Arkady Plotnitsky

Literature Program
Duke University
aplotnit@acpub.duke.edu

Lee Smolin, The Life of the Cosmos.New York: Oxford UP, 1997.

Lee Smolin’s The Life of the Cosmos (hereafter LC) offers its readers ideas, scientific and philosophical, and a vision (based on these ideas) of a possible future physics. These ideas and this vision stem from the author’s assessment of major achievements and some failures of twentieth-century physics, including its most recent developments, to which Smolin himself made significant contributions. At stake in the book is the ultimate physics. Smolin’s question is: “How to construct a theory of the whole universe?” (LC 16; emphasis added). Although, as will be seen, some metaphysics is also at stake, the theory in question is of course understood here in the sense of modern, say, post-Galilean, physics in general and, specifically, the present day quantum cosmology. According to the currently standard view, once developed (it does not exist as a theory at present) quantum cosmology would bring together, in their ultimate cosmological extensions, quantum physics and Einstein’s general relativity (his theory of gravitation), which are incompatible in their present form. Smolin’s conceptual point of departure is a critique of Newton’s absolute space and absolute time, where he follows Leibniz, who famously asked the fundamental (and ultimately in turn cosmological) question of all metaphysics–“Why are there beings rather than nothing?”–and who is the single most important philosophical figure for Smolin. Leibniz leads Smolin to the central philosophical principle and the central concept of his book, which is grounded in this same principle. The principle is that of “relationalism,” which states that the relationships between things are more decisive than things themselves (if the latter can be meaningfully spoken of apart from the relationships between them). The concept is that of the whole universe as the universe of relations. Indeed, if considered as a quantum entity, it is the universe of a total, cosmic entanglement of all its constituents and parts, which is seen by Smolin as a consequence of the so-called quantum entanglement (which I shall explain below). This self-contained entangled cosmos, the universe without the exterior, is, Smolin argues, a problem for modern physics, in particular quantum mechanics (as it is currently constituted), insofar as the latter must approach any object that it investigates from an “outside,” in this case defined by the experimental devices whose role cannot be disregarded in considering the data in question in quantum physics, in the way it can be in classical physics. Such an “outside” position would of course be definitionally unavailable in the case of the whole (self-contained) universe.

From this vantage point, Smolin advances a number of mostly hypothetical arguments and proposals. In particular, the randomness and incompleteness of modern quantum theory arise from the fact that it can only be a theory of “parts,” usually small parts of the universe, while what happens in any given locale (“part”) in fact depends on the interactions and entanglement with quantum objects elsewhere, ultimately throughout the entangled universe. The latter becomes a kind of Cosmic Internet. (I shall explain the role of human observers in this picture below.) Randomness and, from this perspective, the (a-realist) incompleteness of physical description offered by modern quantum theory are merely results of the fact that the latter can only make available to us partial pictures of this cosmic entanglement. Accordingly, there must be (at least one may hope eventually to discover it) a complete–realist and, it appears, for Smolin ultimately deterministic–theory that would describe the whole universe as a Leibnizian universe of relations. This universe has nothing exterior to it and is ultimately defined by or even consists only of relations between “parts,” or what appear as “parts” (especially as “atomistic units,” such as elementary particles) from the limited perspective of present-day physics. Now (skipping for the moment some physics, and some philosophy, accompanying the theories just described) Smolin proposes, as his second central idea, that the mathematical and conceptual structure of this fundamental theory correspond not only to the present spatial relations within the universe but to the history of total (cosmic) interactions among all particles and parts of the universe as it has evolved–to the life of cosmos as an evolutionary process, “the cosmological natural selection,” loosely modelled in Darwin’s evolutionary theory. New cosmology would reflect and must account for the history and evolution–the life–of the cosmos. Indeed this historical, evolutionary account is necessary in order to account for the present state of the cosmos–its (in turn entangled) macro- and micro-economics.

This is an enormous program, and Smolin’s aim–this must be kept in mind throughout–is not to fully enact or spell out this program, even at the hypothetical level. Rather it is to offer a broad general sketch and to conjecture certain key specific ingredients of this program on the basis of where, according to Smolin, physics stands, or falls, today. These ideas would justify both Smolin’s specific conjectures and the program itself. Accordingly, it is the status of Smolin’s assessment of present-day physics and his usage of it as the grounding of his conjectures and of the program in question that becomes subject to a critical examination (by which I mean a rigorous and meaningful engagement with an argument), which I shall attempt here. This examination is, I would argue, essential for assessing Smolin’s argument, perhaps especially for his readers in the humanities, less familiar with arcane and difficult scientific arguments under discussion in the book. Moreover, the stakes and implications of these scientific questions are immense, certainly their philosophical (in particular epistemological) implications; but at least at the limit, their cultural and political implications as well. This makes a critical examination of these questions all the more significant in the current intellectual and cultural scene, to which, as will be seen, Smolin’s argument itself is reciprocally indebted.

I find a number of Smolin’s ideas compelling and suggestive, especially the two main ideas of the book, and their interconnections within the framework proposed by Smolin–the principle of relationalism, inspired by Leibniz, and the application of the Darwinian evolutionary model to the history of the physical universe, conceived by Smolin as “cosmological natural selection.” Smolin imaginatively connects both these ideas. His readers will appreciate this elegant link (and several equally elegant physical and mathematical arguments accompanying it) and the opportunity to contemplate conceptual parallels and interactions between modern physics and biology, both prominent in recent discussions in the humanities. Indeed, both main inspirations behind these ideas, the thinking of Leibniz and Darwin, are compelling in themselves. It is also worth noting, in the second context, Smolin’s apt invocation (beyond more standard references) of Charles S. Peirce on the one hand, and Henri Bergson on the other (LC 16-17). Smolin’s appeal to Leibniz may, however, especially attract his readers in the humanities. Leibniz is emerging as an increasingly important figure in current discussions, in part in the wake of Michel Serres’s and Gilles Deleuze’s engagement with his work. Accordingly, Smolin’s readers in the humanities will find the role of his ideas in modern physics and cosmology of considerable interest, especially in both key contexts of Smolin’s argument: Leibniz’s critique of the Newtonian concepts of absolute space and absolute time, where his contribution (which anticipated some among the key ideas of Einstein’s relativity) is indeed unique, and his role as the originator of the idea of the relational universe. As will be seen, I find Smolin’s own extension of this idea to his own concept of “the whole universe” less compelling. Leibniz’s monads, his great philosophical invention, are a more complex story, too. Leibniz’s concept is richer than, and in some of its aspects resistant to, Smolin’s rendition of it, as Smolin indeed admits (LC 269-70). Leibniz’s preeminence in the history of relationalist concepts is unquestionable, however, and these concepts are significant across the contemporary intellectual landscape.

The features just described make The Life of Cosmos worthwhile reading for those interested in the most advanced and controversial developments of modern physics. Many technical aspects of these developments are difficult for a nonspecialist even in philosophical or semi-popular, let alone technical, literature. Smolin clearly wanted to make these ideas available to the general reader, and has often succeeded, albeit not without a price, as concerns a number of key nuances; although, as will be seen, there may be other reasons for this problem.

In general, there are a number of questions that Smolin’s readers in the humanities might want to keep in mind, both in assessing his argument and claims, and in contemplating the relationships among science, philosophy, and culture. Accordingly, this review is also a reflection on several philosophical issues which are involved in Smolin’s argument and which are significant for modern science and for the contemporary (and indeed long-standing) intellectual debate. As part of this reflection, I shall suggest that contemporary physics, and in particular quantum theory, allows for a view of nature, at any scale, that is epistemologically more radical than Smolin’s, primarily by virtue of questioning the very concept, central to Smolin, of the whole universe, that the universe can be thought of as a whole. This view, however, allows one to absorb and indeed to give a more radical form to relationalism itself. It also enables one to argue for the philosophical significance of the physical theories in question. The interpretation, at least the philosophical interpretation, of these theories will of course be different; and it is always a complex question to what degree such interpretive and philosophical differences affect the practice of physics. The cultural and political questions involved are still more complex matters, and they can only be minimally addressed here, even though the subject is of great importance for the contemporary scene and throughout what may be called scientific modernity, from Kepler and Galileo on. As I have suggested in more general terms earlier, however, well beyond physics itself, the difference between the two views of nature in question has far-reaching implications for the relationships between scientific theories (or the concepts of nature they advance) and other areas of knowledge or culture, whether one speaks of homologies between theories in different domains (or what they describe) or contiguities between science and culture. This is why it is important to consider and contrast these two views. These views and the epistemological configurations they entail can be, and sometimes are here, considered independently of the physical theories with which they are associated. In order to ensure that the argument remains pertinent to and consistent with these theories, a more involved engagement with them is necessary at certain junctures, although no technical knowledge of physics is required at any point. Readers interested primarily in the epistemological content and impact of my argument may skip over such “more involved” elaborations, although part of my overall argument here is that more involved engagements with substantive scientific arguments (this, once again, need not entail technical knowledge of science) is not without benefits for those in the humanities who are interested in modern science.

It may be observed first that Smolin’s presentation of quantum physics is somewhat choppy and, at points not altogether precise, and as such may lead to misconceptions on the part of readers unfamiliar with key questions involved. I find Smolin more effective on relativity and gravitation, although for a comprehensive treatment of these subjects interested readers might want to consult Kip Thorne’s excellent Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy. The constraints of Smolin’s genre may be in part responsible. Most popular expositions share this problem of losing key nuances, and the present review may not avoid it either. It is very difficult and perhaps ultimately impossible to present the theories in question in sufficiently nontechnical terms without losing some of their philosophical (let alone physical) content. Several portions of Smolin’s presentation of key established theoretical and experimental findings may be recommended over many available expositions. The problem is rather in Smolin’s usage and interpretation of these already established findings, and sometimes in his argument concerning what constitutes established findings. As will be seen, certain at best speculative and debatable, and debated, arguments are awarded the status of established fact and theories by Smolin. This affects the status of Smolin’s extrapolations from these established findings and his proposed extensions of current theories. Smolin admits that most of these extensions are speculative. Indeed–and as I said, the reader must keep this in mind throughout–the book presents a speculative proposal for a future physics. In view of the circumstances just indicated, however, some of its ideas and, hence, his overall argument may be even more speculative than Smolin makes them appear, however unintentionally.

My main questions concern Smolin’s ideas regarding the implications and extrapolations of key features of modern quantum theory, most particularly two such features that are crucial to Smolin’s argument and to the scientific and philosophical debates about quantum physics. The first is the relationships between quantum objects and measuring instruments in quantum theory. As was especially stressed by Niels Bohr, in quantum physics the influence of the interaction between measuring instruments and quantum objects under measurement cannot be disregarded, as it can be in classical physics. According to Bohr, this circumstance makes it impossible to speak meaningfully of conventional physical attributes (such as coordinates or momenta), and perhaps any attributes, of quantum objects independently of observation or measurement. This impossibility has radical epistemological consequences and leads to an understanding of the quantum world (including on the scale of the universe) that is quite different from that of Smolin, who, I argue, does not sufficiently take these consequences into account in his argument concerning quantum cosmology. Accordingly, the status of this argument requires a reexamination, which I shall undertake here.

The second feature is the so-called quantum entanglement, which raises the question of a potential nonlocality of quantum theory. Quantum entanglement is, roughly, a peculiar interdependence of or correlation between experimental data concerning certain spatially separated quantum events, as seen in the so-called Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) type of experiments (LC 246-50). These correlations may signal a nonlocality of quantum physics. Nonlocality (nonspecialist readers should bear this in mind throughout) here means specifically the presence of instantaneous connections between spatially separated physical objects or events. Such connections are forbidden by Einstein’s relativity, which is an experimentally well-confirmed theory. Some claim that this nonlocality is in fact found in the quantum world in view of the so-called Bell’s theorem and Alan Aspect’s experimental findings (LC 249-52). Smolin subscribes to this claim and to the view (sometimes seen as following from or correlative to quantum nonlocality) that the universe considered as a quantum objects constitutes a whole, all the parts of which are irreducibly entangled. This view is crucial for his cosmological argument. While, however, nonlocality of quantum theory is presented by Smolin as fully grounded in scientifically established facts and theoretical arguments rather than as a hypothesis, the argument for nonlocality is by no means indisputable and is far from accepted within the physics community.

Certainly, at least as possible and arguably more plausible is a different case, stated as follows. There is indeed confirmed evidence of strange correlations between certain (“entangled”) quantum events, or more accurately, between our predictions concerning the physical variables involved in measurements associated with such events. The nature of these correlations is enigmatic, and perhaps ultimately inconceivable–that is, it may be impossible to conceive how the observable data involved comes about. It is certainly far beyond anything one finds in classical physics and, as Bohr would have it, far beyond the reach of pictorial visualizations defining it. In this, quantum entanglement is similar (and in part correlative) to other strange features of quantum physics–the wave-particle duality, Heisenberg’s uncertainty relations, and so forth. There is, however, no uncontested experimental evidence and no established theoretical argument for the nonlocality of quantum physics. At the very least, there is much debate concerning these questions, in contrast to more or less factual claims made by Smolin, at least in the form he makes them (LC 249-54). A collection of essays, Philosophical Consequences of Quantum Theory: Reflections on Bell’s Theorem (edited by James T. Cushing and Ernan McMullen), gives one a good idea of the spectrum of different positions on and the debates around the subject, at least prior to 1990. The subsequent literature appears to confirm my point as well, and Smolin does not appear to have in mind anything beyond Cushing and McMullen’s volume. David Mermin’s essays on the subject in Boojums All the Way Through (1992) offer, arguably, the most balanced accessible account of quantum entanglement. It may be that under the quantum conditions we may meaningfully speak only of relations and correlations between quantum events, but not such events themselves taken in isolation from other events; that is, quantum theory may need to be, and may de facto be, relationalist. On this point many orthodox quantum theorists would agree with Smolin, especially since the outcome of the individual quantum events is in general not comprehended by the laws of quantum physics. (In this sense it is irreducibly statistical.) But that need not mean that quantum physics is nonlocal or that all quantum events are mutually entangled within one whole–the Cosmos–which Smolin claims, problematically, as an established fact (LC 253). Here orthodox theorists and Smolin would part company. In short, quantum entanglement need not entail nonlocality, and there is no incontrovertible argument either for it or for the total cosmic entanglement. Or, if one wants to speak in strictly relationalist terms, not all correlations are themselves correlated.

Smolin’s view of the implications of quantum entanglement appears to be close (although not identical) to that of David Bohm, the inventor of the so-called hidden variables theory, which accounts (differently from the standard quantum theory) for the quantum data responsible for the introduction of quantum mechanics in the mid-1920s. Smolin himself made contributions to the hidden variables program in the 1980s (LC 334). Bohm and his coworkers developed several versions of this theory, all nonlocal. Bohm’s arguably most famous exposition, containing a rather grand philosophical vision (and even some quasi-postmodern resonances), is found in his Wholeness and the Implicate Order. Smolin even argues that Bohmian “additional [hidden?] variables” are a necessary consequence of quantum entanglement (LC 253). Bohm also invokes Leibniz, who is in general a prominent figure among the adherents of Bohm’s theory. The proximity to Bohm is also reflected in Smolin’s realist and causal view of the quantum world. This view entails both physical reality of the classical type (i.e., quantum objects are claimed to possess physical attributes existing independently of observation and measurement) and the underlying global causality and determinism. Both features appear to be germane to Smolin’s picture of the wholeness of the cosmos, bringing it into a conflict with quantum theory in its standard or orthodox interpretation. Smolin is of course aware of this conflict, which is indeed a crucial part of his rationale for his own proposal. The main reason for his argument is that, according to Smolin, the standard quantum mechanics is incompatible with the possibility of the quantum theory of the universe as a whole. This point itself is correct. As will be seen, however, it may entail an argument different from Smolin’s. My point at the moment is Smolin’s claim that key ingredients of his picture of the universe are grounded in the currently established experimental facts and theoretical explanations. This claim is, I argue, problematic. Accordingly, insofar as Smolin’s speculations are shaped by this claim, their status, even as speculations, becomes less convincing and more questionable than it would be otherwise.

This is not to deny the potential significance, in quantum physics or elsewhere, of the relationalist ideas. There is nothing wrong with relationalism as such, and Smolin may well be right to insist on it. As will be seen, contrary to Smolin’s contention, quantum theory as currently constituted allows and perhaps entails a form of relationalism more radical than Smolin’s. There has been significant recent work stressing relations and correlations (rather than relata or correlata) in quantum physics, for example, by Mermin, whose framework, as presented in “What Quantum Mechanics is Trying to Tell Us?”, is based on quantum entanglement. However, while arguing, radically, that “correlations without correlata,” should be seen as the only proper subject of quantum theory, Mermin does not claim the nonlocality of the latter. Nor does his theory aspire to determinism; on the contrary, it sees quantum probabilities as irreducible and central to any future framework. He credits, among others, Smolin and Carlo Rovelli, who in turn figures significantly in Smolin’s book. Most of this work, however, for example by Smolin and Rovelli, aspires to a classical (causal and realist) view close to that of Einstein, who faulted quantum mechanics and its radical epistemology on both counts–realism and causality.

My point instead is that contemporary physics allows for a view of nature at any scale that is very different and epistemologically more radical than that of Smolin’s proposal. This view can be stated as follows. One can think of the quantum world in terms of a combination or, one might say with Bohr and perhaps in his sense, complementarity of relationalism and (in Smolin’s terms) “atomism”–at least a certain atomism in which the only “atoms” are relations. These relations, however, are not always necessarily connected to each other. Accordingly, one must think in terms of both connections (entanglements) and disconnections (separations) between physical objects or events. These can be enacted either on local levels or on the level of the universe, no longer composable into a whole. Such a cosmos or, to use Joyce’s coinage, “chaosmos” (not chaos), would thus be often multiply entangled, but also just as often disentangled. This chaosmos would have connected (sometimes irreducible entangled) and disconnected (sometimes in turn irreducibly disconnected) regions. Some of such networks of connections would extend across any conceivable region and some would be strictly localized, especially if one thinks of this world as allowing only for networks and correlations, rather than isolated elements. The “picture” (and the unpicturability) here proposed would not, however, entail instantaneous connections between distant objects or events, or other violations of currently established features of the physical world, relativistic or quantum. This chaosmic un-universe is entangled in the sense of quantum correlations, but, in contrast to Smolin’s or Bohm’s universe, is first local, and second neither causal nor classically realist, in accordance with quantum physics as currently constituted. Accordingly, it would also disallow a total, all-encompassing nonlocal network or/as entanglement of the type Smolin envisions–either in practice (in the sense of difficulty or even impossibility for us to access this network) or in principle (insofar as such a total network could be postulated as existing while ultimately inaccessible in its totality to any given observer). It is the “in principle” that is most crucial here, although Smolin appears to be more optimistic than most sharing his views as concerns the “in practice” as well.

Nor are quantum objects in this chaosmos endowed with conventional, and perhaps any conceivable, physical attributes–that is, attributes ascribable as independent of observation or measurement. In this sense, following Bohr, as I stressed from the outset and as I shall further discuss presently, one always needs to be “outside” of quantum objects (whatever their scale) in order to investigate them or, more accurately, the effects of their interaction with observational devices, in terms of physics. Accordingly, the physical world just described is more radically “participatory” or “reciprocal” and, as such, more radically “relationalist” than Smolin’s cosmos–defined by partial access, on the part of different observers, to the same whole, as an independently existing world of quantum objects endowed with determinate, even if ultimately inaccessible, physical properties. The difference between these two forms of relationalism is subtle and is sometimes overlooked, but it is epistemologically decisive.

Most crucially, according to the alternative view just presented, there would not be a universe that can ever be seen as a whole, or, conceivably, as otherwise fully figurable, especially if considered as a quantum object, although even the classical (nonquantum) relativistic cosmology poses certain problems for Smolin’s view. For, once the universe is considered as a quantum object, our claims concerning it become as limited as in the case of any quantum system–by virtue of the fact that observation and measurement of quantum objects irreducibly depend on the observational technology involved, a fact, Bohr argues, correlative to uncertainty relations. At the same time, however, quantum interconnections operative or producing effects on any scale (but always compatible with locality) are allowed. Nor does this view prevent unification programs, for example in considering the early universe (where such programs are especially important). It may, of course, change the meaning of (some among) such programs and possibly the character of the physical theories involved in them. A different program for physics may ultimately be at stake.

Smolin never questions the concept of the universe as a whole (which, again, should not be confused with the scale, however large, of physics). Instead Smolin uncritically accepts this concept as a given and as a fundamental ground for his argument against the compatibility of quantum theory, as currently constituted, with quantum cosmology. Smolin claims as the main reason for this argument, jointly, the irreducible role of measurement in quantum physics and quantum entanglement, both defining features of modern-day quantum theory. However, the first may be taken into account differently, namely by questioning the very possibility of considering the universe as an (absolute) whole, and the second need not entail Smolin’s view, at least as it figures in the EPR experiment, Bell’s theorem, and Alan Aspect’s experiments. Smolin discusses these subjects in Chapter 19, “The Meaning of the Quantum” (LC 240-54), but gives them an interpretation which can and in my view must be questioned. Following Leibniz and Einstein, Smolin rightly criticizes the Newtonian concepts of absolute space and absolute time as the absolute, universal background of (and as independent of) physical events. This concept of “background” is related to but should not be identified with Smolin’s more general, and in my view somewhat confusing, usage of “the background” in referring to an exterior of a physical system under description, which notion indeed cannot apply to the universe as a self-contained whole (LC 13-14). Part of my argument is that, in contrast to his Leibnizian critique of Newtonianism, Smolin’s critique of “the background” as the exterior in quantum physics ultimately fails, and the very term “background” is hardly useful and even misleading in the latter case. Beyond its philosophical incongruities, noted already by Leibniz, the Newtonian concepts of absolute space and absolute time are incompatible with the constancy of the speed of light in a vacuum (the absolute limit of propagation of all physical signals and influences) and its independence of the speed of the source or the observer, and, hence, with Einstein’s relativity, which accounts for these experimental facts. While, however, free of this Newtonian problem, Smolin’s own view entails a total universe as the universe of relations, whose nonlocality would ultimately be in turn in conflict with Einstein’s relativity.

The potential presence, within Smolin’s cosmology, of other universes “outside” (and inaccessible to) our universe, while an interesting question in itself, does not change his view, as it could, since Smolin does not consider the differences that the presence of these other universes or black holes, to begin with, make for the universe we live in. Nor does he consider how black holes, as singularities (i.e., points at which no conceivable physical description applies) may “rupture” the wholeness of our universe from within. Smolin only uses this picture for his elegant statistical account of the evolution of the universe and of the emergence of the particular value of certain fundamental parameters of physics. The physics and (in mathematical terms) topology of spaces punctured by black holes are, however, where the possibility of the universe as a whole may be disrupted even at the level of general relativity as a classical theory–that is, without taking the quantum aspects of black holes into account. (Ultimately we must do so, of course.)

Smolin’s conception of the (self-contained) whole universe is, I argue, a reinstatement of a certain form of Newtonianism, via Leibniz and Einstein; and here Leibniz or Einstein (or ultimately Smolin) and Newton are not quite as far apart as they are in their views of the particular nature or structure of the world. Smolin’s program, again following Einstein (and in juxtaposition to Bohr), is of course also Newtonian in its realist (and causal) aspirations, in particular in his at least implicit assumption that nature and at the limit the universe themselves (rather than only the outcomes of certain interactions with them, such as those in quantum measurement) are at least in principle governed by mathematically formalizable laws. On the other hand, Leibniz’s own relationalism may be seen as close, along certain lines, to Bohr’s participatory or reciprocal relationalism as described above (i.e., as predicated on the irreducible relationships between quantum objects and measuring instruments, while without claiming an absolute wholeness of the universe), as it is along other lines to Smolin’s relationalism (predicated on the existence of quantum objects possessing independent physical attributes and the entangled wholeness of the cosmos). Of course in both (or all three) cases, we still observe the universe in a certain sense from within. This point, however, does not change the epistemological differences in question, since at stake is what is claimed concerning the universe in each of these cases. Although there are, of course, no quantum objects in the modern sense in Leibniz, Leibniz’s monads may be seen as representing the Bohrian or proto-Bohrian relationships, while the world is conceived by Leibniz as a whole, as in Smolin. (The status of the attributes of the constitutive parts of this whole in Leibniz is a more complex matter, which I shall leave aside here.) While, that is, there is an all-encompassing wholeness of the cosmos in Leibniz, the nature of the encompassment is different from that envisioned by Smolin. It is closer to Bohr’s participatory or reciprocal physics. The latter, however, against Leibniz’s and Smolin’s pictures alike, prevents us from ascribing an absolute wholeness to the universe, once it is considered as a quantum object. By contrast, Smolin’s quantum cosmos is a relational network totality–a global cosmic Internet, a “World Wide Web” with, at least in principle, instantaneous connections between all of its points and “democratic,” if partial access to the “subscribers”–partial observers of the whole universe, conceived of as a quantum object, here as an entangled quantum network. Chapters 21 and 22, entitled, revealingly, “A Pluralistic Universe” and “The World as a Network of Relations” spell out these concepts.

The Internet, the World Wide Web, and democracy are not accidental or arbitrary metaphors here, although one should not of course fully ground Smolin’s ideas in them, because some of these connections or metaphors also proceed in the opposite direction, or condition each other reciprocally. The cosmic Internet of modern physics (let alone Leibniz’s) has obviously been in place well before the World Wide Web, while the latter, with its (for argument’s sake) “instantaneous” connections and access to the subscribers, appears to shape some aspects of Smolin’s particular vision of the cosmos. Smolin not only acknowledges that the contemporary–postmodern and by now post-postmodern–culture conditions his views, just as their culture conditioned those of Newton or Leibniz, but also directly draws some of his inspirations and ideas from this culture. (Some of these connections are explained in “Notes and Acknowledgments,” LC 324-36). Most of the elements of postmodern culture inspiring Smolin are utopian in nature. They also correspond to his own ethical and political vision, especially pronounced in his “Epilogue,” but apparent throughout. These utopian elements appear to be transferred to and shape his vision of the cosmos, in part by way of related metaphors, such as the contemporary city, and specifically New York. The city metaphor is, however, also due to Leibniz’s metaphorization of monads which Smolin cites as his epigraph to the book: “Just as the same city viewed from different directions appears entirely different and, as it were, multiplied perspectively, in just the same way it happens that, because of the infinite multitude of simple substances, there are, as it were, just as many different universes, which are nevertheless, only perspectives on a single one” (The Monadology #57). The concepts or metaphors of life and evolution play a different role in Smolin’s argument, except to the degree that these concepts are in turn read by Smolin in terms of the utopian models just mentioned. Such concepts as the city or the Internet can obviously be differently configured and may be in turn differently conditioned by (or of course condition) physical ideas, more or less established or more or less hypothetical, such as that of the global cosmic entanglement and/as nonlocality, as in Smolin, or, conversely, by the radical Bohrian epistemology suggested here. These differences in conception and particularly in epistemology may also change our understanding of how such entities as the city and the Internet, or democracy, can, in principle, function and how they, in practice, do or are likely to function. Smolin’s is a metaphysical-idealist vision of the universe as the Leibnizian relationalist wholeness, which, as we have seen, is not to say that it is the same as that of Leibniz himself. Smolin’s is, philosophically, a classical view, in contrast to, say, Bohr’s quantum epistemology (Bohr, it is true, does not deal with cosmological issues) or those of such thinkers as Nietzsche, Bataille, Levinas, and Derrida, or if one wants to proceed via Leibniz, Deleuze. It is of some interest that the authors in the humanities to whom Smolin refers and who inspire him, such as Drucilla Cornell and Roberto M. Ungar, also displace the authors just mentioned and such earlier figures as Hegel into a similarly utopian metaphysical-idealist register. I use the term “idealist” in the sense of the metaphysical structure of one’s theory. This idealism can also be materialist–the idealism of unproblematized materiality, which in Smolin’s book assumes the shape of the wholeness of the (material) universe.

It is clear why Leibniz arrives at a similar (although, again, not identical) type of idealism. The reason is his theological vision, for which monads are crucial, but to which they in turn give extraordinary complexity and richness, brought into the foreground in Serres’s and Deleuze’s work. This work also suggests strong conceptual affinities between the structure of monads–which, we recall, have no windows, but have mirrors, are full of mirrors, and are themselves mirrors–and the quantum-mechanical conceptions of light itself and the participatory relationalism of Bohr’s interpretation, as considered earlier. There remains much to be said in this context about the relationships between “relationalism” and “rationalism” in Leibniz; his sense, mathematical and philosophical, of “ratio” as proportion; or his idea of “preestablished harmony” (which concept is also that of proportion), but these questions cannot be addressed here.

That Smolin’s sense of the contemporary (and some earlier) philosophical ideas and intellectual landscapes is not comprehensive and is at points misconceived does not matter much here, and Smolin acknowledges that his knowledge of these ideas is somewhat superficial. Nor is his own intellectual, cultural, or political sense of the modern and postmodern world–that is, our world–especially significant here either. What matters is his view of the physical world, which is conditioned accordingly, as he admits. It matters especially if physics as such (i.e., the currently available experimental data and experimentally confirmed theories) does not offer any more support for his program than for others. Indeed, as I argue, quantum physics may compel one to take a different and epistemologically more radical view of the cosmos, as the chaosmos, and its life. Such views may, of course, be in turn conditioned by modern culture and shaped by its concepts (albeit different from those shaping Smolin’s view). Let me stress that my point is not to deny the significance of global concepts, the necessity of investigating large-scale relations, and so forth. In question is a different (in this case non-totalizing) repositioning of large-scale configurations, such as those on the scale of the “universe,” and it is conceivable that the latter can be effectively approached only through such a repositioning.

The core of the problem is the character of the universe considered as a quantum object. Smolin recognizes and considers some among the complexities involved, to which his argument is a response. However, he also misses or disregards several key points, in particular as concerns the relationships between quantum objects and measuring instruments in the standard quantum theory, where, in contrast to classical physics, the role of these relationships cannot, as we have seen, be disregarded in describing the observable phenomena in question in quantum physics. At the same time, the presence of the two counterparts involved entails two incompatible theoretical descriptions. Measuring instruments are, as macro-objects, described by means of classical physics, although their ultimate constitution is quantum and although they are capable of quantum interaction with quantum objects. It is the latter that makes possible the observation and measurement of quantum objects, or what is inferred as such on the basis of the results of such measurements–physical marks, “traces,” left on certain parts of measuring instruments, such as photographic plates. These marks themselves are describable by means of classical physics. Their emergence, however, is unexplainable by these means. One needs quantum mechanics, which is irreducibly nonclassical, to explain this emergence. It follows, however, that we can only approach quantum objects, and indeed infer their existence, from an outside, insofar as we are linked to these objects by means of measuring instruments–whatever quantum object is in question. That would include the universe, if it is considered as a quantum object (that is, while immense, as microscopically constituted), if we could observe all of it from an outside. This of course we cannot do. There is no “outside” available to us which would enable us to approach the quantum universe in the way we approach such objects in quantum physics as just described. This point is central for Smolin’s argument, since he sees, correctly, the situation of quantum measurement as defining quantum physics in its present state (LC 260-62). Accordingly, he sees it as fundamentally inhibiting our access to the quantum-entangled universe as a whole. The reason for this inhibition is the one just given: we cannot be outside the whole universe, which would be required for a quantum account of it; we can only be outside a portion of it, which we can consider as a quantum object. This is, of course, correct. Smolin’s critique of the concept of the single privileged outside observer is to the point as well. There can indeed be only particular outside observers, none of whom can have an absolutely privileged observational position. None of this, however, need entail the rest of Smolin’s argument. Quantum theory in its present form may well be incompatible with a quantum theory of the whole universe. This point is not in question. The question is which one of these incompatibles is to be rethought or given up.

It would appear that once two conceptual structures are incompatible one needs to investigate both, which here would involve questioning the concept of the whole universe. Not so to Smolin. Even though he admits that “everything [he] say[s] [at this point] must be [considered as] controversial, as there is no settled opinion about how to extend quantum theory to cosmology” (LC 261; emphasis added), he never considers the possibility that the concept of the whole universe itself may be questionable. Instead, he sees it as more reasonable to suppose that quantum mechanics is an approximation of another theory where the (whole) universe can be considered as quantum in and by itself, while particular observers would have partial access to it (LC 262). He considers several proposals and finally turns to his Leibnizian idea of the total universe, in particular (this is what makes his view necessary, Smolin argues) as a quantum object–a total but “pluralistic universe,” partially knowable to various observers, who as outside observers, would remain subject to the constraints equivalent to those of standard quantum theory (LC 267-72). Quantum entanglement, seen as entailing nonlocality, is Smolin’s other key rationale here (LC 262). As I have indicated at the outset, however, quantum entanglement is accountable, without entailing nonlocality, by means of the standard quantum mechanics. That includes the irreducible and constitutive role of the relationships or, one might in turn say, “entanglement” between quantum objects and the means of observation. This “entanglement” should not be confused with quantum entanglement, although both can be related and may even be mutually constitutive in quantum physics, as Bohr shows, and as Bohm realized, which in part led him to his hidden variables quantum mechanics. Smolin touches upon this point, but in a rather confused and not altogether accurate statement (LC 253).

In view of the considerations given here, however, quantum mechanics allows, perhaps even compels us to turn the question of the mutual compatibility of quantum physics and the concept of the whole universe around. The circumstances of quantum measurement may make impossible any ultimate claim concerning any attributes (certainly all conventional physical attributes) of quantum objects themselves, including the attributes designated as “wholeness” and “object,” or, once everything is quantum, “inside” or “outside,” which, too, may be fundamentally classical attributes. There may be nothing that we may be able to say about them in themselves, but only about certain effects of their interactions with our instruments, which may be seen as corresponding to various parts, at most halves, of the classical physical description. This is what the standard quantum theory describes. According to Bohr, not even a single conventional physical variable of any kind (such as position or momentum) can be meaningfully or unambiguously ascribed to a quantum object itself, outside an interaction with the classicaly configured “exterior” measuring instruments. In such an interaction only one of the two complementary variables, either position or momentum, can be unambiguously associated with a quantum object–still with caution and, in all rigor, only symbolically, by analogy with classical physics. In practice, all we can ascertain concerns measurement of corresponding classical variables describing the macroscopic behavior of measuring instruments, which and only which make any observation of anything microscopic–quantum–possible. We can, thus, ascertain certain effects of quantum objects (for example, the quantum universe), resulting from their interaction with measuring instruments. We cannot, however, make ultimate claims about quantum objects and, accordingly, the universe as quantum, such as that the latter can be constituted as the whole universe, or, conversely, that there are irreducible and distinct multiple parallel universes, in the manner of Hugh Everett’s “many-world interpretation” of quantum mechanics, of which Smolin is suspicious as well (LC 263-65).

The above considerations do not mean that there is nothing we can say about the universe. The situation is the same as in the case of other quantum objects. We can say a great many things about quantum systems, certainly their effects. We must, however, be extremely careful as to what we can or cannot meaningfully say and about what. Nor are the above considerations incompatible with cosmological research, including quantum cosmology. The shape of such theories may be affected, of course; and I would argue that, in terms of their physical and mathematical content, some new theories discussed by Smolin towards the end of the book, such as topological quantum field theories, may be developed without the concept of the whole universe.

Once the universe is considered as classical, the situation changes, and, according to the standard quantum theory, we can only see (classical) traces of a quantum universe, as of any quantum object. In classical physics the question does not arise in this form, since observational or measuring instruments, such as telescopes, do not irreducibly affect the data, in the way they do in quantum physics, and hence, their impact, although present, may be disregarded or compensated for. The universe may even appear, and may have been originally conceived of, in terms of wholeness, because we see it classically (although, as I said, some aspects of the universe, such as black holes, suggest that this wholeness may be ruptured even at the classical level). We do not know what we would see–wholeness, cosmos, chaos, chaosmos (perhaps none of these)–if we could see the universe as quantum. We cannot ascertain any properties of it, on whatever scale, or even claim that it has independent properties as properties, outside their interaction with observational technology (beginning with the human eye), especially properties conceived on the model of classical physics. At the same time, it is this technology that enables us to observe any effects of quantum objects and to argue that we can infer their existence from these effects.

Certainly–this is the meaning of the complementarity of phenomena in quantum physics, according to Bohr–“partial” pictures or more accurately, pictures arising from always mutually exclusive experimental arrangements, do not imply, and in fact prohibit, the classical-like wholeness behind them, whether this wholeness is seen as fully or partially accessible, or inaccessible. These pictures are “partial” only in the sense that they correspond to parts–at most halves–of the classical physical description, and not in the sense of the existence of some wholeness behind complementary phenomena.

Indeed, it can be argued, in fact by using the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen experiment, quantum entanglement, and Bell’s theorem, that if such a complete classical-like picture had existed behind partial complementary pictures, it would contradict the data either of quantum physics itself or of relativity. Quantum entanglement not only does not change anything here but is germane to this view, as Bohr realized (as early as 1935) in his reply to Einstein’s argument concerning the “problems” of quantum mechanics. Bohr’s view and, accordingly, the view delineated here are not positivist. These and other “strange” aspects of quantum mechanics tell us that something that we can know nothing about–and the very fact that we cannot know anything about it–can make a difference. If we could, in principle (not only in practice) know or indeed define simultaneously both a position and a momentum for a given particle (which we cannot do because of uncertainty relations), the “numbers”–correlations between events–would not come out right. They would be in conflict with what we observe, unless relativity is violated, as in Bohm’s hidden variables theories. This is what Bell’s theorem tells us.

This argument does not imply that “quantum objects,” or, more accurately, something that enables us to infer something like quantum objects (and perhaps the very concept and attribute of “existence”) from the data generated by measuring instruments, do not exist if, say, we are not present to observe the “world” (if this or indeed any term can be applicable in our absence). In this sense, contrary to Smolin’s argument, a comprehensive and, in a certain sense, “objective” description of “the world as it would be independently of whether we were here or not” does not in fact conflict either with “the results of [quantum] experiments” or with quantum theory as currently constituted, although a “complete description of the world” may indeed not be possible in the way Smolin understands it (ultimately on the classical model, however non-Newtonian), especially as a description of a world seen as complete, as an absolute whole (LC 253; emphasis added).

In view of these considerations I am compelled to take issue with some of Smolin’s assertions concerning experimental and theoretical “facts” about quantum physics as currently available. According to Smolin:

Quantum mechanics is not a local theory. As I have described it, it is radically non-local. A very interesting question for those of us who feel uncomfortable with the quantum theory, is whether [if we accept experimental data it accounts for] it could be replaced by any theory that is local.... The answer is no. We know this because of a remarkable piece of work by an Irish physicist named John Bell in the early 1960s. What Bell did was to find a way to test directly the principle of locality. What Bell found was that in certain cases... the prediction of any local theory [compatible with statistical predictions of quantum mechanics] must satisfy certain constraints, which we call the Bell inequalities. Quantum theory, being non-local, must violate these conditions. (LC 251; emphasis added)

This statement requires much qualification and quite a few corrections. First of all, this is not quite what Bell found. What Bell found, at least in his original findings here referred to, is that no local realist theory (a type that includes classical physics) and in particular no hidden variable theory, can be compatible with the statistical predictions of standard quantum mechanics (say, as described by Schrödinger’s equation). According to Bell’s theorem nonlocality would follow only if we had a theory of quantum data like classical physics, a theory allowing for determinable independent properties–overt, such as positions and momenta of the particles involved, or hidden, as in Bohm, which would fully determine the behavior of quantum systems in the way classical physics does; even if we could not fully trace this behavior in practice. Actually, in certain versions of the theory, nonlocality (i.e., a violation of relativity) would not be observable in practice. It is, however, a structural, built-in feature of the theory. It automatically follows from its equations. For Bohm the impossibility of definable independent properties (according to him, found in quantum physics) would entail the so-called hidden variables or parameters which are perhaps (at this point or ever) unobservable in practice, but which make the behavior of quantum systems themselves, in principle, classical-like. Such a theory would be similar to classical statistical physics, where statistics is the result of our insufficient knowledge concerning a system that in itself behaves classically. By contrast, as stressed by Bohr (whose formulations I am adopting here), in quantum mechanics the appeal to statistical considerations has nothing to do with our ignorance of the values of certain physical quantities determining the behavior of quantum systems. It has to do with the impossibility of defining such quantities in an unambiguous way (in part in view of the irreducible role of measuring instruments, as considered earlier), and hence with the fundamental inability of the classical frame of concepts to comprise the peculiar features of quantum mechanics.

The argument of Bohr’s reply to Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen is based on these considerations. This argument is misread by Smolin in terms of relationality (in his, rather than in Bohr’s sense, as considered earlier) and, it appears, implicitly nonlocality, to which Bohr never subscribed. Bohr’s argument is actually based on the impossibility of unambiguously assigning independent physical properties to quantum objects in the manner of classical physics, on which EPR based their argument. The main reason for Smolin’s misreading is that he disregards the role of measuring instruments in Bohr’s argument, which is decisive and which is stressed by Bohr in the article and in all his writings on quantum physics. This omission, although not uncommon, is curious in this case, since, as we have seen, Smolin realizes the general significance of this role, which is for him negative, of course. Bohr also argues that the quantum-mechanical description is complete, within its scope–as complete as it can be, given quantum data.

