will follow him.

Notes

1. An original version of this paper was presented as a lecture, entitled “Postmodernism and Hegemony: Theory and Politics in Latin America,” at the Humanities Institute at SUNY Stony Brook on March 2, 1989.

2. Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” inThe Anti-aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, WA:Bay Press, 1983), 112.

3. Stanley Aronowitz, “Postmodern and Politics,” inUniversal Abandon?: the Politics of Postmodernism, ed. Andrew Ross (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 50.Universal Abandon? cited hereafter in text and notes asUA.

4. Chantal Mouffe, “Radical Democracy,”UA 32.

5. Ernesto Laclau, “Politics and the Limits of Modernity,”UA 66-67.

6. Jean-Francois Lyotard,The Postmodern Condition, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).

7. Frederick Engels,Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1975),46.

8. See Ellen Meiksins Wood,The Retreat from Class: a New ‘True’ Socialism (London: Verso, 1986) chapter 4, “The Autonomization of Ideology and Politics.”

9. Georg Lukacs,The Destruction of Reason, trans. Peter Palmer (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1981), 395.

10. “The two moments–that of reason and that of its other–stand not in opposition pointing to a dialecticalAufhebung, but in a relationship of tension characterized by mutual repugnance and exclusion” (Habermas, “The Entry into Postmodernity: Nietzsche as Turning Point” inThe Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 103).

11. See the introductory chapter to myModernism and Hegemony: a Materialist Critique of Aesthetic Agencies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990).

12. “[T]he exterior is constituted by other discourses.” Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985), 146.

13. See Lenin,What is to Be Done?: Burning Questions of Our Movement (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1973):

all worship of the spontaneity of the working class movement, all belittling of the role of the "conscious element," of the role of Social- Democracy, means, quite independently of whether he who belittles that role desires it or not, a strengthening of the influence of bourgeois ideology upon the workers. (39) Since there can be no talk of an independent ideology formulated by the working masses themselves in the process of their movement, the only choice is--either bourgeois or socialist ideology. There is no middle course (for mankind has not created a "third" ideology, and, moreover, in a society torn by class antagonisms, there can never be a non-class or an above-class ideology). Hence to belittle the socialist ideology in any way, to turn aside from it in the slightest degree means to strengthen bourgeois ideology. There is much talk of spontaneity. But the spontaneous development of the working class movement leads to its subordination to bourgeois ideology. . . . (40-41)

14. Peter Dews,Logics of Disintegration (London: Verso, 1987), 217.

15. “Interview with Cornell West,”UA 273.

16. Fredric Jameson, “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,”Social Text 15 (Fall 1986): 69.

17. See Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism: the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,”New Left Review 146 (July-August 1984).

18. Edward Said,The World, the Text and the Critic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983),241.

19. Gayatry Chakravorty Spivak,In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York, London: Methuen, 1987), 209.

20. See “The Discourse of Others: Feminism and Postmodernism,” in Foster, 57-82.

21. George Yudice, “Marginality and the Ethics of Survival,”UA 220.

22. See Rigoberta Menchu,Me llamo Rigoberta Menchu y asi me nacio la conciencia (Mexico: Siglo veintiuno, 1983).

23. See “Actual Situation and Perspectives of Latin American Philosophy for Liberation,”The Philosophical Forum 20.1-2 (Fall-Winter 1988-89): 43-61. Cited hereafter in text asLAP.

24. See Enrique Dussel,Philosophy of Liberation, trans. Aquilina Martinez and Christine Morkovsky (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1985), 158-160.

25. Roberto Fernandez Retamar,Para una teoria de la literatura hispano-americana (Habana: Casa de las Americas, 1975).

26. Neil Larsen, “Latin America and Postmodernity: a Brief Theoretical Sketch,” unpublished paper; andModernism and Hegemony.

27. Aijaz Ahmad, “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory’,”Social Text 17 (Fall 1987): 3-27.

28. Adolfo Sanchez Vasquez, “Marxism in Latin America,”The Philosophical Forum 20.1-2 (Fall-Winter 1988-89): 114-128.

29. Roque Dalton,Miguel Marmol, trans. Kathleen Ross and Richard Schaaf (Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press, 1982), 119. Cited hereafter in text asM.

John Beverley

University of Pittsburgh

This article appeared initially in the British journal Critical Quarterly 31.1 (Spring, 1989). I’m grateful to its editors for permission to reproduce it here, and in particular to Colin MacCabe for suggesting the idea in the first place. I’ve added a few minor corrections and updates.

for Rudy Van Gelder, friend of ears

Adorno directed some of his most acid remarks on musical sociology to the category of the “fan.” For example:

What is common to the jazz enthusiast of all countries, however, is the moment of compliance, in parodistic exaggeration. In this respect their play recalls the brutal seriousness of the masses of followers in totalitarian states, even though the difference between play and seriousness amounts to that between life and death (...) While the leaders in the European dictatorships of both shades raged against the decadence of jazz, the youth of the other countries has long since allowed itself to be electrified, as with marches, by the syncopated dance-steps, with bands which do not by accident stem from military music.¹

One of the most important contributions of postmodernism has been its defense of an aesthetics of theconsumer, rather than as in the case of romanticism and modernism an aesthetics of the producer, in turn linked to an individualist and phallocentric ego ideal. I should first of all make it clear then that I am writing here from the perspective of the “fan,” the person who buys records and goes to concerts, not like Adorno from the perspective of the trained musician or composer. What I will be arguing, in part with Adorno, in part against him, is that music is coming to represent for the Left something like a “key sector.”

* * * * * * * * *

For Adorno, the development of modern music is a reflection of the decline of the bourgeoisie, whose most characteristic cultural medium on the other hand music is.² Christa Burger recalls the essential image of the cultural in Adorno: that of Ulysses, who, tied to the mast of his ship, can listen to the song of the sirens while the slaves underneath work at the oars, cut off from the aesthetic experience which is reserved only for those in power.³ What is implied and critiqued at the same time in the image is the stance of the traditional intellectual or aesthete in the face of the processes of transformation of culture into a commodity–mass culture–and the consequent collapse of the distinction between high and low culture, a collapse which precisely defines the postmodern and which postmodernist ideology celebrates. In the postmodern mode, not only are Ulysses and his crew both listening to the siren song, they are singing along with it as in “Sing Along with Mitch” and perhaps marking the beat with their oars–one-two, one-two, one-two-three-four.

* * * * * * * *

One variant of the ideology of postmodern music may be illustrated by the following remarks from an interview John Cage gave about his composition for electronic tapeFontana Mix (1958):

Q.--I feel that there is a sense of logic and cohesion in your indeterminate music.

 

A.--This logic was not put there by me, but was the result of chance operations. The thought that it is logical grows up in you... I think that all those things that we associate with logic and our observance of relationships, those aspects of our mind are extremely simple in relation to what actually happens, so that when we use our perception of logic we minimize the actual nature of the thing we are experiencing.

 

Q.--Your conception (of indeterminacy) leads you into a universe nobody has attempted to charter before. Do you find yourself in it as a lawmaker?

 

A.--I am certainly not at the point of making laws. I am more like a hunter, or an inventor, than a lawmaker.

 

Q.--Are you satisfied with the way your music is made public--that is, by the music publishers, record companies, radio stations, etc.? Do you have complaints?

 

A.--I consider my music, once it has left my desk, to be what in Buddhism would be called a non- sentient being... If someone kicked me--not my music, but me--then I might complain. But if they kicked my music, or cut it out, or don't play it enough, or too much, or something like that, then who am I to complain?⁴

We might contrast this with one of the great epiphanies of literary modernism, the moment of the jazz song in Sartre’sNausea:

(...)there is no melody, only notes, a myriad of tiny jolts. They know no rest, an inflexible order gives birth to them and destroys them without even giving them time to recuperate and exist for themselves. They race, they press forward, they strike me a sharp blow in passing and are obliterated. I would like to hold them back, but I know if I succeeded in stopping one it would remain between my fingers only as a raffish languishing sound. I must accept their death; I must evenwillit: I know few impressions stronger or more harsh.I grow warm, I begin to feel happy. There is nothing extraordinary in this, it is a small happiness of Nausea: it spreads at the bottom of the viscous puddle, at the bottom ofour time-- the time of purple suspenders and broken chair seats; it is made of wide, soft instants, spreading at the edge, like an oil stain. No sooner than born, it is already old, it seems as though I have known it for twenty years (...)

 

The last chord has died away. In the brief silence which follows I feel strongly that there it is, thatsomething has happened.

 

Silence.

 

Some of these days
You'll miss me honey

 

What has just happened is that the Nausea has disappeared. When the voice was heard in the silence, I felt my body harden and the Nausea vanish. Suddenly: it was almost unbearable to become so hard, so brilliant. At the same time the music was drawn out, dilated, swelled like a waterspout. It filled the room with its metallic transparency, crushing our miserable time against the walls. I amin the music. Globes of fire turn in the mirrors; encircled by rings of smoke, veiling and unveiling the hard smile of light. My glass of beer has shrunk, it seems heaped up on the table, it looks dense and indispensable. I want to pick it up and feel the weight of it, I stretch out my hand... God! That is what has changed, my gestures. This movement of my arm has developed like a majestic theme, it has glided along the jazz song; I seemed to be dancing.⁵

 

* * * * * * * *

The passage fromNausea illustrates Adorno’s dictum that music is “the promise of reconciliation.” This is what betrays its origins in those moments of ritual sacrifice and celebration in which the members of a human community are bonded or rebonded to their places within it. InNausea the jazz song prefigures Roquentin’s eventual reconciliation with his own self and his decision to write what is in effect his dissertation, a drama of choice that will not be unfamiliar to readers of this journal. Even for an avant-gardist like Cage music is still–in the allusion to Buddhism–in some sense the sensuous form or “lived experience” of the religious.⁶

Was it not the function of music in relation to the great feudal ideologies–Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Shinto, Confucianism–to produce the sensation of the sublime and the eternal so as to constitute the image of the reward which awaited the faithful and obedient: the reward for submitting to exploitation or the reward for accepting the burden of exploiting? I am remembering as I write this Monteverdi’s beautiful echo duetDue Seraphim–two angels–for theVespers of the Virgin Mary of 1610, whose especially intense sweetness is perhaps related to the fact that it was written in a moment of crisis of both feudalism and Catholicism.

Just before Monteverdi, the Italian Mannerists had proclaimed the formal autonomy of the art work from religious dogma. But if the increasing secularization of music in the European late Baroque and 18th century led on the one hand to the Jacobin utopianism of the Ninth Symphony, it produced on the other something like Kant’s aesthetics of the sublime, that is a mysticism of the bourgeois ego. As Adorno was aware, we are still in modern music in a domain where, as in the relation of music and feudalism, aesthetic experience, repression and sublimation, and class privilege and self-legitimation converge.⁷

* * * * * * * *

Genovese has pointed out in the Afro-American slave spiritual something like a contrary articulation of the relation of music and the religious to the one I have been suggesting: the sense in which both the music and the words of the song keep alive culturally the image of an imminent redemption from slavery and oppression, a redemption which lies within human time and a “real” geography of slave and free states (“The river Jordan is muddy and wide / Gotta get across to the other side”).⁸ Of the so-called Free Jazz movement of the 60s–Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, late Coltrane, Archie Shepp, Sun Ra, etc.–the French critic Pierre Lere remarked in a passage quoted centrally by Herbert Marcuse in one of the key statements of 60s aesthetic radicalism:

(...)the liberty of the musical form is only the aesthetic translation of the will to social liberation. Transcending the tonal framework of the theme, the musician finds himself in a position of freedom(...) The melodic line becomes the medium of communication between an initial order which is rejected and a final order which is hoped for. The frustrating possession of the one, joined with the liberating attainment of the other, establishes a rupture in between the Weft of harmony which gives way to an aesthetic of the cry (esthetique du cri). This cry, the characteristic resonant (sonore) element of "free music," born in an exasperated tension, announces the violent rupture with the established white order and translates the advancing (promotrice) violence of a new black order.⁹

 

* * * * * * * *

Music itself as ideology, as an ideological practice? What I have in mind is not at all the problem, common both to a Saussurian and a vulgar marxist musicology, of “how music expresses ideas.” Jacques Attali has correctly observed that while music can be defined as noise given form according to a code, nevertheless it cannot be equated with a language. Music, though it has a precise operationality, never has stable reference to a semantic code of the linguistic type. It is a sort of language without meaning.¹⁰

Could we think of music then as outside of ideology to the extent that it is non-verbal? (This, some will recall, was Della Volpe’s move in his Critique of Taste.) One problem with poststructuralism in general and deconstruction in particular has been their tendency to see ideology as essentially bound up with language–the “Symbolic”– rather than organized states of feeling in general.¹¹ But we certainly inhabit a cultural tradition where it is a common-sense proposition that people listen to music precisely to escape from ideology, from the terrors of ideology and the dimension of practical reason. Adorno, in what I take to be the quintessential modernist dictum, writes: “Beauty is like an exodus from the world of means and ends, the same world to which beauty however owes its objective existence.”¹²

Adorno and the Frankfurt School make of the Kantian notion of the aesthetic as a purposiveness without purpose precisely the locus of the radicalizing and redemptive power of art, the sense in which by alienating practical aims it sides with the repressed and challenges domination and exploitation, particularly the rationality of capitalist institutions. By contrast, there is Lenin’s famous remark–it’s in Gorki’sReminiscences–that he had to give up listening to Beethoven’sAppasionata sonata: he enjoyed it too much, it made him feel soft, happy, at one with all humanity. His point would seem to be the need to resist a narcotic and pacifying aesthetic gratification in the name of the very difficult struggle–and the corresponding ideological rigor–necessary to at least setting in motion the process of building a classless society. But one senses in Lenin too the displacement or sublation of an aesthetic sensibility onto the field of revolutionary activism. And in both Adorno and Lenin there is a sense that music is somehow in excess of ideology.

Not only the Frankfurt School, but most major tendencies in “Western Marxism” (a key exception is Gramsci) maintain some form or other of the art/ideology distinction, with a characteristic ethical-epistemological privileging of the aesthetic over the ideological. In Althusser’s early essays– “A Letter on Art to Andre Daspre,” for example–art was said to occupy an intermediate position between science and ideology, since it involved ideology (as, so to speak, its raw material), but in such a way as to provoke an “internal distancing” from ideology, somewhat as in Brecht’s notion of an “alienation effect” which obliges the spectator to scrutinize and question the assumptions on which the spectacle has been proceeding. In the section on interpellation in Althusser’s later essay on ideology, this “modernist” and formalist concern with estrangement and defamiliarization has been displaced by what is in effect a postmodernist concern with fascination and fixation. If ideology, in Althusser’s central thesis, is what constitutes the subject in relation to the real, then the domain of ideology is not a world-view or set of (verbal) ideas, but rather the ensemble of signifying practices in societies: that is, the cultural. In interpellation, the issue is not whether ideology is happening in the space of something like aesthetic experience, or whether “good” or “great” art transcends the merely ideological (whereas “bad” art doesn’t), but ratherwhat or whose ideology, because the art work is precisely (one of the places) where ideology happens, though of course this need not be the dominant ideology or even any particular ideology.

* * * * * * * *

If the aesthetic effect consists in a certain satisfaction of desire–a “pleasure” (in the formalists, the recuperation or production of sensation)–, and if the aesthetic effect is an ideological effect, then the question becomes not the separation of music and ideology but rather their relation.

Music would seem to have in this sense a special relation to the pre-verbal, and thus to the Imaginary or more exactly to something like Kristeva’s notion of the semiotic.¹³ In the sort of potted lacanianism we employ these days in cultural studies, we take it that objects of imaginary identification function in the psyche–in a manner Lacan designated as “orthopedic”– as metonyms of an object of desire which has been repressed or forgotten, a desire which can never be satisfied and which consequently inscribes in the subject a sense of insufficiency or fading. In narcissism, this desire takes the form of a libidinal identification of the ego with an image or sensation of itself as (to recall Freud’s demarcation of the alternatives in his 1916 essay on narcissism) it is, was or should be. From the third of these possibilities–images or experiences of the ego as it should be–Freud argued that there arises as a consequence of the displacement of primary narcissism the images of an ideal ego or ego ideal, internalized as the conscience or super ego. Such images, he added, are not only of self but also involve the social ideals of the parent, the family, the tribe, the nation, the race, etc. Consequently, those sentiments which are the very stuff of ideology in the narrow sense of political “isms” and loyalties–belonging to a party, being an “american,” defending the family “honor,” fighting in a national liberation movement, etc.–are basically transformations of homoerotic libidinal narcissism.

It follows then that the aesthetic effect–even the sort of non-semantic effect produced by the organization of sound (in music) or color and line (in painting or sculpture)–always implies a kind of social Imaginary, a way of being with and/or for others. Although they are literature-centered, we may recall in this context Jameson’s remarks at the end ofThe Political Unconscious (in the section titled “The Dialectic of Utopia and Ideology”) to the effect that “all class consciousness–that is all ideology in the strict sense–, as much the exclusive forms of consciousness of the ruling classes as the opposing ones of the oppressed classes, are in their very nature utopian.” From this Jameson claims–this is his appropriation of Frankfurt aesthetics–that the aesthetic value of a given work of art can never be limited to its moment of genesis, when it functioned willy-nilly to legitimize some form or other of domination. For if its utopian quality as “art”–its “eternal charm,” to recall Marx’s (eurocentric, petty bourgeois) comment on Greek epic poetry–is precisely that it expresses pleasurably the imaginary unity of a social collectivity, then “it is utopian not as a thing in itself, but rather to the extent that such collectivities are themselves ciphers for the final concretion of collective life, that is the achieved utopia of a classless society.”¹⁴

What this implies, although I’m not sure whether Jameson himself makes this point as such, is that the political unconscious of the aesthetic is (small c) communism. (One would need to also work through here the relation between music–Wagner, Richard Strauss –and fascism.)

* * * * * * * *

I want to introduce at this point an issue which was particularly crucial to the way in which I experienced and think about music, which is the relation of music and drugs. It is said the passage fromNausea I used before derived from Sartre’s experiments in the 30s with mescaline. Many of you will have your own versions of essential psychedelic experiences of the 60s, but here–since I’m not likely to be nominated in the near future for the Supreme Court–is one of mine. It is 1963, late at night. I’m a senior in college and I’ve taken peyote for the first time. I’m lying face down on a couch with a red velour cover. Mozart is playing, something like the adagio of a piano concerto. As my nausea fades–peyote induces in the first half hour or so a really intense nausea–I begin to notice the music which seems to become increasingly clear and beautiful. I feel my breath making my body move against the couch and I feel the couch respond to me as if it were a living organism, very soft and very gentle, as if it were the body of my mother. I remember or seem to remember being close to my mother in very early childhood. I am overwhelmed with nostalgia. The room fills with light. I enter a timeless, paradisiacal state, beyond good and evil. The music goes on and on.

There was of course also the freak-out or bad trip: the drug exacerbated sensation that the music is incredibly banal and stupid, that the needle of the record player is covered with fuzz, that the sound is thick and ugly like mucus; Charlie Manson hearing secret apocalyptic messages in “Helter Skelter” on the Beatles’sWhite Album; the Stones at Altamont. Modernism in music, say the infinitely compressed fragments of late Webern, is the perception in the midst of the bad trip, of dissonance, of a momentary cohesion and radiance, whose power is all the greater because it shines out of chaos and evil. In Frankfurt aesthetics, dissonance is the voice of the oppressed in music. Thus for Adorno it is only in dissonance, which destroys the illusion of reconciliation represented by harmony, that the power of seduction of the inspiring character of music survives.¹⁵

* * * * * * * *

Consider what moderation is required to express oneself so briefly… You can stretch every glance out into a poem, every sigh into a novel. But to express a novel in a single gesture, a joy in a breath–such concentration can only be present in proposition to the absence of self- pity. –Schoenberg on Webern¹⁶

* * * * * * * *

Cage’s4’33”–which is a piece where the performer sits at a piano without playing anything for four minutes and thirty-three seconds–is a postmodernist homage to modernist aesthetics, to serialism and private language music. What it implies is that the listening subject is to compose from the very absence of music the music, the performance from the frustration of the expected performance. As in the parallel cases of Duchamp’s ready-mades or Rauschenberg’s white paintings, such a situation gives rise to an appropriately “modernist” anxiety (which might be allegorized in Klee’s twittering birds whose noise emanates from the very miniaturization, compression and silent tension of the pictorial space) to create an aesthetic experience out of the given, whatever it is.

Postmodernism per se in music, on the other hand, is where the anxiety of the listener to “make sense of” the piece is either perpetually frustrated by pure randomness–Cage’s music of chance–or assuaged and dissipated by a bland, “easy-listening” surface with changes happening only in a Californianlongue duree, as in the musics of La Monte Young, Philip Glass, Terry Riley, or Steve Reich. The intention of such musics, we might say, is to transgress both the Imaginary and Symbolic: they are a sort of brainwashing into the Real.

* * * * * * * *

 

I [heart] ADORNO

 

--bumper sticker (thanks to Hilary Radner)

* * * * * * * *

One form of capitalist utopia which is portended in contemporary music–we could call it the Chicago School or neoliberal form–is the utopia of the record store, with its incredible proliferation and variety of musical commodities, its promise of “different strokes for different folks,” as Sly Stone would have it: Michael Jackson–or Prince–, Liberace, Bach on original instruments ora la Cadillac by the Philadelphia Orchestra, Heavy Metal–or Springsteen–, Country (what kind of Country: Zydeco, Appalachian, Bluegrass, Dolly Parton, trucker, New Folk, etc.?), jazz, blues, spirituals, soul, rap, hip hop, fusion, college rock (Grateful Dead, REM, Talking Heads), SST rock (Meat Puppets etc.), Holly Near,Hymnen, salsa, reggae, World Beat,norteno music, cumbias, Laurie Anderson, 46 different recorded versions ofBolero, John Adams, and so on and on, with the inevitable “crossovers” and new “new waves.” By contrast, even the best stocked record outlets in socialist countries were spartan.

But this is also “Brazil” (as in the song/film): the dystopia of behaviorly tailored, industrially manufactured, packaged and standardized music–Muzak–, where it is expected that everyone except owners and managers of capital will be at the same time a fast food chain worker and consumer. Muzak is to music what, say, McDonalds is to food; and since its purpose is to generate an environment conducive to both commodity production and consumption, it is more often than not to be heard in places like McDonalds (or, so we are told in prison testimonies, in that Latin American concomitant of Chicago School economics which are torture chambers, with the volume turned up to the point of distortion).

In Russell Berman’s perhaps overly anxious image, Muzak implies a fundamental mutation of the public sphere, “the beautiful illusion of a collective, singing along in dictatorial unanimity.” Its ubiquity, as in the parallel cases of advertising and packaging and design, refers to a situation where there is no longer, Berman writes, “an outside to art (…) There is no pre-aesthetic dimension to social activity, since the social order itself has become dependent on aesthetic organization.”¹⁷

Berman’s concern here I take to be in the spirit of the general critique Habermas–and in this country Christopher Lasch–have made of postmodern commodity culture, a critique which as many people have noted coincides paradoxically (since its main assumption is that postmodernism is a reactionary phenomenon) with the cultural politics of the new Right, for example Alan Bloom’s clinically paranoid remarks on rock inThe Closing of the American Mind.¹⁸

Is the loss of autonomy of the aesthetic however a bad thing–something akin to Marcuse’s notion of a “repressive desublimation” which entails the loss of art’s critical potential–, or does it indicate a new vulnerability of capitalist societies–a need to legitimize themselves through aestheticization–and therefore both anew possibility for the left and a new centrality for cultural and aesthetic matters in left practice? For, as Berman is aware, the aestheticization of everyday life was also the goal of the historical avant garde in its attack on the institution of the autonomy of the aesthetic in bourgeois culture, which made it at least potentially a form of anti-capitalist practice. The loss of aura or desublimation of the art work may be a form of commodification but it is also, as Walter Benjamin pointed out, a form of democratization of culture.¹⁹

Cage writes suggestively, for example, of “a music which is like furniture–a music, that is, which will be part of the noises of the environment, will take them into consideration. I think of it as a melodious softening the noises of the knives and forks, not dominating them, not imposing itself. It would fill up those heavy silences that sometimes fall between friends dining together.”²⁰ In some of the work of La Monte Young or Brian Eno, music becomes consciously an aspect of interior decorating. What this takes us back to is not Muzak but the admirable baroque tradition ofTafel Musik: “table” or dinner music. Mozart still wrote at the time of the French Revolution comfortably and welldivertimentii meant to accompany social gatherings, including meetings of his Masonic lodge. After Mozart, this utilitarian or “background” function is repressed in bourgeois art music, which will now require the deepest concentration and emotional and intellectual involvement on the part of the listening subject.

The problem with Muzak is not its ubiquity or the idea of environmental music per se, but rather its insistently kitsch and conservative melodic-harmonic content. What is clear, on the other hand, is that the intense and informed concentration on the art work which is assumed in Frankfurt aesthetics depends on an essentially Romantic, formalist and individualist conception of both music and the listening subject, which is not unrelated to the actual processes of commodification “classical” music was undergoing in the late 18th and 19th centuries.

* * * * * * * *

The antidote to Muzak would seem to be something like Punk. By way of a preface to a discussion of Punk and extending the considerations above on the relation between music and commodification, I want to refer first to Jackson Pollock’s great paintingAutumn Rhythm in the Met, a picture that–like Pollock’s work in general–is particularly admired by Free Jazz musicians. It’s a vast painting with splotches of black, brown and rust against the raw tan of unprimed canvas, with an incredible dancing, swirling, clustering, dispersing energy. As you look at it, you become aware that while the ambition of the painting seems to be to explode or expand the pictorial space of the canvas altogether, it is finally only the limits of the canvas which make the painting possible as an art object. The limit of the canvas is its aesthetic autonomy, its separation from the life world, but also its commodity status as something that can be bought, traded, exhibited. The commodity is implicated in the very form of the “piece;” as in the jazz record in Nausea, “The music ends.” (The 78 RPM record–the commodity form of recorded music in the 20s and 30s– imposed a three minute limit per side on performances and this in turn shaped the way songs were arranged in jazz or pop recording: cf. the 45 and the idea today of the “single.”)

Such a situation might indicate one limit of Jameson’s cultural hermeneutic. If the strategy in Jameson is to uncover the emancipatory utopian- communist potential locked up in the artifacts of the cultural heritage, this is also in a sense to leave everything as it is, as in Wittgenstein’s analytic (because that which is desired is already there; it only has to be “seen” correctly), whereas the problem of the relation of art and social liberation is also clearly the need totransgress the limits imposed by existing artistic forms and practices and to produce new ones. To the extent, however, such transgressions can be recontained within the sphere of the aesthetic– in a new series of “works” which may also be available as commodities–, they will produce paradoxically an affirmation of bourgeois culture: in a certain sense theyare bourgeois high culture.

A representation of this paradox in terms of 60s leftism is the great scene in Antonioni’s film Zabriskie Point where the (modernist) desert home of the capitalist pig is (in the young woman’s imagination) blown up, and we see in ultra slow motion, in beautiful Technicolor, accompanied by a spacy and sinister Pink Floyd music track, the whole commodity universe of late capitalism–cars, tools, supermarket food, radios, TVs, clothes, furniture, records, books, decorations, utensils–float by. What is not clear is who could have placed the bomb, so that Jameson might ask in reply a question the film itself also leaves unanswered: is this an image of the destruction of capitalism or of its fission into a new and “higher” stage where it fills all space and time, where there is no longer something–nature, the Third World, the unconscious–outside it? And this question suggests another one: to what extent was the cultural radicalism of the 60s, nominally directed against the rationality of capitalist society and its legitimating discourses, itself a form of modernization of capitalism, a prerequisite of its “expanded” reproduction in the new international division of labor and the proliferation of electronic technologies–with corresponding “mind- sets”–which emerge in the 70s?²¹

* * * * * * * *

From Punk manifestos:

Real life stinks. What has been shown is that you and I can do anything in any area without training and with little cash.

