Volume 11, Number1
September, 2000 Every issue of Postmodern Culturecarries notices of events, calls for papers, and other announcements, free of charge. If you respond to one of the ads or announcements below, please mention that you saw the notice in PMC.

Publication Announcements

• Web Guide to Complex Systems
• The Robot in the Garden: Telerobotics and Telepistemology in the Age of the Internet
• TAM Monitor, Vol. II

• Organdi Revue

Conferences, Calls for Papers, Invitations to Submit

• Writing Europe 2001: Migrant Cartographies
• E-POETRY, 2001: An International Digital Poetry Festival
• Crompton-Noll Prize for Best Essay in Lesbian and Gay Studies and the Modern Languages

• Digital Arts & Culture 2001

General Announcements

• Challenge the Philosophy Competition
• New England Complex Systems Institute–Research and Education Opportunities
• NATOarts: A Retrospective
• Contemporary Greek Poetry (translated)
• OnLine English
• UnDo.net: Italian Network on Contemporary Art
• NomadLingo: Mobile-Text Art

• John U. Abrahamson at Circle Elephant Art

Sheli Ayers

Department of English
University of California at Santa Barbara
sayers@calarts.edu

Review of: Bret Easton Ellis, Glamorama. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999.

In his New York Times review, Daniel Mendelsohn calls Glamorama “a bloated, stultifyingly repetitive, overhyped book” full of vacuous characters “who talk to one another and about themselves in what sounds suspiciously like ad copy” (8). In short, Mendelsohn’s suspicions are well-founded. Glamorama is repetitive and bombastic (though also, at times, wickedly funny). The characters do without a doubt speak in ad copy. But his glib judgment bypasses the most important function of aesthetic criticism–that is, not to “make taste” but rather to illuminate the historical situation of a particular aesthetic act. The question is: why has Ellis moved steadily further into the realm of allegory, and what relation does this allegory bear to the culture of postmodernity?

To say that Glamorama is a novel would be misleading. Although Ellis plays with and against the conventions of the first-person Bildungsroman, Glamorama is less a novel than a system of textual effects analogous to other scripted spaces: themed architecture, animated digital games, and special-effects films. Erik Davis has noted that adventure games cast the player in a first-person allegory, a highly structured space through which players wander, gathering objects and deciphering clues (213). A number of recent films, including The Matrix, Existenz, and Eyes Wide Shut, have explored this allegorical landscape. Yet, judged by traditional novelistic criteria–particularly the staid psychological realism that still prevails in many American creative writing programs–such texts inevitably fail. Characterization appears facile, tone flat. Plots seem gimmicky, often thematically overloaded and unbalanced, juvenile, or incoherent. Yet, given their prevalence and visibility in various media, only reactionary criticism can continue to dismiss these immersive allegories that offer the opportunity to act within a scripted space from the vantage point of a model identity. Our model in Glamorama is Victor Ward (née Johnson), semi-famous It-Boy and son of a US Senator, who falls in with a group of high-fashion terrorists. In a scene near the beginning of the book, Victor explains that Super Mario Bros. mirrors life: “Kill or be killed…. Time is running out…. And in the end, baby, you… are… alone.” Near the end of the book, as Victor’s narrative slides occasionally into second-person, it is clear that this wisdom refers to the allegory of Glamorama itself.

Ellis’s interest in this kind of allegory appears to date back to his first book, Less Than Zero (1985).¹ But Glamorama foregrounds allegory with new intensity. This movement into the forest of allegory may relate to the controversy that has surrounded his books, especially American Psycho (1991). This debate has focused rather narrowly on representations of violence in Ellis’s work, and whether these representations are justified by a didactic satirical intent. Moving to the stage of international terrorism and conspiracy, Glamorama attempts to reframe these issues in terms of a historical thesis: Victor Ward and the enchanted panorama through which he moves are symptomatic of a cultural condition. In this respect, we might recall Walter Benjamin’s suggestion that allegory arises during historical periods of radical change, when cultural referents are stripped of their traditional values and must be re-signed through allegory. Benjamin might argue that the violence, confusion, amnesia, and enchantment that characterize Victor’s condition should not be seen as mere thematic content; such conditions are manifestations of allegorical form.

In allegorical narrative, surface is the essence of the thing. In Glamorama this rule applies not only to consumer commodities and designer fashions but also to male and female bodies, indiscriminately. Victor acts as a beautiful-but-disposable avatar within a textual labyrinth. In his Xanax-laced dreamstate, he cannot recall many past events or effectively account for his own movements. He’s a “sample size” with “the standard regrets,” cast in this role for his “‘nonspecific… fabulosity.’” Superficial from the start, he struggles feebly to stanch an ontological leakage that leaves him empty and used up. He struggles to awake, but manages only relative degrees of wakefulness. His limbs keep going numb, then finally his entire body “falls asleep.” Ultimately, Victor is nothing other than the emblematic image of fashion. When he describes himself as “coolly disheveled in casual Prada, confident but not cocky,” I am reminded of Benjamin’s description of the characters in baroque drama: these characters are emblematic images, and the words they speak are like captions “spoken by the images themselves” (195).

Glamorama points toward the shortcomings of its narrator without transcending those shortcomings. Yet, despite (or perhaps because of) his vacuity, Victor emerges as a privileged knower. His ability to grasp things by their surface appearance and his mastery of fashion and pop-culture codes enable him to operate in this textual world. While his memory is faulty in every other respect, it functions perfectly as an index for trivia such as the names and lengths, in minutes and seconds, of popular music tracks. Thanks to his knowledge of a specific track on Paul McCartney and Wings’s Band on the Run album, Victor alone can decipher the terrorists’ plans to bomb an airliner. (Unfortunately for the fictional passengers as well as for the squeamish reader, he decodes the message too late.) In short, while Victor cannot change anything fundamentally, he does suffice admirably as an avatar navigating within the provisional spaces that constitute the entirety of his textual world.

Ellis utilizes allegorical effects that transform the text into a kind of rebus. Repetitive mottoes, cultural references, and word-images (flies, confetti, ice) compose a network of correspondences. This is not to say that he achieves a hermetic textual system to rival, say, an alchemical manuscript from the seventeenth century. Glamorama may invite decipherment, but it operates mainly on the level of ineluctable confusion. Just as the seventeenth-century Vanitas signified uncertainty of the senses–life as dream and illusion–Glamorama invites the contemplation of a confused reality. The brevity of life and the ephemerality of fashion appear against the backdrop of a world outstripped by rapid technological change.

Glamorama represents the history of imaging technology–cave drawings, trompe l’oeil, theater, still photography, film, animation, video, and various digital media–as a confused totality. From the first sentence, Victor is haunted by various kinds of “specks.” Confetti pervades the text; video screens show static; characters wave flies away from their faces despite the freezing temperature. These specks suggest a pixelated and infinitely transformable universe. Strangely, Ellis draws no strong distinction between analogue and digital imaging technologies, even though the advent of the digital would seem to be the direct cause of this state of historical crisis and transformation. Instead, he stresses the prolific production of images of all kinds. The result is a telescoping of history in a technological apotheosis. All techniques of illusion–from perspective to the cut to the morph–are employed in the transformation of the real.

Bodies too are subject to this transformation. Torture and dismemberment are means by which allegory re-signs the body because parts of bodies are more useful emblems than whole, living bodies. Benjamin notes that the many scenes of torture and martyrdom in baroque drama are actually the means by which allegory partitions the body for emblematic use: “And the characters of the Trauerspiel die, because it is only thus, as corpses, that they can enter the homeland of allegory” (217). In the Arcades Project, Benjamin develops further the deep kinship between allegory and fashion that Glamorama brings to an extreme conclusion. In Glamorama, the way in which bodies are killed–most often by emptying out or by dismemberment–is not irrelevant to their preparation as emblems or “statements.”

Only through death may the body enter the domain of pure fashion. To demonstrate this, Glamorama offers stylized tableaux of fashion and torture perpetrated by models who fail to recognize a difference. In one scene, the body parts of bomb victims–including “legs and arms and hands, most of them real”–lie in piles among the mannequins and goods from designer outlets and corporate retail chains, their logos splattered with gore. In another scene, the aftermath of the airliner bombing, “the trees that don’t burn will have to be felled to extract airplane pieces and to recover the body parts that ornament them… a macabre tinsel.” The belongings of the young passengers lie strewn among this corpse-swag, bodies that have been rendered equivalent to things: “entire wardrobes of Calvin Klein and Armani and Ralph Lauren hang from burning trees.” Objects exchange traits with other objects, caught in the leveling whirl of death.

Torture, exercise, and sex serve equally to demonstrate the pornographic (that is, technological) possibilities of the body. Body parts are modifiable, detachable, and interchangeable. Victor’s celebrity trainer exclaims, “Arms are the new breasts.” Fetishistic or emblematic tattoos mark bodies that may be dismembered at any moment. Party chatter revolves around clothes and bodies, as characters compliment each other’s eyebrows and arm veins. Tortured and dead bodies look inauthentic, like props or wax anatomical dummies, and the characters remind each other of automatons, dolls, and puppets. Devoid of interior lives, they wear “glycerin tears,” “sob inauthentically,” offer “canned responses.” Gyms double as torture chambers, and sex is coldly gymnastic. Pain itself is stylized: “She suddenly looks like she’s shot through with something like pain or maybe something else like maybe something by Versace.”

Clearly, Ellis is exploring territories charted long ago by J.G. Ballard and Andy Warhol. But he is also advancing his own project, not only by increasing the body count but also by altering the relationship between violence and history. American Psycho attributes violence to a social class accustomed to commodification and the instrumental use of the body. Glamorama employs this kind of social satire, but it also suggests that violence arises as a condition of rapid technological change. The body must adapt–or be adapted through death and disfigurement–to meet a new historical condition. In this way, Ellis issues a didactic moral in the Vanitas image of transformation through death. And yet, this memento mori remains wholly consistent with capitalist consumption in practice. Glamorama operates within an ethos of accommodation, representing a diminishment of political possibilities akin to baroque pragmatism: “Confusion and hopelessness don’t necessarily cause a person to act. Someone from my first publicist’s office told me this a long time ago. Only now does it resurface. Only now does it mean anything to me” (emphasis in original).

Glamorama warrants critical attention not as an original or successful novel, but rather as a text that typifies a momentary cultural ethos. Even now, as I turn my eyes away from the text, this pop-millennium book becomes obsolete, opaque, difficult. In ten years Glamorama will lie buried under the glaciers of consumer memory. And in its strangely baroque sentiment, this is possibly its singular claim to literary immortality: it was conceived from the outset as post-consumer waste. “In is out,” as Victor says. “Out is in.”

Note

1. One of the epigraphs to Less Than Zero is a lyrical fragment by the band X: “This is the game that moves as you play.”

Works Cited

• Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Trans. John Osborne. London: NLB, 1977.
• Davis, Erik. Techgnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information. New York: Harmony Books, 1998.
• Mendelsohn, Daniel. “Lesser Than Zero.” Rev. of Glamorama, by Bret Easton Ellis. The New York Times Book Review 24 Jan. 1999: 8.

David Banash

Department of English
University of Iowa
david-banash@uiowa.edu

Review of: Survivor and Big Brother. CBS, 2000.

Andy Warhol once said that the perfect picture would be “one that’s in focus and of a famous person doing something unfamous” (qtd. in Pratt 269). It seems that the invention of inexpensive web-based telecasting technologies has one-upped Warhol’s vision. A web-search for “cam” will generate thousands of hits, and one can spend hours gazing at the interiors of anonymous refrigerators, litter boxes, or corporate cubicles. If the idea behind cinéma vérité was always to capture real life, its promise has been fulfilled on the web with thousands of cams trained on the quotidian in a continuous and mind-numbing stream of banality. It would seem that the perfect picture now is of poor resolution and of someone unfamous doing something profoundly ordinary. In a way, all this is very reminiscent of early Warhol. After all, there really are cams where you can watch someone sleep for eight hours at a stretch. The real surprise is that in this new incarnation people are actually watching. New cams are posted every day, and established cam operators receive hundreds of e-mails from obsessed viewers. There clearly is something compelling in all this. That fact, combined with the almost nonexistent cost of production, has catapulted the everyday into the center of our usually hallucinatory, star-struck culture industry. Television is now trying to capture what The Learning Channel calls “life unscripted.” In the largest and most successful gambit to capitalize on this new trend, CBS has produced Survivor and Big Brother, hybrid game shows that put contestants under constant surveillance.

Time magazine’s James Poniewozik captures the mainstream optimism associated with Survivor, Big Brother, and other reality TV programs: “there’s also a refreshing populism in the casting; here are people that you rarely see on TV: mixed-race characters; the devout; chubby gay men over 30.” Time is only one of the major mainstream media publications to be interested in what it calls “VTV, voyeur television.” In a cover story devoted to “reality entertainment,” The New York Times Magazine observes that “the new obsession in TV (and on the internet) is with capturing the rhythms of ordinary life–or, at least, the kinds of intimate human interactions that have previously eluded the camera’s gaze” (Sella 52). But given the focus on the banal and the ordinary that VTV supposedly values, Survivor seems an odd program in many ways. The basic premise of the series deftly mixes cynical corporate marketing and primal nostalgia. The producers have put sixteen people on an island in the South China Sea, and then split them into two eight-person teams (tribes) that have to feed and shelter themselves. Every few days, based on the outcome of various competitions, one of the groups has to vote a member off the island. The last person left on the island receives $1 million. How can such a scenario possibly provide what the producers call a glimpse of reality? Even more striking are the inversions that animate this entire concept. For American audiences, Survivor could not be set in a more exotic location. In fact, almost none of the audience for Survivor will have to engage in the kind of activities that define the day-to-day routines of the cast: starting fires, building shelter from raw materials, hunting for food, etc. Then there is the odd idea of shipwreck. In addition to the obligatory references to Gilligan’s Island in almost all the reviews, there is constant talk of being marooned, the very word flashing across the screen in the title sequence. One might expect that in a shipwreck scenario the object should be to leave the island. Not here. The very object of Survivor is to stay on the island for as long as possible. These kind of inconsistencies are not minor oversights, but integral to both the production and reception of the show.

The ideological functions of these odd inversions become clearer when we look at the kind of social order the producers have attempted to simulate. The cast has been organized into two tribes, complete with native names. (Given a media culture that is often obsessed with fabricating definitive, hyper-real simulations, e.g., Saving Private Ryan, the tribal paraphernalia of the titles, sets, and music for Survivor remind one of nothing so much as a Don Ho comeback. In part, the poor production values help to persuade the audience that what they are seeing inside that clumsy frame is actually some less mediated reality.) The Survivor iconography thus plays with one of capitalism’s perennial themes, the bourgeoisie-in-the-bush. The tensions between the tribal pose and bourgeois individualism indicate just how deeply Survivor is informed by the worst kinds of reactive, neo-conservative ideology. In a way, what we see is also the new millennium’s equivalent of ’80s corporate executives walking over coals (a stunt that the last four “survivors” were actually made to perform in a symbolic ritual during the final episode of the show). As Salon.com notes “‘Survivor’ pulls in its highest Nielsen ratings in households with incomes over $80,000 and its lowest in households with incomes under $30,000” (Millman, “PBS”). Just in case the implications of this statistic were not immediately apparent, Survivor‘s staff psychoanalyst tells us that “the ultimate survivor will most likely possess the ability to combine leadership skills with being a team player. To rise to the top, they will have to demonstrate conflict management without alienating or appearing aloof and detached. They will have to care. The capacity to master the subtle social politics, to assert without offending, and to adapt to changing dynamics will be critical” (Ondrusek). In short, the best survivor will exactly coincide with the best kinds of corporate employees–i.e., those who achieve their tasks without giving in to pesky emotions or critical judgments about the company’s overall means or ends. For all its pseudo-tribal kitsch, it is clear to everyone that this is a show about corporatist thinking and management: “the show gets at some larger truth about our corporate society, where total loyalty and teamwork is demanded but seldom rewarded” (Millman, “Booted”). Clearly this formulation is dead-on, but it could also be pushed much further. What gets lost in this is, of course, the fact that the show really is a corporation in its own right, protecting its own collective interests. After all, the struggles and humiliations of all these cast members are really only there for the corporate profits, and even the winner of the show will have only a minuscule share in the real profits that are at stake. Should we choose to read Survivor as an allegory, it is a particularly dark rewriting of Adorno’s analysis of Hollywood’s mass appeal. If any one of us might become that surviving millionaire, that very possibility obscures the place of that millionaire in the vast corporate machine. Like The Real World, the production goes to great lengths to ensure that the audience does not see the well-rested and fed camera operators who would indicate the presence of the network orchestrating every aspect of the show. Above all, we are not to see the survivors themselves as the literal corporate employees that they are. In this respect, though, the show’s finale provided for a return of the repressed. For it was Richard Hatch, a corporate trainer specializing in conflict management, who finally won the game.

This is not to say that Survivor is not compelling. In fact, with all its narrative inconsistencies and unreality, and at times because of them, the entire show is fascinating. Like other VTV (The Real World, etc.), much of the audience response is invested in petty dramas, rivalries, and identifications with the characters. In addition to speculation about who will finally win and which cast members have the most sex appeal, message boards, chat rooms, and fan pages abound with detailed analysis and argument about the various strengths, weaknesses, and idiosyncrasies of the cast. It is this kind of focus on purportedly unscripted human interaction that is at the heart of VTV. As the show’s producer pitches it, “the behavior we saw was genuine… they either forgot the cameras were rolling or they didn’t care” (qtd. in Sella 53). This is, of course, the appeal of VTV, the promise of documenting human interaction with as little mediation as possible. In fact, the title sequence for Survivor includes a lingering shot of Jenna with a quivering lip, about to cry, barely able to gain control of herself. The episodes themselves concentrate on the conflicts that will inevitably produce exactly such visible emotional turmoil. It should come as no surprise that the entire show is a competition itself organized around competitions, for the emotional reactions to this stress comprise the set pieces every week. What seems most evident here is that mainstream TV does not yet find the majority of those practices that comprise human interaction of any interest. Only the most intense displays of emotion (be they in victory, defeat, or the humiliation of being voted off) have any real interest for the network cameras.

We might take our pleasure in Survivor and dismiss it as the reactive corporate ideology that it is. However, as an example of the move to mainstream VTV with its self-proclaimed focus on the banal and the everyday (so long the province of art films and Marxist critics) even the faux-exotic, faux-banal Survivor raises fundamental questions that few in the mainstream media have asked of this new genre. On the one hand, the reinvention of the banal and the everyday seems to hold progressive and critical potential. Even if a series like Survivor is more an allegory than an attempt at mimesis, it still has the promise of a more inclusive cast that gives us a frame other than the clever sit-com or the studied grittiness of neo-noir cop shows. Further, if not exactly set in the context of everyday life, it is an attempt to reintroduce some element of unscripted chance into TV. Thus, it does seem as if such a series can provide critical room to move. On the other hand, there are reasons to be deeply suspicious of this new genre.

If Survivor is in part an attempt to work through a corporatist allegory of ruthless competition in the face of total surveillance, then Big Brother is a soft-sell advertisement for the panopticon at home. Set within the confines of a small house, Big Brother pits ten houseguests against one another under total surveillance. Not only are live and edited television shows broadcast several times each week, there are 24-hour web-cam feeds. Like Survivor, Big Brother is animated by some very strange inversions. While the program sells itself as a glimpse of everyday life, the house is particularly odd in that it lacks almost every kind of device its core audience takes for granted: no phones, televisions, computers, or radios. All access to the outside world has been cut off. In essence, what most Americans spend most of their time doing (consuming media) is almost the only thing that Big Brother really forbids. Focused solely on each other, the houseguests have the task of nominating two of their own for banishment every other week. The final decision is then made by the viewers through referendum via toll call to CBS. The last one standing will win $500,000. In fact, given the adroit combination of claustrophobia, sensory deprivation, and prize money, it would seem as if Big Brother could really live up to its namesake, the two-dimensional image of thought control in Orwell’s novel. However, the real nightmare here is that CBS is selling its revision of 1984 as an allegory of the functional family.

CBS has opted to create a kinder and gentler prison of middle-class normativity. Instead of a frightening warden, the houseguests are at the mercy of the unbearably perky Julie Chen. Once a week she speaks with them from a brightly lit studio, packed with their fans, families, and friends. There is something of a carnival feeling to the whole thing, right down to the house and sets dominated by garish primary colors and the too-cute logo. The theme music’s perky, up-tempo guitar and sax feels more like a sit-com than a nightmarish drama. The focus of the episodes, both live and edited, is always on the ability of the group to get along, to conform, and actively to demonstrate that they like one another. Thus, any one of the houseguests who causes any kind of friction, or anyone who simply stays aloof, falls under threat of banishment. In part, this has been a problem for CBS. After all, interesting narrative emerges only when normative expectations are violated. The first few episodes were devoted to the ousting of the militant African American, Will, and the sexually outspoken woman, Jordan. In the more sedate episodes that have followed, it has become clear that the winner of Big Brother will be the houseguest who is best at banishing the so-called trouble-makers while appearing to be an interested but unthreatening member of the family. The amount of time the remaining guests spend giving one another hugs and saying “I love you” is probably unprecedented in prime-time television. Just in case this wasn’t clear enough to the audience, the houseguests are subjected to the analysis of MTV’s spokesman for the normative, psychologist Dr. Drew. Once a week he appears to praise the group for its ability to oust anyone who creates any kind of instability, reminding everyone what a credit it is to both the houseguests and the viewing public that they are voting for functional and stable relationships. The ideology informing the show is even more disturbing in that it turns a significant portion of its audience into a kind of repressive state apparatus. After all, it is the viewers who finally choose which houseguest will be banished. Not only is CBS selling voyeuristic thrills, it is thus encouraging each viewer to become Big Brother and delight in punishing resisters. In its original European incarnation, much of Big Brother was about resisting the disembodied voices of the producers. However, to watch the American version one might be left with the impression that living under constant surveillance is the most pleasurable experience in the world. Those who watch the web-cam feeds know better. As Martha Soukup has it, “There isn’t an episode of the show a frequent feed-watcher couldn’t tell you is, in three or six or a dozen ways, slanted. It’s too bad. George the spontaneous labor organizer [his attempt to organize a walkout by the entire cast was initially suppressed], Jordan the ex-Mormon, the code Josh and Jamie developed with a deck of cards to talk without the microphones understanding–these have all been deemed not ready for prime time. (Indeed, Big Brother made the two card coders stop.)” Not only is CBS selling a kinder, family-oriented brand of surveillance, it has consistently attempted either to edit out or to downplay moments of friction with the institutional apparatus–in short, minimizing anything which might make the panopticon look less than enjoyable.

As these programs wind down, it is clear that they are transforming the lives of the participants. The casts of Survivor and Big Brother are busy fielding offers from radio, television, film, and other media. Playboy is interested in the women of both programs, Rich has become an AM talk host, Jenna is beginning to show up on MTV and, in what has to be the most apt career change of all, Survivor‘s Sean, a neurologist, will give up being a doctor in order to play a doctor on the daytime soap opera Guiding Light. And, for the moment, these shows are also transforming television. Television and the internet are merging, and there is a sense that Big Brother is a preview with much more to come. How viewers will be transformed by all this is another question altogether. In the case of Survivor and Big Brother, as a mass audience it seems as if the culture is working through what once might have been called the difference between private and public virtues. As Robin Goodman puts it, “It seems that most people have lost, or at least loosened, the boundaries between our public and private selves. The public is able to get ‘up close and personal’ on every issue and for everyone. President Clinton’s misconduct is one prime example of our fascination.” However, Goodman goes on to say of Survivor and Big Brother that people watch these shows in hopes of seeing something that is considered forbidden, such as something you wish you could do but would not do. Yet the reaction to Big Brother particularly seems to contradict this kind of analysis. After all, the viewers have gone to great lengths to banish any one of the houseguests who seems to threaten the serene and seemingly happy family space that CBS is constructing. Indeed, it seems no accident that George, the forty-something white male and would-be father figure, is usually identified as the most popular houseguest by the viewers. Dramatized through its domestic setting, Big Brother argues for private virtues that include getting along with others, throwing out those undesirables, and telling everyone how happy you are. As private virtues, these are surely suspect. As private virtues made public, they can only be the wish fantasy of a corporate world bent on the manipulation of docile and well-disciplined bodies.

Curiously, the most frequent fears identified in the mainstream media suggest that the reception of all VTV is deeply embroiled with larger fears about the emerging electronic panopticon. Thus, Survivor and its Orwellian kin are compelling because they help us work through a world in which there is no privacy at all. As Time puts it, “the mainstream embrace of voyeurism comes precisely as many Americans feel their own privacy is in danger, be it from surveillance on the job, marketers on the Net or database-wielding bureaucrats in their HMOs.” But maybe our fear should not be that there will be no more privacy, but that as a culture we will become even less able to value the very privacy we have. Perhaps part of the problem with this very fear is that it is framed as a debate about privacy when it is really a debate about anonymity. Following Debord and Deleuze, Paul Trembath observes that our culture is animated by “the reactively certain sense, or capital sense certainty, that value is always elsewhere (on screen, in books, or ‘in’ other attention-invested media…).” What Trembath points out is the danger in devaluing our anonymous, untelevised lives. Not so much because our privacy is somehow threatened, but because our very ability to devote our attention to our anonymous practice is at stake. After all, it is in the anonymous that our banal practices might be transformed into the invention of new forms of counter-hegemonic desire. What then happens if our experience is of value only to the extent that we can recognize it in the alienated images of the culture industry? In terms of something like Survivor, this might be our inability to recognize or value any emotion or thought that is not a caricature, that is not immediately readable through the lens of the spectacle. Warhol brilliantly exploited the idea that anyone could be a star. There was, however, a critical irony at the heart of this notion. If The Factory stars unabashedly enjoyed some of the privileges of fame, they nonetheless underscored the arbitrary basis and alienating effects of the entire process. It is just this element of critique that Survivor, Big Brother, and the rest of the VTV productions have succeeded in stripping away.

Works Cited

• Goodman, Robin. “Do You Love Reality Based TV?” MSNBC. <http://www.msnbc.com/news/431975.asp>.
• Millman, Joyce. “They’ve booted Mrs. Howell!” Salon.com. <http://www.salon.com./ent/log/2000/06/01/first_survivor/index.html>.
• – – – . “PBS Peep Show.” Salon.com. <http://www.salon.com/ent/col/mill/2000/06/19/1900/index.html>.
• Ondrusek, Gene. “A Psychologist’s Point of View.” <http://www.cbs.com/network/tvshows/mini/survivor/buzz/featured_commentary.shtml>.
• Poniewozik, James. “We Like to Watch.” Time.Com 26 June 2000. <http://www.time.com/time/magazine/articles/0,3266,47712,00.html>.
• Pratt, Alan R. The Critical Response to Andy Warhol. Westport: Greenwood, 1997.
• Sella, Marshall. “The Electronic Fishbowl.” The New York Times Magazine. 21 May 2000: 50-57.
• Soukup, Martha. “‘Big Brother’ mutiny brewing!” Salon.com. <http://www.salon.com/ent/tv/feature/2000/08/22/bb_web/index.html>.
• Trembath, Paul. “Reactivating Deleuze: Critical Affects After Cultural Materialism.” Rev. of Deleuze: A Critical Reader, ed. Paul Patton. Postmodern Culture 7.3 (1997). <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v007/7.3r_trembath.html> and <http://www.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.597/review-2.597>.

Michael Sinding

Department of English
McMaster University
sindinm@mcmail.cis.mcmaster.ca

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books, 1999.

This audacious project based in cognitive linguistics began its career as a tentative collaboration between a linguist and a philosopher, with Metaphors We Live By in 1980. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson are key figures in what has become an international collective enterprise studying the central role of processes traditionally thought peripheral, if not deviant, with respect to normal thought, pre-eminent among which is metaphor. Lakoff and Johnson followed up their claims in 1987 with studies of other elements of the embodied mind: prototype categorization and image-schemata.¹ This latest opus sets out the current state of the overall theory, then analyzes the metaphorical structure of five basic philosophical concepts and eight important philosophies from the Pre-Socratics to present-day Rational Action Theory. With lucid, close argumentation and well-organized evidence, it consolidates a powerful theory of mind, provides answers to perennial intuitions about the irreducible power of metaphor, and does justice to its ambition to recast reason and philosophy.

In the past few decades, it has become common to draw on findings in cognitive science in areas beyond the philosophy of mind, where it emerged as a major force.² The Anglo-American tradition of analytic philosophy has embraced cognitive science more than has continental European-inspired postmodern thought. Philosophy in the Flesh presents itself as a middle way between these two main options (3), and while the former attracts more attention than the latter, their literalism and objectivism, stalled in “first-generation cognitive science” are similarly ventilated. This is an appealing third path: asked to choose between radical objectivism and radical subjectivism, one replies with Melville’s Bartleby, “I’d prefer not to.” But preferring not to is not very viable, despite the problems that flow from settling for the estimated lesser of two evils. With the new brew of the embodied mind, dissatisfied critics need no longer hold their noses as they swallow their intellectual commitments. Now they can say, with Shakespeare’s Mercutio, “a plague o’ both your houses.” Examples of Lakoff and Johnson’s approach are their highwire walks between analytic and postmodern errors over signs and self: signs are not natural reflections of reality nor arbitrary fabrications, but “motivated” (464-66). We have no essence that is just autonomous and rational or fractured and irrational; rather, we understand ourselves through variations of a basic metaphorical schema relating two entities: “subject” and “self.” By the end of the book, that highwire has turned into a broad highway.

The first section, “How The Embodied Mind Challenges The Western Philosophical Tradition,” begins to do so by extrapolating from empirical research to philosophical principles, instead of the more usual reverse. Lakoff and Johnson’s view of reason conflicts with all the major philosophical accounts, and so also rejects previous accounts of the human person (3-7). The stakes of this debate are high, and we hear the ring of a manifesto at times. Three abrupt opening sentences state the major findings that buttress the authors’ claims:

The mind is inherently embodied.
Abstract thought is largely metaphorical.
Most thinking is unconscious. (3)

Specifically, “second-generation cognitive science” proves that a “cognitive unconscious” uses structures that emerge from bodily experience to shape conscious thought at every level. “Empirically responsible philosophy” must renounce “a priori philosophizing” and incorporate these discoveries. That is, “the very structure of reason comes from the details of our embodiment. The same neural and cognitive mechanisms that allow us to perceive and move around also create our conceptual systems and modes of reason”; reason is “evolutionary, in that it builds on… forms of perceptual and motor inference present in ‘lower’ animals”; it is “shared universally by all human beings”; and it is mostly unconscious, largely metaphorical and imaginative, and emotionally engaged (4).

Chapters 1 and 2 lay the groundwork of the project and its polemic. Chapter 3 begins to delineate the evidence for the authors’ theory, exploring concepts relating to color, basic-level categories, spatial relations, bodily movement, and event- and action-structure. Chapters 4 and 5 are the real meat of the theory, bringing together recent findings in conceptual metaphor. Chapter 4, “Primary Metaphor and Subjective Experience,” unifies a wide range of research into the mechanisms of metaphorical reason’s use of bodily experience to “conceptualize and describe subjective experience” (46). This is the “Integrated Theory of Primary Metaphor” (46-58), composed of four theories: domain “conflation,” primary metaphor (natural minimal mappings), neural metaphor, and conceptual blending. The latter is to molecules what primary metaphor is to atoms. It occupies Chapter 5, “The Anatomy of Complex Metaphor,” which shows how blends are built out of combinations of primary metaphors with each other and with forms of commonplace knowledge such as cultural models and folk theories. This chapter also investigates aspects of the rational efficacy of metaphor, in relation to conventional versus novel metaphor, mental imagery, multiple metaphors for a single concept, and the dependence of concepts on their metaphors.

In Chapter 7, Lakoff and Johnson contrast their concept of “embodied realism” to views of “direct” or “representational” realism, which must deal with how symbols “correspond” to the things they represent. They show how representationalism founders on the problem of multiple “levels” of description and truth (such as the scientific level versus the phenomenological level), since correspondence requires one consistent level-independent truth (105), whereas embodied realism meets the problem by making reality and truth relative to our various levels of understanding. This chapter closes with a rejoinder to an important objection, courtesy of John Searle, that merits a closer look. Searle contends that the entities and processes Lakoff and Johnson postulate are mere vague “background” without the properties Lakoff and Johnson attribute to them. They insist that the mechanisms of the cognitive unconscious do real cognitive work; that is, they are “intentional, representational, propositional, and hence truth characterizing and causal,” and thus meet Searle’s own criteria for meaning and rational structure (115-16). Basic-level categories are intentional and representational, in that our mental image, motor program, and gestalt perception for, say, “chair” both represent and pick out the things that fit the concept. Semantic frames characterize our structured background knowledge of things like restaurants, and carry propositional information that is inference-generating, and therefore relates to truth and to causation of understanding: concepts like “waiter” and “check” are defined relative to such frames, and enter into propositional knowledge of situations (normal inferences about “after we ate, we got up and left” are that the waiter brought the check, and we paid him the right amount for the meal before leaving). Spatial relations concepts are causal of understanding, in that we use them to impose structure on scenes (the cat is in front of the tree, the bee is in the garden) that enter into our beliefs and expressions. And conceptual metaphors are causal of truth conditions, in that they structure our understanding of our experience. Under a conceptualization of times as objects moving towards us in space, it is true that Christmas day comes a week “ahead of” New Year’s day, and the reverse is false (116-17).

In this theoretical outline, confined to 129 pages, Lakoff and Johnson omit some aspects covered in other studies, but they do provide considerable new information–especially in the “Integrated Theory of Primary Metaphor.” The material here is usefully organized. The Appendix on the Neural Theory of Language Paradigm, for example, helps to explain key terms and outlines the interrelation of different disciplines of cognitive analysis such as linguistics and neuroscience. With respect to the book’s major goal of recasting “reason” itself, clearly further study of scientific, mathematical and logical reasoning is called for. The authors have attempted to explain elements of math and logic as metaphor, but these abstract systems do not take center-stage here.³ Lakoff and Johnson present ingenious image-schematic analyses of Aristotelian first-order formal logic (the law of the excluded middle, modus ponens, and modus tollens) (375-81), and brief discussions of intentional, Meinongian, and Boolean logics. Chapter 6 comments somewhat briskly on science, and there is an intriguing, even dazzling, study of the mathematics connected with Rational Action Theory in Chapter 23 (515-25). I should not dwell on what is left out in an almost 600-page volume, but I would have liked the authors to address more dialectical operations. Such “logic” is informal; our concept of it may rely on image-schemas of splitting, opposition, links, and balance. What about paradoxical encomiums and modest proposals? Perhaps there are cultural models that supply the norms upon which irony depends. These are problems for theories that focus on the internal structure of concepts and frameworks. Analysis and contrast, as well as synthesis, should be explained in embodied terms.

Part 2, “The Cognitive Science Of Basic Philosophical Ideas,” commences the focus and contribution of this volume. This section “uses the tools of cognitive science and cognitive linguistics to study empirically concepts such as time, causation, the self, and the mind… that is, studying basic philosophical ideas as a subject matter for cognitive science” (134). Each abstract idea has an

underspecified nonmetaphorical conceptual skeleton… [that] is fleshed out by conceptual metaphor, not in one way, but in many ways by different metaphors…. None of them is monolithic, with a single overall consistent structure…. The metaphors are typically not arbitrary, culturally specific, novel historical accidents, or the innovations of great poets or philosophers. Rather, they tend to be normal, conventional, relatively fixed and stable, nonarbitrary, and widespread throughout the cultures and languages of the world. (134)

This may seem to reverse the typical order of explanation; metaphorical language shows ideas “as they occur in the cognitive unconscious of present-day speakers” (134). Philosophers, like everybody else, must use the meanings and concepts already in their human conceptual systems (136).

Lakoff and Johnson’s chapter on time is a well-developed case of how this works. Their earlier Metaphors We Live By became exciting when its novel method demonstrated the coherence underlying an apparent contradiction to metaphoric systematicity in the fact that “the weeks ahead” and “the weeks following” mean the same thing. In this volume, they show in greater depth how we understand time metaphorically in relation to motion, space and events (137). First, there is a basic observer orientation with respect to time, whereby the present is the observer’s location, the future is in front of her and the past is behind her. Then there are two variant metaphors for temporal process, the “Moving Time” (141) and “Moving Observer” metaphors (145). These are distinct metaphorical structurings of the target domain that are inconsistent but coherent with each other. In the first set of metaphors, time is a (divisible) substance moving past us as stationary observers; in the second, time is a series of locations through which we move. In the first, but not in the second, future weeks “follow” past weeks. What these sets of metaphors have in common is the relative motion of the elements. Ekkehart Malotki’s 1983 study refuting Benjamin Lee Whorf’s well-known claim that the Hopi language contains no concept of time or metaphors declares the trans-cultural relevance of the analysis. Lakoff and Johnson discuss the metaphysical implications of our spatial metaphors for time. With reference to the work of Zeno, Saint Augustine, A. N. Prior, and Stephen Hawking, the authors describe the puzzles that can result from failing to recognize metaphors as metaphors (150-51). To illustrate the dangers of institutional reification of metaphors, Lakoff and Johnson cite a recent study that posits employee “time theft” as the first crime against American business, a perspective that mistakes the metaphor “time is a resource” for literal truth. Time has some literal structure from its characterization as a comparison of events, such as directionality and irreversibility, but it is not possible to think about time without metaphors; asking what time is objectively will lead one down one metaphorical path or another. Our constructions, however, are not merely subjective, arbitrary, or cultural, but deeply “motivated” (157-69).

The other studies in this book have profound implications for our understanding of events and causes, the mind, the self, and morality. The cross-cultural data suggest a large body of natural mappings. Still, questions arise about this view of concepts and metaphors. The idea that a skeletal concept is fleshed out by metaphors is more plausible for the self or morality, which have obvious human dimensions, than for time and events and causes. It is hard to accept that our ontological foundations themselves, and not just our concepts of them, are subject to multiple determinations. Is only the skeletal structure “real” then, and are the metaphors just convenient ways of grasping it? Should we not then extract the core from the superfluous shell? But if metaphor is really inevitable then we are up against limitations of knowledge about entities that are to an unknowable extent humanly constituted.

How does the whole system of source and target domains hang together? Metaphors are organized by target domain here, and overarching conceptualizations uniting them are given–for example, domains mapped onto thinking include Moving, Perceiving, Object Manipulation and Eating, all of which are forms of Physical Functioning With Respect To An Independently Existing Entity (235-43). But do metaphors relate to one another by source domain? Warmth is affection, but it is also anger and lust. Each is a feeling, and each has a related but distinct grounding in bodily heat. A different conception of the source-domain for each suggests a regress of conceptualizations (if in order to structure anger a certain way we need to structure heat in one way out of many). Perhaps when the source-target pairing occurs, it fixes a mutual structuring by means of intervening image-schemas. Or the target’s skeletal structure may have priority in our mental economy–given that the more value-laden concepts, morality and the self, seem less metaphorically integrated than the others. But these are partly speculative forays, as on the coherence of moral metaphors (311-13); and one looks forward to further discoveries.

Part 3, “The Cognitive Science Of Philosophy,” “employs methods from cognitive science to study the structure and content of particular philosophical theories” (134). Lakoff and Johnson argue that philosophers select certain metaphors from the range available, in order to give their theories consistency. Consider their analysis of Noam Chomsky’s key metaphors, who, as the most philosophically advanced representative of analytic language philosophy, gets the longest chapter (469-512). His theory has two parts: an “a priori philosophical worldview… not subject to question or change” (474); and his specific linguistic theory, which has changed over his career. Lakoff and Johnson suggest that Chomsky’s worldview is Cartesian, involving such principles as separation of mind and body, an autonomous rationality defining the essence of human nature, mathematics-like formal reason, thought as language, innate ideas, and an introspective method (470-71). The attribution of mind-body dualism seems unfair. Chomsky has explicitly rejected this, and has compared mental “modules” with bodily organs (81). But Lakoff and Johnson do not mean belief in a “mental substance,” but rather that study of brain and body can give no additional insight into language. Neither does Chomsky advocate an introspective method, but by this Lakoff and Johnson presumably mean the use of grammaticality intuitions as data, not the idea that “reason/language is all conscious and… its workings are available to conscious reflection” (472). Wedded to the Cartesian frame are many aspects of the Formalist view of language, including the Thought As Language and Thought As Mathematical Calculation metaphors. These both turn up in ordinary speech, as with “I can read her mind” and “I put two and two together.” They are considered central to the “Linguistic Turn” in philosophy (244-247).

This worldview, Lakoff and Johnson claim, predetermines linguistic conclusions, and is invulnerable to criticism because it rejects any counterexamples as outside the definition of linguistics. The introduction to cognitive linguistics claims that it, on the other hand, makes only methodological assumptions about integrating “the most comprehensive generalizations,… the broadest range of converging evidence, and… empirical discoveries about the mind and the brain” (496). Lakoff and Johnson dispute the influential notion of an innate autonomous syntax module, which demands separation of mechanisms for perception and conception: it is an updated version of an outdated faculty psychology (38). Linguistically, they claim that syntax expresses meaning, accords with communicative strategies and with culture, and arises from the sensorimotor system, rather than being independent of all these things (479). Neurally, “there can be no autonomous syntax because there can be no input-free module or subnetwork in the brain” (497). Grammatical categories and constructions result from projection of meaning from a conceptual pole to a phonological pole (496-506). These linguistic debates are abstruse to the nonspecialist, but clear enough to make their point.

Lakoff and Johnson demonstrate the overall coherence of Chomsky’s views by relating his assumptions about mind to his politics. Thus, because minds are independent from bodies, we can think and act freely of physical constraints. This defines human nature, so that all people require maximum freedom, and do not need excess material possessions. Therefore government rule and capitalism tend to violate human nature, and an ideal political system is anarchist and socialist. These reconstructions may find little favor with specialist scholars, since when it comes to fine points, we seem far from simple mappings. But it is a strength of this method that it accounts for the sense of large regularities linking distant parts in a theory, even when they do not strictly follow one from another. How might the logic of details conflict with the logic of their governing metaphors? Chomsky says the two parts of his work are only loosely related, but accepts Harry Bracken’s linking of models of mind with ethics, in that rationalism erects a “modest conceptual barrier” against racism because it proposes a universal human essence (Chomsky 92-94). How does this square with the fact that a racist could be a Chomskyan linguist? The basic mappings provide an overall structure from our prereflective source-concept, but presumably further specifications can depart from that concept without changing it. One could accept the linguistic metaphors without seeing reason and freedom as the human essence, or one could apply other metaphors of stable order as human nature. Perhaps everyone has a system with a Kuhnian paradigmatic structure that stays in place as long as it can, and a more literal periphery that accommodates local demands for consistency with itself and with new knowledge. Johnson has explored how Hans Selye, the founder of modern stress research, viewed the body first as a machine, then as a homeostatic organism, and how his inferences about biology and medicine changed accordingly (Body in the Mind 127-38). We need similar research with the depth of the specialist.

The continuity here from the founders of Western philosophy through Descartes and Kant to analytic thought is a liability as well as a virtue. Granted, Lakoff and Johnson must be selective to do justice to their subjects, and this tradition supplies their main opponents in the field. But the continental traditions need better representation and need to be studied more fully. The authors’ theory strongly challenges some familiar tenets of postmodernism. Lakoff and Johnson do not allege that metaphors destabilize and deconstruct the “proper” literal thought, conceived in terms of binary oppositions. They deny that metaphor is indeterminate and explain how metaphors are constitutive of thought, sources of unifying inferential structure, and often very stable in themselves (543). By metaphor we create and extend knowledge of abstract domains, describe reality, and assert truths. Postmodern historicizing blurs conceptual and ontological boundaries, showing categories to be slippery by virtue of their shifting relations to other categories within a matrix of power relations. There are no foundational principles, but only “rules of thumb” as Stanley Fish says. Against this Lakoff and Johnson argue that categories have never been defined by necessary and sufficient conditions. That concepts regularly admit of borderline and ambiguous cases does not impugn the reality of clear cases, and no skeptical conclusions about meaning or reality follow. But since categories are not univocal and monolithic, we need research that examines cultural specificity and semantic shifts in their construction (467).

Psychoanalysis and Marxism have elevated imagination by elevating irrationality. They dwell on unconscious drives and downplay the conscious mind’s excuses for itself. But to restore imagination to its central place requires showing how it does real cognitive work: an account of the mind as imaginatively rational can still accommodate the irrational, but an account of the mind as imaginatively irrational cannot explain the successes of reason. This task requires changing our basic ideas about reason. Philosophy in the Flesh goes a long way to this end; in doing so, it shows how irrationalism leaves the traditional picture of reason intact. A theory that invests so much in metaphor should produce echoes within the padded walls of literary academe. Embodied cognition conceived in this range and depth informs the structure of culture, creativity, narrative, imagery, figures and signification, belief and ideology and the epistemological grid, empathic projection, emotion, desire and the unconscious, and the elements of the other arts. Lakoff and Johnson put the study of imaginative processes on a new footing–keen attention to their work could revitalize the study of culture.

Notes

1. Lakoff’s Women, Fire and Dangerous Things argues that recent discoveries about human categorization overturn an “Objectivist” view of categories that has been canonical since Aristotle. Johnson’s The Body In The Mind explores how “image-schemata” that emerge from recurrent forms of experience function as nonpropositional structures of meaning, and so undermine “Objectivist” accounts of meaning that dwell on propositions and belief.

2. In 1989 More Than Cool Reason, born from the collaboration of Lakoff with Mark Turner, applied the conceptual theory to poetic metaphor. Johnson’s Moral Imagination (1993) and Lakoff’s Moral Politics (1996) apply the new view of mind to morals. And essays in collections and journals have brought it into contact with linguistics, anthropology, psychology, education, religion, social thought, science, and math. The bibliography for Philosophy In The Flesh lists a great number of important studies and is helpfully divided into aspects of the theory of embodied mind.

“Cognitivism” has also emerged as a stance competing with the reigning psychoanalytic paradigm in film studies. See especially David Bordwell’s “A Case for Cognitivism” and the other papers in the same volume, and Bordwell and Carroll’s Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, which bills itself as a herald of the new stance. There are a number of websites dedicated to the theory or its relatives: Mark Turner’s “Conceptual Blending and Integration” website at <http://www.wam.umd.edu/~mturn/WWW/blending.html>, and the “Center for the Cognitive Science of Metaphor Online” at the University of Oregon at <http://philosophy.uoregon.edu/metaphor/metaphor.htm> are good places to start. On literature in particular, there is “Literature, Cognition and the Brain” at <http://www2.bc.edu/~richarad/lcb/>; Francis Steen’s “Cogweb: Cognitive Cultural Studies” at <http://cogweb.english.ucsb.edu/>; Cynthia Freeland’s “Cognitive Science, Humanities & the Arts” at <http://www.hfac.uh.edu/cogsci/index.html>; and a special issue of the Stanford Humanities Review on Literature and Cognitive Science at <http://www.stanford.edu/group/SHR/4-1/text/toc.html>.

3. See Johnson’s The Body in the Mind, especially chapters 2-5; and Lakoff and Núñez’s “The Metaphorical Structure of Mathematics.”

Works Cited

• Bordwell, David. “A Case for Cognitivism.” Iris 9 (Spring 1989): 11-40.
• Bordwell, David, and Noël Carroll, eds. Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1996.
• Chomsky, Noam. Language and Responsibility. New York: Pantheon Books, 1979.
• Johnson, Mark. The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.
• —. Moral Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Science for Ethics. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993.
• Lakoff, George. Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.
• —. Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know That Liberals Don’t. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996.
• Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980.
• Lakoff, George, and R. Núñez. “The Metaphorical Structure of Mathematics: Sketching Out Cognitive Foundations for a Mind-Based Mathematics.” Mathematical Reasoning: Analogies, Metaphors, and Images. Ed. L. English. Hillsdale, N. J.: Erlbaum, 1997.
• Lakoff, George, and Mark Turner. More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989.

Andrew Hoberek

Department of English
University of Missouri-Columbia
hobereka@missouri.edu

Review of: Michael Kreyling, Inventing Southern Literature. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1998, and Patricia Yaeger, Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women’s Writing, 1930-1990. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000.