These considerations are decisive. They establish that quantum mechanics, which is neither causal nor realist, is local (or at least, cannot be claimed to be nonlocal), and that it cannot be supplemented by a causal or realist theory, without violating locality, and hence relativity. This is also what Alan Aspect’s experiments demonstrated, rather than that quantum theory in its present form is nonlocal, as Smolin contends without any hesitation or qualification, as many of his statements show: any theory of quantum data “must be explicitly and radically non-local” (LC 252); there exists an “experimental disproof of the principle of locality” (253); and “locality is not a principle that is respected by nature” (253). None of these statements can be accepted as referring to established facts. It is true that there have been attempts (mostly motivated by the fact that quantum mechanics violates Bell’s inequalities) to derive nonlocality from within quantum theory as such–without any supplementary features–and that there were some claims for the success. In this sense, Smolin’s formulation cited above gets the case backwards. It is not that “quantum theory, being non-local, must violate these conditions” (the Bell inequalities), as he says, which is simply not the case. Rather, since quantum theory also violates these conditions, it may be, and is by some, suspected to be non-local. One would be hard pressed, however, to see these attempts as conclusive or accepted by the physics community, as, again, a number of essays in Cushing and McMullen’s volume and many other works would show. Certainly Bell’s theorem in itself is insufficient for this claim, and Bell himself never thought so, as his articles on the subject, now assembled in Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics, would testify in direct conflict with Smolin’s claim. Smolin does not differentiate between nuances of nonlocality or entanglement, for example, whether the violation of relativity is seen by him as observable or not (on which issue the reader may, again, consult Cushing and McMullen’s volume). He also does not consider nuances introduced by different Bell-type theorems (there are several), which would complicate the situation but would leave the present argument in place. Nor does Smolin really explain how nonlocality in certain quantum situations, assuming that it exists, leads to the total cosmic nonlocal entanglement. In any event, Smolin’s formulations cited above leave no doubt that he sees nonlocality (entailing an instantaneous connections between distant events and, hence, violating relativity) as an established experimental and theoretical fact of quantum physics. This view, if it can be maintained at all, is far from being undisputed, let alone accepted. Accordingly, Smolin’s contentions, which serve as major and perhaps uniquely significant grounds for his further hypothetical arguments become at best themselves hypothetical. At the very least, many qualifications not offered and, it appears, not entertained by Smolin are necessary. I would strongly contend, however, that there is no proof of and no widely accepted argument for the nonlocality of quantum physics.

While, then, from the perspective of all present day physics, we are always within our universe, in the context of quantum physics, we are always, irreducibly “outside” whatever we can observe, big or small (quantum-ness is not a matter of actual size). Yet, simultaneously, it is never possible in quantum mechanics, in contrast to classical physics, to isolate what we observe from the means of observation (no quantum object can be defined otherwise). It is this joint point, at least in its full significance, that Smolin misses. One can see quantum physics as suggesting something quite different from Smolin’s entangled quantum universe. It is this: however global the scale of quantum “events” may be (and some of them are global), quantum physics disallows claims concerning at least the ultimate (and perhaps any) structure of quantum objects themselves, whatever their scale, from photons to the universe. What matters is their quantum nature, defined by ultimate (micro) constituents of matter and their interactions at various scales. From this point of view, the notion of the ultimate structure of the “universe” becomes suspect. “The universe as a whole,” Newtonian or relational, or “the universe itself,” are all claims of that type. Indeed, as I said, ultimately even the classical general relativity (that is, leaving quantum gravity aside) may entail the ultimate unfigurability of the universe. The latter itself becomes a misguided term under these conditions, as Maurice Blanchot observes, as he invokes the idea of the unfigurable universe and argues rightly that “nothing permits one to exclude the hypothesis of an unfigurable Universe (a term henceforth deceptive); a Universe escaping every optical exigency and also escaping consideration of the whole” (The Infinite Conversation 350). This is not to say (by way of a reverse ultimate claim) that the universe is a chaos, assuming that we have, or even can have, such a concept.

The significance of the considerations just offered is twofold. First, they affect Smolin’s claim concerning the grounding of his speculations, making some of this grounding itself at best hypothetical, which affects the status of his speculative arguments and his overall program. Secondly, certain key areas and debates of modern physics are not presented by Smolin so as to give his readers, especially nonspecialists, an adequate picture. These omissions may lead to much misunderstanding on the part of such readers. It may also lead to questionable extrapolations of modern physics in the humanities, which are often criticized by the members of the scientific community. These critics are not always wrong, but they also do not always stop to consider that one of the sources of these problems is the presentation of modern science in popular writings by scientists themselves. It is true that in Smolin’s book these problems occur at some of the most subtle and complex junctures of modern physics. But then such junctures are also where the most careful and qualified accounts are especially necessary. At stake is an extraordinarily complex picture–and unpicturability–of the physical world, and of the world of physics. In any event, the humanists and other nonscientists should not take physicists’ accounts of physics for granted, especially if they want to use them in their own work. This is not to deny physicists’ abilities, often remarkable, to explain their work and ideas, and, as I said, Smolin often does an excellent job in doing this as well. It may well be, however, that the best reading of Smolin’s book, and the one would do most justice to both its achievements and the questions it poses, is a skeptical (not distrustful) reading–a reading that contests every argument and explores alternatives at each point. This approach entails much and not always easy reading in different areas and genres. The rewards, however, may be considerable. One can certainly learn quite a bit about both the life of cosmos and the life of physics.

Works Cited

• Bell, John S. Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987.
• Blanchot, Maurice. The Infinite Conversation. Trans. Susan Hanson. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993.
• Bohm, David. Wholeness and the Implicate Order. London: Routledge, 1980.
• Bohr, Niels. “Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality be Considered Complete?” Quantum Theory and Measurement. Eds. John A. Wheeler and Wojciech H. Zurek. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983. 145-51.
• —. Philosophical Writings of Niels Bohr. 3 vols. Woodbridge, Conn.: Ox Bow Press, 1987.
• Cushing, James. T. and Ernan McMullen. Philosophical Consequences of Quantum Theory: Reflections on Bell’s Theorem. Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 1989.
• Deleuze, Gilles. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Trans. Tom Conley. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988.
• Einstein, Albert, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen. “Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality be Considered Complete?” Quantum Theory and Measurement. Eds. John A. Wheeler and Wojciech H. Zurek. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983. 138-43.
• Leibniz, Gottfried, W. The Monadology. Leibniz: Philosophical Writings. Ed. G.H.R. Parkinson. London: Dent, 1973. 175-194.
• Mermin, N. David. Boojums All the Way Through: Communicating Science in a Prosaic Age. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.
• —. “What Is Quantum Mechanics Trying to Tell Us?” Notes for a lecture at the Symposium in Honor of Edward M. Purcell, Harvard University, October 18, 1997.
• Plotnitsky, Arkady. “Complementarity, Idealization, and the Limits of the Classical Conceptions of Reality.” Mathematics, Science and Postclassical Theory. Eds. Barbara H. Smith and Arkady Plotnitsky. Durham: Duke UP, 1997. 134-72.
• —. “Landscapes of Sibylline Strangeness: Complementarity, Quantum Measurement and Classical Physics.” Metadebates. Eds. G.C. Cornelis, J.P. Van Bendegem, and D. Aerts. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer, 1998 (forthcoming).
• Serres, Michel. Le système de Leibniz. 2 vols. Paris: Seuil, 1982.
• Thorne, Kip. Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy. New York: Oxford UP, 1994.

Scott Michaelsen

Department of English
Michigan State University
smichael@pilot.msu.edu

José David Saldívar, Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies.Berkeley: U of California P, 1997.

It was not colorless, nor was it of any one uniform color--presenting to the eye, as it flowed, every possible shade of purple, like the hues of a changeable silk... we perceived that the whole mass of liquid was made up of a number of distinct veins, each of a distinct hue; that these veins did not commingle; and that their cohesion was perfect in regard to their own particles among themselves, and imperfect in regard to neighboring veins. Upon passing the blade of the knife athwart the veins, the water closed over it immediately, as with us, and also, in withdrawing it, all traces of the passage of the knife were instantly obliterated. If, however, the blade was passed down accurately between the two veins, a perfect separation was effected, which the power of cohesion did not immediately rectify. The phenomena of this water formed the first definite link in that vast chain of apparent miracles with which I was destined to be at length encircled. (Poe 194)

This miracle, which takes place at the end of Chapter 18 of Edgar Allan Poe’s racial tale, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), is perhaps the nineteenth-century analogue for the miracle now taking place in our midst, in the realm of post-colonial criticism. It is the miracle of hybridity. Here is the potentially utopian, boundary-shattering figure of the hybrid: that which is a conjunction of the many makes its appearance as a changing flow, as a swirl of shifting color, such that it is neither “colorless” nor “uniform,” such that it embodies “every possible shade” without being any particular shade. And here is the miracle: that which is so conjoined can always be reduced to “a perfect separation.” Each element of the hybrid can be cut “athwart”; that is, the “veins” of the multiple elements can be cut open, exposed to one another, as indeed they must have been innumerable times before, and yet the singular veins always maintain their essential characters. And the individual veins can be exposed and analyzed in all of their singularity by simply passing a blade “between” them. Which is to suggest, as Poe’s extended metaphor certainly does, that the appearance or the effect of hybridity is phantasmatic–a trick of light and motion which, finally, is founded upon strands each of which is an unchanging essence. This episode in Pym, then, can be read as a polygenist response to the seemingly incontrovertible, visible fact of racial intermixture. The integrity of the individual strands puts the lie to any claim regarding hybridity.

Poe’s brief text, perhaps, should serve as a warning to certain forms of post-colonial criticism concerned with hybridization. The warning takes this complex form: hybridity cannot really be hybridity–cannot really be a mixture and confusion of categories, types, bodies–if it is still possible, in the end, to identify the individual elements that compose the hybrid. If the hybrid were truly a hybrid, it would subvert the possibility of locating its individual parts, of producing an analytic which might chart the contributions of origin. A hybrid which can be disarticulated, then, is a compound without mixture, not a hybrid. When recent post-colonial criticism both marks approvingly the existence of hybrids, as a sign of utopian powers and potentialities, and determines the individual elements which make up the hybrid, it is in danger of fully recapitulating the logic of nineteenth-century racial studies. It falls, in short, into Poe’s trap.

José David Saldívar’s recent volume, Border Matters, is entirely organized around the logic of the hybrid. He contends that “any examination of some of the key theoretical turns in cultural theory has to contend with [Néstor] García Canclini’s Culturas híbridas” (Saldívar 29).¹ Hybridity, Saldívar claims, is the large fact of the modern Mexican-U.S. borderlands–a fact pregnant with possibility. “What changes,” he asks, “when culture is understood in terms of material hybridity, not purity?” (19). The answer is at least all of the following: a certain “playfulness of form” is evident (33); a certain subaltern agency is made possible in the “shifting and shifty versions of border culture” thereby produced (35); a certain sort of “deconstruction” takes place, of the “monological desire of cultural nationhood” (5-6)²; a certain “crossing, circulation, material mixing, and resistance” takes place such that contestation of power is possible and the “multiple-voiced” or inherently dialogic emerge (xiii, 13-14). In short, the borderlands is figured as “now only liminal ground, which may prove fertile for some and slimy for others” (21).

Saldívar’s account, then, is one of material fertility, and of the political powers that accrue under such conditions. But Border Matters, at every turn, would be subject to Poe’s critique. To cite just one example, Tish Hinojosa’s music is described as a hybrid music; she “plays an eclectic blend of U.S.-Mexican border styles, mixing elements of corridos, cumbias, folk, rock, and country and western lyrics and lilting melodies” (188). Saldívar’s descriptions of hybridity amount to a taking account of individual cultural elements. To listen to Hinojosa productively is to be able to identify the point of origin of each contribution–to determine cultures and their products. Saldívar writes that Hinojosa’s “simple power” lies in her ability to “disentangle the segregated musical boundaries that divide the mass-mediated music industry,” which is a curious formulation (188): Why is it that hybridic desegregation is premised, then, on the act of disentanglement, rather than an entanglement of that which is culturally segregated? The answer is that the form of hybrid analysis which is practiced by Border Matters is entirely commensurate with Poe’s water streams.

Border Matters occasionally but consistently is organized as an argument with anthropology. In pages on the nineteenth-century “soldier-ethnographer” John Gregory Bourke, for example, Saldívar writes:

Culture in this light is the nimbus perceived by one group when it comes into contact with and observes another one. It is the objectification of everything alien and weird and exotic about the contact group. (166)

This is a rather all-encompassing and generalized critique of anthropology and the anthropological project, and Saldívar sustains it elsewhere–for example: “forms of imperial dominion have often been concretized in the personas and functions of the traveler, especially the missionary and the anthropologist” (139). And yet, of course, Saldívar’s crucial term of art, hybridity, belongs entirely to the history of colonial anthropology–a fact that goes unremarked in Border Matters.

The nineteenth-century concept of the materially fertile hybrid, as the key figure in the wars between racialist monogenists and polygenists, was designed, as Robert J.C. Young reminds, to operate in precisely the manner in which Saldívar forecasts: “Hybridity… is a key term in that wherever it emerges it suggests the impossibility of essentialism” (Young 27). This, perhaps, is now well known. What has gone unnoticed, however, is the strange journey of the hybridity concept in nineteenth-century U.S. thought.³

In the first place, hybridity is advanced by the so-called monogenists, and this “beginning” should give one pause, because if those on the side of hybridity can only announce the existence of hybrids in the name of The Unity of the Human Race, as hybridity theorist John Bachman’s 1850 book title has it, then hybridity can only be the logic of incest; it cannot be the logic of the “heterotopic,” as Saldívar would have it (14), but rather the thought of the singular. When Saldívar announces his intention, at the end of his “Introduction,” “to unify a rhetoric or stylistics of the border” (14), he places himself in line with those nineteenth-century figures who reveal the wild card of hybridity only to always already keep it in its place, to announce a kind of impossibility of hybridization in the face of unification.

The crucial nineteenth-century U.S. debate over hybridity took place between the Reverend Bachman and Samuel Morton in the early 1850s. Bachman was minister of St. John’s Lutheran Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Morton was a medical doctor whose fascination with the measurement of human skull size yielded Crania Americana (1839) and Crania Aegyptiaca (1844)–perhaps the two most crucial American texts for the development of a scientific racist perspective. Bachman’s three works from 1850 on hybridity–each produced as a combination of scholarship and personal attack on Morton–prompted a searching investigation on Morton’s which lasted the whole of the next year, until his death in May of 1851. His contemporaneous biographer Henry S. Patterson comments:

Never had Morton been so busy as in that spring of 1851.... His researches upon Hybridity cost him much labor, in his extended comparison of authorities, and his industrial search for facts bearing on the question. (Nott and Gliddon lvi)

The texts Morton produced in this last year of his life are quite fugitive–stray paragraphs toward a response to Bachman, for example, in the pages of the Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, for example, and unfinished pages, or what his literary executors call “inedited manuscripts,” toward a full-scale revision of Crania Americana. What one learns from these pages appears to be counter-intuitive. One learns that Morton, rather than simply rejecting the test of hybridity, or denying its ability to produce non-degenerate persons, incorporated hybridity into his account of the races, incorporated it in such a way that the very idea of distinct races rests upon a foundation of earlier hybridizations of what one might call proto-races. The crucial moment comes on September 10, 1850, when Morton, President of the Academy of Natural Sciences, reads a short paper from the chair to those in attendance “on the value of the word species in Zoology” (Morton 81). While Morton defines “species” as a “primordial organic form” in a perhaps entirely conventional polygenist manner, his further comment, clearly influenced by Bachman’s attack, says otherwise:

It will be justly remarked that a difficulty presents itself, at the outset, in determining what forms are primordial.... My view may be briefly explained by saying, that if certain existing organic types can be traced back into the "night of time," as dissimilar as we see them now, is it not more reasonable to regard them as aboriginal, than to suppose them the mere accidental derivations of an isolated patriarchal stem of which we know nothing? Hence, for example, I believe the dog family not to have originated from one primitive form, but many. Again, what I call a species may be regarded by some naturalists as a primitive variety... (Morton 82)

Here is what Morton has done: Bachman’s evidence of hybridization among what Morton treats as the five basic races has now been taken into account. The possibility of, say, black-white mixtures in the world, does not refute an “aboriginal” racial thesis, but merely demonstrates that at a more “primitive” moment, a much larger and more complex network of “forms” intermingled, producing five distinct races but retaining traces of their interrelationship. Morton therefore does not do battle directly with Hybridity, but rather swallows it whole, adopts it as his foundational historical gesture, uses it to undergird a theory of now relatively stable races that can at least be differentiated in terms of talents and possibilities in the last instance, if not prevented from certain sorts of hybridization given primitive “proximate” or “allied” relations (Morton 82).

One can, of course, read this definition of “species” as “variety” as an act of desperation, of logical confusion, or as a misunderstanding of what hybridity threatens in relation to narratives of racial difference. But it is perhaps best not to move too quickly in adopting this perspective, and to take seriously the fact that 1850 stages the great debate between essence and hybridity, produces a concept of hybridity to undermine essence, then locates hybridity as the ground of essence. The very idea of hybridity undergirds, belatedly, but, finally, in the first place, the idea of different entities–guarantees their space, their properties. Its every attempt to calculate original, non-binary relations produces the conditions for impermeable borders, restructures cultural geography in a manner akin to the “redlining” of real estate districts.

Nothing is quite what it seems in this great hybridity debate. The existence of hybrids is announced in the name of a worldview–monogenism–which seemingly would preclude the possibility of absolute differences among human bodies, of therefore the very possibility of the “hetero.” The announcement is issued from the old slave South, in the pages of the Charleston Medical Journal, in order to do battle with a Northerner who publishes his great works of scientific racialism in Philadelphia, the home of American liberty. And Bachman, finally, sided with the South on the question of secession, a week before South Carolina’s official decision to leave the union: “I must go with my people,” he announced from his pulpit, leaving one to wonder precisely who one’s “people” might be in a world of nothing but kin (qtd. in Shuler 216).

Given this complex and problematic history, one might finally wonder in what way a reinvigorated notion of hybridity might do battle with racial and cultural essentialisms at the end of the millennium. Saldívar’s sixth chapter, “Tijuana Calling,” is useful for such a purpose. It is here that Sald�var surveys a number of commentators on Tijuana as a border flashpoint, as a sign or a token of a new hybrid world being born. Saldívar dismisses New York Times writer Beverley Lowry’s travel writing on Tijuana precisely because it “is [not] sympathetic… to the material hybrid and heteroglossic (sub)cultures of Tijuana” (134); praises Rubén Martínez’s The Other Side (1992) because it can hear Tijuana’s “noisy music of intercultural bricolage” (144); and in general weighs a number of writers by the standard of whether they have managed to attend to the existence of hybrid cultural formations.⁴ One of the key texts in Saldívar’s account is Richard Rodriguez’s Days of Obligation: An Argument With My Mexican Father (1992). He concludes his Tijuana chapter with Rodriguez (and performance artist and writer Guillermo Gómez-Peña) “because their work provokes both celebration and disdain,” and, indeed, the highly visible Rodriguez for years has been vilified by progressive Chicano studies scholars for writing against such matters as “affirmative action and bilingual education” and for support of the “English-only movement” (146, 151).⁵ Over five remarkable pages, Saldívar concludes that Rodriguez, in Days of Obligation, has discovered hybridization and that, therefore, Rodriguez has undergone a “sea change”: his “mandarin” views have been transformed, and he has converted into a figure who “seems to want to put behind [him] the earlier polemics” (149, 151). In essence, Saldívar suggests that Richard Rodriguez has moved from an anti-Mexican, anti-Chicano viewpoint to “the Mexican point of view” through acknowledgment of his identity as a gay man and a Mexican man, through acknowledgment that he himself is a hybrid figure shot through with determinations that include both Anglo and Mexican elements (150). Hence Rodriguez’s newfound ability to use hybridity as a weapon against essentialism; Saldívar reads Rodriguez as concluding that “the South is in the North” and that “Mexico… is ready to spill over across the wire into the North and take up the whole enchilada” (149). Saldívar welcomes Rodriguez into the fold of those who have converted to hybridity analysis, to the “undoing [of] hegemonic readings of Baja and Alta California” (150). Rodriguez is now one of us, then, a figure who, through discovery and celebration of the forces of Americas’ hybridity, has re-entered and repositioned himself within the battle over identity politics on the left-progressive side.

To intervene at this moment in Saldívar’s text is, in one sense, easy, and in another, complex. It is relatively easy, for example, to document that Rodriguez himself has undergone no political conversion, has not “put behind” him any of his former political beliefs. Rodriguez in 1998 is giving major public lectures in which he proclaims that “multiculturalism is loony” and that “the ideological premises of affirmative action are dying” (qtd. in Miller 1). The difficult part is the reconciliation of Rodriguez, the public lecturer, with the claims Saldívar makes concerning Days of Obligation. What must first be said is that Rodriguez’s discovery of hybridity–material hybridity–has enabled his polemic against affirmative action, multiculturalism, and the like. The fact that “we are finding more kids like Tiger Woods who don’t identify with a single racial identity,” for example, is a sign of the bankruptcy of claims to particular identities (qtd. in Miller 1). Now that “we” are all hybrids, according to Rodriguez, it is no longer possible to imagine coherent claims to racial-cultural heritages. At the level of the genes, of bodies, Rodriguez has produced an at least coherent (although deeply problematic) narrative of hybridity–one that takes account of Poe’s polemic and suggests that hybridity implies a mixture without recourse to origins and elements.

But when one examines Rodriguez’s Days of Obligation, one is doubly struck by the force of the attack on narratives of racial-cultural persistence (particularly in the opening chapter, “India”), and by the powerful advocacy of persistence narratives of what one might call national-religious cultures. For Rodriguez, America is two stories: Anglo-Puritanism and Spanish-Catholicism. The first is “comedy,” and the second “tragedy” (Rodriguez xvi). The first is hopeful optimism (represented by the dream of Anglo California), and the second tends toward “cynical conclusions” about the world (xvii). The first is maternal and seedy, the second paternal and quasi-fascist.⁶ When Saldívar highlights Rodriguez’s conversion to the “Mexican point of view,” he highlights a conversion to what Rodriguez calls a truly Augustinian vision of the inevitability of “human unhappiness” (26), of a community of suffering without sentimentalism.⁷

Saldívar’s dating of Rodriguez’s conversion to his moments of “coming out” as both gay and Mexican misses entirely Rodriguez’s own conversion statement: in the wake of Martin Luther King’s death, the rise of “hack radicals” like Stokely Carmichael and César Chávez (purveyor of pastoral-victimization narratives, and who was and remains “irrelevant to Mexican-American lives”) transformed him from a Protestant optimist to Mexican pessimist (Rodriguez 189, 67, 70). As for Rodriguez’s gay identity, a close reading of Days of Obligation’s key chapter, “Late Victorians,” indicates that Rodriguez seeks to distance himself, at every turn, from the culture of gay life, which he characterizes as fully Protestant or “Victorian” in its quest for wealth, taste, artificiality, and the like. The chapter’s repeated trope has Rodriguez sitting alone in his room, ruminating on gay street life outside his door, and Rodriguez identifies himself not as “gay” (there is no “coming out” in these pages) but as a person with a deep “unwillingness to embrace life” (43). “Late Victorians” tacitly affirms the results of the AIDS epidemic because it potentially will force San Francisco gay men to embrace a Catholic community of resigned suffering.

As a final point, Saldívar has completely misunderstood Rodriguez’s Tijuana chapter, “In Athens Once.” Tijuana, in Rodriguez’s view, is fundamentally an Anglo-Protestant city: an “optimistic city,” a city whose fundamental character is revealed by the supermarket which has “Everything!” (93, 104-5). Rodriguez’s logic is that post-AIDS California is turning Catholic, that North American religion is turning Catholic,⁸ that border-Mexico has turned Protestant, and his vision, then, of Tijuana invading the North is an image of the re-Protestantization of the North: “silent as a Trojan horse, inevitable as a flotilla of boat people, more confounding in its innocence, in its power of proclamation, than Spielberg’s most pious vision of a flying saucer” (106). Rodriguez’s vision of Tijuana engulfing the North is a deeply ironic one, and hardly celebratory, as Anglo-America uncannily bears witness to a vision of its former self reconquering it in the name of Protestant commerce and individuality.

José David Saldívar, then, has misunderstood everything of importance in his readings of hybridity–absent the bare fact that Rodriguez’s book concerns his own hybridity⁹–and this must be weighed in all seriousness. One: Rodriguez, on matters of “culture,” is absolutely monolithic and essentialist. His vision of national-religious-cultural hybridization is one that Poe precisely unmasks, but such unmasking is unnecessary because Rodriguez has no interest, here, in an account of hybridization which might be put to work against essentialisms. And Two: Rodriguez, on matters of “culture,” is absolutely not a late convert to liberal politics of inclusion and rights. He remains a bitter foe of liberalism in all of its guises, and advocates, in Days of Obligation, a return to original Catholic “relief from loneliness” in this world through “the Catholic knowledge of union, the mystical body of Christ” (198, 196). “Novelty should not come from within the Church,” Rodriguez warns: “I am not prepared to watch the Catholic Church stumble over a Protestant issue like multiculturalism” (190, 194).

The presumption, then, on the part of Saldívar, that the very recognition of hybridity is inherently democratic, dialogic, subversive, deconstructive, and the like, is what is at stake here. It is that presumption, in virtual reduplication of the strange shape of the nineteenth-century Bachman-Morton debate, which permits Saldívar’s Border Matters to validate Rodriguez’s text and thus affirm the hybrid’s participation in Rodriguez’s Mother Theresa-like rapture over the suffering, failed body. Border Matters, finally, represents a certain crisis of reading in post-colonial, ethnic, and border studies, in which the assumed value of a network of concepts overrides the possibility of seeing what is literally placed right in front of one’s eyes. Border Matters, then, is an act of faith: faith in a deep anthropological vision which has, however, failed “us” at every instance, and in the last instance.

Notes

1. Originally published in 1990; now translated as Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity, trans. Christopher L. Chiappari and Silvia L. López (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1995).

2. This phrase is Saldívar citing David Lloyd approvingly.

3. Young’s interesting book is the latest attempt to read the epochal debates over race in the nineteenth century. Other important works in this line include Stanton, Gossett, Bieder, and the two works by Horsman. The section of my text which follows is a too-short summarization of a reading of these debates which diverges from this tradition, and which I am preparing for publication.

4. Saldívar, it should be noted, uses other criteria at times to render judgments: often he searches for writers who utilize standpoint theory and reflect critically upon their own social subject positions. Thus, Luis Alberto Urrea’s Across the Wire is “trapped in the antinomy of the missionary and the ethnographer,” and it would have been “conceptually stronger if he [Urrea] had reflected more on the evangelist-anthropological processes themselves” (140, 139). Such standpoint reflection has been criticized on a number of grounds, not least of which because it does nothing but reconstitute a transcendental subject, despite its best efforts.

5. Rodriguez has long courted social conservatives, in the pages of American Scholar magazine, and in his first book, Hunger of Memory.

6. Rodriguez writes, pointedly, “Protestant trains smell better than Catholic trains and they run on time” (183).

7. See, particularly, Chapter 9, “The Latin American Novel.”

8. See page 197: “As Latin America turns Protestant, North America experiences the dawning of a Catholic vision–‘the global village’–an ecology closer to medievalism than to the Industrial Age.”

9. See Rodriguez xvii.

Works Cited

• Bieder, Robert E. Science Encounters the Indian, 1820-1880: The Early Years of American Ethnology. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1986.
• Gossett, Thomas F. Race: The History of an Idea in America. 1963. New ed. New York: Oxford UP, 1997.
• Horsman, Reginald. Josiah Nott of Mobile: Southerner, Physician, and Racial Theorist. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1987.
• —. Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1981.
• Miller, David. “Author: Multiculturalism ‘looney,’ race irrelevant.” The State News 9 April 1998: 1, 10.
• Morton, Samuel. “September 10th.” Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia 5 (1852): 81-82.
• Nott, J.C. and Geo. R. Gliddon. Types of Mankind: or, Ethnological Researches, Based Upon the Ancient Monuments, Paintings, Sculptures, and Crania of Races, and Upon Their Natural, Geographical, Philological, and Biblical History, Illustrated by Selections from the Inedited Papers of Samuel George Morton, M.D., (Late President of the Academy of Natural Sciences at Philadelphia,) and by Additional Contributions from Prof. L. Agassiz, LL.D.; W. Usher, M.D.; and Prof. H.S. Patterson, M.D.: 1854. Ninth ed. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1868.
• Poe, Edgar Allan. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. 1838. Ed. Harold Beaver. New York: Penguin, 1975.
• Rodriguez, Richard. Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father. New York: Penguin, 1992.
• Shuler, Jay. Had I the Wings: The Friendship of Bachman and Audubon. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1995.
• Stanton, William. The Leopard’s Spots: Scientific Attitudes Toward Race in America 1815-59. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1960.
• Young, Robert J.C. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Mark Goble

Department of English
Stanford University
m.goble@leland.stanford.edu

James Clifford’s Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997.

Why is it not surprising that the Oxford English Dictionary locates the word “vacationer” as a term used chiefly in the United States? Across the whole complicated spectrum of U.S. cultures, classes, and ethnic identities, it can be said that practically no one “goes on holiday” and only rarely does someone “travel.” Instead, Americans take vacations. The very locution suggests the intensity with which leisure is pursued and constructed in the U.S., the almost violent attachment to small bits of time away from everyday life here in the industrialized nation that keeps its workers at work–across the class structure–for more hours of more weeks than all but a few Pacific Rim nations, which are then of course demonized for making their workers work too hard. At frequent stops along the various ways through modernity that James Clifford charts in his latest book, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, he makes use of his own location as the American “vacationer” to orient himself and us within the many cultures-in-transit with which he is concerned. This is not to say that orientation, once achieved, is readily understood or long maintained. One of the particular strengths of Clifford’s work as “a historical critic of anthropology” (8), whether in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, a collection of essays he edited with George Marcus, or his previous book, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art, has always been its willingness to dispense with rigid conclusions in favor of a dialectical flexibility across a heterogeneous landscape that excludes total purity of either theoretical abstraction or empirical experience.

Routes extends and amplifies Clifford’s familiar style of analysis, though sometimes departing from his established topics of interest. “Routes continues an argument with the concept of culture” (2), Clifford writes, but this argument is often carried out on a terrain in which academic argument itself is on a sort of vacation, purposefully avoided in hopes of radically re-creating some of the standard styles of writing in which the study of “culture” is done. As Clifford writes, “Experiments in travel writing and poetic collage are interspersed with formal essays. By combining genres I register, and begin to historicize, the book’s composition–its different audiences and occasions. The point is not to bypass academic rigor…. The book’s mix of styles evokes these multiple and uneven practices of research, making visible the borders of academic work” (12). Routes gives one the sense of critique carried out under conditions of compulsory movement from place to place and from discourse to discourse. And like an American vacation in the strict sense of the term, different historical sites are visited both literally and figuratively. Each of the book’s three sections is loosely organized around standard essays. “Traveling Cultures” and “Spatial Practices” set the terms for the book’s first section, “Travels”; “Museums as Contact Zones” serves as the critical mass for several pieces on “Contacts”; and “Diasporas” outlines what is at stake in the various “Futures” that Clifford investigates in the book’s third and final portion. These “formal essays” inform and contend with other texts that range in styles among the various aforementioned genres. There are several pieces of travel writing that visit such locations as the northwest coast of Canada, the Museum of Man in London, the bustling tourist center of Palenque, Mexico, and Fort Ross, California. And in the practice of “poetic collage,” Clifford visits such texts as John Wesley Powell’s The Exploration of the Colorado River and John Steven’s Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan, both works of nineteenth century U.S. travel writing; Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of my Name; and Freud’s Moses and Monotheism. The diversity of approaches and appropriations is in keeping with Clifford’s conception of the book’s deceptively plain yet formidable goal: “Routes begins with [the] assumption of movement, arguing that travels and contacts are crucial sites for an unfinished modernity…. The essays gathered here aim to make some sense, or senses, of people going places” (2).

“Fort Ross Meditation,” the book’s final chapter, is an exemplary place to begin to understand in more detail Clifford’s project in Routes. It is no accident that Clifford ends a book on “people going places” under the signs of the most global dynamics one can imagine–capitalism, communication technologies, the nation-state–with an essay that examines a place just hours away from Clifford’s home in northern California. The irony speaks to the dialectical complexity of modern “dwelling/traveling.” The most elaborate histories of travel more than likely await us wherever we are in the late twentieth century, and we need barely move in order to witness the mobile narratives of imperial conquest and cultural change that play across the landscape. The first-person plural, however, remains highly conditional in Clifford; he rarely generalizes his investigations in the service of a constructed totality under which the entire chronotope of contemporary life may be situated. The most seductive totality that Clifford avoids in Routes is that of an essentially “deterritorialized” postmodernism of the kind associated with Deleuze and Guattari. Clifford instead devotes himself painstakingly to the project of differentiating between the relative and unstable experiences of mobility and stasis that interact in the countless “contact zones” between and within cultures. Fort Ross, California may represent an upper limit case for the complexity of such encounters. Fort Ross–“Ross” here derived from “Russia”–was a fur-trading outpost of the Russian Empire, its southernmost point of expansion into the Spain’s empire in the Americas. In addition to Russia and Spain, Great Britain and the United States also come into contact at Fort Ross. But the presences of these nations give only the barest sketch of the different communities “located” at Fort Ross: others include the Kayshaya Band of the Pomo Indians, Russian Siberians, Aleutian creoles, and Mormon missionaries. Each of these communities experienced Fort Ross as a different kind of far-flung destination and/or rapidly-changing homeland, and constructed different histories of mercantile dreams, imperial devastation, labor exploitation, postcolonial decline, and international conflict. And these pasts, as Clifford narrates them one after another, were necessarily assembled in dialogue with different presents, depending upon who was doing the work of historical narration.

“Fort Ross Meditation” in many ways recalls “Identity in Mashpee,” the concluding chapter of The Predicament of Culture, but it is in its departures from that earlier piece that we see how Clifford has transformed and refined his project. “Identity in Mashpee” told the story of a New England Indian tribe’s courtroom drama of recognition in the face of a long and bewildering history of resistance, assimilation, reinvention, hybridization, and modernization: “What if identity,” Clifford asked, “is conceived not as a boundary to be maintained but as a nexus of relations and transactions actively engaging a subject?” (Predicament 344). His calculus attempted to track cultural identities over time, and his conclusions were that “culture” as “identity” must always and necessarily fail to account fully for the histories that converge at any one individual, and that neither narratives of total assimilation nor unchanging continuance adequately describe the diverse fates of Indian peoples in the United States.¹ In “Fort Ross Meditation,” however, the center of attention is not a people but a place, a construction of both ethnographic and geographic fashioning. This shift in focus is accompanied by a shift in analytic style as well, for if one of the purposes of “Identity in Mashpee” was to show how a kind of anthropological deconstruction could sift out the traces of something called “Mashpee culture” in unlikely histories and practices, then “Fort Ross Meditation” can perhaps be read as a work of polymorphous cartography, a multiplied mapping of a particular place by means of narrative proliferation: the story of Russian discovery written over the story of Kayshaya subjugation, written over the story of Spanish decline, written over the story of U.S. expansion, written over the story of Kayshaya resistance, written over the story of contemporary reconstruction of the story of Russian discovery, and so on. By choosing location itself as the “field” for his investigation, Clifford permits himself to speculate about histories that may exist in relation to a specific ecology of place in which the human is but one variable among many, often the most destructive but not necessarily the most important. The Russians came to Fort Ross because of the sea otter and the lucrative Chinese trade in pelts that made such a far-flung outpost profitable and therefore possible. Thus Clifford suggests the rather eccentric project of a history that not only accounts for the sea otter’s role in the local and international economies that came to a nexus at Fort Ross, but a history which actually belongs to the sea otter.

This makes for a strange moment in the book, for here it becomes necessary to ascertain just how much indulgence Clifford may be permitted in the rhetorical play that comes with any attempt to shift the work of critical analysis into a different register of language. As such, the following passages in “Fort Ross Meditation” suggest themselves as paradigmatic of the book’s larger aims both stylistically and thematically:

A symptom, perhaps, of this uncertainty [about the nature of historical agency and consciousness] is my hankering to ask an absurd question. What does the history of changing environments, including their own near extinction, commodification, and consumption since 1700, look like to sea otters? How might this history appear to them? The arrival of a new predator? Holocaust? The predator's removal? Survival? Can we imagine a nonhuman historical consciousness?... Why this desire to find something like historical consciousness and agency in nonhumans? What temporalities define the consciousness of sea otters? Day and nights? Tides? Seasons and currents? The life cycles of kelp and other food? Reproduction? Birth and death? Perhaps even generations--a sense of living through offspring? None of these temporalities, the feelings, actions, and skills associated with them, come within distant translation-range of 'history' in its human senses.... Why indulge in such speculations? Perhaps to glimpse, from a translated place of animal difference, the enveloping waters in which I myself swim, the environment in which my 'life' unfolds, a habitat called history. (325-326)

This passage brings to mind Thoreau’s Walden and its allegorizing of a battle between two ant colonies to signify across a great many meanings from the most existentially abstract (the futility of human endeavor) to the most historically referenced (the potential for violence in a nation both free and slave). At the same time, Clifford wants to forestall an allegorical interpretation even as he dances across its possibility. There is something corny about all this and Clifford knows it: after an earlier collage on “White Ethnicity” has ironically detailed Clifford’s own formative encounters with bluegrass music and its performance of whiteness, I don’t think it an accident that “hankering” here makes what must be one if its first appearances in a book of cultural theory. The wider latitude of travel writing as a genre brings with it rhetorical dangers. Questions stack up and hover over each other like airplanes in a holding pattern at a busy airport. A down-home kitsch mediates a moment that oscillates between wildly divergent languages: on the one hand, Clifford reaches for a kind of metaphorical excess reminiscent of Benjamin in his phantasmagoric attempts to speak from the soul of the commodity, but on the other hand, he must ward off the kind of didactic sentimentality reminiscent of Charles Kuralt in his syrupy naturalization of history as another consumable for Sunday morning brunch. But no abstract of quotation and comment can stand in for the experience of reading a text like “Fort Ross Meditation.” The critical energies of the essay depend wholly upon the literary performativeness of the writing, a statement which is, I admit, a truism that could be said of any text, but a truism that is brought to the fore and animated by Clifford’s writing in Routes.

“I’m looking for history at Fort Ross,” Clifford begins one section of “Fort Ross Meditation,” “I want to understand my location among others in time and space. Where have we been and where are we going?” (301). The combination of flat tone and big questions would not be out of place on a postcard–though admittedly of a very particular kind. Clifford exploits the conventions of travel writing again in “Palenque Log,” a narrative reconstruction of one day in and around a major site of Mayan ruins in Chiapas. Here, Clifford maintains the form of a diary with exact notations of time and place as a device that both frames and generates the ethnographic discourse of the piece. The sentences are short. The syntax is economical. The text achieves the slightly compromised and degraded status of travel writing while simultaneously commenting on the very conventions it inhabits. Thus the entry for “11:00-1:30” begins “Jungle atmosphere in the hotel restaurant” and develops into a brief moment of reflection on the writings of a previous American tourist in Palenque, the nineteenth-century traveler John Stephens (227). Clifford invites, if not demands, a reckoning of his own travels against those of a predecessor of whose ideological limits he is only too aware. But whereas a conventional essay would extrapolate, evade, or contextualize such a moment of anxious influence, Clifford opts for a dazzling and deflating narrative gesture: he ends the entry by confessing, “I doze off” (228). Yet what sort of confession is this? Is it possible to doze off in the present tense? The present tense signifies a break in narrative time that is impossible to suture shut. No matter what a narrator writes–“I am falling asleep,” “I dozed off”–an implication of constructed discontinuity cannot be dodged, and Clifford makes no effort here or elsewhere to dodge these effects of writing as such.

The more “writerly” chapters in Routes, like “Fort Ross Meditation,” “Palenque Log,” and the fascinating collage “Immigrant” (inspired by a Susan Hiller installation at the Freud Museum in London), all display–and I use this word pointedly, in conversation with Clifford’s own critiques of the display of objects in museums–their hybrid genealogies as interdisciplinary experiments in analysis and language. The less ostentatiously experimental chapters, like “Spatial Practices: Fieldwork, Travel, and the Disciplining of Anthropology” and “Paradise,” a wide-ranging essay that begins as a review of an exhibit on New Guinea at the Museum of Mankind in London and expands into a discussion of how the discourse of cultural hybridity addresses its own potential for hegemony, display the strengths familiar to readers of Clifford’s previous work. Whether writing about the historical construction of the “field” as a site of anthropology’s codification as a discipline, or about the role played by the discourse of diaspora in such works as Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic and Jonathan and Daniel Boyarin’s writings on Jewish identity, Clifford is a powerful synthesizer of diverse arguments. Yet even the more traditional essays in Routes eschew the more structurally aggressive kinds of arguments that Clifford made in The Predicament of Culture; for while Routes announces itself as a sequel to its predecessor, the thematics of the new book drive Clifford to more provisional conclusions. In “Traveling Cultures,” for example, Clifford tells how a re-reading of the essay “On Ethnographic Surrealism” led him to imagine an essay of the chronotope–the privileged theoretical figure of The Predicament of Culture–of the hotel in the 1920s and 1930s. “But almost immediately the organizing image, the chronotope, began to break up. And I now find myself embarked on a research project where any condensed epitome or place of survey is questionable. The comparative scope I’m struggling toward is not a form of overview. Rather, I’m working with a notion of comparative knowledge produced through an itinerary, always marked by a ‘way in,’ a history of locations and a location of histories” (31).

The book Clifford produces out of his struggle toward a “comparative scope,” a book in which modern experiences of relative habitation and relative mobility can be understood as mutually constituting one another even as they propel cultures and subjects along different paths through the twentieth century, must of necessity feature more instances of startling insight than comprehensive perspective. The book’s overall shape conforms imperfectly to any available models: too heterogeneous to articulate a single argument, too stylistically diverse for a collection of essays, and yet too rigorous to be considered a work of postmodern travel writing (whatever that might be). And while there is a great deal of autobiographical reflection in Routes, its field of vision is categorically more broad and more historically committed than most of the academic memoirs that have been appearing for the last few years. As Clifford himself notes, of the modern domains of knowledge, anthropology has long been the discipline in which the first-person singular plays the most compelling role in legitimizing the knowledge itself. Anthropologists insist that they were “there” in a way that few literary critics insist they have read the book. It is too soon to know if Routes is to be the first or the last statement Clifford makes within that peculiar tradition of autobiographical anthropology that includes Michel Leiris’s Rules of the Game and Malinowski’s Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term, and that perhaps should cover James’s The American Scene as well. What is certain, however, is that for the time being James Clifford is among the most interesting traveling companions we’re likely to meet on the way to wherever it is we’re going.