 

We're demanding that real life keep up with advertising, the speed of advertising on TV... We are living at the speed of advertising. We demand to be entertained all the time, we get bored very quickly. When we're on stage, things happen a thousand times faster, everything we do is totally compressed and intense on stage, and that's our version of life as we feel and see it. In the future T.V. will be so good that the printed word will function as an artform only. In the future we will not have time for leisure activities. In the future we will "work" one day a week. In the future there will be machines which will produce a religious experience in the user. In the future there will be so much going on that no one will be able to keep track of it. (David Byrne)²²

The emergence and brief hegemony of Punk–from, say, 1975 to 1982–was related to the very high levels of structural unemployment or subemployment which appear in First World capitalist centers in the 70s as a consequence of the winding down of the post-World War II economic long cycle, and which imply especially for lower middle class and working class youth a consequent displacement of the work ethic towards a kind of on the dole bohemianism or dandyism. Punk aimed at a sort of rock or Gesamtkunstwerk (Simon Frith has noted its connections with Situationist ideology²³) which would combine music, fashion, dance, speech forms, mime, graphics, criticism, new “on the street” forms of appropriation of urban space, and in which in principle everybody was both a performer and a spectator. Its key musical form was three-chord garage power rock, because its intention was to contest art rock and superstar rock, to break down the distance between fan and performer. Punk was loud, aggressive, eclectic, anarchic, amateur, self-consciously anti- commercial and anti-hippie at the same time.

As it was the peculiar genius of the Sex Pistol’s manager, Malcolm McClaren, to understand, both the conditions of possibility and the limits of Punk were those of a still expanding capitalist consumer culture –a culture which, in one sense, was intended as a compensation for the decline in working-class standards of living. Initially, Punk had to create its own forms of record production and distribution, independent of the “majors” and of commercial music institutions in general. The moment that to be recognized as Punk is to conform to an established image of consumer desire, to be different say than New Wave, is the moment Punk becomes the new commodity. It is the moment of the Sex Pistols’ US tour depicted inSid and Nancy, where on the basis of the realization that they are becoming a commercial success on the American market–the new band–they auto- destruct. But the collapse of Punk–and its undoubted flirtation with nihilism–should not obscure the fact that it was for a while–most consciously in the work of British groups like the Clash or the Gang of Four and also in collective projects like Rock Against Racism–a very powerful form of Left mass culture, perhaps–if we are attentive to Lenin’s dictum that ideas acquire a material force when they reach the millions–one of the most powerful forms we have seen in recent years in Western Europe and the United States. Some of Punk’s heritage lives on in the popularity of U2 or Tracy Chapman today and or in the recent upsurge of Heavy Metal (which, it should be recalled, has one of its roots in the Detroit 60s movement band, MC5).

* * * * * * * *

The notion of postmodernism initially comes into play to designate a crisis in the dominant canons of American architecture. Hegel posited architecture over music as the world historical form of Romantic art, because in architecture the reconciliation of spirit and matter, reason and history, represented ultimately by the state was more completely realized. Hence, for example, Jameson’s privileging of architecture in his various discussions of postmodernism. I think that today, however, particularly if we are thinking about how to develop a left practice on the terrain of the postmodern, we have to be for music as against architecture, because it is in architecture that the power and self-representation of capital and the imperialist state reside, whereas music–like sports– is always and everywhere a power of cultural production which is in the hands of the people. Capital can master and exploit music–and modern musics like rock are certainly forms of capitalist culture–, but it can never seize hold of and monopolize its means of production, as it can say with literature. The cultural presence of the Third World in and against the dominant of imperialism is among other things, to borrow Jacques Attali’s concept, “noise”–the intrusion of new forms of language and music which imply new forms of community and pleasure: Bob Marley’s reggae; Run-DMC on MTV with “Walk This Way” (a crossover of rap with white Heavy Metal); “We Shall Overcome” sung at a sit-in for Salvadoran refugees; the beautiful South African choral music Paul Simon used onGraceland sung at a township funeral;La Bamba; Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power”; Ruben Blades’Crossover Dreams.

The debate overGraceland some years ago indicates that the simple presence of Third World music in a First World context implies immediately a series of ideological effects, which doesn’t mean that I think there was a “correct line” onGraceland, e.g. that it was a case of Third World suffering and creative labor sublimated into an item of First World white middle-class consumption.²⁴ Whatever the problems with the concept of the Third World, it can no longer mark an “other” that is radically outside of and different than contemporary American or British society. By the year 2000, one out of four inhabitants of the United States will be non-european (black, hispanic of latin american origin, asian or native american); even today we are the fourth or fifth largest hispanic country in the world (out of twenty). In this sense, the Third World is alsoinside the First, “en las entranas del monstruo” (in the entrails of the monster) as Jose Marti would have said, and for a number of reasons music has been and is perhaps the hegemonic cultural form of this insertion. What would American musical culture be like for example without the contribution of Afro-American musics?

Turning this argument on its head, assume something like the following: a young guerrilla fighter of the FMLN in El Salvador wearing a Madonna T-shirt. A traditional kind of Left cultural analysis would have talked about cultural imperialism and how the young man or woman in question had become a revolutionaryin spite of Madonna and American pop culture. I don’t want to discount entirely the notion of cultural imperialism, which seems to me real and pernicious enough, but I think we might also begin to consider how being a fan of Madonna might in some sensecontribute to becoming a guerrilla or political activist in El Salvador. (And how wearing a Madonna T-shirt might be a form of revolutionary cultural politics: it certainly defines–correctly–a community of interest between young people in El Salvador and young people in the United States who like Madonna.)

* * * * * * * *

Simon Frith has summarized succinctly the critique of the limitations of Frankfurt school aesthetic theory that has been implicit here: The Frankfurt scholars argued that the transformation of art into commodity inevitably sapped imagination and withered hope–now all that could be imagined was what was. But the artistic impulse is not destroyed by capital; it is transformed by it. As utopianism is mediated through the new processes of cultural production and consumption, new sorts of struggles over community and leisure begin.²⁵ More and more–the point has been made by Karl Offe among others–the survival of capitalism has become contingent on non-capitalist forms of culture, including those of the Third World. What is really utopian in the present context is not so much the sublation of art into life under the auspices of advanced consumer capitalism, but rather the current capitalist project of reabsorbing the entire life energy of world society into labor markets and industrial or service production. One of the places where the conflict between forces and relations of production is most acutely evident is in the current tensions–the FBI warning at the start of your evening video, for example–around the commercialization of VCR and digital sound technologies. Cassettes and CDs are the latest hot commodities, but by the same token they portend the possibility of a virtual decommodification of music and film material, since its reproduction via these technologies can no longer be easily contained within the “normal” boundaries of capitalist property rights.

As opposed to both Frankfurt school styleAngst about commodification and a neopopulism which can’t imagine anything finer than Bruce Springsteen (I have in mind Jesse Lemisch’s polemic against Popular Front style “folk” music inThe Nation)²⁶, I think we have to reject the notion that certain kinds of music area priori ethically and politically OK and others not (which doesn’t mean that there is not ideological struggle in music and choice of music). Old Left versions of this, some will recall, ranged from jazz=good, classical=bad (American CP), to jazz=bad, classical=good (Soviet CP). The position of the Left today–understanding this in the broadest possible sense, as in the idea of the Rainbow–should be in favor of the broadest possible variety and proliferation of musics and related technologies of pleasure, on the understanding–or hope–that in the long run this will be deconstructive of capitalist hegemony. This is a postmodernist position, but it also involves challenging a certain smugness in postmodernist theory and practice about just how far elite/popular, high culture/mass culture distinctions have broken down. Too much of postmodernism seems simply a renovated form of bourgeois “art” culture. To my mind, the problem is not how much but rather how little commodification of culture has introduced a universal aestheticization of everyday life. The Left needs to defend the pleasure principle (“fun”) involved in commodity aesthetics at the same time that it needs to develop effective images ofpost-commodity gratification linked–as transitional demands–to an expansion of leisure time and a consequent transformation of the welfare state from the realm of economic maintenance–the famous “safety net”–to that of the provision of forms of pleasure and personal development outside the parameters of commodity production. While it is good and necessary to remind ourselves that we are a long way away from the particular cultural forms championed by the Popular Front–that these are now the stuff ofour nostalgia mode–, we also need to think about the ways in which the Popular Fronts in their day were able to hegemonize both mass and elite culture. The creation–as in a tentative way in this paper–of anideologeme which articulates the political project of ending or attenuating capitalist domination with both the productionand consumption of contemporary music seems to me one of the most important tasks in cultural work the Left should have on its present agenda.

Of course, what we anticipate in taking up this task is also the moment–or moments–when architecture becomes the form of expression of the people, because that would be the moment when power had really begun to change hands. What would this architecture be like?

Notes

1. Theodor Adorno, “Perennial Fashion–Jazz,” in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (London: Neville Spearman, 1967), 128-29.

2. On this point, see Adorno’s remarks inThe Philosophy of Modern Music, trans. Anne Mitchell and Wesley Blomster (New York: Seabury, 1980), 129-33.

3. Christa Burger, “The Disappearance of Art: The Postmodernism Debate in the U.S.,”Telos, 68 (Summer 1986), 93-106.

4. Ilhan Mimaroglu, extracts from interview with John Cage in record album notes for Berio, Cage, Mimaroglu,Electronic Music (Turnabout TV34046S).

5. Jean-Paul Sartre,Nausea, trans. Lloyd Alexander (New York: New Directions, 1959), 33-36.

6. Cf. the following remarks by the minimalist composer La Monte Young:

Around 1960 I became interested in yoga, in which the emphasis is on concentration and focus on the sounds inside your head. Zen meditation allows ideas to come and go as they will, which corresponds to Cage's music; he and I are like opposites which help define each other (...) In singing, when the tone becomes perfectly in tune with a drone, it takes so much concentration to keep it in tune that it drives out all other thoughts. You become one with the drone and one with the Creator.

Cited in Kyle Gann, “La Monte Young: Maximal Spirit,” Village Voice, June 9, 1987, 70. (Gann’s column in the Voice is a good place to track developments in contemporary modernist and postmodernist music in the NY scene.)

7. “Beethoven’s symphonies in their most arcane chemistry are part of the bourgeois process of production and express the perennial disaster brought on by capitalism. But they also take a stance of tragic affirmation towards reality as a social fact; they seem to say that the status quo is the best of all possible worlds. Beethoven’s music is as much a part of the revolutionary emancipation of the bourgeoisie as it anticipates the latter’s apologia. The more profoundly you decode works of art, the less absolute is their contrast to praxis.” Adorno,Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), 342.

8. Eugene Genovese,Roll, Jordan, Roll. The World the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage, 1976), 159-280.

9. Pierre Lere, “Free Jazz: Evolution ou Revolution,”Revue d’esth tique, 3-4, 1970, 320-21, translated and cited in Herbert Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt (Boston: Beacon, 1972),114.

10. See Attali’s,Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1985).

11. Barthes is perhaps an exception, and Derrida has written on pictures and painting. John Mowitt at the University of Minnesota has been doing the most interesting work on music from a poststructuralist perspective that I have seen. He suggests as a primer on poststructuralist music theory I. Stoianova,Geste, Texte, Musique (Paris: 10/18, 1985).

12.Aesthetic Theory, 402.

13. The semiotic for Kristeva is a sort of babble out of which language arises–something between glossolalia and the pre-oedipal awareness of the sounds of the mother’s body–and which undermines the subject’s submission to the Symbolic. “Kristeva makes the case that the semiotic is the effect of bodily drives which are incompletely repressed when the paternal order has intervened in the mother/child dyad, and it is therefore ‘attached’ psychically to the mother’s body.” Paul Smith,Discerning the Subject (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1988), 121.

14. Fredric Jameson,The Political Unconscious. Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell, 1981), 288-91.

15.Aesthetic Theory, 21-22.

16. I’ve lost the reference for this quote.

17. Russell Berman, “Modern Art and Desublimation,”Telos, 62 (Winter 1984-85): 48.

18. Andreas Huyssen notes perceptively that “Given the aesthetic field-force of the term postmodernism, no neo-conservative today would dream of identifying the neo-conservative project as postmodern.” “Mapping the Postmodern,” in hisAfter the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986), 204. I became aware of Huyssen’s work only as I was finishing this paper, but it’s obvious that I share here his problematic and many of his sympathies (including an ambivalence about McDonalds).

19. See in particular Susan Buck-Morss, “Benjamin’sPassagen-Werk: Redeeming Mass Culture for the Revolution.”New German Critique, 29 (Spring- Summer 1983), 211-240; and in general the work of Stuart Hall and the Birmingham Center for Cultural Studies. Peter Burger’s summary of recent work on the autonomy of art in bourgeois society is useful here: Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota, 1984), 35-54. In a way Frankfurt theory didn’t anticipate, it has seemed paradoxically necessary for capitalist merchandising to preserve or inject some semblance of aura in the commodity–hence kitsch: the Golden Arches–, whereas communist or socialized production should in principle have no problem with loss of aura, since it is not implicated in the commodity status of a use value or good. Postmodernist pastiche ormode retro–where a signifier of aura is alluded to or incorporated, but in an ironic and playful way–seems an intermediate position, in the sense that it can function both to endow the commodity with an “arty” quality or to detach aspects of commodity aesthetics from commodity production and circulation per se, as in Warhol.

20. John Cage, “Erik Satie,” inSilence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1966), p.76.

21. “Yet this sense of freedom and possibility– which is for the course of the 60s a momentarily objective reality, as well as (from the hindsight of the 80s) a historical illusion–may perhaps best be explained in terms of the superstructural movement and play enabled by the transition from one infrastructural or systemic stage of capitalism to another.” Fredric Jameson, “Periodizing the 60s,” in Sohnya Sayres ed., The 60s Without Apology (Minneapolis:Social Text/Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1984), 208.

22. From Isabelle Anscombe and Dike Blair eds., Punk! (New York: Urizen, 1978).

23. Simon Frith,Sound Effects. Youth, Leisure and the Politics of Rock ‘n’ Roll (New York: Pantheon, 1981), 264-268.

24. On this point, see Andrew Goodwin and Joe Gore “World Beat and the Cultural Imperialism Debate,” Socialist Review 20.3 (Jul.-Sep., 1990): 63-80.

25.Sound Effects, 268. Cf. Huyssen: “The growing sense that we are not bound tocomplete the project of modernity (Habermas’ phrase) and still do not necessarily have to lapse into irrationality or into apocalyptic frenzy, the sense that art is not exclusively pursuing some telos of abstraction, non- representation, and sublimity–all of this has opened up a host of possibilities for creative endeavors today.”After the Great Divide, 217.

26. “I Dreamed I Saw MTV Last Night,”The Nation (October 18, 1986), 361, 374-376; and Lemisch’s reply to the debate which ensued, “The Politics of Left Culture,”The Nation (December 20, 1986), 700 ff.

Kathy Acker

     IN ANY SOCIETY BASED ON CLASS, HUMILIATION IS A

     POLITICAL REALITY.  HUMILIATION IS ONE METHOD BY WHICH

     POLITICAL POWER IS TRANSFORMED INTO SOCIAL OR PERSONAL

     RELATIONSHIPS.  THE PERSONAL INTERIORIZATION OF THE

     PRACTICE OF HUMILIATION IS CALLED HUMILITY.

     CAPITOL IS AN ARTIST WHO MAKES DOLLS.  MAKES, DAMAGES,

     TRANSFORMS, SMASHES.  ONE OF HER DOLLS IS A WRITER

     DOLL.  THE WRITER DOLL ISN'T VERY LARGE AND IS ALL

     HAIR, HORSE MANE HAIR, RAT FUR, DIRTY HUMAN HAIR,

     PUSSY.

          ONE NIGHT CAPITOL GAVE THE FOLLOWING SCENARIO TO

     HER WRITER DOLL:

     As a child in sixth grade in a North American school,

     won first prize in a poetry contest.

          In late teens and early twenties, entered New York

     City poetry world.  Prominent Black Mountain poets,

     mainly male, taught or attempted to teach her that a

     writer becomes a writer when and only when he finds his

     own voice.

     CAPITOL DIDN'T MAKE ANY AVANT-GARDE POET DOLLS.

     Since wanted to be a writer, tried hard to find her own

     voice.  Couldn't.  But still loved to write.  Loved to

     play with language.  Language was material like clay or

     paint.  Loved to play with verbal material, build up

     slums and mansions, demolish banks and half-rotten

     buildings, even buildings which she herself had

     constructed, into never-before-seen, even unseeable

     jewels.

          To her, every word wasn't only material in itself,

     but also sent out like beacons, other words.  Blue

     sent out heaven and The Virgin.  Material is rich.

     I didn't create language, writer thought.  Later she

     would think about ownership and copyright.  I'm

     constantly being given language.  Since this language-

     world is rich and always changing, flowing, when I

     write, I enter a world which has complex relations and

     is, perhaps, illimitable.  This world both represents

     and is human history, public memories and private

     memories turned public, the records and actualizations

     of human intentions.  This world is more than life and

     death, for here life and death conjoin.  I can't make

     language, but in this world, I can play and be played.

          So where is 'my voice'?

          Wanted to be a writer.

          Since couldn't find 'her voice', decided she'd

     first have to learn what a Black Mountain poet meant by

     'his voice'.  What did he do when he wrote?

          A writer who had found his own voice presented a

     viewpoint.  Created meaning.  The writer took a certain

     amount of language, verbal material, forced that

     language to stop radiating in multiple, even

     unnumerable directions, to radiate in only one

     direction so there could be his meaning.

          The writer's voice wasn't exactly this meaning.

     The writer's voice was a process, how he had forced the

     language to obey him, his will.  The writer's voice is

     the voice of the writer-as-God.

          Writer thought, Don't want to be God; have never

     wanted to be God.  All these male poets want to be the

     top poet, as if, since they can't be a dictator in the

     political realm, can be dictator of this world.

          Want to play.  Be left alone to play.  Want to be

     a sailor who journeys at every edge and even into the

     unknown.  See strange sights, see.  If I can't keep on

     seeing wonders, I'm in prison.  Claustrophobia's sister

     to my worst nightmare: lobotomy, the total loss of

     perceptual power, of seeing new.  If had to force

     language to be uni-directional, I'd be helping my own

     prison to be constructed.

          There are enough prisons outside, outside

     language.

          Decided, no.  Decided that to find her own voice

     would be negotiating against her joy.  That's what the

     culture seemed to be trying to tell her to do.

          Wanted only to write.  Was writing.  Would keep on

     writing without finding 'her own voice'.  To hell with

     the Black Mountain poets even though they had taught

     her a lot.

          Decided that since what she wanted to do was just

     to write, not to find her own voice, could and would

     write by using anyone's voice, anyone's text, whatever

     materials she wanted to use.

          Had a dream while waking that was running with

     animals.  Wild horses, leopards, red fox, kangaroos,

     mountain lions, wild dogs.  Running over rolling hills.

     Was able to keep up with the animals and they accepted

     her.

          Wildness was writing and writing was wildness.

          Decision not to find this own voice but to use and

     be other, multiple, even innumerable, voices led to two

     other decisions.

          There were two kinds of writing in her culture:

     good literature and schlock.  Novels which won literary

     prizes were good literature; science fiction and horror

     novels, pornography were schlock.  Good literature

     concerned important issues, had a high moral content,

     and, most important, was written according to well-

     established rules of taste, elegance, and conservatism.

     Schlock's content was sex horror violence and other

     aspects of human existence abhorrent to all but the

     lowest of the low, the socially and morally

     unacceptable.  This trash was made as quickly as

     possible, either with no regard for the regulations of

     politeness or else with regard to the crudest, most

     vulgar techniques possible.  Well-educated,

     intelligent, and concerned people read good literature.

     Perhaps because the masses were gaining political

     therefore economic and social control, not only of

     literary production, good literature was read by an

     elite diminishing in size and cultural strength.

          Decided to use or to write both good literature

     and schlock.  To mix them up in terms of content and

     formally, offended everyone.

          Writing in which all kinds of writing mingled

     seemed, not immoral, but amoral, even to the masses.

     Played in every playground she found; no one can do

     that in a class or hierarchichal society.

          (In literature classes in university, had learned

     that anyone can say or write anything about anything if

     he or she does so cleverly enough.  That cleverness,

     one of the formal rules of good literature, can be a

     method of social and political manipulation.  Decided

     to use language stupidly.)  In order to use and be

     other voices as stupidly as possible, decided to copy

     down simply other texts.

          Copy them down while, maybe, mashing them up

     because wasn't going to stop playing in any playground.

     Because loved wildness.

          Having fun with texts is having fun with

     everything and everyone.  Since didn't have one point

     of view or centralized perspective, was free to find

     out how texts she used and was worked.  In their

     contexts which were (parts of) culture.

          Liked best of all mushing up texts.

          Began constructing her first story by placing

     mashed-up texts by and about Henry Kissinger next to

     'True Romance' texts.  What was the true romance of

     America?  Changed these 'True Romance' texts only by

     heightening the sexual crudity of their style.  Into

     this mush, placed four pages out of Harold Robbins',

     one of her heroes', newest hottest bestsellers.  Had

     first made Jacqueline Onassis the star of Robbins'

     text.

          Twenty years later, a feminist publishing house

     republished the last third of the novel in which this

     mash occurred.

     CAPITOL MADE A FEMINIST PUBLISHER DOLL EVEN THOUGH,

     BECAUSE SHE WASN'T STUPID, SHE KNEW THAT THE FEMINIST

     PUBLISHING HOUSE WAS ACTUALLY A LOT OF DOLLS.  THE

     FEMINIST PUBLISHER DOLL WAS A BEAUTIFUL WOMAN IN A ST.

     LAURENT DRESS.  CAPITOL, PERHAPS OUT OF PERVERSITY,

     REFRAINED FROM USING HER USUAL CHEWED UP CHEWING GUM,

     HALF-DRIED FLECKS OF NAIL POLISH, AND BITS OF HER OWN

     BODY THAT HAD SOMEHOW FALLEN AWAY.

     Republished the text containing the Harold Robbins'

     mush next to a text she had written only seventeen

     years ago.  In this second text, the only one had ever

     written without glopping up hacking into and rewriting

     other texts (appropriating), had tried to destroy

     literature or what she as a writer was supposed to

     write by making characters and a story that were so

     stupid as to be almost non-existent.  Ostensibly, the

     second text was a porn book.  The pornography was

     almost as stupid as the story.  The female character

     had her own name.

          Thought just after had finished writing this, here

     is a conventional novel.  Perhaps, here is 'my voice'.

     Now I'll never again have to make up a bourgeois novel.

          Didn't.

          The feminist publisher informed her that this

     second text was her most important because here she had

     written a treatise on female sexuality.

          Since didn't believe in arguing with people, wrote

     an introduction to both books in which stated that her

     only interest in writing was in copying down other

     people's texts.  Didn't say liked messing them up

     because was trying to be polite.  Like the English.

     Did say had no interest in sexuality or in any other

     content.

     CAPITOL MADE A DOLL WHO WAS A JOURNALIST.  CAPITOL

     LOVED MAKING DOLLS WHO WERE JOURNALISTS.  SOMETIMES SHE

     MADE THEM OUT OF THE NEWSPAPERS FOUND IN TRASHCANS ON

     THE STREETS.  SHE KNEW THAT LOTS OF CATS INHABITED

     TRASH CANS.  THE PAPERS SAID RATS CARRY DISEASES.  SHE

     MADE THIS JOURNALIST OUT OF THE FINGERNAILS SHE

     OBTAINED BY HANGING AROUND THE TRASHCANS IN THE BACK

     LOTS OF LONDON HOSPITALS.  HAD PENETRATED THESE BACK

     LOTS WITH THE HOPE OF MEETING MEAN OLDER MEN BIKERS.

     FOUND LOTS OF OTHER THINGS THERE.  SINCE, TO MAKE THE

     JOURNALIST, SHE MOLDED THE FINGERNAILS TOGETHER WITH

     SUPER GLUE AND, BEING A SLOB, LOTS OF OTHER THINGS

     STUCK TO THIS SUPER GLUE, THE JOURNALIST DIDN'T LOOK

     ANYTHING LIKE A HUMAN BEING.

     A journalist who worked on a trade publishing magazine,

     so the story went, no one could remember whose story,

     was informed by another woman in her office that there

     was a resemblance between a section of the writer's

     book and Harold Robbins' work.  Most of the literati of

     the country in which the writer was currently living

     were upper-middle class and detested the writer and her

     writing.

     CAPITOL THOUGHT ABOUT MAKING A DOLL OF THIS COUNTRY,

     BUT DECIDED NOT TO.

     Journalist decided she had found a scoop.  Phoned up

     the feminist publisher to enquire about plagiarism;

     perhaps feminist publisher said something wrong because

     then phoned up Harold Robbins' publisher.

          "Surely all art is the result of one's having been

     in danger, of having gone through an experience all the

     way to the end, where no one can go any further.  The

     further one goes, the more private, the more personal,

     the more singular an experience becomes, and the thing

     one is making is finally, the necessary, irrepressible,

     and, as nearly as possible, definitive utterance of

     this singularity . . . Therein lies the enormous aid

     the work of art brings to the life of the one who must

     make it . . .

          "So we are most definitely called upon to test and

     try ourselves against the utmost, but probably we are

     also bound to keep silence regarding this utmost, to

     beware of sharing it, of parting with it in

     communication so long as we have not entered the work

     of art: for the utmost represents nothing other than

     that singularity in us which no one would or even

     should understand, and which must enter into the work

     as such . . . "  Rilke to Cezanne.

     CAPITOL MADE A PUBLISHER LOOK LIKE SAM PECKINPAH.

     THOUGH SHE HAD NO IDEA WHAT SAM PECKINPAH LOOKED LIKE.

     HAD LOOKED LIKE?  SHE TOOK A HOWDY DOODY DOLL AND AN

     ALFRED E. NEUMAN DOLL AND MASHED THEM TOGETHER, THEN

     MADE THIS CONGLOMERATE INTO AN AMERICAN OFFICER IN THE

     MEXICAN-AMERICAN WAR.  ACTUALLY SEWED, SHE HATED

     SEWING, OR WHEN SHE BECAME TIRED OF SEWING, GLUED

     TOGETHER WITH HER OWN TWO HANDS, JUST AS THE EARLY

     AMERICAN PATRIOT WIVES USED TO DO FOR THEIR PATRIOT

     HUSBANDS, A FROGGED AND BRAIDED CAVALRY JACKET, STAINED

     WITH THE BLOOD FROM SOME FORMER OWNERS.  THEN FASHIONED

     A STOVEPIPE HAT OUT OF ONE SHE HAD STOLEN FROM A BUM IN

     AN ECSTASY OF ART.  THE HAT WAS A BIT BIG.  FOR THE

     PUBLISHER.  INSIDE A GOLD HEART, THERE SHOULD BE A

     PICTURE OF A WOMAN.  SINCE CAPITOL DIDN'T HAVE A

     PICTURE OF A WOMAN, SHE PUT IN ONE OF HER MOTHER.

     SINCE SAM PECKINPAH OR HER PUBLISHER HAD SEEN TRAGEDY,

     AN ARROW HANGING OUT OF THE WHITE BREAST OF A SOLDIER

     NO OLDER THAN A CHILD, HORSES GONE MAD WALLEYED MOUTHS

     FROTHING AMID DUST THICKER THAN THE SMOKE OF GUNS.  SHE

     MADE HIS FACE FULL OF FOLDS, AN EYEPATCH OVER ONE EYE.