At first glance, nothing seems less postmodern than southern literature, a body of writing simultaneously dominated by the legacy of Faulknerian modernism and associated with an embattled critical and institutional conservatism. The study of southern literature still seems locked in an ethos of depth, seriousness, and monocultural integrity not only at odds with the postmodern world of surfaces, free play, and global multiculturalism, but indeed designed to defend prophylatically against this world.¹ Yet there’s a moment about two hundred pages into Patricia Yaeger’s groundbreaking new study of southern women’s writing, Dirt and Desire, that suggests how much those of us outside the field of southern literature have to learn from a renewed attention to southern writing. Yaeger quotes Adorno on the “incommensurab[ility]” of artworks “with historicism, which seeks to reduce them to a history external to them, rather than to pursue their genuine historical content” (182-183). Such reductive historicism, Yaeger suggests, has been the legacy of the critical tradition dominated, for the last sixty years, by the mythmaking sensibilities of Faulkner and the Agrarians: “In making history monumental,” she writes, “what is lost is a sense of its unintelligibility in the flux of experience: its rawness, its presentness” (183). This judgment, delivered almost off-handedly in the midst of a reading of Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding, deftly reorients our understanding of the contemporary culture wars. Complaints about critics “reduc[ing artworks] to a history external to them” issue, as we all know, from traditionalists seeking to defend the autonomy of literature from historical and political concerns. While by no means uninterested in history and politics, Yaeger’s Adornian gesture toward the specificity of the literary object suggests the extent to which some southernists have themselves sacrificed literature on the altar of their own essentialist narrative of southern history. What’s important here is not simply that Yaeger identifies the cultural right’s strategic hypocrisy. What’s important is the way her account suggests the buried kinship between southern literature and other, more recent, literatures intertwined with the politicized construction of subcultural identities. We are used to imagining identity politics and multicultural literature as products of the 1960s; could it be that these developments, so crucial to the political and aesthetic history of the twentieth century, actually have an earlier origin in the rise of a distinctly southern identity? This is the question that Yaeger’s book, and Michael Kreyling’s Inventing Southern Literature, compel us to ask, although neither formulates the question quite this way. Yet to ask the question this way–to ask whether southern literature might be understood as the origin of American multiculturalism and identity politics–not only reframes the genre but also our sense of multiculturalism and identity politics as political and literary-political phenomena. Taken together, these two books, despite their significant differences, mark a key shift in the study of southern literature, a shift that has important implications for the study of twentieth-century literature and culture more generally.

Kreyling’s book addresses the question of southern identity and its construction within and through the southern literary tradition from “the inside,” as it were. Invoking the locus classicus of an embattled southern intellectualism–Quentin Compson’s ambivalent defense of the South to his Harvard roommate, the Canadian Shreve–Kreyling refuses to side entirely either with Quentin’s defensiveness (“If one must be born in the South to participate meaningfully in its dialogue, then there is in fact only a monologue”) or with Shreve’s disdain (“On the other hand, Quentin’s roommate is no cultural prize either”; xviii). Instead, he chooses to foreground the debates and disagreements that have made up the southern critical tradition, belying the seemingly hermetic coherence that this tradition sometimes presents to those outside the field. Citing Gerald Graff, Kreyling argues that “teachers and students of southern literature have a world to gain from foregrounding the ‘conflicts’” that have shaped the study of southern literature (57). Kreyling casts his account in the form of a series of such conflicts: among the Agrarians; between their conservative legacy and the liberalism of Louis D. Rubin, Jr.; between the white, male tradition and subsequent generations of African American and female authors; and so forth. In this respect it is fitting that a book called Inventing Southern Literature addresses the period from the 1930s to the present; this is precisely Kreyling’s thesis, that southern literature is continually reinvented at each new moment of conflict and questioning. Kreyling’s narrative is not, however, one of simple assimilation. He recognizes the ways in which the hegemonic narrative of southern identity has foreclosed options for critics and creative writers alike. Indeed, in what is arguably his best–and certainly his most inventive–chapter, he claims that the first victim of the Faulknerian legacy was Faulkner himself, who “had to live at least the last decade of his life in the crowded company of representations, projections, avatars, ghosts of himself–many of which he [himself] had summoned” (130). Likewise, Kreyling asks, in his chapter on African American literature, “What interest could exist that might persuade a black southern writer that his [sic] identity is to be found in an ideology so consistently exclusionary and prejudicial to him and to images of him?” (77). This is a good question, and for the most part Kreyling doesn’t oversimplify the answer. His willingness to pursue the intersections between African American and southern literature leads him, among other places, to a powerful rereading of Ralph Ellison as–contrary to both Ellison’s own claims and the critical consensus about him–Richard Wright’s inheritor and defender (81-88).

Kreyling’s avowed partisanship is both his strength and his weakness. Yaeger contends that Kreyling’s goal of critically rereading the southern literary tradition is “unevenly achieved” (34), and it’s possible to read his ambivalence as of a piece with–rather than critical of–this tradition (recall Quentin’s “I don’t hate it! I don’t hate it!“). At the same time, Kreyling’s willingness to wrestle with the question of southernness, rather than simply to dismiss it, leads to an account of southern identity as an ongoing historical project, one that is unevenly performed and frequently the site of explicit debate. Although he does not cite her, Kreyling provides a version of southern identity that enacts Diana Fuss’s model for identity politics in Essentially Speaking: he avoids rigid dichotomies between authenticity and inauthenticity; he understands southernness as historically constructed but none the less materially real. Kreyling’s book implicitly asks us to think about the ways in which the project of southern identity has influenced similar projects in late twentieth-century America. It may also help us to understand these latter-day forms of politically-motivated identity in ways that avoid the authenticity trap, that foreground relationships (positive and otherwise) among different identities, and that don’t flinch at uncomfortable politics–and here is where Kreyling’s subject matter may have the most to teach us.

Yaeger criticizes Kreyling’s approach by way of distinguishing her own, which is, she says, not to problematize “the official narrative along which the Dixie Limited has been bound” but rather “to dynamite the rails”–to go beyond the “mystifications designed to overlook the complexities of southern fiction” and to recover the narratives that exist alongside and behind the standard ones about place, patriarchy, and the past (34). In order to do this she sidesteps what she calls “the Faulkner industry” (xv, 96-97) and other frequently canonized male authors, focusing instead on an array of white and African American women writing in and about the South: Willa Cather, Zora Neale Hurston, Eudora Welty, Alice Walker, Ellen Gilchrist, and Toni Morrison, to name just a few. Likewise, she replaces the standard thematics of southern literature with a range of new categories–“crisis and… contestation” (38) instead of community, neglected children instead of family, labor instead of miscegenation. In doing so, Yeager also refurbishes traditional categories, such as the grotesque.² Yaeger’s willingness to simply disregard the standard texts of southern literary history is bracing and edifying. “The central thesis of this book,” she writes,

is that older models of southern writing are no longer generative, that they don’t yield interesting facts about women’s fictions, about the struggle of some southern women to make sense of a society seething with untold stories, with racist loathing; nor do they help place this fiction within its “American” context. (xv)

Thus her response to Kreyling’s query about what interest the southern tradition could have for African American writers is simply to reverse the equation: Yeager insists that “We need to get over the idea that writing by African Americans has to fit a certain mold before it can be considered ‘southern’” and calls us to deploy African American literature to “change our definitions of what southern literatures are” (44).

Yaeger’s aims are, perhaps, not quite so far from Kreyling’s as she claims. She does, after all, maintain the category of southern literature, even if it looks completely different by the end of her book. Her admitted obsession with the grotesque remains, likewise, a distinctly southern obsession, and her prose demonstrates a propensity (familiar to readers of southern fiction) for empty adjectives like “lustrous” (xi) and “lush” (279 n. 2). Finally, she too begins by claiming for herself Quentin Compson’s inability “to refuse a lingering passion for the South” (1). In the end, her contribution lies in her weariness with the accepted stories about the South–“I’m tired of these categories,” she writes in her prologue (ix)–and in the two-way traffic she opens up between southern literary studies and other fields. Yaeger worries about who will read about southern literature outside the field of southern studies; her (hopefully successful) strategy for reinvigorating the field is to bring wide-ranging theoretical expertise–in black feminist studies, in whiteness studies, in body studies–to the table, in order to change the kinds of questions that we can ask about and through southern writing. Her use of Susan Tucker’s Telling Memories Among Southern Women: Domestic Workers and Their Employers in the Segregated South as a touchstone, for instance, leads both to stunning readings of scenes of African American labor in southern writing and to speculations on literature’s role in maintaining or questioning the normative invisibility of such labor. In moments like this, Dirt and Desire enacts a powerful paradigm of creative destruction, teaching us to remake identity categories by attending to what isn’t discussed or debated and has remained until now out of bounds.

What may be most apparent about these books to those interested in postmodernism is the fact that while Kreyling and Yaeger both address contemporary writing, they do so more in terms of continuity than of rupture. For both of these critics, recent literature is best understood in relation to a tradition dating back to the 1930s. One response to this might be to conclude that southern literature really is a backwater, trapped in outmoded paradigms and thereby having nothing to tell us about postmodernity. Yet this would be a hasty conclusion. Michael Bérubé has recently recommended skepticism about our received language for discussing postmodern fiction, in which “we acknowledge that modernist fiction is fragmentary, experimental, and self-reflexive, but that postmodern fiction is, um, well, more so” (B4). In place of this increasingly untenable distinction, he proposes that we turn from formal categories to historical ones–in particular, the striking globalization of fiction in the second half of the twentieth century (B5). Bérubé’s advice is well taken, although it may be that globalization alone does not exhaust the ways that we can distinguish what comes after modernism. One other phenomenon that we might note is a kind of internal globalization, in which the stable canon of modernism that everyone is expected to know gives way to multiple canons with specialist readerships or constituencies. It’s possible to argue that the creation of southern fiction as a distinct category initiated this phenomenon. If this is so, then thinking about southern literature becomes crucial to understanding how the advent of postmodernity transforms the production and consumption of literature and other cultural artifacts.

For one thing, we might note that southern fiction comes into being as a distinct category during the Depression, when the South becomes visible as a particularly symptomatic site of national economic transformation; and that it achieves its highest cultural prominence in the 1950s, when its stereotypical “backwardness” suddenly provides enormous cultural cachet amidst concerns about suburbanization and national homogenization. John Aldridge was not the only critic in the postwar period to contend that “the South…, aside from certain ailing portions of the moral universe of New England, happens to be the only section of the country left where… there is still a living tradition and a usable myth” (143). Several decades later, Irving Howe underscored the connection between regional and ethnic difference, and located both as responses to perceived cultural homogenization, when he argued that southern fiction, like Jewish fiction, came to prominence at mid-century as the representative of a “subculture [which] finds its voice and its passion at exactly the moment that it approaches disintegration” (586). At the beginning of the twenty-first century, meanwhile, the answer to Patricia Yaeger’s inquiry into “the diminished place of the South in the academic marketplace” (250) may be that the South is simply no longer different enough. As Yaeger herself notes, “the horrors of racism have migrated,” with the result that “everywhere is now the South” (251). Nor is it simply the case that the entire US now resembles its own erstwhile stereotype of a politically intransigent South, although this is true (and not just as far as racism is concerned–the execution record that once would have qualified George W. Bush as a classic example of the southern grotesque, for instance, now makes him into presidential material). Perhaps more importantly, the South has become more like the rest of the nation, with the Sunbelt now vying with the Pacific Rim for the country’s economic, social, and political leadership. As a result of these changes, we now look elsewhere for cultural difference. As we seek to write the history of our recent past, however, southern fiction’s rise and fall may have much to tell us about the conditions that have motivated a general interest in cultural difference–and how to think about these conditions without sacrificing the specificity of particular traditions. For this reason, those of us who don’t consider ourselves southernists have much to gain from turning to America’s first multicultural literature.

Notes

1. Joshua Esty has recently proposed that we replace the modern/postmodern divide with a tripartite division in which the first and final thirds of the twentieth century share similar anxieties about the international dispersal of people and capital, and thus have more in common with each other than either does with a middle third marked by the relative power and stability of the nation-state. Within this scheme, the publications of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and the Agrarian manifesto I’ll Take My Stand in, respectively, 1929 and 1930 might be seen to bring southern literary nationalism into being as a response to the transnational (and regionally imperialist) modernism of the twenties.

2. For another brilliant revisionary account of the southern grotesque that bears affinities to Yaeger’s, see Adams.

Works Cited

• Adams, Rachel. “‘A Mixture of Delicious and Freak’: The Queer Fiction of Carson McCullers.” American Literature 71.3 (1999): 551-583.
• Aldridge, John. In Search of Heresy: American Literature in an Age of Conformity. New York: McGraw, 1956.
• Bérubé, Michael. “Teaching Postmodern Fiction Without Being Sure That the Genre Exists.” The Chronicle of Higher Education 19 May 2000: B4-B5.
• Esty, Joshua D. “National Objects: Keynesian Economics and Modernist Culture in England.” Modernism/Modernity 7.1 (2000): 1-24.
• Fuss, Diana. Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference. New York: Routledge, 1990.
• Howe, Irving. World of Our Fathers. New York: Harcourt, 1976.
• Tucker, Susan. Telling Memories Among Southern Women: Domestic Workers and Their Employers in the Segregated South. New York: Schocken, 1988.

Jason B. Jones

Department of English
Emory University
jbjones@emory.edu

Review of: Alenka Zupancic, Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan. New York: Verso, 2000.

The point of Lacan’s identification of the Real with the impossible is not simply that the Real is some Thing that is impossible to happen. On the contrary, the whole point of the Lacanian concept of the Real is that the impossible happens. This is what is so traumatic, disturbing, shattering–or funny–about the Real. The Real happens precisely as the impossible. (“Signs”)

Though they appear nowhere in her splendid first book, Ethics of the Real, these sentences neatly telescope the rigor, clarity, and good humor characteristic of Alenka Zupancic’s work.¹ These traits will not surprise attentive readers of Slavoj Zizek’s collection, Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Lacan, But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock, or the two volumes in the SIC series from Duke University Press, Gaze and Voice as Love Objects and Cogito and the Unconscious, all of which feature significant contributions by Zupancic. Beyond the obvious attraction for admirers of the particular Ljubljanian conjunction of philosophy, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and pop culture, Ethics of the Real merits the serious attention of anyone interested in one of the great ethical crises of our time: Why is nothing but fundamentalism deemed worth dying for any longer?

Ethics of the Real satisfies three quite disparate interests. First, it offers a fascinating Lacanian account of causality and freedom in the ethical domain. In this sense, it belongs in the tradition of works such as Joan Copjec’s Read My Desire and Charles Shepherdson’s Vital Signs. Second, Zupancic advances stimulating and novel readings of Laclos’s Les liaisons dangereuses, Molière’s Don Juan, Sophocles’s Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus, and Claudel’s The Hostage. Zupancic’s reading of The Hostage is insightful in its own right; it should have the additional merit of attracting the attention of American scholars to Lacan’s extensive discussion of Claudel’s play in Seminar VIII: Le transfert. Finally, Ethics of the Real is also useful as a guide to two recent trends in Lacanian theory and scholarship: first, the argument that politics and ethics can be understood as a mode of traversing the (social) fantasy; and second, the increased attention to Alain Badiou’s philosophical and political thought.² In this review, I concentrate on Zupancic’s interrogation of causation and her readings of tragedy.

Zupancic begins by quickly mapping the terrain laid out by Lacan in both Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis and “Kant with Sade.” For Lacan, psychoanalytic praxis must refuse any idea of “the good.” Analysis cannot center on the analyst’s conception of the good, because then it would turn into a gratification of the analyst’s narcissism, measuring progress in the treatment by the extent to which the analysand slavishly imitates the analyst’s ego. Then again, the analysis clearly cannot focus on the analysand’s idea of the good, either, because the suffering that drives the analysand to analysis in the first place indicates a disconnect between the analysand’s desire or drive and his or her idea of “the good”–an idea that is bound up with the ego. Finally, the analysis also cannot appeal to cultural ideals of “the good” without turning psychoanalysis into a strictly normative endeavor. Instead, by the end of the Ethics seminar, Lacan proposes that “the only thing one can be guilty of is giving ground relative to one’s desire [cédé sur son désir]” (321; see Dean 33n14 for a discussion of the stakes involved in this translation). This formulation has caused considerable controversy when applied to Antigone, the figure under discussion in the last section of the seminar. Are we to take Antigone as an ethical hero? Moreover, shortly after this seminar, Lacan begins increasingly to emphasize the drive, instead of desire, as the endpoint of analysis. In the later view, desire is understood as a defense against the satisfaction of drive. How can we reconcile these two arguments in a discussion of ethics? Zupancic shows with great clarity that the drive should be understood as the farthest point of desire, as it were, and not as strictly opposed to it. That is, one can only reach the drive by going through desire.

Fine, but where is Kant in all of this? The crucial Kantian point, for Zupancic, is that “ethics demands not only that an action conform with duty, but also that this conformity be the only ‘content’ or ‘motive’ of that action” (14). This is the only way the subject can free herself of pathological contaminants of her will.³ However, as Zupancic points out, this is thoroughly paradoxical: “how can something which is not in itself pathological (i.e., which has nothing to do with the representation of pleasure or pain, the ‘usual’ mode of subjective causality) nevertheless become the cause or drive of a subject’s actions?” (15). Or, more simply, “how can something which, in the subject’s universe, does not qualify as a cause, suddenly become a cause?” (15).

What is the difference in outcome of an act done according to one’s duty and one done exclusively for that duty’s sake? Nothing. There is a perceptible difference however, at the level of form. Zupancic points out that this introduces a pure form: a “form which is no longer the form of anything, of some content or other, yet it is not so much an empty form as a form ‘outside’ content, a form that provides form only for itself” (17). The form itself is “pure” insofar as it is exclusively a surplus. Zupancic connects Kant’s surplus with that famous Lacanian surplusage, the objet a. Although pure form and objet a would appear to be antagonistic (a form vs. an object), Zupancic suggests that such a reading is too hasty. For Kant, the proper drive of the will is “defined precisely in terms of pure form as an absence of any Triebfeder [drive]” (18). Similarly, for Lacan, “desire can be defined precisely as the pure form of demand, as that which remains of demand when all the particular objects (or ‘contents’) that may come to satisfy it are removed. Hence the objet petit a can be understood as a void that has acquired a form” (18). For both Kant and Lacan, there is thus a form of deferred action at work (Zupancic calls it a “temporal ‘in-between’” [19]). In Kant, the absence of motive itself must acquire motive force. For Lacan, likewise, the objet a marks the “that’s not it” coextensive with any object one might attain; it thus becomes the motive for desire to slide to the next potential object.

To understand this temporal ambiguity, Zupancic embarks on a closely-argued investigation of causality, freedom, and determinism. Kant places humans entirely under the laws of causality. It will not do to affirm “psychological” freedom against “biological” or “material” determinism, because one could always adduce psychological causes for one’s actions. Here Zupancic takes, as it were, a left turn: Rather than grounding her discussion of freedom on “Of the Deduction of the Principles of Pure Practical Reason,” she focuses on the “Critical Elucidation of the Analytic of Pure Practical Reason.” In that chapter, she finds a theme dear to any psychoanalytically-inclined reader’s heart: guilt. Guilt, in Zupancic’s reading of Kant, is the very foundation of freedom.

We must be very clear about this “guilt,” however. The essential point is the “fact that we can feel guilty even if we know that in committing a certain deed we were, as Kant puts it, ‘carried along by the stream of natural necessity.’ We can feel guilty even for something which we knew to be ‘beyond our control’” (26). The point here is not that we “really” or “deep-down” wanted to commit the deed that we inescapably committed, nor that we are mistaken about the extent to which events were beyond our control. Instead, the guilt registers our freedom. According to Zupancic:

Where the subject believes herself autonomous, Kant insists on the irreducibility of the Other, a causal order beyond her control. But where the subject becomes aware of her dependence on the Other (such and such laws, inclinations, hidden motive… ) and is ready to give up,… Kant indicates a “crack” in the Other, a crack in which he situates the autonomy and freedom of the subject. (28)

For Zupancic, this is therefore another meeting ground between Kant and Lacan: Kant is, in effect, claiming that “There is no Other of the Other.” Freedom comes because “there is in causal determination a ‘stumbling block’ in the relation between cause and effect” (29). This does not mean of course that we can clap our hands together, rejoice in the gap between cause and effect, and revel in our freedom. Freedom is not characterized by “the arbitrary, or the random as opposed to the lawlike” (33). Instead, freedom is the “point where the subject itself plays an (active) part in lawful, causal necessity” (33, emphasis in original). Zupancic’s argument clarifies the Lacanian proposition that psychoanalysis is neither a mode of determinism nor of performative voluntarism, and that those aren’t even the most interesting or politically efficacious models of subjectivity available.

An excellent example of this “freedom” is, as Zupancic points out, the psychoanalytic idea of the “choice of neurosis” (35). Consider, for example, this description from Freud’s “The Dynamics of Transference” (1912):

It must be understood that each individual, through the combined operation of his innate disposition and the influences brought to bear on him during his early years, has acquired a specific method of his own in his conduct of his erotic life–that is, in the preconditions to falling in love which he lays down, in the instincts he satisfies and the aims he sets himself in the course of it. This produces what might be described as a stereotype plate (or several such), which is constantly repeated–constantly reprinted afresh–in the course of the person’s life. (99-100)

On the one hand, nothing strips the subject of autonomy more than this “stereotype plate.” On the other hand, though, even grammatically Freud indicates that the subject has something at stake here: it is the subject who lays down the preconditions for falling in love, and so forth. Zupancic claims, following Lacan, that this “choice” is in fact “the very condition of possibility of psychoanalysis”–the end of analysis occurs when the subject can take up a new position vis-�-vis her determinants; when she can, in other words, choose a different neurosis (35). Zupancic summarizes the dilemma of freedom nicely:

The subject is forced to confront herself as mere object of the will of the Other, as an instrument in the hands of mechanical or psychological causality. At this point Kant intervenes with his second gesture, which concerns the choice of the Gesinnung [disposition]. This gesture opens the dimension of the subject of freedom. The subject of freedom is indeed the effect of the Other, but not in the sense of being an effect of some cause that exists in the Other. Instead, the subject is the effect of the fact that there is a cause which will never be discovered in the Other; she is the effect of the absence of this cause, the effect of the lack in the Other. (40-41)

I cannot do justice to the complexities of Zupancic’s argument here, but I hope that this brief account demonstrates the advantages of engaging closely with her work. Ethics of the Real is more than a gloss on the canonical Lacanian references to Kant; it so forcefully connects the two thinkers that we are left wondering how, precisely, we got along without Kant in psychoanalysis. Moreover, Zupancic’s argument usefully clarifies the dynamics by which the Lacanian category of the Real can achieve genuine political and social purchase. Even though we “know that ‘God is dead’ (that the Other does not exist)” and “He knows it too” (255), an ethics of the Real could gesture towards a realization of the infinite.

To make these claims clearer, I want briefly to sketch Zupancic’s novel argument about Oedipus. She advances the startling proposition that Oedipus is not guilty of anything, and therein lies his tragedy. Her reading begins with Oedipus’s self-blinding. Oedipus blinds himself after learning that he has, after all his precautions, fulfilled the prophecy that said he would murder his father and marry his mother. The traditional interpretation of Oedipus’s self-inflicted wound is that he thereby acknowledges his guilt and takes up his foretold destiny. However, Sophocles shows us something slightly different when Oedipus appears before the Chorus. Oedipus wails, “A curse upon the shepherd who released me from the cruel fetters of my feet, and saved me from death, and preserved me, doing me no kindness! For if I had died then, I would not have been so great a grief to my friends or to myself” (467). The Chorus extends this argument: “I do not know how I can say that you were well advised; you would have been better dead than living but blind” (467). This sentence refers both to Oedipus’s self-punishment–suicide would clearly be the nobler way out of this situation–and to his past–better to have died as an infant than to live under the misconception as to his parentage. Oedipus rebukes the Chorus, however, crying “Do not try to show me that what has been done was not done for the best” (469).

Zupancic argues that rather than internalizing his guilt, Oedipus identifies with his symptom: “Oedipus does not identify with his destiny, he identifies–and this is not the same thing–with that thing in him which made possible the realization of this destiny: he identifies with his blindness” (179). Oedipus the King thus ends somewhat like an analysis: with the traversal of fantasy, in which the analysand becomes, not the subject of desire, but the subject of the drive. This process is more of an “objectification” than a “subjectification”; that is, the analysand identifies with his or her enjoyment rather than with his or her desire. As Renata Salecl puts it, the logic of the drive is “‘I do not want to do this, but I am nonetheless doing it’”; she further explains that this logic of the drive is opposed to the logic of desire “since the subject does not desire to do something, but nonetheless enjoys doing exactly that” (106). At the end of analysis, the subject comes to identify with the enjoyment that he or she has disavowed for so long. Similarly, Oedipus literalizes his blindness as a way to continue being blind, even after he is confronted with knowledge.

However, it is not enough to say that Oedipus is self-deceiving. Zupancic insists that when Oedipus says “it’s not my fault,” we are convinced (181). She asserts that “guilt, in the sense of symbolic debt, arises when the subject knows that the Other knows” (182-83). This refers not simply to a knowledge of one’s actions. Instead, it is a sort of “‘surplus-knowledge,’ a knowledge to which the desire of the subject is attached. This ‘surplus-knowledge’… is related to the place from which knowledge (of parricide and incest, for example), is enunciated” (185-86). Oedipus’s problem is that his knowledge has been displaced from the beginning. This “rob[s] him of his desire (which alone could have rendered him guilty). In exchange he is given over to someone else, to the ‘social order’ (to the throne) and to Jocasta” (186). He cannot recognize his father. Oedipus’s complaint is thus:

If only I were guilty! If these words suggest a complaint about injustice…, they also suggest something perhaps even more radical. If only I were guilty–but you took from me even that honour, that place in the symbolic (open to me by right)! After all the suffering I have undergone, I am not even guilty (this emphasizes the non-sense of his destiny, not its Sense or Meaning). (195)

To the extent that Oedipus’s destiny is meaningful, it will not be due to the oracle’s prophecy.

While in this argument Oedipus is not guilty of desiring to marry his mother and murder his father, it does not follow that he is not responsible for his destiny. Zupancic also draws attention to Oedipus’s confrontation with the Sphinx, following Lacan’s argument from Seminar XVII: L’envers de la psychanalyse. In this argument, the crucial thing about Oedipus’s solving the riddle isn’t that he somehow divined an unknowable truth, but rather, in answering it “the subject actually gives something–he must give or offer his words; thus he can be taken at his word” (Zupancic 203). The subject’s answer thus produces an irrevocable truth that was in no way determined in advance. The result is the curious psychoanalytic perspective on ethics and freedom: “Meaning is never determined in advance; in order to find its determination and be ‘fixed,’ an act of the subject is required” (210); or, to put it another way, Oedipus “installs the Other (the symbolic order) while simultaneously demonstrating that the Other ‘doesn’t exist’” (211).

Ethics of the Real is an arresting book, one that amply repays the attention it exacts. As a guide to Lacanian arguments about ethics, Zupancic’s book serves the dual purposes of explication and polemic, while sacrificing neither. Her readings, both of Kant and Lacan on the one hand, and of literary works on the other, are provocative and insightful. The result is a book about the “ethics of the real” that takes both ethics and the real seriously.

Notes

1. The quoted passage is from “Signs and Lovers,” Zupancic’s presentation at the Affiliated Psychoanalytic Workgroups Conference at Emory in May. The paper is forthcoming in ERR, the journal of APW.

2. The argument that politics should amount to a sort of traversing of the fantasy has been most ably articulated by Zizek in many places, most recently in The Ticklish Subject 247-399. On Badiou, also see Ticklish 128-67; additionally, the Umbr(a) issue featuring Badiou is an excellent introduction to his work (in addition to the four essays by Badiou, see Gillespie “Subtractive” and “Hegel”; Fink).

3. Keeping in mind here the Kantian, and not psychoanalytic, definition of pathological: the pathological is anything that compels our actions. It is thus the field of normality itself, and not opposed to the normal.

Works Cited

• Dean, Tim. Beyond Sexuality. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000.
• Fink, Bruce. “Alain Badiou.” Umbr(a) 1 (1996): 11-12.
• Freud, Sigmund. “The Dynamics of Transference.” 1912. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. and trans. James Strachey. Vol. 12. London: Hogarth, 1953-74. 97-108. 24 vols.
• Gillespie, Sam. “Hegel Unsutured: An Addendum to Badiou.” Umbr(a) 1 (1996): 57-70.
• —. “Subtractive.” Umbr(a) 1 (1996): 7-10.
• Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Dennis Porter. New York: Norton, 1992.
• Salecl, Renata. “The Satisfaction of Drives.” Umbr(a) 1 (1997): 105-110.
• Sophocles. “Oedipus Tyrranus.” In Sophocles I: Ajax, Electra, Oedipus Tyrranus. Ed. and trans. Hugh Lloyd-Jones. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1994. 323-483.
• Zizek, Slavoj. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. New York: Verso, 1999.
• Zupancic, Alenka. Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan. New York: Verso, 2000.
• —. “Signs and Lovers.” ERR 3 (Forthcoming): manuscript. Paper delivered at “Reading: The Second Annual Conference of Affiliated Psychoanalytic Workgroups.” Emory University, Atlanta, GA. 19-21 May 2000.

Richard Kaye

Department of English
Hunter College, CUNY
RKaye43645@aol.com

Review of: Susan Bordo, The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Private. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999.

When former Republican senator and one-time presidential aspirant Robert Dole appeared on television last year extolling the benefits of the drug Viagra, a fundamental module in the imagery of American masculinity would seem to have been dislodged. To be sure, Dole never uttered the word “impotence,” preferring, instead, to invoke a clinical demurral, “E.D.”–Erectile Disfunction–but there, nonetheless, was the surreal specter of an icon of American conservatism speaking what had hitherto been unspeakable amongst the golf-and-martini set. The austere setting in which Dole appeared (a senatorial library, perhaps) reminded viewers that this particular E.D. sufferer was speaking from a place in the culture far removed from that of most Americans. Yet in some ways Dole was the ideal poster guy for breaking the silence on E.D. Although the syndrome affects men of all ages, men of Dole’s generation–veterans of World War II, men who had heroically sacrificed their bodies in battle–have been famously reluctant to discuss their physical frailties.

Dole’s hand injury from an explosion during World War II had been powerfully if somewhat quietly deployed throughout his campaign against Bill Clinton. It was, of course, the noncombatant Clinton who would prove the better campaigner, despite a soft body given over to fast food; the generational gulf between silent virility before Fascism and weak child of the Sixties was registered during the presidential race. Clearly, it takes a Republican to achieve what no mere Democrat can accomplish: arguably Dole’s appearance in a television ad for Viagra accomplished on the domestic front what Nixon’s 1972 visit to China did for international diplomacy–helping to end, as it were, another Cold War.

At the moment, the body of the American male is being subjected to more scrutiny than ever before as an ever-wider array of new images of the male physique permeates the culture. Television shows like Ally McBeal and The View depict fictional and real-life women giddily discussing male performance and penis size, magazines devoted to male fitness and health break circulation records, and advertisers become bolder and bolder in purveying hardened übermenschen. Adolescent boys–the newest focus for worried psychologists and social workers, according to The New York Times Magazine–fret over the relative scrawniness of their physiques, worrying over ab definition and penis size much as young women worry over breast size and fat. In a democracy, evidently, everyone gets to be anxiety-ridden about his or her physique.

The utopia of androgynous bodies that the counterculture welcomed in the 1960s has been supplanted by an androgyny of a fierce corporate culture, so that women must now have hard physiques to arm themselves in the jungle of business culture and males are encouraged to eliminate wrinkles and invest in Propecia, lest they be considered too old for the youth-dominated world of computer-era innovation. The writer Susan Faludi has turned from the backlash against feminism to the backlash against the American male. Her latest book, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, excerpted as a cover story in Newsweek, has been greeted as a startling turnaround for a feminist–a laudatory truce in the war between the sexes. It is a key point of Faludi’s book that the average American guy has been forced to develop “womanly” skills such as communication–not by his female mate, but by corporate culture. All of this concern for the fragility of American men has fomented its own backlash. In a recent cover essay in The Times Literary Supplement, the conservative political scientist Harvey Mansfield decried the low repute into which “manliness has fallen in our culture” (14).

Meanwhile, Masculinity Studies is experiencing a boom. In the latest issue of American Quarterly, Bryce Traister writes of “the new phallocriticism in American literary studies” and declares that “judging from the sheer number of titles published, papers solicited, and panels presented in the last ten years,” it would appear that “masculinity studies has emerged as a discipline unto itself. Masculinity, one might say without irony, is everywhere” (289). According to Traister, male critics, male writers, male characters, male perspective–all of them are being rapidly restored to “the center of academic cultural criticism” by a renaissance at once informed by and defensively responding to feminist criticism (and, to a lesser degree, queer studies). American masculinity studies, which Traister labels “heteromasculinity studies,” is, he says, “academic Viagra” that has invigorated more than a few disciplines, bringing “the hitherto ‘normal’ into closer historical proximity with its previously repudiated others: gays, racial and ethnic others, [and] women” (292). Once upon a time, John Updike could declare that “inhabiting a male body is like having a bank account, so long as it’s okay one does not think about it,” since “to inhabit a male body is to be somewhat detached from it,” but those days obviously have gone the way the three-piece suit and the fedora (519).¹

In The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Private, Susan Bordo aims to make sense of the sudden obsession with masculinity by concentrating on the American male’s bodily incarnations; she navigates the shifting terrain of guy imagery as it alters almost daily. She registers a sea change occurring in American life, and like Faludi, she views American men as newly vulnerable–scrutinized, refashioned, victimized–in a Brave New World in which conventional masculinity is forced to submit to brutalizing marketplace ideals. The culture no longer honors traditional codes of manhood, argues Faludi, as corporate-culture values dominate. The veterans of World War II, according to Stiffed, were eager to embrace a manly ideal that revolved around providing rather than dominating, but postwar white-collar employment, especially for defense contractors fat on government largesse, required “organization men” who found themselves confused by what they were managing.

As with Faludi’s analysis, Bordo’s study is far more absorbed in the question of male frailty than male power. In a quaint tack for a feminist critic, Bordo can become almost rhapsodic about the 1940s and 1950s, a period in which men, we are instructed, maintained a certain innocence about their physiques and Hollywood stars like James Stewart and Cary Grant became screen idols without having to bare any flesh. But whereas Faludi the intrepid journalist tackles the social history of American males, skirting a direct discussion of the representation of the male body, Bordo the cultural critic thrives in the world of popular icons, in which men must now care about their bodies with obsessive attention because the culture has become oversaturated with hairless, buff Adonises. (As if to illustrate Bordo’s thesis on the pressures to dangle male icons before a salivating public, Newsweek took the occasion of excerpting Faludi’s book to offer several pages devoted to pictures of hunky males. Running alongside Faludi’s piece were movie and sports stars as well as “unknowns,” among them a full-page head shot of an unshaven model looking bruised–and not just emotionally, as a small, fetching scar on his nose testified.)

Bordo worries over the pressures put on the American man, now required, as women have always been, to accept mass-produced myths. If anorexia continues to bedevil females, as Bordo argued in her previous book, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (1993), today males have “bigorexia” (compulsive body building) and intense insecurities about penis size. The whole culture, Bordo repeatedly demonstrates, has been Hellenized. In her earlier study (a book that already has become a classic work of feminist cultural analysis), Bordo hinted at the relation between idealized female and male forms, seeing a Victorian precedent for current gender divisions in that

The sharp contrast between the female and male form, made possible by the use of corsets and bustles, reflected in symbolic terms, the dualistic division of social life into clearly defined male and female spheres. At the same time, to achieve the specified look, a particular feminine praxis was required–straightlaced, minimal eating, reduced mobility–rendering the female body unfit to perform activities outside its designated sphere. This, in Foucauldian terms, would be the “useful body” corresponding to the aesthetic norm. (181)

Now the ideal male body, transformed into the new century’s Organization Man (who may or may not have to leave the house to participate in Internet Culture) has become feminized aesthetically as gender dualities begin to collapse. Male bodies no longer need be mobile, but they must be thinner, sleeker, more adaptable, and this may be one reason that, according to Bordo, the phallus takes on an added symbolic burden for contemporary American men.

In what may be the most exhaustive exegesis of the cultural manifestations of the penis ever written, Bordo devotes a chapter to how perceptions of the phallus have altered over time. She sees in male anxiety about penis size the analogue to (late-twentieth-century) female discomfort over weight. “The humongous penis, like the idealized female body,” she writes in The Male Body, is a “cultural fantasy,” one that metaphorically turns the penis into a useful tool, more like a dildo than anything made of flesh” (71), and she itemizes the objects to which the fantasy penis is usually compared: “Big Rig. Blowtorch. Bolt. Cockpit. Crank. Crowbar. Destroyer. Dipstick. Drill. Engine. Hammer. Hand tool. Hardware. Hose. Power Tool. Torpedo”–objects that never get soft and always perform (48).

The first third of The Male Body is given over to a detailed inquiry into images of the American male from the 1950s to the present. Bordo examines ad campaigns, paradigmatic Fifties male movie stars such as Marlon Brando and James Dean, and films of the last fifty years. The key cultural markers are A Streetcar Named Desire, Rebel Without a Cause, Father Knows Best, Shampoo, American Gigolo, and My Best Friend’s Wedding. Bordo argues that popular culture, even at its most legitimizing of patriarchal assumptions, is always mediated through individual experience. To drive home her point she offers her own experience as a middle-class, intellectually inclined adolescent, fascinated by the Bad Boys of her youth who modeled themselves on Brando and Dean. In Bordo’s view, the Fifties were never so suffocating that the movie industry could not produce disreputable male matinee idols to entice young women out of their complacent acceptance of domestic virtues. If the social critic Barbara Ehrenreich once focused on the Playboy cult which, she argued, rendered stay-at-home women economically at risk and thus helped usher in the feminist movement, Bordo now sees women like herself as having been galvanized by the reckless glam-boys of Fifties culture (not by Heffner, of course, but by Brando and Dean).

While Heffner was proffering images of men in silk smoking jackets (images that time has cruelly recast as a sort of Straight Camp), women such as Bordo were dreaming of Brando and Paul Newman taking them out of the stultifying world of the prom dance and the sorority tea. One learns much about Bordo’s own experience here–as when she writes about her father, sometimes powerfully, and sometimes, as when she writes about her erotic fantasies, a little embarrassingly. A real strength of Bordo’s study is that its author continually registers the contradictory responses popular culture evokes in her, refusing to have hard or permanent feelings about writers such as Philip Roth, say, who have been excoriated by an early generation of feminist critics but whom Bordo guiltlessly announces had a liberating effect on her cramped, middle-class youth.

The second part of The Male Body explores how gay-male driven icons have slipped into mainstream culture: the strapping males in Calvin Klein ads, for example, who wink at gay men with one eye while wooing self-identified straight guys and their girlfriends and spouses. An epiphany that Klein had in 1975 at a gay disco–in which the designer realized that men could be portrayed as “gods”–becomes a key epoch-changing transition for Bordo. The image of shirtless young men with hardened torsos was swiftly disseminated throughout the world, and a once-underground gay ideal overnight became, mutatis mutandis, everyone’s ideal. Much of Bordo’s thinking here has antecedents in the work of queer cultural critics such as Dennis Altman, Michael Bronski, Richard Dyer, and Daniel Harris, who have charted the ways in which American culture has become “homosexualized,” as Altman and Bronski argued, or in which gay experience has become dissipated, as Harris polemically contends in The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture. For Harris, the successful realization of gay crossover dreams of entering “straight” culture is a sad dilution of a pure homosexual culture that flourished before corporate America discovered the value of the gay (male) dollar. Unlike Harris, Bordo is not troubled by the disappearance of a gay underground or its hijacking by the so-called mainstream. In recent movies such as My Best Friend’s Wedding and The Object of My Affection, for example, Bordo cheerfully welcomes what she characterizes as yet another sea-change: the homosexual male depicted as an idealized urban cosmopolitan, the openly gay actor Rupert Everett revamping the playful charisma of the sexually ambiguous Cary Grant, only now as an explicitly gay-male charmer.

Bordo might have acknowledged more of these queer critical predecessors, some of whom have been writing for decades on the subject of gay imagery and its emergence into and accommodation by “straight” culture that she tackles here. She also might have updated her analysis of advertising images to include phenomena such as the more recent versions of the so-called “gay vague” trend in advertising, in which ads deliberately, coyly court gay consumers without alienating their straight constituency. First introduced in Paco Rabane cologne advertisements in the early 1980s, these ads typically depicted a semi-nude man lying in bed as he talked on the phone to a genderless lover. Today, these ads have been revamped for what is arguably the more conservative millennium, encompassing Ikea furniture ad campaigns in which (evidently) gay male lovers worry over home furnishings. The homosexual as fast-lane narcissist popularized by Calvin Klein morphs into a countervailing picture of gay domestic bliss. In Bordo’s scheme, urban gay males forever function as libertine sensualists delivering good news (sex, drugs, youth, beauty) to a too straight-laced straight culture. But nowadays it’s so-called “straight” culture that seems eager to deliver the good news (marriage, fidelity, home ownership) to urban gay men.

The last third of The Male Body splits off from the first two-thirds of Bordo’s book, as it explores the subject of sexual harassment, the Clinton White House scandals, and the question of whether a sexual harasser is a “sex fiend.” (Bordo thinks not.) What this last portion of Bordo’s work has to do with the matter of male bodies, as opposed to male behavior, is never clear, and there is a curiously long detour of a discussion of the two film versions of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. It is, however, in some ways the most intelligent, coherent section of The Male Body, and that which relies least on Bordo’s personal experience. Bordo can be a subtle and engaging critic of popular images, and this latest book represents the intelligent dissemination to a wider reading public of academic ideas that have been circulating in fields such as Gender Studies, Cultural Studies, and Queer Theory for nearly a decade. It’s a pity, really, that even as the media has taken a hostile stance against innovative academic fields, invariably seeing them as abstruse if not wacky, books such as The Male Body do not receive wider attention. Bordo picks and chooses among advanced thinking in fields such as Gender Studies at the same time that she distills her own evocative view of culture as richly textured, ideologically complex and–this is key to her whole approach–fun.

Still, despite the good-humored, Life-is-a-Wonderful-Seminar brio with which Bordo pursues her theme, there are several problems with The Male Body, the first of which is related to Bordo’s first-person responsiveness to her material as well as to something that might be called History. The turn toward the autobiographical voice in cultural critique has had salutary results, reminding readers that experience is always arbitrated by subjective selves. It has also had some tedious effects. The confessional first-person singular can be a complex, endlessly changing one, but the trouble with the personal voice Bordo assumes here is that it’s also a fairly familiar one. The narrative here in some ways has its own prefabricated structure: the Bad, Intelligent Girl Caught in Bad Times–namely, the Fifties–comes to realize that pop cultural icons allow for freedom, a respite from the dreariness of Fifties culture. Bordo’s account has by now become the conventional wisdom. So much personal anecdote can be engaging, but it also leaves out a more deeply-grained historical story. The problem with the Cosmopolitan Magazine voice and its attendant insights is that if it personalizes the political, it also tends to privatize history, so that one is never sure of the larger implications of Bordo’s self-chronicling. “We’re all earthlings,” Bordo writes breathlessly at one point, “desperate for love, demolished by rejection” (87). One need not be a heartless non-Earthling to wonder how this kind of statement not only flattens out differences but simplifies experience.

History is precisely what gets short shrift in Bordo’s book, and in its place one finds a series of survey gatherers, professional psychologists, and journalistic pundits whom Bordo quotes each time she requires evidentiary backing for some social or cultural phenomenon. One moment she claims that “pop psychologists are dead wrong” (35), the next she quotes them approvingly (“I was struck by Psychology Today‘s finding that women who rate themselves as highly attractive were more concerned about penis size than other women” [82]). Elsewhere, she breezily quotes Eileen Palace, director of Tulane University’s Center for Sexual Health, on Viagra and other “histological problems having psychological bases” (63). Bordo never considers that the institutionalized procedures of psychological counseling and interviewing might themselves be problematic and worth questioning, or that survey gathering is a highly mediated, pseudoscientific procedure that invariably reveals less about inherent truth than about what people like to tell interviewers.

One of the best features of The Male Body is Bordo’s critique of evolutionary psychologists (“Darwinian fundamentalists” in Stephen Jay Gould’s phrase) who have attempted to see the “male personality” and the imagery associated with it as related to transhistorical, nature-imbedded “drives.” But Bordo wants to have it both ways, wryly (and acutely) critiquing the “truths” of evolutionary psychology when it suits her larger thesis, but falling back on the latest biological studies and pop psychology’s insights when it suits other rhetorical aims. The real limitation is in a system of knowledge that reduces complex selves to a series of attitudes recorded in surveys and accounts by journalists. Movies and books, images and reputations, all tend to get flattened out into a rhetoric of factoids, anecdotes, and social-science data. One moment Bordo is a merciless critic of the universalizing assumptions of evolutionary psychologists, the next she is surrendering to the deeper assumptions informing their endeavors. “Perhaps, then, we should wait a bit longer, do a few more studies, before we come to any biological conclusions about women’s failure to get aroused by naked pictures,” Bordo asserts at one point, seemingly unaware that conclusive biological “truths” about attraction form a system of knowledge that creates “problems” as it inevitably claims to “solve” them conclusively (178).

By the time we discover Bordo mischaracterizing the late literary critic Charles Bernheimer (whose specialty was nineteenth-century French fiction) as a “social theorist,” we can already intuit Bordo’s preference for social theory over any other form of knowledge (43). (I suspect Bernheimer would have found Madame Bovary to be a much more reliable guide to nineteenth-century gender relations than the work of any imaginary contemporary survey-gatherer.) There’s a curious methodological tic animating The Male Body, in which “reactions” are forever being tracked by social scientists or pop psychologists only to be sorted out by the savvy cultural critic, who is herself always eager to draw on her own personal experience as a way of clinching a point. One comes to yearn for a more nuanced conception of the pop-culture consuming self, an awareness of that part of the self that eludes data-creating social scientists.

Even as it traces the history of images of the male physique, The Male Body reveals some serious historical lacunae. First, Bordo overstates the novelty of the cultural phenomenon she tracks, providing a theory of erotic reaction over time that can be breathtaking in its reductionism. “In 1998, we look at the frontal bulges of fashion models clad in clinging jersey briefs and think: Sex. From the early Renaissance to the eighteenth century, it was just the opposite” (26). Recent research by scholars such as Michael Rocke, James Saslow, and Richard Rambuss has questioned precisely this conclusion about early-modern notions of the erotic. Saslow has suggested that many of the paintings of Renaissance artists were received erotically by contemporary viewers. Rambuss, examining some intensely sensual Metaphysical Poetry with putatively theological themes, argues that we need to rethink our notion of what constitutes religious experience if we believe that in the past it invariably was segregated from sexual experience. Bordo also might have more than cursorily discussed what actually took place in the eighteenth-century, that watershed era according to her timeline, so as to better contextualize the uniqueness of the male-as-spectacle phenomenon she takes as her theme. As the art historian Abigail Solomon-Godeau demonstrates in Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation (1997), the male nude became an object of display in French sculpture and painting beginning in the late-eighteenth century, dominating French art for nearly half a century until it was eclipsed by the female nude. Solomon-Godeau traces a widespread taste on the part of male critics for feminized, passive male bodies, whose languishing, disempowered torsos appeared alongside martial, virile heroes. (Just as today, the Marlboro Man continues to appear in the same magazines that might run a Calvin Klein androgyne.)