Note

1. For an intriguing critique of Clifford, see Walter Benn Michaels, Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (Durham: Duke UP, 1995). In a long and cunning footnote, Michaels pushes at what he sees as the underlying incongruities in Clifford’s attempt to articulate a difference between reinvention and continuity as indicators of cultural presence and identity. Bluntly put, Michaels argues that there is no reinvention without the prior assumption of a continuity that renders a subject already a participant in the “culture” whose activities she pursues. Thus Michaels’s contention that “drumming will make you a Mashpee not because anyone who drums gets to be a Mashpee but because, insofar as your drumming counts as remembering a lost tradition, it shows that you already are a Mashpee” (177). Michaels imagines a laboratory condition in which all the variables of identity are burned away save two: freely chosen material practices and biological phantasms of race. Clifford revisits the predicaments of identity at several points in Routes, most notably in an exchange with Stuart Hall reproduced at the end of the essay “Traveling Cultures.” When pressed by Hall to articulate how “something” of an identity can be carried on through situations of pronounced migration, diaspora, and acculturation, Clifford argues that identity might be better conceived as “something more polythetic, something more like a habitus, a set of practices and dispositions, part of which could be remembered, articulated in specific contexts” (44). And later, Clifford augments this idea by figuring identity as “a processural configuration of historically given elements–including race, culture, class, gender, and sexuality–different combinations of which may be featured in different conjunctures. These elements may, in some conjunctures, cross-cut and bring each other to crisis. What components of identity are ‘deep’ and what ‘superficial’? What ‘central’ and what ‘peripheral’?” (46). I doubt that Michaels would be swayed by these statements either. Michaels’s critique of identity is all but irreconcilable with the most basic assumptions of anthropological discourse, namely that social agents larger than the individual and smaller than discourse itself really do exist.

Works Cited

• Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988.
• Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997.
• Michaels, Walter Benn. Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism. Durham: Duke UP, 1995.

Thomas Lavazzi

Department of Humanities/English
Savannah State University
lavazzit@tigerpaw.ssc.peachnet.edu

Mark Russell, ed. Out of Character: Rants, Raves, and Monologues from Today’s Top Performance Artists.New York: Bantam, 1997.

Out of Character anthologizes the work of thirty-one contemporary performance artists in ten times as many pages, from high poptech artists like Laurie Anderson and big-ticket monologists like Spalding Gray to less well-known ethno rappers like Robbie McCauley and multi-character soloists like Peggy Pettitt. While many of the performance texts are captivating, the collection’s emphasis on the monologue format, its lack of critical apparatus, and the absence of semiotic analysis of the mise en scène of individual performance events produce a limited view of the contemporary Performance Art scene.

Each brief chapter opens with a full-page photo of the performance artist, followed by a “biographical questionnaire” of the Playboy’s-Most-Eligible-Bachelors variety (in addition to basic personal information like Name, Stage Name, and Birthplace, the categories include Favorite Performance Experience, Most Terrifying Performance Experience, Hobbies, Reading List, and Favorite Quote). Following the profile is a brief “Artist’s Notes” section, which usually consists of a first-person commentary (ranging in style from the notorious grant-writer’s “artist statement” to casual self-contemplations) or an excerpt from an interview (conducted by someone other than the editor); this section provides helpful grounding for the scripts (often excepts from larger works) that follow.

Despite the bubble gum and flip card attitude of the setup, which does not always jibe with the slant of the “Artist’s Notes” (“flippant,” as Russell admits in his “Foreword” (xii), without accounting for how such a textual performance relates to his overall project), many of the performance scripts are insightful, witty, and engaging. Marga Gomez, for example, blends stand-up comedy with childhood recollections and incisive socio-cultural commentary (“When did I go from positive and perky to bitter and pathetic? I’m just like the first lesbians I ever saw. I was ten. I saw them on David Susskind’s Open End…” (165)). Penny Arcade deploys stream-of-consciousness personae to generate edgy satire and confront us with voices from “out/over there” that we would rather not hear (“You wanna help me out? With fifty cents or a buck? I can buy lunch with a buck! Shit. My name is Girl! An’ I am homeless!” (22)). Arcade’s troubling voices speak to Eric Bogosian’s dark humor, which brings us to the verge of a self-annihilating otherness. In addition to excerpts from Bogosian’s confrontational solo and ensemble pieces, the selection here includes “The Poem,” from Advocate. A stirring, eerie, and evocative piece, “The Poem” is performed in a dark room at a desk with a gooseneck lamp illuminating the “Narrator’s” face in a “spooky fashion” (“Come here, my little children. Come here, small tender ones. Into my arms. Into my teeth of streets. Run into the midnight traffic. Fall against the hot drops of water from your mother’s tears. Laughing into my teeth….” (46)). Though Bogosian is known popularly as a stand-up comic, the selections here highlight his evocative, provocative use of mise en scène, running performance along the edge of consciousness.

Bogosian is not alone among the artists represented who deploy basic means to create poetic effects. Ishmael Houston-Jones imagines death through the body. In his 1971 piece included here, “Score for Dead,” Jones dances through a litany of prerecorded names of the dead (relatives of friends, celebrities, fictional characters) in a semi-ritualistic event, part homage and part shamanistic transference of the power of death (“When I hear a name that has a particular resonance for me, fall down to the floor in some emblematic way and try to rise again before the next name is called. As the next and the next and then the next names are spoken, repeat the falling… and rising dance… become exhausted with the effort” (195)). Houston-Jones unpacks the mystique of death by embodying–dancing–its relentless rhythm. Houston-Jones is the one of the few artists represented in Out of Character for whom the monologue (in one form or another) is not the primary aesthetic form. At the opposite end of the sensibility spectrum from Houston-Jones is West Coast performance artist Ron Athey, who explores religious fetishism through satirical texts embodied in a tableau-style mise en scène incorporating “medical-based s/m techniques” (34) (he describes Martyrs and Saints, for example, as a “pageant of erotic torture and penance” (34)). While delivering a monologue in 4 Scenes–“a true story from my childhood” (35)–Athey is shackled nude to a column à la St. Sebastian, painfully resplendent with tattoos and kinky body piercings: “From the time I was a baby, my grandma and aunt Vena repeatedly informed me, ‘You’ve been born with the calling on your life’… According to this message from the holiest of holies, I was to sacrifice the playthings of the world in order to fulfill the plans of God” (36).

A riveting narrative excerpt from Gray’s Anatomy, by Spalding Gray, is quite at home in the center of the collection–perhaps as its centerpiece. The relatively detailed and informative note preceding the selection emphasizes the importance of personal presence in performance (“being there is everything” (169)), while revealing a theoretically hip Gray (“an inverted Method actor… I use autobiographic emotional memory to play myself rather than some other character” (171)) who nevertheless has a down-to-earth side (“This is how I work. I keep a journal, a Mead wide-ruled composition notebook” (169)). Gray’s performances coalesce around the personal and memory. For Gray the goal of performance is the “presentation of self in a theatrical setting” (171). The excerpt here demonstrates the sheer force such attention can achieve. Though Gray claims that his monologues are initially improvised in front of a live audience from key word outlines, the writing tightens through successive performances to deliver exquisite moments of narrative suspense, as when Gray describes his visit to a Philippine psychic surgeon for an eye operation. On the day of the operation, Gray tries to postpone the dreaded moment by, uncannily enough, telling stories (“But Pini [the surgeon] didn’t want to hear that story. He wanted to operate, and it was time…. I went into the operation chamber… I stripped to my red underwear… the Japanese began to go up to the table. Out come the bloody grapes again!… My time comes, and I jump on… I’m lying there quaking on the table… ‘It’s my eye! Remember, my left eye!… Don’t pull any meatballs out of me!’… his two fingers are erect bloody penises coming at me” (179)). This blend of humor and suspense, with a symbolic tickle (flitting metonymically through the details) is characteristic of a Gray monologue; the excerpt leaves the reader with a piquantly precise taste of Gray’s art.

On the whole, Out of Character provides a wide, intriguing sampling of monologists, from the outrageously risky, violently self-present, and brilliantly humorous, to the (self-)celebrative and quietly poetic. But as compelling as such scripts are, without description and analysis of actual performances (other than notes provided by the artists themselves, as above), we have only a sketchy sense of the mise en scènes that are the performances. In his foreword, Russell advises his readers that “to actually understand [the work of the artists represented], closer study of each… is required, starting with viewing them live…” (xii) pointing out later that “numerous elements of these live performances… can only be hinted at on the page” (xiii); but a few such semiotically attuned “hints,” supplied from what must be a rich storehouse of his own observations after a decade and a half as artistic director of P.S. (Public School/Performance Space) 122, could have gone a way toward creating a more complex awareness of the material field of the performances.

Nor does the anthology provide evaluative commentary to expand the reader’s understanding of the overall “state” of the art. The entire “critical apparatus” (xi) (other than the artists’ brief self commentaries) is contained in the foreword, in the first page and a half. The remaining six pages primarily narrate the history and social significance of P.S. 122 as a place that allows a “dialogue between a community and its artists” to take shape (i.e., “Public Space”), a place the editor was instrumental in developing: Russell has been artistic director of P.S. 122 since 1983. Certain assumptions, however, about the purpose of Performance Art resound throughout, the bottom line being “to tell one’s story” (vii).

The foreword also takes for granted certain conventions of theater that don’t necessarily hold in experimental theatrical situations: for example, that the performance artist is a storyteller performing “in front of” a “listening, watching” audience (vii). Not only does Russell overlook the altered audience/performer relationship in much performance art (consider, for example, Hanon Resnikov’s breaks in loosely scripted Living Theatre pieces to dialogue directly with his audience–Resnikov is not mentioned in the collection), but also lists several features of postmodern performance as influences on “Performance Art” without noting their differences from–and potential disruption of–his own rather constricted mapping of the terrain. He mentions Elizabeth LeCompte’s experimentation with the “nature of personal theater” without commenting on the Wooster Group’s Brechtian bracketing of the “personal” and denaturalizing of the “dramatic” through collage structure; he vaguely notes the influence of “action performances of visual artists” (vii) without explaining what, exactly, these are or how they might support the concept of Performance Art as dramatized/fictionalized autobiography (does he mean “action painting” of the ’50s? but this falls outside the context of his chronology; certainly he can’t mean ’60s and ’70s happenings by Allan Kaprow, Joseph Beuys, Jack Smith, et al., which dialogize the “personal” as a means of vectoring out of the (ego-bound) self). He acknowledges the impact of technology–“consumer electronics,” “fun tools”–while again taming, containing, and subjectivizing their subject-fracturing potential by reducing them to just another means to “tell your story” (vii).

This sort of “show-and-tell” attitude toward technology does not gel with the work of one of his own featured artists–and the one who kicks the collection off–Laurie Anderson, who Russell claims “can spin a fabulous yarn” and who “cuts through all the state-of-the-art technology” to sit us on the “front porch, telling stories” (xii). Laurie Anderson is a performer, but she is also an installation artist; her personal presence (sometimes in body and voice, sometimes only in voice) is an important part of her performances, but it is exactly that–a part. It is more accurate to say that Anderson incorporates technology into her performances and installations to dialogize (or cut against) the self, rather than cutting through technology to get to the “personal.” Her performances are at their best when she lets technology play through the self and vice versa (as the “live” synthesizing of her own voice in, for example, Home of the Brave). The “personal,” after all, is not a telos, but merely another rhetorical position, one among the flux–and so what is the self? (Think of the mechanical parrot in a recent Anderson installation at the Guggenheim Downtown, NYC–a computerized voice “speaking” fragments of the installator/orchestrator’s “auto”biography collaged with other textual bits/bites). This is the kind of question that Performance Art à la Anderson raises and that Russell’s version of the scene evades. The foreword stages a similar moment of overreading when Russell highlights Tim Miller’s (a founding member of P.S. 122) autobiographical performances “with props collected on the way to the theatre” (ix) and briefly describes some of the open-ended events that P.S. 122 has hosted, such as “twenty-four-hour marathon performances with bad jokes told on the hour” (x), without considering how such aleatoric events and artificially imposed structures question/put on trial conventional concepts of the “self”/subject and its relation to the “other” (animate or inanimate)/outside.

The “Foreword” might have announced its approach to Performance Art a bit more clearly and conscientiously in the larger field of multimedia performance. Like the (formally) monologic gathering of scripts, the foreword’s voice sounds a one-note story about “Performance Art.” Granted anthologies of creative work don’t necessarily have to provide critical apparatus, and all anthologies are selective, but since there are so few gatherings of contemporary performance art, the editor who takes on such a project also takes on a particular responsibility: she or he should be as comprehensive as possible, and at least self-reflexively account for her/his own assumptions about what “Performance Art” is, a kind of editorial reflectiveness that the brief foreword sidesteps. Russell’s disclaimer in the foreword that this is “Not meant to be a comprehensive study” (vii) simply side-steps the issue (“study” is utilized broadly). He goes on to qualify the artists he does include as “some of the most adventurous in the field,” while simultaneously (and arbitrarily) equating “Performance Art” with “solo theatre” (vii).

Do we really need 31 examples of the monologue form? And why limit the collection to solo performers, excluding performance art collectives? The combination of disclaimer and promotion of his own aesthetic agenda with the convenient (re)definition of the field through the mask of an unassuming rhetoric (“what might be called…” (vii)) effectively represses the need–if it be allowed that a reader might have one–for a more comprehensive gathering (moreover, Russell universalizes his own assumptions by devaluing the need for any classification whatsoever: “I don’t like any of those titles. I just call it Performance” (vii)).

“Might” is a key word. The foreword “might” have benefited from a brief consideration of what Performance Art “might” be, before (instead of) hedging so quickly to a reductive definition. Though the foreword begins with a brief, elliptical chronology of how one strand of Performance Art developed out of gestures toward “personal theater” in the ’70s and ’80s, it does not mention the influence of seminal art movements such Happenings/Assemblage and Fluxus, which would have brought another dimension to the present gathering (and perhaps would have encouraged Russell to reconsider his frame). Considering that many of the readers of the anthology probably will not have this more comprehensive knowledge, Russell could have provided a clear and detailed outline of what’s missing and how it relates to what’s there.

And what, for example, is missing? The insularity of the project–most of the performers represented have at one time or another been affiliated with P.S. 122–means that many folks aren’t invited to the party. Notable absences: performance poets such as John Giorno and Armand Schwerner; multimedia artists who feature voice and instrumentation, like Diamanda Galas and Robert Ashley; experimental theater artists like Rachel Rosenthal, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, and Theodora Skipitares who make extensive use of props (and marionettes, in Skipitares’s case); Fluxus-oriented performers like Stewart Sherman, Dick Higgins, Larry Miller, and the Kipper Kid(s); multimedia collectives like the critical art ensemble, V-Girls, Gorilla Girls, and TEZ, who parody academic settings and situations; even including some anti- (or less) dramatically oriented monologists–such as Eileen Myles or “talk poet” David Antin–might have created an insightful (and fruitful) juxtaposition. Some exclusions, of course, such as Karen Finley and Annie Sprinkle, whose shticks have been overplayed/played out, are understandable. In his brief overview of the genre’s development in the beginning of the foreword, Russell does mention Robert Wilson, Trisha Brown, and Meredith Monk (though not Mabou Mines, Yvonne Rainer, or Carolee Schneemann), and groups that work the boundaries between Performance Art and (“just call it” (vii)) Performance, such as Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theatre and the Wooster Group (formerly TPG), but such inclusion is mostly name dropping, as no indication is given of how these works might go beyond the narrow frame he has established.

Near its end, the “Foreword” rhetorically restages a cliché of performance theory–that the theater “asks for participation in the illusion” (in this case, of character) (xiii). In Out of Character, Russell’s highly selective (though provocative) collection of performance scripts and the editor’s embedded assumptions about the nature of Performance Art encourage us to participate in a reductive de(il)lusion about a still emerging and not easily defined or semiotically delimited artistic territory. The job of such an anthology should, more productively, be–in the spirit of its subject matter–to open as fully as possible onto the field, to risk losing (one’s)self within it, rather than to seek a comfortable place/space of recognition and subjectivization–however seductive, aesthetically satisfying, and/or intellectually challenging those locales may be.

Christopher Sieving

Department of Communication Arts
University of Wisconsin at Madison
csieving@students.wisc.edu

Jennifer Doyle, Jonathan Flatley, and José Esteban Muñoz, eds., Pop Out: Queer Warhol. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1996.

In a year that marks the eleventh anniversary of his death, Andy Warhol–artist, filmmaker, icon–continues as a cultural force to be reckoned with. His profile within the Pop culture imaginary swelled in 1996 and 1997, fueled by the release of three films: Mary Harron’s I Shot Andy Warhol, Julian Schnabel’s Basquiat, and Susanne Ofteringer’s Nico Icon. (Screen bios of Edie Sedgwick and Holly Woodlawn are also, reportedly, on their way.) Warhol’s celebrated serial-image technique continues to be appropriated in dozens of ways throughout contemporary graphic design. The end of the century will undoubtedly spawn many more testimonials to the Warhol oeuvre, such as the one offered in a 1997 Chicago Tribune piece, which names Warhol as one of the 20th century’s five artists “that anyone seeking an understanding of modern and contemporary art will have to come up against and, if possible, accept” (G5).

Arts scholars and academics have come up against Warhol many, many times prior to the publication of Pop Out: Queer Warhol. Whereas 1996 constituted a mini-revival of popular interest in the artist, 1989 (the year of MoMA’s massive retrospective) represents the most recent revival of widespread critical interest. That year saw an explosion of publications on Warhol: not just the commercially accessible portraits by David Bourdon and Victor Bockris (and Warhol himself, via his Diaries), but critical anthologies from Michael O’Pray, Gary Garrels, and Kynaston McShine. Add the stalwart Warhol texts by John Coplans, Rainer Crone, Peter Gidal, Stephen Koch, Carter Ratcliff, et al., and there can be little doubt as to the sheer tenacity of Warhol scholarship.

So, one may reasonably wonder: do we really need more critical and analytical treatises on the work and world of Andy Warhol? Pop Out answers with a resounding “yes.” The book’s subtitle–Queer Warhol–announces a political agenda made explicit in its introduction: Pop Out‘s collected essays, according to editors Jennifer Doyle, Jonathan Flatley, and José Esteban Muñoz, “call out and combat the degaying of Warhol” (2). The term “degaying” comes from Simon Watney, whose inaugural article “Queer Andy” condemns the critical tradition (exemplified by many of the previously named texts) that “refus[es] to engage with the most glaringly obvious motif in Warhol’s career–his homosexuality” (21). Doyle, Flatley, and Muñoz argue for the recovery of a queer “social or symbolic context” (the context of Pop Art) in order to understand and appropriate Warhol and Popism (7). Recent analyses have largely failed at this task.

Watney perhaps exaggerates the denial of sex (“let alone queer sex”) and sexuality by critics of the Warhol films (20); as Doyle et al. rightly acknowledge, film scholarship has done more to foreground the sexiness of Warhol’s art than any other critical discipline (16n). But Watney’s larger point is well taken by Pop Out‘s twelve contributing essayists, each of whom sets out to reclaim Warhol as a decidedly queer artist and cultural figure.

It would be a mistake, however, to equate a discursive “queer Warhol” with the real-life gay Warhol. While the artist’s homosexuality is the jumping-off point for a number of essays (most notably, Watney’s “Queer Andy,” Thomas Waugh’s “Cockteaser,” and Michael Moon’s “Screen Memories, or Pop Comes from the Outside”), part of Pop Out‘s larger project is to complicate binarisms like “gay/straight.” This point comes through most eloquently in a passage in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s essay “Queer Performativity.” Queerness, for Sedgwick, does not simply equal “gayness,” although there is significant overlap. Rather, it is more productive to think of shyness and shame as primary indicators of queerness–which may or may not later manifest itself with regard to sexual orientation (138). Sedgwick locates the crucial site of the formation of a “shame-delineated place of identity” (138) within childhood; parenthetically, she remarks “on how frequently queer kids are queer before they’re gay” (137; original emphasis). Accordingly, the theme of queer childhood acts as something of a leitmotif in Pop Out: José Muñoz’s vision of “a sickly queer boy who managed to do much more than simply survive” (144) is also taken up by Watney and especially Moon, both of whom are concerned with how young Andy channeled his queerness and, in the words of the editors, “forg[ed] a self from his investments in the mass culture available to him” (10).

According to Sedgwick, once we start thinking of Warhol’s achievements as bound up with–as transformations of–his queerness, then those achievements can serve as models for subaltern persons and communities. The “shame-delineated place of identity” embodied by Warhol can be usefully appropriated by what Muñoz refers to as “minority subjects”; as Sedgwick notes, “race, gender, class, sexuality, appearance, and abledness are only a few of the defining social constructions that will crystallize there” (138). The frequent use of terms like “minority subject” and “survival strategy” (or “tactic”) by Pop Out‘s contributors underscores the political efficacy of Warhol’s brand of Pop appropriation.

Muñoz’s conception (informed by the work of Michel Pecheux and Judith Butler) of “disidentification”–“a strategy that tries to transform a cultural logic from within” (148)–further illuminates this crucial theoretical formulation. The elasticity of the word “queer” in nearly all of these essays enables the authors to draw a variety of disempowered social groups (non-whites, women, the working class) into the Warhol nexus. Sedgwick and Muñoz are forthright in promoting the empowering effects of Warhol’s queer survival tactics; Muñoz even draws an analogy to Michele Wallace’s conception of black female film spectatorship, a process “about problematizing and expanding one’s racial identity instead of abandoning it” (150; original emphasis). However, while the Warhol philosophy may indeed prove liberating for some, to appropriate him as a vanquisher of patriarchy, white supremacy, or capitalistic terrorism is to ignore some unpleasant biographical truths: Warhol was certainly no friend to feminism (his 1972 film Women in Revolt is a bitchy parody of the nascent “Women’s Lib” movement), and examples of his casual racism have been remarked upon in a number of sources.¹ By and large Pop Out‘s authors avoid an apologia for Warhol’s misogyny or classism, yet this avoidance might also be construed as an evasion. Only Marcie Frank, in “Popping Off Warhol,” makes a significant attempt to reconcile feminism and Popism (through the unlikely mediating figure of Valerie Solanas, Warhol’s would-be assassin).

Nevertheless, Muñoz’s encouragement of these “theories of revisionary identification” (149) nicely encapsulates the vitality and diversity this project brings to the discipline of media studies. Instead of straining Warhol’s work through the meshes of a single theoretical approach, Pop Out allows for a variety of useful critical frameworks and methodologies. Studies of spectatorship and reception are skillfully employed in two of the anthology’s finest pieces. Waugh’s “Cockteaser” vividly reconstructs the audience for the embryonic gay cinema of the 1960s and positions Warhol’s films (e.g., My Hustler, Lonesome Cowboys) within that “underground” exhibition context, detailing how “censorship and film industry pressures shaped the form of Warhol’s cockteaser-like address to his gay male audiences” (59; original emphasis). Sasha Torres’s “The Caped Crusader of Camp” draws on contemporary press reports on Warhol, Pop Art, and the Batman phenomenon to expose the failure of recent revisionist critiques of 1960s camp to theorize the links between “camp and gay subcultural tastes… between subcultural style and its more ‘mainstream’ appropriations” (246)–i.e., between “gay camp” and “mass camp.”

Elsewhere, Moon and Muñoz apply the methodologies of psychoanalysis and critical race theory, respectively, to analyze Warhol’s (and protégé Jean-Michel Basquiat’s) use of cartoon heroes and comic-book illustrations as subjects for art; Moon’s provocative thesis situates Warhol’s comic-strip painting as a continuation of “his flagrantly homoerotic art of the fifties” (79). Jennifer Doyle in “Tricks of the Trade” locates a multi-layered social critique in Warhol’s exploitation of “work” as “sex” (and vice versa) and offers her own critique of the modernist “figuring [of] Warhol’s relationship to his work as a kind of prostitution” (192); whereas Mandy Merck in “Figuring Out Andy Warhol” perceptively criticizes the rhetoric of transvestism employed by postmodernists (after Jameson and Baudrillard) to marginalize the Warhol silkscreen as, “[l]ike the drag queen, the copy without an original” (235). In addition, a number of essays follow David James’ suggestion and do away with the false opposition posited between Warhol’s celebrated ’60s work (enshrined in POPism, Warhol’s 1980 memoir) and his “denigrated” ’70s and ’80s output (34).

While most of Pop Out‘s flaws are minor, one could take issue with some of the evidence–theoretical and empirical–used to support some of the more contentious claims. When a response to the existing literature seems necessary to bolster a proposition, many of the new scholars bypass the canonical critical takes on Warhol (Coplans, Crone, and Ratcliff don’t even make the bibliography) and go directly to the source himself: the “self-penned” Andy Warhol Diaries (1989), POPism: The Warhol Sixties, and dark horse The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again (1975) emerge in Pop Out as the new source texts for Warhol studies, to be plumbed for textual and subtextual clues. Thus, only a bit of Pop psychoanalysis is required to conjecture a theory of underclass queer attraction to Dick Tracy (Moon)–or an articulation of a chocolate fetish with racial revulsion (Sedgwick)–out of a few phone conversations later transcribed as part of the Andy Warhol Philosophy.

It seems odd that so many of Pop Out‘s contributors embrace these memoirs at face value, as if they presented unmediated access to the mind of the artist: not only is the “author” known to have been notoriously selective about autobiographical details (Stephen Koch has remarked of Warhol and his assistant Paul Morrissey: not “a single statement either one of them made to me… upon examination, turned out to be true” (qtd. in O’Pray 12), but all three books were apparently ghost-written and/or edited by collaborators. And yet I don’t wish to propose Jonathan Flatley’s trotting out of the theoretical big guns (de Man, Marx, Benjamin, Derrida, Butler, Saussure, Lacan, Freud–the last five within a page of each other) in “Warhol Gives Good Face” as a useful corrective, either; surely a middle ground can be attained, even within the solidly academic context of a book in which allusions to “Sedgwick” more often mean Eve, not Edie.

Pop Out would also have profited from a closer look at Warhol’s temporal-based art. If, as Waugh claims, “a frank, intelligent, and materialist questioning of Warhol’s sexual address… and of his relation to erotic and specifically homoerotic mythologies of his day” (52) is to be found in much of the recent writing on the Warhol films, might not it prove fruitful to further expand the consideration of a distinctly “queer Warhol” to his often explicitly gay cinema (and his less explicitly gay TV work)? With the exceptions of Waugh and of Doyle, who cites Warhol and Morrissey’s Flesh (1968) in her analysis of “artistic exchange as the setting for erotic, sexual exchange” (198), most of the Pop Out essayists miss this opportunity. Sedgwick’s fine essay might have further benefited from an analysis of queer performativity in Warhol’s films, following the lead of Doyle, Flatley, and Muñoz’s offhand take on the “bad acting” of Warhol’s Superstars: “the performance that avows its performanceness acknowledges the difficulty of fitting into roles” (15). Flatley’s notion of the “politics of publicity” (103) seems very applicable to Warhol’s celebrity “biopics” of the middle ’60s (Harlot, Hedy, Lupe, and More Milk, Yvette), and Torres’s insights make one ponder how straight audiences and mainstream critics may have used the Pop/camp distinction to make sense of The Chelsea Girls (1966), the underground cinema’s box-office champ.²

Still, the fact that possibilities for further exploration leap easily to mind is an indicator of Pop Out‘s usefulness for film historians, analysts, and theoreticians. A surge of additional scholarly appraisals of the Warhol cinema are in our future, as the long-awaited, long-delayed video releases of Warhol’s films finally become reality. And though future film scholars will have the luxury of access to these primary texts, they will be equally indebted to this book’s multiplicity of vibrant critical approaches. By illuminating methodological and theoretical alternatives like queer studies, feminist theory, and poststructuralism, Pop Out‘s essays have helped free Warhol studies from the dead ends of simplistic textual analysis and auteurism. This represents a significant advance (even at this late date), and it’s bound to be Pop Out‘s legacy for cinema studies.

Notes

1. See, for example, Nat Finkelstein’s account of “Andy in the Slums” in his book Andy Warhol: The Factory Years 1964-1967 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989).

2. In this respect the anonymous Time reviewer’s queer-bashing synopsis of the three-and-a-half hour “very dirty and… very dull peep show” is particularly interesting: “A couple of sacked-out homosexuals in dirty underwear fondle each other incuriously. Another homosexual does a striptease. One lesbian beats another with a big-buckled belt. Another lesbian who is also a junkie jabs herself in the buttock with a hypodermic. A faggot who calls himself ‘the Pope’ advises a lesbian to sneak into church and do something obscene to the figure on the cross–‘It’ll do you good’” (“Nuts From Underground: The Chelsea Girls” 37). One wonders which review–Time‘s or Jack Kroll’s rave in Newsweek–was more influential in building popular enthusiasm for the movie.

Works Cited

• Artner, Alan G. “Artful Dodgers.” Chicago Tribune 2 March 1997: G5.
• Doyle, Jennifer, Jonathan Flatley, and José Esteban Muñoz, eds., Pop Out: Queer Warhol. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1996.
• Finkelstein, Nat. Andy Warhol: The Factory Years 1964-1967. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989.
• “Nuts From Underground: The Chelsea Girls.” Time 30 December 1966: 37.
• O’Pray, Michael. “Introduction.” Andy Warhol Film Factory. Ed. Michael O’Pray. London: British Film Institute, 1989.

Nicky Marsh

Department of English
University of Southampton, UK
ebpd0@central.susx.ac.uk

Susan Howe, Frame Structures: Early Poems 1974-1979. New York: New Directions, 1996.
and
Leslie Scalapino, Green and Black: Selected Writings.Jersey City: Talisman, 1996.

Frame Structures and Green and Black are single-author collections written by two poets associated with the Language movement in American poetry. Leslie Scalapino’s collection gathers together excerpts from a number of her long poems published in the previous eleven years and ends with a new poem that shares the title of the collection, “Green and Black.” Susan Howe’s collection contains unabridged (although slightly altered) versions of her four earliest poems which, in their original form, are no longer in print. The central difference between the two collections, as Howe gathers her earliest work for publication and Scalapino excerpts from her latest, can possibly be explained by the relatively different standing the two poets have accrued within the academy; as Howe is tentatively accepted by the mainstream, Scalapino remains more thoroughly “experimental.” What these two poets share in these texts, however, beyond their imprecise categorization as experimental or Language writers, is an apparent, and for both largely new, desire to locate the significance of these poetics for the reader.

“Note on My Writing” is the promisingly explicatory title of the opening essay in Leslie Scalapino’s latest collection. This title suggests, as do the other three “notes” that interleave the excerpts from Scalapino’s poems, that these short essays offer some process of initiation–that they bring to light how this sometimes unyielding and sometimes dazzling verse should be read, or at least how Scalapino would like it to be read. Susan Howe’s collection is similarly prefaced with a sense of introduction and elucidation. Frame Structures is not only the title of the book but the title of an extended inaugural essay in which Howe in her eclectic chronicling of fragmentary history left by the marginalized, familiar to readers of her other works, now turns to examine her own past and familial genealogy. This sense of literary autobiography/family history opens this collection of Howe’s earliest poems: the “frame structure” this combination delivers, from within which we are reading, seems to be that of the poet herself.

The introductions or explanations with which these two works begin may be part of the acceptance by many of the writers involved in Language writing’s linguistically disruptive and politically skeptical project that they are being published and read as substantial contributors to American poetics. The collections by Howe and Scalapino can be placed alongside the other anthologies and literary histories–Douglas Messerli’s From the Other Side of the Century, Maggie O’Sullivan’s Out of Everywhere, and Bob Perelman’s The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History–that have emerged in the mid-nineties as testament to the growing significance of Language writing within the mainstream American literary academy. However, these works by Scalapino and Howe also call into question any homogeneity of meaning or intent that Language writing either claimed or received by attribution. Their putative foregrounding of the materiality of language now seems to be a construct that many key participants in the movement are more than willing to deconstruct. Hence, these collections indicate not only the growing popularity of the experimentalism associated with Language writing, but also how complex and varied this writing actually is.

The differences between Susan Howe and Leslie Scalapino are borne out by the stylistically distinct ways in which they locate the significance of their own work. In “Note on My Writing,” Scalapino is tersely explicit about what her writing means to her. The sentences are sharp and blatant: “I intend this work to be the repetition of historically real events the writing of which punches a hole in reality (as if to void them but actively)” (1). The energy that Scalapino suggests her work conveys is coiled up into the spring-like keenness of the writing. Nothing can be wasted when “a segment in the poem is the actual act of event itself” in a poetics that denies the distance between the text and its referents, making the text its own action (1). Scalapino’s writing inverts the insight that social constructions are always necessarily mediated through language (a notion integral to Language writing’s most basic poststructuralist precepts), suggesting instead that these vehicles of mediation are themselves the central constituents of experience–hence the text becomes the act. Scalapino asks that the reader acknowledge that the text doesn’t simply represent reality for us (albeit in an ideologically governed way) but produces a reality on its own terms.

Susan Howe’s Frame Structures does not share either this laconic style or its invocation of text as action. Consistent with much of Howe’s earlier work, the text’s use of narrative shards of “local histories, antiquarian studies, bibliographies” is descriptive, elaborate, and assured (19). “Historical imagination,” the text informs us on the first page, “gathers in the missing,” and as the poem continues we are made aware that Howe’s own sense of the “missing” is being sought not only in historical documents, family letters, and diaries but in personal memories and family anecdotes. The materiality of the physical word (the antiquarian document, the markings in a family book of poetry) becomes prominent in this text because of its apparently stalwart ability to resist the homogenizing implications of what culture sanctions as “history”–because, like memory, texts can hold the eccentric and unsettling truths written out of official history which Howe elsewhere suggests is “the record of winners” (Europe of Trusts 11).

Although both Scalapino and Howe emphasize the materiality of language in these introductions, the corresponding poetics suggested by these collections are quite different. Leslie Scalapino’s foregrounding of language is part of her attempt to overcome the divisions between the internal and external, past and present, that structure our experience. In “Note on My Writing,” Scalapino explains how she uses the comic strip or cartoon form to problematize these divisions: “Cartoons are a self-revealing surface as the comic strip is continuous, multiple, and within it [cartoons] have simultaneous future and past dimensions” (3). The extracts collected in Green and Black suggest how Scalapino makes sense of her relationship with the outside world through the form of comics.

Winos were laying on the sidewalk, 
   it's a warehouse district; I happen 
   to
be wearing a silk blouse, so it's 
   jealousy, not    
that they're jealous of me
necessarily.

They're not receded, and are inert--as 
   it happens are bums (6)

This extract is characteristic of much of the writing in this anthology. Scalapino makes apparent how our possession of mainly metropolitan space is organized around the social politics of class and gender. Moreover, this awareness also embraces the complexities of these categories. The woman narrator’s sensitivity to the “winos” comes not only through her apprehensive vulnerability (because of the sheerness of her clothes) but from her awareness that these same clothes also denote the place of privilege she occupies. The “bums” are visible to her–they are “not receded”–because she is acutely aware of the disparity of her own position, and that they are “static” in contrast to her own movement, that the “bums” lack the mobility that comes with social power.

These twin themes of mobility and visibility, of location and social power, emerge throughout the various poems included in the collection. Indeed, Scalapino intersperses unannounced photographs from her book Crowd and Not Evening or Light within Green and Black almost to emphasize the significance of the landscape–the visible image–to the effect her text is trying to create. Her examination of the way these antagonisms disrupt the easy categories of public and private, class and gender, is extended in her erotic writing where the sex act is often defamiliarized in order to lay these constructions bare.

having  
swallowed the 
water
lily bud--so having
it in
him when he'd 
come on some
time with her (44)

The motif of the lily is one that recurs in sexual scenarios throughout much of Scalapino’s work. The apparent coyness of the image (with its combination of a phallic stem and a feminine “flowering”) is constantly undercut by lengthy and decidedly unerotic images of the mechanics of sex–of fluid, movements, and deadpan orgasms. These rather estranging sequences seem to remove intercourse from its more customary overdetermined presentation, to deny it romantic, moralizing, or medical discourses and to return it to the everyday.

The last poem in the collection is the previously unpublished “Green and Black.” This poem, like Scalapino’s other work from the mid-nineties such as New Time and Front Matter Dead Souls, attempts to bring Scalapino’s poetics, her resistance to the most foundational of dualities (you/me, inside/outside, then/now), to bear not only upon the public realm but upon specifically named public events. Scalapino’s reach over these events encompasses, and often seems to make no distinction between, the landscape, the economic system, and individual interaction. In all cases she attempts to bring out what we are inoculated against witnessing, what we are encouraged to accept.

     Slavery of  people in  events--
        their having
no entrance--
as there being no other ground as 
   oneself
     only occurrence there's no 
   observing 

     putting people down was the 
   fascist act inherently--in 
every
case ? 
     the teachers in my schools 
   created 
     pets--as cowardly groupies
--and waifs jeered---there (95)

Scalapino problematizes the unity or authenticity of the individual’s view of events, “there being no ground as oneself,” but stresses that domination, be it the play of power within a classroom or an allusion to racial subjugation (although perhaps Scalapino too easily suggests the two are comparable), structures our world, so that new ways have to be found to interpret domination if we would learn to negotiate it.

Although Howe shares Scalapino’s suspicion of a lyrical presence and similarly foregrounds language in place of either self or narrative, the poems collected in Frame Structures explore a very different type of poetics from that which I have ascribed to Scalapino. Although these very early texts are marked by a lack of historical specificity, they do not share the references to “real” documents and voices that have come to characterize Howe’s later poems; they still attempt to make manifest the secrets concealed within language. The poems “Hinge Picture” and “Cabbage Gardens” intermingle snatches of narrative with mesmerizing chains of words and sounds.

Remembered a fragment of the king's 
   face
remembered a lappet wing
remembered eunuchs lip to lip in 
   silent profile
kissing
remembered pygmies doing battle with 
   the cranes
remembered bones of an enormous size 
   as proof of 
the existence of giants   (41)

Howe’s anaphoric “remembered” works as both a verb and a noun: the incredible nature of what is being recalled throws the act of memory, and the limitations of narrative against which it is posited, into relief. The frequent slips into neologism often focus attention more on the visual and aural effect of the words themselves than on any meaning they may lead us to–the sensuality of Howe’s early training as a painter is especially apparent in these early texts.

However, the listing of the fantastic that dominates this work is often structured around a sense of quest. What becomes in Howe’s later work a search for hidden truths and voices here emerges as a much more playful venture. The activities of the various mythical protagonists seem to have no final destination or goal in mind; it is the hazards of the journey that Howe seems most keen to capture.

Zingis filled
nine sacks 
with the ears of his enemies

in winter
the Tartars
passed the D
anube on ice (47)

It is only occasionally, as in the poem “Chanting at the Crystal Sea,” that the sense of foreboding that emerges in later work surfaces, a sense that seems rooted in the same anxieties as Howe returns again and again in her work to lost origins that can never be recovered, to losses that are often at once personal and historical.

I left you in a group of grownup 
   children and went in search
wandered sandhills snowy nights
calling "Mother, Father"

A Dauphin sat down to dine on dust
alone in his field of wheat

One war-whoop toppled a State. (63)

“The Secret History of the Dividing Line,” the last and thus most recent poem in this collection, is similarly resonant with the impossibility of the fairy tale. However, in this text Howe is concerned to counter the fantastic with a more specific interrogation of the relationship between language and domination: an interrogation that alludes simultaneously to early America and a more personal sense of past. The word “mark,” for example, is given multiple meanings early on in the poem.

MARK
border
bulwark. An object set up to indicate 
   a boundary or
position
hence a sign or token
impression or trace (90)

These composite meanings of the sound are acknowledged to possess some degree of historical specificity; Howe intervenes in the play of signifiers whilst acknowledging it is uncontrollable. The poem’s ostensible concern to narrate the “war whoop in each dusty narrative” begins by focusing on the inequities associated with the claiming–symbolically and literally–of American land (99). Marking territory with “an object set up to indicate a boundary or position,” becomes synonymous with the systems of power and dominance that Howe’s poetry constantly seeks to evade. Like the poems collected in The Singularities anthology, this text is concerned to trace the devastation of native American common land ownership, and consequently culture, caused by the cartographic project inherent in the colonization of America. In the righthand corner of the following page appear the words: “for Mark my father and Mark my son.” The word here also intimates, although with an affection suggestive of the complex qualifications that always mar attempts to map easy political allegiances onto Howe’s work, the system of paternal naming upon which female identity has symbolically foundered. Finally, and crucially, the word centrally refers to the hierarchical project of writing itself, the very project that Howe’s agenda most often attempts to examine and disrupt.

These two collections seem to participate in what the critic Marjorie Perloff has described as Language poetry’s “coming of age,” a newfound maturity she attributes to the re-examination of the principles of Language poetry as discussed by its “New York and San Francisco founding fathers” (558). Crucially, the authors of this examination are a surge of experimental women writers. The publication of these collections by Scalapino and Howe, and their accompanying acts of exegesis, thus suggest not only the slowly increasing readership that this writing has begun to accrue, but also that “this” writing (be it Language, innovative, or avant-garde) has begun to negotiate the issues surrounding politics and representation in new and expansive ways. When placed in contrast, Scalapino’s and Howe’s work most obviously illustrates that an investment in the text, a foregrounding of language as a site of privileged action or insight, can result in a poetics with political agendas and landscapes dramatically different from what has gone before. Howe moves assuredly, and often invisibly, through tracts and traces of early Americana, whereas Scalapino grazes on and against the contemporary urban spaces of this country. What these collections seem to demand above all, however, is a careful and generous reading capable of scrutinizing the assumptions and politics that lie concealed within these written landscapes.