     Harold Robbins' publisher phoned up the man who ran the

     company who owned the feminist publishing company.

     From now on, known as 'The Boss'.  The Boss told Harold

     Robbins' publisher that they have a plagiarist in their

     midst.

     CAPITOL NO LONGER WANTED TO MAKE DOLLS.  IN THE UNITED

     STATES, UPON SEEING THE WORK OF THE PHOTOGRAPHER ROBERT

     MAPPLETHORPE, SENATOR JESSE HELMS PROPOSED AN AMENDMENT

     TO THE FISCAL YEAR 1990 INTERIOR AND RELATED AGENCIES

     BILL FOR THE PURPOSE OF PROHIBITING "THE USE OF

     APPROPRIATED FUNDS FOR THE DISSEMINATION, PROMOTION, OR

     PRODUCTION OF OBSCENE OR INDECENT MATERIALS OR

     MATERIALS DENIGRATING A PARTICULAR RELIGION."  THREE

     SPECIFIC CATEGORIES OF UNACCEPTABLE MATERIAL FOLLOWED:

     "(1) OBSCENE OR INDECENT MATERIALS, INCLUDING BUT NOT

     LIMITED TO DEPICTIONS OF SADOMASOCHISM [ALWAYS GET THAT

     ONE IN FIRST], HOMO-EROTICISM, THE EXPLOITATION OF

     CHILDREN, OR INDIVIDUALS ENGAGED IN SEX ACTS; OR (2)

     MATERIAL WHICH DENIGRATES THE OBJECTS OR BELIEFS OF THE

     ADHERENTS OF A PARTICULAR RELIGION OR NON-RELIGION; OR

     (3) MATERIAL WHICH DENIGRATES, DEBASES, OR REVILES A

     PERSON, GROUP, OR CLASS OF CITIZENS ON THE BASIS OF

     RACE, CREED, SEX, HANDICAP, AGE, OR NATIONAL ORIGIN."

     IN HONOR OF JESSE HELMS, CAPITOL MADE, AS PILLOWS, A

     CROSS AND A VAGINA.  SO THE POOR COULD HAVE SOMEWHERE

     TO SLEEP.  SINCE SHE NO LONGER HAD TO MAKE DOLLS OR

     ART, BECAUSE ART IS DEAD IN THIS CULTURE, SHE SLOPPED

     THE PILLOWS TOGETHER WITH DEAD FLIES, WHITE FLOUR

     MOISTENED BY THE BLOOD SHE DREW OUT OF HER SMALLEST

     FINGER WITH A PIN, AND OTHER TYPES OF GARBAGE.

     Disintegration.

          Feminist publisher then informed writer that the

     Boss and Harold Robbins' publisher had decided, due to

     her plagiarism, to withdraw the book from publication

     and to have her sign an apology to Harold Robbins which

     they had written.  This apology would then be published

     in two major publishing magazines.

          Ordinarily impolite, told feminist publisher they

     could do what they wanted with their edition of her

     books but she wasn't going to apologize to anyone for

     anything, much less for twenty years of work.

          Didn't have to think to herself because every

     square inch of her knew.  For freedom.  Writing must be

     for and must be freedom.

          Feminist publisher replied that she knew writer

     was actually a nice sweet girl.

          Asked if should tell her agent or try talking

     directly to Harold Robbins.

          Feminist publisher replied she'd take care of

     everything.  Writer shouldn't contact Harold Robbins

     because that would make everything worse.

          Would, the feminist publisher asked, the writer

     please compose a statement for the Boss why the writer

     used other texts when she wrote so that the Boss

     wouldn't believe that she was a plagiarist.

     CAPITOL MADE A DOLL WHO LOOKED EXACTLY LIKE HERSELF.

     IF YOU PRESSED A BUTTON ON ONE OF THE DOLL'S CUNT LIPS

     THE DOLL SAID, "I AM A GOOD GIRL AND DO EXACTLY AS I AM

     TOLD TO DO."

     Wrote:

          Nobody save buzzards.  Lots of buzzards here.  In

          the distance, lay flies and piles of shit.  Herds

          of animals move against the skyline like black

          caravans in an unknown east.  Sheeps and goats.

          Another place, a horse is lapping the water of a

          pool.  Lavendar and grey trees behind this black

          water are leafless and spineless.  As the day

          ends, the sun in the east flushes out pale

          lavendars and pinks, then turns blood red as it

          turns on itself, becoming a more definitive shape,

          the more definitive, the bloodier.  Until it sits,

          totally unaware of the rest of the universe,

          waiting at the edge of a sky that doesn't yet know

          what colors it wants to be, a hawk waiting for the

          inevitable onset of human slaughter.  The light is

          fleeing.

          Instead, sent a letter to feminist publisher in

     which said that she composed her texts out of 'real'

     conversations, anything written down, other texts,

     somewhat in the ways the Cubists had worked.  (Not

     quite true.  But thought this statement

     understandable.)  Cited, as example, her use of 'True

     Confessions' stories.  Such stories whose content seemed

     purely and narrowly sexual, composed simply for

     purposes of sexual titillation and economic profit, if

     deconstructed, viewed in terms of context and genre,

     became signs of political and social realities.  So if

     the writer or critic (deconstructionist) didn't work

     with the actual language of these texts, the writer or

     critic wouldn't be able to uncover the political and

     social realities involved.  For instance, both genre

     and the habitual nature of perception hide the violence

     of the content of many newspaper stories.

          To uncover this violence is to run the risk of

     being accused of loving violence or all kinds of

     pornography.  (As if the writer gives a damn about what

     anyone considers risks.)

          Wrote, living art rather than dead art has some

     connection with passion.  Deconstructions of newspaper

     stories become the living art in a culture that demands

     that any artistic representation of life be non-violent

     and non-sexual, misrepresent.

          To copy down, to appropriate, to deconstruct other

     texts is to break down those perceptual habits the

     culture doesn't want to be broken.

          Deconstruction demands not so much plagiarism as

     breaking into the copyright law.

          In the Harold Robbins' text which had used, a rich

     white woman walks into a disco, picks up a black boy,

     has sex with him.  In the Robbins' text, this scene is

     soft-core porn, has as its purpose mild sexual

     titillation and pleasure.

          [When Robbins' book had been published years ago,

     the writer's mother had said that Robbins had used

     Jacqueline Onassis as the model for the rich white

     woman.]  Wrote, had made apparent that bit of politics

     while amplifying the pulp quality of the style in order

     to see what would happen when the underlying

     presuppositions or meanings of Robbins' writing became

     clear.  Robbins as emblematic of a certain part of

     American culture.  What happened was that the sterility

     of that part of American culture revealed itself.  The

     real pornography.  Cliches, especially sexual cliches,

     are always signs of power or political relationships.

     BECAUSE SHE HAD JUST GOTTEN HER PERIOD, CAPITOL MADE A

     HUGE RED SATIN PILLOW CROSS THEN SMEARED HER BLOOD ALL

     OVER IT.

     Her editor at the feminist publisher said that the Boss

     had found her explanation "literary."  Later would be

     informed that this was a legal, not a literary, matter.

     "HERE IT ALL STINKS," CAPITOL THOUGHT.  "ART IS MAKING

     ACCORDING TO THE IMAGINATION.  BUT HERE, BUYING AND

     SELLING ARE THE RULES; THE RULES OF COMMODITY HAVE

     DESTROYED THE IMAGINATION.  HERE, THE ONLY ART ALLOWED

     IS MADE BY POST-CAPITALIST RULES; ART ISN'T MADE

     ACCORDING TO RULES."  ANGER MAKES YOU WANT TO SUICIDE.

     Journalist who broke the 'Harold Robbins story' had

     been phoning and leaving messages on writer's answering

     machine for days.  Had stopped answering her phone.  By

     chance picked it up; journalist asked her if anything

     to say.

          "You mean about Harold Robbins?"

          Silence.

          "I've just given my publisher a statement.

     Perhaps you could read that."

          "Do you have anything to add to it?"  As if she

     was a criminal.

          A few days later writer's agent over the phone

     informed writer what was happening was simply horrible.

     CAPITOL DIDN'T WANT TO MAKE ANY DOLLS.

     How could the writer be plagiarizing Harold Robbins?

          Writer didn't know.

          Agent told writer if writer had phoned her

     immediately, agent could have straightened out

     everything because she was good friends with Harold

     Robbins' publisher.  But now it was too late.

          Writer asked agent if she could do anything.

          Agent answered that she'd phone Harold Robbins'

     publisher and that the worst that could happen is that

     she'd have to pay a nominal quotation rights fee.

          So a few days later was surprised when feminist

     publisher informed her that if she didn't sign the

     apology to Harold Robbins which they had written for

     her, feminist publishing company would go down a drain

     because Harold Robins or harold Robbins' publisher

     would slap a half-a-million [dollar? pound?] lawsuit on

     the feminist publishing house.

          Decided she had to take notice of this stupid

     affair, though her whole life wanted to notice only

     writing and sex.

     "WHAT IS IT" CAPITOL WROTE, "TO BE AN ARTIST?  WHERE IS

     THE VALUE THAT WILL KEEP THIS LIFE IN HELL GOING?"

     For one of the first times in her life, was deeply

     scared.  Was usually as wild as they come.  Doing

     anything if it felt good.  So when succumbed to fear,

     succumbed to reasonless, almost bottomless fear.

          Panicked only because she might be forced to

     apologize, not to Harold Robbins, that didn't matter,

     but to anyone for her writing, for what seemed to be

     her life.  Book had already been withdrawn from print.

     Wasn't that enough?  Panicked, phoned her agent without

     waiting for her agent to phone her.

          Agent asked writer if she knew how she stood

     legally.

          Writer replied that as far as knew Harold Robbins

     had made no written charge.  Feminist publisher

     sometime in beginning had told her they had spoken to a

     solicitor who had said neither she nor they "had a leg

     to stand on."  Since didn't know with what she was

     being charged, she didn't know what that meant.

          Agent replied, "Perhaps we should talk to a

     solicitor. Do you know a solicitor?"

          Knew the name of a tax solicitor.

          Since had no money, asked her American publisher

     what to do, if he knew a lawyer.

     WOULD MAKE NO MORE DOLLS.

     American publisher informed her couldn't ask anyone's

     advice until she knew the charges against her, saw them

     in writing.

          Asked the feminist publisher to send the charges

     against her and whatever else was in writing to her.

          Received two copies of the 'Harold Robbins' text

     she had written twenty years ago, one copy of the

     apology she was supposed to sign, and a letter from

     Harold Robbins' publisher to the head of the feminist

     publishing company.  Letter said they were not seeking

     damages beyond withdrawal of the book from publication

     [which had already taken place] and the apology.

          Didn't know of what she was guilty.

          Later would receive a copy of the letter sent to

     her feminist publisher from the solicitor whom the

     feminist publisher and then her agent had consulted.

     Letter stated: According to the various documents and

     texts which the feminist publisher had supplied, the

     writer should apologize to Mr. Harold Robbins.  First,

     because in her text she has used a substantial number

     of Mr. Robbins' words.  Second, because she did not use

     any texts other than Mr. Robbins' so there could be no

     literary theory or praxis responsible for her

     plagiarism.  Third, because the contract between the

     writer and the feminist publisher states that the

     writer had not infringed upon any existing copyright.

          When the writer wrote, not wrote back, to the

     solicitor that most of the novel in question had been

     appropriated from other texts, that most of these texts

     had been in the public domain, that the writers of

     texts not in the public domain were either writers of

     'True Confessions' stories (anonymous) or writers who

     knew she had reworked their texts and felt honored,

     except for Mr. Robbins, that she had never

     misrepresented nor hidden her usages of other texts,

     her methods of composition, that there was already a

     body of literary criticism on her and others' methods

     of appropriation, and furthermore [this was to become

     the major point of contention], that she would not

     sign the apology because she could not since there was

     no assurance that all possible litigation and

     harassment would end with the signature of guilt,

     guilt which anyway she didn't feel: the solicitor did

     not reply.

          Not knowing of what she was guilty, feeling

     isolated, and pressured to finish her new novel, writer

     became paranoid.  Would do anything to stop the

     pressure from the feminist publisher and simultaneously

     would never apologize for her work.

          Considered her American publisher her father.

     Told her that the 'Harold Robbins affair' was a joke,

     she should take the phone off the hook, go to Paris for

     a few days.

          Finish your book.  That's what's important.

     WOULD MAKE NO MORE DOLLS.

     Paris is a beautiful city.

          In Paris decided that it's stupid to live in fear.

     Didn't yet know what to do about isolation.  All that

     matters is work and work must be created in and can't

     be created in isolation.  (Remembered a conversation

     she had had with her feminist publisher.  Still trying

     to explain, writer said, in order to deconstruct, the

     deconstructionist needs to use the actual other texts.

     Editor had said she understood.  For instance, she was

     sure, Peter Carey in Oscar and Lucinda had used other

     people's writings in his dialogue, but he would never

     admit it.  This writer did what every other writer did,

     but she is the only one who admits it.  "It's not a

     matter of not being able to write," the writer replied.

     It's a matter of a certain theory which is also a

     literary theory.  Theory and belief."  Then shut up

     because knew that when you have to explain and explain,

     nothing is understood.  Language is dead.)

     SINCE THERE WERE NO MORE DOLLS, CAPITOL STARTED WRITING

     LANGUAGE.

     Decided that it's stupid living in fear of being forced

     to be guilty without knowing why you're guilty and,

     more important, it's stupid caring about what has

     nothing to do with art.  It doesn't really matter

     whether or not you sign the fucking apology.

          Over the phone asked the American publisher

     whether or not it mattered to her past work whether or

     not signed the apology.

          Answered that the sole matter was her work.

          Thought alike.

          Wanted to ensure that there was no more sloppiness

     in her work or life, that from now on all her actions

     served only her writing.  Upon returning to England,

     consulted a friend who consulted a solicitor who was

     his friend about her case.  This solicitor advised that

     since she wasn't guilty of plagiarism and since the law

     was unclear, grey, about whether or not she had

     breached Harold Robbins' copyright, it could be a legal

     precedent, he couldn't advise whether or not she should

     sign the apology.  But must not sign unless, upon

     signing, received full and final settlement.

          Informed her agent that would sign if and only if

     received full and final settlement upon signing.

          Over the phone, feminist publisher asked her who

     had told her about full and final settlement.

               A literary solicitor.

          Could they, the feminist publishing house, have

     his name and his statement in writing?

          "This is my decision," writer said.  "That's all

     you need to know."

     WROTE DOWN "PRAY FOR US THE DEAD," THE FIRST LINE IN

     THE FIRST POEM BY CHARLES OLSON SHE HAD EVER READ WHEN

     SHE WAS A TEENAGER.  ALL THE DOLLS WERE DEAD.  DEAD

     HAIR.  WHEN SHE LOOKED UP THIS POEM, ITS FIRST LINE

     WAS, "WHAT DOES NOT CHANGE/ IS THE WILL TO CHANGE."

          WENT TO A NEARBY CEMETERY AND WITH STICK DOWN IN

     SAND WROTE THE WORDS "PRAY FOR US THE DEAD."  THOUGHT,

     WHO IS DEAD?  THE DEAD TREES?  WHO IS DEAD?  WE LIVE IN

     SERVICE OF THE SPIRIT.  MADE MASS WITH TREES DEAD AND

     DIRT AND UNDERNEATH HUMANS AS DEAD OR LIVING AS ANY

     STONE OR WOOD.

     I WON'T BURY MY DEAD DOLLS, THOUGHT.  I'LL STEP ON THEM

     AND MASH THEM UP.

     For two weeks didn't hear from either her agent or

     feminist publisher.  Could return to finishing her

     novel.

          Thought that threats had died.

          In two weeks received a letter from her agent

     which read something like:

          On your express instructions that your publisher

     communicate to you through me, your publisher has

     informed me that they have communicated to Harold

     Robbins your decision that you will sign the apology

     which his publisher drew up only if you have his

     assurance that there will be no further harassment or

     litigation.  Because you have requested such assurance,

     predictably, Harold Robbins is now requiring damages to

     be paid.

          Your publisher now intends to sign and publish the

     apology to Harold Robbins as soon as possible whether

     or not you sign it.

          In view of what I have discovered about the nature

     of your various telephone communications to me, please

     contact me only in writing from now on.

          Signature.

          Understood that she had lost.  Lost more than a

     struggle about the appropriation of four pages, about

     the definition of appropriation.  Lost her belief

     that there can be art in this culture.  Lost spirit.

     All humans have to die, but they don't have to fail.

     Fail in all that matters.

          It turned out that the whole affair was nothing.

     CAPITOL REALIZED THAT SHE HAD FORGOTTEN TO BURY THE

     WRITER DOLL.  SINCE THE SMELL OF DEATH STUNK, RETURNED

     TO THE CEMETERY TO BURY HER.  SHE KICKED OVER A ROCK

     AND THREW THE DOLL INTO THE HOLE WHICH THE ROCK HAD

     MADE.  CHANTED, "YOU'RE NOT SELLING ENOUGH BOOKS IN

     CALIFORNIA.  YOU'D BETTER GO THERE IMMEDIATELY.  TRY TO

     GET INTO READING IN ANY BENEFIT YOU CAN SO FIVE MORE

     BOOKS WILL BE SOLD.  YOU HAVE BAGS UNDER YOUR EYES."

          CAPITOL THOUGHT, DEAD DOLL.

          SINCE CAPITOL WAS A ROMANTIC, SHE BELIEVED DEATH

     IS PREFERABLE TO A DEAD LIFE, A LIFE NOT LIVED

     ACCORDING TO THE DICTATES OF THE SPIRIT.

          SINCE SHE WAS THE ONE WHO HAD POWER IN THE DOLL-

     HUMAN RELATIONSHIP, HER DOLLS WERE ROMANTICS TOO.

     Toward the end of paranoia, had told her story to a

     friend who was secretary to a famous writer.

          Informed her that famous writer's first lawyer

     used to work with Harold Robbins' present lawyer.

     First lawyer was friends with her American publisher.

          Her American publisher asked the lawyer who was

     his friend to speak privately to Harold Robbins'

     lawyer.

          Later the lawyer told the American publisher that

     Harold Robbins' lawyer advised to let the matter die

     quietly.  This lawyer himself advised that under no

     circumstances should the writer sign anything.

          It turned out that the whole affair was nothing.

          Despite these lawyer's advice, Harold Robbins'

     publisher and the feminist publisher kept pressing the

     writer to sign the apology and eventually, as

     everything becomes nothing, she had to.

          Knew that none of the above has anything to do

     with what matters, writing.  Except for the failure of

     the spirit.

     THEY'RE ALL DEAD, CAPITOL THOUGHT.  THEIR DOLLS' FLESH

     IS NOW BECOMING PART OF THE DIRT.

          CAPITOL THOUGHT, IS MATTER MOVING THROUGH FORMS

     DEAD OR ALIVE?

          CAPITOL THOUGHT, THEY CAN'T KILL THE SPIRIT.

George Yudice

CUNY, Hunter College

To eat is to appropriate by destruction; it is at the same time to be filled up with a certain being…. When we eat we do not limit ourselves to knowing certain qualities of this being through taste; by tasting them we appropriate them. Taste is assimilation…. The synthetic intuition of food is in itself an assimilative destruction. It reveals to me the being which I am going to make my flesh. Henceforth, what I accept or what I reject with disgust is the very being of that existent….

 

It is not a matter of indifference whether we like oysters or clams, snails or shrimp, if only we know how to unravel the existential signification of these foods. Generally speaking there is no irreducible taste or inclination. They all represent a certain appropriate choice of being.

 

Jean-Paul Sartre¹

At first glance, it seems unlikely that contemporary U.S. culture can offer a gastrosophy to match that of other civilizations. Brillat-Savarin’s (and Feuerbach’s) adage, “You are what you eat,” does not throb today with metaphysical significance as it did scarcely two generations ago for Sartre. In the United States, it is indeed a matter of indifference “whether we like oysters or clams, snails or shrimp”; much of the lower priced seafood today is made from other processed fish. Consequently, the differences between particular foods are less important; what really matters is taste itself, laboratory produced flavor. Food as substance gives way to the simulacrum of flavor, which is something that “science” recombines in ever new ways to seduce us to this or that convenience food. As synthetic food replaces Sartre’s “synthetic intuition of food,” we find it impossible to transcend the brute “facticity” of eating, which is ironically as fake as it is real. We eat substances (the “real”) yet we do not know them as such but as simulations (the “fake”).

The portrait I’ve drawn here obviously calls for a reference to Baudrillard, which will come in due time. First, however, it is necessary to reflect a bit more on the changes wrought by the transition to simulation in our (seemingly) most immediate experience: eating. Anthropologists have explained in great detail how entire civilizations defined themselves allegorically through their eating practices. Inclusion or exclusion, symbolic and material exchange, body boundaries, gender, and other identity factors are systematically and most deeply inscribed in the members of a given group through eating practices. Consequently, the metaphysics of most groups is conveyed by these practices. This inscription conditions, for example, how people understand divinity. For the Greeks of Hesiod’s Theogony, the rituals of sacrificial cooking and eating, paralleled in agricultural, funereal and nuptial practices, establish a communication between mortals and immortals which paradoxically expresses their incommensurability. In contrast, the Orphic anthropogony makes possible the mystical transcendence of the barrier between gods and humans by rejecting the sacrifice of the official religion.

By refusing this sacrifice, by forbidding the bloodshed of any animal, by turning away from fleshy food to dedicate themselves to a totally "pure" ascetic life--a life also completely alien to the social and religious norms of the city--men would shed all the Titanic elements of their nature. In Dionysus they would be able to restore that part of themselves that is divine.²

Since mystical transcendence usually involves some relation to eating–or not eating, as in the Orphic cult–it is interesting to ask what are the possibilities of such transcendence in an age of fake fat and microwavable synthetic meals. The mystic engages in a struggle whose reward is nourishing grace. As Saint Teresa says, the soul “finds everything cooked and eaten for it; it has only to enjoy its nourishment.”³ In our consumer culture, however, such convenience food comes to most of us without the struggle. Unlike the mystic–who is “like a man who has had no schooling…and [yet] finds himself, without any study, in possession of all living knowledge”–we are not graced by any special knowledge. Without negativity–Sartre’s “appropria[tion] by destruction”– there is no transcendence. And negativity is precisely what gives the Orphics and mystics like Saint Teresa– often taken as heretics by orthodoxy–a feeling of power which makes them “master of all the elements and of the whole world.”⁴ Transcendence, in these cases, is closely related to contestatory social movements which attempted to invert the power differential between the dominant and the subaltern.

The experiences of people (mostly women) with eating disorders today seems to contradict the argument that there are no longer any practices of negativity. In fact, on the basis of power reversals similar to the ones claimed by mystics, contemporary theorists/practictioners of ecriture have rediscovered–and extended to the anorectic–the prototype of an “herethics” beyond the dominant order of things,⁵ or a “mysterique” (fusion of mystic and hysteric) who carves out her own space of enunciation within Western discourse.⁶ Following this latter analogy, the mystic’s relationship to the inquisitor would be like that of the hysteric before the psychoanalyst who seeks to extract her secrets for the benefit of his doctrine.⁷

The correlation of mystic/heretic, hysteric and anorectic, however, encounters a serious problem: against what or whom is the anorectic wielding her negativity? Endocrinological and other biomedical factors aside, anorexia and other eating disorders are, of course, an expression of gender struggle in our society.⁸ But that does not explain everything; if that were the case, we could expect all the victims of patriarchy to suffer from eating disorders. It seems to me that the issue of control is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the negativity of the anorectic (or the bulimic or the obese woman). Class and/or gender analysis is not enough to account for all questions of subjectivity and desire. We are all constrained but some of us go on to become mystics or anorectics. Why? In the most suggestive essay I have read on the topic, Sohnya Sayres argues that some of us are more sensitive to the limitless loss brought on by the shrinking of experience. As in mystical experience, the loss becomes the point of departure for the will to greatness and glory, to empowerment:

It is glory that these body-loss-obsessed men and women seek, in making themselves "lost," rapacious glory in society constraining them in rituals around limitless loss. They externalize the return of the repressed in this society which, more than others, is rationalized around the ledger sheets and the accountants of gain, whose most serious intonations are about the "bottom line"--which has remade the "full plate" into the latest idiom for dealing with bad news. One wonders, now, whether the ultimate loss that young people say they are almost sure will be their not too distant future--millennialist, cataclysmic loss--hasn't excited, but sent deeper, those fantasies of messianic rescue lying choked beneath weeds the body imperatives plant in the spirit. Fat and anorectic women and men want to be great, in ways unaccountable...unless we accept the enormity of the unaccountable in this society. Then, perhaps, the drama of food and the body can be given a storyteller's innovations, that is, when it is released from explanation and accommodation, all that quantifying, into flights of wit and provocation--released, in other words, from a singular, petty, tale of compulsion into one of sacrifice, mortification, and redemption-- into a grander delusion, worthy of the person, worthy of hearing about, worthy of transforming.⁹

I have quoted Sayres at length because she expresses so well the dialectic of loss and transcendence which Baudrillard, in turn, will transform into a paean to banality. Baudrillard’s hyperreality has no place in it for delusions of grandeur and redemption. Or it may be more exact to say that he does acknowledge grandeur, but it is the grandeur of limitless banality. There is no sense, however, of how people suffer and struggle against that banality. In fact, he has taken the figure of the obese/anorectic, in which some feminists situate a radical negation of patriarchy, and cast it as the emblem of a society in which there is no longer any possibility of opposition because everything has been “digest[ed into] its own appearance”:

This strange obesity is no longer that of a protective layer of fat nor the neurotic one of depression. It is neither the compensatory obesity of the underdeveloped nor the alimentary one of the overnourished. Paradoxically, it is a mode of disappearance for the body. The secret rule that delimits the sphere of the body has disappeared. The secret form of the mirror, by which the body watches over itself and its image, is abolished, yielding to the unrestrained redundancy of a living organism. No more limits, no more transcendence: it is as if the body was no longer opposed to an external world, but sought to digest space in its own appearance.¹⁰

Like the social systems in which we live, which are “bloated with information” and deprived of significance, Baudrillard’s obscene obese/anorectic body has lost the “principle of law or measure” that once supported it. Its meanings and representations have also transmuted into metastatic self-replication. History is now seen as a succession of devourments which, along with ideology and politics, reach a saturation point that knows no limits; metastasis encompasses everything, nothing is at odds with it, nothing can transcend it. And as every condition has its symptomatic figuration, Baudrillard’s obscene hyperreality finds its “perfect confirmation and ecstatic truth” in the obscene body, which “instead of being reflected, captures itself in its own magnifying mirror.”¹¹

Europe has long served as the proscenium for the death of the subject and history; the allegory of the death of life could have no other setting, of course, than the United States, home of those exemplary killers of experience: fast food, safe sex and genetic engineering. I would like to talk about an anomaly–that fascinating obesity, such as you find all over the U.S., that kind of monstrous conformity to empty space, of deformity by excess of conformity that translates the hyperdimension of a sociality at once saturated and empty, where the scene of the social as well as that of the body are left behind.¹²

In the grand allegorical tradition, Baudrillard offers us a new reading of the body-as-microcosm-of- the-world. This body is not a temple, nor a machine, nor a holistic organism. It is the obscene body without order, whose cells have gone rampant in “cancerous metasteses” that parallel the useless flow of information in the postmodern world. If disease was once interpreted as lesion (the body as machine model) or as adaptive response to stress (the organic model),¹³ Baudrillard’s viral analogy construes it as coextensive with “life.” It is, however, a life with no rhyme or reason other than the momentum/inertia of self-replication: “Quite simply, there is no life any longer […] but the information and the vital functions continue.”¹⁴

The body registers the “useless and wasteful exhaustion” of all systems in the figure of the obese (satiation) and/or the anorectic (inertia). On this view, the obese and the anorectic are neither the victims of some accident whose results can be reversed by altering a body part (“removing portions of the stomach or intestine so that only small amounts of food could be eaten or digested”) nor the adaptation to stressful “environmental factors (exercise habits, self-image, personal relationships, work pressures, etc.).”¹⁵ They are, rather, the embodiment of permanent crisis: inflation, overproduction, unemployment, nuclear threat, anomaly, to sum up.