In terms of the images it produces, popular culture is never quite as ideologically univocal as Bordo ends up suggesting. Decade-itis, which afflicts so many cultural historians, tends to flatten out the contradictory nature of a given period. At the same time, Bordo moves from 1950s culture to 1990s with the speed of someone turning the dial on a radio, skirting at least two decades in the representation of the male body, so that one might be forgiven for experiencing a certain cultural whiplash. She has little to say about the masculine images of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, no doubt because the plot she traces here is one in which the male body keeps getting harder and more muscular. That leaves out all of the androgynous, narcissistic, neo-Romantic princes of pop culture such as David Bowie and Jim Morrison (both unmentioned by Bordo), whose scrawny, unkempt, ghostly pale bodies offered counter representations of masculine beauty, arising from too many drugs, cigarettes, and late-night jam sessions. There is a world of difference between those petulant, messy narcissists and today’s health-obsessed gym guys. The former offered an aura of bisexual, death-courting glamour that the rock-music industry to this day retains, while the latter suggests a frenetic fear of mortality. As Bordo must realize, it is the 1960s rock star that paved the way for Klein’s glossy imagery of androgynous princes. (They may even have indirectly helped in the formation of a recent type that Bordo, glancingly, finds appealing, the ineffectual-but-desirable Jewish males signaled by Ken Olin’s Michael Steadman of television’s thirtysomething or Jerry Seinfeld’s character on Seinfeld.)

Another problem shadowing The Male Body is Bordo’s too schematic sense of gay cultural history–in her telling, a melodrama in which homosexual men serve largely as cultural apparatchiks whose svelte, feminized physical ideals screw up the culture’s gender fixities. “Gay Men’s Revenge” is the title of Bordo’s chapter on the phenomenon whereby gay men find themselves appearing “positively” in current cinema, spoofing heterosexual norms, but that nifty rubric tends to overstate the so-called subversiveness of Hollywood films like My Best Friend’s Wedding. The idea of an “underground” that successfully presses its resentments onto an oppressive overculture defined as “mainstream” is appealing for its ironies, since in this scenario gay men, so despised by social conservatives, suddenly emerge as the unlikely deliverers of Madison Avenue. Bordo seems to see gay men, one and all, as cultural militants who again and again emerge from their subcultural trenches to lob hand grenades at the Official Culture. It’s a pleasing image, but it fails to gauge the growing tensions within gay culture itself–namely, between the radical cultural left represented by groups such as Queer Nation and the conservative, assimilationist gay men whose representatives (Andrew Sullivan, Bruce Bawer) have proven so popular as “gay spokesmen” with the television media. In this chapter, one senses that Bordo has no particular interest in gay male culture per se, but only in how the cultural values of certain urban gay men have helped to topple heterosexual paradigms and thus have paved the way for male-female rapprochement.

Bordo’s understanding of gay men’s relation to popular film and to the culture more generally is similarly fraught and as earnestly positivist in its sense that gay men have proven themselves victorious in the Culture Wars. If one needs to speak of “gay male revenge” to describe (some) gay men’s retaliatory relation to mainstream culture, one might go a bit further than looking at recent films with mega-stars like Rupert Everett. These films are, after all, the products of Hollywood production- and profit-requirements. For a politically freighted cultural critique of heterosexual courtship norms in film–to speak only of the limited area in which Bordo has a keen interest–one might look towards the whole queer independent film movement of the 1990s, in which gay men and women moved beyond the tired pressures to produce exemplary heroes and heroines and instead delighted in offering up a variety of filmic counter myths. The new Queer cinema as exemplified by films such as Swoon, Poison, Tongues Untied, Go Fish, The Life and Times, and High Art, has produced its own set of Bad Girls and Bad Boys. For all her abiding absorption in the most up-to-date products of pop culture, Bordo can be rather square in her tastes, sticking to the latest offerings at the local Cineplex and never making her way into the cultural nooks and crannies that one associates with much recent (and largely urban) Queer culture.

What Bordo does value in large part are imaginative reconsiderations of classic Hollywood narratives and cultural idées fixes, although for her these often take the form of movies that offer socially positive plot lines and appealing “role models.” Thus there’s a note of pop-cultural triumphalism in Bordo’s chapter on recent idealized gay men in Hollywood movies, as if a La Cage Aux Folles or a My Best Friend’s Wedding could trump the effects of a film like Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs. Bordo is so intent on endorsing the allegedly “subversive” value of recent popular culture (no doubt because she wishes to bury the image of the feminist critic as humorless puritan) that she downplays the contradictory messages that the culture telegraphs about gay men. The “specter of effeminacy” that she correctly detects in 1950s films such as Tea and Sympathy endures today, more insidiously than anything the 1950s produced, as in The Silence of the Lambs. The pop cultural landscape is far more volatile, contradictory, and conflicted than Bordo allows. Today, a The Silence of the Lambs would still make a killing at the box-office, pull in a few Academy Awards, and garner serious critical plaudits, but it would have to compete with the sweetly effete (arguably “effeminate”) dandy bachelors of television sitcoms like Frasier or the overt gay guys on Will and Grace, whose power as icons may be greater than Demme’s cross-dressing psychopaths in that they reach much larger audiences and appear on TV several times a week.

Although when reporting on her own experience Bordo can be subtly split in reacting to pop images, she continually forgets that her fellow consumers of pop culture are more than self-identified sexual and sociological entities, and that popular culture functions across demographic groups, and at even a deeper level than Bordo allows. Thus, when Bordo notes that many of her female college students started to “sweat” the moment she shows them a sexy Calvin Klein ad (of a male), one sees the problem with a critical approach that borrows its methodology as well as its wisdom from the tactics of consumer-product testing (170). Presented with the case of a classroom full of young women declaring their attraction to an advertisement, a whole range of questions should come to mind to a critic as theoretically savvy as Bordo: Does the observation that these women “sweat” (by which Bordo presumably means that her female students vocally declared their attraction to the fellow in the ad) indicate that these women were eager to declare a heterosexual identity? What do the comments in this staged scenario indicate beyond what students find comfortable declaring in a classroom setting? Were there any lesbian-identified students in Bordo’s class and if so, how did they respond to those pectorals?

Clearly, Bordo recounts this story because she is pleased that today’s female students, unlike her generation of women boxed into those cramped 1950s, are able to speak publicly of their attraction to a Calvin Klein hunk. But a more demanding cultural critic would have gone further in looking at this staged sweat-fest. Elsewhere Bordo breezily and approvingly cites Foucault, but here she seems unaware of what Foucault was so intent on accentuating in The History of Sexuality: the complex relation between vocalized, explicit self-representation, through a language of “sexual attraction,” and a larger discourse of sexuality in which desires are not and perhaps cannot be articulated. Specifically, Bordo seems surprisingly unaware of the power she wields in such a circumstance. A young woman sitting in a classroom in the 1950s would not have been pressured to “articulate” in verbal terms an attraction to that Calvin Klein ad. For many of us, that is more liberating than a classroom of co-eds ready to sweat with Pavlovian exuberance before an approving professor.

The Male Body is animated by an unacknowledged paradox that troubles the book throughout: Bordo is drawn to the Brandos and Deans of her youth but repelled by the social implications for heterosexual women of the homoerotic bonds these men seem to articulate–namely that women are dispensable. Always with these matinee idols, women function as the civilizing impediments to an all-male idyll. This self-conflicted relation to the famously homoerotic dimension in American popular culture, from buddy films to fraternity rushes, may explain why Bordo’s ideal gay man is the suave Rupert Everett–wryly articulate, debonairly unthreatening, British. Bordo seems unaware, as well, of the subtle class and racial biases inherent in admiring Everett over, say, the cross-dressing, badmouthed basketball star Dennis Rodman (an appealing mischief-maker in the recent history of the American sportsman’s body and a figure who goes unmentioned by Bordo).

History so thoroughly personalized tends to have the parameters and feel of an airless diorama, and finally, the images presented here seem to float too free from their determinants. Whereas Unbearable Weight was driven by a searching, abiding concern with the actualities of a genuine and sometimes deadly social problem (namely adolescent women’s distorted self-conception of their bodies), it is not always clear what the larger pressing concern addressed by The Male Body might be. In her final pages, Bordo offers thoughtful remarks on the culture of high-school and college male athletes, who are confronted with the paradox of having to act savagely on the playing field and then civilly in their gender-sensitive classes. Nonetheless, The Male Body never demonstrates compelling connections between the popular culture it studies (all those buff guy bodies) and an urgent social problem (the allegedly widespread male insecurity and confusion), the kind of correlation that made Unbearable Weight, haunted as it was with women’s morbidly distorted self-images, such an important work. As Bordo seems to recognize, there is only a limited analogy to be forged between anorexia and bulimia as experienced by women and the body-health craze of American males. No one, it needs to be said, ever died of penis-size envy or erectile dysfunction.

Note

1. One of the best multidisciplinary texts devoted to Masculinity Studies remains Constructing Masculinity, edited by Maurice Berger, Brian Wallis, and Simon Watson (New York: Routledge, 1985).

Works Cited

• Altman, Dennis. The Homsexualization of America, The Americanization of the Homosexual. New York: St. Martin’s, 1981.
• Bordo, Susan. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993.
• Bronski, Michael. Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility. Boston: South End Press, 1984.
• Dyer, Richard. Images: Essays on Representations. London: Routledge, 1993.
• Ehrenreich, Barbara. The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment. New York: Doubleday, 1983.
• Faludi, Susan. Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Male. New York: William Morrow, 1999.
• Harris, Daniel. The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture. New York: Hyperion, 1997.
• Mansfield, Harvey. “The Partial Eclipse of Manliness.” The Times Literary Supplement 17 Jul. 1998: 14-16.
• Rambuss, Richard. Closet Devotions. Durham: Duke UP, 1999.
• Saslow, James. Pictures and Passions: A History of Homosexuality in the Visual Arts. New York: Viking, 2000.
• Solomon-Godeau, Abigail. Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1997
• Traister, Bryce. “Academic Viagra: The Rise of American Masculinity Studies,” American Quarterly 52.2 (Jun. 2000): 274-304.
• Updike, John. “The Disposable Rocket,” Michigan Quarterly Review 32.4 (Fall 1993): 517-520.

Terry Harpold and Kavita Philip

Department of English
University of Florida
tharpold@english.ufl.edu

Just So Stories

Three hundred million souls,… swarming on the body of India, like so many worms on a rotten, stinking carcase,–this is the picture concerning us, which naturally presents itself to the English official!

 

–Swami Vivekananda, East and West (1901)¹

The central event of the 20th century is the overthrow of matter. In technology, economics, and the politics of nations, wealth–in the form of physical resources–has been losing value and significance. The powers of mind are everywhere ascendant over the brute force of things.

 

–Esther Dyson, George Gilder, George Keyworth, and Alvin Toffler, “Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age” (1994)²

Nineteenth-century Indian social reformer Swami Vivekananda’s choice of metaphor for his fellow subjects–teeming, disease-bearing maggots–reflects the horrified fascination for the native he perceived in the colonial gaze. Faced with the task of figuring the colonized Other, western social and ethnographic discourses of the period dwell, with symptomatic insistence, on a semiotic of grotesque and infectious bodies. A fundamental challenge to the integrity of the European psyche appears to have been: how could the colonizing subject imagine the radical alterity of the native without introjecting its forms, that is, without being seduced or infected by the traits of its difference? Christopher Herbert’s history of nineteenth-century ethnography links its strategies for narrativizing the primitive to Methodist founder John Wesley’s fantastical theology of sin–both, Herbert observes, were shaped by the violent desire for and the abomination of that which seemed to be beyond representation. The tropologies of colonial discourse, he writes, played against and within a field of forces “prior and alien to and implicitly destructive of symbolic order” (Herbert, 31).

The spectacular appropriation of technoscientific modernity by the postcolonial global citizen appears at first glance to have consigned images of the filthy and irredeemable autochthon to the discarded lapses of history.³ In place of insistence on an unbreachable ontological difference between peoples, narratives of twentieth- and twenty-first-century informational globalization announce the imminent arrival of an all-inclusive global community.⁴ Unlimited access to data, the unfettered movement of capital and labor, and liberal-democratic freedoms of speech and the marketplace will ensure–the proponents of this narrative claim–that all human beings may become subjects of the new civil information society. This happy narrative presumes a historical rupture with the psychic and political-economic orders of the Ages of Exploration and Colonialism, and celebrates the creation of a new ethnographic field in which to anchor the technological subject of our time. It openly acknowledges faults of distribution and access within the current state of the global network, but only as engineering problems–“bugs”–which will one day be corrected by technical mastery and/or entrepreneurial initiative.⁵

Euphoric claims of an emerging universal network are belied by statistics detailing the vast numbers of unwired global citizens, state and corporate control of network content, and gendered, raced, and class-bound disparities in access. Evangelists of the informational order predict a systematic rectification of these shortcomings; opponents of globalization worry that only those shortcomings which impede the machinery and flow of capital (or which are irrelevant to its dominions) will be eliminated. Recent cultural criticism of informational globalization has noted that global communicational and economic networks may be (depending on the analyst’s theoretical and political position) homogenizing and/or particularizing, totalizing and/or fracturing, radically novel and/or predictably repetitive.⁶

Rather than debate content-based significations of the cross-cultural encounter entailed in such understandings, we wish to step back from such formulations and ask why encounters with the cultural and technoscientific Other are structured in particular ways. We propose that the faults which fascinate enthusiast and opponent alike, far from being merely technical or developmental blockages, are, rather, constitutive elements of an imaginary which intensifies and refigures political-economic differentials along a familiar axis: that of civilization and savagery, cleanliness and filth, health and disease. Both utopian and dystopian dreams of techno-globalization attempt to govern a resistant material kernel, in relation to which are articulated anxieties and longings elicited by the permeability of human-natural-technological boundaries. Cybercultural narratives of desire for subjection to and fusion with the machinic are inseparable from the early- and late-modern subject’s fascination with filth–that is, with matter not susceptible to technological governance. This is precisely the matter that has proved vexing to colonial and post-colonial discourses of identity and alterity, and that continues to inflect the claims of popular cyberculture. The authors of the 1994 “Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age”–all prominent American apologists for the New Economy–proclaim that the landmark achievement of the twentieth century has been “the overthrow of matter” and the ascendency of “the powers of mind” over “the brute force of things.” The triumphalist tenor of this claim is shockingly (albeit predictably) inattentive to the historical association of the categories of mind and brute matter with raced and gendered identities, and to the ways in which applications of those categories have propped up many of the most disastrous political practices of the modern era: that inattention is, we think, a symptomatic trace of familiar conceptual strategies.

To claim that the content or aim of domination has simply remained the same across six centuries and enormous technological change would, of course, be naïve. We instead propose a fantasmatic homology, oriented around a structural constant of the technological field. Our method is coextensive with Slavoj Zizek’s, when he argues that a technique of formal decipherment is properly the domain of Marxist-Freudian critique:

There is a fundamental homology between the interpretative procedure of Marx and Freud…. In both cases the point is to avoid the properly fetishistic fascination of the “content” supposedly hidden behind the form: the “secret” to be unveiled through analysis is not the content hidden by the form (the form of commodities, the form of dreams) but, on the contrary, the “secret” of this form itself. (Sublime Object 11)

The “secret” of the forms of informational globalization and colonial othering lies in the desirous binary of horror and longing that constitutes the knowing, representing subject.⁷ This paper briefly (and, we freely admit, eclectically) delineates a space of trauma between knowledge of the body’s productive agency and belief in the body’s dangerous monstrosity. But we also mark the need to think beyond this fantasmatic binary–not to penetrate its resistant kernel, but to begin to reconceive future modes of political subjectivation and technoscientific practice.⁸

2. Of Bugs and Rats

Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, a pioneer of American computing best known for directing the development of the programming language COBOL, is also the source of an often-repeated anecdote which has become part of computer science folklore. As Admiral Hopper tells the story,

In the summer of 1945 we were building Mark II [an early electromechanical computer]; we had to build it in an awful rush–it was wartime–out of components we could get our hands on. We were working in a World War I temporary building [on the campus of Harvard University]. It was a hot summer and there was no air-conditioning, so all the windows were open. Mark II stopped, and we were trying to get her going. We finally found the relay that had failed. Inside the relay–and these were large relays–was a moth that had been beaten to death by the relay. We got a pair of tweezers. Very carefully we took the moth out of the relay, put it in the logbook and put Scotch tape over it. (Hopper 285-86)

The logbook recording this event was long kept in a display case at the Naval Surface Warfare Center, open to the page to which the moth was taped. Beneath the insect’s corpse, a handwritten entry noted dryly that it represented “the first actual case of a bug being found” (Figure 1). The logbook is now in the collection of the Natural Museum of American History, at the Smithsonian Institution.⁹

Consider now a more recent intrusion of the real into the informational domain:

KAMPALA, Oct. 13, 1998 (Reuters). Thousands of Ugandan students are unsure whether they have won university places after rats chewed through computer cables at the National Examination Board causing the system to crash, a newspaper reported on Tuesday. The New Vision Daily said senior board officials were very concerned that rodents were able to infiltrate areas holding such vital information. The hitch has affected students who were to be placed in teacher training colleges, polytechnics and medical institutions. It is not the first time that rats have eaten away at important installations in Uganda. Earlier this year they chewed through telecommunications wires, cutting off phone links to parts of western Uganda and Rwanda. Last week a workshop on law reform heard that reams of vital computerised court evidence had been lost in the same way.

The Reuters news story has none of the humor of Hopper’s anecdote. The image of a lone moth crushed in an electrical relay seems unlikely to elicit the sort of anxious frissons provoked by the image of rats swarming in the darkness, gnawing on electrical cables with implacable, intemperate appetite. The insect culprit of Hopper’s account is desubstantialized (desiccated, mounted, displayed) so as to fit easily into the tropology of modern technical discourse, within which a “bug” is something structural or procedural: a glitch in logic or function, which may be eliminated once it is identified. Rats, by comparison, are resistant to this sort of metonymy–there’s no getting away from the beady eyes, the gnashing teeth, the slinking tail, the piles of droppings; rodents seem uncannily out of place in the sterile abstractions of computing. The origin myth of the bug is, moreover, a story of computational victory: a bit of matter jamming the works is located by its human attendant and safely removed; the program continues, undeterred. If, on the other hand, rats are busy in the bowels of the machine–excretory metaphors seem appropriate here–eating away at its infrastructure, one might never locate all the damage they’ve caused before valuable data are lost forever. Sinister adversaries for the programmer, they could be anywhere in the dark, biding their time; no method of formal verification or debugging, no pair of tweezers and bit of cellophane tape, will help.¹⁰

The crucial difference between these stories of interrupted computing lies in how each figures a response to a material resistance responsible for the interruption. Programming bugs (in the most common sense of the term) may certainly have concrete effects, but they themselves are insubstantial, discernible only after an interruption of normal program execution, or in the calculation of an erroneous result.¹¹ Hopper’s “bug,” although initially figured as a material blockage of an equally material relay, is by her anecdote’s end rendered inoffensive, even irrelevant–by a verbal sleight of hand that amounts to a sort of signifying “relay.” The actual, historical moth is still around after the breakdown, but only as the evidence of the triumph of the informational order over the organic.

The Reuters account of rats chewing through Ugandan computer cables admits of no such wordplay. The rats–expressly because of their appetitive organicity, their uncanny “out-of-placeness” in the rationalized interior of the computer–are irreducibly, horribly tautological, a quality figured in the scientific name of the common black rat, host to the fleas whose bites transmit bubonic plague: rattus rattus. The residues they leave behind–flea-laden fur, disease-bearing saliva, stinking excrement–open the abstractions of informational space to an infectious materiality which threatens to exceed its symbolic closure.

The Reuters rats are, we think, negative forms of two other “rats” marking important moments in the history of informational practice. The first of these is rat-like only in name: Claude Shannon’s 1951 maze-solving machine, dubbed an “electronic rat” by the participants in the Macy conferences on cybernetics of the 1940s and 1950s.¹² This electromechanical device used a simple routing scheme to move a sensor within the confines of a small maze, in search of a target (a “cheese”) placed somewhere within it, thus demonstrating that a computing device can “learn” from prior calculations, and on that basis eliminate unsuccessful strategies of problem-solving.¹³ As Katherine Hayles observes, Shannon’s rat was a crucial support for a reductive rhetorical and conceptual strategy characteristic of the early years of cybernetics: the assertion that the inconsistent aims of (embodied, desirous) human beings may be reduced to lucid, normative–and computationally reproduceable–principles.¹⁴

The second informational rodent is more obviously rat-like, at least in its physical appearance: the figure of prosthetic transcendence introduced by Clynes and Kline in their landmark 1960 article on the “cyborg” (Figure 2).

This laboratorycyborg-rat–albino-white, sleek, and of a strictly-controlled genetic ancestry–seems a marvelous machinic-biological hybrid, at ease with the clumsy device grafted to its hindquarters, and able to function smoothly and efficiently (to quote Clynes and Kline) “without any attention on the part of the organism.” Describing this image as a “snapshot [belonging] in Man’s family album,” Donna Haraway finds in it evidence of an heroic anticipation of cyborg possibilities:

Beginning with the rats who stowed away on the masted ships of Europe’s imperial age of exploration, rodents have gone first into the unexplored regions of the great travel narratives of Western technoscience. (“Cyborgs and Symbionts,” xv)¹⁵

The rats of the Reuters story, on the other hand, seem less the vanguard of a new political order secreted in the hold of nascent capitalism than a material embodiment of resistant interruption of any systematic, abstracting order whatsoever. There is no room in this imaginary either for the programmed heuristics of information theory (Shannon’s rat) or for a hopeful symbiotic collaboration or triumphalist collectionism of machine and biological organ (Clynes, Kline, and Haraway’s rat).

The historical political-economic significations of both Hopper’s and the Reuters accounts of interrupted calculation are made clear when these accounts are read in relation to long-standing western narratives binding figures of contaminating materiality to fantasies of technological cleansing. We suggest here not that action and thought in these domains have been consistent across widely-separated historical periods, but rather that there is evidence of a consistent imaginary framed by historically-specific actions and thoughts. Discourses of alterity fixated on dirt and cleanliness have not of themselves determined the political and psychic economies of informational globalization. But they have propped up those economies with a class of reasonable, operational alibis essential to their structure.

One might explain away colonial fears of dirt and contamination as originating from the physical discomforts of life in the tropics–mixed, perhaps, with a regrettable element of outdated ethnocentrism. And one might rationalize the need to eliminate insects and rats from the interior of computing machines as a prerequisite to efficient, bug-free information processing, while citing the more extreme examples of such infestations as evidence of an unfortunate first-third world technological “divide.” However, the insistent tautology of the Reuters’ story of rats in the machine gives us pause. Pushing past explanations of the story’s content, we are compelled to inquire into the fantasmatic logic of this insistence.

3. The Monstrous and the Filthy

The barbarian craps where he pleases; the conquerer emblazons his trails with a primordial prohibition: “No shitting allowed.”
 

–Dominique Laporte, History of Shit¹⁶

 
For over twenty centuries, western philosophers and travelers recorded supposedly factual accounts of fantastic creatures found to the east of Greek and European civilization: unicorns, dragons, chimerae, giants, human cyclopes, men with multiple or animal heads, men with faces in their chests, ape-like androgynous figures with grotesquely matted hair, and so on. The Alexander Romance tradition, initiated by narratives of Alexander the Great’s encounters with these and similar creatures in India, became the inspiration for stories of fabulous violations of “natural” forms, and influenced encyclopedists and theologians up through the Renaissance and Enlightenment (Figure 3).¹⁷

Images of the fabulous East and images of the devil at home often used the same language, sometimes borrowing specific figures and descriptions from each other. Travelers in seventeenth-century India saw, for example, “the lascivious Greek and Roman underworld of satyrs, Pan, and Priapus” (Cohn 4)–devils and the evil spirits of nature consorting with the natives, who themselves appeared as bizarre hybrids of the human and the animal. As McClintock observes, this tropic slippage among the alien, the monstrous, and the sinful encoded powerful libidinal energies which could not be expressed directly:

For centuries, the uncertain continents–Africa, the Americas, Asia–were figured in European lore as libidinously eroticized. Travelers’ tales abounded with visions of the monstrous sexuality of far-off lands, where, as legend had it, men sported gigantic penises and women consorted with apes, feminized men’s breasts flowed with milk and militarized women lopped theirs off…. Long before the era of high Victorian imperialism, Africa and the Americas had become what can be called a porno-tropics for the European imagination–fantastic magic lantern of the mind onto which Europe projected its forbidden sexual desires and fears. (22)

The specificity of overlap between the anti-Christ at home and the normative abroad suggests a fairly straightforward displacement of fears rooted in the western self onto an eastern Other. The insistence on the absolute strangeness of the Other, however, grew troublesome in the Ages of Discovery, Exploration, and Colonialism, as it became more difficult to maintain the literal existence of the monsters of the Alexander Romance. The medieval “fabulous” tradition lost its explicit links with theology and art, but none of its ability to evoke visceral horror, as seventeenth- and eighteenth-century travelers and twentieth-century administrators attempted to render difference tractable while still preserving its integrity. The autochthonic monster mutated, over time, into a less fabulous–but no less alien–part-animal or imperfectly human primitive, whose humanity was overshadowed by the traits of its variance from a Eurocentric norm: in physiognomy, skin color, manner of dress (meaning often, an absence of “modest” clothing), religious, cultural, and sexual practices (Figure 4).

The monsters described by medieval and early Renaissance travelers had seemed to them evidence of the superabundant mystery of God’s creation. In an era increasingly dominated by the discourse of Reason, the alterity of the colonial native testified to a vexing disjunction between spiritual and scientific/anthropometric descriptions of the real. Examples of this disjunction appear in colonial writing across the globe, from the Congo to Australia. J. Brunton Stephens’s 1890 poetic puzzling over the humanity of an Aboriginal woman (“To a Black Gin,” Figure 4) is typical:

Thou art not beautiful, I tell thee plainly,
Oh! thou ungainliest of things ungainly;
Who thinks thee less than hideous dotes insanely.

 

Most unaesthetical of things terrestrial,
Hadst thou indeed an origin celestial?
Thy lineaments are positively bestial!

 

…

 

Thy nose appeareth but a transverse section:
Thy mouth hath no particular direction–
A flabby-rimmed abyss of imperfection.

 

Thy skull development mine eye displeases;
Thy wilt not suffer much from brain diseases;
Thy facial angle forty-five degrees is.¹⁸

Stephens’s poem enjoys a scientistic confidence in anthropometrically justified prejudices, which seem in their mode of representation very different from ancient botanical-geographic iconography and the medieval religious inflections of the fabulous monster narratives.

Accounts of the fabulous monster disappear soon after the Renaissance, and some scholars have suggested that modern scientific observation dispelled the myths of monsters forever.¹⁹ However, the image of the monstrous, the radically inhuman, and the unredeemably bestial persisted as a remainder inaccessible to the new linguistic economy of the Rational and the Real. The human and physical sciences were called upon to manage this remainder, so that procedures of resource- and population-management might proceed unimpeded by the recalcitrant bodies and vapors of the East.²⁰ Increasingly, the colonial domain itself was seen as constitutive of its horrors. When one was no longer contemplating the alien from afar but rather dwelling within it, the fear of its contamination intensified, expressed in colonial anxieties regarding the “miasmic” vapors of the tropics. Just as the medieval discourse of monsters had bled over boundaries with the Age of Reason, the “environmental” theory of disease persisted in the colonies long after it had been superseded in Europe by germ theory. India continued to be the site where many of these discourses emerged; they would travel, in remarkably stable forms, to other sites in the British Empire, to Southeast Asia, and to Africa.²¹

Historian of medicine David Arnold describes the colonizers’ fears of the pathogenic environment thus:

It was the lethal combination of heat and humidity and the hot, moist air’s capacity to hold poisonous, disease-generating “miasma” in suspension that appeared to make tropical regions so deadly. Bengal’s jungles, creeks, and marshes, its hot and humid climate, and the great variations in temperature between and within seasons seemed to provide an almost archetypal example of the savage effects a hostile environment could have on the human constitution. (33)

The Environmental theory of disease held that the causes of disease were in climate, topography, and vegetation, in conjunction with the effects of heat and humidity and the idiosyncratic nature of disease in India. It therefore rejected the direct application of western medicine, assuming an intrinsic difference in the nature of disease and therapeutics in the tropics (Arnold 58-59). Not only would Westerners have to behave differently in the East, it followed, they would have to preserve their vigor and strength if they wished to escape the torpid weakness of the native. In order to preclude contamination by the languor of the tropical vapors, an elaborate system of individual behaviors emerged, focused on preserving the boundaries between dirt and cleanliness, activity and torpor, production and decay.²²

The description of the pathogenic environment gradually came to include other markers of social and cultural difference, blurring the boundaries between ethnographic and climatic data. In nineteenth-century Congo, for example, fear of native excess (embodied, most famously, in European stories of cannibalism) was contained through Protestant missionaries’ obsession with “personal cleanliness and moral habits” (Hunt 131). Nancy Rose Hunt, drawing on Timothy Burke’s work on the cultural significance of soap in colonial and post-colonial Zimbabwe and Leonore Davidoff’s work on Victorian rituals of order and cleanliness, points out that such concerns “were aspects of a new imaginary born of the industrial revolution” (131). She traces soap’s doubled semiotic, as it stood in for both moral and commercial duties in the colonies, and for spectacularly scrubbed bodies, cutlerly, and surgical instruments. “The word ‘hygiene,’” she points out, “came into use in early-nineteenth-century Europe as the novelty of bathing with soap remade the distinction between clean and dirty” (131). Hunt traces the influence of colonial surgeons, missionaries, and ethnographers in the creation of colonial domesticity, arguing that cleanliness and domesticity were ways of taming the excesses of the native Other:

Women’s excess was scandalous, arousing hidden dark, desiring laughter. It was for certain and for always. The laughter was shameful. And the only hope was in dead serious, consistent rescripting of the human female narrative as dutiful, clean mother and wife. (158)

Colonial medicine, religion, and anthropology, thus intertwined, had a powerful effect on the public imagination in scientific as well as in popular contexts. Colonizers and their subjects followed rituals of everyday life carefully scripted according to the binaries of cleanliness and filth, technological containment and organic surplus. These anxious efforts at disease containment were, of course, continually thwarted in the everyday spaces of the colonized world. If they were not to allow themselves to be undermined, the discourses of scientific management had to entrench themselves in institutional spaces that were more easily regulated: jails, barracks, schools, and hospitals. Here were the sites these discourses could reliably discipline and sanitize.

The retreat of technoscientific practices to more reliably governable spaces marks a fear that is often characterized, straightforwardly, as the white colonist’s fear of the non-white body. It is obviously true that colonialism entailed assumptions of racial hierarchies. But tracing a critique through colonial fears of contamination by the Other–conceived of in terms of superficial racialized physical or behavioral traits–misses the structural constitution of those fears in the encounter of technoscience with human agency. We find Laporte’s argument, that markers of racial difference in this context were supported by figurings of the matter of the bodies involved, more persuasive:

For its subjects to participate in the body of the empire, their waste need not be subjected to microscopic scrutiny. The patrolling and controlling of orifices are sufficient strategies. It is enough to enforce a code of shitting–the master’s code, the code of he who knows; namely, he who knows how to hold it in. (63)

The white hygienist’s efforts to contain and eliminate the residual matter within the colonial domain is bracketed by an inevitable return of the repressed: in the skin color and body odors of the native servant (“To the white man, the black man has the color and odor of shit” [Laporte 59]), and in the waterlogged turd she carries away in the master’s chamber pot, the “remainder of earth” which belies his claim to civilized (that is, technical) transcendence of the body–“The white man hates the black man for exposing that masked and hidden part of himself” (Laporte 59).²³

The configurations of the cultural, natural, and technological that inform the specifically cybercultural binary of desire/horror/cleanliness/filth entail a quantitative shift in the scale of psychic identification of the self with the technics of the machine: the threatening contaminant is no longer identified with mobile bodies or sloshing chamberpots but with mobile, microscopic particles. Confronted with the stuff of an irreducibly messy agentified body, the technophile retreats into a space of disembodied, machinic cleanliness.

4. The Cleanroom

A single computer microprocessor is slightly smaller than a US penny and may include millions of transistors (Figure 5). Their small size and complexity make transistors extremely vulnerable to physical damage: a single speck of dust falling on a microprocessor can render it unreliable or unusable. Thus, much of the effort of commercial production of microprocessors is devoted to insuring that the environment in which they are manufactured is as free as possible from airborne contaminants. Critical stages of manufacture take place in strictly-controlled fabrication facilities (“FABs”) known as “cleanrooms.”²⁴ The atmosphere in a cleanroom is kept at a constant temperature and humidity, and is circulated as rapidly as 100 feet per minute in a uniform direction from floor to ceiling or wall to wall known as a “laminar flow.” Before it enters or is returned to the cleanroom, the air is passed through High Efficiency Particulate Air (HEPA) filters, which trap all but the very smallest particles. Exposed surfaces in the room are made of coated, highly-polished metal or non-porous synthetic materials, free of microscopic fissures and cavities that might collect debris. Machinery with moving parts or open reservoirs of liquid is kept to a minimum. All forms of paper–a notorious dust and microbe magnet–are prohibited. The most environmentally controlled cleanrooms, known as “Class 1” cleanrooms, contain no more than one particle larger than 0.5 microns (one millionth of a meter, approximately 1/25,000 inch) per cubic foot of air–several orders of magnitude fewer than the number of airborne particles permitted in a modern hospital operating room.²⁵

The primary sources of contaminants in the cleanroom are the human agents who supervise the machinery and ferry the delicate chips through the stages of manufacture: a human body can slough off from five to ten million particles of skin, hair, and dirt every minute.²⁶ Workers in cleanrooms devoted to commercial microprocessor production wear specially-designed full-body garments, known in the industry as “bunny suits” (Figure 6).²⁷

Putting on a bunny suit requires adhering to a precise sequence.²⁸ Workers first minimize contaminants they might bring to the suit’s interior: getting rid of any gum, candy, etc.; rinsing the mouth and throat so as to remove stray food particles; washing all exposed skin surfaces to remove dirt, makeup, and loose hairs or flakes of skin; covering head and facial hair with lint-free hoods and masks; cleaning shoes carefully before covering them with multiple shoe covers; passing through a high-pressure air shower to blast away dust from their street clothing. This process takes place in spaces divided into progressively “cleaner” zones–a worker, for example, must not allow her shoe to touch the floor on the “clean” side of a bench until the shoe has been properly covered. The parts of a bunny suit–belted frocks, booties, gloves, hoods, protective goggles or facemasks–are donned in several stages, and workers must take care not to allow any article of clothing to make contact with a surface of the gowning room before it has been tucked in and fastened appropriately. Any misstep in these procedures will compromise the cleanliness of the suit, and may mean having to start over again. Production targets in most FABs are unrelenting and time-sensitive. Effective workers quickly learn that they cannot afford to dress carelessly.

This progressive insulation of the worker under layers of Dacron taffeta, latex, and polycarbonate anticipates the isolation and sensory deprivation of the cleanroom itself. There, the hum of the processing equipment and the steady rush of the laminar flow merge into a constant white noise Dennis Hayes calls “the crescendo”:

Casual conversation is difficult and the distraction often dangerous. Their mouths gagged and faces veiled (often above the nose), phrases are muffled, expressions half-hidden. The customary thoroughfares of meaning and emotion are obscured. Do furrowed eyebrows indicate pleasure or problem? Like deep-sea divers, the workers use hand-gestures, or like oil riggers, they shout above the din created by the refrigerator-sized machines and the hushed roar of the laminar flow. But mainly, the crescendo encourages a feeling of isolation, or removal from the world. (63-64)

In the most strictly-controlled cleanrooms, the confinement of the worker’s body is nearly complete: each suit is equipped with an individual filtering unit to purify the air she breathes out, trapping exhaled fluids and particles inside the suit.

The cleanroom and the bunny suit offer limited protection for the worker against the highly toxic chemicals used in the production of microprocessors.²⁹ But these barrier technologies serve primarily to isolate the space of production from the substance of the worker’s body. This targeting of the body as the primary source of contamination is the foundation of the cleanroom’s significance as one of the principal fantasy spaces of the informational order. Ideological and libidinal urgencies of the informational order masquerade in the cleanroom as operational necessity and purposive design. Within this scheme, the fantasmatic function of the cleanroom is to calm the anxieties of the technoscientific subject with regard to her own body, by masking–literally and metaphorically–a problematic organic materiality with an apparatus of technical governance.

The precise technical strategies of this masquerade–the methods of cleanroom practice specific to different stages of microprocessor manufacture are, in this regard, merely stylistic variations on an underlying strategy of estrangement of the substance of the body.³⁰ These ritual techniques establish an informational cordon sanitaire freed of material difference and its dangers, in which human labor is subject to principles of cleanliness in keeping with the demands of a machinic order: a grain of dust poses no threat to the human organism, but may be fatal to the computer chip; the most elementary human activities–simply breathing and moving about–must therefore be bracketed by the demands of manufacture.³¹ The cleanroom governs the threat of stray matter by containing it within a strictly-limited space identified with the unruly organic processes of the worker’s body, insofar as they are removed from the field of production.

Moreover, the bunny-suited worker is decorporealized in a manner fully in keeping with the deracialized and genderless utopia celebrated by the evangelists of the “virtual community.” Traces of the worker’s gender and race are also sealed off from the field of her labor: the bunny suit’s mask or helmet obscures her face; the baggy suit’s frumpy, unisex appearance hides the contours of her body.³² In its best-known instance, the suit serves another kind of concealment of the body. The disco-dancing “BunnyPeople” of Intel’s 1997 ad campaign for the Pentium II® Processor are costumed in shiny, brightly-colored outfits (Figure 7).³³

“Real” cleanroom garments are nearly always white, though pastel shades are sometimes seen. The rainbow hues of the BunnyPeople’s suits substitute appealing, synthetic signifiers of difference for the actual gender or racial traits that the suits conceal. The ad campaign’s soundtracks further domesticate the marks of racial identity, clumsily stripping the lyric of Wild Cherry’s 1976 hit, “Play That Funky Music,” of its famous in-joke. “Play that funky music, white boy,” goes the original lyric; in the Intel commercials, the first half of this line is sung twice, replacing the song’s tongue-in-cheek reference to racial stereotype (white boys aren’t supposed to be able to play funky) with a pacifying tautology.

The BunnyPeople are not monstrous. They are, rather, cheerful and reassuring, even cute and cuddly. Slogans of the BunnyPeople campaign insisted that the new chips “put the fun in computing” and would “make your multimedia dance,” and the BunnyPeople are eminently fitted to making those claims seem truthful.³⁴ Though the Pentium II campaign has been superseded by campaigns for newer, more-advanced microprocessors, one can still purchase BunnyPeople beanbag dolls, jewelry, handbags, T-shirts, and the like, from Intel’s corporate web site.

We suggest, however, a filiation between ludic images of the hyperclean, hermetically-sealed BunnyPerson and the monstrous, ungovernable Other and filthy savage of medieval and Renaissance travel narratives (Figure 3). Both forms are oriented by a fundamental fantasy relating the boundaries of the subject to threatening extremities of matter. In the case of the cleanroom, the danger is attributable to any body, regardless of its familiarity: in the domain of informational production, the residue of all bodies is dangerous, infectious, and repellent. The leftover of the organic order poses a risk to the smooth working of the informational system of production; it must be eliminated or–at least–contained and expelled. The subject position of an ideal, clean, and normative body which served to distinguish the European colonialist from the native and the miasmic landscape is, in the tropology of the cleanroom, mapped onto the position of the microprocessor.³⁵ The position of the infectious, filthy primitive which must be governed or contained, is mapped onto the position of the worker, sealed within the cordon sanitaire of her suit. The cleanroom functions as a fantasy-space when it supports positive and negative variants and subject positions of the relation of technological agency to material resistance: the cleanroom as necessary precaution for informational production (the “reasonable” narrative of the microprocessor industry); the cleanroom as a toxic space of isolation and disempowerment (Hayes’s narrative of the discontented Silicon Valley worker); the cleanroom as the site of ecstatic celebration of the new order of labor (as exemplified by the dancing BunnyPeople–a form which, we suspect, fuses the narratives of reasonableness and discontent).

5. Cyber-cleanliness and Cyber-squalor

At all the more important moments while he was telling his story his face took on a very strange, composite expression. I could only interpret it as one of horror at pleasure of his own of which he himself was unaware.

 

–Freud, “Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional
Neurosis [The Rat-Man]” (1909)

This remainder of earth [Erdenrest],
it’s distasteful to bear it;
even cremated,
it would still be impure.

 

–Goethe, Faust II, 11,954-11,957

The technophilic fantasy of a decontaminated agent of production logically concludes in the eschatological myth which fascinates contemporary discourses of computing technology: that of the subject whose consciousness has been “uploaded” into the network, where she roams freely without the encumbrances of a real body.³⁶ In its positive and negative forms (“cyber-cleanliness” and “cyber-squalor”), the fantasy of decorporealization–and we propose that this is a constitutive element of the tropology of the cleanroom–binds informational subjectivation to informational production, in the interest of the latter’s need for absolute efficiency and material mastery.³⁷

But what sort of subject is a BunnyPerson, we wonder, and what is it celebrating in its frenzied dance? If, as the Intel commercials seem to suggest, the BunnyPerson dances to eulogize the unpleasures of embodied labor (computing, and the making of computers, are finally fun), then what is to be done with–and made of–the thingness of the microprocessor, and the irreducible materiality of the worker’s body? These are precisely the remainders that the cleanroom fantasies attempt to govern. To imagine that they may be someday purged, or transformed into the immaterial stuff of a pure agent of the network–everywhere and nowhere, the perfected subject of the informational order–is to beg the question: what forces are served by the apparent necessity of one or the other formulation: cyber-cleanliness or cyber-squalor?

We suggest a displacement of the question of technological agency, away from its articulation in the tradition of cyborg studies established by Haraway’s manifesto and the criticism it has inspired. The hope of cyborg agency, Haraway has suggested, lies in “attention to the agencies and knowledges crafted from the vantage point of nonstandard positions (positions that don’t fit but within which one must live)” (269). The nonstandard positions Haraway emphasizes are desirous structures; within them, the agency of the modern subject–“agency” conceived as purposive, intentional action, grounded in technological extension of the intellect and the body–is deeply problematic. That model of agency is, we think, modelled on a heuristic reductiveness that is also characteristic of Shannon’s electromechanical model of the rat-in-a-maze. Rather, the longing and revulsion encoded into the satisfactions and anxieties of the field within which the technoscientific subject operates are, in a sense, two articulations of the same process of desiring-constitution of the self. This is the sense of Freud’s astonishing insight (cited above) into the obsessional structure of the Rat-Man’s fascination with an obscene form of torture involving the insertion of a hungry rat into the anus of the condemned. The spectre of the foulest, most unruly appetite may reward the fantasizing subject in two senses, and at the same time: as the image of the Other’s implacable, hateful alterity; and as the truth of the subject’s most intimate passion.

Does such a re-staging of the “agency” question in terms of the inconsistency of desire displace and subvert the political promise of cyborg studies? Again, Zizek anticipates a version of this question:

To philosophical common sense, such a procedure appears, of course, like “evading the real issue”; whereas the dialectical approach recognizes in the scenic dramatization which displaces the question, replacing the abstract form of the problem with concrete scenes of its actualization within a life-form, the only possible access to its truth–we gain admittance to the domain of Truth only by stepping back, by resisting the temptation to penetrate it directly. (For They Know Not 145)

If the aim of critique of informational globalization were simply an epistemological revolution based on pluralistic democratic passions, we would not need to complicate commonsense understandings of the technological imaginary. The “temptation to penetrate it directly” grows stronger–and is often satisfyingly fulfilled–when one professes solidarity with non-hegemonic voices confronting the limitations of technological progress. Nevertheless, novel morphings in the global flows of capital and in the modes of technological progress reveal a sophisticated extension of the fantasy of belonging to those who might earlier have been “non-hegemonic” actors. We believe there is a need in this domain for careful, critical investigation of the historical and symbolic antecedents of an emerging imaginary which is in some senses new (in its compression of time and space), and in others, very familiar (in its replaying of well-worn tropes of the division of the clean from the unclean, the civilized from the primitive). Within the imaginary of the cleanroom-as-technologically-perfect-cordon sanitaire, subjectivity is constructed by occluding and repelling barriers, and human agency is confined to a definite, idealized space of production, from which every trace of abject materiality–literally, the unproductive leavings of organic life–is excluded.

Homologous with its elimination of the messy specificity of the body, these barrier technologies flatten out bodily traits of race and gender–not, we would contend, in the interest of a progressive social policy (the “happy,” communal form of the virtual community), but rather in the interest of eliminating every troublesome aspect of the body, its drives and its residues (the evidence of an “unhappy,” excessive, agonistic kernel of the virtual socius, the very thing it must exclude from consciousness in order to imagine itself a community).³⁸ They render every BunnyPerson, as it were, equal–at least within a radically sanitized domain. (Which is to say, every body is rendered equally offensive.)³⁹

The rat persists–the real, to paraphrase Lacan, is that which stays with us, stubbornly refusing to be exhaustively symbolized and so gotten rid of. The rat–the rat of the real, not the rat of cyborg dreams–feeding and shitting in the bowels of the machine, is the macroscopic, aporetic figure of the contaminating particle that the cleanroom would seek to govern. Unlike Hopper’s moth, its effects cannot be dissipated in the masquerade of wordplay, re-presented as a ludic prop for the regime of machinic efficiency. Its appetite and intractability point to an anchor or pivot in the fantasized spaces of cybernetic agency. As in the fantasies of the autochthonic monster and the filthy savage, the fantasies of cyberculture turn on the dual effects of a kernel, marking from one perspective that which must be excluded at any cost, and from another, that which will return as the very thing defining the logic of exclusion: the “remainder of earth” of cyberculture. A crucial task for theorists is not to undertake the unambiguous penetration of that kernel, but, on the contrary, to reconceive the emerging fields of technological, economic, and political subjectivation in ways that take account of their irreducible inconsistency: the mutual constitution of their horror and pleasure.

Notes

1. Cited in Arnold, 284.

2. See also a version of this text with critical annotations by Phil Bereano, Gary Chapman, David Gelernter, and Katherine Hayles, at <http://www.feedmag.com/95.05magna1.html>.

3. See, for instance, Kumar, Rekhi, and Murthy’s cover story for the April 2000 siliconindia, which celebrates that fact that some of the wealthiest members of Silicon Valley’s information technology boom are post-colonial Indians; or Goonatilake, who suggests that “East and West” can now (as a result of “globalization”) be combined by “mining” each for their scientifically meritorious elements.

4. Our use of the adjective “informational” to describe the nexus of late capitalism and cyberculture follows Manuel Castells’s use of the term. See Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, 1-28.

5. For extended critiques of this narrative, see Stallabrass and Castells.

6. For representative positions, see: Jameson and Miyoshi, Sassen, and Mittelman.

7. Is this subject, we might ask, the sole, necessary and inevitable subject of history? Clearly not; that would be not only a gloomy prospect but also a transhistorical and idealist claim. However, the field of alternative subjectivities is not rich.

8. This essay extends arguments of other of our published essays on scientific visualization of global Internet diffusion and Imperial colonial scientific and hygienic discourses. (See Harpold, “Dark Continents,” and Philip, “English Mud.”) It is excerpted from a book-length project that aims to problematize binaries that characterize critical analyses of the content of technoscientific globalization.

9. See <http://www.americanhistory.si.edu/csr/comphist/objects/bug.htm>. The episode is often cited as the first use of the term “bug” in the sense of a defect or malfunction in a machine. As the logbook entry suggests, this was not the case; “bug” had had a long history of being used in this way. The OED, for example, records one such use in an 1889 newspaper account of Edison troubleshooting the phonograph.

10. The dual logic of the Reuters account–horror of the implacable appetite of the organic and bemusement at the eternal recalcitrance of non-western technological agency–are commonly repeated in descriptions of other technical spheres. A June 6, 2000 BBC News story entitled “Indian Phone Users Smell a Rat” announced the discovery of rats feeding on Indian telecom networks. The story slips effortlessly from a description of the brute technical breakdown to relocating the most resistant aspects of the failure in the Indian bureaucratic machine and its inability to control human laborers:

Rats with a taste for fibre optics have affected important telecom links between the Indian capital, Delhi, and the commercial hub of Bombay. Telecom officials say the rodents, lured partly by the smell of optical fibre, are nibbling away at underground cables connecting Delhi and Bombay. Telecom workers have tried controlling the problem. But that may take some time. As it happens, the telecom workers are on a strike themselves. They say a cohesive strategy for dealing with the problem cannot be worked out as technically-qualified people are denied top posts in the telecom department.