Works Cited

• Howe, Susan. The Europe of Trusts. Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1990.
• —. Singularities. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan UP, 1990.
• Messerli, Douglas. From the Other Side of the Century. Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1994.
• O’Sullivan, Maggie. Out of Everywhere: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America and the UK. London: Reality Street Press, 1996.
• Perelman, Bob. The Marginalisation of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History, Princeton: Princeton UP, 1996.
• Perloff, Marjorie. “The Coming of Age of Language Poetry.” Contemporary Literature 38.3 (1997): 558-567.
• Scalapino, Leslie. Crowd and Not Evening or Light. San Francisco: O Books, 1992.
• —. The Front Matter, Dead Souls. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan UP, 1996.
• —. New Time. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan UP, 1996.

Mark Nunes et al.

Department of English
DeKalb College
mnunes@dekalb.dc.peachnet.edu

In February of 1997, a dozen individuals began working on a collaborative on-line project entitled “Postmodern Spacings.” We came from various academic and professional fields in North America, Europe, and Australia. Our only initial “guiding principle” was that we were to discuss a variety of understandings of postmodern space. The seminar as a whole would be responsible for drawing up a syllabus and setting the focus. Together, we set up our reading list, held real-time discussions in an on-line meeting space called 1k+1 MOO (hero.village.virginia.edu:7777), carried on conversations via a list-serv, and constructed collaborative, interwoven texts. The hypermedia work we present here is the culmination of that effort.

Postmodern Spacings attempts to address the significance of “space” in contemporary cultural discourse. It looks at manifestations of bodily space, the space of the text, and social spaces, and it attempts to question the current relevance of a philosophy of space. The project also considers the intersection of these domains and the various hybrid spaces produced by these crossings.

Our readings and conversations served as a series of openings to various questions about space and spacing. In our discussions of “postmodern space,” we assume that “space” has a history, and that it is more than a passive container of events. In acknowledging that space can be other than as it is, we were working from the assumption that “space” is something produced by social, cultural, and cognitive arrangements, while at the same time productive of experiential relations.

Our project grew from a general question posed toward contemporary culture: what are the conditions of possibility present in various spacings of the everyday? As early as 1857, Marx described the historical transformation of everyday life in industrial modernity as “the annihilation of space by time.” We find that “space” increasingly appears as a term of interrogation in contemporary discourse.

We discussed the production of sex and gender in relation to that spatial locus called “the body.” We looked toward the concepts of “production” and “poiesis” to explore the experience of “determined” subjectivity. We attempted to rethink urban space, sub-urban spaces, and the varied heterotopias and “non-spaces” of malls, highways, homeless encampments, and college classrooms. We considered the multilinearity of new textual spaces and the production of mediated spaces in on-line environments. Often we found our discussions heading in multiple directions. The weaving of our words into a hypermedia project allowed us to pursue connections that at times seemed aberrant, eccentric, or even monstrous.

We drew from our various technical, academic, and professional backgrounds and attempted to produce a collaborative, coalitional space of our own in which to explore these topographies. Since discussions took place on-line, “the virtual” and “the real” occurred as a motif in various postings and conversations, but by no means was it a limiting topic. We did come to understand that the Postmodern Spacings project itself was an experiment in spaces, making use of several networked environments to encourage collaborative effort between participants. Thus, the project provided a space of sorts for a discussion of the benefits and shortcomings of on-line collaborative work. The Internet did indeed provide us with a profoundly open “supplemental” site of contact for the exchange of ideas and information. But this chaotic space, while wonderful for creating new openings, makes an attempt at “closure” seem somewhat artificial or forced.

 
Postmodern Spacings is, therefore, a project in the truest sense, opening outward, forward, toward a positive expression. It provides a series of experiments on spatial issues according to various social, cultural, and economic discourses. The material presented “here” is not intended to serve as a finished work, but rather as a set of headings onto the various theoretical and practical issues relating to figurations and configurations of space in the post-industrial late 20th century. Perhaps it is best, then, to consider Postmodern Spacings (both the seminar itself and the work we produced) as a network of experiments and trials–essays–that point in the direction of further collaborative work.

Proceed to Postmodern Spacings…

Michele Pierson

Department of English and Cultural Studies
University of Melbourne
m.pierson@pgrad.unimelb.edu.au

The November 1997 issue of Wired magazine featured a special report on the future of Hollywood filmmaking (“Hollywood 2.0 Special Report: The People Who Are Reinventing Entertainment”). In the Hollywood of the future there will be no film. Theatres will not be theatres. And feature films will be created on desktop computers for less than $1,000. The cinema of the future promises at once to deliver filmmaking into the hands of home-computer users and to make actually going to the movies an entertainment experience more akin to a trip to a theme park. Hollywood 2.0 is do-it-yourself cinema and Holodeck Enterprises all rolled into one. The report does not suggest that making movies for CD-ROM, DVD, or on-line delivery is the same thing as having one’s digital creations projected in one of Gerard Howland’s 360-degree, 3-D full-motion theaters. That’s not how things work in the future. Hollywood 2.0 still only offers would-be “creatives” the choice between producing low-resolution “art” films for the small screen, and trying to get a piece of the big-screen action elsewhere. And despite the closing of a number of high-profile special effects houses in 1996-97 (Buena Vista Visual Effects, Warner Digital Studios, and Boss Film Studios), the special effects industry is still the best representative of this fantasy-elsewhere that Hollywood 2.0 has to offer.¹

The “Hollywired Index” that accompanies this special report plots the emergence of Hollywood 2.0 in terms of the history of computer generated imagery (or CGI) in Hollywood cinema. A check-list of “firsts” for CGI in feature films lists the first completely computer generated sequence in a feature film (“Genesis effect” in Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan); the first completely computer generated character (“Stained-glass knight” in Young Sherlock Holmes); the first morph (Willow); and the first computer generated main character (“T-1000” in Terminator 2: Judgment Day). Similar lists have been a recurring feature in a magazine that imagines a readership intensely fascinated by the production of computer generated imagery. The very first issue featured an article on the special effects company Pacific Data Images (Quinn, “Beyond The Valley of The Morphs”). Subsequent issues have featured articles on effects house Digital Domain (Rothman, “Digital Deal”); Digital Domain’s co-founder, James Cameron (Parisi, “Cameron Angle”); and ILM’s George Lucas (Kelly and Parisi, “Beyond Star Wars“). Special effects were also the cover story for the December 1995 issue–which featured an article on the history of the Hollywood special effects industry (Parisi, “The New Silicon Stars”), and another on the making of Toy Story (Snider, “The Toy Story Story”).

The regular features on the Hollywood special effects industry, mini-profiles of computer animators, and reviews of entertainment applications for computer graphics-based programs are only the most obvious sites where special effects figure in the magazine as content. In “Fetish” (a regular section that reviews the latest electronic gizmos for self-proclaimed and would-be hardware fetishists), readers are regularly addressed as producers of special effects. This is a trope that also frequently appears in advertising copy for multimedia and special effects hardware and software.

Wired is not the only magazine that features articles, advertising, and artwork that displays computer-enhanced and computer generated images in this way. Mondo 2000 may have seen its heyday, but it was once the lifestyle magazine of choice for the wired-at-heart. And along with the crash courses in “DIY TV” and interviews with the Hollywood digerati, it too has fed readers’ home-production fantasies with sumptuous, digitally enhanced photo-montages and glossy, full-color computer generated images. It is Wired, however, with its saturation level advertising, high-res, digital-art-effects, and extensive coverage of the entertainment and consumer electronics industries, that provides the best site for examining some of the economic, technological, and popular-cultural rationalities that have molded and shaped the look of computer generated imagery (or CGI) in recent years.

This essay looks at some of the ways Wired visualizes, discusses, and alludes to computer generated imagery, focusing in particular on how frequently visual and discursive references to special effects appeal to readers’ fantasies of producing such images themselves. In the early 1990s, computer generated special effects became a major attraction of science fiction cinema. As well as representing the techno-scientific wonders demanded by science fiction narratives, the computer generated images in films like The Abyss (1989), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), Jurassic Park (1993), Stargate (1994), Johnny Mnemonic (1995), and Virtuosity (1995), also presented the techno-scientific achievements of the filmmaking and special effects industries to cinema audiences.

Over the years, film and cultural critics like Vivian Sobchack, Brooks Landon, and Scott Bukatman have offered compelling accounts of the techno-cultural matrix in which computer generated imagery has emerged as a new kind of visual spectacle on the postmodern mediascape. But their work has, on the whole, looked less closely at the popular and sub-cultural resonances of a form of spectacular image production which has also produced a distinctly popular aesthetic. The computer generated imagery featured in the science fiction cinema of the early-to-mid-1990s was bracketed for mainstream cinema audiences–both by the formal organization of the films themselves and by the formal and informal networks of information about special effects that now play such an important role in the contemporary entertainment experience. This imagery was both a techno-scientific tour-de-force for the special effects industry and a new kind of aesthetic object. Mapping some of the cultural contours of this new aesthetic is therefore another project of this essay.

The Consumption Junction

With the exception of the seminal work by Sobchack, Landon, and Bukatman in science fiction studies, critical commentaries on CGI in Hollywood cinema have paid scant attention to aesthetics. Hollywood has typically been seen as a technologically and aesthetically conservative institution–in many ways, a justified perception. But while Hollywood has reacted conservatively to new technologies in some areas of film production, it has also opted in some areas for technical novelty over any strict calculus of risks. To take an example from the early 1950s, the aesthetic project governing Hollywood’s experiments with 3-D formats was arguably conservative, driven by a centuries-old quest for illusionism, realism, and mimesis. However, these experiments also represented a technologically adventurous–if ultimately unsuccessful–bid to bring cinema into the third dimension.

Movies made in 3-D were widely pilloried by critics of the day. They were criticized for being gimmicky and juvenile, or for having stupid stories, or no stories at all. Most of the films made in 3-D between 1952 and 1953 used a dual-strip process that required two strips of film to be simultaneously projected onto the screen. The two images thus produced were meant to be perceived as a single, three-dimensional image when viewed by audiences through special polarized glasses; but if the projectors were not in perfect synchronization and/or correctly separated from each other, the effect would fail. The 3-D process was plagued by technological problems every step of the way: the cameras were bulky, film stock and printing costs were exorbitant, and synchronization was rarely achieved in projection. For a time, however, films made in 3-D formats were also popularly perceived to be the most technologically adventurous movies in theaters. Even after their moment of mass popularity was over, they continued to invite the delight of a new audience demographic: the techno-buffs.

Hollywood’s experiments with 3-D in the 1950s differ in many important respects from its experiments with CGI in the early 1990s. Not only is the structure of the film industry different, so is the context of film reception. 3-D and CGI were also produced by different kinds of technologies. Assessing the cultural implications of these differences requires methodologies capable of identifying them. Philip Hayward and Tana Wollen address this issue in the introduction to Future Visions: New Technologies of the Screen, arguing that new methodologies are needed to deal with the cross-media nature of new computer technologies. Their work points out that developments like CGI are not anchored to cultural institutions in the same way that film is anchored to cinema (4). The fact that the history of CGI spans so many applications has implications for the way that history is written even when it is narrowed down (as it is here) to the history of CGI in Hollywood feature films. This last point is an important one: cultural analyses of new technologies ought to be different from cultural analyses of older technologies just (and not only) because the circumstances of their development, application, and consumption are different.

Like the wide-screen formats that replaced it, 3-D cinema was born out of technological experimentation aimed at creating an immersive experience for spectators. The films that defined the look of CGI in the early 1990s, on the other hand, constructed a very different spectatorial relation to the images projected on the screen. Far from being designed to make spectators feel, as Bukatman once described it, that “[they] are there (even if [they’re] not)” (“The Artificial Infinite” 263) the cinema of this period was designed to focus attention on the disruption of cinematographic space by the insertion and installation of a markedly different technological and aesthetic object.

By 1996, Hollywood science fiction cinema was already moving away from a mode of arts-and-effects direction that put the display of computer generated images at the center of the spectatorial experience. But in these early years, computer generated images became the focus of intense public scrutiny and the site of popular speculation about the aesthetic possibilities of new imaging technologies then coming to market.

A number of factors have contributed to the prominence of consumer fantasies about spectacular image production in the 1990s. It could be argued that such fantasies of production arise inevitably when the interests of powerful industrial sectors converge–in this case, the entertainment, consumer electronics, and information technology industries. But such analysis fails to account for more diffuse processes involved in this phenomenon.² Writing about the widespread media interest in entertainment applications of virtual reality technologies in the early 1990s, Philip Hayward commented that although much of this coverage suggested that recent innovations had only just burst onto the scene, “[a]nalysis reveals a more gradual pattern of diffusion through a range of (sub)cultural channels whose character and concerns have molded the public image and perception of the phenomenon itself.”³ Much the same might be said of the way the public image and perception of special effects has been shaped over the same period. Indeed, many of the cultural forms that Hayward identifies as having contributed to the popularity of discourses about virtual reality–music videos, rock and fringe culture magazines, computer games, and cyberpunk–have also helped popularize discourses about special effects.

Journalisimo⁴

Wired’s post-feminist posturing and consistent editorial support for a free-market, techno-libertarian stance on government regulation of information technology and telecommunications have repeatedly been the focus of dissent from readers and critics alike.⁵ More difficult to pin down, the magazine’s visual gestalt has also captured the attention of cultural critics interested in the ramifications of a design sense that has appeared, to many, to have made of the computer generated image, not so much a new kind of aesthetic object, as a new kind of corporate logo.

This is not the first time that reflection on this aspect of the magazine has centered on, or invoked, computer generated special effects. In “Wired Unplugged“–a revised version of a review which first appeared in Educom Review–Mark Dery begins by imagining that the magazine itself simulates the polymorphous perversity of a computer graphics effect.⁶ Invoking an already iconic moment in the history of CGI in Hollywood cinema, Dery wonders if Wired isn’t “actually the shape-shifting android from Terminator 2, disguised as a magazine.” In its use of digital production technologies, he likens Wired to “the liquid metal T-1000, whose ‘mimetic polyalloy’ enables it to morph into ‘anything it samples by physical contact.’” Dery is a perspicacious commentator on contemporary technocultures. His analysis in Escape Velocity of the subcultures that have emerged among underground roboticists, cyber-body artists, postmodern primitives, and cyberpunk rockers is happily devoid of the “cyberdrool” that sometimes passes for theoretical reflection at the more ecstatic end of cultural commentary on new technologies. For Dery, these subcultures are appealing because, while they take it as a given that “technology is inextricably woven into the warp and woof of our everyday lives,” they also manage to “short-circuit the technophile-versus-technophobe debate” that tends to follow this assumption (Escape Velocity 15). Some, it would seem, even go so far as to turn a critical eye on that ubiquitous new formation, “the military-industrial-entertainment complex.”

The same, however, cannot be said for the readership that Dery imagines for Wired, this “magazine simulating a simulation” (“Wired Unplugged”). If he chastizes Langdon Winner for taking Wired’s hyperactive visual design as a sign that the magazine lacks substance, it is because Dery is too perceptive a critic not to recognize that Wired’s slippery, refracting visual style reverberates with meanings of its own. Curiously, he posits its “aesthetic of overt manipulation–of ‘overdesign’”–as the graphic equivalent of the opening line of William Gibson’s Neuromancer: “‘The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel’” (3). This seems an odd choice, not least of all because, unless you press your nose to the screen, the flickering fuzz that appears on a television set tuned to a dead channel seems strangely monochrome. It is not an image, one would have thought, that is readily identifiable as the textual equivalent of Wired’s day-glo graphical interface. The point of this reference is to draw a parallel between Gibson’s vision of the future and Wired’s professed desire to produce a magazine that looks “as though it had literally landed at your feet as a messenger from the future.”⁷ But Dery’s suggestion that “both Gibson’s world and Wired’s remind us that technology is transforming our environment into a profoundly denatured, digitized–and, increasingly, corporate–place” (“Wired Unplugged” 3), only succeeds in foreclosing upon any further speculation about what this future might look like.

In its rhetorical effects, Dery’s writing blurs any distinction between Wired’s visual style and something approximating its world view. On one level, this seems entirely appropriate. For as Dery himself points out, it is not for nothing that Marshall McLuhan is listed as Patron Saint on the magazine’s masthead. The problem with this thinking lies not in trying to ascertain the cultural meaning of Wired’s visual style. Much less does it lie in refusing to separate style from content (or medium from message). For much of this review it lies, rather, in the assumption that Wired’s world is so dominated by the view of “corporate futurists, laissez-faire evangelists, and prophets of privatization,” that no meaning can be imagined for it that does not fit this ideological configuration (2). When it is not being retrofitted as corporate-futurist, Wired’s aesthetic is figured as an attempt to simulate “the sensation of bodily immersion familiar from video games and techno-thrillers, where warp-speed, gravity-defying flights through cyberspace, seen from a computer-generated point of view, offer gamers and moviegoers a taste of cyborg vision” (4). But to the extent that it is really intended to signal a new mode of visualization, the metaphor of “cyborg vision” all too neatly elides important differences between the ways that computer generated images produced for VR, movies, games, and magazines actually circulate in popular culture.

More prosaically, it might be noted that some aspects of Wired’s visual design are tuned into the anti-formalist, cut-and-paste expressionism being explored in fringe culture magazines like Ray Gun and Inside Edge. Much of the layout in these magazines features Barry Deck’s expressionist typefaces (which have names like Caustic Biomorph, Cyberotica, and Template Gothic). The contents pages of each issue of Wired are preceded by a four-page digital art spread that includes quotes from an upcoming article. This regular feature–along with the contents pages themselves–plays with all manner of digital art forms, including those emanating from the cyberdelic end of the techno-fringe. Images and typeface are combined in ways that suggest the editorial brief for these pages is to capture a mood, attitude, or tone. Not fully-formed ideas, but snippets of ideas, float or flash through the magazine at the speed of a turning page.

Despite the fact that Ray Gun’s founder, David Carson, has been commissioned to create ads for Pepsi, Nike, Citibank, and TV Guide, or the fact that still more advertisements have been inspired by Carson’s approach to design, Ray Gun continues to be perceived by many cultural commentators as a new edge publication.⁸ It would seem that no corporate takeover has yet managed to cast a shadow over its claims to push back the boundaries of conventional design. In reviews of Wired, Ray Gun is also the magazine that most often crops up as a contextual reference for Wired’s own design sense. “Wired,” says Dery, “is the limit case for postmodern technodazzle in graphic design, pushing the eyestrain envelope to just this side of unreadability” (“Wired Unplugged” 1). In parentheses he adds: “It falls to magazines with a younger, fringier demographic, like Ray Gun and Poppin’ Zits, to shatter the legibility barrier into postliterate fragments” (1). For Dery, then, comparisons between Wired and Ray Gun are intended to raise questions about the fate of critical thinking and rationality in a so-called “postliterate” design space. But neither Wired’s broad-bandwidth broadcasting of the corporate-futurist message, nor its simulation of the cyborg’s terminal gaze, allow much room for the fragmentation of meaning that we have been given to understand occurs in this space. As far as critical ciphers go, both suggest the restitution of an organizing rationality that makes it difficult to conceptualize the magazine in any other terms.

It falls to cyber-sceptic Keith White to offer a reading of Wired’s design strategy that resolves some of the discontinuities in Dery’s review. If Dery’s own reading is perhaps best understood as a discontinuous series of short takes on a theme–chosen more for their immediate impact than their relation to each other–White’s review is the monotheistic voice of rationalist indignation. In a review originally published in The Baffler (subtitled “The Journal That Blunts the Cutting Edge”), and currently available on-line, White argues that Wired’s much-touted design sense speaks nothing so much as good marketing: “Don’t be sucked in” is the White message–whatever this packaging owes to publications like Ray Gun, Sassy, and Inside Edge, this material has most certainly been relieved of any genuinely radical edge. According to White, Wired’s co-optation of the radical “look” of these magazines extends the same logic that launched Apple’s Macintosh computer. The famous 1984 Chiat/Day television commercial presented the Macintosh to its Super Bowl audience as a conformity-smashing innovation in computer design. Thereafter, says White, “the course that ideologues of the computer should take” had been set. In putting “together an ideological packaging for information technology that screamed nonconformist,” Wired’s founders simply “picked up where the TV advertising left off” (“The Killer App” 2).

White’s claim that Wired’s vision of the good life is remarkably consistent–“money, power, and a game boy sewn into the palm of your hand”–has real critical bite (3). However, it might also be said of this critique that it fabricates consistency where it might not otherwise exist. Take for example the argument that throughout the 1960s, ’70s, and early ’80s, the computer industry suffered from a massive public relations problem that stemmed from the Cold War. This was a time, according to White, when the counterculture and corporate America shared a suspicion of computer technology. If information technology was “to achieve proper acceptance in the business world,” then it would have to “undergo a gigantic face-lift.” This critical revamp was achieved, says White, by appealing to the business world’s increasing fascination with “notions of chaos, revolution, and disorder” (2).

Here, then, is the missing link between Wired’s chaotic, disorderly–to say nothing of revolutionary–visual style, and its corporate, free-market ideology. The only problem is that this narrative relies on a strange cultural bifurcation. For where do the first technofreaks–with their whole-earth lifestyles, low-tech equipment, and high-tech predilections–fit into this picture? The first communities of computer programmers that sprang up in places like Santa Cruz County in the 1960s and ’70s were an important site for the development of a sensibility –if not yet an aesthetic–fascinated by chaos, disorder, and random phenomena.

The fringe technocultures that clustered around the first bulletin board systems (BBSs) in the mid-1970s did not simply disappear into Start-up Valley ten years later. Indeed, the contemporary “ravers, technopagans, hippie hackers, and other cyberdelic subcultures” that come in for such close critical scrutiny in Dery’s Escape Velocity have their techno-cultural roots in these kinds of communities.⁹ Dery’s criticism of these subcultures bristles with impatience. His most scathing criticism is reserved for their “techno-transcendentalism” and “high-tech millenarianism”–all that flaky cyberbabble about “consciousness technologies” and “magickal programming” (21-22). As well it might be. Dery fears that “[t]heir siren song of nineties technophilia and sixties transcendentalism seduces the public imagination with the promise of an end-of-the-century deus ex machina at a time when realistic solutions are urgently needed” (49); and this fear may, in fact, turn out to be well-founded. It is worth remembering, however, that the do-it-yourself ethos of the cyberdelic fringe was nourishing future experiments in digital art–fractal art, genetic art, multimedia–well before the PC boom of the mid-1980s.

In “Cyberhype,” a review essay for World Art magazine, the Australian cultural critic McKenzie Wark offers what is perhaps the most persuasive reading of how spectacular image production and the commodity form converge in Wired. As in Dery’s and White’s reviews for Educom Review, it is not Wark’s argument so much as his rhetorical style that proves most persuasive. His avatar for this essay is a “jaded, bloated 30-something former punk” (67) whose street-weary, intellectual cool is reminiscent of science fiction novelist Rudy Rucker’s jaundiced anti-heroes. Wark (it seems reasonable to continue to identify him in this way), casts a disparaging glance at what he sees as being Wired’s corporate-cultural mission: the production of cyberhype.

According to the Wark lexicon, cyberhype is hype about hype: it is hype about multimedia, cyberspace, and virtual reality. It is “the swanky image of nothing but the promise of ever niftier images” (66). And it is virtually indistinguishable from marketing hype. Wired and its sister publication Mondo 2000 emerge from Wark’s review as magazines for the “first off-the-shelf romantic revolution.”¹⁰ His reflection on the spectacular imagery in these magazines leads him to speculate that the commodity form and the spectacular image form have, in fact, “become one.”¹¹ What seems to bother him about this fusing of art and advertising is not the idea that it has become impossible to distinguish between the two (although this is bad enough), but rather that anyone with half an idea and access to the right sort of equipment can produce these spectacular image-commodities.

Advertising, he argues, is no longer the sole preserve of the big manufacturers and media outlets: “Now anyone can sell!” And not just classifieds and garage sales: “anyone can make images of themselves and sell themselves as makers of images, and distribute those images through the endless capillaries of the new micromedia: cable TV access channels, do-it-yourself ‘zines, covert and even overt self-promotion on the Internet, info-hucksters puffing each other up on the big cyber-communities like the Well” (69). The more alarmist Wark’s tone becomes, the more one begins to suspect that what he finds most worrisome about this proliferation of images is that it raises the possibility that we now live in an era when art is no longer possible. For Wark, art seems to stand in this instance as the sign of a mode of production that says no to spectacle and to cyberhype.

Wark is no cyber-refusnik, so it is hard to imagine that he really means to signal the impossibility of something called computer, or digital, art. It is even harder to imagine him arguing that the democratization of this technology–the fact that it is within reach of “a great number of the ever expanding info hacking class”– has led, inexorably, to the conflation of image production with something called cyberhype, or the spectacle, or the commodity.¹² After all, this claim betrays a sneaking disregard for the desires of the populace that does not sit easily with Wark’s more populist impulses. Again, it is worth remembering that neither Wark’s nor Dery’s reviews of Wired were specifically written for an academic audience. They are tactical pieces: written quickly and designed for maximum impact. But they also raise important questions about some of the ways that computer generated images are being produced, distributed, and above all, consumed.

Just Do-It-Yourself

Although advertising for multimedia technologies in Wired regularly appeals to consumers’ fantasies of becoming image-makers themselves, this advertising tends (interestingly) not to represent this possibility visually. This is especially noticeable in a magazine otherwise filled with images. There are advertising campaigns in Wired that are sites of spectacular image production–the Absolut Vodka campaign is a case in point–but ads that actually advertise computer imaging technologies are more likely to refer to their placement in a magazine already filled with images and high-profile image-makers in order to invoke the imaging capabilities of their products. An ad for Autodesk video editing and animation software, for example, claims that with the company’s vast range of plug-ins, “you’ll not only be doing things typically reserved for high-end workstations today, you’ll be doing the hottest things in this magazine tomorrow” (Wired January 1995, 61). Perhaps the most interesting feature of this advertising, however, is its appeal to consumers not in the market for “high-end workstations.” While the advertised cost of something like Media 100’s video editing system (under $30,000) clearly puts it out of range for the vast majority of home producers of multimedia, much of the advertising for multimedia authoring tools that appears in Wired is pitched to the home producer. In fact, the entire magazine is rather clearly structured to appeal as much to the do-it-yourself fantasies of would-be home producers as to the purchasing power of imagemaking professionals.

Articles like one featuring an interview with the low-budget filmmaker Scott Billups feed consumers’ fantasies of home production in a number of ways (“Shot By An Outlaw”). Most obviously, Billups himself is represented as something of a home producer (in this case of low-budget horror movies). The article is promoted on the front cover with an invitation to “Make Special Effects in Your Basement.” Inside, the title page brazenly declares: “Who needs ILM? Completely digital movies will be made by lone ranger cinemagicians like Scott Billups. Welcome to Basementwood.” As for the article itself, much is made of the fact that Billups performed the duties of producer, director, cinematographer, virtual set designer, computer animator, and digital editor and compositor for his low-budget special effects extravaganza, Pterodactyl Woman of Beverly Hills.

Like articles in other publications that cover special effects and effects-based productions–Cinefex, American Cinematographer, Computer Graphics World–this article contains the usual product reviews. Billups reviews in some detail available graphics platforms (“[p]ound for pound, dollar for dollar, the new 150-Mhz PCIs render at least two times faster than comparable SGIs” (204)) and software packages (ASDG’s Elastic Reality Morphing package gets the thumbs up). Notably, he evaluates these products in terms of affordability and/or user-friendliness. It matters less that the cost of these tools still puts them beyond the reach of the majority of would-be home producers–or that attaining the level of knowledge and proficiency needed to use them may entail long periods of trial and error (not to mention expensive training)–than that their advertised accessibility makes them available as objects for consumer fantasies of home production.

Wired binds the logic of image production to technological consumption through fantasies of home-production. In the magazine’s advertising, special effects frequently figure as metonyms for spectacular image production. Nowhere is the appeal of producing special effects illustrated more clearly than in a long-running advertisement for the Kingston Technology Corporation. The ad, which first appeared in December 1995, features a sepia-tinted photograph of a woman hysterically pulling at her hair. Her hairdo and clothes are circa 1950. The text box beneath the image reads: “You’re creating special effects for the next blockbuster, so why are you using B-movie memory?” (97). In the decision to spectacularize the subject of production (represented as the hysterical, and notably feminine, image-maker), over either the object of production (special effects) or the advertised product (Kingston memory), the ad draws attention to the arbitrary relation between image and product–to the fact that it appeals less to the desirability of the product itself than to the fantasy of spectacular image production.

Undeniably, this fantasy is both consumerist and utopian. Just as clearly, the language and iconography used in much of the advertising and artwork in Wired is at best ambiguously gendered and at worst smugly masculinist. On these grounds alone, more criticism of the magazine should be welcome. Nevertheless, some of Wired’s critics may have moved too quickly to dismiss consumers’ fantasies of home production as unworthy of critical attention. Behind this dismissal lies the assumption that these fantasies only mask the extent to which consumers of new multimedia technologies don’t actually produce anything with them–or at least, nothing worthwhile. But it may just be that it is still too early to tell what effects the utopian fantasies surrounding these technologies will have on the image-making futures being dreamed about in basements, bedrooms, and home studios right now. It may also be too early to determine the extent to which fantasies of home production either facilitate or impede individuals’ abilities to conceptualize collective forms of cultural production. Cultural critics must continue to investigate how these fantasies play out in relation to other cultural activities, other sites of consumption and interactivity, if they wish to find out how the concept of “do-it-yourself” figures in them.

Digital Expressionism

When histories of computer generated imagery in Hollywood science fiction cinema speculate about aesthetic parameters, they almost always describe a quest for simulation.¹³ There are, however, other ways of understanding this history–ways that do not regard the aesthetic project governing the production of CGI as one that always, or necessarily, values photorealism over visual novelty and experimentation. Where computer generated special effects are concerned, the relation between CGI and simulation is not simply isomorphic.

In “From Abstraction To Simulation: Notes on the History of Computer Imaging,” Andy Darley argues that early interest in the aesthetic possibilities of computer art displayed a modernist preoccupation with visual abstraction and novelty (43-46). In the 1960s and ’70s, artists like John Whitney, Stan Vanderbeek, and Lillian Schwartz produced a number of abstract films using computer graphics. Whitney’s Matrix III (1972) and Arabesque (1975) were concerned, for instance, with the formal arrangement and movement of light, line, and color. But in the history of CGI that Darley later maps out in these “Notes,” any interest in pushing the aesthetic possibilities of computer art in new directions has all but disappeared by the 1970s. By then, he argues, this project had been overtaken by research into “the formidable copying or simulational power of computers”–a project which (unlike “art”) would repay the high levels of capital invested in it by corporate and state-funded R&D bodies with lucrative commercial applications (49). Wrested from the hands of artists, the history of computer generated imaging becomes, at this point, a quest for simulation: or, rather, a drive to produce computer generated images that are indistinguishable from photographs.

But the end-of-art was not yet nigh. In the 1970s, computer animation became the site of renewed interest in research centers like Bell Laboratories, MIT, and the University of Utah. Many of the computer animation techniques that were developed during this period–techniques for achieving motion blur, texture mapping, computer-controlled rotoscoping–were, in fact, designed to facilitate the development of commercial applications for computer simulation such as flight simulation, scientific and medical visualization, and computer-aided-design. However, a number of artists maintained their interest in experimental computer animation. William Moritz is an historian of computer animation and author of a brief history of experimental computer animation included as part of an on-line festival of experimental works produced by Christine Panushka and sponsored by Absolut Vodka (Absolut Panushka). In Moritz’s telling of this story, abstract animation continued to flourish in the 1970s in films produced by artists like Robert Breer and Jules Engel (who also worked on Disney’s Fantasia).

Moritz wants to make the history of experimental animation a history of films which, as he says, have been made by artists who have tried “to make something personal, exploring techniques to find exactly the right look to express it–something new, fresh, imaginative, dealing with significant subject matter, made independently and often single-handedly.” For him, this means excluding cartoons and animated films produced by major studios, as well as short works produced by animators working in the field of computer generated special effects. However, it is impossible to keep these intersecting fields entirely separate. The animation program founded at the California Institute of the Arts by Jules Engel in 1969 not only fostered a number of independent filmmakers, but also provided a training ground for animators who would later continue their work in the Hollywood film industry. Graduates of Cal Arts include people like Tim Burton, Henry Selick, and John Lasseter. But a history of computer animation interested in further teasing out the institutional contexts of experimental research in computer animation would also, of course, include someone like Pixar’s founder, Ed Catmull, a graduate of the University of Utah whose research also led to the development of commercial rendering software (Renderman) while at Lucasfilm.

It could be argued that there have always been continuities, as well as discontinuities, between the kind of computer generated imagery produced for feature film production and the kind of imagery produced by animators working outside of the industry. Interestingly, Moritz himself chose Ed Emshwiller’s Sunstone (1978) as “one of the classic computer graphics images.” Ermshwiller’s luminous, pulsating “happy face” is, indeed, an iconic computer generated image. But a term like “photorealistic” doesn’t describe it any better than it describes any number of other “classic” computer generated images, either those produced as experimental animation, or those produced as special effects for science fiction cinema.

Techno-futurism

Much of the computer generated imagery that found popularity with audiences in the early-to-mid-1990s represents the refinement, not of a realist aesthetic that takes the cinematographic image as its point of reference, but of a hyperreal electronic aesthetic that takes the cinematographic image as its point of departure. For all its ability to produce stunningly plausible objects–solid, textured, light-refracting bodies–computer generated special effects during this period also showed a marked preference for imagery displaying the kind of visual properties that can only be achieved in the hyperreal electronic realm of computer generation. Too bright and shiny by far, the hyper-chrominance and supra-luminosity characteristic of CGI effects in this period imbued the digital artifact with a special visual significance. This significance was augmented by a style of arts-and-effects direction that, by bracketing the computer generated object off from the temporal and narrative flow of the action, offered it to the contemplative gaze of cinema audiences.

In their creation of this imagery, directors, effects designers, and computer animators were also, of course, responding to the knowledge that by the early 1990s, familiarity with new media technologies had altered cinema audiences’ perceptions of the sort of effects that could be achieved with computer generated imagery. This point was illustrated by “lone cinemagician” Scott Billups. Reflecting on the expectations of a generation of moviegoers raised on computer and video games for special effects imagery, Billups suggests that one of the things they want is “high chrominance,” which, as he says, “is not a film attribute: [t]here are colors you can get in the electronic realm that you just can’t get on film” (Parisi 204).

While morphing is now a familiar special effects technique–having been used in countless television commercials, music videos, television programs, and Hollywood films–it might be remembered that it too has been a defining feature of many CGI effects. Morphing is a technique that transforms one image into another by stretching each image sequence and then cross-dissolving between the two distorted images. It endows computer generated and optically-photographed images alike with a hyperreal elasticity. Although the effect is achieved electronically, morphing is also used to create the kinds of visual puns that were so finely honed by traditional cel animation artists for cartoons. Even though the technique has been demonstrated many times over, morphs are still used to create subtle (and not so subtle) visual jokes that, again, draw attention to the synthetic properties of this imagery.

In the introduction to Future Visions, Hayward and Wollen use the term “techno-futurism” to describe the rationale behind the production and marketing of new media and communications technologies (3). Techno-futurism, they argue, works as a classic ideological paradigm: always representing new technologies as an improvement on older ones. But the term techno-futurism might also be re-deployed to describe an aesthetics of CGI effects in Hollywood science fiction cinema which is specifically electronic. For it is the electronic properties of this imagery–as much as the technological wonders that this imagery ostensibly represents–which have come to be figured in popular discourses on computer generated special effects as the very sign of a future in which technology figures as a force to be reckoned with.

Techno-futurism, then, describes an aesthetics which is at once inclined towards simulation and mimesis–and a decidedly synthetic, visibly more plastic, mode of visualisation. Pulled, on the one hand, towards photorealism and, on the other, towards a synthetic hyperrealism, the computer generated imagery in the Hollywood science fiction films of the first half of this decade exhibits an aesthetic that plays across these two poles. And more than anything else, it is this electronic reconfiguring of the cinematographic image which gives key CGI effects in these films their special reflexivity. The drive for simulation–long acknowledged, within the industry, to be something of a digital mantra in the field of CGI effects production–describes but one half of this aesthetic project.

Art-Effects

Wired differs from other publications that regularly report on the special effects industry in being neither a magazine specifically produced for industry professionals (like Cinefex, American Cinematographer, Computer Graphics World), nor a magazine primarily addressed to fans, buffs, and aficionados of the cinematic digital domain (like Cinefantastique, Starlog, Sci-Fi Universe, SFX). But it shares with both types of publications a specifically aesthetic interest in computer generated special effects.

Many of the computer generated images featured in Wired exhibit the recombinant, hyperreal aesthetic characteristic of some of the 3-D imagery being created in this new medium by artists like “demon animator” Steve Speer (“Speer’s Head”) and Australian computer animator and multimedia artist Troy Innocent. In reviewing Innocent’s artwork for PsyVision–a fifty-minute music video made in collaboration with the Australian techno-music label Psy-Harmonics, Darren Tofts describes it as “uncompromisingly synthetic.” The imaginary spaces created for PsyVision’s eleven sections are represented in Tofts’ review as explorations of the limits and possibilities of computer animation. Each section draws “on a succession of symbolic forms and visual dynamisms, ranging from fractal geometries, kaleidoscopic pulses and textural ‘soft spaces’ to fantastic landscapes, info-overload collages and liquid architectures” (31). Some of the images that have been reproduced for the pages of World Art magazine have been taken from Innocent’s interactive database, Idea-ON>!. Innocent’s “rigorous donut” and glistening “iconbods” playfully rework the rod-and-cone candy look of much of the CGI that appears, for instance, in television advertising.

In Wired, an article focusing on the graphical possibilities currently being explored in new on-line environments like “Graphical MUDs”–virtual worlds where animated avatars interact with each other and their environments–comes accompanied by three double-pages of spectacular, and somewhat satirical, visual interpretations of the synthetic inhabitants of these new electronic worlds (“Metaworlds”). Representing the work of three different artists–Steve Speer, Lynda Nye, and Michael Crumpton–this imagery shares with Innocent’s artwork an exploration of the synthetic visual effects that can be achieved in the hyperreal electronic realm of computer generation.

Some of the best examples of imagery featuring the hyperreal, synthetic properties, and visual punning, idiomatic of the work of these contemporary artists, can be found in the TBWA Chiat/Day Absolut Vodka campaign which until 1996 ran on the back cover of Wired. (It has since been replaced by a campaign for Stolichnaya Vodka.) Andy Warhol kicked off the Absolut Vodka campaign in 1985 with his rendition of the absolut vodka bottle (reproduced on the back of Wired October, 1994). Since then, the campaign has featured, and advertised, the work of many painters, sculptors, jewellers, fashion designers, and photographers. Much of the artwork featured at the back of Wired was exclusively “produced by and for” the magazine. Covers by Steve Speer (“Absolut Speer”) and the computer graphics designers and artists at Troon Ltd. (“Absolut Kelly”), exhibit a playful aesthetic that combines an abstract expressionist’s exploration of the technical and aesthetic possibilities of this new synthetic medium with the pop artist’s retro-visionist eye for re-figuration.

On the printed page, these glistening images lack the luminosity and hyper-chrominance they would have in an electronic format like video or CD-ROM. A video signal is comprised of luminance (brightness), chrominance (color, including saturation and hue), and sync (alignment). While all colored signals have both luminance and chrominance, black and white signals lack chrominance. Artists working in the digital realm have looked to exploit the specifically electronic properties of this new medium. At present, however, the printed page still reproduces a more lustrous, higher resolution image than most on-line delivery systems, which tend to deliver grainy, pixelated images that in most instances still take some time to download. The computer generated imagery that glosses the pages of Wired magazine are visually more spectacular than anything that Hotwired–the magazine’s on-line counterpart–has to offer. By comparison, Hotwired’s clunky frames, day-glo wallpaper and occasional animated graphics offer a computer graphics environment lacking in visual effects.

The creation of three-dimensional computer generated imagery is a labor-intensive enterprise which, in addition to involving the long periods of gestation, conceptualization, and experimentation that are familiar to artists working in any medium, also involves long spans of rendering time. As one might expect, rendering time increases exponentially in the case of animated images. Other considerations of application and technique aside, computer generated imagery does not lend itself particularly well to the make-do, fly-by-night ethos of monthly magazine production. This is one reason computer generated images are actually so scarce in Wired. Sprinkled across a design space where collage and photomontage–not even détournement–still define the graphical style of the magazine, these images are designed and placed to arrest the gaze of the magazine browser like so many special effects.

By treating the computer generated special effects produced by computer animators and artists working in the special effects industry as aesthetic objects, by featuring this work alongside the work of other artists working in digital media, and by showcasing the computer generated imagery produced by and for the magazine and its advertisers, Wired blurs the distinctions between special effects and art, commerce and art, and art and advertising–disinctions that critical commentaries on the history of computer generated imagery have so far held apart. No critical consensus has yet emerged to account for the cultural and political valences of this blurring. But rather than interpreting this development as a sign of the end of art, this essay has sought to examine some of the contexts in which CGI has emerged as the site of populist fanasies of home-image production. In Wired, appeals to these fantasies are invariably underwritten by a consumerist imperative to keep up with the very latest in computer imaging technologies.¹⁴ However, these appeals are just as regularly staged around special effects. For, more than any other entertainment application for CGI, science fiction cinema has treated the computer generated image as an aesthetic object. Although it is unclear what aesthetic and/or editorial directions Wired will take under its new owners–Condé Nast–it seems certain that the magazine will continue to map contemporary technoculture’s fascination with the computer generated image.

Notes

Thanks to Paulina Borsook for answering my email all the way back in August 1996. We need her, I think, to remain skeptical. Thanks also to the reviewers of an earlier version of this article.

1. For more on the economic state of the special effects industry see Kris Goodfellow, “Mayday! Mayday! We’re leaking Visuals!: A Shakeout of the Special Effects Houses,” New York Times 29 September 1997.

2. For an account of this argument see Herbert I. Schiller, “Media, Technology, and the Market: The Interacting Dynamic.” Schiller argues that although no one factor explains the development of the special effects industry, one contributing stimulus stands out: “the intensifying effort to maintain and extend personal consumption and to develop it abroad” (37).