Yes. At first sight, the example seems irrefutable. What better emblem of the empire of the senseless, useless waste of resources than the insatiable obese and anorectics of (North) America, driven to passivity, apathy and indifference by the infinite choice of consummables?¹⁶ In a very insightful essay in which he mines the contradictions between capitalism and transgression, Octavio Paz notes that by rigorously applying the norm of the “limitless production of the same,” North American society succeeded in coopting the erotic and gastronomic rebellions of the 60s into slogans for the media:¹⁷

The popular character of the erotic revolt was immediately appreciated by the mass media, by the entertainment and fashion industries. For it is not the churches nor the political parties, but the great industrial monopolies that have taken control of the powers of fascination that eroticism exerts over men. [...] What began as a[n erotic] liberation has become a business. The same has happened in the realm of gastronomy; the erotic industry is the younger sister of the food industry. [...] Private business expropriates utopia. During its ascendancy capitalism exploited the body; now it has turned it into an object of advertising. We have gone from prohibition to humiliation.¹⁸

Paz did not fathom the extent to which gastronomy was being appropriated by industry. Today it no longer takes a major intellectual to understand that food is subject to the same image manipulation as all other commodities. Flavor, color, consistency, texture, smell, caloric and nutritional value, even genetic composition are all engineered to seduce each and every consumer. Food has, in effect, become a simulacrum which the omnivorous psyche of North America cannot get enough of even at the ever quicker pace of production, preparation and consumption

With the ever-accelerating pace of life, the act of eating--once a leisurely undertaking synonymous with pleasure and social interaction--has been reduced to a necessary function not unlike shaving or refueling the car, in the view of food manufacturers, social scientists and others.¹⁹

The loss which Sayres refers to above, is not only the erosion of the supreme experience of transcendence; even the petty pleasure of eating a cheeseburger fades as the milk fat is replaced by vegetable oils (if not a cellulose-based fat substitute) and the grill gives way to the microwave. Even the singe marks are painted on the frozen patty. Increasingly, we consume in solitude; a recent Gallup poll found that only 1/3 of North American adults dine at home in the company of others.²⁰ By 1992, cars will come equipped with microwaves so we can consume on our way to and from work.²¹ And moms are now free to stay at work as children from two years of age and older pop My Own Meals or Kid Cuisine in the microwave.²²

“Freedom” seems to come so easily, there is no struggle; there isn’t even an “other” to struggle against; the values once instilled by preparing our own food and eating together as a family have given way to a new ethos: flip the switch. For Baudrillard, we become the simulacra we consume, hostages “of a fate that is fixed, and whose manipulators we can no longer see.”²³ We are thus levelled to a homogeneous status of victim and perpetrator. None of us and all of us are to blame. A very convenient fiction that furthers the hegemony of those whom he refuses to see.

It is hardly a secret that a handful of transnational corporations–General Foods, Nestle, Monsanto, R.J. Reynolds, etc.–control agribusiness, from production to shipping, processessing, distribution and marketing. It is no secret that this control puts those “disappeared” others who produce what we consume in the most onerous of conditions– twelve hours of work for a couple of dollars in Central America–in a situation which has been getting worse under the Reagan and Bush administrations. Nor is it a secret that people here in the United States are also going hungry due to increases in prices and the erosion of welfare benefits by inflation and cutbacks.²⁴ Add to these “secrets” the devastation of the world’s natural resources for the ingredients and packaging of fast and convenience foods,²⁵ and you get a good sense of the loss, the other side of the simulacrum.

Baudrillard’s allegory is a rather simplistic correlation of digestion and information processing, which permits passing over the intense battles which are currently waged in the medium of the body. The body is not simply the screen on which the rampant exchange of information and images is captured; it is, rather, the battleground in which subjects are constituted, contradictorily desiring and rejecting prescribed representations. Baudrillard does not even recognize this struggle; in his hyperreal world there is only conformity, an unproblematic consensus in which not only consumers but even terrorists collaborate.

Since, for Baudrillard, experience has disappeared his allegorical viral body is raceless, classless, genderless, ageless; it has no identity factors. Consequently, and contrary to the reported experience of most people, it is not shaped by the ways particular social formations interpellate specific bodies through these factors. The struggle of women against what Kim Chernin has called the “tyranny of slenderness” is a good example of how some bodies and not others are made to incarnate certain social contradictions on the basis of gender.²⁶ Obesity and anorexia, then, do not correlate so much with the self-replication of information but rather with the control of bodies. In the United States, control of the body by means of “idealizing” representations (consumerism and the media) and ever more frequently through outright coercion and the interdiction of counterrepresentations (the conservative offensive) have pretty much replaced prior forms of maintaining hegemony. For Susie Orbach, the anorectic’s “hunger strike” is a metaphor for this struggle of representation.²⁷ But this is a struggle to which Baudrillard seems quite indifferent; in his view, we have already lost and there is no way of transforming that loss into the “grander delusion” of something worthy (Sayres). Why play the deluded fool that resists the body snatchers; the sooner we yield the sooner we can all enjoy the obscenity.

Baudrillard bears a resemblance to the confessors of the mystics. They attempted to control the interpretation of the mystics’ experiences, differentiating those inspired by God from those inspired by the devil, thus negotiating the mystics’ relationship to the church. Baudrillard also differentiates between experiences of transcendence (“This is not Georges Bataille’s excessive superfluity”) and the sublime banality of the hyperreal and hypertelic, which know “no other end than limitless increase, without any consideration of limits.”²⁸ Baudrillard, of course, does not evaluate the experiences in terms of divine/demonic inspiration, but he does clearly valorize the banalization of life by capital-logic, with its concomitant emptying of moral value. As such he embodies Jameson’s description of the sublime hysteric, hungering after figurations (simulacra) of the other of capitalism once Nature and Being have been eclipsed.²⁹ Control and limits, nonetheless, continue to be important, even constitutive, for Baudrillard because his fascination with obscenity, like all appreciations of sublimity, plays off the point at which limits can no longer be controlled. Hence, the body, not figuratively but (hyper)really embodies the world. In becoming image, it matches the mediatedness that is the world.

In one respect I think that Baudrillard has chosen a very apt allegory of sublime banality in the obese/anorectic body. In some sense, women with eating disorders are today’s mystics; the ethical substance of their search for transcendence may not be sublime in the conventional sense, but they occupy a privileged space in a world that has depleted its divine incommensurabilities. In other words, today’s incommensurability is the representational space of their own bodies, which they struggle to control. Most interpretive (in contrast to biomedical) analyses of eating disorders take a psychoanalytic and/or feminist stance according to which the obese or the anorectic woman strives to manage the double binds of prescriptions of slenderness and consumption, will and abandon to instant gratification. Whether these analyses take an essentialist (e.g., Kim Chernin) or a social constructionist (e.g., Susie Orbach) approach, they almost exclusively emphasize repression and control.

Susan Bordo summarizes very well the “deeper psycho-cultural anxieties…about internal processes out of control–uncontained desire, unrestrained hunger, uncontrolled impulse.” Bordo posits the bulimic as the embodiment of the “contradictions that make self-management a continual and virtually impossible task in our culture.”³⁰ The bulimic, she argues, plays out on her body the “incompatible directions” of consumerist temptations and the freedom implied in the virile image of a well-muscled slender body. If consumerism makes the feminine image central to our culture (because of its seductive power, Baudrillard would argue),³¹ such that even literary theorists can claim that writing is a subversive feminine activity, it nevertheless requires repressing the very materiality or essential nature, as Kim Chernin puts it, of women’s bodies.³² For Chernin it is repression that transforms the body into an “alien” that may in momentary lapses of control rear its head and return with a vengeance.

But clearly it is also the relatively non- repressive introjection of images that produces this alienation. In contrast to Chernin, I would argue that alienation is not the loss of an essential nature; in an age in which people believe and practice making themselves over, the traditional notion of essence becomes absurd. It is, rather, a question of remaking not only oneself but even more importantly the social formation that attributes value to the “nature” that we embody.³³ It is this capacity which so many people experience as having been lost. Sociality can then be understood as the struggle for value, which entails the recognition of diverse “natures” and the social ministration to their needs. Elsewhere I have elaborated on how such ministration responds to the struggle over needs interpretation, which is basically a struggle over the representation of our “nature,” be it in the form of gender, ethnicity, age, and so on.³⁴

On this view, the materiality that defines us need not be understood monolithically as the rejected archaic maternal body which according to Kristeva undergirds the radical limit-experience of abjection. It seems to me that the very notion of the archaic is remade in the image of the media. The current “fat taboo” may in fact hark back to the separation process performed by traditional dietary and other ritual prohibitions, although today fat food and fat image are hypostatized in our consciousness:

[Such prohibitions] keep a being who speaks to his God separated from the fecund mother... [the] phantasmatic mother who also constitutes, in the specific history of each person, the abyss that must be established as an autonomous (and not encroaching) place and distinct object, meaning a signifiable one, so that such a person might learn to speak.³⁵

Dietary taboos, however, are increasingly becoming a matter of image manipulation. For example, you can still have your cake and eat it too if you’re kosher and desire to eat a slice of (simulated) cheesecake after your pastrami on rye at Katz’s Delicatessen, that exemplary custodian of Glatt kosher cuisine. Taboo only makes a difference if you can have your cake and not eat it. Does this mean, then, that in a culture of simulation there are no longer ways of distinguishing the abject from the proper object, thus making the will to transcendence irrelevant? Rather than accept this premise, it seems preferable to me to explore Mary Douglas’s notion that anxiety around bodily boundaries signals significant social change or crisis. What and how we eat undergirds other kinds of social boundaries (marking off the difference between purity and pollution, inside and outside, etc.). As such, dietary practices function as a support for the cognitive systems by which cultures make sense of the world. They wire, so to speak, the way in which our bodies interface with the media of signification.³⁶ This is what Kristeva means when she says, in the passage quoted above, that the maternal body archaically establishes radical negativity, which she then goes on to fetishize, in the metaphor of the abyss, as the very condition of speech. But this is to reduce speech to the verbal and practice to negativity, thus privileging avant-gardist practices in the registers of high aesthetics. The recognition of mediation as necessary for our survival does not have to lead, however, to a Baudrillardian celebration of the simulacrum:

Seduction as an invention of stratagems, of the body, as a disguise for survival, as an infinite dispersion of lures, as an art of disappearance and absence, as a dissuasion which is stronger yet than that of the system.³⁷

The struggle over representation as I have briefly sketched it out does not fetishize the disguise nor lead one to confuse the high aesthetic appropriation of pop and mass culture with political effectivity. Its political value is more complex than the simple play of quotes or intertextuality. It challenges institutional control over images but not by remaining totally within the frame of the institution as, say, in the work of Cindy Sherman or Sarah Tuft. In a recent video,Don’t Make Me Up (1986),³⁸ Tuft seeks to reframe commercial images of women’s bodies variously eating, exercising, courting, etc. by overlaying them with critical comments (e.g., “I just won’t buy this pack of lies”) and by juxtaposing them with images that give a critical twist to the prescription of thinness, such as photographs of emaciated concentration camp prisoners. The images succeed each other rapidly to the beat of a rap song, a vehicle which should have helped give the video a more contestatory tone. However, due to the blandness of the voice (this is no Public Enemy) and the too rapid succession of images (which does not leave enough time to register that some of the images run counter to commercial idealizations), the video does not succeed in raising the consciousness of those who aren’t already convinced. Even the convinced tend to enjoy it for its display of “idealized” bodies and its danceable rhythm. The overall effect is the very opposite of its punch line: “I must get free of the messages being fed to me.” With a better sound track, it would not seem out of place on MTV.

David Cronenberg’sVideodrome (1983) also flirts with the possibility of resistance to the implosion of reality into media imagery. But the video images which the hero/victim Max Renn consumes end up consuming him, absorbing him into the image world of video. As head of a small TV station in search for seductive programming, he views a pirated snuff movie which, unbeknownst to him, inoculates him with electronic frequencies that produce a brain tumor that takes control of body and mind. A vagina-like VCR slot opens up in Max’s abdomen in which video cassettes with behavioral programming are inserted by the agents of Videodrome, a transnational corporation engaged in a conspiracy to take control of North America in order to counter the debilitating effects of liberal ways of life. Through the video-mediated intervention of Professor Brian Oblivion, a thinly disguised combination of McLuhan and Baudrillard, Max turns the weapon of his “new flesh” against Videodrome. The film ends with Max killing off his old flesh and fusing with the “new flesh” of the video monitor, whose screen stretches out like a pregnant belly. Professor Oblivion’s daughter and assistant Bianca tells Max that he has “become the video word made flesh.” Mysticism and abjection thus collapse onto the flesh of mediation.

Despite the evident retaliation which the protagonist carries out,Videodrome is less about resistance or rearticulation of society than a Baudrillardian celebration of the apocalyptic collapse–or implosion–onto the surface of the image. This implosion, however, does not collapse the conventions of capitalist, patriarchal culture. The hero is the proverbial white middle class male, female figures are portrayed as the usual stereotypes (whore or primal medium-mother), there is no solidary consciousness on the part of the very few racial minorities or otherwise marginal characters, like the homeless man whose begging is facilitated by the “dancing monkey” of a TV monitor on a leash. The closest to a political intervention is Professor Oblivion’s video version of a soup kitchen: The Cathode Ray Mission, where patrons are given a diet of TV frequencies rather than food. They are being prepped, it is suggested, for taking on the “new flesh” of electronic mediation.

E. Ann Kaplan makes a half-hearted attempt to argue for some “progressive” content in Videodrome.³⁹ It is not, for example, typical of mainstream media in presenting the abject in the form of a male body. Secondly, the body is made androgynous by the vagina-like slot that opens up in Max’s belly and the placenta-like covered handgun that he sticks in and out of the slot. As a feminist, Kaplan interprets “postmodern discourse of this kind” as an implicit critique of the “horror of technology that deforms all bodies and blurs their gender distinction.”⁴⁰ I am not convinced of the contribution to feminism, however, of the positive conclusions which Kaplan draws from the androgynizing blurring of distinctions effected by Videodrome, rock videos and other forms of mass culture:

Many rock videos have been seen as postmodern insofar as they abandon the usual binary oppositions on which dominant culture depends. That is, videos are said to forsake the usual oppositions between high and low culture; between masculine and feminine; between established literary and filmic genres; between past, present and future; between the private and the public sphere; between verbal and visual hierarchies; between realism and anti-realism, etc. This has important implications for the question of narrative as feminists have been theorizing it, in that these strategies violate the paradigm pitting a classical narrative against an avant-garde anti- narrative, the one supposedly embodying complicit, the other subversive, ideologies. The rock video reveals the error in trying to align an aesthetic strategy with any particular ideology, since all kinds of positions emerge from an astounding mixture of narrative/anti-narrative/non-narrative devices.⁴¹

The hybridity, ambiguity and lack of a “fixed identity” which Kaplan and cultural historians of video like Roy Armes attribute to the medium,⁴² are also terms that Kristeva has used to describe the abject. They both are about “the breaking down of a world that has erased its borders.”⁴³ In this sense, Cronenberg’sVideodrome is not so much a metaphor or allegory of the abject but rather the cinematic demonstration that experience is the consumption of media, that the body of mediation is the body of the real (“whatever appears on the television screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it,” says Professor Oblivion). If the reality of mediation in Videodrome is its embodiment in “uncontrollable flesh,” for Kristeva the blurring of the corporeal limits established by food, waste, and signs of sexual differentiation produces “uncontrollable materiality.” In both cases there is an avowal of the death drive (“To become the new flesh [of mediation] first you have to kill off the old [demarcated] flesh,” Bianca says to Max) and a disruption of identity (“I don’t know where I am now. I’m having trouble finding my way around,” says Max).

This dissolution of identity, furthermore, takes place for Kristeva in relation to the mother’s body, the “place of a splitting,” “a threshold where `nature’ confronts `culture’.”⁴⁴ InVideodrome, Max’s dissolution (which is concomitant to the vaginal stigmata that opens up in his belly) and his transformation into the “new flesh” take place in the medium of video, a body on which viewers “gorge themselves” and with which Max fuses in an inverse birth (i.e., when he sticks his head into the “pregnant” TV monitor). In fact, both maternal body and mediation come together in Kristeva’s positing of the mother as the agency that maps or formats the body and readies it for the mediation that is language.

[Maternal authority] shapes the body into a territory having areas, orifices, points and lines, surfaces and hollows, where the archaic power of mastery and neglect, of the differentiation of proper-clean and improper- dirty, possible and impossible, is impressed and exerted. It is a `binary logic,' a primal mapping of the body that I call semiotic to say that, while being the precondition of language, it is dependent upon meaning, but in a way that is not that of linguistic signs nor of the symbolic order they found.⁴⁵

Can we call this experience a transcendence? And what does it achieve? If we consider mysticism, we readily see, as in Saint Teresa’s writings, that transcendence is experienced as a freedom which empowers the subject through infinite expansion:

When a soul sets out upon this earth, He does not reveal Himself to it, lest it should feel dismayed at seeing that its littleness can contain such a greatness; but gradually He enlarges it to the extent requisite for what He has set within it. It is for this reason that I say He has perfect freedom, since He has power to make the whole of this palace great.⁴⁶

But the mystic’s experience is not totally determined by a God from the outside. Self-mastery through prayer and meditation is the precondition for fashioning a space without which the divinity could have no presentation. Perhaps Saint Teresa’s best known claim for the constitutive capacity of the mystic is the metaphor of the silkworm inThe Interior Castle. Through speech-prayer (_oracion), the nuns spin their interior dwellings, like the silkworm its cocoon. In language that recalls Heidegger’s, Saint Teresa describes these dwellings as the resting place of the nuns, the space of their death. It is also the space of the Godhead, the “new [mystic] flesh.” Saint Teresa would seem to be on the verge of heresy here for she claims that it is the nuns who can place or withdraw God at will since it is they who “fabricate the dwelling which is God so that they might live/die in it.⁴⁷ “[The Lord] becomes subject to us and is pleased to let you be the mistress and to conform to your will.”⁴⁸

I have brought up the case of Saint Teresa because, as inVideodrome, transcendence takes the form of the subject embodying the medium. For both the mystic (Saint Teresa) and the subject of the “new flesh” (Max Renn) phenomenality is overcome not by reaching beyond it but by collapsing what would otherwise be the “supersensible idea” of the sublime onto appearance or image itself. The “new flesh” is the collapse of idea and body as medium, a collapse which, in Saint Teresa’s words, provides “free[dom] from earthly things…and master[y] of all the elements and of the whole world.”⁴⁹ In Saint Teresa’s case it is not too difficult to understand how the dialectic of freedom and mastery enabled this marginal and subaltern person (woman, “new Christian,” eccentric) to negotiate a measure of power in a hierarchical and patriarchal society overseen by the all-pervasive scrutiny of the Inquisition:

You will not be surprised, then, sisters, at the way I have insisted in this book that you should strive to obtain this freedom. Is it not a funny thing that a poor little nun of St. Joseph's should attain mastery over the whole earth and all the elements?⁵⁰

The influence of St. Catherine of Siena over popes and monarchs is also well known. Through radical fasting both of these saints brought their bodies to extreme states of abjection that resulted in death. But abjection gave them a power over and above representation that the authorities of the Inquisition felt obliged to recognize and to channel in ways that did not topple the institution, for both saints were also reformers.

Can the same be said for either Max Renn or the anorectics of today? What is their power, if any? Can they, like the mystics, transform their abjection into transformative power? I think not. The problem is that the thematics of abject rebellion have been conceived in relation to high art. Kristeva’s examples–Dostoyevsky, Lautreamont, Proust, Artaud, Kafka, Celine–are not easily transferred to the mass mediated reality of today, say Roseanne Barr. Why is that?

In the first place, Kristeva’s privileged abjects are all (male) avant-gardists and as we know the lynchpin of the avant-garde was to transform life by recourse to an aesthetic modality that had its raison d’etre in bourgeois modernity. Secondly, since aesthetics is thoroughly commodified as mass culture absorbs it, it can hardly be the means for a transformation of life in the service of emancipation. To collapse idea and body onto medium, then, implies a commodification which is not sufficiently thematized in Videodrome. Can the “new flesh” really be other than commodified flesh? The references to simulated foods in an earlier section of this essay only reinforce the idea that mass mediated simulation is in fact transforming us all into commodified media. The rebellion of the anorectic counters this but only at the cost of dysfunction or death, that is, disembodiment.

Is there, then, any other politics of representation that can prove more successful? One attempt is the acceptance of the premise that we too are simulations but that we can rearticulate the way we have been constituted. This takes at least two forms: one which continues to accept that an autonomous aesthetics can have an impact on the culture. For example the work of Cindy Sherman or the Sarah Tuft’s videoDon’t Make Me Up. Ultimately, I think these are failed attempts not because they work with commodified images but rather because they still accept the confines of aesthetic institutionalization. On the other hand, the aesthetic practices involved in identity formation among ethnic groups and certain social movements like gays and lesbians do not distinguish between the market, the street, the university and the gallery. The work of such groups as ACT-UP and Guerrilla Girls as well as many other groups working in collaboration with particular constituencies stake out new public spaces for re-embodying media and struggle within and against the dominant media to reconfigure the institutional arrangements of our society. New “safe-sex” videos, for example, attempt to re-eroticize body in an age increasingly defined by a new puritan fundamentalism (which includes the anti- abortion movement, reinforced homophobia, and the War on Drugs).

It is not enough, in the face of this offensive, to reshuffle representations. If this were all to contemporary cultural politics, Baudrillard would indeed be correct in understanding any practice as the body “digest[ing] space in its own appearance.”⁵¹ As regards the consumption of food, the age of the counterculture, which saw the emergence of the new social movements, also spawned contestatory movements like Fat Liberation and the politically motivated vegetarianism ofDiet for a Small Planet.⁵² Warren Belasco’s history of the Food Revolution in the past two and a half decades recognizes that the powerful food industry ultimately won, in part because of the counterculture’s too diffuse means of implementing its utopian visions. As an individualistic politics, it gave way to its own commodification and presented no unified front against the social causes of obesity in the U.S. and exploitation of agricultural workers in the third world. A contestatory politics of food production and consumption would have to articulate more directly with other social movements and to take into account the ways in which myriad factors intersect in the constitution of subjectivity and identity. This means also taking into consideration ethical as well as aesthetic questions, even the experience of transcendence as I have been describing it here.

There are signs, however, that a coalitional politics is possible. An example is the Institute for Food and Development Policy, which Frances Moore Lappe founded with the profits from her counterculturalDiet for a Small Planet. The most recent direction of the institute is to encourage the formation of new social values that, on the one hand, contest the conservative rapaciousness in industry and its attack on civil rights and, on the other, the redefinition of the individual, grounding his/her sense of value not in the isolated person, as proclaimed by Liberal ideology but, rather in the entirety of society. InRediscovering America’s Values, Lappe argues that the privatization of values in the Reagan 80s (“fidelity, chastity, saying no to drugs”) have to be re-publicized.⁵³ This entails examining how they have become embodied in us, what social and aesthetic practices have enabled us to become inured to widespread hunger and environmental devastation throughout the world. Lappe’s strategy for recreating public values is of a piece with current progressive agendas: new ways of eroticizing, new ways of articulating needs in pursuit of recognition, valuation, and empowerment. In an age of simulation, these are worthy transformations. Perhaps if the will to transcendence were articulated along these lines, we would be able to find more socially responsible and convincing values than those advocated by the Right and by Liberals. The aesthetics accompanying current analyses of eating disorders tend to celebrate the individual body, thus not posing any challenge to the Right or to Liberalism. We need an aesthetics that instills the values of the social body.

Notes

1. Jean-Paul Sartre,Being and Nothingness (New York: Washington Square Press, 1966).

2. Jean-Pierre Vernant, “At Man’s Table: Hesiod’s Foundation Myth of Sacrifice,” in Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant,The Cuisine of Sacrifice among the Greeks, trans. Paula Wissing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 51.

3. Saint Teresa of Avila,The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila By Herself (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957), 190.

4. Saint Teresa of Avila,Way of Perfection, tr. E. Allison Peers (Garden City, NY: Image Books/Doubleday, 1964), 137.

5. Julia Kristeva, “Stabat Mater,” inThe Female Body in Western Culture, ed. Susan Rubin Suleiman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 99-118.

6. Luce Irigaray,Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 191.

7. “It is easy to learn how to interpret dreams, to extract from the patient’s associations his [sic] unconscious thoughts and memories, and to practise similar explanatory arts: for these the patient himself [sic] will always provide the text.” Sigmund Freud, Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (New York: Collier, 1963), 138. Freud goes on to observe that the difficult part of interpretation is taking into account unavoidable transferences, “new editions” or replays of fantasies in which the analyst stands in for prior actors. This phenomenon must also be taken into consideration in the very production of the subaltern’s text. In the mystic’s case, an analysis of the role of confessors and inquisitors is crucial. The role of the mystic and the hysteric should also be considered transferentially in the production of current theories of gendered discourse or behavior (such as eating disorders).

8. Recognition of endocrinological and biomedical factors in the etiology of eating disorders does not diminish the relevance of an approach that focuses on the social interpretation and evaluation of thinness and obesity. Moreover, it is mistaken, in my view, to take biomedical factors asreal and social factors as epiphenomenal. On the contrary, the social may work in tandem with the biomedical in a synergistic way. In any case, how one interprets the relative importance of these factors depends on the models of biology, society and disease that frame one’s discourse. This essay is part of a more general attempt on my part to discern the workings of the aesthetic as it interfaces bodily sensation and social valuation.

9. Sohnya Sayres, “Glory mongering: food and the agon of excess,”Social Text, 16 (Winter 1986-87): 94.

10. Jean Baudrillard, “The Obese,” inFatal Strategies, trans. Philip Beitchman and W.G.J. Niesluchowski (New York: Semiotext(e)/Pluto, 1990), p.27.

11. “The Obese,” 34.

12. “The Obese,” 27.

13. For an account of the “body as temple/machine/holistic organism/etc.” cognitive schemas which underwrite these different accounts for disease, see Mark Johnson,The Body in the Mind. The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination and Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 126-36.

14. Jean Baudrillard, “The Anorectic Ruins,” in Jean Baudrillard, et al.,Looking Back at the End of the World, eds. Dietmar Kamper and Christoph Wolf, trans. David Antal (New York: Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series, 1989), 39.

15. Johnson,The Body in the Mind.

16. Cf. Lena Williams, “Free Choice: When Too Much Is Too Much,”The New York Times (2/14/90): C1, C10.

17. For a recent account of the radical potential and eventual cooptation of the “gastronomic counterculture,” see Warren Belasco,Appetite for Change: How the Counterculture Took On the Food Industry, 1966-1988 (New York: Pantheon, 1989).