11. See Neumann, Perrow, Peterson, and the essays collected in Colburn, Fetzer, and Rankin, for discussions of the irreducibility of design faults in computer software and hardware, and of the influences of material factors on real-world computing applications.

12. See Hayles, ch. 3, for an overview of the Macy conferences, and a discussion of Shannon’s important role in them. A photograph of Shannon adjusting a later version of the rat appears on the dust jacket of his Collected Papers.

13. Echoing the material-informational “relay” trope noted earlier, the “brain” of Shannon’s rat was made up primarily of a telephone relay switch, the same sort of device jammed by Hopper’s moth.

14. “By suggesting certain kinds of experiments, the analogs between intelligent machines and humans construct the human in terms of the machine.… Whether they are understood as like or unlike, ranging human intelligence alongside an intelligent machine puts the two into a relay system that constitutes the human as a special kind of information machine and the information machine as a special kind of human. Presuppositions embodied in the electronic rat include the idea that both humans and cybernetic machines are goal-seeking mechanisms that learn, through corrective feedback, to reach a stable state. Both are information processors that tend toward homeostasis when they are functioning correctly.” (Hayles 64-65)

15. As if to confirm its mascot status for an optimistic vision of cybernetic transcendence, Clynes and Kline’s cyborg-rat appears on the cover of Chris Hables Gray’s classic essay collection, The Cyborg Handbook. Haraway’s “Cyborgs and Symbionts” essay introduces the collection.

16. 57. Laporte’s remarkable monograph sketches a history of the political economy of filth and disease parallel to the one we outline here. His emphasis on the psychic-symbolic resistance of excremental materiality to technical-economic domestication admirably distinguishes it from most analyses of the use/exchange value alchemy of capital. This essay is in one regard an effort to extend Laporte’s analysis into a specifically cybercultural domain.

17. “India” served as a geographical trope for all lands at a great distance from the civilized world. Wittkower traces the earliest surviving origin of the “Marvels of the East” tradition to the 5th century BC (Herodotus, Bk. IV, 44). “India” and “Ethiopia” were widely used as synonyms even up to the medieval period, a confusion Wittkower traces to Homer (Odyssey I, 23).

18. …And so on. The full text of the poem is cited on Ross Woodrow’s “Race and Image” web site. See <http://www.newcastle.edu.au/department/fad/fi/woodrow/compare1.htm>.

19. Wittkower explains that as “people slowly learned to discriminate between fictitious and trustworthy matter,” the reports of marvels ceased to come from India, retreating to still-unexplored areas of the world (197).

20. Thus, for instance, the newly developed science of craniology, with handy new statistical methods, allowed anthropometrists to measure primitivity to the second decimal place, by computing skull and nasal indices. See, for example, Gould’s discussion of this history.

21. Imperial medicine offered one of the strongest discourses of the native body and its infectiousness. As an episteme of tropical hygiene emerged, it was carried by British botanists, surgeons, and administrators from one colony to another, and back to the metropole. For parallels in Africa, see Coombes and Hunt; in Australia, see Griffiths and Robin; for a French construction of the savage, see Bullard.

22. Bernard Cohn cites the “first Indian ethnographer of the British,” Golam Husain Khan, who observed that the British “locked themselves up in their offices and houses”: “When the Englishmen went out, they were invisible, shut up in their carriages or being carried hurriedly in a palankeen with its shutters drawn” (20). Cohn also notes that the British typically preferred to travel by river, as it enabled them to view the colorful and picturesque from a distance, “without the smells, din, and constant presence of Indians all about them” (20).

23. This “remnant of earth” [Erdenrest] of which the more-perfect angels complain at the end of Goethe’s second Faust (11, 954-11, 957)–these lines are cited by Freud in his 1913 preface to Bourke’s Scatological Rites of All Nations–is a recurring element in Laporte’s book. See Section 5 of this article.

24. The cleanroom technologies we describe in this essay are not unique to microprocessor manufacturing. They are also used in research and manufacture which require strict control of particulate and microbial contaminants, for example: life sciences applications involving infectious disease organisms, pharmaceutical production, aerospace satellite assembly, and the manufacture of surgical implants.

25. Cleanrooms are classified under U.S. Federal Standard 209D according to the number of particles 0.5 microns (5m) or larger per cubic foot of air: the least restrictive classification is “Class 100,000” (100,000 such particles per cubic foot); the most restrictive is “Class 1” (1 such particle per cubic foot). Cleanroom classifications also regulate the number of permitted particles smaller than 0.5 5m–for example, a Class 1 cleanroom can have only 35 particles 0.1 5m or larger per cubic foot of air. By way of comparison: unfiltered room air can contain as many as 5 million particles larger than 0.5 5m. In 1999, U.S. standards (now 209E) were revised to use a metric nomenclature. New ISO standards (applying to all countries in the EU), were also released in 1999 and provide for a new classification below Class 1, called “M1,” which limits particles 0.5 5m or larger to only 0.3 per cubic foot. Because the ISO standards are relatively new and based on more complex formulae, most cleanroom industry literature still uses the 209D/E categories. See Cleanroom.com’s “A Cleanroom Primer,” <http://www.cleanroom.com/learning_center/partone.html>, for a brief introduction to cleanroom equipment and practices.

26. See Ljungqvist and Reinmüller, 37. Efforts to fully automate cleanroom microprocessor manufacture have had limited success. For the time being, Mathas notes, the flexibility, adaptability, and economy of the human worker outweighs the inconveniences of her dirtiness.

27. The etymology of the name is uncertain. Intel has trademarked the term “BunnyPeople,” to describe their cleanroom-suited workers.

28. An Intel web site devoted to “working in a cleanroom” lists 43 separate steps involved in putting on a bunny suit and entering a cleanroom. See <http://www.intel.com/education/chips/cleanroom.htm>.

29. Many of the substances used in the manufacture of computer chips are dangerous to living organisms and long-lived in the environment. It is one of the ironies of the high-tech economy that the manufacturing technologies which support it are equally or more ecologically toxic as those of traditional industrial practices. See, for example, Sachs’s overview of the environmental damage of unchecked growth of the computer industry in California’s Silicon Valley. Hayes, ch. 3, describes the poisonous and mutagenic chemicals used in microprocessor manufacture (many of which are outgassed in dangerous concentrations in the course of normal production), and the high risk–and occurrence–of chemical injury among workers in the industry.

30. They are thus correlative to national differences in toilet design noted by Zizek as variants of the same strategy of estranging the most intimate of human matter: “In a traditional German toilet, the hole in which shit disappears after we flush water is way in front, so that shit is first laid out for us to sniff and inspect for traces of illness. In the typical French toilet, on the contrary, the hole is in the back: shit is supposed to disappear as soon as possible. Finally, the American toilet presents a kind of synthesis, a mediation between these two opposed poles–the toilet basin is full of water, so the shit floats in it, visible, but not to be inspected. It is clear that none of these versions can be accounted for in purely utilitarian terms: a certain ideological perception of how the subject should relate to the unpleasant excrement which comes from within our body is clearly discernible in it” (“Fantasy as a Political Category” 90).

31. This is one of the ways in which the cleanroom spaces of microprocessor production differ from cleanrooms and “containment rooms” used in the handling of infectious organisms. In the latter case, the technologies involved serve to protect the worker from infection, rather than to protect the space of production from the debris of the worker’s body.

32. Hayes (71-73) cites industry statistics showing that electronics assembly workers in the U.S. are overwhemingly female and disproportionately drawn from immigrant and racial minority populations. The electronics industry in general is the second largest U.S. employer of women, surpassed only by the apparel manufacturing and clothing industry.

33. The BunnyPeople campaign was produced for Intel by DSW Partners, who also produced Intel’s landmark “Intel Inside” campaign. (See <http://www.dsw.com/> for examples of the print, radio, and television ads included in the BunnyPeople campaign.) The television campaign was launched with broadcasts during the 1997 SuperBowl.

34. See <http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/cn12297a.htm>.

35. Intel’s 1998 television ad campaign for the Pentium III carried this mapping to the next level. The first ad in the campaign featured a robot, who begins as a lusterless, somewhat clunky figure. After entering through a door in the center of the Pentium III chip (“through this door lies the power to make your Internet come to life”) the robot is “upgraded,” and passes through a series of Adobe® Photoshop® filters. At the end of the commercial, the robot is shiny, golden-colored, and smiles broadly at the viewer as it shows off its new outfit. During the commercial, an uptempo version of West Side Story‘s “I Feel Pretty” plays in the background. (Sondheim’s original lyric is, however, changed: “I feel pretty, and witty, and gay” is replaced with “I feel pretty, and witty, and bright.” The revision substitutes a sexless, inorganic adjective for one which might, in 1998, be interpreted as erotically charged.) Intel’s principal slogan for the Pentium III campaign, “Don’t just get onto the Internet, get into it,” recaps in straightforward language of the ad’s fantasy narrative of decorporealization. In this vein, the song’s second verse (with which the commercial concludes) seems disconcerting, even sinister:

I feel charming,
Oh so charming,
It’s alarming how charming I feel,
And so pretty
That I hardly can believe I’m real.

36. To name only a few examples in which this fantasy is articulated: in fiction, William Gibson’s “Sprawl” novels, Rudy Rucker’s “ware” tetralogy; in nonfiction: Ray Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines and Hans Moravec’s Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind; in film and television: Max Headroom, the Lawnmower Man films, Strange Days, The Thirteenth Floor.

37. This fantasy of decorporealized, sterile subjectivity is also the logical telos of the historical-technical-symbolic process Joseph A. Amato calls “The Great Cleanup”: nineteenth- and twentieth-century efforts to identify and eliminate the smallest particulate and biological contaminants of lived human spaces. As Amato emphasizes repeatedly in his popular history of dust, the technologies of the Industrial Revolution were responsible for a massive increase in the density and variety of particulate contaminants assaulting the human body; moreover, dissimilar representations of the “natural” and the “technical” supported by those technologies were at the root of the distinctively modern fantasy that the body is under assault by very small, often invisible, things. This process is, Amato notes, accelerated by twentieth-century physical and biological sciences: a host of invisible environmental contaminants and pathogens (radioactive particles, industrial pollutants, viruses, prions, etc.) are generated and/or identified by technical practices which are then turned to the control of those threats. Amato concludes that, despite its modern dethronement from the position of the privileged measure of the “infinite granularity of all things” (177), dust will remain central to the discourse of the small and invisible, because it is the measure most meaningful to the human body. This assertion insufficiently addresses, we think, the role of human subjection to the demands of the machinic: dust is all the more relevant to human practice in this historical moment because it is increasingly threatening to the efficient work of the machines upon and within which human agency is defined.

38. Cf. Laclau’s discussion of the “constitutive outside” of social formations, in the title essay of New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time.

39. One political-economic sense of the decorporealized order of production is evident in the expansion of the use of the term “cleanroom” within a domain we have not discussed here: the legal discourses of intellectual property. Reverse engineering of a competitor’s product is often performed under so-called “cleanroom” conditions, meaning that no data which might be traceable to the competitor’s technologies or employee know-how is permitted to “contaminate” the engineering process. Obviously, there is room here for further investigation of the semiotic constellation joining cleanliness (as in propre) with “property.”

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Mark Hansen

English Department
Princeton University
mbhansen@princeton.edu

As several recent critical studies have conclusively demonstrated, biological research and theory form a central reference point in Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy.¹ From his early major work culminating in Difference and Repetition of 1968, through his collaboration with Félix Guattari on Capitalism and Schizophrenia (especially, A Thousand Plateaus of 1980), to his final work on Leibniz and geophilosophy (The Fold, and with Guattari again, What is Philosophy?), Deleuze has framed his account of individuation and agency through an evolving critical engagement with evolutionary thinking. Rooted in his early rehabilitation of Henri Bergson’s 1907 Creative Evolution, Deleuze’s heretical “evolutionism” draws widely and irreverently on the advances of recent biology; and yet, for all its gesturing toward biological theory, it remains distinctly philosophical in flavor. Not only was Deleuze’s very interest in biology overdetermined from the beginning by his desire to redress the almost total neglect of Bergson as a philosopher, but (more importantly for my purposes) his ongoing engagement with biological theory (and with Bergsonism itself) has been marshaled to support a metaphysics of the virtual that is, for all its resonances with recent developments in biology, at odds with the distinct priority biological theory (and the Bergson of Creative Evolution) places on processes of actualization.

Laying bare this différend between science and philosophy motivates the first strand of my argument in this paper: an attempt to unpack and clarify the genealogy of Deleuze’s changing, though lifelong, engagement with Bergson. Essentially, after starting off from a point of seemingly perfect convergence between philosophy and biology–Bergson’s notion of the élan vital–Deleuze drives an ever-widening wedge between the biological notions he appropriates from neo-evolutionism and what he increasingly comes to view as a model of creative evolution too fundamentally bound up with both humanism and a residual representationalism. As I shall argue, what compels Deleuze to distance himself from creative evolution and from a certain Bergson is his (paradoxically very Bergsonian) philosophical aim of furnishing a metaphysics for contemporary science, that is, a metaphysics of the virtual.² Against such a metaphysics, I shall insist, against such metaphysics and with the support of contemporary biologists, that a certain priority be granted processes of actualization.

Still, despite Deleuze’s distancing from creative evolution, something substantial persists across his changing relation to both Bergson and biology: namely, his commitment to a notion of internal difference, or difference in itself. This commitment motivates Deleuze’s initial adherence to Bergson’s creative evolutionism no less than his later “break” with Bergson over the status of intensity as well as the correlated model of creative involution he develops together with Guattari. The initial impetus driving Deleuze’s effort to rehabilitate the fraught notion of the élan vital and with it, the very career of Bergson as philosopher, was nothing other than the notion of internal difference. As he reconstructs it in his 1956 essay, “Bergson’s Conception of Difference,” and then again in his 1966 Bergsonism, the élan vital introduces an explosive force internal to the process of evolution (internal difference) that is capable of accounting for the positive power of time as a source of creative invention. With the progress of his own philosophical career, Deleuze soon found reason to temper his initial adherence to Bergsonism–and specifically, to Bergson’s derivation of internal difference from qualitative difference–without in any way abandoning his own commitment to internal difference. As early as Difference and Repetition (1968), Deleuze traces qualitative difference or difference in kind (together with quantitative difference or difference in degree) to a fluid continuum of intensity, thereby eschewing Bergson’s argument that qualitative difference is itself one of two tendencies being differentiated and thus, a tendency internal to difference that, as Deleuze puts it, “show[s] the way in which a thing varies qualitatively in time” (Bergsonism 32).

By attending to what is at stake in this shift concerning the source of internal difference, I shall correlate Deleuze’s break with Bergson over the role of intensity with the generalized philosophical Aufhebung of biology that underwrites his introduction (in Difference and Repetition) of a “transcendental sensibility,” a “being of the sensible” that evades empirical determination. Drawing on what one commentator has called the “emerging consensus” in contemporary biology–that development involves dynamical processes ³–I contrast Deleuze’s own radicalized Bergsonism (one that eschews the very core of creative evolution) with complexity theory, a branch of contemporary biology which has, in effect, turned something very like creative evolution into a proper research program. What is crucial in this différend between science and philosophy is the relative importance accorded differentiation as a process of actualization: while Deleuze, in turning away from Bergson, eschews the necessity for discrete levels of differentiation in favor of a single plane of immanence (which paradoxically, he derives from the Bergson of Matter and Memory⁴), complexity theorists link differentiation to actualization and to processes of morphogenesis that are inseparable from the emergence of “natural kinds” in nature. Thus, while both Deleuze (or Deleuze + Guattari) and complexity theorists like Brian Goodwin and Stuart Kauffman recognize that transversal communication occurs across morphogenetic fields, only the latter insist on the irreducibility of the emerging organism (“natural kind”) as one “agent” among others active in morphogenetic processes of emergence. This difference furnishes the basis for a critical corrective to certain excesses in D+G’s biophilosophy that, I think, tend to compromise the value of their impressive conceptual apparatus for rethinking subjectivity and bodily agency in light of current developments in the biological, cognitive, and neurological sciences.

Without presuming to adjudicate between conflicting positions within the emerging consensus in biology (a task better left to practicing biologists), I shall thus invoke contemporary work in complexity theory in support of a second, more tendentious strand of my argument–a biologically-rooted critique that challenges D+G’s biophilosophy (redubbed, in A Thousand Plateaus, “creative involution”) on three main topics: 1) their investment in a molecular Darwinism; 2) their dismissal of the organism as a molar form that negatively limits life; and 3) their dubious use of macro-cosmic processes in molecular biology (all of which highlight the nonselectional dimension of “evolution”) as the basis for a posthuman (or at least nonhuman) ethics (the model of becoming presented in Plateau 10). While the analysis surrounding all three points introduces plausible and extremely important considerations into biological theory (considerations that are to a great extent, as I suggested above, shared by contemporary complexity theorists), the sheer radicality of D+G’s line of argumentation in each case not only sets them into conflict with their scientific sources, but ultimately undermines the value of their cross-disciplinary explorations of agency, subjectivity, and life.

Why then, the reader may be wondering, my interest–indeed investment–in D+G’s biophilosophy? The short answer concerns the sustained and often surprising resonances between their enterprise and the ground-breaking work that has been transforming the cognitive and biological sciences in the last few decades. No other cultural theorist pays anywhere near as much heed to work in science (the relation between philosophy and science is one of the central topics of D+G’s final collaboration, What is Philosophy?), which, concretely speaking, means that no other theorist is able to follow and to capitalize upon the sustained break with representationalism that forms a core principle of recent work in cognitive science and neurobiology. D+G’s interest in ethology–and indeed in what Keith Ansell-Pearson aptly calls an “ethology of assemblages”–anticipates the recent consensus in cognitive science (including AI) that behavior can only be understood when viewed systemically, i.e., as a component in a larger system or assemblage. Thus D+G’s theoretical corpus helps us unpack the cultural significance of the “adaptive responder” model (Clark 1997) in which body, brain, and world form a complex, holistic, evolutionarily-based system of intelligent behavior. With its insistence on a radically ecological model of agency, D+G’s work resonates with research in biology (Maturana and Varela, Bateson) and cognitive science (Edwin Hutchins, Andy Clark, Rodney Brooks) that understands adaptive behavior as a coproduction of intrinsic dynamics and response to environmental conditions. Such research highlights the role of human agents as “distributed cognitive engines” and situates “the flow of reason” across brain and world (with resonances, once again, to the Bergson of Matter and Memory); consequently, the new picture of living systems to which it gives rise deterritorializes the locus for evaluating adaptive success, attributing it to “brain-body coalitions in ecologically realistic environments” (rather than to the individual brain or organism) (Clark 69). Not only do D+G embrace a similar ecological picture of systems (or machinic assemblages), but, in their function as cultural theorists (and not biologists), they concentrate on extrapolating its implications for the pragmatics of human existence (what they call becoming). By situating the operation of selection within specific ecological contexts and by emphasizing the role of “side-communication” as a source for novelty, D+G foreground the possibilities for novel becomings that arise independently of selective pressures in ways that can potentially alter their impact.

At a moment when developments in the cognitive and biological sciences have revolutionized our view of the brain, behavior, and evolution, and when hitherto unimagined convergences between humans and machines are transforming the very meaning of life, it is imperative that cultural theory follow suit. In the light of these developments, notions of subjectivity, agency, and selfhood can no longer remain anchored in an obsolete representationalism, but must be rethought from the ground up. What D+G’s work accomplishes, despite whatever criticisms we may launch against their more radical tendencies, is precisely such a rethinking: eschewing all representationalist models of agency (including theories of performativity which, despite their promises, comprise nothing less than the last bastion of a moribund representationalism), D+G model agency as an emergent process rooted in biology and inseparable from a larger ecological context. In so doing, they make possible an affirmation of the rich, multi-leveled embodiment that characterizes our existence as human beings.

I say “make possible,” and not “accomplish,” because, as my argument will bear out, D+G’s dismissal or marginalization of the organism as nothing but a limited, molar, and thus epiphenomenal entity compromises their success in doing justice to the significant agency–indeed, multiple forms of agency–that we acquire by dint of our multi-leveled embodiment (Varela’s “Organism” enumerates five distinct levels of selfhood ranging from the most basic form of biological existence to the richness characteristic of social life). As I see it, D+G’s tendency to privilege the flexibility of the plane of immanence over any constraint imposed by organization–and, correlatively, to emphasize ecological context at the expense of emergent organism or system–risks indulging a familiar posthuman fantasy: to wit, the fantasy that the body can be programmed, that embodied life is simply the consequence of an operation of coding. While D+G’s model of becoming is far more nuanced than the flat-footed notions of performativity that have dominated recent discussions of cyberculture, their willingness to view the embodied organism as a component of a “haecceity” rather than an evolving system risks dissolving the body into the vast sea of life that is the plane of immanence.

To counter this risk and to salvage the immense promise of D+G’s fertile cross-disciplinary undertaking, we must therefore read their biophilosophy against their tendency toward radicalism. Accordingly, I offer my critical arguments not as a repudiation of D+G’s work, but rather as an effort toward a broader synthesis of Deleuzean philosophy of difference with contemporary science. By reintroducing a certain notion of organismic autonomy (borrowed from the systems theory of Maturana and Varela), I seek to reinject a particular “Bergsonism” into D+G’s ethology of assemblages–the Bergsonism that stresses the necessity for matter (and the organism) to serve as obstacles to the flow of life. Revamped in light of recent complexity theory, such a Bergsonism yields a model of human agency that eschews much of what D+G find intolerable about organic theories of the human ⁵ and also, incidentally, much of what contemporary cognitive science and neuroscience has shown to be implausible in the representationalist model of the mind (e.g., the idea of a central processing unit, the priority of representation, etc.⁶). Thus in the end, while D+G’s account of becoming will be shown to involve an illegitimate appeal to nonselectional factors that are active only at the level of macro-cosmic “evolution,” their work remains of the utmost importance for the lead they take in modeling agency as an ecological system. Purged of its “anti-organicism” and developed into a form of what Maturana and Varela call “structural coupling” (which, importantly, is necessarily local and concrete), the notion of a machinic assemblage furnishes the very basis for a model of embodied agency that can do justice to the two facets of ethology: the capacity to affect and to be affected.

From Creative Evolution to Creative Involution

The original impetus behind Deleuze’s interest in Bergson, as Ansell-Pearson and others have noted, stems from Bergson’s qualified rejection of natural selection, the core principle of Darwinism, which explains evolution in terms of an external principle of differentiation.⁷ With his notion of creative evolution, by contrast, Bergson furnishes an alternate understanding of differentiation: for him, evolution follows an internal principle that explains genetic change not as the result of selection from purely contingent variations but rather of a “continuity of genetic energy” (27). By appropriating this internalist perspective, Deleuze commits himself to a philosophical position that will guide his work from this point forward, initially through an alliance with Bergson that focuses on the nature of difference and later, following his break with Bergson over the role of intensity, in his effort to develop a “transcendental empiricism.” Given Bergson’s importance for Deleuze (and also his resonance with contemporary biology), it thus behooves us to explore his account of “creative evolution” and to unpack its relationship with biological theory.

Though expressly modeled on August Weismann’s theory of the “germ-plasm” (itself a precursor to modern theories of the selfish gene), Bergson’s concept of creative evolution rejects the idea that the germ-plasm is continuous in favor of a less extreme, though more metaphysical, notion of continuity: “though the germ-plasm is not continuous, there is at least continuity of genetic energy, this energy being expended only at certain instants, for just enough time to give the requisite impulsion to the embryonic life, and being recouped as soon as possible in new sexual elements, in which, again, it bides its time” (27). On the basis of this substitution, Bergson introduces his vitalism as a sort of qualified finalism (one shorn of its specificity and predeterminism) according to which life “is like a current passing from germ to germ through the medium of a developed organism” (27). “It is,” he continues, “as if the organism itself were only an excrescence, a bud caused to sprout by the former germ endeavoring to continue itself in a new germ. The essential thing is the continuous progress indefinitely pursued, an invisible progress, on which each visible organism rides during the short interval of time given it to live” (27).

Two elements of this conception are worth special attention. First, by rejecting Weismann’s localization of the vital element in the highly specific form of the germ-plasm, Bergson leaves room for the creativity he ascribes to time; accordingly, what is transmitted is not just the physico-chemical germ-line, but the vital energy of a life force which expresses itself through repeated though flexible and open-ended processes of ontogenesis (embryogenesis and morphogenesis). Second, Bergson conceives of this life force as a counterpoint to the entropic decline of the physical universe in a manner that underscores the importance of its stabilization in material forms.⁸ It is, Bergson contends, the attachment of the vital force to organisms that conditions the emergence and propagation of life:

The life that evolves on the surface of our planet is indeed attached to matter. If it were pure consciousness, a fortiori if it were supraconsciousness, it would be pure creative activity. In fact, it is riveted to an organism that subjects it to the general laws of inert matter…. Incapable of stopping the course of material changes downwards, [life] succeeds in retarding it. The evolution of life really continues, as we have shown, an initial impulsion: this impulsion, which has determined the development of the chlorophyllian function in the plant and of the sensori-motor system in the animal, brings life to more and more efficient acts by the fabrication and use of more and more powerful explosives. (245-46)

While these two elements (consciousness and matter) tend in opposite directions (the former toward differentiation; the latter toward stabilization), it is important to note that they are held together through Bergson’s sustained biological realism and his correlated commitment to a biological notion of differentiation. If the creativity internal to life expresses itself, ideally, as a drive toward freedom from matter, in actual fact it utilizes the constrained freedom provided by flexible and open-ended processes of ontogenesis to express itself in stabilized forms that store solar energy and retard entropic dissipation. In short, stabilization of life in the organism is fundamental to Bergson’s vitalism. As we will see, the priority on actualization that this implies is central to the notion of differentiation as it takes shape in contemporary biological theory.

It is precisely this realism and the biological basis of differentiation that Deleuze eschews in his effort to arrive at a (philosophical) principle of difference in itself. The roots of such a principle–a principle that will underwrite both Deleuze’s philosophical Aufhebung of biology in Difference and Repetition and D+G’s marginalization of the organism in A Thousand Plateaus–can be found in Deleuze’s interpretation of vital difference as internal difference in Bergsonism. Introduced in the context of an effort to distinguish Bergsonian creative evolution from Darwinism, this interpretation foregrounds Bergson’s stress on the indeterminacy of vital difference in order to present the élan vital as the ultimate and purely internal cause of differentiation above and beyond any resistance matter offers to life, and indeed in place of such resistance. Before expressing itself as material differentiation, that is, the élan vital differs from itself: it is difference in itself. What this means is that vital difference is virtual and that expressed difference is the actualization of virtual life.

It is on this point that Deleuze contrasts Bergsonism with the “misconceptions” of both preformism and evolutionism: whereas in Bergson’s scheme “evolution takes place from the virtual to actuals,” preformism interprets it in terms of “the ‘possible’ that is realized” and evolutionism in terms of “pure actuality” (Bergsonism 98). In the former case, evolution is modeled “in the image and likeness of the possible that it realizes” with the consequence that difference is reduced to resemblance; in the latter case, vital variations are conceived “as so many actual determinations that should then combine on a single line,” and not as differences in themselves (differences that differ from themselves) (99). In order to avoid these two misconceptions, Deleuze informs us, “a philosophy of life” must meet three requirements: 1) vital difference must be thought of as internal difference in which the “tendency to change” is not accidental; 2) the variations produced must enter into “relationships of dissociation or division” and not just “relationships of association and addition”; 3) these variations must involve a “virtuality that is actualized according to the lines of divergence,” such that evolution proceeds not from one to another actual term in a unilinear homogeneous series, but from a virtual term to heterogeneous terms that actualize it along a ramified series (99-100). These requirements, Deleuze continues, introduce the question of how “the Simple or the One, ‘the original identity,’” has the power to be differentiated in the first place, and the answer he provides, not surprisingly, involves the status of the virtual, a sort of “gigantic Memory” or “universal cone in which everything coexists with itself, except for the differences of level” (100).

The introduction of the virtual–or rather, the differentiation of a philosophical notion of the virtual from a biological one–allows Deleuze to determine vital difference as a properly philosophical concept. As Deleuze sees it, biological notions of “organic virtuality or potentiality” tend to maintain that “potentiality is actualized by simple limitation of its global capacity” and thus to confuse the virtual and the possible (Bergsonism 97). What is crucial to a true (or philosophical) notion of the virtual is the repudiation of any form of elimination or limitation: “to be actualized,” Deleuze argues, “the virtual… must create its own lines of actualization in positive acts” (97). Unlike the real, the actual “does not resemble the virtual that it embodies,” which means that difference is “primary in the process of actualization” (97). “In short,” Deleuze notes, “the characteristic of virtuality is to exist in such a way that it is actualized by being differentiated and is forced to differentiate itself, to create its lines of differentiation in order to be actualized” (97). As we will see, Deleuze’s shift to a model of difference as intensity (rather than as one tendency within difference, the tendency to differ in kind) marks the advent of such a philosophical conception of difference in his work: since the unity of creative evolution is a unity of the virtual, it constitutes what Deleuze will later call a transcendental principle of difference (or intensity) that is itself responsible for the lines of differentiation which express creative evolution in the various different organisms constitutive of material life on earth. In this open-ended monadology, “what coexisted in the virtual ceases to coexist in the actual and is distributed in lines or parts that cannot be summed up, each one requiring the whole, except from a certain perspective, from a certain point of view” (101). It is on the basis of their emergence from the virtual unity that these lines of differentiation realize their creative potential: “They only actualize by inventing, they create in these conditions the physical, vital or psychical representative of the ontological level that they embody” (101). In Bergsonism, Deleuze attributes such a philosophical (or virtual) conception of internal difference to Bergson, arguing that Bergson’s stress on matter as an obstacle to élan vital does not recur to the conception of the negative he had previously condemned. Rather, since “evolution is actualization” and “actualization is creation,” the stabilization of life in the material form of organisms must be understood as differentiations that express the virtuality actualized in them, not as negative limits placed on that virtuality.⁹ Here, without spelling it out, Deleuze implies the existence of a domain of intensity that embodies this virtuality, thus effectively repudiating the primacy Bergson (and contemporary complexity theory) accord actualization as differentiation. As Deleuze states in a passage just cited, the differentiation of a properly philosophical concept of difference (or the virtual) attains its urgency from the poverty of biological notions of the virtual; things might be quite otherwise, as we shall see, should contemporary biology prove able to furnish a non-limitative organic or biological notion of the virtual.

Only in Difference and Repetition does Deleuze fully articulate the transcendental principle of difference central to his important work of the late 60s. As I have suggested, this articulation involves a certain break with Bergson and also, it must be stressed, with the biological realism with which Bergson theorizes the élan vital. Intended as a means of reaching a properly philosophical realm of analysis and directed against Bergson’s determination of the life force as a counterpoint to entropy (which Deleuze perceives to involve a potentially crippling reliance on a thermodynamic model), this break involves a key revision in Deleuze’s previous understanding of vital difference. Rather than deriving vital difference from Bergson’s two forms of difference, as he had in Bergsonism,¹⁰ Deleuze now finds it necessary to posit a fundamentally separate and primordial form of difference (intensity) from which both of Bergson’s forms are derived.¹¹

In the analysis he offers in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze accordingly rejects Bergson’s critique of intensity together with the correlated analysis of vital difference as the tendency of difference in kind to differ from itself. Taking up the thread of his earlier insight into the ambiguity flavoring Bergson’s critique of intensity in Time and Free Will,¹² Deleuze now goes on to oppose his own mature concept of difference to Bergson’s. In order to develop the radical potential of intensity against Bergson’s own reduction of it, Deleuze repudiates his earlier reading of internal difference on the basis of difference of kind, contending instead that vital difference concerns a more primordial domain of difference–differences of intensity which constitute “the entire nature of difference,” that is, both differences in degree and differences in kind (Difference 239). Vital difference (or difference in itself) can be neither qualitative nor extensive, since even qualities (following Deleuze’s critique of Bergson on intensive magnitudes) involve resemblance. In the wake of this transformation, it will be necessary to distinguish two orders of difference,

two orders of implication or degradation: a secondary implication which designates the state in which intensities are enveloped by the qualities and extensity which explicate them; and a primary implication designating the state in which intensity is implicated in itself, at once both enveloping and enveloped. In other words, a secondary degradation in which difference in intensity is cancelled, the highest rejoining the lowest; and a primary power of degradation in which the highest affirms the lowest. (240)

These two orders of difference belong to scientific and philosophical orders respectively; only a transcendental inquiry, Deleuze stresses, can fathom the illusion generated by empirical apprehension of intensity. Cutting through the scattered image reflected by the surface, such an inquiry affirms the “subterranean life” of difference: it discovers “that intensity remains implicated in itself and continues to envelop difference at the very moment when it is reflected in the extensity and the quality that it creates, which implicate it only secondarily” (240).

Not surprisingly, in light of its centrality for Deleuze’s mature philosophical project, this distinction allows us to fathom the fundamental correlation between the philosophy of difference and the critique of modern science: just as difference is covered over by the operation of negation central to philosophies of identity, intensity is obscured by the transcendental illusions of modern science. With this shift in his understanding of difference, Deleuze abandons the analysis of duration as qualitative difference (difference of kind) in favor of a continuum of intensity. From this point on, the philosophical principle of difference will set the terms for Deleuze’s encounter with science (modern biology) and will do so irrespective (and, I shall argue, to the detriment) of the increasingly concrete and serious nature of this encounter.

More fundamentally still, the shift to a model of difference as intensity introduces an ontological doubleness into Deleuze’s conceptual apparatus which generates the important notion of the “plane of immanence” so central to both Capitalism and Schizophrenia and Deleuze’s Cinema books. This ontological doubling allows Deleuze to differentiate an order of emergence from an order of constituted functioning without placing the two orders into opposition. Most readers of D+G will readily recognize this doubling in the differentiation of the molecular from the molar, an example which serves perfectly to illustrate what is crucial here: emergent actuals do not limit the virtual by means of an operation of negation, but rather express a concrete differentiation that remains in contact with the domain of intensity (or the virtuality) from which it emerges. Far from there being an opposition or contradiction between the levels, there is a profound complementarity: immanence and organization refer to distinct conceptual frameworks; they furnish variant accounts of phenomena, from the standpoint of process and product, respectively. Deleuze’s turn to a metaphysics of intensity, in other words, allows for a division between two separate orders at which the real can be grasped: on the one hand, there is the familiar domain of quality and quantity where things are given external determination; and on the other, the “subterranean” domain of intensity where relationality reigns supreme. Much of the difficulty in understanding D+G’s criticisms and transformations of Darwinism stem, as we will see, from the way one interprets the inseparability of these two domains: can and how can what emerges on the plane of organization (e.g., the organism) be traced to the plane of immanence, the domain of intensity?

Becoming as Creative Involution

Initially introduced to combat the thermodynamic model, the transcendental principle of difference (intensity or the “being of the sensible”) informs a crucial shift in Deleuze’s view of matter, a shift that stands behind the picture of the organism as a molar arrest of energy so central to the ethical project of A Thousand Plateaus. Reconceptualized as the transcendental ground of difference, intensity constitutes both differences of degree (extensity) and differences of kind (quality). Accordingly, it can no longer be the case, as it was for Bergson (and for the Deleuze of Bergsonism), that life expresses itself as the play of a virtual creative evolution involving divergent lines of actualization. The passage from one quality to another is not discrete, as the Bergsonian emphasis on qualitative difference (difference in kind) must contend; rather “even where there is a maximum of resemblance or continuity [between qualities], there are phenomena of delay and plateau, shocks of difference, distances, a whole play of conjunctions and disjunctions, a whole depth which forms a graduated scale rather than a properly qualitative duration” (238). These “phenomena” comprise intensity and their presence within qualitative difference insure the integrity of intensive quantities against or in spite of Bergson’s (attempted) reduction. Thus, rather than a varied production of material forms (organisms) which retard its movement, life qua virtual difference describes a continuum of intensity cutting across differences of kind (i.e., phyletic lineages or species) in a “dance of the most disparate things.”

As Ansell-Pearson notes, this defense of intensity against qualitative reduction forms the basis for D+G’s later “etho-logic of living systems,” furnishing the metaphysics underlying the model of becoming introduced in Plateau 10 and the more general account of creative involution on which it is based. This philosophical basis serves to differentiate D+G’s becoming from theories of agency–ranging from existentialist humanism to recent accounts of identity as performance–to which it otherwise appears similar. What is central on D+G’s account is neither the authenticity of intentional action, nor the performative effects of ritualized action, but rather the possibilities for tranversal or rhizomatic connections across boundaries of all kinds. The kind of identity generated through becoming is thus molecular and fleeting: a conjunction of a set of singularities, of speeds and affects, that defines a concrete mode of individuation or “haecceity.”

Accordingly, while D+G’s examples of becoming–little Hans’s becoming-horse, French performance artist Lolito’s becoming-animal, Robert De Niro’s becoming-crab, Hofmannsthal’s becoming-rat, Vladimir Slepian’s becoming-dog, and so forth–seem to suggest a necessary anchoring in a human-focused existential situation, the particular kind of becoming they illustrate is just one instance of a broader, encompassing category. Human becomings, D+G make clear, are no different in kind from the most inhuman becoming imaginable: “all becomings are molecular: the animal, flower, or stone one becomes are molecular collectivities, haecceities, not molar subjects, objects, or forms that we know from the outside…. We must say the same of things human: there is a becoming-woman, a becoming-child, that do not resemble the woman or the child as clearly distinct molar entities” (Thousand Plateaus 275). Nor is there any humanist privilege involved in interspecies becomings, since these latter occur beneath the (molar) thresholds that determine species form: “You become animal only molecularly,” D+G continue. “You do not become a barking molecular dog, but by barking, if it is done with enough feeling, with enough necessity and composition, you emit a molecular dog. Man does not become wolf, or vampire, as if he changed molar species; the vampire and werewolf are becomings of man, in other words, proximities between molecules in composition, relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness between emitted particles” (275). Regardless of their point of origin or their local effects, becomings occur beneath and beyond any form of molar organization and involve the transversal communication of molecular forces. What this means is that human beings engage in processes of becoming that are, in all important respects, exactly similar to the processes of becoming that snap up the wasp and the orchid (or, for that matter, microbial genetic systems and animal or plant cells) into symbiotic complexes.¹³ In all cases, what is at stake are relations of speeds and affects that generate events or haecceities within the global plane of consistency that is Nature. Understood as movement at the molecular level, the becomings in which humans engage comprise a particular instance of a more general process of becoming that D+G term “involution.”

In contrast to evolution (including Bergson’s creative evolution), involution describes a creative process whose field of production does not depend on differentiation, but rather involves a dissolution of form that “free[s] times and speeds” and thus makes possible the “dance of disparate things” through transversal modes of becoming (267). Accordingly, creative involution privileges the “unnatural participation” or monstrous coupling which, by generating becoming without heredity, comprises the hidden principle of Nature itself: “We oppose epidemic to filiation, contagion to heredity, peopling by contagion to sexual reproduction…. The difference is that contagion, epidemic, involves terms that are entirely heterogeneous: for example, a human being, an animal, a bacterium, a virus, a molecule, a microorganism. Or in the case of the truffle, a tree, a fly, and a pig. These combinations are neither genetic nor structural; they are interkingdoms, unnatural participations. That is the only way Nature operates–against itself” (241-2). Beneath the apparent divisions of natural history and the discrete products of natural selection there exists a rich field of heterogeneous molecular activity that, D+G argue, is responsible for the creation (as well as the creativity) of life, organic and nonorganic alike.

Though they stop short of jettisoning natural selection wholesale, D+G do significantly restrict its function, arguing (with Bergson) that selection forms a purely external principle of difference capable of operating only on constituted forms, that is, at the molar level. That such a principle cannot by itself account for the proliferation of life is well accepted by the majority of contemporary biologists and furnishes one common ground linking biological theory to D+G (and Bergson): in all these cases, some internal or vital principle of differentiation is required. D+G, however, distinguish themselves by their desire to furnish a rigorously molecular account of “evolution” (creative involution). As Ansell-Pearson has noted, the crux of Deleuze’s (and later D+G’s) transformative appropriation of Darwinism is the insistence (following Gilbert Simondon) that “differentiation presupposes individuation as a field of intensity” and that processes of individuation precede the constitution of individuals and thus “enjoy an independent evolution” (Germinal Life 92). While individuals (organisms) might be the carriers of individual differences, they do not comprise the locus of evolutionary mechanisms: “evolution” (and later, involution) operates directly through processes of individuation.

D+G transformatively appropriate two aspects of “neoevolutionism” in particular–the central role of population thinking and the importance of non-filiative, transversal modes of communication between living systems–in order to discount the shaping function of natural selection. As exemplified by various contemporary biologists ranging from traditionalists like Ernst Mayr to “mild” revisionists like Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould, population thinking focuses on the plethora of individual variation within a species and between species in a manner that breaks definitively with any form of typological essentialism.¹⁴ Its importance, both for contemporary biology and for D+G, stems from the emphasis it places on variation over type, an emphasis which allows it to define species fluidly as sets of organisms held together not by predetermined and static form but rather through genetic as well as ecological bonds. Within contemporary biology, population thinking has largely broken down the rigid boundaries traditionally attributed to species, since the phenotypic variation between populations of individuals is no different from that within populations.¹⁵ This in turn has brought about a fundamental shift in the focus of evolutionary change, with biologists like Richard Dawkins and Lynn Margulis repudiating the traditional focus on the individual organism (which itself can no longer designate a static and wholly autonomous entity) in favor of sub-organismic exchanges of genetic material and symbioses that occur at the molecular level. Still, there is a decisive difference between this development and D+G’s transformative appropriation. While population thinking and transversal communication break down the fixation of biology on species and organisms, the revised picture of evolution they produce involves a cooperation between such molecular factors (which are themselves subject to selection) and the contribution they make as “components” of higher forms like organisms (also subject to selection). Indeed, on the model presented by complexity theory, these two levels freely interact with one another in the process of morphogenesis that yields organismic forms. For D+G, by contrast, the point of a molecular reading of Darwinism is to eliminate the need and possibility for such interaction: as Ansell-Pearson argues, population thinking and transversal communication furnish them a way out of the problem of the “irreducibility of the forms of folding”: since individuals are formed through fluid populations, there is no incompatibility between the novel becomings operative in creative becoming and the irreducibility of forms of life. Moreover, as Ansell-Pearson astutely observes, the resources of neo-evolutionism furnish D+G with the means, effectively, to reduce molar forms like species to molecular dynamics: D+G’s suggestion, he argues, “is that one can only understand a molar population, such as a species, in terms of a different kind of population, a molecular one, which is the subject of the effects of, and changes in, coding” (Germinal Life 159). Both the viability and the limitations of such a reduction will be investigated once we turn to a discussion of complexity theory.

For the moment, it behooves us to grasp the concrete transformations to which D+G submit neo-evolutionism. To support their turn from evolution to involution, they push the fluidity introduced by population thinking and sub-organismic communication to its extreme, contending on the one hand that molecular factors, both genetic and extra-genetic, determine higher levels of organization, and on the other that ecological relations (what, following modern ethology, they call “territorialization”) are capable of selecting variations that arise in “a free margin of the code” (Thousand Plateaus 322). In both cases, emphasis is placed on the extra-genetic mechanisms of variation that, following the so-called modern synthesis, necessarily accompany processes of genetic transmission:

A code is inseparable from a process of decoding that is inherent to it…. There is no genetics without “genetic drift.” The modern theory of mutations has clearly demonstrated that a code, which necessarily relates to a population, has an essential margin of decoding: not only does every code have supplements capable of free variation, but a single segment may be copied twice, the second copy left free for variation. In addition, fragments of code may be transferred from the cells of one species to those of another, Man and Mouse, Monkey and Cat, by viruses or through other procedures. This involves not translation between codes (viruses are not translators) but a singular phenomenon we call surplus value of code, or side-communication. (Thousand Plateaus 53)

This surplus value provides a “free margin of the code” that frees molecular particles from their restricted role within the process of genetic transmission. Moreover, surplus value of code empowers local environmental factors with the capacity to forge modifications of a code: such modifications, D+G contend, “have an aleatory cause in the milieu of exteriority, and it is their effects on the interior milieus, their compatibility with them, that decide whether they will be popularized. Deterritorializations and reterritorializations do not bring about the modifications; they do, however, strictly determine their selection” (54).

Despite their aim to empower molecular processes as the active agents for modifications of code, D+G here invoke some minimal notion of organismic or systemic agency that, I would suggest, is crucial both for evaluating their molecular Darwinism and for adapting their ecological perspective for the purpose of developing a distributed model of embodied human agency. In the first place, D+G’s marginalization of the organism is clearly manifested in how they treat the topic of autonomy–a topic central to much recent work in the biological sciences. By stressing the determinative function of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, D+G subtly shift the agency for code modification from organism to environment. Accordingly, whatever autonomy they invoke must be predicated not of the organism, but exclusively of the larger ecological circuit in which it is involved. Despite a superficial resemblance to autopoietic theory, which defines living systems according to their autonomy (i.e., their capacity to reproduce themselves) and holds the organism to be “operationally-closed” (though “interactionally open”) to information from its environment, D+G’s conception of code modification remains vigorously heteronomous. Rather than merely being “triggered” by an environmental stimulus, it involves the environment in a far more active sense: through the process of territorialization, the environment itself plays the role of agent which, D+G contend, has the role of strictly determining the selection of code modifications. This displacement of autonomy from the organism to the ecological circuit is made manifest when D+G contrast mutation with differentiation and introduce territorialization as the mechanism that creates differentiation from the surplus value of code:

The essential thing is the disjunction noticeable between the code and the territory. The territory arises in a free margin of the code, one that is not indeterminate but rather is determined differently. Each milieu has its own code, and there is perpetual transcoding between milieus; the territory, on the other hand, seems to form at the level of a certain decoding. Biologists have stressed the importance of these determined margins, which are not to be confused with mutations, in other words, changes internal to the code: here, it is a question of duplicated genes or extra chromosomes that are not inside the genetic code, are free of function, and offer a free matter for variation. But it is very unlikely that this kind of matter could create new species independently of mutations, unless it were accompanied by events of another order capable of multiplying the interactions of the organism with its milieus. Territorialization is precisely such a factor that lodges on the margins of the code of a single species and gives the separate representatives of that species the possibility of differentiating. It is because there is a disjunction between the territory and the code that the territory can indirectly induce new species. (Thousand Plateaus 322, last emphasis added)

In expanding the scope of the “organism” to embrace “an external milieu of materials, an internal milieu of composing elements and composed substances, an intermediary milieu of membranes and limits, and an annexed milieu of energy sources and actions-perceptions,” D+G wrest the function of territorialization from the individual organism itself and predicate it instead of a fluid immanent totality of “transcoding or transduction,” a fluctuating interconnection of milieus “in which one milieu serves as the basis for another, or conversely is established atop another milieu, dissipates in it or is constituted in it” (Thousand Plateaus 313).

The effect of this move is to resituate phenotypic change both “beneath” and “outside” the organism, in the fluctuations that reverberate throughout the entire plane of immanence:

There is a self-movement of expressive qualities. Expressiveness is not reducible to the immediate effects of an impulse triggering an action in a milieu… expressive qualities, the colors of the coral fish, for example, are auto-objective, in other words, find objectivity in the territory they draw…. expressive qualities or matters of expression enter shifting relations with one another that ‘express’ the relation of the territory they draw to the interior milieu of impulses and exterior milieu of circumstances. To express is not to depend upon; there is an autonomy of expression.” (Thousand Plateaus 317)

By attributing autonomy to expression, D+G are able to propose the “refrain” as a form of territorialization distinct from organic territorialization. Defined as “any aggregate of matters of expression that draws a territory” and predicated of functional totalities that involve an organ’s structural correlation with an environment (refrains, D+G specify, can be “optical, gestural, motor, etc.”), the refrain forms the operative principle for phenotypic change qua fluctuation in the plane of immanence.