3. See Philip Hayward, “Situating Cyberspace: The Popularization of Virtual Reality,” in Hayward and Wollen, Future Visions (130).

4. After John Thornton Caldwell, “journalisimo” refers to a mode of discourse characterized by an “excessive style.” See his Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Telivision (360).

5. See Paulina Borsook, “The Memoirs of a Token: An Aging Berkeley Feminist Examines Wired,” in Wired Women.

6. This review is part of a special report titled “Do We Really Want To Be Wired?” It is Scott Bukatman, of course, who coined the term “cyberdrool” in Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction (189).

7. Dery attributes this quote to Wired’s creative director, John Plunkett, and his collaborator and partner, Barbara Kuhr.

8. For an interview with Carson focusing on Ray Gun’s critical reception see Tom Eslinger and Brian Smith, “American Typo,” World Art.

9. See Dery, “Turn On, Boot Up, Jack In: Cyberdelia”, in Escape Velocity (41). Also see Sandy Stone, The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age. According to Stone, these early fringe communities were decidedly counter-cultural in their choice of lifestyle. However, she also points out that the communities of programmers that settled in the hillsides surrounding San Lorenzo Valley only superficially resembled the neighbouring hippies “whose grubby, marginal, and financially precarious lifestyle was not a thin cover over graduate-level degrees and awesome technical proficiencies” (106). She adds that “the depth of this gulf” seems also to have been “oddly invisible to the technofreaks” who, on the whole, preferred to regard their hippy neighbors as fellow-travellers (106). Stone describes the “technosocial context” in which these programmers lived and worked as “a milieu dense and diverse, wild and woolly, a bit crazed in places, and shot through with elements of spirituality and cultural messianism” (108). Her brief cultural history of one of these communities–the ill-fated CommuniTree Group–is the story of how an unprotected and unstructured conference environment was eventually brought down by a small band of teenage hackers who were able to exploit the vulnerability of a system that made itself available to all-comers. The next wave of designers were forced to reckon with the trade-off between the maintenance of social order and their desire to see this equilibrium achieved through the principles of organic regulation and freedom of expression. Suffice it to say that subsequent on-line conferences were considerably more regulated environments.

10. See Wark, page 68. In referring to Mondo 2000 as Wired’s “sister” publication, I do not mean to suggest that this gendering of the magazine is in any way unambiguous. I have used it to mark an ongoing engagement with Scott Bukatman’s analysis of the way the two magazines negotiate gender (both visually and discursively). See his “Mondo Babes & Wired Boys,” Educom Review, available at http://educom.edu/web/pubs/review/reviewArticles/30622.html.

11. Wark writes: “Now that the means of domination, the commodity form, the spectacular image form, have become one and proliferated such that they are obvious to everyone, we choose not to refuse them, but say yes! yes! yes! with deliberate abandon” (“Cyberhype” 69).

12. What Wark actually says is that “[t]he means of domination are not only obvious to all, they are within the reach of the credit cards of, well, not all, but a great number of the ever expanding info hacking class, who make their living driving the economy forward on ever expanding waves of cyberhype” (69).

13. For a wide cross-section of such histories, see Steven R. Holtzman, Paul Virilio, Lev Manovich in Timothy Druckrey, and the catalogue essays accompanying the exhibition in Photography after Photography, eds. Hubertus v. Amelunxen et al.

14. See Simon Penny, “Consumer Culture and the Technological Imperative: The Artist in Dataspace,” in Critical Issues in Electronic Media, 47-73. In this essay, Penny explores “the position of the artist who uses technological tools, with respect to the larger [i.e., economic] formations of technologically mediated culture” (48).

Works Cited

• Amelunxen, Hubertus v., Stefan Iglhaut and Florian Rötzer, eds. Photography After Photography: Memory and Representation in the Digital Age. Amsterdam: G+B Arts, 1996.
• Borsook, Paulina. “The Memoirs of a Token: An Aging Berkeley Feminist Examines Wired.” Wired_Women: Gender and New Realities in Cyberspace. Eds. Lynn Cherney and Elizabeth Reba Weise. Seattle: Seal Press, 1996. 24-41.
• Bukatman, Scott. Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction. Durham and London: Duke UP, 1993.
• —. “The Artifical Infinite: On Special Effects and the Sublime.” Visual Display: Culture Beyond Appearances. Seattle: Bay Press, 1995. 255-289.
• —. “Mondo Babes & Wired Boys,” Educom Review. On-line. Internet. Available: http://www.educom.edu/web/pubs/review/reviewArticles/30622.htm
• Caldwell, John Thornton. Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers UP, 1995.
• Daly, James, ed. “Hollywood 2.0 Special Report: the people who are reinventing entertainment.” Wired November 1997: 200-215.
• Darley, Andy. “From Abstraction To Simulation: Notes on the History of Computer Imaging.” Culture, Technology & Creativity in the Late Twentieth Century. Ed. Philip Hayward. London, Paris, Rome: John Libbey, 1992. 39-64.
• Dery, Mark. Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century. London: Hodder & Stroughton, 1996.
• —. “Wired Unplugged.” On-line. Internet. Available: http://www.t0.or.at/dery/wired.htm”
• Edwards, Gavin. “Speer’s Head.” Wired April 1997: 136-139, 182-184. Also available on-line. Internet. http://www.wired.com/wired/5.04/speer/ff_spear.html
• Eslinger, Tom and Brian Smith. “American Typo,” World Art 1 (1995): 72-77.
• Goodfellow, Kris. “Mayday! Mayday! We’re leaking Visuals!: A Shakeout of the Special Effects Houses.” New York Times 29 September 1997: C5, C8.
• Hayward, Philip and Tana Wollen, eds. Introduction. Future Visions: New Technologies of the Screen. London: BFI, 1993. 1-9.
• Holtzman, Steven R. Digital Mantras: The Languages of Abstract and Virtual Worlds. Cambridge, Mass. and London: The MIT Press, 1994.
• Innocent, Troy. PsyVision. Psy-Harmonics: Melbourne, 1996.
• —. Idea-ON>!. CD-ROM. place of pub: publisher 1992-4.
• Kelly, Kevin and Paula Parisi. “Beyond Star Wars.” Wired February 1997: 160-166, 210-217.
• Landon, Brooks. The Aesthetics of Ambivalence: Re-Thinking Science Fiction Film in the Age of Electronic (Re)production. Westport, Conn. and London: Greenwood Press, 1992.
• Manovich, Lev. “The Automation of Sight: From Photography to Computer Vision.” Electronic Culture: Technology and Visual Representation. Ed. Timothy Druckrey. New York and London: Aperture Foundation Inc., 1996. 229-239.
• Moritz, William. “A Brief History of Experimental Animation.” Absolut Panushka: n. pag. On-line. Internet. http://www.absolutvodka.com/panushka/history/bill/index.html
• —. “In the Abstract.” Absolut Panushka: n. page. On-line. Internet. http://www.absolutvodka.com/panushka/history/storys/1970/ abstract/index.html
• Parisi, Paula. “Cameron Angle.” Wired April 1996: 130-135, 175-179.
• —. “The New Hollywood: Silicon Stars.” Wired December 1995: 142-145, 202-210.
• —. “Shot by an Outlaw,” Wired September 1996: 136-141, 200-206.
• Penny, Simon. “Consumer Culture and the Technological Imperative: The Artist in Dataspace.” Critical Issues in Electronic Media. Ed. Simon Penny. New York: SUNY Press, 1995. 47-74.
• Quinn, Michelle. “Beyond The Valley of The Morphs.” Wired January 1993. Also available on-line. Internet. http://www.wired.com/wired/1.1/features/morphs .html
• Rossney, Robert. “Metaworlds.” Wired June 1996: 140-146, 202-212.
• Rothman, Matt. “Digital Deal.” Wired March 1993. Also available on-line. Internet. http://www.wired.com/wired/1.3/features/digital.deal.html.
• Schiller, Herbert I. “Media, Technology, and the Market: The Interacting Dynamic.” Culture on the Brink: Ideologies of Technology. Ed. Gretchen Bender and Timothy Druckrey. Seattle: Bay Press, 1994.
• Snider, Burr. “The Toy Story Story.” Wired December 1995: 146-150, 212-216
• Sobchack, Vivian. “Postfuturism.” Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film. New York: Ungar, 1987.
• Stone, Allucquére, Rosanne. The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age. Cambridge, Mass. and London: The MIT Press, 1995.
• Tofts, Darren. “Troy Story.” World Art 12 (1997): 28-33.
• Virilio, Paul. the vision machine. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1994.
• Wark, McKenzie. “Cyberhype,” World Art (Inaugural U.S. Edition) November 1994: 64-69.
• White, Keith. “The Killer App: Wired Magazine, Voice of the Corporate Revolution.” Voyager. On-line. Internet. Available: http://www.base.com/gordoni/thoughts/wired/revolution.html.

Stefan Mattessich

Literature Board
University of California, Santa Cruz
hamglik@sirius.com

Remedios Varo, “Bordando el Manto Terrestre,” 1961. Reprinted by permission.¹

Always follow the rhizome by rupture; lengthen, prolong, and relay the line of flight; make it vary, until you have produced the most abstract and tortuous of lines....
--Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (11)

Near the beginning of The Crying of Lot 49, Oedipa Maas recalls a trip to Mexico City with the recently deceased real estate mogul Pierce Inverarity, and in particular an art exhibition she saw there by the Spanish surrealist Remedios Varo. The text, in a moment of ekphrastic digression, describes one painting in detail:

[I]n the central painting of a triptych, titled "Bordando el Manto Terrestre," were a number of frail girls with heart-shaped faces, huge eyes, spun-gold hair, prisoners in the top room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void: for all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in this tapestry, and the tapestry was the world. (20-1)

This room in Varo’s tower assumes for Oedipa the fatal and enigmatic attraction of a destiny from which there is no escape, a point of departure and arrival that exposes the illusion of movement between a here and a there, between life “among the pines and salt fogs of Kinneret” (20), California, and the imagined or imaginative freedom of Mexico. Time as both a causal sequence and a signifying chain suffers its catastrophic involution, turns in on itself, immobilizes or suspends the presumption of an animate nature, a substantial self and an autonomous desire. The experience precipitates in Oedipa an immediate paranoia:

Oedipa, perverse, had stood in front of the painting and cried.... She had looked down at her feet and known, then, because of a painting, that what she stood on had only been woven together a couple thousand miles away in her own tower, was only by accident known as Mexico, and so Pierce had taken her away from nothing, there'd been no escape. What did she so desire escape from? Such a captive maiden, having plenty of time to think, soon realizes that her tower, its height and architecture, are like her ego only incidental: that what really keeps her where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant, visited on her from outside and for no reason at all. (21)

If Oedipa’s tower is “only incidental,” however, it is also omnipresent–that is, she finds it everywhere. It is a human condition, the human condition as incidental, as nonessential subordination, remainder, residue or “W.A.S.T.E,” that spectral communication system which Oedipa comes to encounter as a kind of destiny in the novel. Pynchon’s metaphors here signify that displacement or paratactic placement beside or to one side of one’s self that characterizes the feeling of subjection to a fundamentally irrational externality. Oedipa is an incident person, a projection, a kind of hologram whose point of origin, that which “keeps her where she is,” suggests a terrifying complicity between “anonymous” gravitational force and “malignant” social power, between ineluctable physical law and fantasmatic structures actively vitiating (to borrow a Marxian locution) the social field in which self-recognition (as a subject, as a citizen) is possible.² Oedipa’s imprisonment in the tower, at least on one level of implication, cannot be understood apart from this reified estrangement from a labor that quite literally comes to figure the alien object of paranoid investment, and which the paranoid subject can only reconsummate in a continual fabrication of that external world which “keeps her” in her place. To be “incidental” is therefore to experience alienation in the form of a fantasm installed at the center of being, a fantasm that destabilizes any clear sense of the human or the real. The novel specifies this experience a little later on in the figure of Metzger, who relates to Oedipa his dual career as an actor-lawyer in the following terms:

"But our beauty lies," explained Metzger, "in this extended capacity for convolution. A lawyer in a courtroom, in front of any jury, becomes an actor, right? Raymond Burr is an actor, impersonating a lawyer, who in front of a jury becomes an actor. Me, I'm a former actor who became a lawyer. They've done the pilot film of a TV series, in fact, based loosely on my career, starring my friend Manny Di Presso, a one-time lawyer who quit his firm to become an actor. Who in this pilot plays me, an actor become a lawyer reverting periodically to being an actor. The film is in an air-conditioned vault at one of the Hollywood studios, light can't fatigue it, it can be repeated endlessly." (33)

With this permutative logic, Pynchon weaves a profound textual likeness of life in a differential world of signs, images, filmic doubles, digitized desires, a world effectively transformed into a simulacrum, suspended or orbitalized in the etherous medium of an endless replicability and without any footing in a secured ground. If Oedipa is one of the women in Varo’s tower “embroidering the mantle of the earth,” her peculiar capacity or labor power is limited by this spectrality, transformed into an empty repetition not capable of transcending its own determination from without and so condemned to wallow in a postmodern America generated as if by “magic.” Of course it is not actually generated by magic but, as the text implies, by Oedipa herself in her tower, and the virtuality that Oedipa represents rests upon a simultaneous abstraction from and reduction to material forms of existence that are no less real for the unreality in which they are lived. This is why Oedipa is essentially a machine, a kind of information-processing computer that organizes or links together the elements of the textual world through which “she” seeks answers to the mystery of the Tristero and the underground postal system W.A.S.T.E, much in the same way that Maxwell’s Demon “sorts” molecules and “connects the world of thermodynamics to the world of information flow” (106) for another character in the novel, John Nefastis. In or around Oedipa, that is, the terrifying conspiracy of physis and techne manifests itself, deploys its secret as secret, as the blank and impervious surface of an impossible matter, a matter that does not mean even as it conditions the possibility for signification itself. Submission to gravity, to entropy, to a repetition “automatic as the body itself” (120), to a sign that is pure or unmotivated, constitutes the “destiny” that Oedipa sees figured in Varo’s tower, a destiny so total in its extension that no escape is possible, indeed the desire for escape only apotheosizes the law it seeks to transgress by perfecting the illusion of freedom that supports it.

In their seminal and enigmatic work, Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari make a distinction between “technical machines” that are defined extrinsically in terms of their functional use-value or in proportion to how well they work, and “desiring machines” that work only by “continually breaking down” (31). This latter type of machine denotes a structure or system founded upon the internalization of its own difference, an intrinsic boundary or an invaginated contour that makes it no more like a technical machine than it is unlike one. A desiring machine can only oppose its own determination, and this is why it always malfunctions, this is why its fundamental reflex is masochistic, this is why its proper mode is catastrophic or singular, always tending toward its own disappearance. Pynchon’s preoccupation in The Crying of Lot 49 with the process of entropy closely parallels this malfunctioning modality of desiring machines, and suggests a fundamental structural principle of the novel. Oedipa’s attempt at escape through her search for the Tristero (a figure, finally, for the possibility of freedom) enacts a kind of cancer in the body of meaning itself; her “quest” multiplies possible senses of the Tristero and erodes any single truth it might contain. But the “endless, convoluted incest” (14) of repetitious waste generated by the novel cannot be read as a simple neutralization of desire. If this were the case, then The Crying of Lot 49 would only be a technical machine to which the reader/worker is subjected, and not a broken machine that works by metabolizing itself, by becoming a residual supplement within an underground economy of WASTE. The interpretive stakes could not be higher here: one can only read the novel as enacting at the level of expression what it constructs at the level of content by modifying the relation between desire and the machine, by acknowledging an investment of desire in the machine so extreme as to displace the distinction between them (and the category of the human which this distinction supports).

This much needs to be said against any “liberal” interpretation of the novel which would confer upon Oedipa the attribute of freedom or spontaneity, the election of a subjectivity which needs only to overcome the accident of its dehumanization in a late capitalist society: “she” never ceases being that machine, never escapes the quotation marks that underscore “her” intrinsic virtuality, “her” constructed and supplemental nature, “her” status not as character but as caricature. The solidity and force of the paranoid moment in Pynchon’s novel is such that it never yields to reason, to community, or to political effectivity. Quite categorically, I would say, no alternative to social repression as it is analyzed in The Crying of Lot 49 can be thought outside that moment of paranoid apprehension. In a sense the novel itself is woven inside Varo’s tower, a proposition which suggests in turn that Varo’s tower stands in metonymically for the entire text, its description of the painting taking on a function of ekphrasis with respect to its own artistic production. If this is so, and if it is not enough simply to assert a thoroughgoing pessimism (or full-blown paranoia) which the novel does no more than sustain, then the stake of freedom (personal or political) that it raises will be found as well in that ekphrasis, encrypted in the painting which figures that peculiar destiny of making a world or constructing the ground upon which a world can be formed, weaving as well a “mantle” in the sense of a covering, an enveloping skin, that cortical interface between inside and outside that is the place of form or the limit where forms appear, where the “coral-like” genesis of structure occurs.³

Toward the Tower

“Embroidering the Earth’s Mantle” forms the central panel of an autobiographical triptych, and though Pynchon mentions this fact he never expands the allusion or explicitly elaborates on the contextualization it suggests.⁴ The triptych lies dormant in the text not so much in a mode of figurative connotation as of simple displaced absence, buried there in a kind of ghostly obliquity to its signifying systems. It functions as a supplement without necessity to the text, as the negative space of a reference that needs no other support than itself, but which nonetheless conjures a double dimension, an unconscious of that unconscious formed by the act of reference and accessible only through an intertextual (and cross-generic) digression from the novel proper. What one finds in this double unconscious, in this “other” dimension of reference, is a set of parallel themes centered on the possibility of escape. The first panel, entitled “Toward the Tower,”

Remedios Varo, “Toward the Tower,”
1961. Reprinted by permission.

introduces the “frail girls with heart-shaped faces, huge eyes, [and] spun-gold hair” of Pynchon’s description emerging from a building of narrow gables set against an umber-colored sky (the same as that identified by Pynchon in the second panel as a “void”). The visual effect of the gables suggests a honeycomb, a fragment of latticework, or more generally a process of algorithmic or polymeric duplication that recurs again in the faces of the young girls, who appear not as individuals but as replicas of each other, a group of identically dressed figures with identically spellbound expressions. Varo’s interest in the triptych is clearly with an automaton-like sameness: the “replicant” girls leave a “replicant” building in a movement toward the tower and the compulsion it represents continually to remake their own oppression. But since the gables also strongly suggest a plurality of towers as the girls’ point of origin, this movement is qualified by an implication of tautology, of a certain motion in place further indicated by the fact that all the girls are riding bicycles, and so evoke in the very act of “cycling” a static immobility.

This condition of arrested or static motion seems universal in the first two panels and clearly expresses the girls’ lack of freedom, their subordination to sinister overseers (the man carrying a bag full of crows, the woman in a nun’s habit, the man in the tower holding an open book over an hourglass-shaped container from which the filaments of thread used by the girls to embroider the earth’s mantle are taken), and their palpable alienation in the work they perform. Conjoined with the visual motif of repetition, then, is a focus on forced labor, on an activity of production or creation subsumed under a requirement of regimentation and panoptic management, of an almost bureaucratic routine extending even into the bodies and minds of the producers. But if the story Varo tells here is about the artist constrained by a uniform and mechanical production, what she means by artistic (or productive) freedom cannot be understood in terms of a simple opposition to that constraint.

The theme of escape is introduced in the first panel by a small detail: one of the girls does not look straight ahead as the others do, but glances to her left out of the painting and back at the viewer in a scarcely perceptible deviation from an almost catatonic norm. This deviation is significant for its very slightness, the fact that it manifests itself in a mode of diminution or subtle variation, not as a constituted difference from the rote repetitiousness of work, but as a difference in repetition or repetition with a difference that becomes the essentially tautological movement of an emancipatory desire. In this light, Varo’s triptych cannot be interpreted solely as a representation of an unfree dissimulation or doubleness characteristic of that political economy of the sign that obtains in modern societies, but rather as inherently dissimulatory and double, inherently catatonic, invested in its own (machinic) repetitiousness as the ground for any escape it might make possible.

To put this another way, escape for Varo will be art as production and as thing produced, as the making of the triptych and as the triptych itself; it will be this glance out of the world of the painting that makes the painting itself worldly or material, only its materiality will consist in elements of simulation or fantasy, in virtual or “as-if” effects that are never “vitiated” even when they become double in their self-conscious apprehension as the necessary conditions for achieving artistic freedom. The triptych dramatizes art as escape, then, only by raising a further question about the nature of fantasy and the simulacral, or only by disrupting the semiotic claim to signify a “real” world which can be felt in meaning itself, in the attribution of truth to a particular event, situation or identity (even when that identity is as an “artist”). It is this complicity between signification and the real, between truth and self-identity or self-presence, that the triptych disrupts in its surreal emphasis upon the girls as replicated or several. If this disruption indeed lets its effects be felt in the paintings, then it leads to a quite different reading of that multiplicity: not only does it reflect their alienated relation to the means of production, but it also expresses an almost schizophrenic subjectivity lived in the ambiguous shifting between “she” and “they.” The girls are all the same girl, that is, they exist only in terms of each other. They constitute holograms repeating the whole in each part, making each part or fragment a totality as such, a complete part or complete incompletion enclosing a process and a result, a processive result, a product that changes or that indexes in itself a motion predicated upon the immobilizing passage within its own object-nature or objectification. The triptych, then, profoundly treats the artist-producer’s relation to a reified and alienated socius not from a place of non-perspectival privilege, but from within the socius’s own deepest tendencies, and this inclusiveness informs a production bearing on the world itself, producing not just particular things, external differences or even simulacra seen as self-contained within a horizon of realistic expectation, but the real as a simulacrum or as the exposure of its own boundary, its own fundamental constructedness.

For this perhaps “convoluted” reading to be persuasive, then, the possibility of escape held out by Varo will have to pass through the world made by the artist-producer or within the woven mantle which serves both as the world’s ground (in its function as an interior layer of the earth) and as its peripheral limit (in its function as a covering or skin). The central panel of the triptych rejoins the thematic of minimal variation or

Detail from
“Embroidering Earth’s
Mantle.”

difference in repetition by once again skewing the eyes of the girl farthest to the left of the tower. Her expression, more cunning than her predecessor’s, here registers a consciousness of her overseer and the impassive suppression of guilt. What has she done? In what Varo herself, commenting on the triptych, describes as the girl’s “trick,”⁵ one fold of the mantle flowing out from the slit window just underneath her station discloses two tiny upside-down figures within the enlacing branches of bare trees, “woven” literally and figuratively together in an attitude of embrace. These two eminently textual and textural lovers become the central figures of the third panel, entitled appropriately enough “The Escape,” which shows them standing in a vehicle of indeterminate type (it resembles in inverted form the umbrella-like rudder controlled by the woman, but also suggests in its hairy texture some kind of vegetal or animal matter) as it conveys them upwards toward mountain peaks and a clearing sky of yellow light.⁶This line of

Remedios Varo, “The Escape,”
1961. Reprinted by permission.

flight drawn through the three paintings does not go by way of a simple transcendence any more than it indicates a “real” freedom from a simulacral labor, from repetition or from fantasy. It delineates what Deleuze would call an “abstract line” generated at the point where the tension between form and matter, figure and ground, surface and depth, center and periphery collapses and gives way to a generalized non-distinction, to a formal, figural or structural difference that is internal to itself and so not determinable in an empirical sense.⁷ For the girl who makes her escape, for the artist who makes her escape, and for the triptych that constitutes their collective escape, this internal difference undermines the self-identity of escape, opens it/her/them to an otherness or to a world from which no escape is possible except through this opening, this singular experience in being, in art, in structure, in meaning, of a fundamental alterity and displacement rendering what is “real” virtual in its essence.⁸

To account for Varo’s triptych in its molecular details (its repetitions, its multiplicities, its automata, its production of the real or of the ground of the real, its peculiar escape) requires a different understanding of what constitutes being, such that it no longer conditions a simple opposition between a living present and a simulacral or spectral logic.⁹ It requires that one do without this opposition and grasp the singularity of the “real” in its impossible possibility, as a form of expression that does not signify or presuppose the Saussurean structure of the sign.¹⁰ Instead of counterposing to a “transcendent” signifier (whose relation to its signifieds can only be one of dominance) an empirical or imaginary content, Varo’s triptych suggests what Deleuze and Guattari call a “collective assemblage of enunciation” subsuming within its form variables or “flows” of a semiotic, material and social kind no one of which is privileged over the other and no one of which is intelligible in isolation. The “subject” in general becomes this collective assemblage producing a world (in speech, in acts, in art, in writing) that does not differ from that production (i.e., of the world in which “you” appear), or rather from a production of production itself which appears only in a “free” indirect discourse without agency or authorship.¹¹ The “outside,” according to Deleuze and Guattari, “has no image, no signification, no subjectivity” (A Thousand Plateaus 23), only this machinic co-implication or lived displacement in discourse, only this mode of radical becoming which is “imperceptible” precisely in its perceptibility, disappearing in the act of its appearance. This catastrophic ontology (or this catastrophe for ontology) serves as a clear subtext for Varo’s triptych insofar as it relates the making of a world to a virtual contour or intensive trait, and insofar as it implies in its multiplicities an inclusive relation to the world which one becomes. “Becoming everybody/everything (tout le monde),” write Deleuze and Guattari, “is to world (faire monde), to make a world (faire un monde). By process of elimination, one is no longer anything more than an abstract line, or a piece in a puzzle that is itself abstract” (A Thousand Plateaus 280). To make a world is therefore to make the world become, to make it the movement of a free difference or a nun that is always other than itself, but that also is this otherness in its positivity, apart from a negative economy of lack or of the “transcendent” signifier (distributing its effects of meaning from on high, by virtue of its detachment from the signifying chain).

To posit movement in this way, however, also implies a certain immobilization or stasis which Varo’s triptych could be said to thematize in the vehicular nature of the escape it constructs. It implies a formal movement akin to what Deleuze and Guattari call nomadism. “The nomad,” they write, “is…he who does not move,” or rather, “the nomad moves, but while seated, and he is only seated while moving…. Immobility and speed, catatonia and rush, a ‘stationary’ process, station as process–these traits…are eminently those of the nomad” (A Thousand Plateaus 381). Such an arrested movement also expresses a discursive time: the time of a writing that is flush with the real, a writing that materially writes, a writing that writes the real in a book as an “assemblage with the outside” rather than as a representation or “image of the world.”¹² The dynamics of Varo’s triptych–tautological or stationary movement, the girl at her station weaving (writing) a mantle or a flow that is the earth–raise as a central issue the relation between art and the world, in particular as it is focalized in the book held up by the man in the tower. This book, it can be inferred, functions as a kind of instructional manual or plan for the process of embroidering the earth’s mantle, and the man appears in this light not simply as a manager or foreman but as a priest interpreting the book by whose representations the world will be formed. The condition of oppression from which the girl desires to escape is coded in terms of a specific model of discourse, a mimesis of the book or labor according to bookish rules which the paintings attempt to disrupt. That this disruption assumes a “nomadic” form, and that its stake is nothing less than a production of the real, indicates not a freedom from the world of the book but the latter’s transformation, its rewriting in terms that include the outside as an internal difference or in its textual/textural singularity.

At stake, in other words, is not a real or living present opposable to representation any more than it is a representation opposed to the present, but an art or a book in whose temporal dimension a “becoming everybody/everything” is played out.¹³ As a result, the first index of any escape afforded by the book as an assemblage will be its indistinguishability from its condition of servitude, its relative success in passing through the world without distinction, repeating but not simply reproducing the separateness of the individual in his or her essence, in an identity which can only experience itself against an existential ground which is not different from it.¹⁴ The nature of escape for Varo (and for Pynchon, as I will shortly argue) hinges upon this desubjectification of art, of the book. It manifests itself not in a detachment from a simulacral labor, or from a “postmodern” human condition, but in a complicity that registers an experience of non-distinction or nomadic spatiality, an in-different freedom in difference itself, an almost masochistic incorporation or encryption of the world that constitutes a refusing desire in the face of social repression.

Oedipa’s Night Journey: Repetition, Language and Desire

This kind of theoretical insight informs a quite different reading of The Crying of Lot 49 than that which starts from a condition of alienation which Oedipa attempts to overcome (even if she does not succeed and even if it is only the reader who experiences “escape” in the form of a catharsis). The novel must first be situated within this logic of the assemblage, of an internal difference, of the displaced opposition between the living present and the simulacral, of a discursive time disclosing in its dimension the abstract lines or intensive traits of a drama about making worlds or about the production of the real. Only in this light can the investments of the novel in its own convolutions, impenetrable enigmas and simulacral effects be seen for the peculiar desire and freedom they evoke. The point, the moral resonance, of Oedipa’s story consists not in a particular content, not in moments of recognition that lay bare (or fail to lay bare) the simulacra that separate her from a genuine relation to her world, but in its parodies of that recognition, its fabulating ironies which always impede communication or ambiguate meanings, its continual reflux back toward its own textuality in a movement itself expressive of the only “human” condition that can be shared in the novel.

This, then, is the central premise I would like to substantiate for The Crying of Lot 49: that the basis for any escape from Oedipa’s tower, for any freedom from the malignancy of social power in a postmodern America, or for any redemption of public space or political agency implied in the novel, is precisely the latter’s refusal to mean, its self-objectification or textual reflexivity as a book that attempts to write the postmodern world in a non-opposable language. Such a refusal governs the ambivalent tension which quite literally holds Pynchon’s words in place, a tension with which one reads statements like this one by Dr. Hilarius, the renegade psychoanalyst turned psycho whom Oedipa had hoped would “talk [her] out of [the] fantasy” of the Tristero. His advice:

"Cherish it!... What else do any of you have? Hold it tightly by its little tentacle, don't let the Freudians coax it away or the pharmacists poison it out of you. Whatever it is, hold it dear, for when you lose it you go over by that much to the others. You begin to cease to be." (138)

Dr. Hilarius can hardly be a less reliable voice in the novel than he is at this point (barricaded in his house, shooting at bystanders, hinting at his sinister role as a psychiatric intern in Nazi death camps), but at the same time his admonition cannot simply be dismissed as yet another symptom of alienation and escapism. The novel acknowledges the power of his contention that fantasy is necessary for being by encasing it in a fantasm of its own, and by deliberately modulating its tone into a farcical register. The value Dr. Hilarius places on fantasy becomes for Oedipa another clue that, far from simplifying her situation or clarifying its mystery, only compounds the problem, knots her deeper into the mystery, and further exacerbates the paralysis which she feels slowly overtaking her (“trapped,” as the text will put it, “at the centre of some intricate crystal” [92]). This means that fantasy works to retard signification in a double sense: as a symptom but also as a breakdown of the symptom, as Pynchon’s diagnosis of postmodern America and as the refusal of diagnosis itself, or of the objectivity claimed by the diagnostician. The subtext of Dr. Hilarius’s insanity is thus this erosion of truth-claims made by the master (analyst or doctor, author or critic) presumed to know, and at the level of expression no less than at the level of content. This is why the text so emphatically highlights its own absurdity: for not only does it represent the absurdity of its culture, it also enacts that absurdity from within. The novel is Dr. Hilarius in this passage, reacting in the modes of violent scandal recapitulated by a tabloid and TV-dominated society (the form would be: “man suddenly goes crazy, arms himself with guns, massacres innocent people, film at 11”) to the alienation that society provokes.

In other words, the novel, in reacting to its own alienation, also compounds it in the same fantasmatic or virtual gesture by which it cogently indicates its escape. The function of paranoia in the novel (Hilarius’s, Oedipa’s, or Pynchon’s) is to ground this double valence in an immanent relation to the world it describes. The text renders its own paranoia schizophrenic, encases it in an inclusive structure of multiple determination and centrifugal effects. This plural dynamic of becoming the world (or, like Mucho Maas on LSD, “a whole roomful of people”) entails not that the schizoid text oppose its own totalizing paranoid moment, but that it take on the external or exclusive difference that denies its own inclusiveness, that it therefore deny itself, submit itself to the “rising” ground of a figure that can only be masochistic and singular, that can only be groundless, turning in an abyssal space of unmotivated signs or paraleptic meanings. This figure is exemplified in The Crying of Lot 49 by the Tristero, or even more concretely by the post horn, insofar as it flashes its signs in a displaced and elliptical phenomenality. What it signifies is a world experienced in a state of displacement that Pynchon in Gravity’s Rainbow will call “preterition,” a “passed over” or dynamically repressed modality of being predicated on an unconscious that belongs to consciousness or that knows no difference between them. This modality exemplifies what Deleuze calls a “second power of consciousness” raised in the act of a repetition which implies “not a second time but the infinite which belongs to a single time, the eternity which belongs to an instant, the unconscious which belongs to consciousness, the ‘nth’ power” (Difference and Repetition 8).¹⁵ The preterite tense is “bygone,” archaic, a reference to a dead past, but it is what Oedipa becomes when she “pursu[es] strange words in Jacobean texts” (104), for instance, or when she yields to an aestheticizing hermeneutic desire in her search for the Tristero. She brings the dead to life, as it were, to a “life-death” that is inherently simulacral or textual, a textual mode of living. Deleuze’s work on a repetition of singular or unrepeatable things turns the concept in on itself, makes it intensive, sediments the moment of repetition with “levels” at which the “whole” of time is repeated not successively but “at once” (Difference and Repetition 83) or simultaneously. The “unconscious” is not “below” but “lifted” into the surface, “belonging to consciousness” in the same way that time “inheres” in the moment of repetition (the model for this present moment is a diachronic cone tapering into a synchronic virtual point). The post horn scrawled on latrine walls, doodled on Yoyodyne stationery, inset on rings, printed on stamps, recycled in dreams, graffiteed in a San Francisco bus or tattooed on a sailor’s hand expresses a structure of clandestine communication which is nonetheless omnipresent, everywhere inscribed in the “malignant, deliberate replication” (124) of post horn symbols that dissimulate an underground that may or may not exist, that indeed may be itself dissembling or apocryphal. The post horn is then dissimulation as such, appearance as a weave of ambiguous signs which does not stand over and against the real, but in which the real appears or becomes legible as a text.

There is nothing outside the text in The Crying of Lot 49, and no place in it from which to guarantee an immunity from its mediations or its fantasms. But at the same time that the real is textual, the textual is also real, it “signifies” a condition that every character in the novel shares. They are all triste, all “wretched” and “depraved” (the etymology is given in these terms on page 102), all expressed in the system of simulacra known as the Tristero, so that what Oedipa (and the novel she structures) seeks is finally her (its) own implication in the underground that may not exist, in the world that she (it) projects and that claims her (it) precisely in its uncertainty. The object of this textual desire focalized in Oedipa is Oedipa herself (the novel itself) in her (its) otherness or non-self-identity; it is therefore strangely anoedipal in nature, grasped in its approach to a limit where meanings and bodies break down, where words and things lose the stability of their difference and begin to flow together.¹⁶ Pynchon quite literally writes this flow in the long hallucinogenic episode of Oedipa’s night journey through San Francisco, which in the following excerpt becomes a musical “score.”

At some indefinite passage in night's sonorous score, it... came to her that she would be safe, that something, perhaps only her linearly fading drunkenness, would protect her. The city was hers, as, made up and sleeked so with the customary words and images (cosmopolitan, culture, cable cars) it had not been before: she had safe-passage tonight to its far blood's branchings, be they capillaries too small for more than peering into, or vessels mashed together in shameless municipal hickeys, out on the skin for all but the tourists to see. (117-8)

The city described here belongs to Oedipa, it is “hers,” her city, the city ofOedipa, and the consequent sense of “safe-passage” she feels at large in it conditions its transformation into a vast organism, a living thing “made up” of “words and images,” a text-body that is strangely abstract, without affect or impersonal, breathing and pumping blood yet chimerical, a virtual city woven out of repetitious symbols as empty and unreal as Oedipa herself (or the novel itself). The text goes on:

Nothing of the night's could touch her; nothing did. The repetition of [post horn] symbols was to be enough, without trauma as well perhaps to attenuate it or even jar it altogether loose from her memory. She was meant to remember. She faced that possibility as she might the toy street from a high balcony, roller-coaster ride, feeding-time among the beasts in a zoo--any death-wish that can be consummated by some minimum gesture. She touched the edge of its voluptuous field, knowing it would be lovely beyond dreams simply to submit to it; that not gravity's pull, laws of ballistics, feral ravening, promised more delight. (118)

Oedipa’s fugue-like passage within the text-city or within the text-body of herself as city begins with a lack of “touch,” of the skin’s or the hand’s abstraction from the sensuous capacities that indicate an animate nature. The city and Oedipa in it become an inanimate “repetition of symbols” that is not “traumatic,” that is posed not as the extinction of desire but as the ground for a pleasure that is indifferent yet “lovely beyond dreams.” In this way Pynchon describes the allure of an interpretive labor that, as an end in itself, is also immaculate, a pulchritudo vaga that seals Oedipa in an almost psychotic hermeticism. If Oedipa “means” an ability to remember or recognize, then that very ability finds itself assumed into the peculiar lightness of her world, transformed into “toy streets” she sees from the detachment of a “high balcony,” or with the conditioned appetite of animals in a zoo. Oedipa’s desire is caught in “roller coaster” cycles of a culture geared to incite and satisfy a “death-wish” in its subjects, to direct desire toward objects that empty its “consummation” of any substance. To “submit” to the destiny of a remembering that nonetheless cannot remember, or that is infinitely attenuated, implies a movement as or more ineluctable than gravity, an orbitalized desire that immobilizes not only Oedipa but the novel with its own repetition of symbols and its own fascination with the Tristero.

So there is no escape from that repetition, and indeed for Oedipa and for The Crying of Lot 49 it will have “to be enough.” What follows from this is that one must understand the nature and function of repetition more clearly. What the post horns repeat, what Oedipa repeats, what the text repeats, is the empty form desire takes in contemporary culture. But as this repetition approaches the relative limit of a death-wish that must always reconstitute itself (to want again), Pynchon’s text discloses what could be called an absolute or asignifying limit at which grammatic and semantic structure loses its edge or begins to blur. A zero degree can be felt in the language in the same way that the executrix Oedipa, upon first encountering Inverarity’s complex legacy, notices a “sense of buffering, insulation,… an absence of intensity, as if watching a movie just perceptibly out of focus, that the projectionist had refused to fix” (20). The Crying of Lot 49 is also just perceptibly out of focus, slightly approximate in its diction, a feature which can be glimpsed in the above-quoted passage’s occasionally lapsed article or ambiguously deployed pronoun. Language begins to erode its own sense or substantive content as it plays out its submission to the “voluptuous field” of its repetitions, and in the process the text becomes a travesty of its own truth-claims, the warp and woof of potentially empty meanings or of an impenetrably parodic “matter” that always obtains or never changes insofar as it is the static condition for change itself, a textual hyle that bears its determination inside itself, or that appears in an in-differentiated form.

Like Oedipa, then, the novel presents a curious detachment and levity (implied even in her name) that complicates the desire it dramatizes in the Oedipal search for a signifier that is not “transcendent” so much as triste, depraved, low, looked for in undergrounds or in depths that are flat, brought to the surface of a transparent consciousness “meant to remember” the secrets with which it is coextensive. This immanent reading of the object (i.e., language itself, iterative, abstract but isomorphic with the real) taken by desire in the novel suggests even as an imperative that one read escape or freedom from Oedipa’s tower not in contradiction with an alienated socius, but as that socius encased within a form of expression that (re)doubles its alienation, citing or incorporating its orbitalized effects until they metabolize, become residual or excremental signs in an economy of WASTE. Language (or writing) is strung through the body in the process of becoming the alternative or “shadow” system that Oedipa witnesses only in an exacerbated degradation on the streets of San Francisco:

So it went. Oedipa played the voyeur and listener. Among her other encounters were a facially-deformed welder, who cherished his ugliness; a child roaming the night who missed the death before birth as certain outcasts do the dear lulling blankness of the community; a Negro woman with an intricately-marbled scar along the baby-fat of one cheek who kept going through rituals of miscarriage each for a different reason, dedicated not to continuity but to some kind of interregnum; an aging night-watchman, nibbling at a bar of Ivory Soap, who had trained his virtuouso stomach to accept also lotions, air-fresheners, fabrics, tobaccoes and waxes in a hopeless attempt to assimilate it all, all the promise, productivity, betrayal, ulcers, before it was too late; and even another voyeur, who hung outside one of the city's still-lighted windows, searching for who knew what specific image. (123)

In this series of encounters, Oedipa looks and listens for her own belonging to the system of WASTE it implies–not its reality or real support for which she cannot find adequate assurances (but which is really there behind the appearances), but the perverse or denatured “interregnum” that it constitutes for time itself, the discontinuous space or gap in structure that renders it paratactic, displaced in its place, double, spectral or self-parodic. Oedipa takes her place within this series precisely by displacing herself, by loving the repetition of symbols, by desiring texts, and by failing to find any unmediated connection in a common ground or shared public space. What she seeks is not this common ground but the secret of disconnection that nonetheless communicates, the broken machine that links only by unlinking, that posits as the basis for community a reversal of communal values or the “assimilation” of an outside that is absolute and originary. In this light, the welder who “cherishes” his ugliness, the child who “misses” a “death before birth,” the Negro woman “dedicated” to “rituals of miscarriage,” the night-watchman swallowing commodities, and the two voyeurs looking for their “specific images” together indicate a desire not simply trapped in passive cycles of consumption, but actively seeking to undo the structure of repression in which it is caught, indeed from which it is not different. Laid over the “death-wish” implicit in each “species of withdrawal” (123) Pynchon enumerates in Oedipa’s Walpurgisnacht is another theory of the death drive, another kind of repetition compulsion than that which presumes a material model of return to inanimate states.¹⁷ Repetition in the above passage abrogates the natural and human functions of sociality, reproduction and digestion; it marks in the text-body a refusal or breakdown of its own organic constitution. But it accomplishes this refusal not through a process of externalization so much as by incorporating, like the night-watchman, the products of a world that reduces desire to its most material (and empty) form. Desire for the inanimate (or as the inanimate) in Pynchon’s novel (and in all his work) has to be seen in this double light to contract two death instincts, two repetitions, two limits, for only in this doubleness can the desire of the text appear in its excessive expenditures, in its masochistic transgressions of its own realism and truth.