18. Octavio Paz, “Eroticism and Gastrosophy,” Daedalus, 101, 4 (1972): 81.

19. Dena Kleiman, “Fast Food? It Just Isn’t Fast Enough Anymore,”The New York Times (12/6/89): A1, C12.

20. The September 1989 Gallup poll is cited in Kleiman, C12.

21. Kleiman, C12.

22. Denise Webb, “Eating Well,”The New York Times (2/14/90): C8.

23. “The Obese,” 35.

24. Dr. DeHavenon, director of a private research committee on welfare benefits stated that the “basic welfare grant in New York had gone up only 28 percent since 1969, while prices have increased 180 percent, and that cutbacks in the foodstamp program have contributed to the problem.” Richard Severo, “East Harlem Study Shows Hunger Worsens,”The New York Times (6/3/84): 46.

25. The literature on transnational control of agribusiness and destruction and contamination of resources is voluminous. It includes such books and essays as: Joseph N. Beldon, et al.Dirt Rich, Dirt Poor. America’s Food and Farm Crisis (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986); James Danaher, “U.S. Food Power in the 1990s,”Race & Class, 30, 3 (1989); Susan George,How the Other Half Dies. The Real Reasons for World Hunger (Washington, DC: Institute for Policy Studies, 1977); Frances Moore Lappe and Joseph Collins,World Hunger. Ten Myths (San Francisco: Food First, 1982); James O’Connor, “Uneven and Combined Development and Ecological Crisis: A Theoretical Introduction,”Race & Class, 30, 3 (1989); N. Shanmugaratnam, “Development and Environment: A View From the South,” Race & Class, 30, 3 (1989); Jill Torrie,Banking on Poverty: The Impact of the IMF and World Bank (San Francisco: Food First, 1986).

26. Kim Chernin,The Obsession. Reflections on the Tyranny of Slenderness (New York: Harper and Row, 1981).

27. Susie Orbach,Hunger Strike: The Anorectic’s Struggle as a Metaphor for our Age (New York: Norton, 1987).

28. “The Obese,” 31.

29. Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,”New Left Review, 146 (July-August 1984): 77.

30. Susan Bordo, “Reading the Slender Body,” in Women, Science, and the Body Politic: Discourses and Representations, eds. Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Sally Shuttleworth (New York: Methuen, 1989), 88.

31. Cf. Jean Baudrillard,The Ecstasy of Communication (New York: Semiotexte, 1988).

32. Chernin,The Obsession, 45-55.

33. “Remaking the self” is part of the contemporary politics of representation, which is often understood in two different ways: as an expression of the collective identity of diverse social movements (feminists, gays and lesbians, racial and ethnic minorities, workers, and so on) or as the expression, in the language of liberal democracy, of interests. The difference is important because the latter understanding of representation does not take into consideration the ways in which particular identity factors traverse other collective identities. There is no general, uncontested interest for a particular group because it is not monolithic; certainly the participation of lesbians within AIDS activist groups like ACT UP, or the objections of women of color to “general” feminist interests bears this out. The politics of this “transversal” critique of interests is an ongoing will to transform the institutions that fix particular interests in place. Jane Jensen (“Representations of Difference: The Varieties of French Feminism,”New Left Review, 180 (March/April 1990), 127-60) lays out this theoretical perspective and applies it in an historical analysis of French Feminism. This is also the direction that Frances Moore Lappe takes in her recent work (see below).

34. Juan Flores and George Yudice, “Living Borders/Buscando America. Languages of Latino Self- Formation,”Social Text, 24 (1990).

35. Julia Kristeva,Powers of Horror. An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982),100.

36. See Mary Douglas,Purity and Danger. An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London/Boston/Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969),121. See also Kristeva, 69.

37. Baudrillard,The Ecstasy of Communication,75.

38. This video was included in “Unacceptable Appetites,” a video program at Artists Space (2/25- 4/2/88) curated by Micki McGee. McGee’s catalogue essay is an invaluable resource for the interpretation of interrelations of images of food and eating, feminine identity and the dialectic of control and self-determination.

39. E. Ann Kaplan, “Feminism/Oedipus/Postmodern- ism: The Case of MTV,” inPostmodernism and its Discontents. Theories, Practices, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (London/New York: Verso, 1988).

40. Kaplan, 40.

41. Kaplan, 36.

42. “[It] is a form which is both fascinating and self-contradictory: distributed in video format but shot on film, free-wheeling yet constrained by its advertising function, visually innovative yet subordinated to its sound track, an individual artefact which is parasitic on a separate and commercially more important object (the record or the cassette), a part of the distinctive youth culture that needs to be played through the equipment forming the focus of family life. Despite–or perhaps because of–these contradictions, the pop video points to the new potential of video as a medium in its own right.” Roy Armes,On Video (London/New York: Routledge, 1988), 158.

43. Kristeva, 4.

44. Julia Kristeva, “Motherhood According to Giovanni Bellini,” inDesire in Language. A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 238.

45. Kristeva,Powers of Horror, 72.

46. Saint Teresa of Avila,Way of Perfection,189.

47. “Que Su Majestad mesmo sea nuestra morada, como lo es en esta oracion de union, labrandola nosotras! Parece que quiero decir que podemos quitar y poner en Dios, pues digo que El es la morada, y la podemos nosotras fabricar para meternos en ella.” Las moradas_ (The Interior Castle of the Dwellings of the Soul) (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, Col. Austral, 1964), 72.

48.The Way of Perfection, 175.

49.The Way of Perfection, 136-37.

50.The Way of Perfection, 137.

51. “The Obese,” 27.

52. Cf. “Judy Freespirit and Aldebaran, “Fat Liberation Manifesto,”Rough Times (formerlyThe Radical Therapist), 4, 2 (March-April-May 1974); Aldebaran, “Fat Liberation–a Luxury?”State and Mind, 5 (June-July 1977): 34-38; Alan Dolit,Fat Liberation (Millbrae, CA: 1975); Frances Moore Lappe, Diet for a Small Planet (New York: Ballantine Books, 1975).

53. Frances Moore Lappe,Rediscovering America’s Values (New York: Ballantine, 1989). The quote is from an interview with the author: Diana Ketcham, “Author Lappe’s plan for planet: Back to basics,”The Tribune Calendar (5/28/89).

Laura Kipnis

University of Wisconsin, Madison

A note on the mise-en-scene: There are large projections –stills, film clips, etc.–behind the action (referred to in the text as KEYS) in many scenes. There is also a Greek chorus of DRAG QUEENS (or DQs) who pop in and out of the action (or are KEYED over the action) in other scenes.

FADE UP ON:

1. MARX'S ROOM, he is
lying in bed, carbuncular,
in pain. ROLLING TEXT OVER:

Karl Marx was born in Germany in 1818, and died in
London in 1883, having been deported from numerous
European countries for revolutionary activity.
Throughout his life he suffered from chronic and
painful outbreaks of carbuncles--agonizing skin
eruptions--particularly during the years he was at work
on his magnum opus, _Capital_. His 30-year
correspondence with Frederick Engels, his friend and
collaborator, deals regularly and in great detail with
the state of his own body.

DISSOLVE TO:

2. CLIP _La Marseillaise_    King: What is it?

SUPER TITLE: 1789            Minister: Sire, the
                             Parisians have taken the
                             Bastille.
                             King: So, is it a revolt?
                             Minister: No sire, it is
                             revolution.
FREEZE on king
                             V/O: Once power resided
                             in the person of the King.
                             The people's task was
                             clear. Get rid of the
                             king.

3. CLIP: Berlin wall         V/O: Once power resided
going down.                  in repressive state
                             bureaucracies. The
                             people's task was clear.
SUPER TITLE: 1989            Smash the state.

4. STILL dead Ceausescu      V/O: At certain moments in
                             history power is centralized
                             and visible, the sites of
                             repression are clear and
                             identifiable; resistance
                             movements arise out of
                             those relations of
                             subordination and
                             antagonism.

5. STILL Postmodern          V/O: At other moments the
urban landscapes             task is less clear. Power
                             is entrenched, but
                             dispersed. Where does
                             power reside? Who are the
                             agents of change?

TRANSITION EFFECT going
back in time

6. STILLS: 1848              V/O: In 1848, Toqueville
uprising                     warned: "We are sleeping
                             on a volcano. A wind of
TITLE: 1848                  revolution blows, the
                             storm is on the horizon."
                             That year Marx and Engels
                             completed The Communist
                             Manifesto. Jean Martin
                             Charcot, who would later
                             devote himself to the
                             study of hysteria, enters
                             medical school. The same
                             year, revolution swept
                             Europe. Students and
                             workers united, but three
                             years later the revolution
                             was toppled.

Time passing TRANSITION

7. STILLS Paris, May 68      V/O: France, May '68.
                             Students and workers
                             united in a three week
                             general strike, demanding
                             radical democratic
                             reforms. Momentarily,
                             revolution seemed
                             possible, but once again
                             that possibility was soon
                             dispelled. In the decades
                             following '68, like the
                             aftermath of 1848--the
                             defeat of forces of change
                             left traces, absences, an
                             unfilled place where
                             something is wanting.
                             Where is the repository of
                             those absences--where are
                             they buried, embodied,
                             misrecognized?

TITLE:  MARX: THE VIDEO  A Politics of Erupting Bodies
1848-1990
-------------------------------------------------------

8. SUPER: 1863               V/O BIOGRAPHER: Looking
over first image of          back, fifteen years later,
MARX; he lies in bed         to the failed revolution.

                             MARX: Dear Engels: One
                             thing is sure, the era of
                             revolution is now once
                             more fairly opened in
                             Europe. And the general
                             state of things is good.
                             But the comfortable
                             delusions and the almost
                             childish enthusiasms with
                             which we greeted the era
                             of revolution before
SUPER: Trotsky waving        February 1848 are gone to
from a train                 the devil. Old comrades
                             are gone, others have
                             fallen away or decayed,
                             and a new generation is
                             not yet in sight. In
looming supers of            addition, we now know what
Stalin, Lenin                role stupidity plays in
                             revolutions and how they
                             are exploited by
Stalin looms over body       scoundrels...Let us hope
                             that this time the lava
Mao looms over body          pours from East to West
                             and not vice versa.

                             V/O BIOGRAPHER: He writes
                             with nostalgia and longing
                             for something thwarted,
                             for something that didn't
                             happen.
-------------------------------------------------------

9. DOCTOR KEYED over         DOCTOR: His body just
examining room STILL.        erupted...It became
Addresses camera             like a battleground. The
                             only cure at the time was
                             arsenic. Terribly painful,
                             like a body trying to turn
                             itself into another body.
                             I think it started shortly
                             after his mother died.  It
                             continued throughout his
                             life.
-------------------------------------------------------

10. STILLS, 19c.             V/O NARRATOR: Marx took up
industrialization            the task of exhaustively
superimposed on              analyzing the historical
Marx's body                  moment in which he found
                             himself: the rise of
                             industrialization and the
                             inception of the working
                             class movement. He
                             stripped the facade off
Poster International         capital to reveal what was
workingmens assoc.           concealed: the labor in
STILL                        the commodity, the
                             alienation of the worker,
                             naked exploitation by the
                             capitalist. He looked to
                             the material foundations
zoom on worker body          of the moment, he looked
worker injury photo          to the body. His analysis
                             of capital relies on a
                             language of the body:
                             "production"
                             "consumption"
                             "reproduction" and
                             "circulation." For Marx,
                             the collective wealth of
                             the state is the body--the
                             labor--of the workers.
 worker injuries             Capital amputates the
                             worker from his own body;
                             he has phantom pain for
                             his missing limbs. But for
                             Marx, which bodies were
                             absent, unspoken,
                             unacknowledged?
-------------------------------------------------------

11.                          DRAG QUEEN 1: What's a
                             real body, a natural body?
                             It doesn't exist, there's
                             only a social body, the
                             body as theater,
                             the body that speaks,
                             unbidden. But in
                             whose language?
-------------------------------------------------------

12. MARX'S ROOM              MARX: Dear Frederick: Two
Fade up on MARX, in          hours ago I received a
foreground, writing.         telegram that my mother is
In suit, suitcase at         dead. Fate claimed one of
feet                         my family. I must go to
                             Trier to settle my
                             inheritance. I myself
                             stood with one foot in the
                             grave...
DRAG QUEEN CHORUS
supered over MARX,           DQ CHORUS: His body just
all dressed as nurses        erupted.
-------------------------------------------------------

13.                          DQ2: What a problem the
                             body is. Keeping it
                             confined to its boundaries
                             (like the lower classes).
                             Concealing anything that
BACKGROUND:                  comes out of it, or
CLIPS porn, slo-mo           protrudes from it.
                             Certainly not speaking of
                             such things. The creation
                             of a meek, submissive
                             hygienic public body.

                             DQ2: His body just
                             erupted.
-------------------------------------------------------

14. Hygiene products,        V/O NARRATOR: Capital
douche, dolls, float         produces a disgusting
through blue sky             body, so it can create new
                             regimes, new products, to
                             police it and make it
                             acceptable. Capital has
                             achieved historical
                             advances in the threshold
                             of delicacy, it produces
                             new varieties of bourgeois
                             disgust, then markets a
                             new and improved body
                             without byproducts,
                             without smells, to exist
                             in a public sphere that is
                             increasingly phobic about
                             the collective body, the
                             lower class body--the
                             mob--a body that might not
                             mind its manners.
-------------------------------------------------------

15. MARX'S ROOM, he          MARX: Dear Fred: It is
writes in bed.               clear that on the whole I
Dolly in                     know more about the
                             carbuncle disease than most
                             doctors...Here and there
                             I have the beginnings of
                             new carbuncles, which keep
                             on disappearing, but they
                             force me to keep my working
                             hours within limits...I
                             consider it my vocation to
                             remain in Europe to
                             complete the work in which
                             I have been engaged for so
                             many years but I cannot
                             work productively more
                             than a very few hours daily
                             without feeling the effect
                             physically...I think this
                             work I am doing is much
                             more important for the
                             working class than anything
                             I could do personally at a
                             Congress of any kind...I
                             would consider myself
                             impractical if I had
                             dropped dead without having
                             finished my book, at least
                             in manuscript.

Cut to second angle          V/O BIOGRAPHER: Writing
on MARX with smoking         Capital, his narrative of
factory, keyed in            the conditions of the
background                   English proletariat, his
                             body broke out with "a
                             proletarian disease."
                             Marx was desperate to
                             finish his work, but
                             unable to. Instead of
                             writing, he was being
                             written. The revolution he
                             anticipated, the thwarted
                             revolution, was displaced
                             onto his own skin.
-------------------------------------------------------

16. MARX'S ROOM: high        MARX: Dear Frederick: You
angle down on bed            see I am still here and I
                             will tell you more, I am
                             incapable of moving about.
                             This is a perfidious
                             Christian illness. In the
                             meantime, I can neither
                             walk, nor stand, nor sit,
                             and even lying down is
                             damned hard. You see how
                             the wisdom of nature has
                             afflicted me. Would it not
                             have been more sensible if
                             instead of me it had been
                             consigned to try the
                             patience of a good
                             Christian? Like a true
                             Lazarus, I am scourged on
                             all sides.

                             DRAG QUEEN 3: His body
                             became sarcastic, taunting
                             the tasteful, discreet
                             body, the one that stays
                             politely behind the
                             scenes, the one that knows
                             its place like the servant
                             serving the master, like
                             the subject serving the
                             state. This wasn't a body
                             you could take into the
                             drawing room.  This was an
                             ill-mannered body.
-------------------------------------------------------

17. MARX writing             Dear Kugelmann: Cut,
at desk, bandaged            lanced, etc, in
REAR SCREEN CLIPS            short treated in every
Russian Revolution           respect. In spite of this
                             the thing is continually
                             breaking out anew...I
                             hope it will end this
                             week, but who can
                             guarantee me against
                             another eruption?

DRAG QUEEN CHORUS            V/O: Marx, writing
POPS ON                      Capital, imagining
                             Capital's overthrow. His
                             body living out his split
                             identifications--

                             DQ1: (the bourgeois who
                             champions the overthrow of
                             the bourgeoisie)

                             DQ3...the body begins to
                             embody another kind of
                             psyche, another sociality.
                             It desired transformation.

                             DQ2: He swathed his
                             carbuncles behind bandages
                             and focused his attention
                             on the working class.

CU Marx at                   BIOG V/O: As he nears
desk, bandaged               completion of the first
                             volume, his carbuncles,
                             mobile, sardonic, and
                             insistent, break out in
                             ever new vicinities.
                             Seizing the flesh,
                             sculpting it into a body
                             bulging, protuberant, not
                             closed and finished, not
                             refined.

                             MARX: You have too low an
                             opinion of the English
                             doctors if you think that
                             they cannot diagnose
                             carbuncles, particularly
                             here in England--the
                             land of carbuncles, which
                             is actually a proletarian
                             illness. It is only in the
                             last few years that I have
                             been persecuted by the
                             thing. Before that, it was
                             entirely unknown to me.
-------------------------------------------------------

18. CLIP riot footage        V/O BIOGRAPHER: Marx--who
KEYED onto his body          would disavow the
high overhead onto           opposition between the
body lying in bed            social and the psychic as
                             mere bourgeois psychology
                             --was possessed of a body
                             whose symptoms mocked the
                             social order; it had
                             become grotesque: open,
                             protruding, extended,
                             secreting: in process,
                             taking on new forms,
                             shapes; his body the
                             figure of the new society
                             that had failed to emerge.
                             He was producing more and
                             more body--too much body
                             for a social order
                             dedicated to its
                             concealment.
-------------------------------------------------------

19. MARX'S ROOM              Dear Engels: It was good
he writes on couch           you did not come on
                             Saturday. My story--now
                             fourteen days old--had
                             reached the crisis point.
                             I could talk a little, and
                             it hurt even to laugh on
                             account of the big abscess
                             between nose and mouth,
                             which this morning has
                             been reduced at least to
                             reasonable proportions.
                             Also the violently swollen
                             lips are becoming reduced
                             closer to their previous
                             dimensions. May the head
                             of the devil go through
                             such fourteen days. All
                             this stops being a joke.
-------------------------------------------------------

TITLE: ELIMINATING THE BODY.

20. TEENAGE GIRL'S ROOM,     I hate my body, god, it's
a number of TEENAGE          so gross, look at these
GIRLS gabbing, shot          thighs...It's disgusting,
documentary style            I'm so fat...
-------------------------------------------------------

21. DISSOLVE TO:
BATHROOM, high shot
toilet, GIRL retching
-------------------------------------------------------

SUPER TITLE: THE AGE OF CONSUMPTION
-------------------------------------------------------

22. Map of the U.S.          V/O: Anorexia, bulimia
little inserts of            --epidemic in abundant
girls retching into          western societies, post
toilets keyed over           1968. 10 to 20 percent
U.S. capitals                of American women now have
                             eating disorders. A
                             symptomatic eruption of the
                             body. Let's wrest this out
                             of secrecy, out of the
                             private sphere and view it
                             for a moment as the social
                             collective act that it is.

TITLE: THINKING THROUGH THE BODY
-------------------------------------------------------

23.                          DRAG QUEEN 3: Like a body
                             trying to turn itself into
                             another body, like a body
                             trying to invent another
                             kind of social existence.

                             DRAG QUEEN 2: Women's
                             bodies as tablets of
                             social meaning, as sites
                             of regulation...
-------------------------------------------------------

24. Pills, laxatives,        V/O: With our increasingly
diet products float          phobic relation to the
through blue sky             collective body, the
                             working class body, with
                             our creation of an ideal
                             public body without fat,
                             without snot or BO, with a
                             yearning for refinement,
                             we will the disappearance
                             of the body, the
                             containment of the mass,
                             the body politic, the
                             threat.
-------------------------------------------------------

25. Worker STILLS            BIOGRAPHER V/O: Marx,
dissolve to                  writing history from
MARX body/                   below: a history of wealth
dissolve to                  as labor, a history of the
riots                        body, a history of the
                             mass, his own body acting
                             out...

                             V/O: Stories told by the
SUPER:                       body--after the failed
STILLS hysterics             revolutions of 1848 this
                             comes to be known as
                             "hysteria" and sweeps
                             Europe.
-------------------------------------------------------

TITLE: THE HYSTERIC IS SUBJECT TO MULTIPLE
IDENTIFICATIONS
-------------------------------------------------------

26. MARX ROOM, he is         Dear Frederick: I would
writing at desk. REAR        have written you sooner,
SCREEN workers               but for approximately the
                             last twelve days all
                             reading writing and
                             smoking have been strictly
                             forbidden. I had a sort of
                             eye inflammation tied up
                             with very unpleasant
                             effects on the nervous
                             system. The thing is now
                             so far under control that
                             I can again dare to write.
                             In the meantime I had all
                             kinds of psychological
                             reveries, like a person
                             going blind or crazy.
-------------------------------------------------------

27. STILL:                   V/O: Marx's symptoms make
"Lecon clinique              their appearance around
de Charcot"                  the time that Freud's
                             future teacher, Charcot,
                             is beginning to recognize
                             and treat a new disease,
                             "traumatic hysteria."
                             Before hysteria was
                             relegated to a female
                             disorder, it afflicted
                             many men as well: Charcot
                             began to recognize that
                             what is novel about
                             traumatic hysteria is that
                             in these cases what lay
                             behind the symptoms were
                             not physical disorders,
                             and not just nerves, but
                             ideas.
-------------------------------------------------------

28.  CHARCOT speaks          "Male hysteria is not all
                             that rare, and just among
                             us, gentlemen, if I can
                             judge from what I see each
                             day, these cases are often
                             unrecognized even by
                             distinguished doctors.
                             One will concede that a
                             young and effeminate man
                             might develop hysterical
                             findings after
                             experiencing significant
                             stress, sorrow or deep
                             emotions. But that a
                             strong and vital worker,
                             for instance, a railway
                             engineer never prone to
                             emotional instability
                             before, should become
                             hysteric--just as a woman
                             might--this seems to us
                             beyond imagination. And
                             yet it is a fact--one
                             which we must get used
                             to."

                             DRAG QUEEN 1: Hysteria
                             which entraps and speaks
                             the patient.
-------------------------------------------------------

29. FILM: BRITISH            Dear Fred: I wanted to
MUSEUM LOCATION              write you yesterday from
Marx, ill, stumbling,        the British Museum, but
drops a book, camera         I suddenly became so
zoom in on copy of           unwell that I had to close
"Vindication of the          the very interesting book
Rights of Women"             that I held in my hand. A
                             dark veil fell over my
                             eyes. Then a frightful
                             headache and a pain in the
                             chest. I strolled home.
                             Air and light helped and
                             when I got home I slept
                             for some time. My
                             condition is such that I
                             really should give up all
                             working and thinking for
                             some time to come; but
                             that would be difficult,
                             even if I could afford it.
--------------------------------------------------------

30. STILL, male              V/O: Freud recounted how
hysterics                    disturbed Charcot became
                             when the German school of
                             neurology resisted the
                             idea of male hysteria and
                             suggested pejoratively
                             that if it occurred in
                             males, it occurred
                             only in French males.
--------------------------------------------------------

31. MARX'S ROOM, he          Dear Frederick: In recent
paces in the set             weeks it has been
                             positively impossible for
                             me to write even two
                             hours a day. Apart from
                             pressure from without,
                             there are the household
                             headaches which always
                             affect my liver. I have
                             become sleepless again,
                             and have had the pleasure
                             of seeing two carbuncles
                             bloom near the penis.
                             Fortunately they faded
                             away. My illness always
                             comes from the head.
-------------------------------------------------------

32. STILL another            V/O: Charcot related male
male hysteric                hysteria to trauma. As the
                             industrial era progressed,
                             the number of unexplained
                             work related illnesses
                             increased enormously;
                             Charcot worked to
                             demonstrate how these
                             could be understood as
                             hysterical.
-------------------------------------------------------

33.                          DRAG QUEEN 2: There were
                             many who thought that the
                             commotion of the French
DRAG QUEEN CHORUS            Revolution may have
supered over                 affected the nervous system
Delacroix's "Libertie        of Frenchmen and Europeans
Leading the Masses"          adversely.

                             DRAG QUEEN 1: It was an
                             infection by ideas, the
                             spread of violent
                             influences displaced from
                             social and class upheaval,
                             fearful ideas about
                             progress, new
                             technologies, social
                             transformations.
-------------------------------------------------------

34. REARSCREEN: Capital      Dear Frederick: The dr. is
MARX at desk, single         quite right: the excessive
lamp burning, fullscreen     nightwork was the main
behind of "workday" text,    cause of the relapse. The
violently moving camera      most disgusting thing for me
                             was the interruption of my
                             work. But I have drudged on,
                             lying down, even if only
                             at short intervals during
                             the day. I could not
                             proceed with the purely
                             theoretical part, the
                             brain was too weak for
                             that. Hence I have
                             enlarged the historical
                             part on the workday, which
                             lay outside the original
                             plan.
-------------------------------------------------------

35. Keyed over Marx          DRAG QUEEN 3 (as Nurse)
                             Like other symptomatics of
                             the day, he took the cure.
MARX in wheelchair,
spa backdrop                 BIOGRAPHER V/O: The
                             medical world had
                             devised various techniques
                             for palliating an
                             irritated and erupting
                             human nervous system.
                             Popular techniques
                             included warm milk and bed
                             rest, hydrotherapy and
                             sojourns at peaceful
                             pastoral spas. Doctors
                             intuitively offered
                             patients physical and
                             psychological means to
                             flee psycho-cultural
                             stress--sending patients
                             to the country, the sea,
                             the mountains. Marx tried
                             all of these. On doctor's
                             orders, he fled his work.
-------------------------------------------------------

36. MARX writing from        Dear Frederick: So far I
lounge chair, spa            have had two sulfur baths,
background, rushing          tomorrow the third.
water noise                 From the bath one steps on
                             a raised board, in the
                             altogether; the bath
In bathing costume           attendant uses the hose
                             (the size of a firehose)
                             the way a virtuoso does
                             his instrument; he
                             commands the movement of
                             the body and alternately
                             bombards all parts of the
                             corpus except the head for
                             three minutes, first
                             strongly, then weakly, up
                             to the legs and feet, an
                             always advancing
                             crescendo. You can see how
                             little desire a man has to
                             write here.

DRAG QUEEN KEYED OVER        DRAG QUEEN 2 (as nurse):
as nurse                     Removing himself from his
                             work brought some relief.
-------------------------------------------------------

37.  MARX at the spa         Dear Frederick: From the
walking around, in           delayed appearance of this
suit, cane                   letter you can see how
                             professionally I use
                             my time here. I read
                             nothing, write nothing.
                             Because of the arsenic
                             three times daily, one has
                             time only for meals and
                             strolling along the coast
                             and the neighboring
                             hills, there is no time
                             left for other things.
                             Evenings one is too tired
                             to do anything but sleep.

DRAG QUEEN KEYED OVER        DRAG QUEEN 1: His symptoms
                             began to speak him.
-------------------------------------------------------

38. MARX, spa                My dear daughter: I run
walking                      about the greatest part of
                             the day, airing myself,
                             going to bed at ten, reading
                             nothing, writing less, and
                             altogether working up my
                             mind to that state of
                             nothingness which Buddhism
                             considers the climax of
                             human bliss...I am
                             afflicted with an
                             inflammation of the eye,
                             not that there is much to
                             be seen of it...the eye
                             has taken to the vicious
                             habit of shedding tears on
                             its own account, without
                             the least regard to the
                             feelings of his master.
-------------------------------------------------------

39. MARX'S ROOM; he          V/O BIOGRAPHER: The
writhes in bed               carbuncles continued
                             to erupt, stalling the
                             writing of Capital,
                             inscribing themselves into
                             the text. Marx focused
                             doggedly on the laboring
                             body (while his own body
                             exploded into new and
                             ever changing configurations)
Pan to STILL of              as if fearful of the
"Libertie Leading the        effect of introducing the
Masses" over desk            unregimented body into the
                             realm of the political.