By attributing the function of territorialization to the plane of immanence, I suggest, D+G vastly overestimate the force of environmental factors, or what amounts to the same thing, significantly marginalize the role of organismic activity. In the place of their one-sided view of the correlation of organism and external milieu, what contemporary biology offers (from systems theory to complexity) is an ecological model whose contribution is precisely to balance intrinsic dynamics with response to the environment. Indeed, given Deleuze’s (and D+G’s) avowedly Spinozist notion of the body, just such a balance would appear to be called for even (or especially) on their account, since Spinoza’s conception of the organism involves what Hans Jonas calls a “seeming paradox,” in fact the very paradox addressed by contemporary biology: “spontaneity paired with receptivity,” “autonomy for itself,… openness for the world” (278). Jonas states:

This dialectic is precisely the nature of life in its basic organic sense. Its closure as a functional whole within the individual organism is, at the same time, correlative openness toward the world; its very separateness entails the faculty of communication; its segregation from the whole is the condition of its integration with the whole…. Only complex functional systems afford the inner autonomy that is required for greater power of self-determination, together with greater variety of inner states responding to the determinations which impinge on it from without…. Only by being sensitive can life be active, only by being exposed can it be autonomous. And this in direct ratio: the more individuality is focused in a self, the wider is its periphery of communication with other things; the more isolated, the more related it is. (278, 277, 278)

How does it happen that D+G’s ecological conception of the organism, in many respects so resonant with current work in biological systems, comes to diverge so markedly over the question of organismic autonomy? Once again, the answer concerns the crucial division between ontological levels that structures Deleuze’s work from Difference and Repetition onward: in line with Deleuze’s (and D+G’s) general tendency to give priority to the domain of intensity (the molecular), their invocation of various milieus as a means of expanding the scope of the organism has the effect of situating causal agency not simply outside the organism, but outside the plane of organization itself, i.e., the plane on which, following the theory of biological systems, an organism is causally and experientially correlated with an environment or milieu. What D+G seek is an understanding of the complex, relational causality that underlies the emergence of organismic effects from the molecular standpoint, that is, from a perspective or on an ontological level at which the organism has no causal autonomy. Such a perspective is, quite simply, alien to the conceptual terrain of current biology and complexity theory, where the tendency of morphogenesis to favor “natural kinds” (Goodwin, Kauffman) and the fractal multileveled nature of the “self” (Varela) necessitate interrelation between the plane of organization and the plane of immanence, between incipient order and transversal communication.

This tension between what I shall call D+G’s cosmic expressionism and current work in biology surfaces quite clearly in their effort to assimilate the body without organs (BwO) to the ecological notion of the milieu. When they claim, in ATP, that the body without organs is “adjacent to the organism” and “continually in the process of constructing itself,” they effectively present it as a variant of what Varela calls a “niche” or “milieu”–namely, the continually-shifting part of the environment which has existential meaning for an organism. In this determination, the BwO would form something like a background that, following the biological notion of structural coupling, is co-constitutive of the organism, or better, fundamentally inseparable from and in fluid interconnection with it. Difficulty arises, however, as soon as D+G shift registers to argue for the molecular fluidity among and between milieus that characterizes the plane of immanence, for in so doing, they dissolve the very principle–the organism–that accounts for the selection of a particular milieu (or milieus) from the larger environment. Simply put, their philosophical conception of a limitless molecular consistency between milieus is not compatible with ecological or biological notions that view the milieu as causally correlated with an organism. And this incompatibility cannot be explained away as an artifact of the division between planes of organization and immanence, since the crux of the notion of biological systems involves a local and causal correlation between organism and milieu that has no complement at the molecular level.¹⁶ Otherwise put, the concrete structural correlation between organism and milieu–a correlation that encompasses the organism’s powers to affect and to be affected, its autonomy and its receptivity–is fundamentally necessary to explain its emergence: the organism simply cannot be reduced to the epiphenomenon or existential effect of molecular forces.

One recent effort to dissolve this incompatibility deserves mention here, particularly since it helps pinpoint the potential contribution D+G’s conceptual apparatus can make toward a rethinking of embodied agency. In an effort to defend D+G against claims that they simply dismiss the organism through abstract negation, Ansell-Pearson unpacks the implications of their claim that the BwO is adjacent to the organism and continually in process, arguing that the BwO enjoys a certain double life. Since the BwO comes into play not only on the plane of consistency (where there are only molecular forces) but also in the strata where molar formations arise, it cannot be the case that it simply negates the organism; rather, there must in fact be two bodies without organs: one which opposes the molecular fluidity characteristic of the plane of consistency against the rigid organization that is constitutive of the organism and another that actually belongs to the stratum and constitutes “a body without organs of the organism” (Germinal Life 154). While the former BwO would comprise a synonym for the plane of immanence itself, the latter BwO would designate something akin to the biological notion of the milieu discussed above. Such a distinction, concludes Ansell-Pearson, saves D+G from accusations of reductionism, since it shows that their aim is not “to negate the organism but to arrive at a more comprehensive understanding of it by situating it within the wider field of forces, intensities, and durations that give rise to it and which do not cease to involve a play between nonorganic and stratified life” (154).

Again, however, the crucial issue concerns the nature of the doubling of the BwO: can a biological notion of the BwO as the milieu(s) adjacent to the organism on the plane of organization (or on a particular, e.g., the organic, stratum) form a complement to a philosophical notion of the BwO as a continuum of molecular forces or intensity? In my opinion, the answer has to be no, since the former requires recognition of the particular autonomy that characterizes the organism and hence some degree of causal agency on the part of the organism (or the tendency in nature toward “natural kinds”). If recent work in biology and complexity theory is right to underscore the crucial role of the organism in morphogenesis, then a theory that would explain away this autonomy as an effect of molecular forces would be powerless to account for the emergence of biological systems, what Stuart Kauffman poetically glosses as “order for free.” At a more general level, Ansell-Pearson’s position here simply does not jibe with the cosmic expressionism through which D+G seek to dissolve all molar organization into a play of individuation through haecceity. Though it may be true that D+G only oppose a specific notion of the organism–the organism “construed as a given hierarchized and transcendent organization”–the clear priority they place on the molecular makes it hard to imagine what possible positive role it could be granted. Even if one eschews the reduction that yields such a notion–abstraction from its “molecular and rhizomatic conditions of possibility”–the organism must by definition remain a molar entity belonging to the plane of organization, and thus, in some sense or other, reductive of the molecular conditions whose epiphenomenal effect it is. How, indeed, can we overlook or discount Deleuze and Guattari’s repeated insistence on the radical difference between organisms and the organs from which they are made? Taking their work as a whole, the BwO seems intended to furnish not so much an alternative model of the organism as a radically divergent organization of organs that acquires its advantages expressly by shedding all traces of the rigidity and constraint structurally constitutive of organisms.

Nonetheless, Ansell-Pearson’s reading pinpoints a dimension of D+G’s work that, once divested from their cosmic expressionism, can furnish a crucial bridge between cultural theory and biology. When he urges us to take seriously D+G’s characterization of the body without organs as a “milieu of experimentation” and an “associated milieu” that a given organism always carries with it (Germinal Life 189), Ansell-Pearson succeeds in characterizing the BwO in a manner that is consistent with biology’s understanding of both evolutionary and somatic change, and that manages to overcome the problems involved in applying “insights gained from the evolution of biological populations, and from the becomings-animal implicated in ethological assemblages, to the field of ‘nonhuman’ becomings of the human”–to wit, the fact that these involve “inordinately lengthy geological timescales and highly complex evolutionary processes” (155). For if the body without organs forms the environment within which the organism emerges, it could bring the radical possibilities of transversal, molecular communication to bear on the organism itself, without requiring its molecular dissolution. Rather than negating the organism’s proper organization, the BwO would then have an indirect impact on the organism: it would furnish the material conditions for the organism to undergo (whether actively or passively) relative deterritorializations, deterritorializations whose significance would remain inseparable from the larger, abiding organismic whole and its correlation with its constitutive milieu(s). In this way, D+G’s work would make an important contribution to a model of embodied agency rooted in the contemporary biology of complex systems: not only would it open the organism to the domain of intensity, thereby explaining how molecular factors intervene in its development in ways that are not established in advance (and that thus draw positively, i.e., without recourse to limitation, on a biological or organic virtuality), it would also clarify the crucial role of embodied duration as a process through which environmental factors lead to structural change in an organism. Rather than being “strictly determine[d]” by deterritorializations and reterritorializations, modifications in code are mediated or processed by the body: they are the result of a self-modification of the organism in response to stimuli or, as Varela puts it, “perturbations” from the environment.

Before turning to a discussion of complexity theory, let me briefly recap my criticism of D+G. By dissolving the role of the organism through molecular reduction and radical ecologism, D+G effectively recast evolution as an expressive process whose primary vehicle is a mode of individuation alien, as Ansell-Pearson puts it, to that of persons, subjects, or substances. The autonomy of expression D+G attribute to ecological systems allows them to account for biological change in terms of haecceities or individuations which are capable of combining molecular factors in the most varied and transversal manner imaginable. Creative involution is thus ultimately synonymous with a sort of cosmic expressionism through which Nature ceaselessly generates differentiation by cutting across any and all boundaries. At this plane of composition (or consistency), there are only molecular aggregates or haecceities; forms and subjects, species and genera have no proper place here: “It is the entire assemblage in its individuated aggregate that is a haecceity; it is this assemblage that is defined by a longitude and a latitude, by speeds and affects, independently of forms and subjects, which belong to another plane. It is the wolf itself, and the horse, and the child that cease to be subjects to become events, in assemblages that are inseparable from an hour, a season, an atmosphere, an air, a life” (262). With this cosmic expressionism, D+G definitively depart from Deleuze’s earlier allegiance to Bergson (and, as we will see, from a consensus shared by virtually all contemporary biologists): far from needing organisms to capture its force in static, material form, life or creative involution possesses an autonomy at the molecular level: as the product of differentiation in itself (transversal communication), individuation is already in itself thoroughly material.

Creative Involution and Contemporary Biology

Despite its philosophical roots, D+G’s cosmic expressionism resonates strongly with much current work in biology and complexity theory. From differing perspectives, the research of central figures like Richard Dawkins, Lynn Margulis, Stephen Jay Gould, Brian Goodwin, and Stuart Kauffman highlights the importance of molecular processes and ecological factors alongside (and sometimes to the detriment of) the role of individual organisms. Nonetheless, D+G’s position can be distinguished from most of this work by virtue of its radicality on two points: 1) its adherence to a thoroughgoing molecular reductionism; and 2) its vocation to limit natural selection to the operation of a purely external difference. While most contemporary biologists have found it necessary to temper the lesson of the molecular revolution by reasserting the importance of higher-level organization (e.g., the organism), D+G consistently portray such organization as an exclusively negative limitation of life, one that does not express so much as restrict its expression. And while no contemporary scientist would think of rejecting natural selection per se (though several question its presumptive priority and its capacity to account for the origin of life), D+G differentiate creative involution from natural selection along the molecular-molar axis, contending that (immanent) distribution across transversal lines is alone sufficient to explain variation and the transmission of novel traits.

In both cases, D+G’s position derives less from a biological rationale than from a prior and overriding philosophical commitment. Thus the staunch adherence to molecular reductionism, though certainly flavored by Deleuze’s early reading of Jacques Monod and François Jacob, French pioneers of the molecular revolution, finds its true necessity in the philosophical break with Bergson over the status of intensity and the role of matter in evolution. For once the Bergsonian model of actualization along variant lines is abandoned in favor of a more radical model of transversal communication across boundaries of all levels, the molecular domain sheds its dependence on form and structure and acquires a wholesale functional autonomy. Likewise, D+G’s repudiation of natural selection as a derivative external mechanism owes far more to Deleuze’s philosophy of difference than to biological theory.¹⁷ The strict priority Deleuze lends distribution over selection, as an immanent over against a merely external mechanism of variation, can find its justification only on a philosophical model of expressionism, not in an ecology of biological systems. Despite its resonance with contemporary accounts of self-organization, D+G’s account thus institutes a rigid separation between natural selection and involution, one that is effectively deconstructed (as we shall see below) by complexity theory’s marriage of self-organization with selection (Kauffman 168).

Despite sometimes significant discrepancies, contemporary biological research programs converge on a certain consensus concerning the irreducibility of higher-level organization in evolution. In practically all cases, whether for reasons that remain within the parameters of the neo-Darwinian framework or not, morphology at the cellular and the organismic level comprises a quasi-autonomous locus for evolutionary change. Like D+G’s understanding of emergence in terms of individuation by haecceity, complexity theory’s notion of morphological emergence from a “generative field” (to introduce just one example) shifts the focus away from the static physical essence of an organism to the dynamical context (the molecular field of forces) out of which organization emerges. In contrast to D+G’s approach, though, emergence on such an account is not purely punctual and singular, but processual in a manner that imposes structure and constraint on the emergent organism. Moreover, the process of emergence interrelates the domain of molecular flux with the plane of organization in a fundamentally different way than do D+G: far from constructing the molar register as a mere epiphenomenon of the play of molecular forces, complexity theory presents a picture of bi-directional causality in which the emerging, if inchoate, proto-organismic form has a downward effect, as it were, during the process of morphogenesis. Accordingly, the morphogenetic field, while certainly not equivalent or reducible to the plane of organization, also differs significantly from the plane of consistency: it comprises a virtual field of forces, representing a subset of the molecular domain, that is oriented around (or selected in function of) a particular emergent form.

Given this fundamental difference as well as the areas of overlap with D+G’s work, the kind of biological research exemplified by complexity theory (but encompassing alternate models including Lynn Margulis’s work on symbiosis and Gould’s conception of morphospace) provides an excellent context in which to evaluate and criticize the two major planks of D+G’s creative involution: their categorical separation of involution from natural selection and their marginalization of the organism.¹⁸ While complexity theorists make common cause with D+G by challenging the privilege accorded natural selection in modern biology, the rationale in the respective cases could not be more different: rather than being compelled, for philosophical reasons, to reduce natural selection to a purely external factor, largely extraneous to the molecular factors informing creative involution, complexity theory rejects the modern doctrine that selection alone is capable of accounting for all evolutionary processes. In its stead, complexity theory proposes what Kauffman calls a “marriage of self-organization and selection,” an asymmetrical pairing in which the spontaneous emergence of order in nature holds a primacy not altogether unlike the one D+G accord vital creativity, with the following difference: selection, in its secondary role, does not operate primarily by acting on constituted forms (as it does in Darwinism), or on molecular factors (as it does for D+G and a contemporary biologist like Dawkins), but rather by forming a source of resistance that “natural kinds” must overcome in order to emerge successfully from morphogenesis. Otherwise put, selection does not so much work in conjunction with vital creativity as against it, forming a counter-pressure to the tendency toward order in nature. On the issue of its interpretation of natural selection, complexity theory is thus far more reminiscent of Bergson than of Deleuze: rather than stripping it of any role in the process of vital creativity, complexity theory resituates selection, dethroning it from its preeminent place as the sole mechanism of evolution, but retaining it in an important supporting role.¹⁹

Complexity theory also resonates with D+G’s biophilosophy in its attempt to go beyond the surface level of typological form. Once again, however, the scope and nature of the rejection of typology differs fundamentally in the two approaches: while D+G (and Deleuze too, following his break with Bergson over the role of intensity) unequivocally view higher level morphology (the organism) as a form of negative limitation on the potential of life, complexity theory in effect expands Bergson’s materialism by insisting on the crucial role played by cellular and morphological processes of self-organization in the perpetual differentiation that is life. Thus, complexity theory rejects surface typology primarily so that it might fathom the deeper laws of organization (differentiation) through which form emerges at levels higher than the molecular. On this account, the organism is neither a negative limitation on some entirely unconstrained (and we might add, fantasized) vitalism, nor a mere epiphenomenon of molecular (genetic and extra-genetic) processes, but is itself an irreducible and quasi-autonomous source of order–a power of nature–whose emergence coincides with and might be said to express local constraints imposed on variation and selection by more general processes of self-organization. “The critical point,” as Kauffman puts it, “is this: In sufficiently complex systems, selection cannot avoid the order exhibited by most members of the ensemble. Therefore, such order is present not because of selection but despite it” (16).

What is ultimately at stake in the confrontation between D+G and complexity theory is a contrast between two vastly different accounts of the molecular and rhizomatic conditions for creativity. Despite claims for its absolute immanence, D+G’s notion of individuation by haecceity yields a view from nowhere (a pure description) that remains entirely synchronic; by contrast, morphological emergence from a “generative field” describes, within a complex, diachronic frame, those processes that generate order spontaneously in nature. Accordingly, while order results, on both accounts, from a combination of internal energy and external stimuli, the respective nature of this combination could hardly be more different. For D+G, the external environment (the molecular field or plane of immanence) exerts an influence that is radically indeterminate (unconstrained by any emerging form) and thus exclusively affirmative and empowering. Emergent “individuations” or “haecceities” can literally take any form whatsoever: they are all logically equivalent and processurally unrelated groupings of molecular singularities which express the impetus of life in particular concrete situations. Given this radical indeterminacy accorded the molecular field, we can better understand why D+G consistently view the organism as a negative limitation: organic form of any sort cannot but restrict the pure open-ended potentiality of the undifferentiated molecular field.

Not surprisingly, an embrace of just such restriction forms a central tenet of complexity theory’s account of emergence. As both Goodwin and Kauffman affirm, external stimuli–what Goodwin terms the generative or morphogenetic field–both facilitate and constrain concrete possibilities for morphological emergence. Introduced to explain the initial emergence of morphological forms in nature (and, in Kauffman’s work, the origin of life itself), the generative field comprises an “organized context within which inherited particulars act, and without which they can have no effect” (Goodwin 41). In other words, the generative field specifies factors–including timing and spatial order–favorable to the genesis of stable form. In this way, as Goodwin’s discussion of chemical self-organization makes clear, morphogenesis explains the emergence of form with absolutely no recourse to genetic principles:

What counts in the production of spatial patterns is not the nature of the molecules and other components involved, such as cells, but the way these interact with one another in time (their kinetics) and in space (their relational order–how the state of one region depends on the state of neighboring regions). These two properties together define a field, the behavior of a dynamic system that is extended in space–which describes most real systems. This is why fields are so fundamental in physics. But a new dimension to fields is emerging from the study of chemical systems such as the Beloussov-Zhabotinsky reaction and the similarity of its spatial patterns to those of living systems. This is the emphasis on self-organization, the capacity of these fields to generate patterns spontaneously without any specific instructions telling them what to do, as in a genetic program. These systems produce something out of nothing. (51)

This capacity to produce something from nothing–what Kauffman succinctly dubs “order for free”–goes hand in hand with a view of nature starkly divergent from that painted by Darwin. Rather than the result of a purely external force (natural selection) acting on entirely random variations, the frequency of different organic forms may simply reflect the probabilities of their respective morphogenetic trajectories. In other words, the preponderance of certain organic forms in nature may reflect internal laws and/or the existence of generic forms, and not simply nor primarily selection of random variations. Natural selection is thereby put into its proper context: at most, it may play a role in testing the stability of particular organismic forms that have been produced independently through processes of dynamic morphogenesis. Likewise, genes find their proper role as mechanisms in the service of generic forms: while they can influence many secondary properties of these forms, they cannot override the generic properties produced by dynamical processes of self-organization. In the end, complexity theory presents a forceful reaffirmation of the importance of the organism as an integral and irreducible factor in morphogenesis: neither the result of external processes of random selection nor a mere epiphenomenon of molecular genetics, the organism attains its proper status as “the fundamental unit of life,” a “natural kind” rather than an historical accident (41). To summarize then, while D+G plumb biological theory in search of support for their marginalization of the organism and natural selection, the most radical work in contemporary biology challenges orthodoxy on both these points only to reassert, with newfound insight, the importance of selection as a secondary regulatory mechanism and the centrality of the organism as the principle agent of evolution.

We can gauge the consequences of this difference by attending to the treatment of both genetic and extra-genetic processes in the respective accounts. From the perspective of complexity theory, D+G’s embrace of the phenomenon of genetic drift–what they call the “surplus value of code”–rings hollow since it assumes a purely undifferentiated context and hence a literally limitless possibility for variation. By interpreting genetic drift as a mechanism for purely unconstrained change, D+G minimize or ignore entirely the significant constraints placed on evolution by cellular processes and morphogenesis. While random genetic drift, and more generally, random variation, certainly do play some role in complexity theory’s account of evolution, they do so only within certain, albeit extremely flexible bounds set by processes of self-organization intrinsic to morphological emergence. More specifically, what D+G ignore in their overvaluation of population thinking and random drift is the role played by “local constraints” and the centrality of “functional wholes” in evolution (Kauffman 21-22). These two factors serve to constrain the possibilities for development along a severely restricted set of pathways. Each cell type, Kauffman argues, is a “highly constrained pattern of gene expression” that is “poised between only two or a few alternatives” and that, “at each stage in ontogeny,… has only a few accessible neighboring cell types” (409). These alternatives and neighbors are determined not through any overriding genetic program, but through the confrontation of contingency with the “underlying general properties of morphogenesis.” Thus, morphogenesis “is not just the genome’s ‘doing’; rather, it is the consequence in time and space of the structural and catalytic properties of proteins encoded in time and space by the genome, acting in concert with nonprotein materials and with physical and chemical forces to yield reliable forms” (410). While the underlying general properties of morphogenesis do not dictate the specific forms taken in any instance, they do specify a range within which possible emergences can occur. Consequently, development occurs in conjunction with organismic form, or, to cite Kauffman’s rather reserved summary, “some developmental mechanisms lie to hand in the evolution of morphogenesis” (410).

Viewed in this context, we discover that D+G’s position actually involves them in an unintentional solidarity with core adherents of the very neo-Darwinism they seek to transform: they too find themselves committed to what Kauffman describes as a simplification too useful to give up: “the initial idealization that variation [and also drift] can occur in any direction” (11). Certainly in their enthusiastic endorsement of random drift, but also with their more general embrace of population thinking as an unconstrained principle for change, D+G would seem guilty of precisely such a simplification: the very plausibility of their notion of transversal communication depends on the broader scope of variation within populations to trump morphological constraints acting on individual organisms. On Kauffman’s account, by contrast, both variation and drift must meet the test of selection, which means, in turn, that they must conform to the constraints morphogenesis imposes on selection. Selection, he contends, “is unlikely to be able to avoid those forms or morphologies which correspond to large volumes of the parameter space of the developmental mechanisms” (410). Like random variation, random genetic drift can only successfully take root when it contributes to the expression of those generic forms favored by nature.

Local constraint exercises a similar regulatory function on non-genetic factors like symbiosis and heterochrony, both of which form central mechanisms in creative involution. Once again, we find that D+G appropriate these factors without taking on the very significant role played by context or, more precisely, by proximity. In the case of heterochrony (change in organism due to changes in developmental timing), this selective appropriation allows D+G to exaggerate the extent of possible change and the power of heterochrony itself. Far from the purely unrestricted and free-floating mechanism D+G assume it is, heterochrony on Kauffman’s account functions within a severely constrained spatial matrix. There is, in any concrete situation, “local constraint on transitions between neighboring forms” (Kauffman 14). What this means is that heterochrony does not form a mechanism for any-possible-change-whatever, as it appears to on D+G’s reading, but rather for selectively “deforming one organism to a closely neighboring organism” (14). There are, Kauffman concludes, significant limitations on heterochrony which follow from the very feature D+G ignore: its concrete contextedness. Far from the freely acting mechanism they take it to be, heterochrony is constrained by “restrictions in generating neighboring forms or organisms, given that the process is starting at a specific point–in a given species or in a specific member of the species” (14). Insofar as these restrictions, like those placed on genetic variation and drift, follow from generic form, they testify to the irreducible role played by the organism in evolutionary processes. Once again, D+G’s hostility to the organism as such leads them to carry out what, from the standpoint of contemporary biology, can at best appear to be a mistaken appropriation.

In the case of symbiosis, a similar decontextualization permits D+G to divorce symbiotic couplings from an evolutionary framework, transforming them in the process into unrestricted mechanisms for becomings of all sorts. For biologist Lynn Margulis and her colleagues, by contrast, symbiosis functions within the parameters set by natural selection. Despite its radical assault on the anthropocentric view of evolution (Margulis’s work lays bare the microbial basis for the emergence of all post-molecular life in a way that questions the principle of morphological division as such), symbiosis can only succeed in generating new forms by passing the test of selection and it can only pass this test by yielding viable forms. Though it challenges the centrality of gradual selection, the “striking scenario” presented by symbiosis remains consistent with, even dependent on, the broadly Darwinian picture of evolution, as Margulis herself stresses:

The descendents of the bacteria that swam in primeval seas breathing oxygen three billion years ago exist now in our bodies as mitochondria. At one time, the ancient bacteria had combined with other microorganisms. They took up residence inside, providing waste disposal and oxygen-derived energy in return for food and shelter. The merged organisms went on to evolve into more complex oxygen-breathing forms of life. Here, then, was an evolutionary mechanism more sudden than mutation: a symbiotic alliance that becomes permanent. By creating organisms that are not simply the sum of their symbiotic parts–but something more like the sum of all the possible combinations of their parts–such alliances push developing beings into uncharted realms. Symbiosis, the merging of organisms into new collectives, proves to be a major power of change on Earth. (Margulis and Sagan 31-32)

While symbiosis allows a far greater adaptive creativity (since “all the world’s bacteria essentially have access to a single gene pool and hence to the adaptive mechanism of the entire bacterial kingdom” [30]), it does not license the literally limitless creative power D+G claim on its behalf. Because it remains bound by the broad constraints of selection, symbiotic mechanisms simply cannot ignore the larger constraints governing macroevolutionary processes.

Not only do such concrete misappropriations of contemporary biological theory render questionable the specific mechanisms of creative involution, they also inform the highly singular alliances D+G forge with two marginalized figures from the history of evolutionary biology: Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and August Weismann. Considered in the light of recent biological thought, these alliances illustrate, even more forcefully than the specific misappropriations just discussed, the limitations of D+G’s synchronic account of creative becoming and, more generally, the reductive consequences of their primarily philosophical engagement with biological theory.

D+G’s cosmic expressionism hinges on a wholesale transformation of the animal kingdom into an immense body without organs defined molecularly by movement and timing. To effect such a transformation, D+G draw on the work of the eighteenth-century rational morphologists, and specifically, that of Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire.²⁰ By playing Geoffroy’s topological conception of Nature as Fold against Cuvier’s conception of Nature as divisible space, D+G are able to introduce an expressive model of species differentiation. Whereas Cuvier invokes a transcendent (molar) principle of analogy to break Nature into (four) distinct branches, Geoffroy privileges the immanent molecular forces underlying such division, going “beyond organs and functions to abstract elements he terms ‘anatomical,’ even to particles, pure materials that enter into various combinations, forming a given organ and assuming a given function depending on their degree of speed or slowness” (254). By deterritorializing the molar analogies of proportionality between species, Geoffroy shifts focus from typology to the fluid plane of immanence in a way that reconceptualizes specification as an epiphenomenon of movement and timing:

Speed and slowness, movement and rest, tardiness and rapidity subordinate not only the forms of structure but also the types of development. This approach later reappears in an evolutionist framework, with Perrier’s tachygenesis and differential rates of growth in allometry: species as kinematic entities that are either precocious or retarded. (Even the question of fertility is less one of form and function than speed; do the paternal chromosomes arrive early enough to be incorporated into the nuclei?) In any case, there is a pure plane of immanence, univocality, composition, upon which everything is given, upon which unformed elements and materials dance that are distinguished from one another only by their speed and that enter into this or that individuated assemblage depending on their connections, their relations of movement. A fixed plane of life upon which everything stirs, slows down or accelerates. (255)

Consonant with new developments in fertility research, D+G propose timing as a molecular principle that yields species as “kinematic entities” prior to their (molar) emergence as relatively discrete forms and functions. In the wake of this transformation of timing into a philosophical principle of molecular expression, D+G are able to cite Geoffroy as an important precedent for their cosmic expressionism: Geoffroy’s understanding of animal taxonomy as the result of a continuous process of folding allows them to articulate their key notion of the plane of immanence: “The proof that there is isomorphism [of forms, but no correspondence] is that you can always get from one form on the organic stratum to another, however different they may be, by means of ‘folding.’ To go from the Vertebrate to the Cephalopod, bring the two sides of the Vertebrate’s backbone together, bend its head down to its feet and its pelvis up to the nape of its neck”(46). At the limit, folding assembles all of Nature into one great Animal totality that, like Spinozist Being, actualizes itself through the manifold of different folds available to it: it is, D+G decree, “still the same abstract Animal that is realized through the stratum, only to varying degrees, in varying modes” (46). Through this radical rehabilitation of 18th century rational morphology, D+G transform a biological theory of typological continuity into the philosophical basis of their molecular monism.

Given the broad resonances between D+G’s biophilosophy and complexity theory, it comes as no surprise to discover that Geoffroy has also been invoked (most emphatically by Goodwin) as a precursor for the notion of morphogenesis. Once again, however, what is at stake in the respective cases could not be more divergent: whereas D+G invoke Geoffroy’s “Principle of Connections” (the notion that diverse forms are all transformations of a single basic ground plan of structural elements) as support for a rigorously molecular theory of becoming–and thus for the wholesale dissolution of form as such–Goodwin cites it as an early insight into the existence of generic forms in nature. On Goodwin’s account, the Principle of Connections “stated that certain patterns of relationship between structural elements in organisms remain unchanged even if the elements themselves undergo alteration” (144). Since these are, for Goodwin, precisely the patterns favored by nature (generic forms), Geoffroy’s Principle of Connections, once placed into the proper dynamic context, would be capable of explaining morphological emergence in a non-reductive manner. In this sense, Geoffroy’s Principle would describe nothing other than the morphogenetic field itself: the (molecular) factors of movement and timing that, as D+G stress, operate within the constraints laid down by structural invariance and are responsible for generating diverse realizations of “a single basic ground plan of structural elements” (144). In short, it simply does not follow from the isomorphism of forms that form itself is dispensable, a mere epiphenomenon of governing molecular processes. Rather, form acquires a role that is not merely historical (and thus susceptible to molecular reduction)–as it is on all superficial accounts of typology–but rather generative in the structural sense: it is both the product and the vehicle of those self-organizing processes which express the underlying structural or generic patterns favored by nature.

By construing Geoffroy’s Principle of Connections as a principle of molecular folding, D+G construct a Geoffroy antithetical to that invoked by his more well-disposed contemporaries. Unlike the morphologist Richard Owen, for example, who understood the Principle as describing a static set of relationships defining an ideal tetrapod limb (following the example used by Geoffroy) from which all variants are derived by transformation, D+G interpret it as the basis for an expressionist theory of emergence that dispenses entirely with form as anything more than a trivial byproduct, a mere epiphenomenon, of underlying molecular processes. Despite this crucial difference, however, D+G’s position presents a picture of emergence that is, at least when contrasted with complexity theory, hardly less static than that of Owen: by making form either transcendental (Owen) or purely fortuitous (D+G), both positions trivialize its relation to the molecular forces from which it emerges. In D+G’s case, this trivialization undermines the explanatory value of their philosophy of emergence, since without form as its product and vehicle, molecular processes lack any sense of direction or motivation. Far from there being favored natural forms or anything that could explain the emergence of one rather than another form, all becomings are effectively equivalent: they all express the same Substance or underlying totality, though in different ways or from variant perspectives. As so many (logically equivalent) sets of molecular singularities or haecceities, becomings thus lack any intrinsic relation to one another and to their generative conditions–any relation, that is, which would implicate them in some or other specific dynamical context. Despite D+G’s insistence on the dynamical status of becoming, their model thus lacks the kind of dynamism that characterizes biological notions of emergence: a dynamism inseparable from the morphological constraint imposed during the process of actualization. The priority they lend the virtual leads them into conflict with the biological perspective, since, in order to preserve the possibility of dissolving any actualization back into the virtuality from which it emerges, they are led to inject a form of reversibility that simply contradicts the primacy biology places on processes of actualization. So long as D+G refuse to recognize the constraint built into self-organization in the biological domain, their conception of differentiation remains formal and empty (at least in terms of that domain) and the notion of emergence it supports simply cannot do justice to the dynamic nature of biological processes. At best, their cosmic expressionism can mimic the dynamics of physical processes, where a thoroughgoing externalism obviates the necessity for any account of internal agency and form.²¹ Moreover, the oft-mentioned resonances between their work and non-linear dynamics ²² is belied by their refusal to embrace the specific irreversibility that characterizes biological systems.²³

A second and far more muted historical alliance–with August Weismann’s theory of germ-plasm continuity–reveals more clearly still the radicality of D+G’s appropriation of biological theory.²⁴ As we noted above in reference to Bergson, Weismann was that late 19th century neo-Darwinian whose conception of the “germ-plasm” addressed the lacuna in Darwinism–its lack of a mechanism to explain heredity–and thus anticipated the genetics revolution that began with the rediscovery of Mendel’s work around 1900. Following on the heels of Bergson (who, remember, rejected the continuity of the germ-plasm in favor of a continuity of genetic energy), D+G rework Weismann’s conception into a notion that Ansell-Pearson dubs “germinal life”: a more general “intense germen” that is effectively synonymous with the body without organs. In the course of this reworking, the germ-plasm is modified practically beyond all recognition: far from regulating the process of genetic inheritance in a diachronic context, as it does for Weismann, the intense germen produces a synchronic convergence of all developmental moments (a body without organs) that facilitates unlimited transversal communication across all possible boundaries. In effect, what D+G accomplish through this transformative appropriation is a deterritorialization of the germen from its location within the nucleus of the cell (hence the name, germ-plasm) to the broadest imaginable environment, the entire set of singularities comprising the plane of immanence at any particular moment. Following this deterritorialization, germinal life loses all dependence not only on genetic material (DNA) but also on organisms per se, understood either as the bearers of such material (following the modern genetics paradigm) or as generic products of self-organizing processes (following complexity theory). D+G, in other words, submit life to a generalization that removes it from the biological domain (and strips away any privilege that biology might enjoy); by situating the intense germen exclusively at the molecular level and predicating it of all processes, organic and nonorganic alike, D+G thus redefine life as a thoroughly machinic process, one that expresses itself in heterogeneous conjunctions of singularities which are themselves heedless of biological constraints.

Once again, this alliance resonates, to a degree, with an historical commitment on the part of complexity theory. Like D+G, complexity theorists attack Weismann and his legacy (i.e., modern genetics) on the issue of context or environment, arguing that the “Weismann barrier” prohibiting communication from the germ-plasm to the soma rests on an untenable dualism. In this case, however, the deconstruction of Weismann’s dualism is advanced to support the centrality of the organism as the fundamental unit of life. “As a general biological principle,” Goodwin argues,

Weismann’s dualism… is incorrect. All unicellular organisms, all plants, and many animal species, including mammals, have no separation of germ plasm from somatoplasm. The capacity to reproduce is a property of the whole organism, not a special replicating part that is distinct from the rest of the reproducing body. And in the case of sexual reproduction, to which Weismann’s concept can be applied, it is the egg cell that carries the organization required for accurate replication of the DNA in the next generation, not hereditary essence. (36)

While they stop short of endorsing a revitalized Lamarckianism (though not without noting that recent studies have suggested the possibility for unicellular organisms like bacteria and yeast to modify their DNA for adaptive purposes), Goodwin and his colleagues argue that the contextedness of genetic transmission has the effect of overturning the strict separation of germ cells and the soma. From their perspective, the unchanging organization of organisms simply cannot be accounted for on the hypothesis of a genetic continuity, since all the molecular components of the cell–including DNA, RNA, and the proteins they code for–undergo “molecular turnover” (37). What does explain this organization is the persistence of the generic form of various organisms: the continuity of “certain aspects of the organization of [molecular] materials–their dynamic relationships, the way they are arranged in space, and the patterns of change they undergo in time” (37-8).²⁵

While Weismann and the modern genetics tradition get things wrong by attributing too much to germ cells (genes), D+G go astray by dissolving all ties between germinal continuity and organic life. The error, in both cases, stems from neglect of the organism. From the standpoint of complexity theory, by contrast, what is crucial is precisely the active role played by the organism as a mediator between the molecular domain and the macro-environment: the organism, Goodwin contends, is “an active agent with its own organizational principles, imposed between the genes and the environment. Organisms both select and alter their environments, and their intrinsic dynamic organization limits the hereditary changes that are possible, so that the variety available for evolution is restricted” (104). There can, in other words, be no continuity of germinal life–whether at the level of the germ-line or the plane of immanence–without the active mediation of the organism. The biological can no more be reduced to molecular processes than it can be dissolved through a broader conception of nonorganic life.

Germinal Life as the Basis for Becoming?: Toward a Critique of D+G’s Ethology

At the same time as they witness the limitations of D+G’s synchronic approach to evolution, these eccentric historical alliances raise questions concerning their effort to develop a model of human practice on the basis of creative involution. In the first place, the flexibility postulated by Geoffroy’s “Principle of Connections” and by the types of symbioses Margulis discusses (e.g., between cells and mitochondria) only arises over large-scale macroevolutionary timescales, not in cases of individual somatic change of the sort that forms the object of D+G’s ethology of becoming. Thus, when they champion a philosophical “Geoffroyism” and embrace nonselectional mechanisms like genetic drift and symbiosis, D+G are in effect illegitimately applying to change at the level of the individual a timeframe that properly characterizes macroevolutionary processes. Consequently, the dissolution of higher level form that D+G derive from Geoffroy’s Principle and from symbiotic processes rests on an illegitimate foundation insofar as it depends on this same application. Far from characterizing the somatic life of individual entities, this dissolution only arises in reference to vast stretches of evolutionary time. While Margulis may be right that we are, from the standpoint of macroevolution, mere hosts for microbial life, in the narrower frame we remain organized units which are, in some sense or other, the objects of nature’s selectional processes. Likewise, while Geoffroy’s principle may establish the ultimate unity of life in the macroevolutionary perspective, it does not have any immediate bearing on more local–and more concrete–processes of morphogenesis. It is one thing for D+G to draw on contemporary biology and on neglected historical pathways to underwrite creative involution as an alternative model of macroevolution and quite another thing to apply this model to the behavior of individuals or use it as the basis for a molecular dissolution of the organism. While the former may wreak havoc with biological orthodoxy, the latter involves an egregious category mistake: a conflation of a developmental (human) timeframe with a macro-evolutionary one.

Insofar as the virtually limitless power of self-modification they grant individual bodies is directly derived from their account of creative involution, it is hardly surprising that D+G’s model of becoming depends on this very same category mistake. Becoming acquires its role as the operator of D+G’s radicalized, Spinozist ethology–a model of practice centered on experimenting with what a body can do–because of its likeness to, or indeed identity with, the mechanisms of creative involution. Becoming, D+G unequivocally claim, “is involution”; it draws its force from phenomena of “side-communication” and “contagion”–precisely those extra-genetic mechanisms which characterize contemporary neo-evolutionism:

Becoming is always of a different order than filiation. It concerns alliance. If evolution includes any veritable becomings, it is in the domain of symbioses that bring into play beings of totally different scales and kingdoms, with no possible filiation. There is a block of becoming that snaps up the wasp and the orchid, but from which no wasp-orchid can ever descend. There is a block of becoming that takes hold of the cat and baboon, the alliance between which is effected by a C virus. There is a block of becoming which is effected by the materials synthesized in the leaves (rhizosphere). (238)

When they go on to assert that such phenomena of side-communication are “essential to all becomings-animal,” D+G leave little doubt concerning their ethological significance: the mechanisms characterizing creative involution form the very basis of their model of ethical practice.

Despite the central importance of this enabling homology between involution and becoming, however, D+G offer scant argument to support it, tending, for the most part, simply to assume its legitimacy as an entailment of their monist cosmic expressionism. What substantiation they do offer, moreover, tends to confound biological common sense. Witness, for example, their effort to coordinate their deterritorializing appropriation of Weismann with von Baer’s groundbreaking work on embryology. By employing the intense germen (the result of their deterritorialization of the germ-plasm) as a context within which to invert the process of embryonic development described by von Baer, D+G transform von Baer’s work in a manner that exceeds the bounds of biological plausibility. Whereas von Baer stresses the developmental irreversibility leading from the embryo to the organism, D+G seize upon the allegedly limitless flexibility of the embryo, as contrasted with the relatively fixed adult organism, wresting it from its concrete and constrained status within biological theory and retooling it into the operative basis of their model of practice. When they align the egg with the BwO, they are clearly seeking more than just biological legitimacy for their account of the BwO’s adjacency to the organism; in what amounts to a far more radical move, they effectively posit a deterritorialized embryology, one that can mobilize the flexibility of the egg well beyond the parameters not only of embryonic growth but of biological development as such.

In order to institute the broad homology with “mythology” that underwrites their generalization of embryology, D+G perform a double deterritorialization of the latter, arguing first of all that the BwO (the cosmic egg) derives its flexibility through its essential likeness to the embryo (the biological egg):

The BwO is the egg…. The egg is the milieu of pure intensity, spatium not extension…. There is a fundamental convergence between science and myth, embryology and mythology, the biological egg and the psychic or cosmic egg: the egg always designates this intensive reality, which is not undifferentiated, but is where things and organs are distinguished solely by gradients, migrations, zones of proximity. The egg is the BwO. (164)

From both biological and cosmic perspectives, the egg comprises a domain of virtual potential that is prior to any actualization, any production of developmentally-constrained forms of life. Just as the flexible potential of the embryo remains inherent in the developed individual, so too does the limitless virtual repertoire of the BwO lie dormant within any concrete organism that it spawns. In this sense, D+G suggest, the biological egg, no less than the cosmic egg, is coterminous with the plane of immanence or consistency. Rather than forming a flexible field of potential that is developmentally prior to morphogenesis and that loses its flexibility through developmental fixation (as it does for complexity theory), embryology in its deterritorialized form comprises what amounts to an atemporal condition of possibility which not only does not disappear or undergo constraining alterations following developmental fixation but remains in force as a virtual reservoir conditioning subsequent movements of becoming. Embryology thus plays a role in D+G’s philosophy analogous to that of Spinoza’s substance: it defines a cosmic field of virtual potential that gets expressed in the particular forms which are selected for actualization.

In a second and even more striking step in their deterritorialization of embryology, D+G model the recursivity between organism and BwO (i.e., precisely what renders them “adjacent” to one another) on the alleged germinal contemporaneity of embryo and organism. Despite their explicit attempt to garner legitimacy through an appeal to biological theory, this step requires D+G to inject psychological principles into the domain of biology in a manner that again exemplifies the limitations of their biophilosophy. As the fruit of a confrontation between Freud and Weismann that wrests the “germ plasm” out of the biological sphere as such, the germinal contemporaneity underwriting D+G’s notion of becoming is, in the end, the product of a certain (anti-Freudian) psychoanalyzing of biology:

The BwO is not “before” the organism; it is adjacent to it and is continually in the process of constructing itself. If it is tied to childhood, it is not in the sense that the adult regresses to the child and the child to the Mother, but in the sense that the child, like the Dogon twin who takes a piece of the placenta with him, tears from the organic form of the Mother an intense and destratified matter that on the contrary constitutes his or her perpetual break with the past, his or her present experience, experimentation. The BwO is a childhood block, a becoming, the opposite of a childhood memory. It is not the child “before” the adult, or the mother “before” the child; it is the strict contemporaneousness of the adult, of the adult and the child, their map of comparative densities and intensities, and all of the variations on that map. The BwO is precisely this intense germen where there are not and cannot be either parents or children (organic representation). This is what Freud failed to understand about Weismann: the child as the germinal contemporary of its parents. (164)

In the wake of this psychoanalytic deterritorialization of biology, we can finally understand how becoming obtains its seemingly unlimited power: If the organism relates to the BwO as the adult relates to the childhood block and if the relation in each case recovers the germinal potential of embryogenesis, then becoming can always in principle draw on the virtual potential of the BwO or “intense germen” that accompanies it as its immanent cause. That is why becoming need not obey the evolutionary constraints that are imposed through developmental processes and also why it can draw irreverently on a wide array of genetic and extra-genetic mechanisms. It is also, we should add, why becoming always appears predestined to succeed. So long as the BwO remains adjacent to the organism, forming an expressive milieu around it, but without undergoing any limitation or actualization, the BwO serves to furnish a limitless source of alternate organizational pathways that form the basis for, and thus guarantee the logical possibility of, the deterritorialization of the organism.

Once again, however, D+G’s unflinching effort to liberate germinal life from biological constraint does not come without significant costs. In the first place, their reliance on a psychoanalytic framework radically disrupts biological theory. By making becoming dependent on a return to the potential of a developmentally prior state, D+G reject out-of-hand all biologically-rooted forms of constraint in a way that simply contravenes the biological consensus concerning the irreversibility of developmental processes within concrete individuals. While D+G could, at worst, be accused of total disingenuousness in their appropriation of biological principles, at best, they are guilty of the profound category mistake we diagnosed earlier: confusing the flexibility attributable to organisms on an evolutionary timescale with the far more narrow flexibility characteristic of developmental processes. In either case, their ethology of becoming is–from the biological standpoint–nothing short of impossible.

Even if we overlook this profound difficulty or discount its significance, D+G’s account founders on an internal inconsistency that witnesses the resilience of biological theory and points toward a possible reconciliation of becoming with biology. Centering on D+G’s account of the reciprocity between the BwO and the organism, this inconsistency revisits Ansell-Pearson’s above-discussed effort to distinguish a BwO of the organism from the BwO that coincides with the plane of consistency. While it is, quite clearly, the latter, destratified BwO that D+G liken to the embryo or biological egg (since it alone can justify the limitless possibility they attribute to becoming), only the former, more narrow and stratified BwO can meaningfully be qualified as “adjacent” to the organism, in the sense that it forms what biologists would call the organism’s “niche” or “world.”²⁶ No matter what D+G say to the contrary, as soon as they introduce the “organism” and correlate it with the BwO, they cannot avoid certain biological constraints which necessarily delimit a specific environment in which the organism is situated and develops. As we noted above, it is precisely this point that informs D+G’s value for theorizing agency on an ecological, distributed model. It also bears on D+G’s distinction of absolute from relative deterritorialization, suggesting the impossibility of the former in the domain of biology: simply put, deterritorialization as a biological process can only take place relative to a concrete if flexible context and can only modify the ecology of the organism within certain structurally and situationally imposed bounds. In short, while the destratified BwO (the BwO proper) forms an inclusive context for becomings understood as conjunctions of singularities or haecceities, becomings that involve actual embodied organisms occur within a significantly more restricted context–the virtual field of possibility that corresponds to the specific environment with which the organism is structurally-coupled. Although this context (i.e., the stratified BwO) can certainly change in conjunction with the organism’s development, it must always in some way delimit the larger plane of immanence if its “adjacency” to the organism is to make any positive contribution toward the latter’s continual construction. Not only is Ansell-Pearson thus right to posit a BwO of the organism (even as he significantly overstates its role in D+G’s thought), but in so doing he exposes the internal contradiction between D+G’s incipient ecological understanding of organic systems and their philosophically-rooted cosmic expressionism. Any effort to render becoming consistent would accordingly have to modify D+G’s cosmic expressionism enough to recognize the ecological basis of the organism. Because it must be rooted in a concrete subsection of the plane of immanence–something like a “morphogenetic field”–that is delimited from the plane as such, becoming cannot possess the infinite (logical) flexibility of a “haecceity,” but must remain relative to emergent properties of the developing organism in a way that underscores the irreducible role biology plays in all processes of becoming, or at least in all of those involving organic entities.