Oedipa’s and the novel’s desire is double: it repeats itself, it repeats itself repeating, it repeats repetition. This nomadic movement in place designates the central ekphrastic dynamic of the text, the precise way it feels itself into the world of forever deferred revelation it describes. Freedom from Oedipa’s tower occurs only through this movement, never against it, never in reaction to it, for to do so would be to destroy the implicate and broken structure of the novel which is its critique of contemporary America. Repetition for its own sake, repetition as an end in itself, repetition at the surface of the text in all its slightness, all its insubstantiality, but also all its brutality, expresses a force at the heart of desire that seeks an end to desire itself (understood as captured within a logic of consumption), a neutral or displaceable energy that verges on a digitized automaticity. This is one way to read the “great digital computer” through which Oedipa walks at the novel’s end, sorting Oedipa’s world into ones and zeros:

For it was now like walking among matrices of a great digital computer, the zeros and ones twinned above, hanging like balanced mobiles right and left, ahead, thick, maybe endless. Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth.... Either Oedipa in the orbiting ecstasy of a true paranoia, or a real Tristero. For there either was some Tristero beyond the appearance of the legacy America, or there was just America and if there was just America then it seemed the only way she could continue, and manage to be relevant to it, was as an alien, unfurrowed, assumed full circle into some paranoia. (181-2)

Oedipa’s conundrum presumes here a digitization at the level of expression, so that the indecision she suffers between “transcendent meanings” and “just America” does not entail a choice between the world as computer or the world as human or public space. The binary choice she faces, in other words, is not between paranoia and something else, since paranoia already figures the ground or frame for choice itself, for any formulation of agency one might attach to her example. The machinic nature of the human precedes any determination of its spontaneity and freedom, and this is why Oedipa’s desire for escape cannot be thought outside or in reaction to her encasement in a machine of generalized communication. On the contrary, this encasement must be seen as the condition for that desire and in two senses: as the cause of her alienation and as the medium for her escape, as the stimulus for an escape from the nexus of power relations that constitutes social repression and an escape in that nexus, within the structures of power from which she is not different. The possibility of freedom held out by the novel hinges on the precise function of this preposition in,or rather on the co-implicate or coincident structure exemplified by the novel itself where it achieves its peculiar effect of orbitalized meanings.

The Crying of Lot 49 does not choose one or the other of the possibilities confronted by Oedipa at the “crying of lot 49”; it chooses the impasse as such, it presents the tautological circle of that double bind as the vehicle for its escape and the condition for any coherent activity of dissent. This elliptical and repetitious textual ambivalence signals a desire that includes the world and that refuses its own exemption or election in it, a preterite desire that takes the world as its object in all its “promise, productivity, betrayal.” By weaving or inscribing in its very texture the empty form of a “wasteful” signification, the novel discloses the incorporating, encrypting link between desire and a masochism that governs the underground or unconscious of the Tristero. This masochistic desire in turn links Oedipa to her world and makes her one of those outsiders who communicate via W.A.S.T.E. The impingement of non-meaning in the text therefore assumes a new insistence or urgency in the allegiance it suggests to an experience which is residual, left over, or paratactically displaced, an experience in which experience itself becomes indeterminate or unlocatable.

To grasp the linkages, the empathic connections, the asymptotic convergences, the calculus of simultaneity that can be observed in Pynchon’s novel is then to center analysis on its disjunctive nature, to underscore the lack of “touch” upon which it everywhere insists as the condition for any “coming together.” It is also to resist recuperative readings that define desire (Oedipa’s and the text’s) as a search for meaning, for identity, or for the recovery of a dispossessed communal space. Oedipa is not a “heroine” in this sense, not the locus of a potential agency capable of wresting her culture from its postmodern catastrophe.¹⁸ Or rather, she is this heroine in a parody, and one can only emphasize the heroic aspect of her character in the context of its parodic quotation, for otherwise one misses the very political point about the nature of dispossessed communities and the bonds (bindings, Bindungen) on which they are based. If The Crying of Lot 49 can be said to contribute in its emphasis upon escape to the theorization of political freedom or of a genuinely public space in America today, it does so by giving us a glimpse of what a rhizomatic “experience” might look like. I do not imply by this that Pynchon has embedded in his text some “real” content which the reader might salvage and claim as its political message, but neither do I mean to occlude the “real” behind the signifier, or confer upon language the monolithic character of a metalanguage. Pynchon’s novel is an attempt to write the displacement of the difference between the real and the simulacral, and as such to imagine the world that follows from that displacement both in its vitiating effects and in its desiring modes. The politics of the novel consists in its formal displacement of that difference, for only with it does the “community” of “people” who “communicate” through WASTE come into being.

Notes

1. Each of the four Remedios Varo images in this article is reproduced by permission of Artists Rights Society (ARS). These images are protected by copyright law. The following are prohibited by law: (1) Any theatrical, televised, or public display or performance, including transmission of any Image over a network, excepting a local area network; (2) The preparation of any derivative work, including the whole or in part, of any Images without the permission of ARS.

2. Vitiation describes for Marx the inverse relation under capitalism between the worker and his labor power (expressed both in the product and in the activity of production). “The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labor becomes an object, assumes an external existence, but that it exists independently, outside himself, and alien to him, and that it stands opposed to him as an autonomous power. The life which he has given to the object sets itself against him as an alien and hostile force” (134). To the alienation of the thing is added the alienation of the worker from himself or from his “species life” conceived as his implicate relation to the “inorganic” world. Ideally, “[t]he object of labor is… the objectification of man’s species life; for he no longer reproduces himself merely intellectually, as in consciousness, but actively and in a real sense, and he sees his own reflection in a world which he has constructed” (140). Work within a capitalist order, however, “vitiates” this self-reflection in the constructed world by taking away the worker’s species life, his real objectivity as a species-being, his produced and producing relation to an inorganic body, to his “belonging” within an inclusive and interdependent nature.

3. The problem of coral reef formation confronted by biologists up to Charles Darwin centered on the fact that corals, in Darwin’s terms, “require for their growth a solid foundation within a few fathoms of the surface” of the sea (Coral Reefs 128). Since the likelihood of geologic foundations as uniformly present at or near the ocean’s surface as the global distribution of reefs would indicate is scant, Darwin proposed a correlation between reef growth and a rising sea level, arguing that coral grows at a limited depth, dies as the sea rises, and so provides its own foundation. This coral-like production of the foundation at the surface is suggestive for the kind of structure I am interested in here, which supposes a non-distinction between ground and figure, inside and outside, as its basis. Deleuze refers this figure internal to its own ground to the concept of “difference in itself,” a difference grasped not as a displacement in space (i.e., external or extensive in nature), but intensively and inclusively, opening the figure up to an intensive field of variable and differential relations which serves as an abyssal ground isomorphic to its own limit (Difference and Repetition 21-2). Deleuze and Guattari’s work on acentered or rhizomatic systems not defined “by a set of points and positions, with binary relations between the points and bi-univocal relations between the positions” (A Thousand Plateaus 21), rests upon the concept of an intensive field that renders a system simultaneous with each of its parts, multi-levelled or multi-dimensional, and expressed in the singular movement of an absolute or “free” difference.

4. See Kaplan, Unexpected Journeys (20-3), for an account of the triptych in relation to Varo’s life as an artist.

5. This is quoted in the book Remedios Varo by Octavio Paz; cited in Kaplan (21).

6. This vehicle is one of many fascinating machines that recur in Varo’s work, and that conspicuously offer a means of conveyance which leaves its passengers in a state of suspension (they are often standing or sitting as they move, float or hover through a painting), and sometimes they even include towers or (usually circular) domiciles in their construction.

7. I am attempting here an economic formulation of Kant’s paradox of internal sense, inflected through Deleuze’s reading of difference in itself. For him, difference as such can be understood as a form differentiated from a ground that does not in turn differentiate itself from the form, with the result that the ground “rises” to the surface and “dissolves” the form’s empirical and symbolic content, rendering it empty. Difference is no longer grasped “between” two things in a classificatory manner, but in the “autonomous existence” of the rising ground that comprehends its own limit (Difference and Repetition 21-2). With this displacement, forms (whether of matters, substances, subjects or objects, of meanings in the broadest sense) assume a certain concrete abstraction or intensive nature apprehensible only as that internal difference which articulates into the structure of being an originary otherness or alterity. An “abstract line” (referred to by Deleuze in conjunction with a brief discussion of Odilon Redon, whose work intersects Varo’s in thematic as well as technical ways) would be the contour of this singular form or of the intensive trait which it becomes once it is no longer opposable to other forms. The object so defined, whether it be of thought, of desire, or of labor–the materiality of things in themselves–assumes a virtual or subtle being which Deleuze and Guattari conceptualize in terms of differential forces, intensive fields and bodies without organs.

8. Varo evokes this singular experience or “abstract line” through techniques, first innovated by Surrealist artists like Max Ernst and Varo’s friend Oscar Dominguez, of decalcomania, which entails blowing and blotting paint on the canvas in such a way that color intensifies and contours assume an ambiguous definition (Kaplan 122). This effect is prominent in the texture of yellow, foliage-like fog on which the lovers rise in “The Escape.”

9. Derrida writes in Specters of Marx that a political being or political event (his example is the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989) cannot be understood today “as long as one relies on the simple (ideal, mechanical, or dialectical) opposition of the real presence of the real present or the living present to its ghostly simulacrum, the opposition of the effective or actual to the non-effective, inactual, which is also to say, as long as one relies on a general temporality or an historical temporality made of the successive linking of presents identical to themselves…” (70). For Derrida in this text, ontology can no longer be thought in adequately historicized terms as referring to determined contents, but must be grasped in a self-reflexive temporal and discursive dimension that he links to ghosts, specters, the work of mourning, etc.

10. Deleuze and Guattari’s polemic against the signifier’s “arbitrary” and biunivocal relation to its signifieds rests upon their contention that the (Saussurean) sign cements an idealist system of representation. They identify two “dimensions” in the work of Saussure: “one horizontal, where the signified is reduced to the value of coexisting minimal terms into which the signifier decomposes; the other vertical, where the signifier is elevated to the concept corresponding to the acoustic image–that is, to the voice, taken in its maximum extension, which recomposes the signifier” (emphasis mine) (Anti-Oedipus 207). In the grid formed by the two axes of value and concept, “the signifier appears twice, once in the chain of elements in relation to which the signified is always a signifier for another signifier, and a second time in the detached object on which the whole chain depends, and that spreads over the chain the effects of signification.” This “detached object” gaurantees the meanings it organizes in virtue of its absence from the signifying chain, and so introduces a second order sign, a “sign of the sign” that can be grasped only in terms of an idealist or metalinguistic domination. It is in this sense that Deleuze and Guattari speak of the signifier as “transcendent,” a usage I am following here.

11. In Deleuze and Guattari’s words, “The social character of enunciation is intrinsically founded only if one succeeds in demonstrating how enunciation in itself implies collective assemblages. It then become clear that the statement is individuated, and enunciation subjectified, only to the extent that an impersonal collective assemblage requires it and determines it to be so. It is for this reason that indirect discourse, especially ‘free’ indirect discourse, is of exemplary value; there are no clear, distinctive contours; what comes first is not an insertion of variously individuated statements, or an interlocking of different subjects of enunciation, but a collective assemblage resulting in the determination of relative subjectification proceedings, or assignations of individuality and their shifting distributions within discourse. Indirect discourse is not explained by the distinction between subjects; rather, it is the assemblage, as it freely appears in this discourse, that explains all the voices present within a single voice…” (A Thousand Plateaus 80). This formulation of an enunciative “assemblage” resonates in The Crying of Lot 49 with Mucho Maas’s LSD-inspired “spectrum” (or immanent plane of movement) on which being becomes a matter of multiplicities (or “whole roomfuls of people” [143]). More formally, it works itself out in the novel’s intertextual excesses, exemplified by Oedipa’s reading excursions through “The Courier’s Tragedy,” the text’s propensity for breaking out into parodic song, or its punning word-play around, for instance, names like “Oedipa Maas,” “Dr. Hilarius,” “Mike Fallopian,” “Pierce Inverarity,” etc.

12. The difference between the book and the assemblage-as-book is analagous to that more celebrated difference between arborescent and rhizomatic systems. For Deleuze and Guattari, “The first type of book is the root-book: the tree is already the image of the world, or the root the image of the world-tree. This is the classical book, as noble, as signifying and subjective organic interiority….” (5). The “fascicular root” proceeds, by contrast, to “abort” the “principal root” and graft onto it an “indefinite multiplicity of secondary roots” that grow rhizomorphically, and support a “modern” text that is asignifying, asubjective, and anorganic (5).

13. For Deleuze and Guattari, this process entails a “transparency” in the world that makes being a matter of passing or impersonation. “Animal elegance, the camouflage fish, the clandestine: this fish is crisscrossed by abstract lines that resemble nothing, that do not even follow its organic divisions; but thus disorganized, disarticulated, it worlds with the lines of a rock, sand, and plants, becoming imperceptible” (280).

14. This is a restatement in other terms of the Deleuzian paradox of a rising ground. A subject experiences the uniqueness of its “essence” only in terms of an existence that is that essence, or only in the empty form of an indifferent existence which invades the autonomy of the “I” and articulates it through time. This point is made forcefully by Jean-Luc Nancy in The Experience of Freedom. Man’s egocentrism, Nancy maintains, entails a “concentration in itself” of being and a setting apart of the subject’s essence in what Hegel calls “a hatred of existence” (14). This unfreedom or “evil,” however, is the “first discernible positivity”of freedom and can only be understood in a co-implicate or “masochistic” relation that renders the “experience” of freedom singular or imperceptible, not a constituted difference, attribute or mode but an internal difference calling forth a particular kind of deconstructive apprehension. Experience for Nancy, indeed, needs to be defined in its “nomadic” singularity or imperceptibility, not in extension but intensively and according to a differential logic (145).

15. Pynchon uses the word preterition in its Puritan sense to refer to the “damned” as opposed to the elect members of a community (204 and passim). Like the “wretched” of the Tristero, the preterite characters of Gravity’s Rainbow are living repression at an elliptical surface, strangely flush with the real from which they are displaced. Preterition for Pynchon is analogous, I think, to repetition for Deleuze, since both concepts bear on the past, on history as contemporaneous with the present in a discursive temporal dimension.

16. Deleuze writes in Difference and Repetition of a reflux of libido upon the self in narcissism which suggests for Freud the formation of a “desexualized, neutral and displaceable energy” (112). Deleuze isolates in this energy a function of emptying subjectivity, of hollowing out the space of the self, of rendering its body virtual. What this energy precipitates in its immateriality is what Deleuze and Guattari call the “pure continuity that any one sort of matter ideally possesses” (Anti-Oedipus 36) or the “unformed, unorganized, nonstratified or destratified body and all its flows: subatomic and submolecular particles, pure intensities, prevital and prephysical free singularities” (A Thousand Plateaus 43). The underlying idea here is similar to an infinite substance in Spinoza’s sense, matter as intensive rather than extensive, differential rather than substantial. My own use of this idea emphasizes the relation of this “empty” desire to language and textuality, echoing a Derridean formulation of a heterological drive or “force” of “disappropriation” (The Postcard 352) that cannot be defined (as self-identical or present to itself) and that therefore manifests itself in an always interpretive textual mode. See Derrida’s analysis of Beyond the Pleasure Principle in “To Speculate–on ‘Freud’” in The Postcard.

17. Deleuze’s reading of Freud in Difference and Repetition and Masochism focuses on the nature of the death instinct. For Deleuze, “Death does not appear in the objective model of an indifferent matter to which the living would ‘return’; it is present in the living in the form of a subjective and differential experience endowed with its prototype. It is not a material state; on the contrary, having renounced all matter, it corresponds to a pure form: the empty form of time” (Difference and Repetition 113). This death instinct is also linked by Deleuze to the desexualized energy discussed in footnote 15.

18. See Peter Euben’s analysis of The Crying of Lot 49 in The Tragedy of Political Theory for an example of the recuperative reading I have in mind. Euben compares Oedipa’s story to Oedipus’s “search for meaning and identity” (284) and claims for her a power of mediation between opposites (male and female, difference and sameness, low and high cultures, “exile” and “incest”) which signify the two limit-cases between which a political identity and community can be founded. She functions as a kind of Hermes-like messenger and so as a figure for analogy itself, for the linking or structural principle of an alternative social and political system symbolized by the Tristero. But for Oedipa to be the “founding mother who can save America” (303), for her to be the linchpin of an alternative social, political, sexual and psychological structure not undone by the simulacra of contemporary society, she must be “real,” just as the Tristero and the WASTEful system it signifies must be a “genuine society of communicants in which real information is exchanged and real diversity sustained” (303). That is, the kind of alternative system Euben has in mind cannot tolerate the ambivalence that nonetheless marks the novel throughout and expresses its economy of waste (which is precisely suspended between the real and the unreal, between fact and fiction, between presence and spectrality). As a result, the only way he can locate political agency in the text is by negating the very implicated structure I have been attempting to analyze here–and therefore cancelling, in the name of a political freedom, the very possibility of freedom held out by the novel.

Works Cited

• Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share: Volume 1. Trans. R. Hurley. New York: Zone Books, 1988.
• Darwin, Charles. The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1889.
• Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Trans. P. Patton. New York: Columbia UP, 1994.
• Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari. Anti-Oedipus. Trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem, H. Lane. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983.
• —. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. B. Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987.
• Derrida, Jacques. The Postcard. Trans. A. Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.
• —. The Specters of Marx. Trans. P. Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994.
• Euben, Peter. The Tragedy of Political Theory. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990.
• Kaplan, Janet. Unexpected Journeys: the Art and Life of Remedios Varo. New York: Abbeville Press, 1988.
• Marx, Karl. “Alienated Labor.” The Portable Marx. Ed. E. Kamenka. New York: Penguin, 1983.
• Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Experience of Freedom. Trans. Bridget McDonald. Stanford UP: Stanford, 1993.
• Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. New York: Perennial Fiction, 1966.
• —. Gravity’s Rainbow. New York: Penguin Books, 1973.

Scott DeShong

Department of English
Quinebaug Valley Community-Technical College
spdes@conncoll.edu

In the following essay, I will read certain poems by Sylvia Plath to demonstrate a way of reading that derives from the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas. According to Levinas, ethics requires one to face others in such a way that the incommensurable weight of the other’s lived existence is primary: the affective dimension of the other is primary to discernible contours or articulable characteristics of the other. This basic move–to apprehension prior to comprehension of the other–provides a new basis for philosophy, Levinas says, as ethics becomes first philosophy, prior even to ontology. To put Levinas’s move in the language of literary criticism and rhetoric, pathos (apprehension of feeling) comes prior to ethos (judgment of character) in a reader’s or audience’s apprehension of alterity. With this connection, I imply an aesthetic aspect to Levinas’s ethics, while at the same time I suggest that the way of reading I will demonstrate has an ethical dimension. But I do not claim that my reading involves an approach to the good. Indeed, insofar as it involves ethics, my essay deals with the difficulty of being ethical.

Considering Levinas’s focus on the affect of the other as an aesthetic move provides a way of handling a key problem that various critics have found in his work: a genuine move to the affective ruptures any determination of the move as ethical. To say this involves recognizing ethics as philosophical discourse, metaphysically centered on the objective of what is defined to be good. Levinas is correct in showing that the affect of the other must be the primary emphasis of ethics, for without it ethics remains an abstract totality; it follows that his emphasis on affect deconstructs ethics. But in retaining the word “ethics,” Levinas obscures the deconstruction. Focusing on a desire to approach the other’s affect, he focuses on desire that in philosophical terms would have been called ethical, but a desire that by its own application–by exceeding the metaphysics of the good–invalidates the name of ethics.¹

My emphasis on affect can work within aesthetics in a way that Levinas’s emphasis cannot work in ethics, because aesthetics may be decentered as ethics cannot be. By reading in such a way that the affective dimensions of texts disrupt the intellectual activity of judgment in aesthetics, I develop an untotalized, denatured aesthetics. One may argue that like ethics, aesthetics must be centered and develop a sense of the good; the argument would be long, and I will simply indicate that I follow Georges Bataille and others who claim an untotalized aesthetics. As my readings emphasize a desire to face the affect of the other, they emphasize that desire which Levinas shows to be mandatory for ethics but which disrupts ethics as such. The desire I emphasize lacks naturalization and totalization, falling outside anthropology as well as philosophy, driving an aesthetics of the feeling of the other which–following literary and rhetorical traditions, albeit loosely–I call the aesthetics of pathos.² Levinas writes of the “restlessness” of consciousness that is open to the other, thus capturing the insecurity of moving outside philosophy; this restlessness should extend into the instability of determining a name for the act of encountering the other (Otherwise than Being 153-62).

The emphasis on an untotalizing approach to the other’s affect, for Levinas, includes focusing on the singularity of the encounter with the other. Reading provides an appropriate occasion for exploring such an encounter, and what follows in this essay–although it will iterate theoretical concerns of the introduction–is not a philosophical treatise, but a performative work of criticism. The first-person voice of the essay (even in its plural manifestations) is a phenomenon of subjectivity, not a voice of definitive truth. Similarly, the reading does not definitively impute characteristics to Sylvia Plath or to an oeuvre, style, or technique that is attributable to her (although my references to other critics are suggestive in this respect, beginning to knit a fabric of literary-critical conversation).³ Although the following readings say more about aesthetics than ethics, they say more about Levinas’s work than Plath’s, more about reading than either, and more about a specific encounter with particular texts than about reading in general or about a particular type of discourse (the essay focuses mainly on poems, but neither exclusively nor necessarily). With the deconstruction of ethics and philosophical aesthetics foregone, my reading primarily develops a singular exposition of desire and judgment in dialogue, amid an aesthetics whose desired focus is affective alterity.

Imagery as a Locus of Pathos

My attraction to the poetry of Sylvia Plath is based in the feeling I find in reading many of her poems, the kind of access to feeling I achieve. In the poems, I read feeling I cannot name, and which seems masked, although I read feeling I am compelled to recognize. There is substantial feeling in “Apprehensions,” for instance, that I find indissociable from the images in which moments of feeling emerge.⁴ The persona faces a wall that is, through metamorphosing descriptions, the main locus of feeling in the poem: changing from “this white wall” to “A gray wall now, clawed and bloody” and then “This red wall” which “winces continually,” it becomes finally a “black wall” on which “unidentifiable birds / Swivel their heads and cry” (195-96). There is more here, and indeed less, than an association of images with particular emotions; the words contain, represent, or transmit feelings less than they serve as a dwelling place for them. In considering uncontained feeling in imagery, we may recognize how poetry may fundamentally concern what is felt as living: an apprehension of substantial experience can occur at a level more fundamental than articulation or communication.

When I confront affective material in “Apprehensions,” I do not find myself engaging with a persona who contains emotions or whose feelings I can accurately articulate in terms of the persona’s situation, thoughts, or actions (although it is possible to make conjectures about such matters). Although I am little tempted to construe details as integrated moments of a psychology, I find palpable the feelings per se. Feelings appear as substantial moments, which as such do not automatically integrate into personality or subjectivity. I do attribute feeling to a voice, which is how I mark the feeling’s otherness: the notion of the voice mediates my apprehension of feeling, raising a disjunction that marks what is not my own feeling. Yet the voice’s otherness does not in itself bring a person present, seeming rather to dwell prior to any notion of a consistent humanity. I do not obtain a sense of naturalized humanity when confronted in such a way by the affective dimensions of a voice, while I may recognize something undeniably living and compelling in the voice’s feelings, particularly in the suffering to which the voice seems subject. Through the recognition of its suffering, a voice’s feeling can register for a reader as affective substance.

What mainly attracts me to Plath’s voices is their pathos; what makes her voices compelling is their apprehensible capacity for suffering. This would appear to be an ethical compulsion, involving attention that is commonly considered an essential component of ethics. This point can help explain a reader’s attraction to the voice of Plath’s “Morning Song,” the voice of a disaffected mother for whom her newborn is “like a fat gold watch,” opaque and inhuman. This is a mother for whom the baby’s mouth, “clean as a cat’s,” in the unfolding of the imagery opens and transforms into the “window square” that “Whitens and swallows its dull stars”: the baby’s organ of nourishment and expression turns, for the mother, into an empty, unsympathetic eternity, revealing the blankness of one of an endless series of mornings (156-57). There is pathos in the mother’s voice that evokes solicitude, however counter this pathos may be to an ethos of motherhood that might be normalized as productive and healthy.⁵ Yet the feeling in the voice is largely opaque, too much so for me to say I can share it. What predominates is the inescapability of the voice’s suffering.

I focus here on the moment of affect’s compulsion, on an aesthetic moment in which affect may be for a reader a substantiality that is excessive of subjectivity, character, ethos, or any similar idea that entails human consistency or integrity. In the vagueness of what we perceive to be an imagistic moment that yet feels substantial–in the incomprehensibility of something tangible–we may recognize an unmanageable excess that convinces us that another’s feeling is real. As Levinas details in the first section of Totality and Infinity, we apprehend moments of affect before comprehension. Levinas’s thought engages us to dwell on the affect as such: as the affect stands out, not drawn into determinate relations that reduce it. Thus, we may apprehend what Levinas refers to as the “infinity” of feeling, which I see as an excess that disrupts the idea of the human as a natural totality. A glimpse of infinite affect in imagery may make that imagery our dwelling place with concrete feeling. Dwelling so with what we recognize as another life, we take the other’s existence even prior to understanding what it is. Levinas thus brackets the trappings of subjectivity and intersubjective communication in a phenomenological reduction upon the affective existence of the other. By this approach to feeling, there can be no knowing an other without dwelling with the other on the terms of the other’s unreduced affect; anything like knowing remains something beyond epistemology, something more tactile.

In Plath’s voices, there is suffering with which I must dwell or which I must dismiss, suffering I must apprehend or reject–which I must take, if I take it, with its obscurity. In “Little Fugue,” for example, images of clouds and other opacities gather in a nebulous blankness, a whiteness in which the affect of the persona largely resides amid the events of its life. A pathos emerges in and as the blankness, dwelling there with the “deafness” and “silence” that interrelate in a “fugue” of imagistic feeling, as the blankness overwhelms the colors of the poem. Imagery comes somewhat at the expense of syntax in this fugal playing of feeling into blank space. The blankness may be among other things the absence of the father, of the law or logos, of the object of love, or the self (I present this poem unbroken, as much as possible to avoid mediating the experience of it):

The yew's black fingers wag;
Cold clouds go over.
So the deaf and dumb
Signal the blind, and are ignored.

I like black statements.
The featurelessness of that cloud, now!
White as an eye all over!
The eye of the blind pianist

At my table on the ship.
He felt for his food.
His fingers had the noses of weasels.
I couldn't stop looking.

He could hear Beethoven:
Black yew, white cloud,
The horrific complications.
Finger-traps--a tumult of keys.

Empty and silly as plates,
So the blind smile.
I envy the big noises,
The yew hedge of the Grosse Fuge.

Deafness is something else.
Such a dark funnel, my father!
I see your voice
Black and leafy, as in my childhood,

A yew hedge of orders,
Gothic and barbarous, pure German.
Dead men cry from it.
I am guilty of nothing.

The yew my Christ, then.
Is it not as tortured?
And you, during the Great War
In the California delicatessen

Lopping the sausages!
They color my sleep,
Red, mottled, like cut necks.
There was a silence!

Great silence of another order.
I was seven, I knew nothing.
The world occurred.
You had one leg, and a Prussian mind.

Now similar clouds
Are spreading their vacuous sheets.
Do you say nothing?
I am lame in the memory.

I remember a blue eye,
A briefcase of tangerines.
This was a man, then!
Death opened, like a black tree, blackly.

I survive the while,
Arranging my morning.
These are my fingers, this my baby.
The clouds are a marriage dress, of that pallor. 
                                     (187-89)

Similarly, the whiteness of the hospital room in “Tulips” becomes a repository for pathos, a space for the suffering of a voice that recognizes itself as stripped of the trappings of character, that at one level desires to be so stripped. As in “Little Fugue,” the deictics “this” and “these” emphasize anemic features of the flesh and of the world, making blankness what is most directly and centrally indicated:

The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here.
Look how white everything is, how quiet, how 
   snowed-in.
I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly
As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, 
   these hands.
I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.
I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the   
   nurses
And my history to the anesthetist and my body to   
   surgeons.

They have propped my head between the pillow and 
   the sheet-cuff
Like an eye between two white lids that will not 
   shut.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 

I didn't want any flowers, I only wanted
To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The tulips are too red in the first place, they 
   hurt me.
Even through the gift paper I could hear them 
   breathe
Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an 
   awful baby.
Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 

Nobody watched me before, now I am watched.
The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me
Where once a day the light slowly widens and 
   slowly thins,
And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper 
   shadow
Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the 
   tulips,
And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself.
                                          (160-61)

An opaque pathos persists in the whiteness of “Tulips,” in contrast to the encroaching redness of a gift of red flowers, which is an additional otherness and also a new locus of pathos (marking an affective shift as occurs in the images of the wall in “Apprehensions”), a new locus that struggles with the voice’s preference to suffer only the vacuous pathos of the whiteness.⁶ Later in “Tulips,” the air “snags and eddies round” the flowers. Read as the voice’s feeling–or perhaps as self, or as language or meaning that would bring the presence of character–the air is a liquid that is equivalent to absence in terms of any possibility of coherence or centrality: the whiteness synesthetically merges with the tactile indeterminacy of air.

I find the whiteness in these poems and others among the most abject and most terrifying imagery in Plath’s writing.⁷ The whiteness is a palpable presence of absence, so I sense in it the force of absence, including the absence of cause, effect, and correlations of psychological elements. But as it marks the absence of determinations, it is also whiteness as a trace of other whiteness elsewhere. It is not only aesthetic but anesthetic, and the lack in it seems never quite chosen; if the poem articulates a death-wish, it seems death suffered to take place, although without determinable reasons: there is not mere annihilation but suffered annihilation. It is indeed the obscurity of this imagery of whiteness that makes the voice’s vulnerability concrete. Through the whiteness I touch the suffered existence of the voice, and thereby I know what I can of the vulnerability of that existence.

Such vacuous pathos in images of whiteness is pathos not only nearer to me than the character or subjectivity of the other, but nearer than the question of being, the question of the nature of the other.⁸ It is nearer, indeed, than even the famous ontological question of Heidegger: “The other person is closer to me than is knowledge or ontology,” says Charles William Reed in summarizing Levinas’s critique of Heidegger (80). Levinas says Heidegger’s radical question still assumes too much concerning living existence, or in other words accounts for too much, by focusing on being and putting the question in such a way that being itself remains at the center of the question, such that we would expect nothing to exceed being (Totality and Infinity 42-48). For Levinas, as we face what we recognize as the substance of otherness, we move to a moment prior to the question of what is (and prior to the question of this question), moving to the moment that we are affected. Only in recognition of the radical alterity of living otherness, Levinas says, might we try to get beyond the tyranny of ontology, beyond the centripetal force that will obtain for any thinking that fails to move anterior to ontology. Thus we move prior to philosophy–and indeed ethics–in an aesthetics that seeks the infinite excess of alterity, that seeks the proximate, palpable excess of otherness through imagery.

Alterity, Infinity, and Abjection in Pathos

I have discussed how reading the pathos of the other leads us toward an infinity of affect; such reading leads into an infinity of complexity in the excess that is affect. We can follow Plath’s poems into such complexity. Most notably, amid the unreduced affective dimensions of her work, voices often reveal their own others, sometimes as alterity internal to themselves. The imagery of the wall in “Apprehensions,” simultaneously with the internal shifts that yield dimensions of feeling (as discussed above), depicts the wall in its more literal role of incarcerating the persona, as the wall is “clawed and bloody,” an insurmountable otherness for the voice. And the image of the wall becomes an explicit psychological figure, as the voice presents the image of the bloody wall and asks, “Is there no way out of the mind?” (195). Thus the alterity and multiple dimensions of the wall emerge as part of the “mind” the voice appears to inhabit, implicating the externality of the wall with the interior of the voice. The imagery suggests a splitting by which alterity begins to proliferate among figural and imagistic renderings of the voice’s feeling.

As a further example, alterity emerges in the voice’s depiction of its feelings in “The Great Carbuncle.” The poem reflects an experience shared by a group of people walking at night. Describing a landscape revealed by “light neither of dawn / Nor nightfall,” light “Other than noon, than moon, stars,” the persona speaks of altered vision, a sort of dream-vision in which familiar details, such as “The once-known way,” become “Wholly other, and ourselves / Estranged, changed.” The persona’s first-person plurality indicates, first, a unity in the ethereal altered light. The result of this early imagery is exhilaration, as the voice observes

              ...our hands, faces
Lucent as porcelain, the earth's
Claim and weight gone out of them.

But upon reaching a destination–as “nearing means distancing”–the “Light withdraws” and “the body weighs like stone” (72-73). The pathos of the poem emerges at the end as a suffering of the weight of the body’s alterity, a weight against the feel of the vision. Indeed, the ethereal vision has an imagistic palpability, and both the opposing moments of “light” and “stone” transcend any restriction into determinate contours of human being. That is, while both moments are irreducibly substantial in the poem, both are transcendent for the voice, as for each other. The irreducibility of these alterities thwarts any sublimation that would bear them toward totality. These moments of transcendence remain incommensurate with each other and, as complex moments felt in and by the voice, they emphasize the incommensurability of the affectively revealed existence of the persona.

To return to “Apprehensions,” images of alterity internal to affect emerge in the “Cold blanks” that “approach us.” The blanks suggest a multiplication of the apprehensiveness embodied in the wall, an unending multiplication as “They move in a hurry” (196). The proliferation of and in alterity occurs in various moments of repetition and recursivity in Plath’s imagery. An example is the image in “Little Fugue” of the cloud “White as an eye all over!”–white as the eye of the blind pianist (187). The white, imagistic locus of pathos becomes the feeling of the other in the simile, the feeling of the blind eye that is other, the tactility of which (itself multiple: the other’s tactile mode of apprehending as well as the perceiver’s tactile apprehension of the other) is palpable in the image of the non-transparent and non-seeing organ. It is the absence of vision that emphasizes the tactility, the multiple bareness of the eye that suffers a lack of vision. In this image, I feel the living eye more in the absence of vision than I would in a depiction of vision’s presence. This tactility of the eye’s suffering depends on my awareness of vision’s recursive trace, as I glimpse a trace that makes present the pathos of its own lack.

There is further recursivity in the punning of “I” and “eye” in “Little Fugue,” by which the complexity of the fleshy imagery of the eye crosses into the domain of the pronoun, inscribing its substantial alterity within the more abstract problematic of the subject’s attempted self-establishment through its own, figural vision. A correlative pun concerns the other that the persona apostrophizes: “you” becomes the black yew tree. As “you” is the voice’s “father,” his voice is visible, “Black and leafy,… A yew hedge of orders” standing against the whiteness of the persona’s pathos. Yet the black/white contrast itself is so vague, dark, and tangled–in the literal images, and by suggestions of sleep, silence, and memory–that the supposed opposites interpenetrate (187-89).⁹ The “you” in “Little Fugue” is similar to the absent loved/hated other of “Daddy,” an other apostrophized and incantatorily referred to as “you” and associated with images of blackness (222-24). As the voices of both “Daddy” and “Little Fugue” engage the absent presence of the other they suffer under, they suffer their uncertain incorporation of the other. At a physiological level, the voiced “you” merges with the persona as it gains palpability when its sound tends to draw the open mouth into a curved space, a fleshed absence at the heart of the poems’ sounds–particularly in “Daddy,” with the help of the German du and other assonant syllables. The voices of both poems suffer a transcending absence that becomes partially absorbed by the voice, emerging in the curved mouth: in speaking flesh, my own voice apprehends these others as recursive parts of itself.¹⁰

Some of Plath’s images of flesh yield affect that similarly emerges as recursive trace. When imagery presents flesh as mundane or denatured, there can persist a recursivity in the absent tactility that is like the pathetic trace of absent vision in the all-white eye. Plath’s poems contain a number of such instances of ostensibly inert flesh. Many of the images relate to the topic of birth, suggesting subtensive dimensions of affect that exceed naturalized maternal intimacy, as noted above in the description of the baby in “Morning Song.” For the second voice in “Three Women”–the most bitter of three would-be mothers, the one who has miscarried–affect lingers as an absence in her own opaque flesh: “I am bled white as wax, I have no attachments. / I am flat and virginal” (184). Opening affective dimensions in a similar way, through the trace of a touch that is pathetically absent in the presentation of its own lack, the voice of “The Disquieting Muses” develops a sense of the inertia of the flesh it has touched in its own infancy, becoming the baby of “Morning Song”: the voice remarks that its “traveling companions,” who “stand their vigil in gowns of stone,” have “Faces blank as the day I was born” (74-76).

Plath’s Holocaust imagery concerns the issue of denatured tactility. Arguably, such imagery could be exemplary for yielding a sense of infinite pathos through the logic of the recursive trace of touch. But as many critics have discussed, Plath’s use of Holocaust imagery problematically determines and manages the pathos of that imagery. Among various examples of her Holocaust imagery is that of flesh as equipment in “Lady Lazarus,” including the images of “my skin / Bright as a Nazi lampshade” and the “cake of soap” made of ash following cremation, plus references to “Herr Doktor,” for whom the persona comes to “turn and burn” (244-47). Among instances in other poems, there is the apocalyptic imagery of “Mary’s Song”:

The Sunday lamb cracks in its fat.
The fat
Sacrifices its opacity....

A window, holy gold.
The fire makes it precious,
The same fire

Melting the tallow heretics,
Ousting the Jews.
Their thick palls float

Over the cicatrix of Poland, burnt-out
Germany.
They do not die.

Gray birds obsess my heart,
Mouth-ash, ash of eye.
They settle.  On the high

Precipice
That emptied one man into space
The ovens glowed like heavens, incandescent.

It is a heart,
This holocaust I walk in,
O golden child the world will kill and eat. (257)

The affect in such Holocaust imagery could lie in the trace of touch I read in the body’s reduction in death, like the pathos of vision as trace in the all-white eye. In “Mary’s Song,” the image of the body as “tallow”–in the manufacture of wax or soap–could lead toward the excess of pathos through the trace of life of what is now flat and mundane substance. But the imagery of denatured flesh in these poems fails to approach the infinity of affect insofar as the poems appropriate their imagery for the ethos of the voice. The pathos in imagery of flesh made ash and equipment recedes as the imagery helps articulate an ethos that establishes the voice’s character.¹¹

Adapting the pathos of its Holocaust images, “Lady Lazarus” stages a phoenix-like resurrection for the persona, in a quest for what Steven Gould Axelrod calls “self-legitimation” (159-61). Similarly, “Mary’s Song” sublimates the pathos of its historical images for the sake of the character of its voice. The poem neglects the abject pathos of the flesh in favor of a relatively simple affective presence, a moment of sublime, clarifying pathos, figurally that of the mother of god or of sacrifice (quite in contrast to the pathos of the mother in “Morning Song”). With its contemplation of the “incandescence” of the scene, from a level above the “Precipice” of civilization (where space exploration and the Holocaust are co-implicated, with “The same fire” as sacrifice), “Mary’s Song” subsumes the images’ pathetic trace of touch in a manipulation of pathos that functions to establish the power of the persona’s ethos. James E. Young notes that this use of Holocaust imagery submits the images to typology, in Aristotelian fashion, wherein an emphasis on categories of use takes over the substance of affect and overpowers the more complex dimensions of the discourse of suffering (139-40).¹² Indeed, as ethos ascends in such an aesthetic operation, it tends to govern a reader’s relationship to a characterized voice and draw the pathos of the images toward catharsis. Insofar as Plath succeeds in reducing the excessiveness of affect in the images by submitting them to ethos, she reiterates the abuse of affect that the historical images reflect. Her management of feeling works to disengage the weight of otherness and to obliterate the palpable sense of vulnerability that the images of the Holocaust yield.

Yet, in the aesthetics of concrete pain and vulnerability that I have been developing, I must attend to the otherness in the images that persists in, and is recognizable primarily through the desperation of, Plath’s own alterity to the material she takes from history. Her voices remain rich with affect that I need to address per se, beyond the ways she tries to subsume, erase, or sublimate the excess and alterity of pathos. Even as they appear managed in a pathos tethered to character, Plath’s references to the Holocaust resonate at another level of incommensurate, imagistic rendering of affect. The challenge here is to dwell with the affect of another otherness, also closer to me than my comprehension of ethos, character, or subjectivity. That is, the otherness of Plath’s Holocaust imagery involves various moments of alterity I must take care not to manage with an ontological aesthetics of ethos, so that I do not abuse the suffering of the other, both the suffering Plath has aesthetically manipulated and the suffering that obtains for Plath herself (which she herself manipulates). It is key for an aesthetics of pathos that we seek in textuality the proliferation of moments of affective alterity, so that instead of subsuming pathos under any ethos, we allow pathos to retain its always excessive pressure on any moment of ethos and thereby keep us dwelling, ever incompletely, on substantial feeling. Indeed, suffering in Plath’s poems usually leads only to more suffering, without catharsis–as Jon Rosenblatt notes (163)–without bringing the infinite alterity of substantial suffering under control. Her imagery usually lends itself to reading that finds affect so complex and weighty it averts any resolution, so that irresolvable affect can persist–as it does for Levinas–prior to being.

Authorial Ethos and the Pathos of Voice

Concerning the poems of Plath, an aesthetics of pathos might be liable to take the name of an aesthetics of the abject.¹³ Indeed, her imagery opens onto feeling in a way that challenges me to find an aesthetics that is not at some level manipulative. That is, there may be slim odds in favor of my avoiding the trap of an ontological aesthetics at some level when reading her poetry. Plath’s public comments could take me off the track of an aesthetics of abjection and indeed away from the aesthetics of pathos. In a BBC interview, she tries to bring the feeling of her poems under the management of ethos, where she claims to be:

I think my poems come immediately out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have, but I must say I cannot sympathize with these "cries from the heart" that are informed by nothing except, you know, a needle or knife, or whatever it is. I believe that one should be able to control and manipulate experiences, even the most terrifying, like madness, being tortured, this sort of experience; and one should be able to manipulate these experiences with an informed and intelligent mind.