                             DRAG QUEEN 2: But then,
dressed as Marianne,         this brings other bodies
one "breast" bare            into the picture--the
                             desiring body, the woman's
                             body, the undisciplined
                             body.
-------------------------------------------------------

TITLE: WOMEN'S BODIES
-------------------------------------------------------

40.                          HELENE V/O: For the 19th
                             century bourgeois male,
                             the servant provokes
                             social anxiety: she is the
                             conduit through which the
                             working class infiltrates
                             the middle class home.
                             Introducing the maid and
                             her sexuality into the
                             bourgeois household is
                             threatening in a period in
                             which both were linked in
                             the bourgeois imagination
                             to the discontent of a
                             dissatisfied working
                             class. But then what is
                             excluded socially is
                             desired, eroticized--the
                             maid becomes a figure of
                             transgressive desire for
                             the bourgeois male, a
                             desire produced by the
                             very categories that rule
                             the bourgeois body. Marx,
                             in the Communist Manifesto
                             mocks the bourgeois male,
                             with an array of women at
                             his disposal, not only
                             proletarian wives and
                             daughters but prostitutes
                             to pick up the slack. This
                             was written two years
                             before he conceived a son
                             with the family maid.
-------------------------------------------------------

41. 19c porn STILLS of       V/O: Women in the public
maids                        sphere were tantamount to
                             prostitutes: they bring the
                             filth and corruption of the
                             market, of wage labor, into
                             the middle class home.
-------------------------------------------------------

TITLE: HELENE
-------------------------------------------------------

42. MARX'S ROOM, he          V/O BIOGRAPHER: Marx, even
writes, HELENE enters,       in the most dire poverty,
serves tea                   did what he could to
                             maintain a bourgeois
                             household. It was Helene
                             Demuth, the servant, who
                             marked his own separation
                             from the working class.
                             She, more than Marx,
                             straddles two worlds,
                             belonging to both the
                             bourgeois family and the
                             working class: she was the
                             certainly the member of
                             that world that Marx knew
                             best.

"pregnant" DRAG QUEEN        DRAG QUEEN 3: The hysteric
KEYED OVER                   is subject to multiple
                             identifications.
-------------------------------------------------------

43. MARX'S ROOM, writing.    Dear Laura, Some recent
PROJECTION from October,     Russian publications,
on rearscreen as HELENE      printed in Holy Russia,
serves tea                   not abroad, show the great
                             run of my theories in that
                             country. Nowhere is my
                             success more delightful to
                             me, it gives me the
                             satisfaction that I damage
                             a power, which besides
                             England, is the true
                             bulwark of the old
                             society.
-------------------------------------------------------

44. Looking down on tile     HELENE V/O: She was ten
floor, HELENE scrubbing,     years younger than Marx's
as MARX walks across         wife Jenny. Lenchen, as
frame                        she was called, ran the
                             Marx household. Often
                             Marx was too poor to pay
                             her but she cast her lot
                             with the Marx family. She
                             did the cooking,
                             housecleaning, laundering,
                             dressmaking, nursing, and
                             everything else, including
                             taking the bedsheets to
                             the pawn shop when
                             eviction was threatened.
                             In 1851, at age 28, she
                             gave birth to Marx's son,
                             secretly.
-------------------------------------------------------

45.  HELENE appears very     BIOGRAPHER V/O: Marx wrote
pregnant, serving tea        to Engels of a "very
                             tangled family situation,"
                             hinting at a "mystery," a
                             "tragicomic" mystery, in
                             which he, Engels, also
                             played a role. Marx
                             traveled to Manchester, to
                             see Engels, where the two
                             negotiated Lenchen's fate.

DRAG QUEEN KEYED OVER        DRAG QUEEN 1: As men are
                             accustomed to negotiating
                             the fate of women's
                             bodies.
-------------------------------------------------------

46. CLIP: beauty             HELENE V/O: Did
contest                      introducing a woman into
                             their collaborative
                             association disrupt it?
                             This triangle--did it
                             trouble a theory that saw
                             the role of women strictly
                             in economic terms? What
                             bodies aren't
                             acknowledged?

clip: Stalin kissing         BIOGRAPHER V/O: Marx
woman; footage keyed         persuaded Engels to accept
onto Helene's pregnant       paternity for Lenchen's
stomach                      child, who was named
                             Frederick, after him, in
                             the custom of
                             patrilineage. Engels
                             accepted responsibility
                             for the child, binding the
                             two men together over
                             Helene's mute body, over
                             the body of the working
                             class woman.

DRAG QUEEN KEYED OVER        DRAG QUEEN 3: Jenny, the
                             wife, was easily persuaded
                             that Engels was the father
                             as she never really
                             approved of his morals.
-------------------------------------------------------

TITLE: THE SECRET
-------------------------------------------------------

47. HELENE speaks            I never betrayed the
directly to camera           secret; I let my baby be
                             brought up by a working
                             class family. Engels
                             occasionally sent money.
                             Marx never acknowledged
                             Freddy as his son. He
                             chose not to acknowledge
                             paternity. After Marx's
                             death, I moved into
                             Engel's home as his
                             housekeeper. My  son
                             Freddy visited regularly
                             once a week: however, as
                             an ordinary working-
                             man, he entered through
                             the kitchen. He was Marx's
                             only living son. He had
                             grown up to be a poorly
                             educated proletarian, his
                             wife had left him and run
                             away with his few
                             possessions. His life was
                             one of trouble, worry and
                             hardship.
-------------------------------------------------------

48.                          V/O BIOGRAPHER: "We
                             should, none of us, want
                             to meet our pasts in flesh
                             and blood," wrote Marx's
                             daughter after his death,
                             after discovering that
                             Freddy Demuth was her
                             father's son. These
                             strategies of concealment
                             are central to bourgeois
                             identity, which wishes
                             most of all to conceal the
                             crucial place of the
                             woman in its network of
                             exploitation, which wishes
                             most of all to conceal the
                             symptomatic and erupting
                             body and the tales it
                             tells.
-------------------------------------------------------

49. DRAG QUEEN CHORUS        DQ 1: The pregnant body,
                             the unruly female body,
                             swollen, grotesque, must
                             be regulated, particularly
                             its appearances in the
                             public sphere.

                             DQ 3: As men are
                             accustomed to negotiating
                             the fate of women's
                             bodies.
-------------------------------------------------------

50. COURTROOM LOCATION       NEWSCASTER: "COURT
                             REJECTS PLEA FOR ABORTION
                             BEFORE JAIL" Oct 26, 1989
                             A Florida county judge
                             has refused a woman's
                             request to postpone her 60
                             day jail sentence so she
                             can have an abortion
                             first. You want a
                             continuance so you can
                             murder your baby, is that
                             it?" Judge Rasmussen of
                             Pasco County Court asked
                             the 26 year old defendant
                             before sending her to
                             jail. While the prosecutor
                             agreed that Ms. Forney
                             whose third month of
                             pregnancy began today,
                             could postpone her
                             sentence by 10 days before
                             serving her term for
                             violating probation for
                             driving under the
                             influence of alcohol. The
                             violation was that she
                             paid only $100 of the $500
                             fine assessed against her.
                             Ms. Forney, a part time
                             bartender who is not
                             married, asked for the
                             additional time because,
                             she said, she was afraid
                             it might be to late for a
                             safe abortion when she got
                             out of jail. She pleaded
                             that she was financially
                             unable to care for a baby.
                             Judge Rasmussen suggested
                             that she carry the baby to
                             full term and then give it
                             up for adoption. In a jail
                             interview Tuesday Ms.
                             Forney said: I thought it
                             was my choice. He's
                             telling me I don't have a
                             choice. It's not right
                             that he can choose for
                             me."
------------------------------------------------------

SCENES 51-60 QUICK MONTAGE:

51. HELENE addresses         He simply chose not to
camera                       acknowledge paternity. I
                             hadn't that choice.

52. Abortion rally           "Get your laws off my
FOOTAGE                      body. Get your laws off my
                             body."

53. Background:              DRAG QUEEN 1: Get your
Bondage STILLS               laws off my body.

54. COURTROOM                JUDGE: I can't define it
                             but I know it when I see
                             it.

55. Background:              DRAG QUEEN 2: They want to
Bondage STILLS               ban pornography because it
                             tells the truth.

56. TITLE: THE LINKING OF WHAT IS POLITICALLY DANGEROUS
TO FEELINGS OF SEXUAL HORROR AND FASCINATION.

57. Abortion rally           "Get your laws off my
FOOTAGE                      body..."

58. WOMAN bent over          DQ3: Desiring a body that
toilet, bathroom             doesn't speak, desiring a
                             body that has the right
DRAG QUEEN keyed over        desires, desiring a
                             different social being, a
                             different social body...

59. WOMAN bent over          WOMAN: How can I live in
toilet                       my body? Where could I
                             live in my body?
-------------------------------------------------------

60. MARX'S ROOM, Marx        How can I live in my body?
in bed, writhing (FIRST      Where can I live in my
SYNC SOUND ON MARX)          body?

-------------------------------------------------------

61. KEY text of Capital      Dear Engels: I had decided
over MARX body so            not to write you until I
that one seems to be         could announce the
emerging from the other      completion of the book
                             which is now the case.
                             Also I did not want to
                             bore you with the reasons
                             for the frequent delays,
                             namely carbuncles on my
                             posterior and in the
                             vicinity of the penis, the
                             remains of which are now
                             fading and which permit me
                             to assume a sitting (that
                             is, writing) position only
                             at great pain. I do not
                             take arsenic, because it
                             makes me too stupid and at
                             least for the little time
                             that I have when writing
                             is possible, I want to
                             have a clear head.

                             V/O BIOGRAPHER: Finishing
                             the book left his body
                             racked and scarred. He
                             was subject to increasing
                             outbursts with each new
                             translation of the book.
                             He continued to search for
                             a cure.
-------------------------------------------------------

62. MARX writing,            My dear Jenny: I am
HELENE cleaning              sending you today the
                             proofs of the French
                             translation of Das
                             Kapital. Today is the
                             first day that I have been
                             able to do anything at
                             all. Until now despite
                             baths, walking, splendid
                             air, careful diet, etc. my
                             condition has been worse
                             than in London. That is
                             also the reason why I am
                             postponing my return,
                             because it is absolutely
                             necessary to return in a
                             condition for work.

                             BIOGRAPHER V/O: The
                             eruptions of his body
                             weren't matched by the
                             social eruptions he
                             anticipated.
-------------------------------------------------------

63. MARX'S ROOM              Dear Sorge: How did it
REARSCREEN civil             happen that in the US
rights riots                 where relatively that is,
                             compared to civilized
                             Europe, land was
                             accessible to the great
                             masses of the people and
                             to a certain degree (again
                             relatively) still is, the
                             capitalist economy and the
Text emerging                corresponding enslavement
from carbuncles              of the working class have
                             developed more rapidly and
                             more shamelessly than in
                             any country?

DRAG QUEEN KEYED OVER        DQ 2: His body continued
                             its parody. Marx came to
                             regard the carbuncles as
                             having a life of their
                             own, his affliction had
                             a theory and a practice.
-------------------------------------------------------

64. MARX'S ROOM, bed.        Dear Kugelmann: After my
Riot FOOTAGE KEYED onto      return, a carbuncle broke
bandages                     out on my right cheek
                             which had to be operated
                             on, then it had several
                             smaller successors, and I
                             think that at the present
                             moment I am suffering from
                             the last of them. For the
                             rest don't worry at all
                             about newspaper gossip;
                             still less answer it. I
                             myself allow the English
                             papers to announce my
                             death from time to time,
                             without giving a sign of
                             life.

DRAG QUEEEN KEYED OVER       DQ 3: Like the
                             revolutionary, the
                             erupting, symptomatic body
                             displays monstrous and
                             unreadable forms to a
                             horrified society.
-------------------------------------------------------

65. HELENE clears the        Dear Frederick: The doctor
table as MARX writes         has opened up the pleasant
in bed                       prospect that I will have
                             to deal with this
                             loathsome disease until
                             late in January. Still
                             this second Frankenstein
                             on my hump is by far not
                             so fierce as was the first
                             in London. You can see
                             this from the fact that I
                             am able to write.  If one
                             wants to vomit politics
                             out of nausea, one must
                             take it daily in the form
                             of telegraphic pills, such
                             as are delivered by the
                             newspapers.
-------------------------------------------------------

TITLE: IF ONE WANTS TO VOMIT POLITICS OUT OF NAUSEA...
-------------------------------------------------------

66. STUDIO high shot         WOMAN: How can I live in
toilet, WOMAN bending        my body? where can I live
over in black space          in my body?

Pan to drag queen            DQ1: Where is the history
riot FOOTAGE                 of the body written? In
KEYED behind toilet          your politeness, in your
                             deodorant and douche,
                             behind the bathroom door,
                             in your shame and
                             revulsion.

Pan to next drag queen       DQ2: In your symptoms.
-------------------------------------------------------

67. MARX'S ROOM              Dear Frederick: I hope
in bed. Zoom into            that with this, I will
bandaged carbuncle           have paid my debt to
                             nature. In my state of ill
                             health, I can do little
                             writing, and then only by
revolutions                  fits and starts. At any
emerging out of              rate, I hope the
carbuncles                   bourgeoisie will remember
                             my carbuncles all the rest
                             of their lives.
Zoom into, then
CREDITS

bell hooks

Oberlin College

Postmodernist discourses are often exclusionary even when, having been accused of lacking concrete relevance, they call attention to and appropriate the experience of “difference” and “otherness” in order to provide themselves with oppositional political meaning, legitimacy, and immediacy. Very few African-American intellectuals have talked or written about postmodernism. Recently at a dinner party, I talked about trying to grapple with the significance of postmodernism for contemporary black experience. It was one of those social gatherings where only one other black person was present. The setting quickly became a field of contestation. I was told by the other black person that I was wasting my time, that “this stuff does not relate in any way to what’s happening with black people.” Speaking in the presence of a group of white onlookers, staring at us as though this encounter was staged for their benefit, we engaged in a passionate discussion about black experience. Apparently, no one sympathized with my insistence that racism is perpetuated when blackness is associated solely with concrete gut level experience conceived either as opposing or having no connection to abstract thinking and the production of critical theory. The idea that there is no meaningful connection between black experience and critical thinking about aesthetics or culture must be continually interrogated.

My defense of postmodernism and its relevance to black folks sounded good but I worried that I lacked conviction, largely because I approach the subject cautiously and with suspicion. Disturbed not so much by the “sense” of postmodernism but by the conventional language used when it is written or talked about and by those who speak it, I find myself on the outside of the discourse looking in. As a discursive practice it is dominated primarily by the voices of white male intellectuals and/or academic elites who speak to and about one another with coded familiarity. Reading and studying their writing to understand postmodernism in its multiple manifestations, I appreciate it but feel little inclination to ally myself with the academic hierarchy and exclusivity pervasive in the movement today.

Critical of most writing on postmodernism, I perhaps am more conscious of the way in which the focus on “otherness and difference” that is often alluded to in these works seems to have little concrete impact as an analysis or standpoint that might change the nature and direction of postmodernist theory. Since much of this theory has been constructed in reaction to and against high modernism, there is seldom any mention of black experience or writings by black people in this work, specifically black women (though in more recent work one may see reference to Cornel West, the black male scholar who has most engaged postmodernist discourse). Even if an aspect of black culture is the subject of postmodern critical writing the works cited will usually be those of black men. A work that comes immediately to mind is Andrew Ross’ chapter “Hip, and the Long Front of Color” in No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture; though an interesting reading, it constructs black culture as though black women have had no role in black cultural production. At the end of Meaghan Morris’ discussion of postmodernism included in her collection of essays The Pirate’s Fiance: Feminism and Postmodernism, she provides a bibliography of works by women, identifying them as important contributions to a discourse on postmodernism that offers new insight as well as challenging male theoretical hegemony. Even though many of the works do not directly address postmodernism, they address similar concerns. There are no references to work by black women.

The failure to recognize a critical black presence in the culture and in most scholarship and writing on postmodernism compels a black reader, particularly a black female reader, to interrogate her interest in a subject where those who discuss and write about it seem not to know black women exist or to even consider the possibility that we might be somewhere writing or saying something that should be listened to, or producing art that should be seen, heard, approached with intellectual seriousness. This is especially the case with works that go on and on about the way in which postmodernist discourse has opened up a theoretical terrain where “difference and otherness” can be considered legitimate issues in the academy. Confronting both the lack of recognition of black female presence that much postmodernist theory reinscribes and the resistance on the part of most black folks to hearing about real connections between postmodernism and black experience, I enter a discourse, a practice, where there may be no ready audience for my words, no clear listener, uncertain, then, that my voice can or will be heard.

During the Sixties, black power movements were influenced by perspectives that could be easily labeled modernist. Certainly many of the ways black folks addressed issues of identity conformed to a modernist universalizing agenda. There was little critique among black militants of patriarchy as a master narrative. Despite the fact that black power ideology reflected a modernist sensibility, these elements were soon rendered irrelevant as militant protest was stifled by a powerful repressive postmodern state. The period directly after the black power movement was a time when major news magazines carried articles with cocky headlines like “what ever happened to Black America?” This was an ironic reply to the aggressive unmet demand by decentered, marginalized black subjects who had at least for the moment successfully demanded a hearing, who had made it possible for black liberation to be a national political agenda. In the wake of the black power movement, after so many rebels were slaughtered and lost, many of these voices were silenced by a repressive state and others became inarticulate; it has become necessary to find new avenues for transmitting the messages of black liberation struggle, new ways to talk about racism and other politics of domination. Radical postmodernist practice, most powerfully conceptualized as a “politics of difference,” should incorporate the voices of displaced, marginalized, exploited, and oppressed black people.

It is sadly ironic that the contemporary discourse which talks the most about heterogeneity, the decentered subject, declaring breakthroughs that allow recognition of otherness, still directs its critical voice primarily to a specialized audience, one that shares a common language rooted in the very master narratives it claims to challenge. If radical postmodernist thinking is to have a transformative impact then a critical break with the notion of “authority” as “mastery over” must not simply be a rhetorical device, it must be reflected in habits of being, including styles of writing as well as chosen subject matter. Third-world scholars, especially elites, and white critics who passively absorb white supremacist thinking, and therefore never notice or look at black people on the streets, at their jobs, who render us invisible with their gaze in all areas of daily life, are not likely to produce liberatory theory that will challenge racist domination, or to promote a breakdown in traditional ways of seeing and thinking about reality, ways of constructing aesthetic theory and practice. From a different standpoint Robert Storr makes a similar critique in the global issue of Art in America when he asserts:

To be sure, much postmodernist critical inquiry has centered precisely on the issues of "difference" and "otherness." On the purely theoretical plane the exploration of these concepts has produced some important results, but in the absence of any sustained research into what artists of color and others outside the mainstream might be up to, such discussions become rootless instead of radical. Endless second guessing about the latent imperialism of intruding upon other cultures only compounded matters, preventing or excusing these theorists from investigating what black, Hispanic, Asian and Native American artists were actually doing.

Without adequate concrete knowledge of and contact with the non-white “other,” white theorists may move in discursive theoretical directions that are threatening to and potentially disruptive of that critical practice which would support radical liberation struggle.

The postmodern critique of “identity,” though relevant for renewed black liberation struggle, is often posed in ways that are problematic. Given a pervasive politic of white supremacy which seeks to prevent the formation of radical black subjectivity, we cannot cavalierly dismiss a concern with identity politics. Any critic exploring the radical potential of postmodernism as it relates to racial difference and racial domination would need to consider the implications of a critique of identity for oppressed groups. Many of us are struggling to find new strategies of resistance. We must engage decolonization as a critical practice if we are to have meaningful chances of survival even as we must simultaneously cope with the loss of political grounding which made radical activism more possible. I am thinking here about the postmodernist critique of essentialism as it pertains to the construction of “identity” as one example.

Postmodern theory that is not seeking to simply appropriate the experience of “otherness” in order to enhance its discourse or to be radically chic should not separate the “politics of difference” from the politics of racism. To take racism seriously one must consider the plight of underclass people of color, a vast majority of whom are black. For African-Americans our collective condition prior to the advent of postmodernism and perhaps more tragically expressed under current postmodern conditions has been and is characterized by continued displacement, profound alienation and despair. Writing about blacks and postmodernism, Cornel West describes our collective plight:

There is increasing class division and differentiation, creating on the one hand a significant black middle-class, highly anxiety- ridden, insecure, willing to be co-opted and incorporated into the powers that be, concerned with racism to the degree that it poses constraints on upward social mobility; and, on the other, a vast and growing black underclass, an underclass that embodies a kind of walking nihilism of pervasive drug addiction, pervasive alcoholism, pervasive homicide, and an exponential rise in suicide. Now because of the deindustrialization, we also have a devastated black industrial working class. We are talking here about tremendous hopelessness.

This hopelessness creates longing for insight and strategies for change that can renew spirits and reconstruct grounds for collective black liberation struggle. The overall impact of the postmodern condition is that many other groups now share with black folks a sense of deep alienation, despair, uncertainty, loss of a sense of grounding, even if it is not informed by shared circumstance. Radical postmodernism calls attention to those sensibilities which are shared across the boundaries of class, gender, and race, and which could be fertile ground for the construction of empathy–ties that would promote recognition of common commitments and serve as a base for solidarity and coalition.

“Yearning” is the word that best describes a common psychological state shared by many of us, cutting across boundaries of race, class, gender, and sexual practice. Specifically in relation to the postmodernist deconstruction of “master” narratives, the yearning that wells in the hearts and minds of those whom such narratives have silenced is the longing for critical voice. It is no accident that “rap” has usurped the primary position of R&B music among young black folks as the most desired sound, or that it began as a form of “testimony” for the underclass. It has enabled underclass black youth to develop a critical voice, as a group of young black men told me, a “common literacy.” Rap projects a critical voice, explaining, demanding, urging. Working with this insight in his essay “Putting the Pop Back into Postmodernism,” Lawrence Grossberg comments:

The postmodern sensibility appropriates practices as boasts that announce their own--and consequently our own--existence, like a rap song boasting of the imaginary (or real--it makes no difference) accomplishments of the rapper. They offer forms of empowerment not only in the face of nihilism but precisely through the forms of nihilism itself: an empowering nihilism, a moment of positivity through the production and structuring of affective relations.

Considering that it is as a subject that one comes to voice, then the postmodernist focus on the critique of identity appears, at first glance, to threaten and close down the possibility that this discourse and practice will allow those who have suffered the crippling effects of colonization and domination to gain or regain a hearing. Even if this sense of threat and the fear it evokes are based on a misunderstanding of the postmodernist political project, they nevertheless shape responses. It never surprises me when black folk respond to the critique of essentialism, especially when it denies the validity of identity politics, by saying “yeah, it’s easy to give up identity, when you got one.” Though an apt and oftentimes appropriate comeback, this does not really intervene in the discourse in a way that alters and transforms. We should indeed suspicious of postmodern critiques of the “subject” when they surface at a historical moment when many subjugated people feel themselves coming to voice for the first time.

Criticisms of directions in postmodern thinking should not obscure insights it may offer that open up our understanding of African-American experience. The critique of essentialism encouraged by postmodernist thought is useful for African-Americans concerned with reformulating outmoded notions of identity. We have too long had imposed upon us, both from the outside and the inside, a narrow constricting notion of blackness. Postmodern critiques of essentialism which challenge notions of universality and static over-determined identity within mass culture and mass consciousness can open up new possibilities for the construction of the self and the assertion of agency.

Employing a critique of essentialism allows African-Americans to acknowledge the way in which class mobility has altered collective black experience so that racism does not necessarily have the same impact on our lives. Such a critique allows us to affirm multiple black identities, varied black experience. It also challenges colonial imperialist paradigms of black identity which represent blackness one-dimensionally in ways that reinforce and sustain white supremacy. This discourse created the idea of the “primitive” and promoted the notion of an “authentic” experience, seeing as “natural” those expressions of black life which conformed to a pre-existing pattern or stereotype. Abandoning essentialist notions would be a serious challenge to racism. Contemporary African- American resistance struggle must be rooted in a process of decolonization that continually opposes reinscribing notions of “authentic” black identity. This critique should not be made synonymous with the dismissal of the struggle of oppressed and exploited peoples to make ourselves subjects. Nor should it deny that in certain circumstances that experience affords us a privileged critical location from which to speak. This is not a reinscription of modernist master narratives of authority which privilege some voices by denying voice to others. Part of our struggle for radical black subjectivity is the quest to find ways to construct self and identity that are oppositional and liberatory. The unwillingness to critique essentialism on the part of many African-Americans is rooted in the fear that it will cause folks to lose sight of the specific history and experience of African-Americans and the unique sensibilities and culture that arise from that experience. An adequate response to this concern is to critique essentialism while emphasizing the significance of “the authority of experience.” There is a radical difference between a repudiation of the idea that there is a black “essence” and recognition of the way black identity has been specifically constituted in the experience of exile and struggle.

When black folks critique essentialism, we are empowered to recognize multiple experiences of black identity that are the lived conditions which make diverse cultural productions possible. When this diversity is ignored, it is easy to see black folks as falling into two categories–nationalist or assimilationist, black-identified or white-identified. Coming to terms with the impact of postmodernism for black experience, particularly as it changes our sense of identity, means that we must and can rearticulate the basis for collective bonding. Given the various crises facing African-Americans (economic, spiritual, escalating racial violence, etc.) we are compelled by circumstance to reassess our relationship to popular culture and resistance struggle. Many of us are as reluctant to face this task as many non-black postmodern thinkers who focus theoretically on the issue of “difference” are to confront the issue of race and racism.

Music is the cultural product created by African- Americans that has most attracted postmodern theorists. It is rarely acknowledged that there is far greater censorship and restriction of other forms of cultural production by black folks–beginning with literary and critical writing. Attempts on the part of editors and publishing houses to control and manipulate the representation of black culture, as well as their desire to promote the creation of products which will attract the widest audience, limit in a crippling and stifling way the kind of work many black folks feel we can do and still receive recognition. Using myself as an example, that creative writing I do which I consider to be most reflective of a postmodern oppositional sensibility–work that is abstract, fragmented, non-linear narrative–is constantly rejected by editors and publishers who tell me it does not conform to the type of writing they think black women should be doing or the type of writing they believe will sell. Certainly I do not think I am the only black person engaged in forms of cultural production, especially experimental ones, who is constrained by the lack of an audience for certain kinds of work. It is important for postmodern thinkers and theorists to constitute themselves as an audience for such work. To do this they must assert power and privilege within the space of critical writing to open up the field so that it will be more inclusive. To change the exclusionary practice of postmodern critical discourse is to enact a postmodernism of resistance. Part of this intervention entails black intellectual participation in the discourse.