As it stands, however, the power D+G ascribe to becoming only obtains in a synchronic framework that yet again betrays the philosophical basis of their project. Far from constituting a biologically plausible account of life, their cosmic expressionism yields a philosophical monism that strategically employs the malleability of cultural coding as a means of loosening the grip of biological constraint.²⁷ We get a clear glimpse of this “strategy” in their effort to move from an ethology of behavior to an ethology of assemblages. Two claims are crucial here. In the first place, D+G underscore the necessity of localizing behavior in assemblages, not individuals; not only must the notion of behavior be expanded to embrace the most diverse components, from the biochemical to the social, but agency must be understood as an emergent, distributed process belonging not to a concrete individual, but to a system or assemblage. In the second place, D+G insist on the molecular dimension of becoming, updating ethology by suggesting that (as Ansell-Pearson puts it) “becomings-animal involve not only the selection of adaptive traits but also the play of physico-chemical intensities and zones of proximity that cut across phyletic lineages”–“a ‘musical becoming’ of life” (Germinal Life 174-5). Such a view allows D+G to deconstruct the binaries (e.g., “innate-acquired”) operative in the ethological tradition and to champion the notion of “consistency” over that of substantial unity or identity. In their “bio-behavioral machinics,” behavior results from “packets of relations… steered by molecules” (the molecular components of ethology’s “centers of activation”) and the problem of consistency, as Ansell-Pearson recognizes, becomes one of molecular engineering. What is thereby gained is the capacity to deterritorialize the innate and the acquired from their anchoring in the organism as a “center of activation”: D+G, continues Ansell-Pearson, “situate the problem of the ‘innate-acquired’ in the more dynamic context of a rhizome in which the natal gets decoded and the acquired is subject to territorialization” (175). By opening the innate and the acquired to molecular forces that circulate beneath the organism, effectively making them a function of the plane of immanence, D+G thus claim to circumvent the constraint they exercise within a standard ethological model of behavior.

Once again, however, D+G’s resonance with contemporary science (here, the cognitive science of distributed systems) is undermined by the radicality of their position. For in shifting from an ethology of behavior to an ethology of assemblages, D+G do not so much shift the locus of agency from isolated organism to larger cognitive and social system as dissolve the role of agency altogether. Unlike the work of Andy Clark or Edwin Hutchins on the social distribution of cognition, D+G’s ethology of assemblages does not aim to expand the framework in which cognitive agency must be situated, but instead to render the emergence of such agency an epiphenomenon of the play of molecular forces on the plane of consistency. It is for this reason and this reason alone that they can claim to dissolve all biological and social constraints limiting what a body (or assemblage) can do: on their model of cosmic expressionism, the coordinates defining a body (longitude and latitude) are not properties specific to a particular body or assemblage, but rather properties that accrue to the body (or assemblage) by dint of its relation to the plane of immanence. Otherwise stated, there is no positive concept of bodily agency in D+G’s work, only an expressive concept that emerges on the basis of an ontology of immanence.

As was the case with the biological notion of the milieu, D+G’s appropriation of cognitive science must be modified in a manner that recognizes both the contextedness and the agency of particular concrete assemblages. Just as the emerging organism furnishes an important source of constraint on its own emergence (since it specifies the range of environmental factors to which it is sensitive), so too does the assemblage introduce a source of constraint on its own development (since its own emergent behavior determines the range of environmental factors to which it can respond). Otherwise put, the assemblage (no less than the organism) plays an active role in selecting which molecular forces can affect it: far from being the expressive correlate of an autonomous play of molecular forces on the plane of immanence, the assemblage is what brings together specific components and a concrete “fringe” of virtuality (the range of factors to which it can respond). The assemblage simply cannot be reduced to a mere epiphenomenon of the molecular forces it contains.

This necessary specificity of the assemblage gives rise to a dual critical imperative: to respect the particular cultural or social contexts out of which assemblages emerge and to demarcate the constraint exercised by such context from the constraint exercised by biological factors. In his criticism of D+G for disregarding the question of animal becoming (the fact that the “animality” of the animal is not simply given and that animal becoming is not automatically relative to the human), Ansell-Pearson draws attention to the first imperative: D+G, he contends, fail “sufficiently to acknowledge… the specific character of becomings-animal of the human, such as the cultural contexts in which they take place and which… make them intelligible… it is quite clear that their reading [in Kafka] of the figuration of such becomings is being carried out in the context of a politics of desire” (Germinal Life 188). What such a criticism foregrounds is the particular limitation that is placed on becomings by the social contexts in which they occur: the becomings-animal of Kafka’s fiction, for example, “operate in the context of a negotiation with values that are at once economic, judicial, bureaucratic, and technological” (188, emphasis added). Such limitation, it need hardly be said, impinges on the limitless potential D+G ascribe to becoming as a matter of an exclusively molecular creative involution.

D+G’s psychoanalytically-derived notion of germinal contemporaneity allows them to present an expressive model of the social that functions to dissolve these limitations. By effectively psychoanalyzing biology, D+G are able to place the social on the same plane with the biological ²⁸ and to reduce the molar conception of the social as limitation to a deeper, molecular socius. The crucial element here is the notion of body (or assemblage) as haecceity: as a punctual expression of a singularity, a body brings together biological codings and cultural markings in a manner that is altogether indifferent to their variant status. Such a conception articulates becoming with a certain model of somatic change (antithetical to any biological notion) based on what we might call social selection. To develop such a conception, D+G dismiss biological constraints on organic development, championing instead a radically deterritorialized mechanism of somatic selection, one rooted not in the organic soma–that is, in the physical body–but in the body qua haecceity, a punctual construct of speeds and affects whose consistency at any given moment derives from its position within a particular synchronic determination of the (totalizing) plane of immanence or socius. In addition to its blatant disregard for biological thought, this move indulges in a particularly pernicious posthuman fantasy that has had a strong resonance in contemporary popular and aesthetic culture: the fantasy that somatic change can itself be programmed, that the body is, more or less, a malleable material which can be reconstituted through particular symbolic, inscriptional, or disciplinary interventions.²⁹

Once again, this fantasy takes root in D+G’s philosophical model of monist expressionism–a model that strips away all intermediate boundaries, including those imposed by organic development. By holding D+G to the test of contemporary biology, we can see how their expressionist model of somatic change actually depends on a conflation of what they describe as an “uprooting of an organ from its specificity” with permanent change in the organ’s function. Only by effectively conflating behavioral with evolutionary change in this way can D+G coherently propose to replace the organic body with a deterritorialized “articulation” of the body according to a new configuration of speeds and affects. In short, this conflation of evolutionary and physiological timeframes comprises the basis for the privilege they accord ethology in their analysis of bodies. Just as traditional ethology privileges a body’s capacities–what it can do–over its static characteristics, D+G’s transindividual “ethology of assemblages” allows them to define a body by two coordinates that articulate it on the plane of immanence.³⁰ Latitude determines “the affects of which [a body] is capable…within the limits of [a given degree of] power,” while longitude specifies “the particle aggregates belonging to [a] body in a given relation” (256). Because they furnish the molecular constituents of bodies, independently of any molar formation (e.g., the organism or assemblage), these two ethological coordinates are not a function of the agency possessed by a concrete assemblage, but rather the expression of the plane of immanence, in this or that particular mode. Though they serve to define a body (or assemblage), these two coordinates are not properties of a specific assemblage so much as they are properties of the plane of immanence itself.

As a kind of “molecular recipe” for organic function, ethology thus facilitates a shift outward from a developmentally-specified, organic body to a synchronic, expressive body. Cutting beneath all molar typological categories, the expressive body is simply the conjunction of all the affects of which it is capable: “In the same way that we avoided defining a body by its organs and functions, we will avoid defining it by Species or Genus characteristics; instead we will seek to count its affects. This kind of study is called ethology, and this is the sense in which Spinoza wrote a true Ethics. A racehorse is more different from a workhorse than a workhorse is from an ox” (257). On such a model, organic functions are the result not of organic form (nor, we should add, of morphogenetic processes that generate such form), but of deterritorialized speeds and affects that circulate on the plane of immanence. Rather than emerging within certain broad constraints set by physiology, ethological relations are thus given a radical freedom and are even, following D+G’s appropriation of von Uexküll’s work, held to condition the very emergence of physiological traits:

It will be said that the tick’s three affects assume generic and specific characteristics, organs and functions, legs and snout. This is true from the standpoint of physiology, but not from the standpoint of Ethics. Quite the contrary, in Ethics the organic characteristics derive from longitude and its relations, from latitude and its degrees. We know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects. (257)

Leaving aside the question of D+G’s fidelity to von Uexküll, it should be clear that this generalized ethology of assemblages comprises a philosophical, not a biological or even systems-theoretical, model of embodiment. Like the geometrical method Spinoza employs in The Ethics, the construction of a body through its affects generates what would be called, in philosophical terms, a “real definition” of that body, a “veritable generation of the object defined” (Deleuze, Difference 79). While it may serve the purposes of D+G’s expressionist monism, such a model can be reconciled neither with the current consensus in biological thought that organ function forms an integral part of organic development, nor with work in cognitive science on socially-distributed cognitive systems. From the biological perspective, organs are not free-floating and purely indeterminate singularities that acquire specificity only when incorporated into a particular assemblages of desire, but are, from the very beginning, constrained by the internal repertoire of functionalities which govern the morphogenetic processes responsible for specifying their functions. And from the cognitive science perspective, assemblages cannot simply be epiphenomenal expressions of the politics of desire, but possess an integrity and agency that also implies limitation and constraint. A model of agency informed by these two bodies of scientific research gives a picture at odds with D+G’s repudiation of the organism: on such a picture, organs form dynamic parts of larger organisms that develop in tandem with the concrete environmental niches to which they are structurally coupled and with the assemblages of which they form one component among others. Organs, the organism, and the assemblage simply cannot be reduced to the philosophical roles D+G reserve for them.

Notes

1. See Caygill, O’Toole, Welchman; most centrally, see Ansell-Pearson’s “Viroid Life” and especially his Germinal Life.

2. “For Bergson,” Deleuze contends, “science is never ‘reductionist’ but, on the contrary, demands a metaphysics–without which it would remain abstract, deprived of meaning or intuition. To continue Bergson’s project today, means for example to constitute a metaphysical image of thought corresponding to the new lines, openings, traces, leaps, dynamisms, discovered by a molecular biology of the brain: new linkings and re-linkings in thought” (Deleuze, Bergsonism 116-17).

3. This commentator is American microbiologist and developmental biologist, Franklin Harold. See Depew and Weber 419.

4. See Cinema I: “This infinite set of all images constitutes a kind of plane [plan] of immanence. The image exists in itself, on this plane. This in-itself of the image is matter: not something hidden behind the image, but on the contrary the absolute identity of the image and movement…. The plane of immanence is the movement (the facet of movement) which is established between the parts of each system and between one system and another, which crosses them all, stirs them up together and subjects them all to the condition which prevents them from being absolutely closed…. The material universe, the plane of immanence, is the machinic assemblage of movement-images” (58-9). With its emphasis on the image, this definition of the plane of immanence differs in important respects from that developed in Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

5. In The Fold, Deleuze appears to return to his earlier, more properly Bergsonian position regarding the organism. For a discussion of the role of biology in The Fold, see Badiou. For a more general discussion of The Fold as a break with reductive materialism and a recognition of the fractal integrity of biological systems, see Mullarkey.

6. See Minsky’s The Society of Mind and Varela, Rosch, and Thompson’s The Embodied Mind.

7. See Ansell-Pearson’s Germinal Life, 66.

8. On this point, incidentally, Bergson’s theory converges with recent efforts to apply nonlinear dynamics to biological systems. See Kauffman and below.

9. It is, nonetheless, difficult for us to avoid the illusion of such a negation, since we (like every other species) can only perceive life from our own differentiated perspective:

Life as movement alienates itself in the material form that it creates; by actualizing itself, by differentiating itself, it loses contact with the rest of ‘itself.’ Every species is thus an arrest of movement; it could be said that the living being turns on itself and closes itself. It cannot be otherwise, since the Whole is only virtual, dividing itself by being acted out. It cannot assemble its actual parts that remain external to each other: The Whole is never ‘given.’ And, in the actual, an irreducible pluralism reigns–as many worlds as living beings, all ‘closed’ on themselves. (Bergsonism 104)

 

It is, moreover, precisely because the Whole is not given that life, and the organisms in which it expresses itself, remain open-ended and creative, not reproductive. This is precisely what Bergson conceptualizes as the “positivity of time”–“an efficacity… that is identical to a ‘hesitation’ of things and, in this way, to creation in the world” (105).

10. In Bergsonism, Deleuze had rooted internal vital difference in a certain duplicity of difference in kind that Bergson introduces in Time and Free Will. In that text, Bergson analyzes abstract time and space as mixtures (of space and duration and or matter and duration, respectively) that divide into two tendencies (toward relaxation in the case of matter or toward contraction in the case of duration). On this account, difference of nature does not only reside between two tendencies, but is itself one of these tendencies: duration as difference that differs from itself.

11. My analysis here follows the lead of Ansell-Pearson in Germinal Life. On the topic of intensity in Difference and Repetition, see also Smith.

12. He had argued in Bergsonism that it raises the question whether it is intensity “that gives all the qualities with which we make experience” (92).

13. The notion that symbioses play a central role in evolution stems from the work of Lynn Margulis. See Margulis and Sagan.

14. For a canonical statement on population thinking, see Mayr. See also Sober and Gould.

15. See the discussion of population thinking in Depew and Weber, Chapter 12.

16. On this point, D+G’s position can be distinguished from that of Jacques Monod, one of the crucial biological mentors of Deleuze, as well as from that of neo-Darwinians like Stephen Jay Gould and Lynn Margulis and complexity theorists like Goodwin and Kauffman. Because of their radical desire to develop a rigorously molecular understanding of evolution (or, better, involution), they must explain the emergence of organisms from the plane of immanence without any recourse to higher order principles. Unlike Monod, who evokes natural selection to explain how the molecular intensities can be drawn out of the realm of chance and operate as the force determining organisms, and unlike contemporary biologists and complexity theorists who explain the emergence of organisms through recourse to nature’s tendency toward “natural kinds” or to the phenomenon of symbiosis, both of which function in conjunction with natural selection, D+G lack any mechanism with which to explain the emergence of organisms as anything other than pure contingency, i.e., the extraneous epiphenomena of molecular processes.

17. This argument is forcefully made by Howard Caygill, who criticizes Deleuze’s privileging of distribution over selection as retroactively humanist insofar as it “sentimentalizes selection.”

18. By using the biological theory most resonant with D+G’s program in order to illustrate the significant differences between the two, my intention is to demonstrate the heretical nature of D+G’s work and its implications for their account of becoming without having to make substantive pronouncements regarding biological theory. My critique, that is, does not hinge on the correctness of this particular theory, but only on the viability of the more general consensus that it exemplifies.

19. For discussions linking complexity theory to Bergson, see Kampis and Rosen.

20. See Depew and Weber 48-50 for a discussion of Geoffroy’s role in the history of biology.

21. On the difference between dynamic systems in the physical and the biological registers, see Goodwin 175.

22. See Massumi, De Landa, and Murphy.

23. On this point, consider the subtle shift to which Isabelle Stengers submits the Deleuzian conception of the virtual in suggesting the substitution of the term “possible” for Deleuze’s “virtual,” and of the term “probable” for Deleuze’s “possible” (Stengers 27n10). Without addressing the biological sciences in particular, this pair of substitutions is intended “to create a more explicit link with scientific practices” and it does so, we might add, by treating the plane of actualization as the crucial site on which these practices operate.

24. In Germinal Life, Ansell-Pearson views Weismann as the most important biological reference for D+G and develops the thesis that D+G’s notion of life generalizes Weismann’s concept of the germ-plasm beyond the boundaries of the organism. In my opinion, the role Ansell-Pearson accords Weismann is much exaggerated (there is, as he admits, only one reference to Weismann’s theory in D+G) and the function it serves (deterritorializing life from the organism) runs counter to my argument here. For a discussion of Weismann’s historical importance in biology, see Depew and Weber 187-91.

25. With this emphasis on the organization of the molecular material, complexity theory converges with the autopoietic theory developed by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela and particularly with its central notion of “organizational closure,” according to which an organism is closed to informational exchange with its environment and functions to preserve its own organization in the face of constant perturbation from the outside. See Maturana and Varela.

26. For a discussion of the structural coupling between an organism and its world, see Varela’s “Organism.” Varela defines the difference between the environment in general and the “world” that exists for a specific organism as the “surplus of significance” that the correlation of organism and environment introduces.

27. My understanding of this strategy significantly revises my earlier treatment of D+G’s model of becoming in Embodying Technesis, Chapter 8. Despite this revision, however, I continue to stress the necessity of according a certain autonomy to molar formations.

28. This leveling of the differences between the biological and the social can be seen more generally in D+G’s psychoanalytically-rooted critique of the “body image.” Here they play off their appropriation of Melanie Klein’s part object (which furnishes the notion of a partial organ) against psychoanalytical and phenomenological notions of a whole body, which, they suggest, retain the privilege of the organism and the molar category of organization. Nonetheless, D+G’s work–despite my criticisms here–gives the means to broaden the analysis of constraint from the biological to the social in a way that complements the work of someone like Varela.

29. While popular practices like body building and tattooing furnish particularly tangible symptoms of such a fantasy, its complex underlying “logic” is perhaps nowhere better laid bare than in Paul Verhoeven’s 1989 science fiction film Total Recall. The film’s central premise involves a struggle of two “minds” to possess a single body. After the complex plot lines work themselves out, the two characters played by Arnold Schwartzenegger–two characters who might be said to share Arnold’s body–confront each other in a scene that brilliantly foregrounds what is at stake, in our negotiations concerning the posthuman, in the postmodern debate on the copy and the simulacrum. The film’s hero, Douglas Quaid, stands–in the flesh–face-to-face with a simulated version of his own face on a video monitor, claiming that, in fact, he (Quaid) is not who he thinks he is, that he is really a certain Hauser, betrayer of the resistance movement, who “would like his body back.” This scene’s enabling divorce of information and embodiment–and the privilege it seems to place on the former as the “essence” of human identity–gives rise to a series of mind-boggling questions: where, for example, has Hauser been “living” during the time he’s “lent” his body to Quaid?; and what, finally, is Quaid (or, for that matter, Hauser), if his being has no essential relation to the body he occupies? Beyond such local questions, however, the denouement of the film–in which Quaid resists the effort to erase him and appropriates the body that is not supposed to be his–foregrounds the specific fantasy that the body can be retrofitted to meet the needs of new informational programs, identities, or selves, or in other words, that somatic change can, as it were, be determined by will. In this way, Total Recall inverts the defensive humanism of Verhoeven’s earlier film, Robocop, and of the vast majority of recent cinematic science fiction: instead of depicting the gradual reassertion of an embodied self following an identity reprogramming, Total Recall invests the far more ambivalent fantasy that we (or those who program us) possess virtually unlimited power to remake our embodied selves in any way that we (or they) see fit.

30. For a comparison of an ethology of behavior and an ethology of assemblages, see Ansell-Pearson, 170ff.

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Nicola Pitchford

English Department
Fordham University
pitchford@fordham.edu

Pastiche is central to the resistant politics of Kathy Acker’s writing–yet she would appear to agree with Fredric Jameson’s influential critique of pastiche as “the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language” (17). Her 1986 novel Don Quixote is all about having to speak “in a dead language” in the absence of a more “healthy” norm. It begins with the death of the protagonist, a female version of Cervantes’s knight, who then goes on to narrate much of the subsequent story. Acker explains, “BEING DEAD, DON QUIXOTE COULD NO LONGER SPEAK. BEING BORN INTO AND PART OF A MALE WORLD, SHE HAD NO SPEECH OF HER OWN. ALL SHE COULD DO WAS READ MALE TEXTS WHICH WEREN’T HERS” (39). The novel then proceeds by plagiarism and pastiche, as Quixote goes on a quest–for a heterosexual love unsullied by patriarchal power relations–through fragments of numerous existing texts. Quixote rereads and pieces together a whole range of textual scraps, from Machiavelli’s The Prince to a Godzilla movie. What becomes clear in her eccentric survey of (primarily) Western culture is that the lost, healthy linguistic norm is more than unhealthy for female readers–indeed, it is deadly.

The novel is motivated by the idea of both reading and speaking “in a dead language”–but “flogging a dead language” seems a more apt description of Acker’s strategy, in more ways than one. For both the reader in and the reader of the novel, the act of rereading that pastiche entails can seem like flogging a dead horse, in the sense of merely covering once again the familiar ground of the already said. Of course, the same has been said of any reading in postmodernity where all language may well be dead, having belonged properly to a previous historical moment that gave it life and from which it has now been dissociated by forces of commercial appropriation and cultural amnesia. But this generic deadness that Jameson identifies as inherent in postmodern writing is not quite what I wish to explore.

Rather, I want to attempt to account for what I see as a particular familiarity, and perhaps a particular tendency toward exhaustion and redundancy, that accompanies reading Acker’s texts from this period in her career, a period characterized by Acker’s extensive use of pastiche or what she frequently refers to as “plagiarism.” In what follows, I look at what happens to and through the act of reading, to ask how reading is connected to agency. Despite the considerable difficulty of Acker’s experimental novels, reading them can become an activity weighed down by a certain deadening obviousness. I want to suggest that this lifelessness derives from Acker’s attempts to construct, through pastiche, a community of readers defined by their opposition to traditional literary culture. I want also to argue that her deployment of pastiche in specific contexts–especially sexual contexts–in fact complicates and undermines the static and oversimplified role that she sometimes seems to offer her reader. In such moments, a complex interplay of various possible readerly identifications creates a contingent and particular version of agency.

In a chapter on Acker in his recent book on literary celebrity, Joe Moran has suggested that in both her public persona and her work, Acker “puts forward two contrasting views of identity–one textual and one essentialist” (142). While he locates these competing versions in Acker’s characters and in her own public performance of the (death of the) author, I wish to extend his observations and apply them also to the modes of reading suggested by her texts, and by this novel in particular. The “textual” version of identity, generally celebrated by those critics friendly to Acker’s work, is readily apparent in the cut-and-paste technique of Don Quixote, in which borrowed textual fragments are reanimated by their juxtaposition. Here, language (my metaphorical dead horse), along with the social identities it produces, is like Quixote’s skinny nag Rocinante, who by all rights should be dead but who keeps lurching doggedly forward to the next flogging. In Acker’s version, the old horse often described by Cervantes as a “hack” acquires the nickname “Hackneyed.” Aside from the association with hackneys, the plodding and reliable work horses once used to draw London cabs, the horse’s new name also, of course, refers to tired and commercially corrupted ways of writing. (“Hackney” can also mean a prostitute of the non-literary sort.) Acker’s narrator notes the name’s evocation of fruitless repetition, telling us that “Hackneyed” means “‘a writer’ or ‘an attempt to have an identity that always fails’” (10). And indeed, stable new identity never emerges from Quixote’s quest or from Acker’s novel, for the characters move from one borrowed text to another, frequently switching names, genders, and even species. But in the repeated attempt to reread and rewrite the dead language in a new context, the failure of identity to become stabilized creates a sense of liveliness, play, and subversive possibility.

Moran suggests that the failure of such pastiche to produce a wholly new language or a definitive new reader can itself become reified as a permanent condition and thus, in his argument, Acker’s “textual” model of identity gives way to an “essentialist” model in which the apparent fluidity of identity collapses into the bohemian stereotype of the outsider or rebel, the person who is always defined against mainstream values: (glorious) failure embodied. When viewed from the perspective of the act of reading, rather than as a model of identity-construction, the failure of pastiche seems to lead to a more oppositional reading strategy. I would argue, however, that this oppositional mode is actually a symptom of “dead language” and the social relations embalmed within it, rather than an act of revivification and agency.

Acker attempts to put agency into pastiche by creating an “outsider” reader–someone who is not the typical implied reader of a patriarchal literary tradition. Within the text, this outsider is Quixote, the female knight. Through Quixote, Acker reveals the paradoxical position available to the female reader/hero. Readers must be desiring beings, for desire moves us to read; yet women are positioned in this tradition as the passive objects of desire. Thus, one cannot both be active, able to join the classic textual reader/hero on his quest, and female, like the object of the hero’s quest. As Acker puts it, “Finally Don Quixote understood her problem: she was both a woman therefore she couldn’t feel [active] love and a knight in search of Love. She had had to become a knight, for she could solve this problem only by becoming partly male” (29). For Acker’s Quixote, the ability to pursue sexual love is the key to female agency. Yet women who pursue sexual love have always been punished or written out of the text, and thus as Quixote puts it, the dilemma of female agency is, “If a woman insists she can and does love and her living isn’t loveless or dead, she dies. So either a woman is dead or she dies” (33).

This impossible location leads Quixote to sift through other texts for a figure who is both exiled from the existing order and yet able to act upon it. This figure will represent the outsider reader who, her experience distorted or excluded by canonical texts, nevertheless turns those texts to her own purposes. Quixote settles on the pirate. The pirate is a thief, or a plagiarist like Acker herself. One of Quixote’s companions, declaring herself a pirate, sings “I who will never own, whatever and whenever I want, I take” (199). Quixote suggests that this myth of the text-thieving, exiled pirate can be the basis not only for a mode of reading but for a different vision of community and social relations:

Even a woman who has the soul of a pirate, at least pirate morals, even a woman who prefers loneliness to the bickerings and constraints of heterosexual marriage, even such a woman who is a freak in our society needs a home.

 

Even freaks need homes, countries, language, communication.

 

The only characteristic freaks share is our knowledge that we don’t fit in. Anywhere. It is for you, freaks my loves, I am writing and it is about you. (201-02)

By recombining the old, purloined chunks of language into a new pastiche, Acker claims, formerly exiled readers can create a language–and thus a community–that supports a different notion of (female) identity and female romantic-sexual desire. The agency to create that change depends on rereading from within a new, previously excluded context.

Acker’s use of the image of the outlaw community of pirate-freaks, formed from the scraps of old stories, and her direct address here to “you, freaks my loves” raise important questions about which readers possess agency in her model. Does she, as Moran suggests, essentialize “the outsider” both as the reader in her text and as the reader of her text? Acker’s novels from the 1980s do begin to reproduce certain predictable patterns, and these can seem to result in fixed and frozen relationships between readers and texts. But here it seems important to place Acker’s desire for oppositional community in the context of the cultural politics of the 1980s. By situating Acker this way, I hope to identify those elements of Don Quixote that might produce the most fruitful interventions in gendered and otherwise power-inflected modes of reading that persist far beyond the mid-1980s. Historicizing Acker may also account for some readers’ sense of Acker’s work as curiously dated or old-fashioned in its “punk” vehemence.

There is no doubt that Acker’s writing came into its own at some point in the 1980s. In 1984, Acker’s work was damned as failed parody and labeled “abusive to women” in The New York Times Book Review (Hoffman 16; qtd. in Jacobs 53). Four years later, the same publication installed her as the “darling of the mid-1980s downtown Manhattan arts scene” (Gill 9), comparing her to Gertrude Stein and paying tribute to “the seriousness of Ms. Acker’s purpose” (Dillard 9). She had moved from obscure publishers to Grove in 1983. Moran traces her (slightly earlier) trajectory in Britain, with the “major breakthrough” being Picador’s 1984 publication of Blood and Guts in High School and Acker’s subsequent appearance on the television arts program, The South Bank Show (132).

Moran understands Acker’s rise to fame from the Lower East Side milieu of the 1970s as part of the culture industry’s tendency to gobble up “cool” subcultures. However, in Acker’s specific case, Moran argues that that tendency was ironically abetted by the particularly local and personal context in which she had become a known personality:

I would suggest that Acker’s avant-garde fame relied primarily on the fostering of a sense of dialogue and community between artist and audience which initially thrived within the concentrated atmosphere of New York’s punk art scene in the late 1970s. As with many other avant-garde groupings, the feelings of marginality and difference from the mainstream created the need for a network of like-minded souls who could provide mutual support and encouragement. (139)

The speculative economy of the time led to an unprecedented acceleration in the commercialization and assimilation of arts subcultures.¹ In addition, the “sense of dialogue and community” that Acker’s work brought from its initial position of “marginality and difference” found a certain kinship–albeit ambivalently–with the contemporaneous movement toward identity politics in academic (and, to some extent, popular) feminism.²

Writing in 1988, Jill Dolan defines “identity politics” as “the current tendency in feminism to valorize cultural and ethnic differences” (86). Indeed, the exploration of difference was a central concern of US feminism in the 1980s; much as Acker’s work does, it brought together two strains of feminist theory–one focused on identity and another on its impossibility. Both were aimed at decentering a homogeneous “woman” that theorists saw as having merely replicated, within feminism, the hegemonic position of the mainstream male. Susan Gubar (perhaps understandably aggrieved, as a frequent target of allegations that the perspective of white women had monopolized academic feminism in the previous decade) traces these two strains in her sweeping critique of developments in feminist criticism during that period: the first was a series of essays and books that defined the terrain of identity politics by emphasizing the axes of race, class, and sexuality as frequently more determinative than gender in their effects on experience, subjectivity, reading practices, and the location of common political interests. Gubar argues that much of this work fruitfully challenged the racial bias of an earlier feminism, but in doing so also implied the debilitating breaking down of the identities “woman” or “feminist” into an ever-proliferating “string of hyphenated adjectival qualifiers” (891). The second tendency was the work of poststructuralist feminists, who “sought to use the race-based interrogation of the term women” to question ideas of identity altogether (894). Although poststructuralism is ostensibly incompatible with the affirmations of authenticating experience often central to identity politics, Gubar suggests that the two often functioned hand-in-hand (in her view, destructively) to privilege difference as the key term in any epistemology, whether retaining the label “feminist” or not.

Acker was deeply ambivalent toward–if not outright suspicious of–various manifestations of identity politics within and outside the feminist movement. In an interview from the collection Angry Women (1991), Acker expresses both her desire to be recognized as “different” and a critique of those who mark such boundaries too exclusively:

A gay friend of mine said something interesting to me. I asked her if she differentiated between gay and straight women, and she said, “Yes, women who are gay are really outlaws, because we’re totally outside the society–always.” And I said, “What about people like me?” and she said, “Oh, you’re just queer.” Like–we didn’t exist?! [laughs] It’s as if the gay women position themselves as outside society, but meanwhile they’re looking down on everybody who’s perverse! Which is very peculiar…. (Juno 182; brackets and ellipses in original)

It is precisely in Acker’s textual exploration of the “perverse” reader–in the way she positions implied readers of her sexually explicit scenes–that she offers a way of turning the tension between identity politics and poststructuralism into a fruitful articulation of difference. I will explore the “perverse reader” in more detail in a moment. Before I do, however, I want to explore the ways in which the intersection of the two strains of 80s feminism–and the resulting emphasis on difference–is evident in Don Quixote and other Acker novels from the period.

On the one hand, Acker’s kinship with identity politics is made manifest in Don Quixote by her ongoing affirmation of difference as a fundamental and total condition–as illustrated by the passage on “freaks,” above (“we don’t fit in. Anywhere”), the recurring image of the pirate or outlaw, and by her development of an epistemology based on reading from the position of the unorthodox and impossible (because either she “is dead or she dies” [33]) sexually desiring woman. On the other hand, Acker’s allegiance to a more poststructuralist tendency is evident not only in her explicit and much noted references to particular theorists and their concepts–for example, two characters’ discussion of Deleuze and Guattari, Lacan, Althusser, Derrida, and Foucault (54)–but also in her refusal to respect the identity-category boundaries drawn between various groups of outsiders.

For example, in a “vision” that Quixote recounts toward the end of the novel, Acker appears to appropriate the practice of Voodoo as an image of her own subversive textual bricolage. Quixote describes a “little church”:

The church was a Haitian church. Being Haitian it held all practices including every sort of fucking and Voodoun. All ways were allowed: all cultures: aloud…. Inside, the priests use nailpolish bottles, raw rums, and whatever they can get their hands on for everything. (193)

Here, as elsewhere, Acker transmutes apparently stable cultural differences–here the culturally specific religious practice of Voodoo–into a disruptive textual strategy. In her earlier My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Voodoo appears even more explicitly as a disruptive and “nominalist” textual strategy. In Don Quixote, Acker likewise uses over-simplified notions of Arabic cultural tradition to construct another mise-en-abyme (as she will do in her later novel, Empire of the Senseless):

Unlike American and Western culture (generally), the Arabs (in their culture) have no (concept of) originality. That is, culture. They write new stories paint new pictures et cetera only by embellishing old stories pictures… They write by cutting chunks out of all-ready written texts and in other ways defacing traditions: changing important names into silly ones, making dirty jokes out of matters that should be of the utmost importance to us such as nuclear warfare. (25; ellipses in original)

Then–like the “Arabs” whose cultural construction she clearly parodies–Acker proceeds to “mak[e] dirty jokes out of matters that should be of the utmost importance to us such as nuclear warfare” as she stages a scene in which Richard Nixon dismisses the SALT negotiations while engaged in sex with his wife (110).

Haitian Voodoo practitioners or Arabs–such indiscriminate, dehistoricized appropriations of various marginalized identities or experiences within the text may function in two somewhat contradictory ways: to mark a radical skepticism toward the construction and narration of identity, and also to signify a desire for an undivided community of rebels, unified by their shared exile from the social mainstream. It is possible that by blurring together the two approaches to difference, Acker risks losing the potential benefits of both: in creating a universal “other” marked only by non-specific difference, she compromises the resistant power of particular, local histories (one of the strengths of identity politics) while simultaneously giving up poststructuralism’s deconstructive ability to work upon the difference also inherent in the hegemonic male subject. My question is, to what extent does the reading practice that Acker offers in Don Quixote leave the implied reader locked, albeit oppositionally, within the “dead” and deadening social relations inscribed in the original texts she borrows, simply occupying the space they reserve for the “other”? To answer this question, I want to focus on her construction of the previously excluded reader as the location from which the novel’s implied reader approaches the incorporated materials that comprise its pastiche.

I turn, again, to Jameson, specifically, to the sections of Postmodernism in which his attention shifts from the text and its production to the effects of reading pastiche. Jameson redirects his focus in order to answer a question that is similar to the one I’m asking here of pastiche in Acker’s work: whether textual pastiche can open up the control of literary meaning to a wider range of (less conventionally privileged) readers and ways of reading. Discussing aspects of Claude Simon’s Conducting Bodies (Les corps conducteurs), Jameson suggests that “for one long moment, the moment in which we read [such] texts,” the process of reading becomes not mere reception but itself an active moment of textual production (146). The reader must work to produce the text because Simon’s extensive use of dislocation (in terms of plot, character, and scene description) and his incorporation of other, borrowed texts and images–techniques shared by Don Quixote–make it impossible to “make sense” in any conventional, more passive fashion.

Jameson speculates that this moment of reading as active production–a moment which I would call a potential moment of agency–might also present something of a utopian image of labor. Primarily, of course, producer and consumer become one–self-sufficient and self-sustaining–as the single reader embodies both roles. But there is also a more complex change taking place; Jameson suggests that in these circumstances, “reading undergoes a remarkable specialization and, very much like older handicraft activity at the onset of the industrial revolution, is dissociated into a variety of distinct processes according to the general law of the division of labor” (140). Rather than merely contributing to the displacement and dehumanization of the skilled craftsman, such processes of “deskilling” also entail a certain democratization, creating “forms of labor that anyone can do” (146). This analogy adds a material-historical angle to the openness and multiplicity of the Barthesian “text,” implying its availability not only to more numerous readings but also to more numerous readers. The new, active reading required by Simon’s novel and Acker’s, therefore, might not only produce agency (as readers, like Acker herself, find new ways to make use of the text in question) but might also render the traditional materials of western culture available to use by more diverse groups of people–not just the original, intended readers.

This “deskilled” reading certainly seems evident within Acker’s novel, where her Quixote stands in for the reader of the novel; both in the specific textual interpretations Acker’s Quixote performs and in her overall language and tone as narrator, Quixote seems to model a sort of subversive stupidity. Following Cervantes’s mad knight, Acker’s protagonist is the very type of the misreading literalist, reading at a level of interpretation that “anyone could do.” She is not only the wrong (unintended) reader of these “male texts”; she also consistently reads wrong, as when she (again following Cervantes) mistakes a procession of penitents carrying a figure of the Virgin Mary for a kidnapping in progress (177). As far as there is one narrative voice among all the shifting fragments, it is the voice of a stubborn misreader, a reader who consistently focuses on the wrong things and fails to notice the things to which she should pay attention if she were to produce a sophisticated reading. This narrative voice thinks Shakespeare’s Juliet is supposed to be a nymphomaniac; later, speaking as Jane Eyre, she complains that the worst thing about her boarding school is the lack of privacy in the dormitory for masturbation. Likewise, Acker’s language is relentlessly non-literary, profane, and full of slang: for instance, her Oedipus declares non-poetically, “I am the biggest shit in the world” (147).

Acker’s exemplary (mis)reader might be likened to Bakhtin’s carnival fool, whose apparently stupid insistence on supposedly minor or self-evident points reveals society’s hypocrisy and the fundamental contradictions of ideology (Bauer 11). The carnival fool’s stupidity is a weapon against the words and the power of the mighty. In this sense, Acker’s deliberate “dumbing down” and lowering into bawdiness of canonical great works might also be a democratization.

However, Jameson ultimately concludes in the case of Claude Simon that the equation of “deskilled” reading with democratization of the text does not, in fact, hold up. Simon’s textual pastiche fails to offer a sustainable image of utopian conditions of production precisely because of its fragmentation and multiplicity. Echoing the famed Brecht-Lukács debates about modernist technique, Jameson concludes that such art can only offer knowledge of society in the form of “symptom[s]” or random “data”; these data fail to cohere into an overall vision of society as a totality (151).

Jameson also offers what I would call a common-sense reason why these texts’ production of a level of reading that “anyone can do” does not result in greater readerly access: he stops to ask who actually reads “so highly technical an elite literary artifact” (146). While access to the means of production may exist in theory, in material terms “the very experience of art itself today is alienated and made ‘other’ and inaccessible to too many people to serve as a useful vehicle for their imaginative experience” (147). And if this is true of “art itself,” it need not be demonstrated that stylistically complex novels like Don Quixote are an even more specialized and rarefied taste, no matter how critical they may be of the closed world of traditional literature. This is, of course, part of their “hip” allure.

I would go further, to suggest that the conditions limiting who actually reads reside not only in social relations extrinsic to the text (although these are frequently the most compelling barriers to access); they are also written into Acker’s practice. By this I don’t mean that pastiche, like satire, necessitates a certain level of education or familiarity with the original texts being borrowed, if one is to “get it” in full. I do not mean, in other words, that one must actually be skilled to catch on to Acker’s “deskilled” reading, for her irreverent and anti-aesthetic tone, her blunt and obscene vocabulary, her incorporation of some widely-known sources (such as popular Shakespeare plays and “commercial” movies), and her focus on scenes of political and personal abuse and domination allow more casual readers, I would argue, to understand a large part of what she’s doing.

Rather, Acker constructs a reading dynamic that depends on a double construction: an implied “insider,” the conventionally right reader who has an insider’s relation to the textual tradition Acker invokes and a more powerfully implied “outsider,” the wrong reader, the freak. This “freak reader” is defined against that other, shadow reader. To take up any agency Acker’s strategy might offer, you may not need to know the original texts, but you do need to know that another, more authorized way of reading them preceded Acker’s/Quixote’s–and that against that authorized reading you must also define your own.

In Don Quixote and elsewhere, Acker tacitly privileges the deskilled reading and the freak reader in the way she deploys obscenity and sexuality. She often inserts obscenity into canonical texts, or juxtaposes them with originally obscene materials such as, in Don Quixote, an episode from the Marquis de Sade’s Justine. The sexuality of Acker’s novels never tries to pass as literary erotica; rather, it is bluntly rendered in the language of hard-core pornography (“fuck,” “cock,” and “cunt”), frequently violent and abusive and, when not so, often puerile and scatological (“I’d like to fuck the shit out of you. I’d like to stick my thingy-dingy up your witchy-washy” [88]). Her work has been branded pornographic and sexist, both by critics and by customs officers eager to confiscate offensive materials. While I see Acker as neither pornographic nor sexist, it seems clear that she intends to scandalize precisely those readers who do. Moreover, she uses this process of scandalization to privilege the “freak” reader. Those readers who are not offended are aware, as they read on, of the other more “typical” reaction to the text. They are thereby invited to identify themselves against those who find explicit sexuality offensive. Acker directly invokes the offended reader in Don Quixote by listing anti-pornography feminist Andrea Dworkin among the “evil enchanters” with whom Quixote must do battle (102). Those who read on thus allow themselves to be interpolated among the “freaks my loves,” the different readers implied by the text, whose awareness of difference depends upon an awareness of what the more “normal” reader must think.

However, there is much more going on in Acker’s obscenity than the calculated attempt to shock–which contributes to the feeling of predictability (flogging a dead horse) I posited above. The “pornographic” scenes in Don Quixote function to bring reading down to its most basic, bodily elements and uses; they are also key to Quixote’s quest for an active female desire. More importantly for my argument, it may be at these very moments in the text, where I have suggested that the distinction between a presumed hegemonic reader and the “freak” reader is made most apparent, that something more complex takes place that in fact disrupts and destabilizes any easy binary between inside and outside reading locations. In Acker’s obscene scenes, a third possible implied reader appears.

This is where my argument most diverges from Moran’s. In his focus on the construction of “Kathy Acker” as a brand name, as an unwilling part of the commodification process that sells her texts, Moran sees the sexual and the shockingly violent scenes in her work as simply playing into the ongoing combination of a discourse of risqué, bohemian authenticity with a frisson of trendily poststructuralist intellectual capital. He argues that Acker’s use of “sexually explicit, violent material often perceived as ‘confessional,’” when combined with the more theoretical and experimental elements, creates a “persona [that] is particularly appealing to celebrity culture… because it suggests that the self can be reinvented at the same time as it points to the existence of an innate, deep-seated identity” (144). The sex scenes, in other words, let readers have their cake and eat it too, while draining Acker’s work of its critique of social relations: readers get the commodified version of identity-politics-as-autobiography (access to others’ “unusual” or “colorful” experiences) and all the hipness of postmodernism. (None of this, Moran is careful to note, necessarily discredits Acker’s writing.)

However, another way of looking at these elements of Acker’s work in this particular context of the mainstreaming of debates over “difference” is to see her as capitalizing upon the uneasy recognition of difference in ways of reading that arose from anti-pornography feminist theorizing. I have argued elsewhere that, increasingly in the 1980s, the issue of pornography and, more broadly, obscenity offered some feminists a rallying point that promised to restore to feminism its sense of unified oppositionality–based, as that sense originally was, on claims of women’s fundamental difference from male society–and to patch up the divisions within feminism to which advocates of identity politics had demanded attention. If anti-pornography activism seemed to offer a way of transcending (or avoiding) the differences among women, it did so by relocating difference elsewhere. In its cruder forms, anti-pornography feminism asserts a clear divergence between women’s sexuality (whether lesbian or heterosexual) and men’s (gay or heterosexual); but often it develops a much subtler assertion of a less essentialized difference, that between two imagined groups of readers of pornography: those who are taken in by it (primarily men, but also women) and those who can “rise above it” in order to see it critically (see Pitchford).

Reading pornography for other than pornographic purposes–whether one reads as a feminist protester or an academic theorist, a historian, or a censor–itself entails imagining another reader who reads differently. Walter Kendrick’s research into the history of public discourse about pornography suggests that its critics have consistently constructed the reader of porn as “someone else,” usually in terms of both class and gender; usually, this someone is presumed to be taken in by the text–and vulnerable to its suggestions and distortions–in ways that the more dispassionate critic claims not to be. While the critic tends to imagine himself or herself as immune to the pornographic text’s intentions, his or her paternalistic concern about such texts centers on the image of other readers who are unable to be critical. So for the critic, the act of looking at pornography is always haunted by the shadowy presence of this other, intended reader and his or her imagined reading–the reading for which the text was ostensibly designed.

Acker’s sexual scenes are not pornographic; their primary purpose is not to arouse the reader (although arousal may be, of course, a secondary effect, and source of reading pleasure, albeit an ideologically troubling pleasure for some readers). Nevertheless, reading such scenes, in the context in which Acker’s pastiche places them, involves taking on a position something like that of the idealized critic of pornography: one is haunted by the awareness of arousal taking place elsewhere, in the previous lives or original intentions of these images and these words. As with the other borrowed texts and language, Acker’s female knight is the wrong reader of these sexual materials–because, as she has asserted, women are not supposed by conventional discourse to have autonomous sexual desires. Again the original, implied (pornographic) reader of the text or language Acker borrows is not identical to the implied freak reader of Acker’s text, whose representative or point of identification is Quixote. However, neither is the original implied reader of pornography identical to the “inside” or hegemonic literary reader I’ve been talking about so far (as Quixote’s/the freak’s other). So, in fact, there are two “other” readers lurking behind Acker’s explicitly sexual scenes: there is the stereotypical implied reader of porn, the solitary male masturbator; and there is the mainstream literary reader–and this now includes the middle-class, anti-porn feminist reader–who might be shocked by such material.³ Neither of these reactions or ways of reading is Quixote’s, and neither of them is the reaction Acker asks of her freaks.

The explicit sexual discourse in Acker’s writing complicates the reader’s subject position, rescuing it from what I have referred to as the potentially flogged-to-death opposition between the “inside,” traditional reader and the “outside,” freak reader (and I think this is true whether her actual reader is the exiled female reader or not). In at least one spot in Don Quixote, Acker’s text makes explicit this more complex triangulation of the implied readers. Here, she incorporates passages from one of Catullus’s love poems in their original Latin, with what starts out as a standard grammatical gloss, in English, printed alongside in a parallel column (for instance, “The subjunctive mood takes precedence over the straightforward active” [47]); but both the poem and the grammatical reading of it are quickly invaded by another reading, in the form of the highly personal and sometimes explicitly sexual voice of a lover, which breaks into the Latin lines and turns the accompanying analysis of tenses into personal musings on time and loss–as in this excerpt:

 

(See Project MUSE)

 

This scene occurs near the start of the section, “Other Texts,” which has as its heading or epigraph the announcement that Quixote can only proceed by “read[ing] male texts which weren’t hers.” Acker begins by presenting a canonical, male-authored text about sexual/romantic desire alongside, literally, a standard way of reading that text; the latter renders visible on the page the conventional implied reader–perhaps not the reader originally intended by Catullus, but the reader implied by contemporary publications of his poems in Latin text books, an objective and privileged reader on the inside of the educational system. The second reader, whose voice breaks into both the canonical text and the “inside” reading of it, is the desiring female freak whose “present is negative” and “imaginary” because her desire is impermissible; she “can’t fuck any boyfriends” and must ask forgiveness for speaking passionately–from a lover named Peter, whose name evokes on the one hand the desired male sexual organ and, on the other, both God’s judge, St. Peter (and his earthly avatar, the Pope–thus, church authority), and the city of St. Petersburg, which has been described a page earlier as “cool [and] cold,” designed by architects to restrain and contain “unhandlable passion” (46).

So here is the “male text” and its two, quite opposite readers. The third implied reader–whom I have called the pornographic reader–appears as Acker follows this borrowed poem with what appear to be her own translations of two other poems from the Catulli Carmina. In the next, two central lines read like dialogue from a hard-core movie:

take it kiss me do it grab me
grab my arms grab my ankles grab my cunt hairs. (49)

I would argue that, whether or not Acker’s reader knows that the original text–by which I mean Catullus’s poem, rather than the less specific text of pornography echoed here–speaks of nothing more graphic than the lovers exchanging thousands of kisses, this is a moment when the explicit evocation of sex intrudes upon both the ways of reading (or elsewhere-implied readers) that had been laid out explicitly in relation to the previous poem. First, these lines clearly imply or invite a shocked reaction from the “inside” reader represented by the standard academic gloss. But they also embody a far more direct, visceral, and, in a sense, authorized desire than that articulated in the voice of the “freak” reader (Quixote? Acker?) above. Their language evokes how women tend to speak in heterosexual pornography–that is, in texts conventionally aimed at male “one-handed readers,” where female sexual desire (or a male vision of it) is welcomed and is articulated openly, greedily, and continually–but toward ends very different from those of Acker’s desiring knight/reader. Only somewhere in the interplay between all three of these implied readers–academic insider, female freak, and male masturbator–can the text in pastiche yield a new life, one that offers a voice to articulate female desire and agency for change.

Thus sexual desire breaks down the reader’s distance from the text and her simple position of polar difference from the canonical reader here. The sexual portions of Acker’s text show more than any others that agency derives not simply from identifying the gaps and inconsistencies of a patriarchal textual tradition, from the cleanly and permanently outside location of the excluded reader; rather, agency also depends on the active articulation of desire, and on rewriting those texts to include and articulate that desire. The position of Acker’s reader is ultimately both outside the text and inside it, bound to enter it because of its offer of a language that might speak desire.