By such remarks, I can see how she favors an aesthetic manipulation of imagery that would involve a sublimating aesthetics and a sublimating ethics, even as she continues by noting that she means to turn felt experience to “larger” issues:

I think that personal experience is very important, but certainly it shouldn't be a kind of shut box, and sort of mirror-looking, narcissistic experience. I believe it should be relevant, and relevant to the larger things, the bigger things, such as Hiroshima and Dachau and so on.¹⁴

Reading this excerpt for its pathos takes me quickly beyond the surface of Plath’s claim for a “larger” aesthetic and ethical emphasis. Various affective tensions emerge in the passage: for example, between the callousness of manipulating “these experiences with an informed and intelligent mind”–experiences such as “being tortured”–and the more heated, perhaps defensive tone of her “I cannot sympathize.” Plath indicates a suffering beneath the surface of her own ethos particularly in her trivialization of “needle or the knife,” examples of what may inform what she calls “cries from the heart”: her “you know” and “whatever it is” are not only belittling but flippant, revealing an acting out in the ethos, an excess of the establishment of ethos that thus does not help stabilize ethos but rather exposes affect that disrupts the attempted constitution of ethos. In short, rather than presenting ethos, control, or agency, the passage tends to reveal vulnerability and powerlessness. It is in Plath’s taking the position of the manipulative aesthete that she most presents victimhood, albeit a victimhood for which there is no clear sense of any perpetrator. In this, the passage is similar to “Daddy,” with its postulated perpetrator, the poem revealing its voice’s desperation to locate some language, imagery, or agency by which to articulate a logic of pathos, by which in turn to claim she is “through” with suffering (224). The result is the same for the passage as for “Daddy,” as many readers of the poem have found: the claim of resolution is weak beside the reading that the voice dwells in pathos it cannot escape.

Thus despite Plath’s apparent effort to consolidate ethos, feeling in her poems tends to emerge disruptively in the affective dimensions of the image, as affect retains its alterity to reading and exceeds attempts to determine articulations of ethos or character. In her poems, I find no character to comprehend, but rather an inassimilable substance of affect that always exceeds contours of personality. Indeed, I cannot exactly achieve compassion with Plath’s voices, because I lack specific articulations of their affect–articulations that would organize feeling in comprehensible structures of character: her voices do not provide me with objective determinations of feeling, so they ultimately fail to establish communication or even emotions I can share. Thus I cannot have sympathy, properly, but empathy: I cannot achieve a synthesis of feelings whose parameters can be determined. I dwell with the problematics of empathy, wherein the excess of alterity merges with my own feeling, and determinate ethical motivations and goals do not materialize.

The indeterminacy of empathy is at the heart of the aesthetic problematics of Levinasian ethics, where ethos does not rule over pathos, but rather lives implicated with the force of pathos. In the aesthetic experience of reading, we may meet the tactile challenge to dwell with the unmitigated affect of the other, to stay with what Levinas describes as the infinite alterity of affect. This engagement of poetry and philosophy prompts the realization that the compulsion to meet such a challenge is as close as we can come to a motive for ethics–a motive, it seems, that can only be articulated without the sense of hope or even goodness with which the name of ethics is habitually invoked.

Notes

1. See John D. Caputo, Against Ethics (1-19), Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction, and Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics.”

2. Although some blurring between the meanings of “pathos” and “affect” may be unavoidable and even appropriate for my topic, the distinction between the terms remains important. “Affect” usually refers to felt material that is not definable or representable, that resists typology or systemization (see Campbell or Laplanche and Pontalis). So it is the more appropriate term for what Levinas emphasizes as substantial feeling, although a claim to practice an “aesthetics of affect” would imply that one could directly get at the substantiality. To approach pathos instead–which, as conceived in aesthetics, is more patent and determinate than affect–is to approach the problem of seeking affect: a problem of seeking substantial feeling amid the inevitable making and suppression of judgments and naturalizations that the more determinate term tends to entail. An aesthetics of pathos, then, for which affect remains the desired emphasis, avoids making the extravagant promise of an “aesthetics of affect.”

3. Along with disrupting any ethical totalization of reading, my approach to aesthetics is meant to disrupt totalizing tendencies that may emerge in historicism, insofar as historicization may reify anthropological categories and, indeed, may depend on naturalizations inherited from a dependence on philosophical ethics. Following Levinas, I seek to maintain a “restlessness” regarding the privileging of categories and regarding the motives and goals of any desire toward otherness.

4. There is not much published commentary on “Apprehensions.” Mary Lynn Broe draws connections between the poem and the emotional focus of others in the same collection (Winter Trees) and some of Plath’s later poetry (128-29).

5. A feminist reading emphasizing affect would focus on the mother’s postpartum feeling in order to put in question the ethos by which the mother would be adversely judged.

6. Also, the flowers may represent the mouth, the vulva, and explicitly the “wound,” in any case creating resonance between a pair of edges or lips and the pair of “eyelids” or pillows cradling the dulled head of the persona, an eye “that will not shut,” similar to the “eyes” of the tulips and the sun. The organ of vision is tactile, while the sense of effacement and incoherence persists: disorganized palpability replaces psychic or visual organization. See also my remarks below on the eye in “Little Fugue” and the mouth in “Little Fugue” and “Daddy.”

7. Such an effect occurs in many of the more than two hundred references to whiteness in The Collected Poems (Matovich s.v. “white” ff). For comparison of color imagery in Plath–perhaps suggesting the importance of contrasts in her work–according to Matovich, “black” or a version thereof appears about 190 times in The Collected Poems, “red,” “green,” and “blue” each a little over a hundred, “yellow,” “gray” (or “grey”), and “orange” about 30 each, and “violet” and “purple” combined about fifteen.

8. In Sylvia Plath: Poetry and Existence, David Holbrook develops in psychoanalytic and existentialist terms the point that Plath’s work functions at a level prior to being: he notes that “being has not come first to Sylvia Plath” (156).

9. Jacqueline Rose notes a corresponding moment of recursivity involving images of black and white in Plath’s novel: “On the back of the first draft [of ‘Little Fugue’] is the passage from The Bell Jar in which Esther Greenwood is almost raped. The typescript has this line–‘In that light, the blood looked black’–crossed out and replaced with this one written by hand: ‘Blackness, like ink, spread over the white handkerchief.’ Underneath the poem to the father, a violence of writing–the poem’s writing (the ink on the page), but equally his own” (231).

10. Plath’s poems alluding to her father have often been read as elegies. Jahan Ramazani maintains that these poems belong to a tradition of the emotionally ambivalent elegy, wherein anger and other emotions challenge the pathos that is proper to a tradition of the more refined elegy; the ambivalent elegy shows the truly “irresolvable” nature of “bereavement” (1143-44). The refined tradition manages pathos, whereas the emotional material emphasized in the ambivalent tradition resembles the unregulated material that I, drawing upon Levinas, discuss as infinite affect.

11. My uses of “ethos” and “character” tend to distinguish between the terms by emphasizing “character” as the delineation of a specific, subjective voice and freighting “ethos” with the sense of “character” that emphasizes a subject’s or voice’s cultural or moral power. Each term is of course complex, as is their relationship, which involves the substitution of “character” for the Greek ethos in English translations since the Renaissance of relevant works such as Aristotle’s Poetics. The ancient meaning of ethos involves “use,” “habit,” or “custom.” Besides the Oxford English Dictionary, see Kittel and Friedrich, Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (2:372-73).

12. Young notes that the resulting typology might serve an articulation of ethos for the Holocaust, beyond the ethos that emerges for the personae of Plath’s poems. But the significant question for him is whether the poems are indeed “about the Holocaust,” and he decides that essentially they are not (133). Since Plath wrote the poems when the Eichmann trial had brought the Holocaust to public awareness in greater detail than ever before, Young considers how her use of the images represents her way of dealing with the historical Holocaust; he speculates about the extent to which such imagery produced for her a trauma with which she was forced to deal and which led to an intensification of her personal suffering. He concludes his essay, “Better abused memory in this case, which might then be critically qualified, than no memory at all” (146).

13. See Rose for a discussion of Plath as a “writer of abjection” (37). On the theory of abjection and differences between the abject and the sublime, see Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Insofar as the issue of form is significant for aesthetic sublimation, we may consider how Plath fails to control formally the affective material of her works; on this, see Mutlu Konuk Blasing, American Poetry: The Rhetoric of Its Forms (55-56) and Hugh Kenner, “Sincerity Kills.”

14. This is my own transcription of the recorded interview from The Poet Speaks.

Works Cited

• Axelrod, Steven Gould. Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990.
• Blasing, Mutlu Konuk. American Poetry: The Rhetoric of Its Forms. New Haven: Yale UP, 1987.
• Broe, Mary Lynn. Protean Poetic: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1980.
• Campbell, Robert Jean. Psychiatric Dictionary. 5th ed. New York: Oxford UP, 1981.
• Caputo, John D. Against Ethics: Contributions to a Poetics of Obligation with Constant Reference to Deconstruction. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993.
• Critchley, Simon. The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992.
• Derrida, Jacques. “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas.” Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978. 79-153.
• Holbrook, David. Sylvia Plath: Poetry and Existence. N.p.: Humanities 1979.
• Kenner, Hugh. “Sincerity Kills.” Sylvia Plath: New Views on the Poetry. Ed. Gary Lane. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1979. 33-44.
• Kittel, Gerhard and Gerhard Friedrich, eds. Theological Dictionary of the New Testament. Trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley. 10 vols. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1964.
• Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1982.
• Laplanche, J[ean]. and J.-B. Pontalis. The Language of Psycho-Analysis. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Norton, 1973.
• Levinas, Emmanuel. Otherwise than Being: Or, Beyond Essence. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1981.
• —. Totality and Infinity: An Essay in Exteriority. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1969.
• Matovich, Richard M. A Concordance to the Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath. New York: Garland, 1986.
• Plath, Sylvia. The Collected Poems. Ed. Ted Hughes. New York: Perennial-Harper, 1981.
• —. Interview. The Poet Speaks. Ed. Peter Orr. Argo, RG455, 1965. Record Five.
• Ramazani, Jahan. “‘Daddy, I Have Had to Kill You’: Plath, Rage, and the Modern Elegy.” PMLA 108.5 (Oct. 1993): 1142-56.
• Reed, Charles William. “Levinas’ Question.” Face to Face with Levinas. Ed. Richard A. Cohen. Albany: SUNY P, 1986. 73-82.
• Rose, Jacqueline. The Haunting of Sylvia Plath. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992.
• Rosenblatt, Jon. Sylvia Plath: The Poetry of Initiation. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1979.
• Young, James E. “‘I may be a bit of a Jew”: The Holocaust Confessions of Sylvia Plath.” Philological Quarterly 66.1 (1987): 127-47.

Gregg Lambert

Department of English and Textual Studies
Syracuse University
glambert@syr.edu

One day, perhaps, there will no longer be any such thing as Art, only Medicine.

 

–Le Clézio

Introduction to the Literary Clinic

The title of this essay recalls an earlier question from Nietszche’s famous “On the Uses and Abuses of History for Life,” which I would like to take up in asking what are the uses and abuses of literature for life and, recalling Nietzche’s guiding question, what kind of health it may promote for “an individual, a people, a culture” (Nietzsche 63). In the various essays assembled around the “problem of writing” in his final work, Critique et Clinique, Gilles Deleuze responds to this question by outlining some of the components of a clinical as well as a critical use of literature, which we might summarize along the following lines. First, certain writers have invented concrete semiotic practices that may prove more effective than psychoanalytic discourse in diagnosing the constellation of mute forces that always accompany life and threaten it from within. Second, as a result of this diagnostic and critical function, certain works of modern literature can be understood to produce a kind of “symptomatology” that may prove to be more effective than political critique in discerning the signs that correspond to the new arrangements of “language, labor, and life” (to cite Foucault’s abbreviated formula for the grand institutions of instinct or habit); third, perhaps most importantly, literature offers a manner of diagramming the potential forms of resistance, or “lines of flight,” which may be virtual to these new arrangements.¹

Taken together, these tasks must be understood as creative and even “vitalist” in the sense that Bergson had earlier employed this notion; or as Deleuze writes, “there is a ‘use’ of representation, without which representation would remain lifeless and senseless” (LS 146). The realization of this “use,” however, may require that we approach the question of writing from a point outside the critical representation this question receives in the institutions of literary study today. In fact, I would like to suggest that a clinical usage may radically alter the conditions of the practice of literature and emerge as a kind of Deleuzian “war machine” against how the uses of literature have been determined by the dominance of institutional criticism in the modern period. Is it simply a question of “style,” in other words, that Deleuze’s own commentaries on writers seem to pay no attention or even tribute to the field of criticism, but rather approach always from a point external to the historical representation of an author or given body of work? Moreover, could we imagine something like a “Deleuzian school of literary theory,” understood as one approach among others in a pluralism of critical styles and methodologies, preserving the relative stability of the field of literary objects and the integrity of “a set of individuals who are recognized and identify themselves practitioners of the discipline” (Godzich 275) of literature?²

For anyone familiar with Deleuze’s writings, and especially those works written in collaboration with Guattari, the response to the above questions might seem an obvious “no”; however, in the academy today where the principle of “marketing” is fast becoming an efficient cause determining the uses of theory, we must always hold out the possibility that anything can be perverted against its own nature. Yet, rather than speculating on the fortunate and unfortunate actualities that might flow from the proclamation, “one day this century will be known as Deleuzian” (Foucault), in what follows I offer a more preliminary discussion of some of the principles we might draw from Deleuze’s own manner of treating literary expression and, in particular, the questions and problems of writing that have been associated with the works by the modern writers who occupy a central role in his own writings, as well as in the works written with Guattari. This discussion represents my own attempt to come to terms with what might be formulated as the characteristic marks of what Deleuze had early on proposed as a generalized “literary clinic.” I hope to provoke creative dialogue about the very conditions that would make a Deleuzian pragmatics distinct in the belief that such a dialogue should occur at this critical juncture as Deleuze’s writings are being increasingly taken up by institutions of literary and cultural studies today.³

The Critical and The Clinical

Foucault’s famous statement in “What is an Author?” that we have passed through the age of the “great writer” and the “universal intellectual” has too often been understood to mean that we can now simply reject the notion of literature itself. Indeed this statement has been generally understood to vindicate the “specialist” or the academic subject of knowledge, who were the objects of an even more severe attack by Foucault as exemplars of merely “bad literature.” On the contrary, Foucault’s statement concerns a change in the conditions of discourse in which the writer function now appears, designating a new arrangement of statements caused by the entrance of a new subject that succeeds what he calls the “Man-Form.” The appearance of the universal intellectual was conditioned by the alliance between literature and the law, as the relationship between universal or general expression and its species or variables. Moreover, the universal man-of-letters was the double of the jurist (e.g., Zola, Dickens) and often appeared speaking the juridical language of being. He was decisive, a moralist. Extending Foucault’s observation to the contemporary period, we can define the subject of modern criticism as a final avatar of the subject who judges, the subject of the statement “I judge”: that is, the subject of certainty whose historical emergence is closely allied to the juridico-legal function of judgment one finds at the basis of what Foucault has called disciplinary societies (a social arrangement which, according to Deleuze, we are now in the process of “quitting”).⁴

The appearance of the “critic,” in other words, is the result of a historical process that has bound the reflective character of judgment to the civil and juridical functions of modern institution. Deleuze and Guattari write that “in so-called modern philosophy, and in the so-called modern or rational State, everything revolves around the legislator and the subject” (TP 376). This is no less true for the subject of literature, for which we have the personages of the critic and his or her double, the “theorist,” both of whom have emerged today as “the only true legislators” of literature and culture. Therefore, the modern critic occupies an intermediary position between, on the one hand, the apparatus of the state and its systems of majority (the school, the press, or modern media) and, on the other, the fragmented (or molecular) body of collective enunciation that circulates at the base of every socius. Because of this relationship, we might discern that the range of issues and problems (pragma) that have frequented literary criticism for the past several decades, and even before, are codeterminous with changes and fluctuations that have taken place in mediums of civil and juridical identity where conflicting moralities and sovereign discursive agents clash over the cultural reproduction of the institutions of “civil morality”: problems of national canon formation, the status of minority expression in a dominant cultural sphere, the conflicts over the ideological mechanisms of “taste” in dominant aesthetic judgments. However, despite their efforts to liberate themselves from this function, modern critics have become so entangled in the disciplinary apparatus that determines their official function in schools and the public press that they find it difficult, if not impossible, to “deterritorialize” their statements from the mechanisms of power and systems of majority they serve.

In Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, Deleuze and Guattari note the critic’s predisposition, even within minority struggles, “to reterritorialize, to redo the photos, to remake power and law, to also remake a ‘great literature’” (K 86). To illustrate this problematic alliance between modern criticism and the disciplinary organization of social strata, we might briefly refer to the comparison made in A Thousand Plateaus, “Treatise on Nomadology–The War Machine” between the games of chess and Go. Following this analogy, criticism can be likened to the game of chess; that is, it can be understood as a “striated space,” or a discursive grid made up of “positions” and “theories” (Marxism, deconstruction, feminism, new historicism, post-colonial theory, queer theory, cultural studies) whose subjects are coded, each bearing intrinsic properties “from which their movements, situations, and confrontations derive” (TP 352). A “marxist” confronts a “deconstructionist”; a “feminist” becomes a “post-colonial critic”; a “third-world post-colonial theorist” check-mates a “white first-world feminist.” As in chess, for an emerging theory or school of criticism “it is a question of arranging a closed space… thus of going from one point to another (TP 353) in a manner that closely resembles passing through territories,” even though these territories are composed of theorems, schools, subjects, and authorities. Those who enter the game of theory are constrained by the axiomatic values that determine the intrinsic properties of the position they have selected; each is like a subject of the statement endowed with a relative power, and these relative powers combine in a subject of enunciation”(TP 352).⁵ This constitutes a form of interiority that is specific to a theoretical movement, or school of critics. It is only the “Queen” (i.e., the Master Theorist) who lawfully combines within herself all possible moves, and thus has the greatest latitude and mobility–that of a ‘Subject au large’–who can surpass the relative powers of the other players, who seems to fly over the entire discursive plane to magically capture the scepter of the King.

The above analogy between the institutionalization of “criticism” and “theory” in the modern period and what Deleuze calls a “State-form” of knowledge is striking and this is not accidental. The analogy confirms that the relations between different theories and the kind of conflict that ensues between particular subjects are inherently conditioned by a disciplinary model of organization that subordinates thought to a model of Truth (Cogitatio Universalis), revealing the underlying “striated” space that conditions their distribution and even orders the modes of actualization and points of conflict between different subjects. For Deleuze, on the other hand, the only means of subtracting thought from its disciplinary organization is to subtract it from its images, since to offer another “image of thought” only amounts to the magical return of the mythical foundation of “the State-form.” The theorist who believes she can leap outside this magical circle by offering a “true” image only ends up becoming the another cog in the machinery of an infinite revolution of disciplinary order. As an antidote to this situation, we might propose what Deleuze and Guattari call “outside thought” according to the analogy of Go, where rather than arranging a closed space and subordinating thought to a model or theorem, it would be a question of “arraying oneself in an open space” and maintaining a form of exteriority that enters in to confront criticism as “a form of interiority we habitually take as a model, or according to which we are in the habit of thinking” (TP 353). Such an “outside thought” must be conceived in terms that are purely strategic:

A thought grappling with exterior forces instead of being gathered up in an interior form, operating by relays instead of forming an image; an event-thought, a haecceity, instead of a subject-thought; a problem-thought instead of an essence-thought or theorem; a thought that appeals to the people instead of taking itself for a government ministry. (TP 378)

For the new subject of knowledge, according to Deleuze and Guattari, the earlier alliance with the Law (“the moral criteria of judgment”) is no longer possible, since the subject of enunciation that underlines juridical language has been “de-ranged” by the entrance of new technologies and bio-physical forces that are taking place on a plane of immanence. In response, according to Deleuze, “the intellectual or writer becomes adept at speaking the language of life, rather than of law” (F 91). Consequently, this new subject attempts to develop the cases of exception and to invent a form of language that allies itself with the forces that arrive from “the outside,” (e.g., madness, sexuality, power, death, etc.), interrupting the notions of good and common sense which belong to the classical language-subject, and exposing the history of violence which founded the Cogitatio Universalis. Contrary to the classical subject of knowledge (savoir), whose conceptual personages are the philosopher (“the Man of the State”), the literary critic (“the prince of the Republic of letters”) and the psychoanalyst (“the model detective of polis”), the new subject corresponds to the personages of the “diagrammatician” (the cartographer or genealogist) and the “symptomatologist” (or diagnostic novelist).

Although the institution of psychoanalysis in the modern period constitutes the dominant representation of the conditions whereby the critical function of knowledge is given a clinical or diagnostic usage, the critique Deleuze and Guattari launch against this representation in Anti-Oedipus (1972) is well known. In A Thousand Plateaus (1980), they write that “[e]ven today, psychoanalysis lays claim to the role of Cogitatio Universalis as the thought of the Law, in a magical return” (TP 376). In Deleuze’s later writings, Foucault himself becomes the “conceptual persona” of the figure who stands for a new arrangement of critical and clinical. Much has already been said of Deleuze’s praise and recognition of Foucault’s later work as nothing less than “diagnostic” novels of the micro-disciplinary regimes of power that have replaced the State-form, regimes whose operations no longer “correspond” to the classical concepts of “truth,” “freedom,” “the good,” etc., that occur in the wake of philosophy and explain the decline of the philosopher’s discourse as the natural expression of the State-form. For Deleuze, the name Foucault designates less the author, or the body of work, than a mode of discourse whose subject no longer corresponds to that of the classical philosopher, but rather to a clinical practitioner who invents a new form of knowledge that corresponds to the problem of how to live a non-fascist life.⁶

This may help clarify why the relationship between critical and clinical is somewhat complex and not always clear, since the clinical can always be too much of a dominant “method” and may threaten to obscure the critical, and, as I will argue in the case of literature today, the opposite may also be true as well. Here, we might recall an earlier example that Deleuze himself uses to interrogate this relationship between critical and clinical: the example of Sacher-Masoch. First addressing the question of the clinical determination of literary work in his introductory essay to Masoch, Coldness and Cruelty (1967), Deleuze writes that, like the physician, the works of Sade and Masoch can be seen to have constituted a profoundly original clinical tableau by disassociating symptoms that were previously confused and grouping together symptoms that were previously disassociated and unperceived. Sade links the order of reason with the sadistic arrangement of the drives from the position of Law, or absolute right; Masoch links together the status of minorities and women and the position of law arranged through the privileged instrument of the contract–the masochist draws up contracts while the sadist abominates and destroys them” (M 13). In the psychoanalytic treatment of both writers, however, Deleuze discerns that the extraction of the “clinical entities” of sadism and masochism from the work of Sade and Masoch results in an evacuation of the descriptions offered by these works themselves. There is a reduction of the language that was specific to Sade and Masoch in which symptoms later associated with the psychoanalytic terms that bear their names were first arranged together and displayed upon a critical tableau indistinguishable from the art of Sade and of Masoch. As Deleuze writes, “symptomatology is always an affair of art…” and, moreover, “the specificities of sadism and masochism are not separable from the literary values proper to the works of Sade and Masoch” (M 10).

In other words, it was the “critical” creation of Sade and Masoch to have first raised these obscure affections, passions, and perceptions to the status of what Deleuze and Guattari will later call affects and percepts. Through this process of creation, their literary works caused what was formerly unperceived, imperceptible, and “outside of language” to pass into language where these percepts and affects become “signs” that will henceforth bear a certain visibility, and, as Deleuze writes, “a tendency toward greater specificity [which] indicates a refinement of symptomatology” (M 13). If we are to regard Sade and Masoch as “true artists and ‘symptomatogologists,’” something curious happens when psychoanalysis appropriates their clinical discoveries: their own proper names are employed to designate the “syndromes” they themselves first brought to light. The critical is obscured by the clinical even as Sade and Masoch are separated from their own language. Sade and Masoch are reduced to “a clinical state” of illness, rather than the critical diagnosis of health. At this point, Deleuze’s accusation of the “Oedipal” function of psychoanalysis, after Krafft-Ebing, becomes clear: First, psychoanalysis was not specifically attentive enough to the works of Sade and Masoch, and consequently, it botched the accuracy of its own clinical conception of sadism and masochism in misinterpreting the symptomatology they had originally created. Second, when the symptoms were separated from their original contexts, they lost the critical force that was specific to their literary production. This led to the subsequent confusion of sado-masochism as a set of complementary and reversible structures, which Deleuze’s essay goes on to separate and clarify as distinct and irreversible. Therefore, Deleuze’s early work functions as both an introduction and a critical recovery of Masoch’s own language in the edition of Venus in Furs. In the title under which this work appears in French, Présentation de Sacher-Masoch, the term “présentation” assumes the juridico-technical meaning of a legal process of “discovery,” the stage in which evidence is gathered from an opposing party in the initial phase of a juridicial proceeding. Therefore, Deleuze’s critique of the clinical appropriation of Masoch can be understood precisely as pleading for the defense in a proceeding against psychoanalysis, a proceeding that would finally come to trial in Anti-Oedipus (1972).

This is why Deleuze writes that, in the case of the psychoanalytic appropriation of Masoch and Sade, because the clinical judgment is too full of prejudices, “it is now necessary to begin again with an approach situated outside the clinic, a literary approach, from which these perversions originally received their names” (M 10). In an interview that took place about the same time he wrote the preface to Masoch’s novel, Deleuze described this point outside as the place where “the problem of symptomatology” must also be situated: “at a neutral point, almost zero-degree, where artists and philosophers and doctors and patients can encounter one another” (CC 177, n.25). Both these remarks correspond to a strategy one can find throughout Deleuze’s writings, from Difference and Repetition, where this point is “difference” (i.e., the repetition of the variable, the “new”) that must be located outside the Western philosophical tradition; to the Foucault, where Deleuze even formulates this strategy in the chapter of “Strategies and the Non-Stratified”; and finally, to the writings with Guattari where this point of “the outside” (le dehors) is expressed in several different ways and itself becomes multiple points each inserted or discovered to be emerging within their own assemblage or plateau (e.g., “the war-machine,” “the nomad,” “smooth space,” “the line of flight,” “deterritorialization,” etc.).

Of course, this strategy no doubt receives its most forceful articulation in the following passage from Anti-Oedipus, where it is applied to the re-configuration of the relationship of critical and clinical, which necessarily entails the destruction of the previous relationship operated by psychoanalysis, as one of the primary tasks of what they call “schizoanalysis”:

[T]he problem [of Oedipus] is not resolved until we do away with both the problem and the solution. It is not the purpose of schizoanalysis to resolve Oedipus, it does not intend to resolve it better than Oedipal psychoanalysis does. Its aim is to de-oedipalize the unconscious in order to reach [from a point almost outside] the real problems. Schizoanalysis proposes to reach those regions of the orphan unconscious--indeed "beyond all law"--where the problem of Oedipus can no longer be raised. (81-82)

As Deleuze and Guattari explain in the next statement, this point outside is not necessarily outside psychoanalysis itself (for example, another discourse or branch of knowledge such as philosophy or political science) as it is the “outside of” psychoanalysis–“the schizo,” a figure which must be sharply distinguished from the clinical entity of the schizophrenic, since many of its representatives are drawn primarily from literature (Artaud, Beckett, Nijiinsky, Rimbaud, etc.)–and which can only be revealed through an internal reversal of the analytical apparatus. Consequently, this strategy is one of reversing the institutional priority between the two functions, critical and clinical, either by investing the clinical object with a critical function, or the critical with a clinical determination, and thereby folding one operation onto the other.

Applying this example to our situation today, the critical institution of literature in the university, we might suggest that certain literary works bear a critical activity that is proper to their own creation, which occurs before or even without its representation by “criticism” or “theory.” We might ask how this activity has often become obscured by the institutional consolidation of criticism in the university so that, today, the problems of literature are separated from their own expressions. In response, we could suggest an analogy with the situation of the schizophrenic within psychoanalytic discourse, who becomes subject to the analytic and clinical form of interpretation which strips this subject of his or her own language and, in turn, makes him or her the “object” of another system of classification and knowledge. Like the clinical subject, literature today is often stripped of any enunciatory power of its own, and lately, often appears so helpless that its very representation predisposes it to the critic’s ideological rectification or discourse of truth. As in the description of Sade and Masoch above, perhaps, like psychoanalysis and its regime of “interpretation,” the critical representation of literature may also be full of too many prejudices to be of use any longer, and it is now necessary to begin all over again, as if to begin once more from a point “outside.” Therefore, we must ask in response to our own situation, how we might begin “as if” from a point outside, that is, to recommence on a plane that is immanent to the expression of “the critical” invented by writers themselves.⁷

The Four Criteria

In the introductory essay of his last work, Critique et Clinique (1993), the plane of immanence upon which the question of literature is unfolded is “Life.” More specifically, Deleuze defines literature as “the passage of life within language that constitutes Ideas (CC 5), somewhat in the same manner that Whitehead had earlier spoken of Ideas themselves as the “passage of Nature” into a place (Fold 73). Recalling the above strategy announced in the preface to Présentation de Sacher-Masoch, it is only on the plane of immanence, that is “Life,” where we can discover a point that is situated outside the (critical) representation of literature, and we can begin to pose again the question(s) proper to literature itself. Yet this statement must be understood precisely and without leaving “Life” as a pure abstraction or metaphysical expression of vitalism. Keeping in mind the strategic necessity of situating the question the critical from a point “outside” its historical representation (or representative discourse), I would like to turn to this introductory essay in order to interrogate the above passage, since it is from this point that Deleuze describes what happens when the questions of living are bound up with “the problems of writing.” In this essay, Deleuze outlines what could be called four criteria for defining the relationship of literature to life. Because these criteria may give a good approximation of the re-configuration of critical and clinical–that is, on the “uses of literature for life”–in the sections that follow I will comment on each one.

I. “Literature is a passage of life that traverses outside the lived and the livable” (CC 1).

This is what Deleuze means by the first sentence that begins the leading essay of Critique et Clinique, “Literature and Life”: “To write is certainly not to impose a form of expression on the matter of lived experience” (1). This statement recalls a question first posed by Proust: “If art was indeed but a prolongation of life, was it worth while to sacrifice anything to it? Was it not as unreal as life itself?” (The Captive 339). Before Deleuze, Proust is probably the greatest apologist for the “duty” of literature. How many have turned aside from its task, he asked, lacking the instinct for it, which is nothing less than the instinct for life itself. “Real life,” on the other hand, “life at last laid bare and illuminated–the only life in consequence to which can be said to be really lived–is literature, and life thus defined is in a sense all the time immanent in ordinary men no less than in the artist” (Time Regained 298). For Proust, therefore, literature is the most “real” of all things, since the ideas formed by pure intelligence may be logical, but are not necessary; moreover, perception or knowledge which is common or general is likewise not necessary, because it has not been deciphered, developed, worked-over, that is, created. (In a famous description, Proust writes that for most people memory is a darkroom containing many negatives that have not been “developed.”) Therefore, literature is life:

remote from our daily preoccupations, [the life] we separate from ourselves by an ever greater gulf as the conventional knowledge we substitute for it grows thicker and more impermeable, that reality which it is very easy for us to die without ever having known and which is, quite simply, our life. (Time Regained 298-299)

According to this principle, certain literary works often take the opposite path: to discern beneath the merely personal the power of the impersonal. Thus, literature sometimes concerns the question of living in the sense that the writer struggles with the problem of life in order to extract movements and becomings that are inseparable from the question of “style.” However, “style,” in this sense, does not reflect the individuated expression or personality of the artist or writer; as Proust wrote:

[A]rt, if it means awareness of our own life, means also the awareness of the lives of other people--style for the writer, no less than color for the painter, is not a question of technique but of vision: it is the revelation, which by direct and conscious methods would be impossible, of the qualitative difference, the uniqueness in which the world appears to each one of us, a difference which, were it not for art, would remain the secret of every individual. (Time Regained 299)

In the passage that traverses both the lived and the livable, the identities of the terms do not remain the same, but enter into a process of mutual becoming; Deleuze calls this process a “capture,” a kind of repetition that causes both to become unequal to their former definitions, and enter into a relation of becoming. Such a becoming, however, concerns the immanence of a life, and only in certain cases does it emerge to touch upon the immanence of a life that is lived and livable by others. We might ask then, what makes the life posed by literature exemplary; in other words, what causes its critical expression to pass over to the side of the clinical? It is upon this question that the value of the literary enterprise is posed, whether it receives justification and a “use” or falls into a miserable state of its own univocity. This is where the question of “passage” receives a definite qualification: literature concerns the passage of a life into language. It is only through this passage that Life itself can achieve the repetition of a higher power, and the personal can be raised to the condition of a language.

Deleuze often remarks that the plane of life surpasses both the lived and the livable; the writer’s encounter often proceeds from an encounter when life, defined in terms of the lived and the livable, becomes impossible, or, when this encounter concerns something that is “too powerful, or too painful, too beautiful” (N 51) when defined in terms to of experience. Accordingly, the writer often returns from the land of the dead and is himself or herself “a stranger to life” (TI 208). In other words, the writer does not simply write from experience or memory, but also from something too painful for memory or too light for experience, perhaps even “an unbearable lightness” as in Kundera. It is for this reason, second, that the act of writing and the figure of the writer always entertain a relationship with a fundamental stupidity (betisse), which is not simply a lack of experience as the fictionalizing factor, as well as with a fundamental amnesia or “forgetting,” which is not simply a weak memory as the factor of an overly active imagination. (The récits of Marguerite Duras are exemplary in this regard). Both stupidity and forgetting are the forces that define the writer’s strangeness and estrangement from the “lived and the livable.” For example, is there not a stupidity proper to Kafka’s relationship with women that initiated the desire of the bachelor (hence, his famous statement, “Prometheus was a bachelor”), or a forgetting that one finds in Artaud, Beckett, and Joyce? As in the famous case of the “jeune homme schizophrene” (an earlier essay of which is included in Critique et Clinique), the relationship to a maternal language has undergone a fundamental trauma and dispossession and must either be invented anew (as in the case of Joyce and Proust) or pushed to its extreme limit to the point where Language itself confronts its impossibility (impouvoir, using Blanchot’s term) and comes into contact with its own outside. The latter can find its various strategies in Artaud (where the outside is the cry beyond words), or in Beckett, who pushed the language of the novel to an extreme repetition that unravels into tortured fragments at the same time that his characters devolve into partial objects (e.g., a mouth, a head, an eye, a torso, a stomach, an anus).

Perhaps we can illustrate the immanence of a life with the following statement which implicitly points to the example of Kafka: “The shame of being a man–is there any better reason to write?” (CC 1). Here, “shame” defines the fundamental trait of a life that is not simply the life of Kafka, but of a “situation” particular to his case. For Kafka, therefore, the problem of writing is posed within an immanent relation to the escape from a “situation” of shame. Benjamin had earlier perceived this shame as an “elemental purity of feeling” that is fundamental to Kafka’s writings and, consequently, “Kafka’s strongest gesture [gestus]” (Benjamin 25). What is the “shame of being human?” For Benjamin, shame is primarily a social feeling: it is something one feels in the presence of others, something one feels for others. Because of this origin, the individual is innocent and cannot be found to be its cause. Consequently, in Benjamin’s reading, the situation of shame always returns to the character of the Law and its officers (the judge, the father, the mother, even the son and the daughter, or sister); the character of law is that of an incredible filth that covers everything and everyone–a defilement of being. The father in “The Judgment” wears a dirty nightshirt; in “The Metamorphosis,” the father’s uniform is covered in filth; in the Trial, the Examining Magistrate pages through a dusty volume of the Law which, when K. discovers its contents, is filled with dirty pictures. One might think this is a characteristic particular to the fathers and the officials only; however, nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, the son has become the embodiment of filth, he is vermin. Neither does woman escape, since as many have noticed, she is touched with the filth of the Law that defiles her own sex, and appears as a slut, a court prostitute, or a hunchback among the assembly of harpies who assemble on the stairs outside the painter Titorelli’s studio. Shame–i.e., the shame of being human–is nothing “personal,” but rather belongs to an unknown “family” which includes both humans and animals alike. And Kafka writes concerning his indefinite relationship to this family: “He feels as though he were living and thinking under the constraint of a family…. Because of this family… he cannot be released” (qtd. in Benjamin 25).

II. “To write is not to recount one’s memories and travels, one’s loves and griefs, one’s dreams and fantasies; neither do we write with our neuroses, which do not constitute ‘passages,’ but rather those states into which we fall when our desire is blocked or plugged-up”–consequently, “literature then appears as an enterprise of health.” (CC 2-3)

We might ask why Deleuze seems to love children and writers so much. Or rather, why are writers so often described in the process of “becoming-child?” Kafka’s letters often demonstrate this directly, particularly those to Felice where he takes a child’s point-of-view in talking about her “teeth” or in day-dreaming over the idea of curling up in her dresser drawer next to her “private articles,” or, finally, in the passages where he describes a thousand agitated hands fluttering and out of reach, which can be understood as prefiguring of Gregor Samsa’s thousand tiny legs waving helplessly in front of him. In addition to Kafka, we might think of Beckett as well, particularly the trilogy, where the transformation of the characters–Molloy, Malone, Jacques, Mahood, the Unnameable–all undergoing incredible and hilarious journeys and transmigrations, are haunted by endoscopic perceptions. The answer, it seems, would be simple enough: because the child knows how to play (to experiment), and the writer in the process of “becoming-child” does not imitate children but repeats a block of childhood and allows it to pass through language. However, to avoid allowing the notion of “play” to remain too simplistic (since most will say they know what “playing” is), we should turn back to Freud who entertained an original intuition of the child-at-play in his “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming.”

There Freud noticed that the child, contrary to the adult, plays in the full light of day, plays openly, and even causes his or her creations to transform the external world of perception. By way of contrast, the adult can only play in secret, and often actively hides his or her creative activities (perhaps even from himself). Adults are, first and foremost, guilty; consequently, they have lost the innocence of play, have repressed it, meaning that they aggressively prohibit all “public displays” of such an activity, transforming the nature of play itself into an unconscious source of pleasure. Freud used this distinction primarily to distinguish the play of child from the fantasy life of the adult; to show the origin of the phantasm itself has this sense of “hiding,” a guilty source of satisfaction for the adult who can only play in secret (and alone). At the same time, even Freud noticed that the artist constitutes the exceptional case to this internalization and continues to play out in the open. What’s more, Freud exclaims with a certain amount of surprise, that society allows it! Even if the artist must usually pay the price in terms of a suffering that compensates for the artist’s enjoyment and seems to satisfy the cruelty of society itself toward the artist for enjoying too much and in a manner that civilization first of all demands to be sacrificed, cut-off. This economic arrangement of cruelty and pleasure, according to Freud, is the guarantee that the creative writer and artist have to exist.

Returning now to emphasize that the writer, like the child, plays openly and in the full light of day, this would seem to imply that the nature of of the activity cannot find its source in the secret, internalized, and guilty affects of the adult. As Deleuze writes, “we do not write with our neuroses” (CC 3). Wouldn’t this imply that we should look for the sense of the process on the surface of the writer’s activity, for a process that seeks to hide nothing? It seems odd, then, that often the function of interpretation is to reveal or to expose a “secret” behind the appearance of the literary effect, underneath the more overt and all-too-evident transformations: to locate the “figure in the carpet” or the figure of ideology. Is there any difference? Moreover, couldn’t this activity be seen as an extension of the earlier repression: to transform what is out in the open, on the surface, to what is hidden and secret? Wouldn’t this transform the very intentionality of the writer, so that the figure itself would appear to have been ferreted away, and desire become the desire of the phantasm? This is why interpretations of ideology begin with a false premise: that the writer was hiding anything to begin with. Perhaps this is why Deleuze-Guattari choose to highlight the most problematic of writers from the perspective of an adult-morality (Carroll and his love for little girls, Faulkner and Melville’s racism, or that of Celine, the misogyny of Miller and Burroughs, Proust’s “closeted” homosexuality, Artaud’s mania and crypto-fascism, Kafka’s bachelor-desire, Woolf’s frigidity, etc.), as if to say, “Well now, there’s nothing hidden here!” “All perverts–everyone of them!” Or perhaps, “If we are to judge, if we must arrive at a judgment, then we must find a better evidence; but at least, we must find something more interesting to say.” But then “perversion” may not be the right word. Again, this evokes the sense of symptomatology, since the writer “plays”–openly, without shame, or guilt–with what the adult chooses to keep “secret,” even though secrecy makes these symptoms no less determining of a life and perhaps even more so. How many times lately have we had to suffer the moralism of perverts, racists, misogynists, and pederasts who choose to persecute others for their own most secretive desires? Thus, the publicity with which the writer plays with his or her desires is not perverse in the least; rather, the function of “perversion” describes the position of a normative morality under the condition that enjoyment either remains “a dirty little secret” of the individual, or undergoes a strange reversal into sadism and cruelty.

III. “Health as literature,” as writing, consists in fabulation, which Deleuze defines as “the invention of a people who is missing”; thus, “the ultimate aim of literature is to set free, in the delirium, in this creation of a health, in this invention of a people, the possibility of a life.”