In his essay “Postmodernism and Black America,” Cornel West suggests that black intellectuals “are marginal–usually languishing at the interface of Black and white cultures or thoroughly ensconced in Euro- American settings” and he cannot see this group as potential producers of radical postmodernist thought. While I generally agree with this assessment, black intellectuals must proceed with the understanding that we are not condemned to the margins. The way we work and what we do can determine whether or not what we produce will be meaningful to a wider audience, one that includes all classes of black people. West suggests that black intellectuals lack “any organic link with most of Black life” and that this “diminishes their value to Black resistance.” This statement bears traces of essentialism. Perhaps we need to focus more on those black intellectuals, however rare our presence, who do not feel this lack and whose work is primarily directed towards the enhancement of black critical consciousness and the strengthening of our collective capacity to engage in meaningful resistance struggle. Theoretical ideas and critical thinking need not be transmitted solely in the academy. While I work in a predominantly white institution, I remain intimately and passionately engaged with black communities. It’s not like I’m going to talk about writing and thinking about postmodernism with other academics and/or intellectuals and not discuss these ideas with underclass non-academic black folks who are family, friends, and comrades. Since I have not broken the ties that bind me to underclass poor black community, I have seen that knowledge, especially that which enhances daily life and strengthens our capacity to survive, can be shared. It means that critics, writers, academics have to give the same critical attention to nurturing and cultivating our ties to black communities that we give to writing articles, teaching, and lecturing. Here again I am really talking about cultivating habits of being that reinforce awareness that knowledge can be disseminated and shared on a number of fronts, and the extent to which it is made available and accessible depends on the nature of one’s political commitments.

Postmodern culture with its decentered subject can be the space where ties are severed or it can provide the occasion for new and varied forms of bonding. To some extent ruptures, surfaces, contextuality and a host of other happenings create gaps that make space for oppositional practices which no longer require intellectuals to be confined to narrow, separate spheres with no meaningful connection to the world of every day. Much postmodern engagement with culture emerges from the yearning to do intellectual work that connects with habits of being, forms of artistic expression and aesthetics, that inform the daily life of a mass population as well as writers and scholars. On the terrain of culture, one can participate in critical dialogue with the uneducated poor, the black underclass who are thinking about aesthetics. One can talk about what we are seeing, thinking, or listening to; a space is there for critical exchange. It’s exciting to think, write, talk about, and create art that reflects passionate engagement with popular culture, because this may very well be “the” central future location of resistance struggle, a meeting place where new and radical happenings can occur.

Andrew Ross

Princeton University

Ever since the viral attack engineered in November of 1988 by Cornell University hacker Robert Morris on the national network system Internet, which includes the Pentagon’s ARPAnet data exchange network, the nation’s high-tech ideologues and spin doctors have been locked in debate, trying to make ethical and economic sense of the event. The virus rapidly infected an estimated six thousand computers around the country, creating a scare that crowned an open season of viral hysteria in the media, in the course of which, according to the Computer Virus Industry Association in Santa Clara, the number of known viruses jumped from seven to thirty during 1988, and from three thousand infections in the first two months of that year to thirty thousand in the last two months. While it caused little in the way of data damage (some richly inflated initial estimates reckoned up to $100m in down time), the ramifications of the Internet virus have helped to generate a moral panic that has all but transformed everyday “computer culture.”

Following the lead of DARPA’s (Defence Advance Research Projects Agency) Computer Emergency Response Team at Carnegie-Mellon University, anti-virus response centers were hastily put in place by government and defence agencies at the National Science Foundation, the Energy Department, NASA, and other sites. Plans were made to introduce a bill in Congress (the Computer Virus Eradication Act, to replace the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which pertained solely to government information), that would call for prison sentences of up to ten years for the “crime” of sophisticated hacking, and numerous government agencies have been involved in a proprietary fight over the creation of a proposed Center for Virus Control, modelled, of course, on Atlanta’s Centers for Disease Control, notorious for its failures to respond adequately to the AIDS crisis.

In fact, media commentary on the virus scare has run not so much tongue-in-cheek as hand-in-glove with the rhetoric of AIDS hysteria–the common use of terms like killer virus and epidemic; the focus on hi-risk personal contact (virus infection, for the most part, is spread on personal computers, not mainframes); the obsession with defense, security, and immunity; and the climate of suspicion generated around communitarian acts of sharing. The underlying moral imperative being this: You can’t trust your best friend’s software any more than you can trust his or her bodily fluids–safe software or no software at all! Or, as Dennis Miller put it on Saturday Night Live, “Remember, when you connect with another computer, you’re connecting to every computer that computer has ever connected to.” This playful conceit struck a chord in the popular consciousness, even as it was perpetuated in such sober quarters as the Association for Computing Machinery, the president of which, in a controversial editorial titled “A Hygiene Lesson,” drew comparisons not only with sexually transmitted diseases, but also with a cholera epidemic, and urged attention to “personal systems hygiene.”¹ In fact, some computer scientists who studied the symptomatic path of Morris’s virus across Internet have pointed to its uneven effects upon different computer types and operating systems, and concluded that “there is a direct analogy with biological genetic diversity to be made.”² The epidemiology of biological virus, and especially AIDS, research is being closely studied to help implement computer security plans, and, in these circles, the new witty discourse is laced with references to antigens, white blood cells, vaccinations, metabolic free radicals, and the like.

The form and content of more lurid articles like Time‘s infamous (September 1988) story, “Invasion of the Data Snatchers,” fully displayed the continuity of the media scare with those historical fears about bodily invasion, individual and national, that are often considered endemic to the paranoid style of American political culture.³ Indeed, the rhetoric of computer culture, in common with the medical discourse of AIDS research, has fallen in line with the paranoid, strategic style of Defence Department rhetoric. Each language-repertoire is obsessed with hostile threats to bodily and technological immune systems; every event is a ballistic manoeuver in the game of microbiological war, where the governing metaphors are indiscriminately drawn from cellular genetics and cybernetics alike. As a counterpoint to the tongue-in-cheek AI tradition of seeing humans as “information-exchanging environments,” the imagined life of computers has taken on an organicist shape, now that they too are subject to cybernetic “sickness” or disease. So, too, the development of interrelated systems, such as Internet itself, has further added to the structural picture of an interdependent organism, whose component members, however autonomous, are all nonetheless affected by the “health” of each individual constituent. The growing interest among scientists in developing computer programs that will simulate the genetic behavior of living organisms (in which binary numbers act like genes) points to a future where the border between organic and artificial life is less and less distinct.

In keeping with the increasing use of biologically derived language to describe mutations in systems theory, conscious attempts to link the AIDS crisis with the information security crisis have pointed out that both kinds of virus, biological and electronic, take over the host cell/program and clone their carrier genetic codes by instructing the hosts to make replicas of the viruses. Neither kind of virus, however, can replicate themselves independently; they are pieces of code that attach themselves to other cells/programs– just as biological viruses need a host cell, computer viruses require a host program to activate them. The Internet virus was not, in fact, a virus, but a worm, a program that can run independently and therefore appears to have a life of its own. The worm replicates a full version of itself in programs and systems as it moves from one to another, masquerading as a legitimate user by guessing the user passwords of locked accounts. Because of this autonomous existence, the worm can be seen to behave as if it were an organism with some kind of purpose or teleology, and yet it has none. Its only “purpose” is to reproduce and infect. If the worm has no inbuilt antireplication code, or if the code is faulty, as was the case with the Internet worm, it will make already-infected computers repeatedly accept further replicas of itself, until their memories are clogged. A much quieter worm than that engineered by Morris would have moved more slowly, as one supposes a “worm” should, protecting itself from detection by ever more subtle camouflage, and propagating its cumulative effect of operative systems inertia over a much longer period of time.

In offering such descriptions, however, we must be wary of attributing a teleology/intentionality to worms and viruses which can be ascribed only, and, in most instances, speculatively, to their authors. There is no reason why a cybernetic “worm” might be expected to behave in any fundamental way like a biological worm. So, too, the assumed intentionality of its author distinguishes the human-made cybernetic virus from the case of the biological virus, the effects of which are fated to be received and discussed in a language saturated with human-made structures and narratives of meaning and teleological purpose. Writing about the folkloric theologies of significance and explanatory justice (usually involving retribution) that have sprung up around the AIDS crisis, Judith Williamson has pointed to the radical implications of this collision between an intentionless virus and a meaning-filled culture: Nothing could be more meaningless than a virus. It has no point, no purpose, no plan; it is part of no scheme, carries no inherent significance. And yet nothing is harder for us to confront than the complete absence of meaning. By its very definition, meaninglessness cannot be articulated within our social language, which is a system of meaning: impossible to include, as an absence, it is also impossible to exclude– for meaninglessness isn’t just the opposite of meaning, it is the end of meaning, and threatens the fragile structures by which we make sense of the world.⁴

No such judgment about meaninglessness applies to the computer security crisis. In contrast to HIV’s lack of meaning or intentionality, the meaning of cybernetic viruses is always already replete with social significance. This meaning is related, first of all, to the author’s local intention or motivation, whether psychic or fully social, whether wrought out of a mood of vengeance, a show of bravado or technical expertise, a commitment to a political act, or in anticipation of the profits that often accrue from the victims’ need to buy an antidote from the author. Beyond these local intentions, however, which are usually obscure or, as in the Morris case, quite inscrutable, there is an entire set of social and historical narratives that surround and are part of the “meaning” of the virus: the coded anarchist history of the youth hacker subculture; the militaristic environments of search-and-destroy warfare (a virus has two components–a carrier and a “warhead”), which, because of the historical development of computer technology, constitute the family values of information techno-culture; the experimental research environments in which creative designers are encouraged to work; and the conflictual history of pure and applied ethics in the science and technology communities, to name just a few. A similar list could be drawn up to explain the widespread and varied response to computer viruses, from the amused concern of the cognoscenti to the hysteria of the casual user, and from the research community and the manufacturing industry to the morally aroused legislature and the mediated culture at large. Every one of these explanations and narratives is the result of social and cultural processes and values; consequently, there is very little about the virus itself that is “meaningless.” Viruses can no more be seen as an objective, or necessary, result of the “objective” development of technological systems than technology in general can be seen as an objective, determining agent of social change.

For the sake of polemical economy, I would note that the cumulative effect of all the viral hysteria has been twofold. Firstly, it has resulted in a windfall for software producers, now that users’ blithe disregard for makers’ copyright privileges has eroded in the face of the security panic. Used to fighting halfhearted rearguard actions against widespread piracy practices, or reluctantly acceding to buyers’ desire for software unencumbered by top-heavy security features, software vendors are now profiting from the new public distrust of program copies. So, too, the explosion in security consciousness has hyperstimulated the already fast-growing sectors of the security system industry and the data encryption industry. In line with the new imperative for everything from “vaccinated” workstations to “sterilized” networks, it has created a brand new market of viral vaccine vendors who will sell you the virus (a one-time only immunization shot) along with its antidote–with names like Flu Shot +, ViruSafe, Vaccinate, Disk Defender, Certus, Viral Alarm, Antidote, Virus Buster, Gatekeeper, Ongard, and Interferon. Few of the antidotes are very reliable, however, especially since they pose an irresistible intellectual challenge to hackers who can easily rewrite them in the form of ever more powerful viruses. Moreover, most corporate managers of computer systems and networks know that by far the great majority of their intentional security losses are a result of insider sabotage and monkeywrenching.

In short, the effects of the viruses have been to profitably clamp down on copyright delinquency, and to generate the need for entirely new industrial production of viral suppressors to contain the fallout. In this respect, it is easy to see that the appearance of viruses could hardly, in the long run, have benefited industry producers more. In the same vein, the networks that have been hardest hit by the security squeeze are not restricted-access military or corporate systems but networks like Internet, set up on trust to facilitate the open academic exchange of data, information and research, and watched over by its sponsor, DARPA. It has not escaped the notice of conspiracy theorists that the military intelligence community, obsessed with “electronic warfare,” actually stood to learn a lot from the Internet virus; the virus effectively “pulsed the system,” exposing the sociological behaviour of the system in a crisis situation.⁵ The second effect of the virus crisis has been more overtly ideological. Virus-conscious fear and loathing have clearly fed into the paranoid climate of privatization that increasingly defines social identities in the new post-Fordist order. The result– a psycho-social closing of the ranks around fortified private spheres–runs directly counter to the ethic that we might think of as residing at the architectural heart of information technology. In its basic assembly structure, information technology is a technology of processing, copying, replication, and simulation, and therefore does not recognize the concept of private information property. What is now under threat is the rationality of a shareware culture, ushered in as the achievement of the hacker counterculture that pioneered the personal computer revolution in the early seventies against the grain of corporate planning.

There is another story to tell, however, about the emergence of the virus scare as a profitable ideological moment, and it is the story of how teenage hacking has come to be increasingly defined as a potential threat to normative educational ethics and national security alike. The story of the creation of this “social menace” is central to the ongoing attempts to rewrite property law in order to contain the effects of the new information technologies that, because of their blindness to the copyrighting of intellectual property, have transformed the way in which modern power is exercised and maintained. Consequently, a deviant social class or group has been defined and categorised as “enemies of the state” in order to help rationalize a general law-and-order clampdown on free and open information exchange. Teenage hackers’ homes are now habitually raided by sheriffs and FBI agents using strong-arm tactics, and jail sentences are becoming a common punishment. Operation Sundevil, a nationwide Secret Service operation in the spring of 1990, involving hundreds of agents in fourteen cities, is the most recently publicized of the hacker raids that have produced several arrests and seizures of thousands of disks and address lists in the last two years.⁶

In one of the many harshly punitive prosecutions against hackers in recent years, a judge went so far as to describe “bulletin boards” as “hi-tech street gangs.” The editors of 2600, the magazine that publishes information about system entry and exploration that is indispensable to the hacking community, have pointed out that any single invasive act, such as that of trespass, that involves the use of computers is considered today to be infinitely more criminal than a similar act undertaken without computers.⁷ To use computers to execute pranks, raids, frauds or thefts is to incur automatically the full repressive wrath of judges urged on by the moral panic created around hacking feats over the last two decades. Indeed, there is a strong body of pressure groups pushing for new criminal legislation that will define “crimes with computers” as a special category of crime, deserving “extraordinary” sentences and punitive measures. Over that same space of time, the term hacker has lost its semantic link with the journalistic hack, suggesting a professional toiler who uses unorthodox methods. So, too, its increasingly criminal connotation today has displaced the more innocuous, amateur mischief-maker-cum-media-star role reserved for hackers until a few years ago.

In response to the gathering vigor of this “war on hackers,” the most common defences of hacking can be presented on a spectrum that runs from the appeasement or accommodation of corporate interests to drawing up blueprints for cultural revolution. (a) Hacking performs a benign industrial service of uncovering security deficiencies and design flaws. (b) Hacking, as an experimental, free-form research activity, has been responsible for many of the most progressive developments in software development. (c) Hacking, when not purely recreational, is an elite educational practice that reflects the ways in which the development of high technology has outpaced orthodox forms of institutional education. (d) Hacking is an important form of watchdog counterresponse to the use of surveillance technology and data gathering by the state, and to the increasingly monolithic communications power of giant corporations. (e) Hacking, as guerrilla know-how, is essential to the task of maintaining fronts of cultural resistance and stocks of oppositional knowledge as a hedge against a technofascist future. With all of these and other arguments in mind, it is easy to see how the social and cultural management of hacker activities has become a complex process that involves state policy and legislation at the highest levels. In this respect, the virus scare has become an especially convenient vehicle for obtaining public and popular consent for new legislative measures and new powers of investigation for the FBI.⁸

Consequently, certain celebrity hackers have been quick to play down the zeal with which they pursued their earlier hacking feats, while reinforcing the deviant category of “technological hooliganism” reserved by moralizing pundits for “dark-side” hacking. Hugo Cornwall, British author of the bestselling Hacker’s Handbook, presents a Little England view of the hacker as a harmless fresh-air enthusiast who “visits advanced computers as a polite country rambler might walk across picturesque fields.” The owners of these properties are like “farmers who don’t mind careful ramblers.” Cornwall notes that “lovers of fresh-air walks obey the Country Code, involving such items as closing gates behind one and avoiding damage to crops and livestock” and suggests that a similar code ought to “guide your rambles into other people’s computers; the safest thing to do is simply browse, enjoy and learn.” By contrast, any rambler who “ventured across a field guarded by barbed wire and dotted with notices warning about the Official Secrets Act would deserve most that happened thereafter.”⁹ Cornwall’s quaint perspective on hacking has a certain “native charm,” but some might think that this beguiling picture of patchwork-quilt fields and benign gentleman farmers glosses over the long bloody history of power exercised through feudal and postfeudal land economy in England, while it is barely suggestive of the new fiefdoms, transnational estates, dependencies, and principalities carved out of today’s global information order by vast corporations capable of bypassing the laws and territorial borders of sovereign nation-states. In general, this analogy with “trespass” laws, which compares hacking to breaking and entering other people’s homes restricts the debate to questions about privacy, property, possessive individualism, and, at best, the excesses of state surveillance, while it closes off any examination of the activities of the corporate owners and institutional sponsors of information technology (the almost exclusive “target” of most hackers).¹⁰

Cornwall himself has joined the lucrative ranks of ex-hackers who either work for computer security firms or write books about security for the eyes of worried corporate managers.¹¹ A different, though related, genre is that of the penitent hacker’s “confession,” produced for an audience thrilled by tales of high- stakes adventure at the keyboard, but written in the form of a computer security handbook. The best example of the “I Was a Teenage Hacker” genre is Bill (aka “The Cracker”) Landreth’s Out of the Inner Circle: The True Story of a Computer Intruder Capable of Cracking the Nation’s Most Secure Computer Systems, a book about “people who can’t `just say no’ to computers.” In full complicity with the deviant picture of the hacker as “public enemy,” Landreth recirculates every official and media cliche about subversive conspiratorial elites by recounting the putative exploits of a high-level hackers’ guild called the Inner Circle. The author himself is presented in the book as a former keyboard junkie who now praises the law for having made a good moral example of him: If you are wondering what I am like, I can tell you the same things I told the judge in federal court: Although it may not seem like it, I am pretty much a normal American teenager. I don’t drink, smoke or take drugs. I don’t steal, assault people, or vandalize property. The only way in which I am really different from most people is in my fascination with the ways and means of learning about computers that don’t belong to me.¹² Sentenced in 1984 to three years probation, during which time he was obliged to finish his high school education and go to college, Landreth concludes: “I think the sentence is very fair, and I already know what my major will be….” As an aberrant sequel to the book’s contrite conclusion, however, Landreth vanished in 1986, violating his probation, only to face later a stiff five-year jail sentence–a sorry victim, no doubt, of the recent crackdown. Cyber-Counterculture?

At the core of Steven Levy’s bestseller Hackers (1984) is the argument that the hacker ethic, first articulated in the 1950s among the famous MIT students who developed multiple-access user systems, is libertarian and crypto-anarchist in its right-to know principles and its advocacy of decentralized technology. This hacker ethic, which has remained the preserve of a youth culture for the most part, asserts the basic right of users to free access to all information. It is a principled attempt, in other words, to challenge the tendency to use technology to form information elites. Consequently, hacker activities were presented in the eighties as a romantic countercultural tendency, celebrated by critical journalists like John Markoff of the New York Times, by Stewart Brand of Whole Earth Catalog fame, and by New Age gurus like Timothy Leary in the flamboyant Reality Hackers. Fuelled by sensational stories about phone phreaks like Joe Egressia (the blind eight- year old who discovered the tone signal of phone company by whistling) and Cap’n Crunch, groups like the Milwaukee 414s, the Los Angeles ARPAnet hackers, the SPAN Data Travellers, the Chaos Computer Club of Hamburg, the British Prestel hackers, 2600‘s BBS, “The Private Sector,” and others, the dominant media representation of the hacker came to be that of the “rebel with a modem,” to use Markoff’s term, at least until the more recent “war on hackers” began to shape media coverage.

On the one hand, this popular folk hero persona offered the romantic high profile of a maverick though nerdy cowboy whose fearless raids upon an impersonal “system” were perceived as a welcome tonic in the gray age of technocratic routine. On the other hand, he was something of a juvenile technodelinquent who hadn’t yet learned the difference between right and wrong—a wayward figure whose technical brilliance and proficiency differentiated him nonetheless from, say, the maladjusted working-class J.D. street-corner boy of the 1950s (hacker mythology, for the most part, has been almost exclusively white, masculine, and middle- class). One result of this media profile was a persistent infantilization of the hacker ethic–a way of trivializing its embryonic politics, however finally complicit with dominant technocratic imperatives or with entrepreneurial-libertarian ideology one perceives these politics to be. The second result was to reinforce, in the initial absence of coercive jail sentences, the high educational stakes of training the new technocratic elites to be responsible in their use of technology. Never, the given wisdom goes, has a creative elite of the future been so in need of the virtues of a liberal education steeped in Western ethics!

The full force of this lesson in computer ethics can be found laid out in the official Cornell University report on the Robert Morris affair. Members of the university commission set up to investigate the affair make it quite clear in their report that they recognize the student’s academic brilliance. His hacking, moreover, is described, as a “juvenile act” that had no “malicious intent” but that amounted, like plagiarism, the traditional academic heresy, to a dishonest transgression of other users’ rights. (In recent years, the privacy movement within the information community–a movement mounted by liberals to protect civil rights against state gathering of information–has actually been taken up and used as a means of criminalizing hacker activities.) As for the consequences of this juvenile act, the report proposes an analogy that, in comparison with Cornwall’s mature English country rambler, is thoroughly American, suburban, middle-class and juvenile. Unleashing the Internet worm was like “the driving of a golf-cart on a rainy day through most houses in the neighborhood. The driver may have navigated carefully and broken no china, but it should have been obvious to the driver that the mud on the tires would soil the carpets and that the owners would later have to clean up the mess.”¹³

In what stands out as a stiff reprimand for his alma mater, the report regrets that Morris was educated in an “ambivalent atmosphere” where he “received no clear guidance” about ethics from “his peers or mentors” (he went to Harvard!). But it reserves its loftiest academic contempt for the press, whose heroization of hackers has been so irresponsible, in the commission’s opinion, as to cause even further damage to the standards of the computing profession; media exaggerations of the courage and technical sophistication of hackers “obscures the far more accomplished work of students who complete their graduate studies without public fanfare,” and “who subject their work to the close scrutiny and evaluation of their peers, and not to the interpretations of the popular press.”¹⁴ In other words, this was an inside affair, to be assessed and judged by fellow professionals within an institution that reinforces its authority by means of internally self-regulating codes of professionalist ethics, but rarely addresses its ethical relationship to society as a whole (acceptance of defence grants, and the like). Generally speaking, the report affirms the genteel liberal ideal that professionals should not need laws, rules, procedural guidelines, or fixed guarantees of safe and responsible conduct. Apprentice professionals ought to have acquired a good conscience by osmosis from a liberal education rather than from some specially prescribed course in ethics and technology.

The widespread attention commanded by the Cornell report (attention from the Association of Computing Machinery, among others) demonstrates the industry’s interest in how the academy invokes liberal ethics in order to assist in the managing of the organization of the new specialized knowledge about information technology. Despite or, perhaps, because of the report’s steadfast pledge to the virtues and ideals of a liberal education, it bears all the marks of a legitimation crisis inside (and outside) the academy surrounding the new and all-important category of computer professionalism. The increasingly specialized design knowledge demanded of computer professionals means that codes that go beyond the old professionalist separation of mental and practical skills are needed to manage the division that a hacker’s functional talents call into question, between a purely mental pursuit and the pragmatic sphere of implementing knowledge in the real world. “Hacking” must then be designated as a strictly amateur practice; the tension, in hacking, between interestedness and disinterestedness is different from, and deficient in relation to, the proper balance demanded by professionalism. Alternately, hacking can be seen as the amateur flip side of the professional ideal–a disinterested love in the service of interested parties and institutions. In either case, it serves as an example of professionalism gone wrong, but not very wrong.

In common with the two responses to the virus scare described earlier–the profitable reaction of the computer industry and the self-empowering response of the legislature– the Cornell report shows how the academy uses a case like the Morris affair to strengthen its own sense of moral and cultural authority in the sphere of professionalism, particularly through its scornful indifference to and aloofness from the codes and judgements exercised by the media–its diabolic competitor in the field of knowledge. Indeed, for all the trumpeting about excesses of power and disrespect for the law of the land, the revival of ethics, in the business and science disciplines in the Ivy League and on Capitol Hill (both awash with ethical fervor in the post-Boesky and post-Reagan years), is little more than a weak liberal response to working flaws or adaptational lapses in the social logic of technocracy.

To complete the scenario of morality play example- making, however, we must also consider that Morris’s father was chief scientist of the National Computer Security Center, the National Security Agency’s public effort at safeguarding computer security. A brilliant programmer and codebreaker in his own right, he had testified in Washington in 1983 about the need to deglamorise teenage hacking, comparing it to “stealing a car for the purpose of joyriding.” In a further Oedipal irony, Morris Sr. may have been one of the inventors, while at Bell Labs in the 1950s, of a computer game involving self-perpetuating programs that were a prototype of today’s worms and viruses. Called Darwin, its principles were incorporated, in the eighties, into a popular hacker game called Core War, in which autonomous “killer” programs fought each other to the death.¹⁵

With the appearance, in the Morris affair, of a patricidal object who is also the Pentagon’s guardian angel, we now have many of the classic components of countercultural cross-generational conflict. What I want to consider, however, is how and where this scenario differs from the definitive contours of such conflicts that we recognize as having been established in the sixties; how the Cornell hacker Morris’s relation to, say, campus “occupations” today is different from that evoked by the famous image of armed black students emerging from a sit-in on the Cornell campus; how the relation to technological ethics differs from Andrew Kopkind’s famous statement “Morality begins at the end of a gun barrel” which accompanied the publication of the do-it-yourself Molotov cocktail design on the cover of a 1968 issue of the New York Review of Books; or how hackers’ prized potential access to the networks of military systems warfare differs from the prodigious Yippie feat of levitating the Pentagon building. It may be that, like the J.D. rebel without a cause of the fifties, the disaffiliated student dropout of the sixties, and the negationist punk of the seventies, the hacker of the eighties has come to serve as a visible public example of moral maladjustment, a hegemonic test case for redefining the dominant ethics in an advanced technocratic society. (Hence the need for each of these deviant figures to come in different versions– lumpen, radical chic, and Hollywood-style.)

What concerns me here, however, are the different conditions that exist today for recognizing countercultural expression and activism. Twenty years later, the technology of hacking and viral guerrilla warfare occupies a similar place in countercultural fantasy as the Molotov Cocktail design once did. While I don’t, for one minute, mean to insist on such comparisons, which aren’t particularly sound anyway, I think they conveniently mark a shift in the relation of countercultural activity to technology, a shift in which a software-based technoculture, organized around outlawed libertarian principles about free access to information and communication, has come to replace a dissenting culture organized around the demonizing of abject hardware structures. Much, though not all, of the sixties counterculture was formed around what I have elsewhere called the technology of folklore–an expressive congeries of preindustrialist, agrarianist, Orientalist, antitechnological ideas, values, and social structures. By contrast, the cybernetic countercultures of the nineties are already being formed around the folklore of technology–mythical feats of survivalism and resistance in a data-rich world of virtual environments and posthuman bodies– which is where many of the SF-and technology-conscious youth cultures have been assembling in recent years.¹⁶

There is no doubt that this scenario makes countercultural activity more difficult to recognize and therefore to define as politically significant. It was much easier, in the sixties, to identify the salient features and symbolic power of a romantic preindustrialist cultural politics in an advanced technological society, especially when the destructive evidence of America’s supertechnological invasion of Vietnam was being daily paraded in front of the public eye. However, in a society whose technopolitical infrastructure depends increasingly upon greater surveillance, cybernetic activism necessarily relies on a much more covert politics of identity, since access to closed systems requires discretion and dissimulation. Access to digital systems still requires only the authentication of a signature or pseudonym, not the identification of a real surveillable person, so there exists a crucial operative gap between authentication and identification. (As security systems move toward authenticating access through biological signatures– the biometric recording and measurement of physical characteristics such as palm or retinal prints, or vein patterns on the backs of hands–the hacker’s staple method of systems entry through purloined passwords will be further challenged.) By the same token, cybernetic identity is never used up, it can be recreated, reassigned, and reconstructed with any number of different names and under different user accounts. Most hacks, or technocrimes, go unnoticed or unreported for fear of publicising the vulnerability of corporate security systems, especially when the hacks are performed by disgruntled employees taking their vengeance on management. So, too, authoritative identification of any individual hacker, whenever it occurs, is often the result of accidental leads rather than systematic detection. For example, Captain Midnight, the video pirate who commandeered a satellite a few years ago to interrupt broadcast TV viewing, was traced only because a member of the public reported a suspicious conversation heard over a crossed telephone line.