I close with one last echo of my phrase “flogging a dead language,” to cite the repeated scenes–there are at least three–of consensual sexual whipping in Acker’s novel. (These are perhaps floggings in a dead language.) Certainly, the rituals and trappings of sadistic and masochistic sex play, when used as signifiers of simple transgression, can become as exhausted and lifeless as any other signifiers. In such contexts they can merely recreate, in dead immobility, an oppositional relation between two social groups–“them” and “us,” imagined bourgeoisie and freaks. But in Acker’s hands, these sexual scenes enact a more complex dynamic between readers and text, and between freak readers and other possible readers. In sexual flogging, a painful act intended for punishment and correction is appropriated as a source of sexual pleasure. Similarly, by appealing to “freak” desires, Acker is able to appropriate the “dead language” of pastiche to create a new place of possibility for her reader, a place beyond the pointless redundancy of repetition and mere opposition.

Notes

1. Walter Kalaidjian notes that more than 40 new galleries opened in New York City during the 1980s (254).

2. Susan Gubar cites a number of influential volumes and essays as central intersection points of identity politics and feminist theorizing in the 1980s: Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa’s 1981 This Bridge Called My Back, bell hooks’s Ain’t I a Woman (also 1981), Audre Lorde’s Zami (1982) and Sister Outsider (1984), Barbara Christian’s “The Race for Theory” (1988), and Barbara Smith’s “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism” (1977; included in Elaine Showalter’s edited collection, The New Feminist Criticism, in 1985). Jill Dolan, in her discussion of identity politics (86), adds Smith’s collection, Home Girls (1983), and Evelyn Torton Beck’s edited volume, Nice Jewish Girls (1982).

3. Laura Kipnis’s reading of Hustler magazine further complicates this scenario of readers-imagining-other-readers; she proposes that part of the pleasure even for Hustler‘s intended (i.e., what I am calling “pornographic”) readers is a sense of transgressing against the “bourgeois proprieties” of imagined others (388).

Works Cited

• Acker, Kathy. Don Quixote: Which Was a Dream. New York: Grove, 1986.
• Bauer, Dale M. Feminist Dialogics: A Theory of Failed Community. Albany: State U of New York P, 1988.
• Dillard, R. H. W. “Lesson No. 1: Eat Your Mind.” Rev. of Empire of the Senseless, by Kathy Acker. New York Times Book Review 16 Oct. 1988: 9-11.
• Dolan, Jill. The Feminist Spectator as Critic. Ann Arbor: UMI Research, 1988.
• Gill, Jonathan. “Dedicated to Her Tattoo Artist.” New York Times Book Review 16 Oct. 1988: 9.
• Gubar, Susan. “What Ails Feminist Criticism?” Critical Inquiry 24 (1998): 878-902.
• Hoffman, Roy. Rev. of Blood and Guts in High School, by Kathy Acker. New York Times Book Review 23 Dec. 1984: 16.
• Jacobs, Naomi. “Kathy Acker and the Plagiarized Self.” Kathy Acker, Christine Brooke-Rose, Marguerite Young. Ed. Ellen G. Friedman and Miriam Fuchs. Spec. issue of Review of Contemporary Fiction 9.3 (1989): 50-55.
• Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991.
• Juno, Andrea. “Kathy Acker” (interview). Angry Women. Ed. Andrea Juno and V. Vale. Re/Search 13 (1991): 177-85.
• Kalaidjian, Walter. American Culture Between the Wars: Revisionary Modernism and Postmodern Critique. New York: Columbia UP, 1993.
• Kendrick, Walter. The Secret Museum: Pornography in Modern Culture. New York: Viking, 1987.
• Kipnis, Laura. “(Male) Desire and (Female) Disgust: Reading Hustler.” Cultural Studies. Ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler, with Linda Baughman and John Macgregor Wise. New York: Routledge, 1992. 373-91.
• Moran, Joe. Star Authors: Literary Celebrity in America. London: Pluto, 2000.
• Pitchford, Nicola. “Reading Feminism’s Pornography Conflict: Implications for Postmodernist Reading Strategies.” Genders 25 (1997): 3-38.

Daniel Punday

Department of English and Philosophy
Purdue University Calumet
pundaydj@axp.calumet.purdue.edu

“It is therefore the game of the world that must be first thought; before attempting to understand all the forms of play in the world.”
 
—Of Grammatology

In the wake of deconstruction, critics have sought some way to reconcile poststructural textual analytics with a concern for political and cultural issues. The broad dissemination of Jean-François Lyotard’s notion of the “local” has come to embody this urge to move away from the abstract metaphysics critiqued by deconstruction for the sake of immersion in the “world.” Thus a discourse of “location” within the world has emerged as an answer to this perceived failure of deconstructive textual analysis. Typical is Susan Bordo’s departure from deconstruction:

In theory, deconstructionist postmodernism stands against the ideal of disembodied knowledge and declares that ideal to be a mystification and an impossibility…. The question remains, however, how the human knower is to negotiate this infinitely perspectival, destabilized world. Deconstructionism answers with constant vigilant suspicion of all determinate readings of culture and a partner aesthetic of ceaseless textual play as an alternative ideal. Here is where deconstruction may slip into its own fantasy of escape from human locatedness–by supposing that the critic can become wholly protean by adopting endlessly shifting, seemingly inexhaustible vantage points, none of which are “owned” by either the critic or the author of a text under examination. (142)

As a result, Bordo argues, deconstruction claims to be the view from everywhere and nowhere, thus failing to recognize its own “locatedness” within the world. In other words, deconstruction’s abstract textual theory must give way to a concern for “location” if we are to analyze cultural and social issues.

Critical “location” has been an especially important and problematic issue in postmodern feminism, where the emphasis on such positioning is coupled with the need to critique mainstream culture. The local, according to Lyotard, is to be a counterforce to the broad narratives that deconstruction has unraveled. Yet, critics find almost immediately that the local has no pragmatic, critical value without such broader narratives. In considering how, for example, one might analyze local instances of gender politics, we are immediately confronted by the metaphysical assumptions implicit within terms such as “man” and “woman,” and forced to construct a larger theoretical apparatus to organize them. Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson describe the problem this way: “Suppose… that one defined that object [of social criticism] as the subordination of women to and by men. Then, we submit, it would be apparent that many of the [metanarrative] genres rejected by postmodernists are necessary for social criticism. For a phenomenon as pervasive and multifaceted as male dominance simply cannot be adequately grasped with the meager critical resources to which they would limit us” (26). Thus, although critics may recognize location as a crucial element of the modeling of social space, when they turn to actual critical praxis and analyze texts for their representation of gender, they find it difficult to operate using the model without accepting some traditional metalanguage. Critics have thus gone to the extreme of claiming that, although master narratives are to be avoided, critics in certain circumstances might be granted a theoretical waiver: “Formulating wrongs, on the other hand, can make use of theory. Victims might turn to existing theories or even themselves theorize when striving to phrase the wrongs signaled by their feelings and so on” (Schatzki 49). Critics fall back upon rather conventional critical models precisely because “local” criticism seems to provide no alternative method for analyzing particular textual features and conflicts in relation to this “locatedness.”

In order to recover a sense of how texts reflect and engage with the location from which they are analyzed, we need to return to deconstruction through the thematics of location. Critics who debate the use and nature of the local have generally assumed that deconstruction and the world are naturally opposed.¹ Certainly, the use to which deconstruction was put in its heyday–as a tool for a type of close reading, a hyper-New Criticism–supports this opposition. I will offer a more sophisticated model of deconstruction’s engagement with the world, and suggest that the concept of critical “location” is reconcilable and indeed crucial to deconstruction. Understanding this engagement helps us to link the model of society based on the “local” with the demands of actual critical practice. Bordo’s call to discuss the “location” of the deconstructive critic is a call to consider deconstruction as a form of critical praxis carried out within a political and cultural context. Inherent to this call is a theory of the space of culture, of interpretation, and of texts. As we attempt to develop a theory of post-deconstructive critical practice that is sensitive both to political location and to textual dynamics, our first step will be to consider the nature of deconstructive space. By recognizing the assumed model of space operating within post-deconstructive criticism–especially in post-deconstructive feminism–we can see how Derrida’s work is being misread. This space will lead us into a consideration of the deconstructive critic’s position between text and world–what I will call, following Derrida, the “worldliness” of the two. Once we recognize that deconstruction operates with an understanding of this worldly position of text and reader, we will be able to articulate much more sophisticated links between the textual analysis associated with deconstruction and the interest in political location that has developed in its wake.

Rethinking Deconstructive Space

A shared spatial language that allows us to speak of texture, movement, layers and boundaries is the closest connection between deconstruction and the post-deconstructive analysis of “location.”² In one sense, post-deconstructive criticism simply shifts this play from the text to the world, reading social relations in the same way that concepts and words were read by the deconstructionist. This strategy is built upon attempts to explicate deconstruction as a more or less politically neutral tool that can be used for political purposes. Rarely is this more brazen than in Michael Ryan’s Marxism and Deconstruction (1982), where the two terms of Ryan’s title appear to be mutually exclusive and to supplement each other perfectly: “Deconstruction is a philosophical interrogation of some of the major concepts and practices of philosophy. Marxism, in contrast, is not a philosophy. It names revolutionary movements” (1). This belief that deconstruction has no inherent concern for politics and location is carried over into more sophisticated post-deconstructive writing. Consider, for example, Teresa de Lauretis’s introduction to Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, a work typical of the attempt to formulate post-deconstructive critical practice. De Lauretis treats the world as a space in which social relations conflict and transform when she notes in recent feminism “a shift from the earlier view of woman defined purely by sexual difference (i.e., in relation to man) to the more difficult and complex notion that the female subject is a site of differences; differences that are not only sexual or only racial, economic, or (sub)cultural, but all of these together and often enough at odds with one another” (14). De Lauretis implies that individuals within social relations function according to a deconstructive model to the extent that we can describe them as inhabiting a space of conflict between overlapping cultural systems and networks. Such a formulation shifts Derrida’s language of hinge, play, trace and boundary from the text to the culture, paralleling cultural space to textual space and individuals to terms caught within a play of différance. At the same time, however, this post-deconstructive criticism also assumes that these social relations function not merely like deconstructive textual play, but also on the basis of it. Thus, de Lauretis quotes Wittig’s remark that hegemony “produces the difference between the sexes as a political and philosophical dogma” (13). This remark bases social reality on a more literal Derridian play, assuming that within any culture there exists a trans-textual space in which these terms arise and on the basis of which social relations are constructed. This clearly carries a different emphasis than the previous passage, where the space of conflict was “real” and the elements under consideration were not terms but individuals. This post-deconstructive criticism thus imports deconstructive spatiality both as a model for speaking about social relations and as a textual system by which those relations are taken to have been constructed in the first place. The result is a sort of kettle logic, a criticism that uses deconstructive spatiality in several contradictory ways.

This contradiction plays a strategic role within the functioning of post-deconstructive critical praxis. One of the principle charges leveled at deconstruction is that it allows the individual no room to act against the discursive systems that function within the culture, since the subordination of reality to textuality implies that no real-world act can affect this textual play. The dual way in which critics have appropriated deconstructive space actually helps them to open up this possibility. Consider, for example, Chris Weedon’s discussion of the political freedom opened up by (an appropriation of) deconstructive space:

Even when the principles of “différance” are inscribed in an historically specific account of discourses, signifiers remain plural and the possibility of absolute or true meaning is deferred. The precariousness of any attempt to fix meaning which involves a fixing of subjectivity must rely on the denial of the principles of difference and deferral. The assertion of “truth” involved is constantly vulnerable to resistance and the redefinition of meaning…. As individuals we are not the mere objects of language but the sites of discursive struggle, a struggle that takes place in the consciousness of the individual. (105-6)

Weedon here straddles two appropriations of deconstructive space in order to define a type of “discursive struggle” in which the individual has the potential to be a conscious and active participant. Weedon accepts the more literal deconstructive notion of space as a textual matter, in which terms play out through différance in a way that makes any term ultimately unstable. At the same time, however, Weedon also accepts the analogy between textuality and social space, defining the space in which individuals interact as merely like this textual space. This latter, analogical use of deconstructive space allows Weedon to emphasize the role of individuals as the site of struggle. To accept either of these spatial models solely would limit Weedon’s image of discursive freedom. To accept deconstructive space as purely textual denies the primacy of the individual; to accept deconstructive space as merely an analogy denies the “precariousness” of meaning and limits the individual’s ability to fight against hegemony. This dual, contradictory appropriation of deconstructive space thus makes possible a vision of political freedom. Such contradictory roots for post-deconstructive space also explain, however, why critics have found it so difficult to justify the use of this space theoretically. From this perspective the “local site” seems to be an inconsistent construction incapable of being justified or extended to a larger system of critical interpretation.

I would like to suggest that these contradictions arise out of the mistaken assumption that deconstructive spatiality has no inherent connection to the concept of world, and thus must be appropriated in various ways. Implicit within this appropriation of deconstructive space in these two ways is a misunderstanding of Derridian space as a flat field and as a mere way of speaking. Both Weedon and de Lauretis assume that deconstructive space is a single plane in which elements (terms or individual subjects) meet, conflict, and transform. This understanding of deconstructive space is not unique to post-deconstructive criticism, but instead can be traced back to the widespread reading of deconstruction as a purely rhetorical discipline. Barbara Johnson, for example, applies deconstruction to literature in an attempt at “identifying and dismantling differences by means of other differences that cannot be fully identified or dismantled” (x). Johnson does this by treating language as the source of exteriority within the text, and as a result casts Derridian space as a metaphor: “The differences between entities (prose and poetry, man and woman, literature and theory, guilt and innocence) are shown to be based on a repression of differences within entities, ways in which an entity differs from itself” (x-xi). Space for Johnson is simply a way of speaking, a way of defining the lack of self-presence in individual terms and their dependence on a metonymic “differing.” This understanding of Derridian space has led critics to reduce textual play to a simple metonymic substitution of linguistic terms, and to see Derrida as cut off from more “worldly” concerns. It is in this sense that Edward Said describes Derridian space:

All this establishes a sort of perpetual interchange in Derrida’s work between the page and the theater stage. Yet the locale of the interchange–itself a page and a theater–is Derrida’s prose, which in his recent work attempts to work less by chronological sequence, logical order, and linear movement than by abrupt, extremely difficult-to-follow lateral and complementary movement. The intention that movement is to make Derrida’s page become the apparently self-sufficient site of a critical reading, in which traditional texts, authors, problems, and themes are presented in order to be dedefined and dethematicized more or less permanently. (202-3)

Said suggests that Derrida’s language is a self-contained stage within which terms undergo a ceaseless transformation. Behind this characterization of Derrida’s textual stage is the same assumption that Johnson makes: textuality is merely a metonymic substitution, and any space attributed to the text must be merely a metaphor, a way of speaking.

This simplification of deconstructive space is not without its benefits for post-deconstructive criticism. Post-deconstructive criticism defines its own relevance to the world, we can suggest, by strategically keeping deconstruction out of the world. That is, by simplifying deconstructive space into a metaphorical stage through which textual slippage can be described, recent critics have made room for themselves to appropriate deconstruction for a more politically-engaged criticism. Yet in doing so, these critics have produced a post-deconstructive space whose contradictions preclude its theoretical justification and articulation into a larger critical praxis. That Derrida does not accept the understanding of textual space as a simple field is quite explicit within his writing. Derrida finds Freud’s “Mystic Writing Tablet” interesting exactly because of its violation of geometrical consistency:

Differences in the work of breaching concern not only forces but also locations. And Freud already wants to think force and place simultaneously. He is the first not to believe in the descriptive value of his hypothetical representation of breaching…. It is, rather, the index of a topographical description which external space, that is, familiar and constituted space, the exterior space of the natural sciences, cannot contain. (“Freud” 204)

Derrida’s discussion of deconstructive space always involves the movement away from classical models of geometric space and thus rejects any notion of a textual “field.” Critics have had difficulty coming to terms with Derrida’s non-linear space because, as we have seen in Johnson, attention to the “sliding” and “exteriority” of terms within a text seems naturally to presuppose some (metaphorical) field upon which they function. In other words, Derrida’s non-linear space is easier to understand in the abstract than it is to insert within a system of critical praxis. It is for this reason that Rodolphe Gasché’s treatment of Derrida as a philosopher is perhaps the most satisfying discussion of Derridian space. Unlike Johnson, Gasché resists the temptation to reduce exteriority to a way of speaking about rhetorical substitution, and thus is able to understand space as something thematized by Derrida:

Recall that the relation to an Other constitutive of a self, whose minimal unit is the arche-trace, presupposes an interval which at once affects and makes possible the relation of self to Other and divides the self within itself. In the same way, differance as the production of a polemical space of differences both presupposes and produces the intervals between concepts, notions, terms, and so on. In that sense, arche-trace and differance, each in a different manner, are spacing. From the perspective of arche-trace, spacing “is the opening of the first exteriority in general, the enigmatic relationship of the living to its other and of an inside to an outside.” (199; citing Derrida, Of Grammatology 70)

According to Gasché, Derrida’s non-linear notion of space has its roots in the production of potential space, in space as an undertaking rather than as a metaphorical field. The difficulty of translating this production of space, presented as a philosophical claim in Gasché, into critical praxis functioning “within the world” has driven critics, on the one hand, to Johnson’s textualism and, on the other, to Weedon’s contradictory appropriation of deconstructive space.

Derrida’s richest articulation of a non-linear space is his essay “Ousia and Gramme,” an essay that can guide us away from the simplified deconstructive space that we have observed thus far. This essay is explicitly about time and the philosophical tradition that has described it in spatial terms. Derrida claims that philosophers have consistently denied temporality for the sake of the presence implied by spatial forms. Derrida does not, of course, reject this spatiality in favor of some direct understanding of temporality. Temporality can never be self-present, and thus can never be known except by how it modifies the spatial models that philosophers attempt to impose upon it. The essay describes, then, a very complex space that results from the attempt to account for time, a space that comes up against the limits of presence. Derrida begins with Hegel’s dialectical model of space. Such dialectics have, for Derrida, a general similarity to the movement of différance, thus allowing Derrida to begin with an already unstable and active approach to space. Two different ways of understanding space arise in three stages by dividing the initial immediacy and completeness of the ideal term, “space.” Derrida writes, paraphrasing Hegel,

Differentiation, determination, qualification can only overtake pure space as the negation of this original purity and of this initial state of abstract indifferentiation which is properly the spatiality of space. Pure spatiality is determined by negating properly the indetermination that constitutes it, that is, by itself negates itself. By itself negating itself: this negation has to be a determined negation, a negation of space by space. The first spatial negation of space is the POINT. (41)

In this passage, Derrida considers how an initial term (pure space) contains within itself an implied differentiation that transforms it into a different understanding of space (the point) in many ways opposed to that initial term. The first and third stages represent two different ways of understanding space–“pure” space and the point. The middle stage of this textual transformation involves postulating a certain ground on which these two terms interact, the stage upon which this transformation occurs–what Derrida refers to elsewhere as “opening up of its own space, effraction, breaking of a path against resistances, rupture and irruption become a route” (“Freud” 214). For Hegel, concrete space is the product of the work of negation, the third stage of the dialectic. Here, however, Derrida departs from Hegel and defines what appears to be the most concrete and fundamental space as a textual ground that allows the movement between the first and third positions. This transitional space is implied by the active terms that this passage employs, in which the terms “space” themselves: “As the first determination and first negation of space, the point spatializes or spaces itself. It negates itself by itself in its relation to itself, that is, to another point. The negation of negation, the spatial negation of the point is the line. The point negates and retains itself, extends and sustains itself, lifts itself (by Aufhebung) into the LINE, which thus constitutes the truth of the point” (“Ousia” 42). This dialectical transformation produces a space by virtue of the force implicit within this transformation, a force that demands a ground upon which to function. Derrida, then, borrows from Hegel the idea that space is produced by this ongoing transformation of concepts; he departs from Hegel by seeing this production as, paradoxically, what allows the movement in the first place.

Derrida’s model of this paradoxically produced and preconditional space is the “gramme,” which most clearly summarizes Derrida’s departure from the flat-field space that has characterized most deconstructive criticism. Literally the gramme refers to a line or trace; more generally it is the spatial rendering of temporal movement. As a spatialization of time, the gramme is the accumulation of moments or points taken as “in act”–that is, moving towards some end and thus referring to a telos of their whole movement. Derrida is dissatisfied with this telos-based model of the gramme because it assumes the self-presence of each point. Such a model, applied to time, simply repeats the metaphysical tradition of spatialization and presence. Nonetheless, Derrida is able to reaccentuate the gramme in a way that allows it to function in a less self-present, more temporal fashion. To do this, Derrida shifts the locus of the gramme to the limit:

But if one considers now that the point, as limit, does not exist in act, is not (present), exists only potentially and by accident, takes its existence only from the line in act, then it is not impossible to preserve the analogy of the gramme: on the condition that one does not take it as a series of potential limits, but as a line in act, as a line thought on the basis of its extremities (ta eskhata) and not of its parts. (“Ousia” 59-60)

Derrida argues that, rather than locating the limit within each point, the space that the gramme provides should be understood as made up of a whole movement that passes through each point “accidentally” but without granting any point self-presence. Rather, the presence of each point is always deferred to the whole movement, which itself is not self-present but potential and multiple. The space of the temporal gramme is not separable into distinct points, but constantly renegotiates different limits and boundaries that are not simply arbitrary but dependent on the possible “paths” of movement that the text opens up. This gramme echoes but makes more specific the space we saw appear out of the play of terms–a space produced temporarily by reference to the “extremes” and out of the movement of signification.

We can say that Derrida’s writing completes the transition from older, linear models of space to a more dynamic space that is much discussed in current criticism, but which has been incompletely understood. Classical geometrical space in many ways reaches its apotheosis in structuralism, where the abstract space that critics like Henri Lefebvre have associated with modern culture is taken to be a basic condition of all meaning. A clear embodiment of this geometrical space is A.J. Greimas’s “semiotic square,” a model of four contrasting elements whose relations are said to organize the more concrete elements within a text, language, or culture. Critics have recognized that deconstruction marks a break from this kind of geometrical space, and have suggested that deconstructive space will be characterized by what Fredric Jameson has called the abolition of “the distinction between the inside and the outside” (98). Jameson’s best example of this deconstructive space is the Frank Gehry House discussed in Postmodernism, a house in which traditional living spaces have been “wrapped” by other architectural units in a way that dissolves conventional ways of thinking about the inside and outside of the house: “What is wrapped can also be used as the wrapper; the wrapper can also be wrapped in its turn” (101-102). This kind of space is frequently called “postmodern” by critics like Jameson to suggest that it is a simple fact of contemporary culture. We have seen that Derrida’s writing, however, affirms neither this postmodern nor the traditional, geometrical spatial models. Indeed, when critics of “location” have sought to make a break from deconstruction and move into a genuinely post-deconstructive space, as we have seen, in many ways they have simply repeated in problematic ways the deconstructive/postmodern space that dissolves the distinction between inside and outside. There is no space that is outside of politics, these critics note, no way in which the space of the text is not always already influenced by the “external” political environment in which it is read.³ In Derrida’s own writings, however, we have seen a theory that escapes the space associated with deconstruction. Space here is neither static and flat, nor is it simply a matter of unending reversals of outside and inside. Instead, Derridian space–which I will call properly post-deconstructive in the sense that it already recognizes the problems implicit within the type of space mistakenly associated with deconstruction–is interested in how spaces are constructed through reference to the outside, by taking up positions in which these sites of analysis are defined. These spaces are neither fixed nor infinitely unstable, but rather dynamically produced by reference to the limits and ultimately, as I will show, to the “location” from which they are read.

Différance and Worldliness

In the gramme Derrida offers a model of a kind of space that is dynamic rather than static, and which provides the basis for thinking about the relation between this space and textual analysis. Derrida is not, of course, the only critic to reject the static spaces of traditional criticism and the simplistic deconstructive spaces that I have criticized in the first section. Indeed, in a number of post-deconstructive theories we can see the development of just such a space. One of the most sophisticated is Laclau and Mouffe’s Marxist writing on hegemony and the construction of a class agent. These critics reject the stable field of social space and insist instead that class identity must always be thought on another level: “The political character of the hegemonic link is fundamental, implying as it does that the terrain on which the link establishes itself is different from that on which the social agents are constituted…. This exteriority [of the hegemonic link] was the root of those paradoxical situations in which the communist militant typically found himself” (55). Such a space works against the dissolution of the line between inside and outside that Jameson associates with postmodernist space, even while complicating traditional ways of understanding this line:

The incomplete character of every totality necessarily leads us to abandon, as a terrain of analysis, the premise of “society” as a sutured and self-defined totality. “Society” is not a valid object of discourse. There is no single underlying principle fixing–and hence constituting–the whole field of differences. The irresoluble interiority/exteriority tension is the condition of any social practice: necessity only exists as a partial limitation on the field of contingency. It is in this terrain, where neither a total interiority nor a total exteriority is possible, that the social is constituted. (111)

The result is a model of space, like that of Derrida, in which the outside of a discourse is thought as a necessary component of the construction of social space. What distinguishes Derrida’s dynamic spaces articulated through the gramme from the complex spaces developed by such sophisticated recent theories is that for Derrida even these extremities are produced through textual analysis. This has two effects. First, it steps away from the danger evident in Laclau and Mouffe’s work of assigning this multi-leveled social space some kind of metaphysical status–of suggesting that a real discursive space exists with stable, albeit complex, characteristics. Derrida’s exteriority is always produced out of particular textual necessities, rather than being an inherent part of social space that will appear over and over again in much the same way.⁴ Second and more importantly, by linking this space to textual analysis, Derrida makes his social model a natural basis for critical practice in a way that other sophisticated post-deconstructive models cannot be. Derrida develops a post-deconstructionist space in a way that makes it particularly available to textual analysis. Especially in feminist practice, this ability to translate space into tools for revealing patterns–let us say, of sexism–is essential to its effectiveness.

What links this complex spatial model to the kind of textual play that we usually associate with deconstruction–and thus the key to Derrida’s theory of space and location–is the ontological instability of the objects that appear within this space. Indeed, one of the reasons that deconstructive space is usually misdefined as a flat field is in order to account for the tensions and conflicts between the terms that are deployed within that space. According to traditional readings of deconstruction, the text creates a space by positing potential “others” that open up a space for the play of différance. Critics reduce Derridian space to this flat field by homogenizing the ontology of these textual elements–that is, treating the element and its others as terms that “exist” in a similar way. This ontological homogenization can perhaps be traced back to a general critical tendency to understand the play of difference and alterity on the model of an individual’s confrontation with his or her social, sexual, or racial “other.” The first description of différance in Terry Eagleton’s widely used Literary Theory: An Introduction follows this pattern: “Woman is the opposite, the ‘other’ of man: she is non-man, defective man, assigned a chiefly negative value in relation to the male first principle. But equally man is what he is only by virtue of ceaselessly shutting out his other or opposite, defining himself in antithesis to it, and his whole identity is therefore caught up and put at risk in the very gesture by which he seeks to assert his unique, autonomous existence” (132). Despite the validity of Eagleton’s summary, this example is dangerous as a general model for différance because it treats the ontological status of the two elements (self and other) as equivalent. Such equivalence demands that the ontological ground of their confrontation be fixed, since such a ground defines the very possibility of these two terms acting as an “other.” In formulating the gramme as a model for the productive, temporalized space of deconstruction, however, Derrida works against exactly this presupposition of ontological equivalence between the elements of différance. Derrida is careful to avoid claiming that the various points within the gramme are self-present; rather, he emphasizes that the gramme marks out a play of potential or accidental points. Within the space marked out by the gramme, such points will seem ontologically fixed; a glance to the limit, however, reveals them as “accidental” and their existence as very much at issue. Only by recognizing an ontological difference functioning within the elements of textual play can deconstructive space avoid being fixed and instead function as something in process.

Textual objects staged within deconstructive space can be seen as fluttering between an ideal, conceptual existence and a concrete, material status. Indeed, one of the principle things that Derrida gains by beginning “Ousia and Gramme” with Hegel is the ability to cast his discussion in terms of concreteness. This is clear in Derrida’s summary of Hegel:

Space… has become concrete in having retained the negative within itself. It has become space in losing itself, in determining itself, in negating its original purity, the absolute indifferentiation and exteriority that constituted itself in its spatiality. Spatialization, the accomplishment of the essence of spatiality, is a despatialization and vice versa. (42)

Whereas the concrete is something produced for Hegel as the end of a teleological process, for Derrida it is a much more ambiguous and transient moment within this movement. We can see the initial play of space in “Ousia and Gramme” as turning on exactly this concrete/conceptual tension. The space that arises in the play of terms is concrete because it is the larger, alloyed space that comprises these two abstract definitions of space and in which they meet and clash. This space is conceptual, however, because it is the concreteness of this term (“space”) that opens up the possibility of polysemy and the slippage between two different understandings of the term; such a transitional space is always a conceptual supplement to a concrete term. This concrete/conceptual tension is implicit within the “pure space” from which Derrida (and Hegel) start: “Nature, as ‘absolute space’… knows no mediation, no difference, no determination, no discontinuity. It corresponds to what the Jena Logic called ether: the element of ideal transparency, of absolute indifferentiation, of undetermined continuity, of absolute juxtaposition, that is, the element without interior relations” (41). What opens “pure space” up to deconstruction is that at times it seems concrete and at others abstract.

This fluttering between concrete and conceptual is essential to textual différance, and is ubiquitous in Derrida’s writing. Implicit within Derrida’s tendency to describe terms as functioning actively within a play of différance is this dramatization of the dually concrete and conceptual nature of textual elements. Indeed, one of the simplest and best-known characterizations of deconstruction is as a method of reading that suspends the reference of textual elements in order to treat them in largely material terms. One thinks, in this context, of Derrida’s discussion of Nietzsche’s umbrella in Spurs, where a particular textual object becomes the occasion for a discussion of style precisely because the referential context of that object is suspended and the qualities of the object itself instead are explored. Gregory Ulmer offers this discussion as evidence that Derrida’s methods are essentially “allegorical,” stressing the ambiguous materiality of the text: “The ‘double’ structure of style–relevant to the problem of allegorical representation which at once reveals and conceals–finds, in the ‘morphology’ of the umbrella with its shaft and fabric, a concrete model. Derrida borrows the ‘umbrella’ left behind in Nietzsche’s Notebooks and remotivates it (its meaning was indeterminate in any case) as a de-monstrative device” (“Object” 99). Ulmer sees Derrida’s methods as allegorical because they take a textual object as a concrete embodiment of abstract textual play. But, of course, the opposite is also the case. When Derrida uses the concrete historical traces and erasures buried within a particular word–the “primitive meaning, the original, and always sensory and material, figure” studied in “White Mythology” (211) for example–as the suppressed basis for the conceptual work that depends upon these words, he ultimately returns to the conceptual, the “logic implicit in this text” (210). Ulmer sees this allegorical functioning as best embodied by the mechanical “apparatus” of writing in Derridian theory (Applied Grammatology 81-83). Derrida discusses the role and the ontological problems introduced by the apparatus of writing most directly in his Mystic Writing Pad essay:

Writing, here, is techne as the relation between life and death, between present and representation, between the two apparatuses. It opens up the question of the technics: of the apparatus in general and of the analogy between the psychical apparatus and the nonpsychical apparatus. In this sense writing is the stage of history and the play of the world. It cannot be exhausted by psychology alone. (“Freud” 228)

Freud’s model of the Mystic Writing Pad is interesting for Derrida in part because it introduces the issue of the apparatus that, as this passage suggests, can never remain simply a conceptual analogy. Indeed, we can see this hesitation between the concrete and the conceptual as the basis of writing and its deconstructive effects. Without this concrete/conceptual ambiguity, a term could not be described as undergoing the kind of slippage that Derrida describes in “Ousia and Gramme” and elsewhere. In Speech and Phenomena, for example, Derrida’s treatment of the opposition between expression and indication turns on the issue of the concrete. In that analysis, Derrida opposes the concrete, situational indication to the ideal, “nonworldly” expression. What drives Derrida’s analysis and deconstruction of these terms is how the concrete nonetheless reappears even out of the movement towards the ideal. Thus, expression moves from being an ideal “nonworldliness [that] is not another worldliness” to become re-entangled within the concrete world: “The opposition between form and matter–which inaugurates metaphysics–finds in the concrete ideality of the living present its ultimate and radical justification” (6). In all of these instances Derrida treats the fluttering between the concrete and the conceptual as the basis of textual construction.

The ontological indeterminacy of textual space embodies and repeats the ontological play of différance itself. More importantly, however, the ontological complexities of deconstructive space also reflect its position between text and world–as both a metaphor applied by a critic and as something genuinely functioning as space. Derrida’s Edmund Husserl’s “Origin of Geometry”: An Introduction concerns itself with exactly this problem of the origin of space in the science of geometry: “There is then a science of space, insofar as its starting point is not in space” (85). Geometry conceives space in contradictory terms: space is concrete within current geometry and metaphorical in the early geometer’s protoidealizations of space. Similarly, Derrida ends Positions with the problem of space and the degree to which it can be taken as equivalent to alterity–that is, the degree to which it is a metaphor for a conceptual exteriority. Derrida notes that “In effect, these two concepts do not signify exactly the same thing; that being said, I believe that they are absolutely indissociable” (81). Derrida elaborates further:

Spacing/alterity: On their indissociability, then, there is no disagreement between us. I have always underlined at least two characteristics in the analysis of spacing, as I recalled in the course of the interview: (1) That spacing is the impossibility for an identity to be closed on itself, on the inside of its proper interiority, or on its coincidence with itself. The irreducibility of spacing is the irreducibility of the other. (2) That “spacing” designates not only interval, but a “productive,” “genetic,” “practical” movement, an “operation,” if you will, in its Mallarméan sense also” (94).

Derrida seems to have in mind an opposition between, on the one hand, space as a metaphor for alterity (the impossibility of identity) and, on the other, space as something concrete and productive in its own terms. The ontological ambiguity of space thus both embodies the ontological play within the text and references its position between text and critic.

Derrida is concerned, we might say, with the “worldly” rather than with the world. Perhaps Derrida’s most concise comment on this world comes at a point in Of Grammatology where Derrida considers the materiality of the trace and what it means for signification: “It is therefore the game of the world that must be first thought; before attempting to understand all the forms of play in the world” (50). This passage occurs in the context of considering Saussure’s claim that the connections among elements of a signifying system are arbitrary, a claim critics have often extended to characterize différance as a shapeless “freeplay.” Derrida’s counterargument is that to treat these elements as arbitrary is to assume that they are concrete things in the world, whose existence is independent of the meaning given them. Instead, Derrida suggests, we must see writing as caught up within a whole system of making these terms worldly and thus arbitrarily inserted within a phonetic system:

From the very opening of the game, then, we are within the becoming-unmotivated of the symbol. With regard to this becoming, the opposition of diachronic and synchronic is also derived. It would not be able to command a grammatology pertinently. The immotivation of the trace ought now to be understood as an operation and not as a state, as an active movement, a demotivation, and not as a given structure. (50-51)

For Derrida, the system of language as pure difference depends on the move into the world, on the stripping away of causality for the sake of a concreteness that is the possibility of signifiers being defined as arbitrarily associated with signifieds. Saussure’s fundamental distinction between signifier and signified is, then, the product of “the game of the world,” the functioning of a process of “worlding.” It is exactly this play of the ideaof the world, the always incomplete movement towards the world, that operates within writing as an “apparatus” and that sets within the text the play of the concrete and conceptual:

Since consciousness for Freud is a surface exposed to the external world, it is here that instead of reading through the metaphor in the usual sense, we must, on the contrary, understand the possibility of a writing advanced as conscious and as acting in the world (the visible exterior of the graphism, of the literal, of the literal becoming literary, etc.) in terms of the labor of the writing which circulated like psychical energy between the unconscious and the conscious. The “objectivist” or “worldly” consideration of writing teaches us nothing if reference is not made to a space of psychical writing…. We perhaps should think that what we are describing here as the labor of writing erases the transcendental distinction between the origin of the world and Being-in-the-world. Erases it while producing it. (“Freud” 212)

 

For Derrida, then, the world as a problem defines the apparatus of the text and thus introduces a slippage between the concrete and the conceptual.

The Structure of Critical Praxis

In linking the dynamic space developed in the gramme to the ontological status of objects represented in the text, Derrida accomplishes something that other critics–even those with sophisticated spatial models–fail to do. He develops a basis for critical practice that does not simply revert to the acceptance of traditional metanarratives for defining this practice–as we have seen so often in deconstructive and post-deconstructive criticism. Indeed, I would like to suggest that Derrida’s model of space and ontology can be used to address concerns of critical location that have sparked the movement “beyond” deconstruction. I will, specifically, argue that this theory of textual “worldliness” based on the play of the conceptual and the concrete is not merely an abstract condition of the text; instead it produces a differentiated and relatively fixed structure of analysis and critical location.

Space’s ability to straddle the text and the world depends on Derrida’s understanding of the “topos” or occasion of writing. In his early essay, “Force and Signification,” Derrida distinguishes between the topographical and the topological, arguing that we cannot directly correlate space and textuality:

Now, stricto sensu, the notion of structure refers only to space, geometric or morphological space, the order of forms and sites…. Only metaphorically was this topographical literality displaced in the direction of its Aristotelean and topical signification (the theory of commonplaces in language and the manipulation of motifs or arguments). (15-16)

Rather than accepting topography as a natural part of the text or rejecting it as a misunderstanding of textuality, Derrida considers the production of textual space out of a spatial self-reflection built into all textual language: “How is this history of metaphor possible? Does the fact that language can determine things only by spatializing them suffice to explain that, in return, language must spatialize itself as soon as it designates and reflects upon itself?” (16). Not only must language spatialize the world (as we saw in “Ousia and Gramme”), but it also relies on an implicit spatialization functioning whenever the linguistic slippage at work in différance forces the text to reflect on itself. The connection between the articulation of a text and the appearance of space is most clearly explained by Derrida’s notion of lieu as both a spatial site and a rhetorical topos. What Alan Bass translates in the passage above as “the theory of commonplaces in language,” Derrida describes in the original as “théorie des lieux dans le langage” (28). Derrida’s emphasis here on topoi as lieuxallows him to suggest a necessary complicity between textual articulation and the creation of textual topography. Derrida makes this association clear elsewhere:

The topoi of the dialogue are never indifferent. The themes, the topics, the (common-)places [les lieux], in a rhetorical sense, are strictly inscribed, comprehended each time within a significant site [des sites chaque fois signifiants]. They are dramatically staged, and in this theatrical geography, unity of place corresponds to an infallible calculation or necessity. (Dissemination 69; original French 77)

In this passage Derrida plays on the distinction between the rhetorical topos and the physical site, implying that the topos allows the working-out of the geography dictated by the topography. The topos here is the means by which the topography manifests itself and textual necessity plays out, the means by which the site that circumscribes it appears. In “Force and Signification,” Derrida defines the topographical as dependent on a previously existing site: “Structure is first the structure of an organic or artificial work, the internal unity of an assemblage, a construction; a work is governed by a unifying principle, the architecture that is built and made visible in a location” (15). Derrida suggests that a textual topography depends on the existence of a topos through which it is “made visible.” The lieu thus holds together text and the analytic “occasion” through which it is articulated by virtue of its very ontological instability, its slippage between concrete topographical site and the rhetorical topos.

This notion of the lieu is very similar to what critics have described as the “local site.” Elspeth Probyn suggests the necessity of this ontological indeterminacy in her characterization of the local site: “the concept of ‘locale’ will be used to designate a place that is the setting for a particular event. I take this ‘place’ as both a discursive and nondiscursive arrangement which holds a gendered event, the home being the most obvious example” (178). Probyn recognizes that the “locale” must exist in a problematic way as both part of discourse, and as something opposed to it–or, in the terms I have used, as conceptual and concrete. The difference between place and event (Probyn’s example is the distinction between home and the family) marks the fluctuation between concrete space and the interpellating (conceptual) representations that appear within that space. As for Derrida, this concrete/conceptual ambiguity arises when space comes up against its limit and recognizes the temporal–summarized nicely by Probyn’s casting of the concrete/conceptual ambiguity in terms of place and event. Probyn inherits this concrete/conceptual tension and its formulation as the play between place and event from Lyotard. When Lyotard suggests that “any consensus on the rules defining a [language] game and the ‘moves’ playable within it must be local, in other words, agreed on by its present players and subject to eventual cancellation” (66), he defines discursive action as constantly fluctuating between using and changing the “rules” of this interaction. Any reference, then, fluctuates between taking this “locale” concretely as a given base for communication, and renegotiating the boundaries of discourse conceptually. As for Derrida, this ontological ambiguity allows the site to “hold” contradictions. For Lyotard, this means that the local produces knowledge by (the possibility of) negating its base: “working on a proof means searching for and ‘inventing’ counterexamples, in other words, the unintelligible; supporting an argument means looking for a ‘paradox’ and legitimating it with new rules in the games of reasoning” (54). Lyotard suggests here that the very possibility of rejecting the site, of switching from the concrete to the conceptual understanding of this local space, is the means by which the contradictions that drive the “game” are worked through. Probyn follows the same reasoning in her use of Lyotard:

In this formulation the bricoleur actively pieces together different signs and produces new (and sometimes unsanctioned) meanings; the bricoleur is always in the process of fashioning her various locales. The concept of “locale” then serves to emphasize the lived contradictions of place and event. In acknowledging that we are daily involved in the reproduction of patriarchy we can nonetheless temper a vision of strict interpellation with the recognition that discourses are negotiated. Individuals live in complex places and differentiate the pull of events. (182)

According to Probyn, the site or locale holds contradictions and allows their analysis precisely because of the difference between “place” and “event”–that is, because of the ontological ambiguity of the site under analysis. Probyn does not simply suggest that the locale can be valued over the event or representation–that is, that we can strip away the representation for the sake of this concrete place. Rather, she recognizes that the very space in which women operate is constructed as part of a necessary duality with representation. Thus, to use Probyn’s example, one can have a proper “home” (as a space) only to the extent that one has a family of some sort–that is, only to the extent that space is bound to and even produced from a representation. The “reproduction of patriarchy” thus is not seamless but reveals its contradictions through the ontological ambiguity of the space in which it appears.

This system can be understood as the structure of deconstructive praxis–something both created by the deconstructive critic and delimiting the path of analysis. Derrida makes this clear in “Ousia and Gramme” in discussing how the gramme can “hold” the force of textual play because of the action of an observer: “The impossible–the coexistence of two nows–appears only in a synthesis–taking this word neutrally, implying no position, no activity, no agent–let us say in a certain complicity or coimplication maintaining together several current nows which are said to be the one past and the other future” (55). In this passage Derrida plays on the association of the now [maintenant] and the act of “maintaining” contradictions within a structure whose presence (and present) is undermined by its necessary reference to an exterior position. If, as Derrida suggests, this position is not a direct result of such an observer’s interaction with the object of synthesis, this structure nonetheless defines a certain space for such an observer that is a condition of this “now.” In describing this external role as one of “maintenance,” Derrida stresses the observer’s role in balancing the physical textual forces in terms of which Derrida describes space and time earlier in the essay: “Ousia as energeia, in opposition to dynamis (movement, power) is presence. Time, which bears within it the already-no-longer and the not-yet, is composite. In it, energy composes with power” (51). In “maintaining” the temporality of the text as a force, this external position renders it concrete, something that can be analyzed in the text as a thing. Indeed, Derrida’s description of the text as an apparatus–so basic to the text’s concrete/conceptual ambiguity–is itself dependent on some external position from which this system is used as a tool. Derrida writes, “The machine does not run by itself. It is less a machine than a tool. And it is not held with only one hand. This is the mark of its temporality. Its maintenance is not simple” (“Freud” 226). Such substantialization is the reason that we can speak about the text itself as retaining “traces”–a play of language made substantial by the work of the deconstructive critic. This substantialized force makes no sense on its own. Instead, it points back–allegorically, in Ulmer’s sense–to linguistic conflicts, to the site in which they appear, and to the means by which it was constructed by an external interpreter. These three relays within a text are all held together by the worldly fluctuation between the concrete and the conceptual, by the problematic substantiality that reveals how this non-presence is given shape within a text and its analysis.

Such substantialized traces best summarize the tripartite structure of worldliness in Derrida’s theory, and most clearly suggest how we can define a relatively fixed system within the text. In the trace, the text’s self-presence gives way to an ongoing series of “worldly” deferrals and references. The space, the topos, of the text in which we discover these traces points back to its core play of linguistic différance. More important–and this is what critics have missed in claiming that Derrida does not address the issue of the “location” of deconstructive praxis–this topos and its dependence on textual conflicts also references an extra-textual, analytic position. It is for this reason that Derrida has stressed the non-arbitrary character of deconstructive criticism. This helps to make sense of Derrida’s often-cited description of deconstruction in Of Grammatology:

The movements of deconstruction do not destroy structures from the outside. They are not possible and effective, nor can they take accurate aim, except by inhabiting those structures. Inhabiting them in a certain way, because one always inhabits, and all the more when one does not suspect it. Operating necessarily from the inside, borrowing all the strategic and economic resources of subversion from the old structure, borrowing them structurally, that is to say without being able to isolate their elements and atoms, the enterprise of deconstruction always in a certain ways falls prey to its own work. (24)

Derrida’s description of the trace emphasizes not merely the function of contradiction and its spatial articulation in the text as a structure, but also the position that this space creates for a critic to “inhabit.” The trace, consequently, is not an arbitrary element of the text, but instead, by its problematic ontology, points back to a whole system of becoming-worldly in the text. Derrida particularly stresses the critic’s dependence on this interconnected system in the following description of deconstruction:

The incision of deconstruction, which is not a voluntary decision or an absolute beginning, does not take place just anywhere, or in an absolute elsewhere. An incision, precisely, it can be made only according to lines of force and forces of rupture that are localizable in the discourse to be deconstructed. The topical and technical determination of the most necessary sites and operators–beginnings, holds, levers, etc.–in a given situation depends upon an historical analysis. This analysis is made in the general movement of the field, and is never exhausted by the conscious calculation of a “subject.” (Positions 82)

 

Here, the position of an observer, the space of the text (its lines and forces), and the basic terms of the analysis are all mutually dependent and related in a system of worldly transformation. If Derrida refuses Weedon’s optimistic post-deconstructive model of self-conscious critics, he also refuses to locate textual play independently of a reader. Rather, language, space and reader are interconnected and function within a system of worldliness. Only by seeing the worldly as something in constant circulation and having multiple manifestations can we recognize the ontological complexity of Derridian space.