Under this criterion, we should recall the three characteristics that belong to the concept of “minor literature”: first, a certain situation occurs when a major language is affected with a high co-efficient of deterritorialization; second, everything is political and the “individual concern” or “private interest” disappears or serves as a mere environment or background; third, everything takes on a collective value. From these three criteria, we can locate the specific conditions that give rise to what Deleuze calls “fabulation.” The concept of “fabulation” first appears in Bergsonism (1966) and then disappears almost entirely until it is highlighted in the later writings, particularly in The Time Image (1985) and again in the interviews conducted between 1972-1990 that appear in Negotiations (1990), where Deleuze makes the following pronouncement: “Utopia is not a good concept, but rather a “fabulation” common to people and to art. We should return to the Bergsonian notion of fabulation to provide it with a political sense” (N 174). In light of our effort to understand this concept in view of a generalized literary clinic, we might understand the concept of fabulation as having two sides: creation and prognosis. Fabulation is the art of invention as well as a conceptual avatar of a “problem solving” instinct that remedies an unbearable situation–particularly with regard to the situation of “the people who are missing” (CC 4). The goal of fabulation, understood as a process, is where the writer and the people go toward one another (see TI 153ff); in this sense they share a common function. Deleuze writes, “To write for this people who are missing… (‘for’ means less ‘in place of’ than ‘for the benefit of’)” (CC 4). That is, they share a process, a vision beyond words, a language beyond sounds. In this sense, fabulation could be said to resemble the function of dream work and, by extension, the moments of selective rearrangement that mark historical discontinuities. What is power unleashed in revolution but the ideal game deployed within what is essentially a fiction; that is, the power to select and re-order the objects, artifacts, and meanings that belong to a previous world? Utopia, then, rather than designating a static representation of the ideal place, or topos, is rather the power of the “ideal” itself which can bifurcate time and create possible worlds. This is why Deleuze calls “fabulation” a better concept than “utopia,” since it designates a power or a vital process rather than representing a static genre–an ideal form of repetition rather than the repetition of an ideal form.

Fabulation entails a “becoming” that happens from both directions–it is both the becoming-popular of the creator or intellectual, and the becoming-creative of a people. In many ways, this movement echoes the description of the cultural process of nationalist or post-colonialist art first examined by Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth (1963), which can be used to illustrate the concept of fabulation.⁸ First, in Fanon’s analysis, the function of fabulation that determines the writer’s cultural presence in colonial culture and the forms of “socialization” and identification that underlie the perspective of the modern “creator” are both explicitly developed:

At the very moment when the native intellectual is anxiously trying to create a cultural work he fails to realize that he is utilizing techniques and language which are borrowed from the stranger in his country. He contents himself with stamping these instruments with a hallmark he wishes to be national, but which is strangely reminiscent of exoticism. The native intellectual who comes back to his people [as Fanon previously qualifies, "whatever they were or whatever they were or whatever they are" (222)] by way of culture behaves in fact like the foreigner. Sometimes he shows no hesitation in using a dialect in order to show his will to be as near as possible to the people; but the ideas he expresses and the preoccupations he is taken up with have no common yardstick to measure the real situation which the men and women of his country know. (223)

The incommensurability that underlines the initial appearance of the colonized intellectual also belongs to a preliminary phase in the creation of national conscience of culture in Fanon’s reading. It must be followed by other phases which re-configure the attributes (or “property”) of culture between its contingent and exterior genres and its interior collective expression of “inner truth” (Fanon 225). (Fanon articulates the latter as culture’s muscularity, in relation to political action, and rhythm, in relation to ethnic and regional identities). In a post-colonial culture’s incipient phase, however, these attributes are uncoordinated and this non-coordination can be seen to inform the very appearance of hybridity in the image of the cultural producer and his or her creative work. From the perspective of the post-colonial “people”–who, at this stage, “are still missing”– the initial schizoid image of culture which is also manifested in the appearance of the colonized intellectual is the result of the mutilating psychological effects and de-humanization of the colonizing situation. This addresses the problem of becoming from the perspective of the native intellectual and writer, where “going back to your own people means to become a dirty wog, to go native as much as possible, to become unrecognizeable, and to cut off those wings that before you had allowed to grow (Fanon 221). Part native and part stranger, near and distant at the same time, the creator only “appears” to manifest a characteristic of proximity by imitating native dialects and speech patterns; however, this creator’s “ideas” are at first both unfamiliar and strangely distant from a people’s perception of their own image.

Fanon himself accounts for this hybridity by assigning it two causes. First, hybridity results from an appearance of “culture” itself that is uncoordinated with political and national conscience (i.e., a direct consequence of the colonial process that “alienated” and even “negated” any relationship between these two sites of mentality). Second, this appearance of the indigenous cultural producer and national conscience of culture precedes the actualization of political revolt. This peremptory and premature appearance gives the creator and the cultural work the characteristics of “a-temporality” and “affective remoteness” in the minds of the people themselves:

The artist who has decided to illustrate the truths of the nation turns paradoxically toward the past and away from actual events. What he ultimately intends to embrace are in fact the castoffs of thought, its shells and corpses, a knowledge which has been stabilized once and for all. But the native intellectual who wishes to create the authentic work of art must realize that the truths of a nation are in the first place its realities. He must go on until he has found the seething pot out of which the learning of the future will emerge. (Fanon 225)

This diagnostic and therapeutic narrative structures the dialectical stages that the creator (and the “people”) must pass through in order to arrive at the synthesis of collective political and cultural expression. Fanon traces these stages from alienation of an interiorized cultural identification with the colonizer; to the spark of an original memory (which Fanon compares to the return of infantile and maternal associations); to a period of malaise, nausea, and convulsion (expressions of “vomiting out” the poison of the earlier cultural identification); and at last to the final stage of combat in the martyrological expression of a true popular culture, where the writer becomes “the mouth-piece of a new reality in action” (Fanon 223). Thus there is a deep analogy between the ethnography of a “people” and the story of the coming-to-conscience of the creator’s voice, the manifestation of a culture’s essential “property” and authentic expression of its innermost nature. At the end of the dialectic of culture outlined by Fanon, the “mental space of a people” that had been distorted by the instruments of colonization gradually draws close to itself in the image of the creator and remembers in the voice of the poet the sound of its own voice. The final image of proximity occurs when the creator and the people become one mentality in which culture thinks itself in–and as–the substance of its own ideational life. The “organic coordination” between the poet’s plastic expression and the people’s inner thought achieves such a synthesis of muscularity and natural rhythm that those who before would never thought to compose a literary work “find themselves in exceptional circumstances… [and]… feel the need to speak to their nation, to compose a sentence which expresses the heart of the people, and to become the mouth-piece of a new reality in action” (Fanon 223).

We could see here in Fanon’s description of the process between the marginalized writer and “a people who are missing,” an echo of a lesson from Kafka that Deleuze often emphasizes in the context of his discussion of fabulation:

The author can be marginalized or separate from his more or less illiterate community as much as you like; this condition puts him all the more in a position to express potential forces and, in his very solitude, to be a true collective agent, a collective leaven, a catalyst. (TI 221-222)

This is the solitude that Kafka addressed in terms of impossibility, where the “problem of writing” is fundamentally related to a collective impossibility: the situation of a people who either live in a language that is not their own, or who no longer even know their own and know poorly the major language they are forced to serve (K 19). To use an expression that is invoked throughout Deleuze’s work, and is principally inspired from Blanchot’s writings, the writer’s solitude cannot be reduced to a normal situation of solitude in the world, to an experience of being-alone and apart from others; this is because the figures above do not experience their aloneness from the perspective of this world, or of this society, or from the presence of others who exist, but rather from the perspective of another possible world or another community that these figures anticipate even though the conditions for this community are still lacking. Often this desire or longing which brings about the condition of solitude is expressed in the discourse of love as in the case of Kierkegaard with Regina, or of Proust with Albertine. In the latter case, Marcel is haunted by the fact that no matter how close he comes to Albertine, or no matter how he draws her near him even to the point of holding her hostage, he is always haunted by the fact that behind the face of Albertine, there always lies another Albertine, a thousand other Albertines each breaking upon one another like waves of an infinite ocean. Thus, it is this experience of solitude that burns into his mind the impossible and delirious desire of capturing each one, of “knowing” all the possible Albertines, as the highest goal of Love.

Returning to the case of Kafka, according to Deleuze, the solitude of the writer is related most profoundly to the situation of the people who are missing. This is why the solitude of certain writers is in no way a private affair for Deleuze, and why the concept of “solitude” must be qualified to evoke the uncanny experience of inhabiting a strange language, a language that is not and may never be one’s own, where the very act of speaking brings with it the feeling of self-betrayal, or of “falsifying oneself,” and where the alternative of remaining silent bears the threat of extinction. It is in this sense that the position of the writer is virtual to that of the collective, and, therefore, the so-called “private” is immediately collective as well, that is, “less a concern of literary history than of a people” (Diaries 149). Deleuze writes concerning this situation which was specific to Kafka’s predicament, but which can describe the situation of other writers as well (such as Melville or Woolf), that “the most individual enunciation is a particular case of the collective enunciation” (K 84). Moreover, “this is even a definition: a statement is literary when it is ‘taken up’ by a bachelor who precedes the collective conditions of enunciation” (K 84). This last definition appears to re-classify the entire sense of the literary as emerging from “a bachelor-machine,” a concept that Deleuze draws from the figure of Kafka but that also can be found to refer to the figure of Proust; however, the condition of a “bachelor” can be redefined, outside its gendered determination, to describe or refer to a situation in which one prefers the state of being alone (i.e., exceptional, singular, anonymous) than to “take on” the identity of a subject one is assigned by the majority. The situation of preferring to remain a bachelor can find affinities, for example, with the situation of a Jew in 18th century Europe, with that of a woman in 19th and 20th century societies, or with the situation of minorities in America today.

IV. Finally, literature opens up a kind of foreign language within language.” (CC 5)

This invention has three aspects: a) through syntax, the destruction of the maternal language; b) through delirium, the invention of a new language which carries the first outside its usual furrows (habitus), and which, in turn, entails a second destruction: the clichés of visibilities and statements which, although not completely reducible to language, are nevertheless inseparable from it, being the “ideas” and “habits” that determine the forms of seeing and saying; c) in the third aspect, as a result of the destruction of the maternal language and of the clichéd statements and stock visibilities (which are like its ghosts), the literary process bears the former language to its limit, turning it toward its own “outside,” which Deleuze describes as its inverse or reverse side made up of visions and auditions, which “are not outside language, but the outside of language” (CC 5). The final aim of these three aspects, according to Deleuze, is the concept of literature defined “the passage of life within language that constitutes ideas” (CC 5).

Taking up the first aspect, through the destruction of the maternal language, literature functions as a war machine. “The only way to defend language is to attack it” (Proust, qtd. in CC 4). This could be the principle of much of modern literature and capture the sense of process that aims beyond the limit of language. As noted above, however, this limit beyond which the outside of language appears is not outside language, but appears in its points of rupture, in the gaps, or tears, in the interstices between words, or between one word and the next. The examples of writers who define their relationship to language under the heading of this principle are too numerous to recount, although I will provide a few significant examples for the purposes of illustration. First, we might point to the poet Paul Celan, for example, whose poetry is precisely defined as the systematic destruction of the language of Goethe and Rilke in the sense that the poem itself expresses a word that no German mouth can speak (the deterritorialization of language from the teeth and the lips). In Celan, the poem itself is nothing less than a materialization of the mother’s corpse that is gradually interned within the German language and given a specific place of mourning; thus, the image of the mother is a shadow of the lost object by which Celan draws the entire German language into a process of mourning. This is Celan’s process: the “passage” of the Mother’s death into the German language; the passage of the living German language into an encounter with his Mother’s death and, by extension, with the murder of his maternal race. The use of color in Celan’s poetry gives us a vivid illustration of the Deleuzian and Proustean notion of vision. The poet is a true colorist who causes colors to appear as nearly hallucinatory visions in the language of the poem; however, in Celan’s poems, the descriptive and neutral function of color is poetically transformed into the attributes of his mother’s body–her hair, or her skin, her eyes; the green of a decaying corpse. It is as if each enunciation of each color will henceforth bear a reference to his mother’s body, that the German language is modified to incorporate this cryptic reference into its poetic and descriptive functions. Thus, the green is the color of summer grass, but it is also the color of my mother’s decaying shadow; blue is the color of the sky, but it is also the color of the sky the day it wore my mother’s hair; red is the color of the tulip, but it is also the color of the one who that day “when the silent one comes to behead the tulips” (Poems 53); finally, yellow is the hair of Marguerite, but it is also the color of my mother’s star, the star that marked her for extinction.

Kafka also approaches the German language with the statement of his swimming champion, “I speak the same language as you, but don’t understand a single word you’re saying” (qtd. in CC 5), and at the same time draws on the resources of the all too vernacular and deterritorialized Czech-German and the all too symbolic and allegorical Yiddish (“a language of the heart” [Diaries 151]) in order to purify the German language and the syntax of Goethe from its own cultural signification. In other words, as Deleuze often recounts, Kafka “creates a kind of foreign language within language” (CC 5) that, although it bears an uncanny and perfect resemblance to the major language, no longer bears the significance for German culture and emerges as a kind of war machine within its majoritarian sense. As Deleuze and Guattari write, by a kind of schizo-politeness hidden beneath an almost too-perfect German syntax, “he will make the German take flight on a line of escape… he will tear out Prague German all the qualities of underdevelopment it has tried to hide; he will make it cry with an extremely sober and rigorous cry… to bring language slowly and progressively to the desert… to give syntax to the cry” (K 26). This marks the importance of animals in Kafka’s shorter works–the musical dogs that appear in “Investigations of a Dog,” the singing mouse-folk in “Josephine, the Mouse-Singer,” the song of the Ape in “Report to the Academy,” the low-cry of the Jackals in “The Jackals and Arabs”–but also the musical auditions of the other fabulous creatures that Kafka creates, such as Odradek in “Cares of a Family Man” whose laughter bears the airy sound of dried leaves, or the silence of the Sirens in the tale of the same name. In all these cases, we have examples of pure sonorous auditions that are introduced into the German language. It is through the deterritorialization of the human that the German language passes through a becoming-animal, that animals introduce the notes of a strange music that has never been heard before in German literature, that Kafka introduces new possibilities into German tongue, “a music made up of deterritorialized sounds” (K 26). In themselves, as pure sonorous material, these sounds may have already been possible: the melody of a dog’s howl, the shrill silence of a mouse, the low moan of the jackal. However, in the form they take in Kafka’s language–for example, the first song that the Ape learns from a drunken sailor, which becomes his primitive language lesson–becomes an “idea” in its passage through language, an “audition” of a cry of humiliation and oppression that Kafka first introduces as such into the German ear. It is in this manner that he both escapes the oppressive, classical harmonies of the German language and, at the same time, institutes a pedagogy of syntax in which he teaches the German language to cry.

Taking up the second aspect, the invention of “a delirium, which forces it out of its usual furrows” (CC 5), we should recall one of the principle axioms of Anti-Oedipus which is that desire always invests or is immanent to the social field of production, in order to apply this axiom to “the desire to write.” The desire to write, at one level, is a delirium which is immediately social. How could we otherwise explain the institution of criticism that has secreted around the work in the modern societies based upon writing if not as an effort to submit this delirium to the identifiable categories of a “proper delirium” that functions as the basis of the group? At the same time, if we were to attempt to grasp “the desire to write” from its immanent perspective within the socius, we would need to conceive of the function of writing in all its occasions: from the legal or juridical and the legislative, to the hermeneutic and confessional modes of writing. Perhaps, then, the figure of the writer emerges to “represent” this delirium and, thereby, to isolate the “problem of writing” to a rare and exceptional cases we call “writers,” almost in the same manner that Derrida had illustrated around the function of the pharmakon. It is as if society, which itself is constructed by and from writing, must also produce a being who embodies in order to protect itself from the madness that belongs to its own order of possibility. Is there any wonder then why the writer has so often been defined by the attributes of illness or bad health? Again, this may explain Deleuze and Guattari’s selection of the series of problematic writers to combat this definition. To close the work off by applying these symptoms to the ethical or psychological character of an author, and thereby to “psychologize” or to “impeach” the writer, is to alienate the critical function of these writers–that is, the “lens” they offer to perceive what otherwise remains obscure and misapprehended by its individuated or psychological forms. Recalling again the second criteria, the principle distinction is the “openness” these symptoms receive in the writing must be set against the usual secret forms that determine the expression of the unconscious phantasies, or individual symptoms.⁹

In Anti-Oedipus, it is with the discovery of the production proper to the schizophrenic that Deleuze-Guattari find a degree-zero of the delirium that the schizophrenic shares with society: “he hallucinates and raves universal history, and proliferates the races” (AO 85). Thus, the schizo refers to the function of a delirium as the principle of “desiring-production” that society itself uses to “distribute races, cultures, and gods”–in short, to “make itself obeyed”–on the body without organs (the full body of the earth) (A0 84). In Deleuze and Guattari’s use of the concept of delirium we might detect a certain cosmological theory of madness (i.e., the thesis of madness as oeuvre which they share in some ways with Foucault), which was first presented by Freud in his famous commentary on Daniel Schreber, who created a universe with his delirium and then proceeded to populate it with gods, demi-gods (or demons), as well as with new races and sexes. These were the personages of Schreber’s fabulous delirium; however, the structure of this delirium also describes the origin of the prohibitive mechanisms that society itself produces. In other words, the language of madness simply locates in the “story-telling function” of figures like Schreber the very same mechanisms that society itself uses to engender a world populated with gods, cultures, races, and peoples. Given the conservative function of this “myth-making” faculty, we might ask how, according to the major thesis of Anti-Oedipus, the delirium proper to schizophrenic production and social production can lead to the potential of fabulation as a relay to revolutionary force. This is the point around which many commentaries on Deleuze-Guattari’s use of the schizo fall into error by taking the clinical entity of the schizophrenic as a kind of model creator, a turn to romanticism. However, the equation of the fabulation of the clinical schizophrenic with social fabulation has the subtle effect of rendering social production the truth of the clinical equation, since the clinical personage of the schizophrenic constitutes that point where desiring-production is blocked, falls into an impasse, becomes reactive or sick. If the clinical entity of the schizophrenic is identical with society, then we find the true subject of schizoanalysis, which is social production. Therefore, within the literary process delirium undergoes a positive “transvaluation” (Nietzsche) which differentiates it from its repressive or conservative functions in madness and society. That is, if the world itself “is the set of symptoms whose illness merges with man,” it is by means of this process that “literature is a health” (CC iv).

Finally, concerning the third aspect of these criteria, Deleuze writes that “…the final aim of literature… is the passage of life within language that constitutes ideas” (CC 5, emphasis mine). In Foucault (1990), Deleuze situates this aspect that belongs to modern literature in what is essentially a psychology of the fold, whereby language is disarticulated from the “grand unities of discourse” (Foucault) which structure the possibilities of enunciation. In Critique et Clinique, Deleuze recalls the above formulation when he describes the event of literature as, “in effect, when another language is created within language, it is a language in its entirety that tends toward an ‘asyntactic,’ ‘agramatical’ limit, or that communicates with its own outside (CC iv). Deleuze locates this aspect of modern literary practices in an analysis that owes much to Foucault’s stubborn persistence to privilege the question of literature in a time when it was being subordinated to the forces of negative (work, communication, information, identity), particularly to privilege the possibilities of resistance that are potential in the recent and overt tendency of modern writers to uncover a strange language within language. Accordingly, modern literature creates within language a non-linguistic stammering that inclines towards “a-typical expression” and “a-grammatical effects” (e.g., Berryman, Celan, Queneau, Cummings, Mallarmé).

As a result of this process, ideas emerge from the process as what Deleuze calls visions and auditions–these are the forms of seeing and hearing that are specific to the literary process in its passage within Language. As Deleuze further describes, however, these ideas appear only when the literary process achieves its aim and breaks through the limit of language, a limit that is not outside language, but rather the outside of language which language alone makes possible. “These visions are not fantasies, but veritable Ideas that the writer sees or hears in the interstices of language, in its intervals” (CC 5). Although they bear a certain hallucinatory quality specific to the literary effect (e.g., Proust’s “madelaine,” Gombrowizc’s “hanged-sparrow,” Melville’s “white whale,” Silko’s “spider-web”), they cannot be reduced to the psychological fantasies of the author nor to “ideologemes” of a collective unconscious, since they take place, as Kafka said, “in the full light of day” and not “down below in the cellar of structure” (Diaries 1910-13 197). Consequently, it is often through words or between words that is the implicit aim of the literary process; this desire on the part of the writer is accompanied by a certain destruction of the stock forms of visibilities and statements, of linguistic and syntactical habits, clichés of the quotidian and common utterances, stock and made-to-order descriptions and categorical prescriptions that all too often imprison what is seen and heard in a fog of nothingness.

This labor of the artist, this struggle to discern beneath matter, beneath experience, beneath words, something that is different from them, is a process exactly the reverse of that which, in our everyday lives in which we live avoiding our own gaze, is at every moment satisfied by vanity and passion, intellect and habit, extinguishing our true impressions that are entirely concealed from us, buried underneath a junk heap of verbal concepts and practical goals that we falsely call 'life.' (Time Regained 299-300)

In a certain sense, then, we might say that modern literature creates the conditions for “good habits” of language use. “What are we but habits of saying ‘I’?” Deleuze first proposes this question in his study of Hume (ES x). The question of language that both philosophy and literature expound upon in different manners, therefore, is one of developing and promoting “good habits” of language usage and diagnosing “bad or destructive” habits. Philosophy has always concerned itself with the “uses and abuses” of language for the purpose of living (and dying) well; however, this image of good sense is not an object of logic, but of ethics or even etiquette. Nietzsche understood this as the essence of logic, as well as an image of philosophy as “the transvaluation of values” which, first of all include linguistic values, or “signs,” whose proper sense can only be the object of a genealogical study, such as Foucault later described in his essay “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” Consequently, we find in Foucault’s work an original relationship of language to the “body” (the materiality of the self), a relationship which is given an historical and diagnostic expression. Habits (habitus), understood as the modern form of repetition, stand for those institutions of the statements that interpellate us and which define us by determining the possible attributes that can belong to the “I.” As a certain species of repetition, moreover, habits achieve a degree zero of memory (where the particular equals the universal), producing the condition in which “what we do not remember, we repeat.” (DR 19). Thus, certain uses of language can be defined as the cause of our illness, since they lead to a botched form of life, self, individuality, power, etc. We must recognize the effects of these “habits” upon the process of thinking as well, particularly in the sense that the “interiority of thought” (the grand circuit of associations, signs, concepts, memory, and feeling) is “limited” (contracted or disciplined) by the external forms of discourse and language. It is not a question of thought that is without language, but rather of thinking which appears in its most extended circuit which enters into combinations with the elements of seeing and speaking which are “exterior” to a language defined by formed statements and the visibility of objects. Consequently, we can define this problematic as a part of the Deleuzian critique of repetition since our repetitions, or habits of language use, determine the unconscious of our representations.

On the other hand, certain modern literary practices, rather than being founded by their representational function, can be understood as a profound experimentation that reveals the positivity and the limits of our language-habits (our addiction to saying “I”). In the statement “I love you,” for example, why is the “I” meaningless, as well as “love”? Perhaps one might attempt to explain the first by the power of the shifter and the second by the privilege of the performative statement. On the other hand, we can understand this as a particular species of repetition which has become abstract and too general, in the case of the first, and meaningless and too particular in the case of the second. What Deleuze praises as “the curve of the sentence” can be understood as a profound experimentation that reveals the limits of certain expressions, negates their abstractness for a “new” positivity of language. Deleuze writes as early as Difference and Repetition that the event of positivity occurs necessarily in the advent of the “new” that introduces variables into a previous repetition. Statements such as Kafka’s “I am a bug” or Fitzgerald’s “I am a giraffe” lead to the discovery of the non-sense that belongs to the statement “I am a man” (TP 377). Consequently, the first two statements repeat the last one and at the same time introduce a new predicate, causing the statement “I am a man” to be lacking definition and, in a certain sense, in need of rectification. In other words, the statement “I am a man” leads to nothing and can be criticized as a bad use of definition. It defines no one and, thus, makes the “abstract” predicate of man possible as a real relationship. Rather than representing, Kafka’s proposition “selects” and corrects the imperfections of the former definition. It reveals the limits of the statement as well as the visibility of the language-predicate; it introduces new variables into old habits of being, new possibilities, clearer and more definite articulations, new possibilities for the passage of a life into language.

Epilogue: The Question “What is Minor Literature” Today?

In conclusion, we should return again to situate the question of literature as one of the principle themes of the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. In order to do so, it would be necessary to pay more specific attention to the status of the literary which occurs in the work of Deleuze-Guattari. When and in what manner is it evoked? For example, in the cries of poor A.A., the stroll of Lenz, the sucking-stones of Molloy, Kleist’s Marionettes or Michael-Kolhaus on his horse. In each case, literature is allied to a “war machine,” which means it draws its force directly from “the outside.” Deleuze and Guattari constantly pit this condition of literary enunciation against any representation that subjugates it to a form of interiority (whether that of the subject-author, the private individual, a culture, or even of a race). It is not by accident that the lines from Nijinsky are always recited like the lyrics of a favorite song: “I am a bastard, a beast, a negro.” The relationship of the concept of literature to a war machine is essential, and we should note that many of the examples of the war machine are drawn from writers (Artaud, Buchner, Kafka, Kleist), as well as philosopher-artists such as Nietzsche and Kiekegaard. In A Thousand Plateaus, the conflict between the literary war machine and the critic as “man of the state” is first attested to by the confrontation between Artaud and Jacques Riviere (although not a man of the state, he was according to Deleuze, not the first or last critic to mistake himself for “a prince in the republic of letters”), who found Artaud incomprehensible and poorly organized and he made no hesitation in giving his advice to “pauvre A.A.”–“Work! work! If you revise, then soon you will arrive at a method (Cogitatio Universalis) to express your thoughts more directly!” (TP 377). Next, the literary war machine is attested to by Kleist’s conflict with Goethe (“truly a man of the State among all literary figures”). In the case of the figures like Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, there is the conflict between the “public professor” and the “private thinker,” although Deleuze qualifies the latter notion in order to argue that, in fact, the “private thinker” may not be a good term, since it closes around too reductive a notion of the “private individual,” and too simple of a form of interiority where the so-called spontaneity of thought is said to occur. Instead, Deleuze argues that the “solitude” one approaches in the writings of Nietzsche, or in Kafka, is a solitude that is extremely “populated” (TI 467).

The concept of literature we have been discussing fundamentally invokes a situation of language where the collective subject of enunciation (different from the official enunciation a “people,” or of a “national consciousness”) exists only in a latent or virtual state that cannot be located in the civil and juridical language of statutes and laws, the “paper language” of bureaucracy, the technocratic and vehicular language of administrators, entrepreneurs, and capitalists. It would not be an exaggeration to assert that most technical and administrative language, even in the first world, bears an historical relationship to the early techniques invented by colonial administrations–a language composed purely of “order-words” (les mots d’ordre), or a language of command in which the law finds its purest expression, just as Sade discovered the essence of Enlightenment reason in the categorical imperatives of pornographic speech: “Do this!” “Submit!” “Obey!” Concerning the status of this language, as Fanon asserts, we have every reason to believe the colonizer when he says, “the colonized, I know them!” since he has created the categories that were installed at the deepest point of their interiority by the colonizing process, categories which continue to legislate their own knowledge of themselves as “a subjected people.” Moreover, Fanon writes, “colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns out to be the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures, and destroys it” (Fanon 210). Deleuze refers to this as the condition by which a “people as Subject” falls to the condition of a “people-subjected” (TI 164ff). As we have witnessed many times, the question of “identity” is always a dizzying and even treacherous problem from the position of the colonized, leading often to the very “impasse” from which this category was created, underscoring an “intolerable situation,” since the identity they assume in speaking, in saying “I (the colonized)” has been essentially fabulated and only serves to subject them further. This intolerable condition of enunciation is a condition that is specific to the concept of “minor literature.” At the same time, we must take inventory of the fact that the history of literature in the West is full of examples of this impossible situation; for example: Hippolytus and Phaedra, Antigone; Kafka’s “metamorphosis,” there is Gregor who cannot speak, but rather emits a shrill note that can barely be discerned; but also in Melville, we have the character of Babo in “Benito Cereno” who refuses to speak “as the accused” and chooses to remain silent (therefore, in full possession of his speech), but also in the figure of Bartleby with his “I would prefer not to…. ”

Why does this situation appear as a fundamental problematic, if not to signal something genetic to the literary enunciation: the problem and the power of “falsehood,” of the fictional status of the enunciation that essentially haunts the situation of writing? Taking up the notion of the “public sphere,” such a concept already refers to the particularly “striated openness” (Offendlichkeit) which is established when the dominant institutions of language and culture reflect the pre-conscious interests of the nation-state or class. In such condition, the literary machine itself has already been “reterritorialized” and now functions to reflect the genius of the national character or the spirit of Culture. Thus, we might refer to this moment, one that has prepared the way for the strictly ideological representation of literature in the academy today, which is reduced to a sub-compartment of the “political unconscious” or to the poetics of the State-form. This representation of literature is necessarily one-dimensional, and must sacrifice the variable relationships that originally belonged to the production of the art-work, and above all, must repress the whole question of art often by reducing it to the category of aesthetics which can, in turn, be prosecuted for its falsifying production. Here we might refer to the process of this reterritorialization, again using the analysis of the relationship between the “war machine” and the “State-form” outlined earlier. When a literary machine is captured by the State-form and provided an end, what is that end except a war directed against “the people” in the form of national memory and an official story-telling function? Recalling the problems of criticism we raised in the beginning of this discussion, the very taxonomy and organization of literature soon repeats the rank-and-file order of major and minor tastes, as well as the striated organization of the story-telling function into a form of Canon. On the contrary, the writer does not often seek to represent the truth since, as Deleuze remarks, the “truth” is often the category invented by the colonizer and the oppressor. Rather, citing another anecdotal phrase that Deleuze often employs, the writer seeks to raise the false to a higher power, that is, beyond the moral-juridical opposition of true-false that is maintained by the model of truth. To raise the false to a higher power is to discover the principle of fabulation that governs even truthful representation, to turn this principle into a critical force which addresses the intolerable situation of “a people who is missing.” Accordingly, literature bears within its fragmented body–scattered, torn to pieces, or ‘dispersed on the four winds”–the seeds of a people to come. These seeds are the germs of a “collective assemblage of enunciation,” which as Deleuze often declares, are real without necessarily being actual and ideal without necessarily being abstract (TI 147ff).

Today, Deleuze and Guattari situate the conditions for the emergence of minor literature in a world where the forms of collective enunciation and national consciousness are breaking down on several fronts, as a result of the immigration patterns and displacement of national labor forces, and the decline of the “State-form” itself.

How many people today live in a language that is not their own? Or no longer, not yet, even know their own and know poorly the major language that they are forced to serve? This is a problem of immigrants, and especially of their children, the problem of minorities, the problem of minor literature, but also a problem for all of us: how to tear a minor literature away from its own language, allowing it to challenge the language and making it follow a sober revolutionary path? How to become a nomad and an immigrant and a gypsy in relation to one's own language? (K 19)

In understanding the above passage, in order to determine the status of the “literary,” the primary emphasis must fall upon the absence of a particular collective enunciation from official and public institutions of language and national culture. In the absence of a distinct majoritarian formation of the “public sphere,” which gives enunciations weight and reference–which “orders reality,” in so many words–a body of literature assumes the shadowy and non-essential region of a collective enunciation, a “minor public” whose existence is always haunted by the “imaginary” (or fabulous) nature of its agora (its open space). But, as Deleuze and Guattari write,

the literary machine thus becomes the relay for a revolutionary machine-to-come, not at all for ideological reasons but because the literary machine alone is determined to fill the conditions of collective enunciation that is lacking elsewhere in the mileau: literature is the people's concern. (K 17-18)

In order to strip this last statement of any romanticism in association with the nationalist or ethnic entity of a people invented during the 19th century, I should stress that without specific attention to the position of enunciation that is evoked here, we lose both the status of what Deleuze-Guattari call the “literary machine” and the specific relationship that is being drawn up between a collective enunciation and the concept of minor literature. Here, the status of a minor literature is the problem of its multiple forms and locations, since it does not have an institution that organizes and disciplines its forms. This does not mean that it is formless, but rather its organization of collective enunciations is dispersed across several registers of the major language it inhabits (legends, private letters, songs, heated conversations, stories, fables, etc.) and has the character of dream-language in the various operations it performs upon the form of visibilities and on the organization of statements. Finally, only when these criteria of minor literature are fulfilled can we begin to understand the statement that “literature is a concern of the people,” perhaps even a vital concern of public health–a concern that may demand both a clinical and a critical approach to the uses (and the abuses) of the question of literature for life.

Notes

1. C.f., “Appendix,” Foucault, p. 131ff. Some of the examples Deleuze gives of these new arrangements are “the foldings proper to the chains of a genetic sequence, a new form of life based on the potential of silicon in third generation machines,” the political and economic stratification of the earth under the final stages of capitalism. The description of a vital logic (or “radical empiricism”) echoes the fabulous “problem-solving” instinct of Life first defined in Bergsonism. (C.f., “Élan Vital as a Movement of Differentiation,” pp. 91-113.) Hereafter, all parenthetical citations will refer to the following works; the most frequently cited references will be indicated parenthetically by the following abbreviations:

• Anti-Oedipus: AO
• Bergsonism: B
• Difference and Repetition: DR
• Empiricism and Subjectivity: H
• Essays Critical and Clinical (Critique et Clinique): CC
• Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature: K
• Logic of Sense: LS
• Cinema I: The Movement Image: MI
• Cinema II: The Time Image: TI
• Foucault F
• Negotiations: N
• Présentation de Sacher-Masoch (Coldness and Cruelty): M
• A Thousand Plateaus: TP.
• What is Philosophy?: WP

2. Wlad Godzich, “Emergent Literature and Comparative Literature,” in The Culture of Literacy (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1994), 275.

3. At times the reader may notice a certain unapologetic Nietzschean tone–as Deleuze himself describes, “becoming a bit of a guerrilla” (LS 158)–in my characterization of the current critical approach to the question of literature. This is not accidental. In my view, there is a weakness inherent in those commentators today who want to appropriate Deleuze’s writings without also appropriating what is dangerous in it as well. It is to raise the possibility of something dangerous or inherently risky that I have alluded to Nietzsche�’s essay “The Uses and Abuses of History for Life,” which itself concerns a similar set of problems and issues that surrounded the dominant epistemological orientation of his age. Although my implicit aim is to cause the current critical image of literature to “explode,” this objective is justified by the belief that only what is worthy of being valued can be submitted to destruction with the faith that this “will promote rather than injure the general propriety” of its uses for life (Nietzsche 86).

4. For a very brief and preliminary discussion of the concept of “disciplinary societies,” see “Postscript on Control Societies,” Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughlin (New York: Columbia UP, 1995), pages 177-182. Concerning the present moment, Deleuze comments that “discipline would in its turn begin to break down as new forces slowly moved into place, then made rapid advances after the Second World War: [from that point] we were no longer in disciplinary societies, we were leaving them behind” (N 178).

5. This is most evident today in marxist or feminist theories, for example, where each statement must refer back to the subject of enunciation in order retain its representative function. Elizabeth Grosz’s writings, for example, bear all the characteristics of a good chess game, in which she must first lay out the positions between orthodox and radical feminism on one side, and the writings of Deleuze and Guattari on the other; surveying which moves are possible and which are not, referring back to the subject of enunciation to discover which statements can be employed to further the game for feminists. Her thinking always moves forward under the condition, even the mandate, that she cannot lose her subject (even if she wanted to) without also losing the representative function of her discourse; consequently, her writing moves constantly “between” feminist subject and the philosophy of Deleuze, proposing an implacable “becoming” which never achieves identification of closure on either end. This constitutes her strategy, since after mapping the board and studying the intrinsic attributes of every piece, Grosz begins the process of redefining the intrinsic characteristics of each concept and thereby injecting new statements into the discourse of feminism that have a potential for collective enuncation.

6. By this statement, I am suggesting a mirror reflection of Foucault’s own commentary on the philosophy of Deleuze-Guattari in the preface to Anti-Oedipus. From as early as Présentation de Sacher-Masoch (1967), Deleuze has identified a certain “clinical” resemblance of a uses of literature or the taxonomy of the “literary sign” that resembles the construction of the proper name (i.e., Parkinson’s, Roger’s) that is made to diagnose symptoms that were previously grouped together and links them up with others that were dissociated. Here, we see a very different conception to the “uses of literature,” one which corresponds in the Deleuzian oeuvre to two important figures: Nietzsche and Spinoza. The figure of Nietzsche has evolved in Deleuze�s thought from its earlier role as the double of Klossowski’s “Baphomet” (i.e., prince of modifications, doctor of the Eternal Return); more recently, his enthusiasm for the “ideal game” has been replaced by another no less profound Nietzsche who resembles less the Nietzsche of Klossowski (or Mallarmé) than the Nietzsche of Foucault: the psychologist of forces and forms that constitute “modernity,” author of the genealogy and the Will to Power, distant cousin to Zarathustra and the writer of Ecce Homo (who were, after all, literary types). Therefore, Deleuze’s remarks concern less an evaluation of “Foucault,” the man and thinker, than a new figure that completes and synthesizes a Nietzschean psychology with a Spinozist ethics.

7. This is to say that in each case the writer herself begins from “a point outside” the critical determination or representation of literature; she begins always–or, at least, in most cases–with the question “what is literature?” Or rather, she begins with a certain series of problematics: “What is…” A narrative? A story? A character? A language? In each case, her answers are always temporary and take the form of a story or narrative, a certain tale or novella, this or that character. This corresponds to a fundamental axiom in Deleuze’s philosophy, often described as his “radical empiricism” or even “pragmatism.” That is, the condition of a statement on literature is at the same time a condition of literary enunciation itself; the criteria by which literature appears as an object of real experience are at the same time the condition of expression or enunciation. It is for this reason that a critical cannot take on a major form without invoking a transcendental function, or without appealing to certain categories that would each time function as constants whether that of the “author,” “narrator,” the “text,” “genre,” or “narrative mode.” The entry of structuralist categories into the study of language and literature after the 1950s marks a certain scientific function which has dominated the major movements of literary criticism from that period onward; however, the need to guarantee a constancy of the object of knowledge, which is a major trait of structurist and narratological theories (like those of Genette, in particular, but also Prince and even Iser in his earlier writings) may, in fact, share the attributes of what Deleuze-Guattari describe as “Royal Science” in their Treatise on Nomadology, and indirectly serve to inscribe the value of literary expression within an apparatus of specialization that also bears a political function consonant with the institutional determination of its subject (which could be invoked as an aspect of reterritorialization).

8. See Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963).

9. Here, the Borgesian formula of “Fang has a secret” often recounted by Deleuze can be used paradigmatically of this moment of turning, or decision, in which nothing is guaranteed. That is, “Fang has a secret” and “there is a stranger at the door.” In order to illustrate the paradigmatic value of this formula, we could substitute for the nameless identity of the stranger the forces signaled by the emergence of a life based on silicon, the formation of the capitalist in the final stages of planetary deployment, the deterritorialization and crisis of disciplinary regimes and their reterritorialization by mechanisms of the “control society,” the emergence of racialized identities and new fascisms of the flesh. In turn, each of these “strangers” marks turning points for the human form, as well as a fullness of time, a time pregnant with possibility, the moment of a “dice-throw.” (These are the somber precursors spoken of in Difference and Repetition.) That is, each arrangement presents us with diverse possibilities, with possible futures that bifurcate, tracing the curve of the present that goes toward the future announced by the new assemblage of Life that appears on the horizon. Borges, for example, discovered a possible means of escaping a colonizing relationship with the past through a comic procedure of overturning the European library and parodying the God of European history in its colonial situation. Kafka discovered through the fictional personage of “K.” a manner to research the diabolical assemblage of law and the institution of the state-form. Burroughs diagnosed the secret filiation of the alien, the homosexual, the junkie as victims the paranoia unleashed by the “bio-power” of modern state which defines its internal enemies in terms of a virus. And there are countless more examples of these “somber precursors” in Deleuze’s work (Buchner’s Lenz, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, Well’s Cane, Melville’s Ahab or Benito Cereno, Duras and Resnais’s Hiroshima). For a fuller discussion, see my “Deleuzian Critique of Pure Fiction,” Sub-Stance 84 (Vol. 26, n. 3, 1997), 128-152.

Works Cited

• Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Forward by Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken, 1968.
• Celan, Paul. Poems of Paul Celan. Trans. Michael Hamburger. New York: Persea Books, 1972.
• Deleuze, Gilles. Bergsonism. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Zone Books, 1988.
• —. Cinema II: The Time Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989.
• —. Coldness and Cruelty. New York: Zone Books, 1991.
• —. Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature. Trans. Constantin V. Boundas. New York: Columbia UP 1991.
• —. Essays Critical and Clinical. Trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael Greco. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997.
• —. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Trans. Tom Conley. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993.
• —. Foucault. Trans. Sean Hand. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988.
• —. The Logic of Sense. Trans. Constantin Boundas. New York: Columbia UP, 1995.
• —. Prisentation de Sacher-Masoch: le froid et le cruel. Paris: Minuit, 1967.
• — and Guattari, Felix. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983.
• —. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Trans. Dana Polan. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986.
• —. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Masumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987.
• —. What is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia UP, 1994.
• Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched fo the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press, 1963.
• Foucault, Michel. “What is an Author?” Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Trans. Donald Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977. 117-138.
• Freud, Sigmund. “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming.” S.E. Volume IX: 143-153.
• Godzich, Wlad. The Culture of Literacy. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1994.
• Kafka, Franz. Diaries. Ed. Max Brod. New York: Shocken Books, 1948.
• Lambert, Gregg. “The Deleuzean Critique of Pure Fiction.” Sub-Stance 84 Vol. 26, n. 3, 1997: 128-152.
• Nietzsche, Fredrick. “On the Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life.” Untimely Meditations. Trans. R.J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997: 57-124.
• Proust, Marcel. In Search of Lost Time. Volume V: The Captive and the Fugitive. Trans. C.K. Scott Montcrieff and Terrance Kilmartin. Revised by D.J. Enright. New York: The Modern Library, 1993.
• —. In Search of Lost Time. Volume VI: Time Regained. Trans. Andreas Mayor and Terrance Kilmartin. New York: The Modern Library, 1993.

Simon Chesterman

Magdalen College–Oxford University
simon.chesterman@magdalen.oxford.ac.uk