Eschewing its core constituency among white males of the pre-professional-managerial class, the hacker community may be expanding its parameters outward. Hacking, for example, has become a feature of the young adult mystery-and-suspense novel genre for girls.¹⁷ The elitist class profile of the hacker prodigy as that of an undersocialized college nerd has become democratized and customized in recent years; it is no longer exclusively associated with institutionally acquired college expertise, and increasingly it dresses streetwise. In a recent article which documents the spread of the computer underground from college whiz kids to a broader youth subculture termed “cyberpunks,” after the movement among SF novelists, the original hacker phone phreak Cap’n Crunch is described as lamenting the fact that the cyberculture is no longer an “elite” one, and that hacker-valid information is much easier to obtain these days.¹⁸

For the most part, however, the self-defined hacker underground, like many other protocountercultural tendencies, has been restricted to a privileged social milieu, further magnetised by the self-understanding of its members that they are the apprentice architects of a future dominated by knowledge, expertise, and “smartness,” whether human or digital. Consequently, it is clear that the hacker cyberculture is not a dropout culture; its disaffiliation from a domestic parent culture is often manifest in activities that answer, directly or indirectly, to the legitimate needs of industrial R&D. For example, this hacker culture celebrates high productivity, maverick forms of creative work energy, and an obsessive identification with on-line endurance (and endorphin highs)–all qualities that are valorised by the entrepreneurial codes of silicon futurism. In a critique of the myth of the hacker-as-rebel, Dennis Hayes debunks the political romance woven around the teenage hacker: They are typically white, upper-middle-class adolescents who have taken over the home computer (bought, subsidized, or tolerated by parents in the hope of cultivating computer literacy). Few are politically motivated although many express contempt for the “bureaucracies” that hamper their electronic journeys. Nearly all demand unfettered access to intricate and intriguing computer networks. In this, teenage hackers resemble an alienated shopping culture deprived of purchasing opportunities more than a terrorist network.¹⁹

While welcoming the sobriety of Hayes’s critique, I am less willing to accept its assumptions about the political implications of hacker activities. Studies of youth subcultures (including those of a privileged middle-class formation) have taught us that the political meaning of certain forms of cultural “resistance” is notoriously difficult to read. These meanings are either highly coded or expressed indirectly through media–private peer languages, customized consumer styles, unorthodox leisure patterns, categories of insider knowledge and behavior–that have no fixed or inherent political significance. If cultural studies of this sort have proved anything, it is that the often symbolic, not wholly articulate, expressivity of a youth culture can seldom be translated directly into an articulate political philosophy. The significance of these cultures lies in their embryonic or protopolitical languages and technologies of opposition to dominant or parent systems of rules. If hackers lack a “cause,” then they are certainly not the first youth culture to be characterized in this dismissive way. In particular, the left has suffered from the lack of a cultural politics capable of recognizing the power of cultural expressions that do not wear a mature political commitment on their sleeves. So, too, the escalation of activism-in-the- professions in the last two decades has shown that it is a mistake to condemn the hacker impulse on account of its class constituency alone. To cede the “ability to know” on the grounds that elite groups will enjoy unjustly privileged access to technocratic knowledge is to cede too much of the future. Is it of no political significance at all that hackers’ primary fantasies often involve the official computer systems of the police, armed forces, and defence and intelligence agencies? And that the rationale for their fantasies is unfailingly presented in the form of a defence of civil liberties against the threat of centralized intelligence and military activities? Or is all of this merely a symptom of an apprentice elite’s fledgling will to masculine power? The activities of the Chinese student elite in the pro-democracy movement have shown that unforeseen shifts in the political climate can produce startling new configurations of power and resistance. After Tiananmen Square, Party leaders found it imprudent to purge those high-tech engineer and computer cadres who alone could guarantee the future of any planned modernization program. On the other hand, the authorities rested uneasy knowing that each cadre (among the most activist groups in the student movement) is a potential hacker who can have the run of the communications house if and when he or she wants.

On the other hand, I do agree with Hayes’s perception that the media have pursued their romance with the hacker at the cost of underreporting the much greater challenge posed to corporate employers by their employees. It is in the arena of conflicts between workers and management that most high-tech “sabotage” takes place. In the mainstream everyday life of office workers, mostly female, there is a widespread culture of unorganized sabotage that accounts for infinitely more computer downtime and information loss every year than is caused by destructive, “dark-side” hacking by celebrity cybernetic intruders. The sabotage, time theft, and strategic monkeywrenching deployed by office workers in their engineered electromagnetic attacks on data storage and operating systems might range from the planting of time or logic bombs to the discrete use of electromagnetic Tesla coils or simple bodily friction: “Good old static electricity discharged from the fingertips probably accounts for close to half the disks and computers wiped out or down every year.”²⁰ More skilled operators, intent on evening a score with management, often utilize sophisticated hacking techniques. In many cases, a coherent networking culture exists among female console operators, where, among other things, tips about strategies for slowing down the temporality of the work regime are circulated. While these threats from below are fully recognized in their boardrooms, corporations dependent upon digital business machines are obviously unwilling to advertize how acutely vulnerable they actually are to this kind of sabotage. It is easy to imagine how organised computer activism could hold such companies for ransom. As Hayes points out, however, it is more difficult to mobilize any kind of labor movement organized upon such premises: Many are prepared to publicly oppose the countless dark legacies of the computer age: “electronic sweatshops,” Military technology, employee surveillance, genotoxic water, and ozone depletion. Among those currently leading the opposition, however, it is apparently deemed “irresponsible” to recommend an active computerized resistance as a source of worker’s power because it is perceived as a medium of employee crime and “terrorism.” ²¹ Processed World, the “magazine with a bad attitude” with which Hayes has been associated, is at the forefront of debating and circulating these questions among office workers, regularly tapping into the resentments borne out in on-the-job resistance.

While only a small number of computer users would recognize and include themselves under the label of “hacker,” there are good reasons for extending the restricted definition of hacking down and across the caste system of systems analysts, designers, programmers, and operators to include all high-tech workers, no matter how inexpert, who can interrupt, upset, and redirect the smooth flow of structured communications that dictates their positions in the social networks of exchange and determines the temporality of their work schedules. To put it in these terms, however, is not to offer any universal definition of hacker agency. There are many social agents, for example, in job locations that are dependent upon the hope of technological reskilling, for whom sabotage or disruption of communicative rationality is of little use; for such people, definitions of hacking that are reconstructive, rather than deconstructive, are more appropriate. A good example is the crucial role of worker technoliteracy in the struggle of labor against automation and deskilling. When worker education classes in computer programming were discontinued by management at the Ford Rouge plant in Dearborn, Michigan, union (UAW) members began to publish a newsletter called the Amateur Computerist to fill the gap.²² Among the columnists and correspondents in the magazine have been veterans of the Flint sit-down strikes who see a clear historical continuity between the problem of labor organization in the thirties and the problem of automation and deskilling today. Workers’ computer literacy is seen as essential not only to the demystification of the computer and the reskilling of workers, but also to labor’s capacity to intervene in decisions about new technologies that might result in shorter hours and thus in “work efficiency” rather than worker efficiency.

The three social locations I have mentioned above all express different class relations to technology: the location of an apprentice technical elite, conventionally associated with the term “hacking”; the location of the female high-tech office worker, involved in “sabotage”; and the location of the shop- floor worker, whose future depends on technological reskilling. All therefore exhibit different ways of claiming back time dictated and appropriated by technological processes, and of establishing some form of independent control over the work relation so determined by the new technologies. All, then, fall under a broad understanding of the politics involved in any extended description of hacker activities. [This file is continued in ROSS-2 990]

The Culture and Technology Question

Faced with these proliferating practices in the workplace, on the teenage cult fringe, and increasingly in mainstream entertainment, where, over the last five years, the cyberpunk sensibility in popular fiction, film, and television has caught the romance of the popular taste for the outlaw technology of human/machine interfaces, we are obliged, I think, to ask old kinds of questions about the new silicon order which the evangelists of information technology have been deliriously proclaiming for more than twenty years. The postindustrialists’ picture of a world of freedom and abundance projects a sunny millenarian future devoid of work drudgery and ecological degradation. This sunny social order, cybernetically wired up, is presented as an advanced evolutionary phase of society in accord with Enlightenment ideals of progress and rationality. By contrast, critics of this idealism see only a frightening advance in the technologies of social control, whose owners and sponsors are efficiently shaping a society, as Kevin Robins and Frank Webster put it, of “slaves without Athens” that is actually the inverse of the “Athens without slaves” promised by the silicon positivists.²³

It is clear that one of the political features of the new post-Fordist order–economically marked by short-run production, diverse taste markets, flexible specialization, and product differentiation–is that the New Right has managed to appropriate not only the utopian language and values of the alternative technology movements but also the marxist discourse of the “withering away of the state” and the more compassionate vision of local, decentralized communications first espoused by the libertarian left. It must be recognized that these are very popular themes and visions, (advanced most famously by Alvin Toffler and the neoliberal Atari Democrats, though also by leftist thinkers such as Andre Gortz, Rudolf Bahro, and Alain Touraine)–much more popular, for example, than the tradition of centralized technocratic planning espoused by the left under the Fordist model of mass production and consumption.²⁴ Against the postindustrialists’ millenarian picture of a postscarcity harmony, in which citizens enjoy decentralized, access to free-flowing information, it is necessary, however, to emphasise how and where actually existing cybernetic capitalism presents a gross caricature of such a postscarcity society.

One of the stories told by the critical left about new cultural technologies is that of monolithic, panoptical social control, effortlessly achieved through a smooth, endlessly interlocking system of networks of surveillance. In this narrative, information technology is seen as the most despotic mode of domination yet, generating not just a revolution in capitalist production but also a revolution in living–“social Taylorism”–that touches all cultural and social spheres in the home and in the workplace.²⁵ Through routine gathering of information about transactions, consumer preferences, and creditworthiness, a harvest of information about any individual’s whereabouts and movements, tastes, desires, contacts, friends, associates, and patterns of work and recreation becomes available in the form of dossiers sold on the tradable information market, or is endlessly convertible into other forms of intelligence through computer matching. Advanced pattern recognition technologies facilitate the process of surveillance, while data encryption protects it from public accountability.²⁶

While the debate about privacy has triggered public consciousness about these excesses, the liberal discourse about ethics and damage control in which that debate has been conducted falls short of the more comprehensive analysis of social control and social management offered by left political economists. According to one marxist analysis, information is seen as a new kind of commodity resource which marks a break with past modes of production and that is becoming the essential site of capital accumulation in the world economy. What happens, then, in the process by which information, gathered up by data scavenging in the transactional sphere, is systematically converted into intelligence? A surplus value is created for use elsewhere. This surplus information value is more than is needed for public surveillance; it is often information, or intelligence, culled from consumer polling or statistical analysis of transactional behavior, that has no immediate use in the process of routine public surveillance. Indeed, it is this surplus, bureaucratic capital that is used for the purpose of forecasting social futures, and consequently applied to the task of managing the behavior of mass or aggregate units within those social futures. This surplus intelligence becomes the basis of a whole new industry of futures research which relies upon computer technology to simulate and forecast the shape, activity, and behavior of complex social systems. The result is a possible system of social management that far transcends the questions about surveillance that have been at the discursive center of the privacy debate.²⁷

To further challenge the idealists’ vision of postindustrial light and magic, we need only look inside the semiconductor workplace itself, which is home to the most toxic chemicals known to man (and woman, especially since women of color often make up the majority of the microelectronics labor force), and where worker illness is measured not in quantities of blood spilled on the shop floor but in the less visible forms of chromosome damage, shrunken testicles, miscarriages, premature deliveries, and severe birth defects. In addition to the extraordinarily high stress patterns of VDT operators, semiconductor workers exhibit an occupational illness rate that even by the late seventies was three times higher than that of manufacturing workers, at least until the federal rules for recognizing and defining levels of injury were changed under the Reagan administration. Protection gear is designed to protect the product and the clean room from the workers, and not vice versa. Recently, immunological health problems have begun to appear that can be described only as a kind of chemically induced AIDS, rendering the T-cells dysfunctional rather than depleting them like virally induced AIDS.²⁸ In corporate offices, the use of keystroke software to monitor and pace office workers has become a routine part of job performance evaluation programs. Some 70 percent of corporations use electronic surveillance or other forms of quantitative monitoring on their workers. Every bodily movement can be checked and measured, especially trips to the toilet. Federal deregulation has meant that the limits of employee work space have shrunk, in some government offices, below that required by law for a two-hundred pound laboratory pig.²⁹ Critics of the labor process seem to have sound reasons to believe that rationalization and quantification are at last entering their most primitive phase.

These, then, are some of the features of the critical left position–or what is sometimes referred to as the “paranoid” position–on information technology, which imagines or constructs a totalizing, monolithic picture of systematic domination. While this story is often characterized as conspiracy theory, its targets–technorationality, bureaucratic capitalism–are usually too abstract to fit the picture of a social order planned and shaped by a small, conspiring group of centralized power elites. Although I believe that this story, when told inside and outside the classroom, for example, is an indispensable form of “consciousness-raising,” it is not always the best story to tell.

While I am not comfortable with the “paranoid” labelling, I would argue that such narratives do little to discourage paranoia. The critical habit of finding unrelieved domination everywhere has certain consequences, one of which is to create a siege mentality, reinforcing the inertia, helplessness, and despair that such critiques set out to oppose in the first place. What follows is a politics that can speak only from a victim’s position. And when knowledge about surveillance is presented as systematic and infallible, self-censoring is sure to follow. In the psychosocial climate of fear and phobia aroused by the virus scare, there is a responsibility not to be alarmist or to be scared, especially when, as I have argued, such moments are profitably seized upon by the sponsors of control technology. In short, the picture of a seamlessly panoptical network of surveillance may be the result of a rather undemocratic, not to mention unsocialistic, way of thinking, predicated upon the recognition of people solely as victims. It is redolent of the old sociological models of mass society and mass culture, which cast the majority of society as passive and lobotomized in the face of the cultural patterns of modernization. To emphasize, as Robins and Webster and others have done, the power of the new technologies to despotically transform the “rhythm, texture, and experience” of everyday life, and meet with no resistance in doing so, is not only to cleave, finally, to an epistemology of technological determinism, but also to dismiss the capacity of people to make their own uses of new technologies.³⁰

The seamless “interlocking” of public and private networks of information and intelligence is not as smooth and even as the critical school of hard domination would suggest. In any case, compulsive gathering of information is no guarantee that any interpretive sense will be made of the files or dossiers, while some would argue that the increasingly covert nature of surveillance is a sign that the “campaign” for social control is not going well. One of the most pervasive popular arguments against the panoptical intentions of the masters of technology is that their systems do not work. Every successful hack or computer crime in some way reinforces the popular perception that information systems are not infallible. And the announcements of military-industrial spokespersons that the fully automated battlefield is on its way run up against an accumulated stock of popular skepticism about the operative capacity of weapons systems. These misgivings are born of decades of distrust for the plans and intentions of the military-industrial complex, and were quite evident in the widespread cynicism about the Strategic Defense Initiative. Just to take one empirical example of unreliability, the military communications system worked so poorly and so farcically during the U.S. invasion of Grenada that commanders had to call each other on pay phones: ever since then, the command-and- control code of Arpanet technocrats has been C5– Command, Control, Communication, Computers, and Confusion.³¹ It could be said, of course, that the invasion of Grenada did, after all, succeed, but the more complex and inefficiency-prone such high-tech invasions become (Vietnam is still the best example), the less likely they are to be undertaken with any guarantee of success.

I am not suggesting that alternatives can be forged simply by encouraging disbelief in the infallibility of existing technologies (pointing to examples of the appropriation of technologies for radical uses, of course, always provides more visibly satisfying evidence of empowerment), but technoskepticism, while not a sufficient condition of social change, is a necessary condition. Stocks of popular technoskepticism are crucial to the task of eroding the legitimacy of those cultural values that prepare the way for new technological developments: values and principles such as the inevitability of material progress, the “emancipatory” domination of nature, the innovative autonomy of machines, the efficiency codes of pragmatism, and the linear juggernaut of liberal Enlightenment rationality–all increasingly under close critical scrutiny as a wave of environmental consciousness sweeps through the electorates of the West. Technologies do not shape or determine such values. These values already exist before the technologies, and the fact that they have become deeply embodied in the structure of popular needs and desires then provides the green light for the acceptance of certain kinds of technology. The principal rationale for introducing new technologies is that they answer to already existing intentions and demands that may be perceived as “subjective” but that are never actually within the control of any single set of conspiring individuals. As Marike Finlay has argued, just as technology is only possible in given discursive situations, one of which being the desire of people to have it for reasons of empowerment, so capitalism is merely the site, and not the source, of the power that is often autonomously attributed to the owners and sponsors of technology.³²

In fact, there is no frame of technological inevitability that has not already interacted with popular needs and desires, no introduction of new machineries of control that has not already been negotiated to some degree in the arena of popular consent. Thus the power to design architecture that incorporates different values must arise from the popular perception that existing technologies are not the only ones, nor are they the best when it comes to individual and collective empowerment. It was this kind of perception–formed around the distrust of big, impersonal, “closed” hardware systems, and the desire for small, decentralized, interactive machines to facilitate interpersonal communication–that “built” the PC out of hacking expertise in the early seventies. These were as much the partial “intentions” behind the development of microcomputing technology as deskilling, monitoring, and information gathering are the intentions behind the corporate use of that technology today. The growth of public data networks, bulletin board systems, alternative information and media links, and the increasing cheapness of desktop publishing, satellite equipment, and international data bases are as much the result of local political “intentions” as the fortified net of globally linked, restricted-access information systems is the intentional fantasy of those who seek to profit from centralised control. The picture that emerges from this mapping of intentions is not an inevitably technofascist one, but rather the uneven result of cultural struggles over values and meanings.

It is in this respect–in the struggle over values and meanings–that the work of cultural criticism takes on its special significance as a full participant in the debate about technology. In fact, cultural criticism is already fully implicated in that debate, if only because the culture and education industries are rapidly becoming integrated within the vast information service conglomerates. The media we study, the media we publish in, and the media we teach within are increasingly part of the same tradable information sector. So, too, our common intellectual discourse has been significantly affected by the recent debates about postmodernism (or culture in a postindustrial world) in which the euphoric, addictive thrill of the technological sublime has figured quite prominently. The high-speed technological fascination that is characteristic of the postmodern condition can be read, on the one hand, as a celebratory capitulation on the part of intellectuals to the new information technocultures. On the other hand, this celebratory strain attests to the persuasive affect associated with the new cultural technologies, to their capacity (more powerful than that of their sponsors and promoters) to generate pleasure and gratification and to win the struggle for intellectual as well as popular consent.

Another reason for the involvement of cultural critics in the technology debates has to do with our special critical knowledge of the way in which cultural meanings are produced–our knowledge about the politics of consumption and what is often called the politics of representation. This is the knowledge which demonstrates that there are limits to the capacity of productive forces to shape and determine consciousness. It is a knowledge that insists on the ideological or interpretive dimension of technology as a culture which can and must be used and consumed in a variety of ways that are not reducible to the intentions of any single source or producer, and whose meanings cannot simply be read off as evidence of faultless social reproduction. It is a knowledge, in short, which refuses to add to the “hard domination” picture of disenfranchised individuals watched over by some by some scheming panoptical intelligence. Far from being understood solely as the concrete hardware of electronically sophisticated objects, technology must be seen as a lived, interpretive practice for people in their everyday lives. To redefine the shape and form of that practice is to help create the need for new kinds of hardware and software.

One of the latter aims of this essay has been to describe and suggest a wider set of activities and social locations than is normally associated with the practice of hacking. If there is a challenge here for cultural critics, then it might be presented as the challenge to make our knowledge about technoculture into something like a hacker’s knowledge, capable of penetrating existing systems of rationality that might otherwise be seen as infallible; a hacker’s knowledge, capable of reskilling, and therefore of rewriting the cultural programs and reprogramming the social values that make room for new technologies; a hacker’s knowledge, capable also of generating new popular romances around the alternative uses of human ingenuity. If we are to take up that challenge, we cannot afford to give up what technoliteracy we have acquired in deference to the vulgar faith that tells us it is always acquired in complicity, and is thus contaminated by the poison of instrumental rationality, or because we hear, often from the same quarters, that acquired technological competence simply glorifies the inhuman work ethic. Technoliteracy, for us, is the challenge to make a historical opportunity out of a historical necessity.

Notes

1. Bryan Kocher, “A Hygiene Lesson,” Communications of the ACM, 32.1 (January 1989): 3.

2. Jon A. Rochlis and Mark W. Eichen, “With Microscope and Tweezers: The Worm from MIT’s Perspective,” Communications of the ACM, 32.6 (June 1989): 697.

3. Philip Elmer-DeWitt, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” Time (26 September 1988); 62-67.

4. Judith Williamson, “Every Virus Tells a Story: The Meaning of HIV and AIDS,” Taking Liberties: AIDS and Cultural Politics, ed. Erica Carter and Simon Watney (London: Serpent’s Tail/ICA, 1989): 69.

5. “Pulsing the system” is a well-known intelligence process in which, for example, planes deliberately fly over enemy radar installations in order to determine what frequencies they use and how they are arranged. It has been suggested that Morris Sr. and Morris Jr. worked in collusion as part of an NSA operation to pulse the Internet system, and to generate public support for a legal clampdown on hacking. See Allan Lundell, Virus! The Secret World of Computer Invaders That Breed and Destroy (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1989), 12-18. As is the case with all such conspiracy theories, no actual conspiracy need have existed for the consequences–in this case, the benefits for the intelligence community–to have been more or less the same.

6. For details of these raids, see 2600: The Hacker’s Quarterly, 7.1 (Spring 1990): 7.

7. “Hackers in Jail,” 2600: The Hacker’s Quarterly, 6.1 (Spring 1989); 22-23. The recent Secret Service action that shut down Phrack, an electronic newsletter operating out of St. Louis, confirms 2600‘s thesis: a nonelectronic publication would not be censored in the same way.

8. This is not to say that the new laws cannot themselves be used to protect hacker institutions, however. 2600 has advised operators of bulletin boards to declare them private property, thereby guaranteeing protection under the Electronic Privacy Act against unauthorized entry by the FBI.

9. Hugo Cornwall, The Hacker’s Handbook 3rd ed. (London: Century, 1988) 181, 2-6. In Britain, for the most part, hacking is still looked upon as a matter for the civil, rather than the criminal, courts.

10. Discussions about civil liberties and property rights, for example, tend to preoccupy most of the participants in the electronic forum published as “Is Computer Hacking a Crime?” in Harper’s, 280.1678 (March 1990): 45-57.

11. See Hugo Cornwall, Data Theft (London: Heinemann, 1987).

12. Bill Landreth, Out of the Inner Circle: The True Story of a Computer Intruder Capable of Cracking the Nation’s Most Secure Computer Systems (Redmond, Wash.: Tempus, Microsoft, 1989), 10.

13. The Computer Worm: A Report to the Provost of Cornell University on an Investigation Conducted by the Commission of Preliminary Enquiry (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University, 1989).

14. The Computer Worm: A Report to the Provost,8.

15. A. K. Dewdney, the “computer recreations” columnist at Scientific American, was the first to publicize the details of this game of battle programs in an article in the May 1984 issue of the magazine. In a follow-up article in March 1985, “A Core War Bestiary of Viruses, Worms, and Other Threats to Computer Memories,” Dewdney described the wide range of “software creatures” which readers’ responses had brought to light. A third column, in March 1989, was written, in an exculpatory mode, to refute any connection between his original advertisement of the Core War program and the spate of recent viruses.

16. Andrew Ross, No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1989), 212. Some would argue, however, that the ideas and values of the sixties counterculture were only fully culminated in groups like the People’s Computer Company, which ran Community Memory in Berkeley, or the Homebrew Computer Club, which pioneered personal microcomputing. So, too, the Yippies had seen the need to form YIPL, the Youth International Party Line, devoted to “anarcho- technological” projects, which put out a newsletter called TAP (alternately the Technological American Party and the Technological Assistance Program). In its depoliticised form, which eschewed the kind of destructive “dark-side” hacking advocated in its earlier incarnation, TAP was eventually the progenitor of 2600. A significant turning point, for example, was TAP‘s decision not to publish plans for the hydrogen bomb (which the Progressive did)–bombs would destroy the phone system, which the TAP phone phreaks had an enthusiastic interest in maintaining.

17. See Alice Bach’s Phreakers series, in which two teenage girls enjoy adventures through the use of computer technology. The Bully of Library Place, Parrot Woman, Double Bucky Shanghai, and Ragwars (all published by Dell, 1987-88).

18. John Markoff, “Cyberpunks Seek Thrills in Computerized Mischief,” New York Times, November 26,1988.

19. Dennis Hayes, Behind the Silicon Curtain: The Seductions of Work in a Lonely Era (Boston, South End Press, 1989), 93. One striking historical precedent for the hacking subculture, suggested to me by Carolyn Marvin, was the widespread activity of amateur or “ham” wireless operators in the first two decades of the century. Initially lionized in the press as boy-inventor heroes for their technical ingenuity and daring adventures with the ether, this white middle-class subculture was increasingly demonized by the U.S. Navy (whose signals the amateurs prankishly interfered with), which was crusading for complete military control of the airwaves in the name of national security. The amateurs lobbied with democratic rhetoric for the public’s right to access the airwaves, and although partially successful in their case against the Navy, lost out ultimately to big commercial interests when Congress approved the creation of a broadcasting monopoly after World War I in the form of RCA. See Susan J. Douglas, Inventing American Broadcasting 1899-1922 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 187-291.

20. “Sabotage,” Processed World, 11 (Summer 1984), 37-38.

21. Hayes, Behind the Silicon Curtain, 99.

22. The Amateur Computerist, available from R. Hauben, PO Box, 4344, Dearborn, MI 48126.

23. Kevin Robins and Frank Webster, “Athens Without Slaves…Or Slaves Without Athens? The Neurosis of Technology,” Science as Culture, 3 (1988): 7-53.

24. See Boris Frankel, The Post-Industrial Utopians (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987).

25. See, for example, the collection of essays edited by Vincent Mosco and Janet Wasko, The Political Economy of Information (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), and Dan Schiller, The Information Commodity (Oxford UP, forthcoming).

26. Tom Athanasiou and Staff, “Encryption and the Dossier Society,” Processed World, 16 (1986): 12-17.

27. Kevin Wilson, Technologies of Control: The New Interactive Media for the Home (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 121-25.

28. Hayes, Behind the Silicon Curtain, 63-80.

29. “Our Friend the VDT,” Processed World, 22 (Summer 1988): 24-25.

30. See Kevin Robins and Frank Webster, “Cybernetic Capitalism,” in Mosco and Wasko, 44-75.

31. Barbara Garson, The Electronic Sweatshop (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988), 244-45.

32. See Marike Finlay’s Foucauldian analysis, Powermatics: A Discursive Critique of New Technology (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987). A more conventional culturalist argument can be found in Stephen Hill, The Tragedy of Technology (London: Pluto Press, 1988).

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