In this notion of the tripartite structure of the deconstructive text, Derrida suggests a clear similarity between deconstruction and the “located” criticism that is usually opposed to it. Both share a recognition of knowledge’s necessary position between text and world. Derrida understands that this worldly position is more than a matter of irony–that is, more than a simple fact that makes a text uncloseable and relativistic. Rather, he suggests that this textual worldliness leads to a specific structure for the dispersion of objectivity and the construction of “positions” of critical praxis. Derrida’s interest in how deconstruction is related to such positions is perhaps easiest to see in his recent writing on Marx. Derrida starts with the problematic figure of Marx himself, and with the difficulty of defining a notion of influence that does not presuppose a self-presence or simple causality:

Among all the temptations I will have to resist today, there would be the temptation of memory: to recount what was for me, and for those of my generation who shared it during a whole lifetime, the experience of Marxism, the quasi-paternal figure of Marx, the way it fought in us with other filiations, the reading of texts and the interpretation of a world in which the Marxist inheritance was–and still remains, and so will remain–absolutely and thoroughly determinate. (Specters 13-14)

 

Derrida’s means of escape from the “temptation of memory” and from a traditionalist explanation of deconstruction’s place in the world is to investigate the ontological ambiguities of the “specter” of Marx: “We believe that this messianic remains an ineffaceable mark–a mark one neither can nor should efface–of Marx’s legacy, and doubtless of inheriting, of the experience of inheritance in general. Otherwise, one would reduce the event-ness of the event, the singularity and the alterity of the other” (28). Derrida casts the “specter” of Marx as ontologically indeterminate, both concrete and conceptual, actual and ideal. It is this “specterality” that fascinates Derrida, both as a condition of Marx’s “presence” within intellectual debates today, and as an issue thematized by Marx. Indeed, when Derrida defines deconstruction as an extension of Marxism–“Deconstruction has never had any sense or interest, in my view at least, except as a radicalization, which is to say also in the tradition of a certain Marxism, in a certain spirit of Marxism” (92)–he seems to have in mind just this shared concern for the “spectral” and how it complicates the self-presence of everyday objects. Derrida makes this connection between the specter and the concrete/conceptual ambiguity of différance directly. Discussing the difference between the specter and spirit, Derrida writes, “it is a differance. The specter is not only the carnal apparition of the spirit, its phenomenal body, its fallen and guilty body, it is also the impatient and nostalgic waiting for a redemption, namely, once again, for a spirit” (136). The tension that Derrida offers here between the ideal presence of the spirit and the physicality of the specter is just the tension that we have seen throughout between the conceptual and the concrete.⁵

Spatial Exchanges

Derrida has suggested that, although knowledge is not disinterested and objective, we can define a structure for critical investment and the organization of knowledge. Derrida’s theory of the tripartite structure of deconstructive praxis relies on the space of the site at its core. As his writing on Marx suggests, Derrida insists on describing the play of the concrete and the conceptual in spatial and temporal terms. Indeed, Derrida is quite explicit in stressing the role of spatial and temporal “location” in “spectral spiritualization”:

In the incoercible differance the here-now unfurls. Without lateness, without delay, but without presence, it is the precipitation of an absolute singularity, singular because differing, precisely, and always other, binding itself necessarily to the form of the instant, in imminence and in urgency.… No differance without alterity, no alterity without singularity, no singularity without here-now. (Specters 31)

Derrida’s articulation of the concrete/conceptual slippage functions according to a certain economy of space and time. Indeed, we can see the whole of the tripartite structure as a collection of several spaces. This is a structure that Probyn herself suggests in using the term “locale” for a specific site, and “location” for a more theoretical space: “By ‘location’ I refer to the methods by which one comes to locate sites of research. Through location knowledges are ordered into sequences which are congruent with previously established categories of knowledge” (178). If Probyn’s distinction between locale and location seems appropriate to Derrida, we should recognize in deconstruction the seed of a radical approach to an individual’s negotiation of textuality and socio-political involvement. Derrida offers us an image of criticism based on what I have called a “non-linear” space–a space that is constantly being constructed, that always gestures beyond itself, and that finally depends upon its continual transformation into other kinds of space.

The radical implications for criticism of this spatial multiplicity are never treated concretely by Derrida. Indeed, the kind of spatial multiplicity that I have described here initially seems merely to repeat the celebration of transience and indeterminacy that critics of postmodernism claim undermines the possibility of concrete political action.⁶ As I have noted above, this more complex notion of space has emerged in other forms of post-deconstructive criticism, without being integrated into the kind of textual analysis that we associated with deconstruction. Particularly helpful for recognizing how the positive connotations of deconstructive spatial multiplicity have been explored is Michel de Certeau’s writing on the negotiation of space in “everyday life.” In particular, de Certeau’s emphasis on social space speaks to the liberatory potential that exists unrecognized within totalizing systems without romanticizing fragmentation. De Certeau’s work on everyday life takes as its point of departure the premise that everyday actions are a tactical bricolage of “making due” that always works against traditional notions of power: “One deploys his forces, one does not take chances with feints. Power is bound by its very visibility. In contrast, trickery is possible for the weak” (37). De Certeau’s approach to everyday life is thus broadly in sympathy with local criticism’s interest in the positive political effect of occupying a critical “position” in a certain way. But de Certeau also echoes Derrida in treating such locations as constantly opening out into other forms of space. As a result, de Certeau uses the Derridian model of multiple interpretive spaces to address the questions of interpretive politics that give local criticism its impetus.

De Certeau’s liberatory criticism depends on complicating the social space upon which traditional images of social power and authority depend. When Foucault argued that modern society develops “a certain policy of the body, a certain way of rendering the group of men docile and useful” (Discipline 305) by locating individuals in isolated spaces where they could be observed and disciplined, he associated within contemporary thought strict spatial organization and the operation of power. De Certeau agrees that power operates by virtue of certain “proper places” that it defines, but he also explores social spaces that fall outside of proper disciplinary arrangement. Distinguishing the hegemonic “strategy” from the “tactics” of the weak, de Certeau writes, “strategies are actions which, thanks to the establishment of a place of power (the property of a proper), elaborate theoretical places (systems and totalizing discourses) capable of articulating an ensemble of physical places in which forces are distributed. They combine these three types of places and seek to master each by means of the others” (38). De Certeau contrasts fixed places to the practice of operating within space, a practice that by its nature undermines stability and the power that it supports. De Certeau’s focus is urban geography, where individuals use city spaces “tactically”: “the street geometrically defined by urban planning is transformed into a space by walkers” (117). Such spatial practices are inherently temporal. De Certeau is worth quoting at some length:

At the outset, I shall make a distinction between space (espace) and place (lieu) that delimits a field. A place (lieu) is the order (of whatever kind) in accord with which elements are distributed in relationships of coexistence. It thus excludes the possibility of two things being in the same location (place). The law of the “proper” rules in the place: the elements taken into consideration are beside one another, each situated in its own “proper” and distinct location, a location it defines. A place is thus an instantaneous configuration of positions. It implies an indication of stability.

 

A space exists when one takes into consideration vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables. Thus space is composed of intersections of mobile elements. It is in a sense articulated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it. Space occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize it, and make it function in a polyvalent unity of conflictual programs or contractual proximities…. In contradistinction to the place, it has thus none of the univocity or stability of a “proper.”

 

In short, space is a practiced place. (117)

De Certeau distinguishes between a defined place (lieu) and a more general and abstract space produced by “proper” places’ confrontation of time. De Certeau imagines that one’s everyday actions cut across places, introducing a temporality and bringing many spaces into contact. This idea of spatial practice at first seems to echo the later writings of Foucault, whose emphasis on individual practices has seemed to many critics to be a productive alternative to the image of panoptical power in works like Discipline and Punish.⁷ But rather than treating practice as an alternative to disciplinary spaces, de Certeau follows Derrida and explores how practice creates many spaces.⁸ Specifically, de Certeau concludes rather surprisingly that undermining place reveals a more abstract space. This is, of course, just the opposite of what we would expect, since we usually think that it is the “concrete” that has the potential to undermine discourse and representation. Like Derrida, de Certeau refuses to posit some fundamental concrete “thing” that troubles concepts or abstract spaces. But he also refuses to relativize all spaces, or to suggest that we simply move tactically between an unending string of specific places. Instead, according to de Certeau, we get a glimpse of an abstract space that “occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it.” De Certeau is suggesting that the shifts between spaces are freeing precisely because they allow us to recognize a broader notion of space that overarches individual places. Against calls for localization, de Certeau suggests that attention to “sites” is valuable only because of the crossing of boundaries that they necessitate, crossings that allow us to glimpse a more abstract notion of space.

The abstract space that de Certeau describes draws our attention to the reader’s active involvement in the construction of objects of knowledge–just as in Derrida’s writing the textual site points back to the critical location which “maintains” it. De Certeau makes clear that this abstract space cannot be inhabited in any permanent way; rather, the importance of this abstract space is that it makes possible a certain kind of action, a practice. When we recognize a space that overarches individual places, we grasp our ability to act in ways not predetermined by those places and the power relations that they support. One form of spatial practice is narrative: “every day, [stories] traverse and organize places; they select and link them together; they make sentences and itineraries out of them. They are spatial trajectories” (115). For de Certeau, narrative is at work within the movement between “proper places” of any sort–including the discursive topoi that legitimate scientific knowledge. De Certeau writes, “the folktale provides scientific discourse with a model, and not merely with textual objects to be dealt with. It no longer has the status of a document that does not know what it says, cited (summoned and quoted) before and by the analysis that knows it. On the contrary, it is a know-how-to-say exactly adjusted to its object” (78). Narrative in this sense is always the practice of discourse, a practice that sets into play the movement between proper places. When we understand the abstract space that de Certeau suggests, we recognize our own role within the construction of objects of knowledge. And once we recognize this role and the larger space upon which it depends, de Certeau suggests, we can begin to formulate new trajectories for critical analysis. Thus, quite against local criticism’s suspicions of theory, de Certeau argues that only through a kind of epiphany-like glimpse into abstract space can critics move beyond the political locations from which they initially approach their object of study. If de Certeau is right, then critics’ willingness to participate in the dialectic of location and textual “site” is precisely what allows interpretation to spin off into new directions. Indeed, we will recall Derrida’s insistence in “Ousia and Gramme” that the point always gestures towards the whole movement of the line. The nexus between critical location and textual site thus resembles the confused space of the city, where many paths overlap and new trajectories constantly appear.

De Certeau provides a way of recognizing the practical implications of the spatial multiplicity that Derrida describes. Both thinkers offer a radical alternative to the view that a critical “location” should be defined, stable, and distinct. By turning to a “non-linear” model of space based on the transformation of interpretive site into critical location, these theories develop a richer model of interpretation that, more importantly, emphasizes the moment when critics glimpse a new way to follow out the transformation of interpretive spaces and interpret texts differently. In contrast to the more concrete and perhaps more accessible spatial models that we see in de Certeau and in Laclau and Mouffe, I have argued that Derrida offers us something unique and essential by linking these spaces to the analysis of textual slippages. Derrida points toward a genuinely post-deconstructive method of textual analysis–one that does not simply, begrudgingly accept traditional metanarratives, but instead balances critical location and textual analysis through a dynamic, non-linear site of analysis.

Notes

1. A high point of this debate was the winter 1985 issue of Diacritics (15.4) devoted to “Marx after Derrida.” For a recent reevaluation of the debate over the politics of deconstruction, see Paul Jay, “Bridging the Gap.”

2. On the importance of such spatial language, see Kathleen M. Kirby, “Thinking through the Boundary.”

3. This reading of Derrida is often predicated on his well-known comment that “there is nothing outside of the text.” For a reconsideration of the idea of exteriority in this comment, see Jeffrey T. Nealon, Double Reading (57).

4. There are times, however, when Laclau and Mouffe actually sound a great deal like Derrida in discussing the production of this space. In “Politics and the Limits of Modernity,” Laclau turns to the notion of a “horizon” in contrast to the metanarrative “foundation” problematized by postmodernist discourse. Although this essay treats the concept in far less detail, we might see similarities between the gramme and this horizon as a site of analysis temporarily produced by reference to a limit that shapes it.

5. Indeed, at one point in Specters, Derrida mentions “Ousia and Gramme” as an essay that examines the temporality of “spectralizing” and the creation of the “‘non-sensuous’ thing” (155).

6. See, for example, John McGowan’s Habermassian critique of the doctrine of “negative freedom” in poststructural thought in Postmodernism and Its Critics.

7. In The Use of Pleasure, for example, Foucault describes how individuals participate in discursive structures to “transform themselves, to change themselves in their singular being, and to make their life into an oeuvre that carries certain aesthetic values and meets certain stylistic criteria” (10-11). This image of individuals participating within the construction of being has offered many critics an alternative to Foucault’s earlier theory of power’s “inscription” of individual bodies.

8. Actually, one might argue that the same is true of Foucault’s later work. Gilles Deleuze argues that Foucault’s idea of space undergoes a fundamental change: “For a long time Foucault thought of the outside as being an ultimate spatiality that was deeper than time; but in his late works he offers the possibility once more of putting time on the outside as being time, conditioned by the fold” (108). Deleuze’s theory of the “folding” of space in Foucault’s last work echoes the spatial multiplicity that I have described in Derrida.

Works Cited

• Bordo, Susan. “Feminism, Postmodernism, and Gender-Skepticism.” Nicholson 133-56.
• de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984.
• de Lauretis, Teresa. “Feminist Studies/Critical Studies: Issues, Terms, and Contexts.” Feminist Studies/Critical Studies. Ed. Teresa de Lauretis. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986. 1-19.
• Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. Trans. Sean Hand. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988.
• Derrida, Jacques. Edmund Husserl’s “Origin of Geometry”: An Introduction. Trans. John P. Leavey. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1978.
• —. La Dissémination. Paris: Seuil, 1972.
• —. Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981.
• —. “Force and Signification.” Writing and Difference. 3-30.
• —. “Force et Signification.” L’ecriture et la différance. Paris: Seuil, 1967. 9-49.
• —. “Freud and the Scene of Writing.” Writing and Difference. 196-231.
• —. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976.
• —. “Ousia and Gramme: A Note on a Note from Being and Time.” Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982. 29-67.
• —. Positions. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago, 1981.
• —. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994.
• —. Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs. Trans. David B. Allison. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1973.
• —. Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles. Trans. Barbara Harlow. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1979.
• —. “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy.” Margins of Philosophy. 207-71.
• —. Writing and Difference. Trans. Allen Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978.
• Eagelton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983.
• Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York; Vintage, 1979.
• —. The Use of Pleasure: Volume 2 of the History of Sexuality. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1990.
• Fraser, Nancy and Linda J. Nicholson. “Social Criticism without Philosophy: An Encounter between Feminism and Postmodernism.” Nicholson 19-38.
• Gasché, Rodolphe. The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1986.
• Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.
• Jay, Paul. “Bridging the Gap: The Position of Politics in Deconstruction.” Cultural Critique 22 (1992): 47-74.
• Johnson, Barbara. The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990.
• Kirby, Kathleen M. “Thinking through the Boundary: The Politics of Location, Subjects, and Space.” Boundary 2 20 (1993): 173-89.
• Laclau, Ernesto. “Politics and the Limits of Modernity.” Universal Abandon? The Politics of Postmodernism. Ed. Andrew Ross. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988. 63-82.
• — and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso, 1985.
• Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.
• Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1985.
• McGowan, John. Postmodernism and Its Critics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1991.
• Nealon, Jeffrey T. Double Reading: Postmodernism after Deconstruction. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1993.
• Nicholson, Linda J., ed. Feminism/Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, 1984.
• Probyn, Elspeth. “Travels in the Postmodern: Making Sense of the Local.” Nicholson 176-89.
• Ryan, Michael. Marxism and Deconstruction: A Critical Articulation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982.
• Said, Edward W. The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983.
• Schatzki, Theodore R. “Theory at Bay: Foucault, Lyotard, and Politics of the Local.” Postmodern Contentions: Epochs, Politics, Space. Eds. John Paul Jones III, Wolfgang Natter, Theodore R. Schatzki. New York: Guilford Press, 1993. 39-64.
• Ulmer, Gregory. Applied Grammatology: Post(e)-Pedagogy from Jacques Derrida to Joseph Beuys. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985.
• —. “The Object of Post-Criticism.” The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Ed. Hal Foster. Post-Townsend: Bay Press, 1983. 83-110.
• Weedon, Chris. Feminist Practice & Poststructuralist Theory. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987.

Paul Youngquist

Department of English

Penn State University
pby1@psu.edu

When I heard the crash on the hiway
I knew what it was from the start
I went down to the scene of destruction
And a picture was stamped on my heart.

 

I didn’t hear nobody pray, dear brother,
I didn’t hear nobody pray;
I heard the crash on the hiway
But I didn’t hear nobody pray.

 

–Roy Acuff

I

Crash!
One catastrophic instant can change your life forever.

J. G. Ballard’s Crash reveals the destiny of the human body in a world of automotive disaster: a new crash-body, ungodly offspring of cars and signs. Set in the concrete landscape of late industrial culture, the novel views the world through a wide-angle lens that deprives it of depth, rendering it an interminable surface. Ballard’s prose is that of the camera–flat, mechanical, omni-detailed, “hyperreal”–and shows that to write in a technological culture is to represent its technologies of perception. The hyper-reality of Ballard’s style is the representational effect of photography, the after-image in another medium of a pervasive perception technology. That’s why Vaughan, the sinister hero of Crash, is not a writer but a camera-monkey; the writer in the narrative, auspiciously named Ballard, takes up a position subordinate to the photographer, who becomes the subject of writing, the condition of narration: “Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash” (1). From its first sentence to its last, Crash pursues the image of Vaughan, its narrative alpha and omega. And that image is photographic, both product and producer of other images. Vaughan is defined by the technologies of photography that condition his perception, as in the following moment of recognition:

The tall man with the camera sauntered across the roof. I looked through the rear window of his car. The passenger seat was loaded with photographic equipment–cameras, a tripod, a carton packed with flashbulbs. A cine-camera was fastened to a dashboard clamp.

 

He walked back to his car, camera held like a weapon by its pistol grip. As he reached the balcony his face was lit by the headlamps of the police car. I realized that I had seen his pock-marked face many times before, projected from a dozen forgotten magazine profiles–this was Vaughan, Dr Robert Vaughan. (63)

Handsome is as handsome does; technologies of photography become the condition of all that Vaughan does and is. Identity is an effect of the photographic image, which is always already a technological representation, capable of being reproduced and disseminated. Photography is thus the a priori of (re)cognition in the technological culture of Crash. Ballard’s prose double-exposes this cultural function. With the disinterestedness of a camera, it reveals the operation of the lens in the language of the hyperreal. Stylistically and analytically, Ballard ‘s book is photo-Kantian.

And its world becomes a surface. One of the effects of the lens upon representation is to flatten it out, reconfiguring the image in a space of two dimensions, a surface without depth. Contiguity, mark of the metonym, regulates relations in such a space. As a result things lose substance. Boundaries lapse and features merge. Where difference once distinguished, contiguity now associates, deferring the substantive identity of things. Where a boundary once ruled, as between humanity and machine, a blur now occurs, creating unprecedented relations and new possibilities. Consider the effects of Vaughan’s camera upon the all too human act of love:

Vaughan stood at my shoulder, like an instructor ready to help a promising pupil. As I stared down at the photograph of myself at Renata’s breast, Vaughan leaned across me, his real attention elsewhere. With a broken thumbnail, its rim caked with engine oil, he pointed to the chromium window-sill and its junction with the overstretched strap of the young woman’s brassiere. By some freak of photography these two formed a sling of metal and nylon from which the distorted nipple seemed to extrude itself into my mouth. (102)

Photography breeds freaks by reconfiguring things. Boundaries that would assert substantive differences, as between metal and flesh, fall to new associations through the intervention of the lens. Vaughan’s camera registers a world where a breast is as much an automotive as a female accessory, where sexuality plays upon a surface that embraces the material and the organic. This surface extends as far as the images it reproduces: to the white border of the photograph proper but also to the ends of perception of a lens set on infinity. Representationally speaking, it is both terminal and interminable.

What most interests Ballard is the life of the human body on this surface. For a body without depth ceases to be an organism in the traditional sense. If to have a body means to inhabit a suit of flesh, then organic substance sets the terms for life, its aims and its ends. But in Ballard’s world, the technological world of late industrial culture, semiotics subsumes substance. The vital, active organism gives way to the conceptual, abstract image. The body becomes conceptualized, and life turns semiotic. So it is for Elizabeth Taylor, “real life” film actress, appearing in Vaughan’s apartment and on the novel’s opening page in image only:

The walls of his apartment near the film studios at Shepperton were covered with the photographs he had taken through his zoom lens each morning as she left her hotel in London, from the pedestrian bridges above the westbound motorways, and from the roof of the multi-storey car-park at the studios. The magnified details of her knees and hands, of the inner surface of her thighs and the left apex of her mouth, I uneasily prepared for Vaughan on the copying machine in my office, handing him the packages of prints as if they were the installments of a death warrant. At his apartment I watched him matching the details of her body with the photographs of grotesque wounds in a textbook of plastic surgery. (7-8)

The body, in this instance the body of Elizabeth Taylor, is no longer an organic entity. Technologies of photographic representation (re)produce images that usurp its priority and reconfigure its integrity. The resulting body conceptual can be interminably manipulated: enlarged, reduced, bisected, rearranged, transcoded, transported, and most importantly, transposed. Once conceptualized, the body is transposable to any homologous geometry. Elizabeth Taylor’s conceptually assimilates the textbook wounds of other anonymous bodies. And because proliferation of conceptual equivalence can distribute such a body over the whole extent of the world as surface, life itself, once an organic matter, becomes a semiotic function.

In the context of late industrial culture, the old organic model of the body is vestigial of an earlier age, a pastoral moment in cultural history when nature at its most benign could serve as a trope for life at its most general. All that has changed. The body has become a conceptual phenomenon (an appropriately peculiar designation). The nearness of the flesh may persuade us daily to live in the faith that we inhabit a vital organism. But in Ballard’s novel such faith proves to be, culturally speaking, habitual nostalgia. His characters no longer animate an organic body. Rather a conceptual body animates them. The flesh has become its after-image and lives within the semiotic horizon of the world as surface. Such a body in such a world has no substance, no interior opposable to an exterior. As with graphic images generally, it is all surface–even to its vital depths, a point made strikingly by the cover of The Atrocity Exhibition, Ballard’s apocalyptic fractal-fiction recently reissued by RE/SEARCH (Figure 1). The body conceptual stands revealed in its full glory as an image that collapses vital depths of substance onto a surface both self-contained and culturally continuous. An image of neither the inside nor the outside of a body neither living nor dead, it reconfigures those old organic oppositions to represent the new form of life characteristic of late industrial culture. As a cultural historian of the body, Ballard documents this sublation of the organism.

II

Conceptual bodies inhabit the world as surface less as human individuals than abstract integers. Technologies invented to enhance life have reinvented it, transforming the human into a cipher in a technological horizon. Viewing the world from the veranda of his apartment, Ballard’s hero Ballard remarks in Crash that “the human inhabitants of this technological landscape no longer provided its sharpest pointers, its keys to the borderzones of identity” (49). That landscape, so obviously technological, bears no essential relation to the human as either end or origin. As an end, the human has ended, and in its place has arisen technology itself, or more specifically the technologies that in fact provide the keys to identity in this landscape. For if the condition of (re)cognition in late industrial culture is the photograph, the condition of agency is the automobile. Crash plots the remarkable logic of an unremarkable observation: that the car sets the terms for life as we know it. Life has ceased to be an exclusively organic phenomenon, and the automobile, as “a total metaphor for man’s life in today’s society” (Introduction 6), plays a decisive role in its transformation.

The car materializes the body conceptual. The photographic image may disseminate that body, but the automobile produces it. A body in a car becomes the prosthesis of a speed machine. As organism, it dies into the life of motor oil and steel, losing human substance and relating conceptually to an entity neither animate nor sentient in the traditional sense. And yet life and even passion persist. Witness Ballard’s increasing sense of connection with the car he drives, superseding even passion for his young lover:

The aggressive stylization of this mass-produced cockpit, the exaggerated mouldings of the instrument binnacles emphasized my growing sense of a new junction between my own body and the automobile, closer than my feelings for Renata’s broad hips and strong legs stowed out of sight beneath her red plastic raincoat. I leaned forward, feeling the rim of the steering wheel against the scars on my chest, pressing my knees against the ignition switch and handbrake. (55)

Built for the average buyer, the interior of the car (mass) produces a conceptual body assimilable to the material geometry of instrument panel and steering wheel. The condition of such a body’s agency becomes the automobile itself. Life in late industrial culture turns auto-telic.

The impact of the automobile upon the organic body is thus to transform it. Literally. The body becomes a surface in relation to the car’s stylized cockpit, a surface which, like that of the photographic image, lacks opposable interior and exterior. However counterintuitive it may seem, the body in vehiculo loses its organic substantiality. Consider the logistics of automobility. You place your body inside a car. The exterior of your organic substance confronts the interior of your vehicle. But since that interior is outside you, it turns you, so to speak, inside out. In the cockpit of a car your body loses its organic interiority, becoming part of a conceptual surface that assimilates it–materially. The interior of a car is more like a fold in flexible material than an inner space with an outer edge. Once inside, the body unfolds, becoming a surface without vital depth. The boundary between interior and exterior disappears as body and machine unite conceptually and materially on this surface. It is in this sense that Ballard can describe an automobile with the tender phrase “my own metal body” (113). The lesson of his violent confrontation with a car’s interior is that his body shares its life, not as organic substance but as conceptual surface:

As I looked down at myself I realized that the precise make and model-year of my car could have been reconstructed by an automobile engineer from the pattern of my wounds. The layout of the instrument panel, like the profile of the steering wheel bruised into my chest, was inset on my knees and shinbones. (28)

Wounds here are not organic traumas but abstract signs that refer body and automobile to a surface that assimilates them both, auto-referentially. The car, in its brute materiality, transforms the body from organic substance to semiotic function.

The passage above continues suggestively: “The impact of the second collision between my body and the interior compartment of the car was defined in these wounds, like the contours of a woman’s body remembered in the responding pressure of one’s own skin for a few hours after a sexual act.” The automobile resexualizes as it reconfigures the body. The result is a “new sexuality born of a perverse technology,” one liberated from both eros and desire. For the sexuality of the body conceptual is less libidinal than semiotic. With the end of the substantive organism comes the release of its semiotic function onto a surface that assimilates body and machine. Libido turns semio-erotic on such a surface, the occurrence of not physical urge but conceptual equivalence. Because such equivalence is abstract it as easily embraces an automobile as a lover. Hence the place of the car in the sexuality of late industrial culture. It is less as erotic object than semio-erotic signifier that it stimulates the body conceptual. Witness the encounter between Ballard and Helen Remington, wife of the man killed in a crash with his car:

The volumes of Helen’s thighs pressing against my hips, her left fist buried in my shoulder, her mouth grasping at my own, the shape and moisture of her anus as I stroked it with my ring finger, were each overlaid by the inventories of a benevolent technology–the moulded binnacle of the instrument dials, the jutting carapace of the steering column shroud, the extravagant pistol grip of the handbrake. I felt the warm vinyl of the seat beside me, and then stroked the damp aisle of Helen’s perineum. Her hand pressed against my right testicle. The plastic laminates around me, the colour of washed anthracite, were the same tones as her pubic hairs parted at the vestibule of her vulva. The passenger compartment enclosed us like a machine generating from our sexual act an homunculus of blood, semen and engine coolant. (80-81)

The automobile is more a sexual signifier than object, condition of conceptual equivalence between body and technology that breeds a new form of life.

The auto-eroticism of Crash is thus thoroughly disembodied. Ballard documents the rise of “a new sexuality divorced from any possible physical expression” (35), a disembodied eroticism that lacks passion even as it multiplies sexual possibilities. Sexual acts themselves–and Crash is full of them: genital, oral, anal, manual, material–confirm no intimacy, communicate no love, proliferate pleasures that are purely formal. Liberated from the organic body, they become “conceptualized acts abstracted from all feeling” (129). The trans-physical sexuality that Ballard describes in such dispassionate detail recapitulates what he elsewhere calls the “death of affect” characteristic of late industrial culture. Disembodied, dissociated from affect, sexuality plays semiotically upon the world as surface, celebrating the conceptual equivalence of body and machine. Or so Ballard concludes, watching his wife Catherine and his friend Vaughan at it in the back seat:

This act was a ritual devoid of ordinary sexuality, a stylized encounter between two bodies which recapitulated their sense of motion and collision. Vaughan’s postures, the way in which he held his arms as he moved my wife across the seat, lifting her left knee so that his body was in the fork between her thighs, reminded me of the driver of a complex vehicle, a gymnastic ballet celebrating a new technology. His hands explored the back of her thighs in a slow rhythm, holding her buttocks and lifting her exposed pubis towards his scarred mouth without touching it. He was arranging her body in a series of positions, carefully searching the codes of her limbs and musculature. Catherine seemed still only half aware of Vaughan, holding his penis in her left hand and sliding her fingers towards his anus as if performing an act divorced from all feeling. (161)

Such is the new sexuality that Crashdocuments: a formal reenactment of conceptual equivalencies, a disembodied ritual without affect, a semiotics without meaning.

III

Without meaning? Isn’t it the function of signs, even sexual ones, to signify? Not in the world as surface. The semio-eroticism of its new sexuality serves the purpose not of representation but of dissemination. It distributes conceptual equivalence over the whole semiotic horizon of late industrial culture. Sexuality becomes a function of a trans-cultural system of signification and not vice versa; desire is no longer a biotic urge impelling an organism that gets represented in private fantasies, but a systemic function structuring an equivalence that gets disseminated in public reenactments. In The Atrocity Exhibition Ballard makes the canny suggestion that “Freud’s classic distinction between the manifest and latent content of the inner world of the psyche now has to be applied to the outer world of reality” (98-99). That “outer world” has acquired the semiotic function Freud ascribed to the Unconscious. It disseminates sexuality over the whole of the world as surface.

Elsewhere Ballard describes the function of the semiotic system that disseminates this new sexuality:

Just as the sleeping mind extemporizes a narrative form of the random memories veering through the cortical night, so our waking imaginations are stitching together a set of narratives to give meaning to the random events that swerve through our conscious lives. A roadside billboard advertising something or other, to TV programmes or news magazines or the radio or in-flight movies, or what have you. (Mississippi Review 31)

The semiotic system that disseminates sexuality is not psychological but socio-material. It includes billboards, TV shows, magazines, movies. It goes by the familiar name of “the media” and stitches together a set of narratives that structure the otherwise random life of late industrial culture. But the “meaning” this semiotic system (re)produces is not “meaningful” in the traditional sense, since it is always a reenactment of a purely conceptual equivalence: between her face and that of the movie star, between my body and that of the automobile, between our sexual postures and those of the porn magazines. It is in this sense that “sex,” as Ballard describes it, “has become a sort of communal activity” (Mississippi Review 32): it is the behavioral after-image of a semiotic system that disseminates sexuality without representing its “meaning.”

Photography is the means of its dissemination and the automobile the place of its reenactment. Car and photograph, the cultural a priori of this new sexuality, together condition the operation of this semiotic system. Without Vaughan’s photographs the sexuality of the body conceptual would be inert, for they advance the logic of equivalence latent in the limbs of the human organism:

His photographs of sexual acts, of sections of automobile radiator grilles and instrument panels, conjunctions between elbow and chromium window sill, vulva and instrument binnacle, summed up the possibilities of a new logic created by these multiplying artifacts, the codes of a new marriage of sensation and possibility. (106)

These codes are not biological but conceptual, the function of a semiotic system that disseminates sex as a set of gestures, postures, behaviors, positions. The media lifts sexuality out of the body and onto a surface determined by a new mimetic logic. Specific sexual acts become reenactments of the images that pervade the semiotic horizon, which is why the car plays so central a role in this sexual mimesis. It is the vehicle of our dreams, and the site of our communal equivalence.

Vaughan imitates in his sexual behavior the imagery that pervades the world as surface and by doing so assimilates himself conceptually to the only transcendental available to such a world: the semiotic system itself. The automobile is simply the site of a conceptualized salvation: imitatio vehiculi. Hence Vaughan’s curious, compulsive need to imitate the imagery of vehicular homicide. It confirms the possibility of a sexuality wholly liberated from the life of the organism, so completely a semiotic function that it includes even postures of violent death. So observes Ballard observing Vaughan:

Often I watched him lingering over the photographs of crash fatalities, gazing at their burnt faces with a terrifying concern, as he calculated the most elegant parameters of their injuries, the junctions of their wounded bodies with the fractured windshield and instrument assemblies. He would mimic these injuries in his own driving postures, turning the same dispassionate eyes on the young women he picked up near the airport. Using their bodies, he recapitulated the deformed anatomies of vehicle crash victims, gently bending the arms of these girls against their shoulders, pressing their knees against his own chest, always curious to see their reactions. (145)

Photograph, automobile, imitation: such are the means to a semiotic transcendence of the life–and the death–of the organic body. Vaughan is the weird messiah of this new transcendence.

And the crash is his crucifixion. If the body conceptual is produced and disseminated by means of a semiotics that has the camera and the car as its material conditions, the automobile accident reveals the way that system works. It is the technological equivalent of apocalypse. As its title suggests, Crash is not primarily about technology or even sex; it is about catastrophe, a sudden and violent shock to the system that interrupts and illuminates its function. Metal crumples, flesh tears, fluids squirt, signs multiply: CRASH. The word is onomatopoeic of disaster. A car crash enacts the banal apocalypse of the body conceptual, revealing its status as a semiotic and not organic phenomenon. After his auto wreck, Ballard awakens to a new perception of his body:

The week after the accident had been a maze of pain and insane fantasies. After the commonplaces of everyday life, with their muffled dramas, all my organic expertise for dealing with physical injury had long been blunted or forgotten. The crash was the only real experience I had been through for years. For the first time I was in physical confrontation with my own body, an inexhaustible encyclopedia of pains and discharges. (39)

Ballard’s crash jolts him out of the organic world and into the conceptual. His body ceases to be a vital organism and becomes, in its most physical experience, a conceptual lexicon, an inexhaustible encyclopedia of pains. Trauma to the body reveals the whole system that produces it. For it is only when something breaks–a tool, a car, a body–that its function is fully revealed. Heidegger makes just this observation in regard to the broken tool, which illuminates a whole system of relations that remains otherwise unrecognized: “for the circumspection that comes up against the damaging of the tool,… the context of equipment is lit up, not as something never seen before, but as a totality constantly sighted beforehand in circumspection. With this totality, however, the world announces itself” (105). For Heidegger as for Ballard, this world is conceptual, since reference, the relation of one sign to another, serves as an “ontological foundation… constitutive of worldhood in general” (114). Is it mere coincidence Heidegger’s example of the sign constitutive of such a world is an automobile’s blinker? A failure to signal could mean catastrophe.

The broken tool illuminates a totality of relations; the crashed car lights up a system of reference. Both reveal a world less substantial than semiotic, one in which the body is a systems function. Such at least is Ballard’s post-traumatic conception of the crash-body. His accident reveals his body’s semiotic status in a system as wide as the world as surface. Ballard’s meta-physical lust for Catherine shows how far that system extends the body conceptual:

Every aspect of Catherine at this time seemed a model of something else, endlessly extending the possibilities of her body and personality. As she stepped naked across the floor of the bathroom, pushing past me with a look of nervous distraction; as she masturbated in the bed beside me in the mornings, thighs splayed symmetrically, fingers groveling at her pubis as if rolling to death some small venereal snot; as she sprayed deodorant into her armpits, those tender fossas like mysterious universes; as she walked with me to my car, fingers playing amiably across my left shoulder–all these acts and emotions were ciphers searching for their meaning among the hard, chromium furniture of our minds. A car-crash in which she would die was the one event which would release the codes waiting within her. (180)

Catherine’s every move models in its geometry some other aspect of the system, disseminating the body conceptual throughout the world as surface. The shock to this system that the crash inflicts reveals the worldhood of that surface even as it assimilates, in one final, fatal catastrophe, the human organism to it. This transfiguration is as close to salvation as late industrial culture has come, and Vaughan is its messiah. Its immanence is what makes him so angelic and so appalling, an “ugly golden creature, made beautiful by its scars and wounds” (201). He is the alien messenger of some new semio-gnosis, and his crash-body is its risen Christ.

IV

Vaughan bears comparison to the old messiah. For nearly two millennia, Western culture wound a web of signs around the body of Christ crucified. It is clearly an overstatement, but one worth pondering, to say that this brutalized, broken body set the terms for representation in the culture of the Christian West. Hanging limp from a wooden cross, the body of God was the locus Christus of signification. Alpha and Omega, all signs began and ended there. But how different the effect of this image of somatic catastrophe than that of Ballard’s crash-body. If the latter reveals, in its trauma, its status as a semiotic function, the crucified body of Christ asserts instead its own empty substance. Vaughan’s is a semiotic body where Christ’s is organic. The latter grounds representation in a dead substance that solicits transcendence. Representing the dead substance of the organic body, Christ crucified transcendentalizes representation. It is after all God’s body that hangs from the cross. The world that announces itself with the broken body of God is not a semiotic but a sacred totality. The catastrophe of crucifixion reveals only one meaningful relationship, that between death and Life, us and Him. Through the representation of the body crucified, then, catastrophe effects transcendence.

The myriad images of the crucifixion that still permeate Western culture disseminate this effect. A brief look at one of the most famous should illustrate the point. The Isenheimer Altar, painted by the mysterious master Matthias Grünewald sometime between 1512 and 1516, presents an image of Christ crucified that has become renowned for its horror. Never has the body of Christ appeared so gruesome (Figure 2). As if suspended between the ground below and an unfathomable abyss above, it hangs from a cross, flanked by Johns (the Baptist and the Beloved) and Marys (the Mother and the Magdalen), awaiting a proper burial. Christ’s body is unnervingly inert, unambiguously dead. And not merely dead–but rotting. Fingers splayed with rigor mortis, toes dripping congealed blood, it bears the viscid signs of impossible suffering (Figure 3). The skin is pierced in a thousand places by thorns that gouged and broke. The wounds have begun to fester, peppering the entire torso with putrid spots. The flesh beneath is cold and sallow, as if hung on a hook to drain. In the hollow just below the ribs on the left gapes an oozing laceration–a new orifice, voluble with blood. Above it the head of Christ drops earthward in decay. Impaled, not crowned, with thorns, it bows to gravity, a dead weight. The mouth that spoke in cure and parable now grimaces in silence. Its teeth and tongue frame an inner dark; its lips are thick and blue. Grünewald’s body of Christ crucified succumbs to putrefaction. It signifies its own inertia: the materiality of a dead and meaningless letter. The pale moon that shines above illuminates only a palpable absence. Christ’s body in its silence cries to heaven for restitution.

Hence the cultural function of its representation: to ground transcendence in bodily trauma. A dead and rotting organism needs a meaning that will heal it. Such is the problem that bodily suffering presents; it inspires an absolute solution. As Nietzsche said, not suffering but meaningless suffering is the curse that plagues humanity. The body crucified offers up a meaning that mitigates the curse. It grounds a transcendence that suffuses and redeems its emptiness. In this regard it makes perfect sense that the Isenheimer Altar stood originally in a church that was also a hospital, a place of solace for those suffering the boil-plague of St. Anthony’s fire. Itself a medicament, Grünewald’s painting served to treat the suffering it depicted. As pilgrims identified their pains with those appearing in the dead flesh of Christ’s body, they awakened to the prospect of divine restitution. Grünewald’s painting is a subjectivity-machine, remaking sufferers into subjects of transcendence. The Isenheimer Altar (re)produces a subjectivity conducive to a higher meaning for human suffering, which it then legitimates by means of a narrative of salvation.

The painting unfolds a story that adds depth to its dismal surface–literally unfolds, as its panels open to reveal this salubrious meaning (Figure 4). Erupting with movement, light, and color, it confronts the sufferer with a narrative that opens from within the empty body of Christ crucified to subsume it in a higher presence. At the center of the narrative is that body, appearing palpably in three different forms: newborn, cadaver, and risen Christ. It instantly becomes clear that the rotting flesh of Christ crucified amounts only to a static moment in a larger movement that would explain it. Inside Grünewald’s crucifixion hides a metanarrative of salvation. That this metanarrative includes the sumptuous episodes of the Annunciation, Birth, and Resurrection of Christ shows it to be underwritten by the Word of God. But the role of Christ’s body in substantiating this Story of stories is what is remarkable here. Its three incarnations center in its substance a logos of transcendence. If for Ballard the body has become a semiotic function, here it makes semiotics possible. The body crucified grounds the circulation of signs in this metanarrative of salvation. Its putrefying flesh is revealed to be the condition of a semiotics that moves dialectically from birth to resurrection. What at first appeared a dead cadaver signifies instead the antithesis of Christ’s thetic birth, the reversal of a synthetic body-logic that reaches fulfillment in the resurrection. It doesn’t take a Hegel to see that these three bodies substantiate a dialectical logos that subsumes organic suffering. Even their placement–the dead body beneath the newborn, the risen body above both–enacts the logos of the body crucified. This body is not a function of signs but their foundation.

And the operation of its logic reproduces a subject of transcendence. As Grünewald’s painting unfolds, it opens up a higher perspective–again, quite literally. Part of the confusion involved in contemplating this particular crucifixion comes with the multiple perspectives that swirl around it. Christ on the cross appears directly opposite and lit from above while the other figures are lit from the front and appear from various perspectives: John the Baptist from the side, Mary Magdalen from on high, etc. This multiplication of perspectives deprives any one of them absolute authority. Death disrupts the subject as it rots the body. With the opening of the triptych, however, two alternatives emerge. The tableau of Mother Mary all but lacks perspective, a surface in high medieval style ordered by the faint but imperious image at the upper left of God. All is coherent here, but in a condition of innocence prior to the crucifixion. It is in the dialectical movement to the image of the risen Christ that a new perspective emerges. Its all but unbearable brightness of being brings to the space of the final tableau an unprecedented depth, which the foreshortened postures of the fallen guards beneath only exaggerate. This is a space wholly structured by the subject of transcendence. Here appears in all its glory the ultimate solution to the problem of meaningless suffering: a higher and undying perspective from which to view the body crucified. The Isenheimer Altar reproduces in its viewers this subject of transcendence, to the healthful end of healing bodily miseries with a much higher meaning.

And what of bodily delight? The subject of transcendence views sexuality from on high, radically devaluing its substantial pleasures. The logic of the body crucified subsumes them in its upward movement, identifying human sexuality with death and promoting a higher, post-sexual life. Archetypal unwed mother, Mary holds in her arms the tender body of the infant Christ, the fully developed image of which lies dead and decaying in the tableau immediately beneath her. The organic body fulfills its possibilities only by dying. Brief, then, and lethal are the joys of bodily love. Christ’s livid cadaver attests to it loudly, demonstrating that a sexuality of the body dies with the body. Only when delight originates not in the body but in the life above does it lead to something better than a corpse. The Isenheimer Altar conveys this sublimation of organic sexuality by locating high above Christ’s limp loincloth a glowing image of God the father, holding in his radiant hands a Sceptre and a Globe. Good sex is God sex. When the life of the body originates above, it transcends the dying animal. In the world of Grünewald’s masterpiece, as in the culture of the Christian West, an organic sexuality breeds an ontology of death. The subject of transcendence that the painting reproduces, however, subsumes it in the post-sexual perspective of a risen life.

V

According to Ballard, all has changed. If the trauma of the body crucified lights up this transcendence, that of the body conceptual reveals its collapse into signs. A post-sexual perspective is not possible in a world where the body has been reborn as a semiotic function. Sexuality becomes a matter no longer of life and death but of dissemination. Sown over the whole field of culture, it reproduces signs of desire. And because its origins are not organic but semiotic, this sexuality cannot die; it lives persistently as signs. Ballard’s crash-body reveals a new alternative to the old transcendence, an eschatological semiotics coextensive with culture. Where once the rotting body of the crucifixion contained the play of signs, now the ruptured body of a crash multiplies it. Vaughan, the weird messiah of this perpetual resurrection, inhabits a strange new cultural space beyond both the opposition of life and death and the organic body that substantiates it. From his perspective, human life has outlived these distinctions, as Ballard observes through his eyes: “I looked out at the drivers of the cars alongside us, visualizing their lives in the terms Vaughan had defined for them. For Vaughan they were already dead” (137). Already dead because never alive, not in the traditional sense. Theirs is an existence made real not by body and blood but by speed and steel. Sexuality sustains such an existence by reproducing appearance rather than substance. Hence the high eroticism of a crash: it releases a sexuality of signs that supersede the organic body: “This pervasive sexuality filled the air, as if we were members of a congregation leaving after a sermon urging us to celebrate our sexualities with friends and strangers, and were driving into the night to imitate the bloody eucharist we had observed with the most unlikely partners” (157). This new eucharist transignifies where the old one transfigures, resurrecting the sexuality of signs in the catastrophe of a crash.

Crash thus documents the obsolescence of transcendence, its collapse into a sexual semiotics driven by cars and cameras. In the landscape of late industrial culture, the new transcendental is the media, sexuality its pervasive paraclete, and Vaughan its only begotten son–at least for now. The body crucified has finally died and in its place has arisen the body conceptual. Vaughan’s genius–and his dark example–is simply to give his life over to the semiotic system that produces and disseminates it, working ultimately to unite them. No subject of transcendence emerges to meliorate a suffering body. Signification assimilates both, rendering misery superfluous. What matters to Vaughan is total equivalence between the body conceptual and a semiotic system that disseminates the life of signs. It falls to Ballard, the accidental apostle, to witness this transignification. He sees that Vaughan’s life is irreducible to the organic: “Vaughan’s body was a collection of loosely coupled planes. The elements of his musculature and personality were suspended a few millimetres apart” (198). Ballard sees too that such a life fulfills itself, not in some higher meaning, but in the system of signification itself.

His infatuation with Vaughan unfolds incrementally according to the logos of that system, as Ballard recognizes in retrospect: “Thinking of the photographs in the questionnaires, I knew that they defined the logic of a sexual act between Vaughan and myself” (137). Because “for Vaughan the motor-car was the sexual act’s greatest and only true locus” (171), Ballard’s initiation into the mysteries of the body conceptual can only occur in transit, the car serving as a signification module, a steel bower less of sexual than of semiotic intercourse: “His attraction lay not so much in a complex of familiar anatomical triggers… but in the stylization of posture achieved between Vaughan and the car. Detached from his automobile, particularly his own emblem-filled highway cruiser, Vaughan ceased to hold any interest” (117). Only when reconstituted conceptually by the interior of an automobile does Vaughan’s body seem appealing, only when assimilated to the sexuality of signs. Then it can circulate throughout the semiotic system and the world as surface.

The epiphany of this system and thus of the body conceptual that it disseminates comes in the LSD apocalypse that consummates Ballard’s liaison with Vaughan. Like a car wreck or a crucifixion, hallucinogens crash the subject. The benign catastrophe they inflict also lights up “a totality constantly sighted beforehand in circumspection” (Heidegger 105). Where the catastrophe of the crucifixion reveals a compensatory transcendence, this one reveals its return to the world as surface:

An armada of angelic creatures, each surrounded by an immense corona of light, was landing on the motorway on either side of us, sweeping down in opposite directions. They soared past, a few feet above the ground, landing everywhere on these endless runways that covered the landscape. I realized that all these roads and expressways had been built by us unknowingly for their reception. (199)

These angels herald not the risen Christ but his latest avatar, the disseminated Vaughan. In this acid-driven vision of the world as surface Vaughan has become coextensive with its totality, as Ballard will as well through their semio-sexual union. Vaughan excarnates the system that disseminates the body conceptual: “I was sure that the white ramp [of the motorway] was a section of Vaughan’s body” (205). Assimilated to the world as surface, he achieves the perpetual resurrection of signs: “The spurs of deformed metal, the triangles of fractured glass, were signals that had lain unread for years in this shabby grass, ciphers translated by Vaughan and myself as we sat with our arms around each other” (200). So when Ballard finally fulfills the sexual logic of their liaison, he experiences with his new messiah this resurrection without transcendence, this rebirth of a crash-body neither living nor dead:

Together we showed our wounds to each other, exposing the scars on our chests and hands to the beckoning injury sites on the interior of the car, to the pointed sills of the chromium ashtrays, to the lights of a distant intersection. In our wounds we celebrated the re-birth of the traffic-slain dead, the deaths and injuries of those we had seen dying by the roadside and the imaginary wounds and postures of the millions yet to die. (203)

With the collapse of transcendence into a culturally pervasive semiotic system comes new life everlasting–in haec signi.

This, then, is the landscape of late industrial culture according to Ballard: a world as surface continuous with the semiotic system that reproduces it. In such a world the human body is transformed, best revealed by the banal, pervasive catastrophe of a crash. The crash serves our culture as the crucifixion served the Christian West, its images circulating to sustain the possibility of another life. For Ballard’s crash-body cannot die. It revives with every traffic fatality. Ballard sees in Vaughan’s example the life of signs, even after Vaughan’s “death”: “I thought of Vaughan, covered with flies like a resurrected corpse, watching me with a mixture of irony and affection. I knew that Vaughan could never really die in a car-crash, but would in some way be re-born through those twisted radiator grilles and cascading windshield glass” (210). Vaughan lives in the myriad crashes that resurrect the life of signs. What is the death of the organic body to this system of signification? A superfluity, a nostalgia. The coming of AIDS since the publication of Crash in 1973 renders its documentation of this change all the more unnerving. Among contemporary artists Andy Warhol best understands the latter (Figure 5). He too knows that the crash is our crucifixion, the crash-body our alpha and omega. His prints define the logic of an atrocity that transignifies. Crash.

Coda: Princess Die!

It was in a strange state of surreality that I awoke some time ago to the sound of a bereaved radio reporter quietly announcing the death in a car crash of Princess Diana. Was it a sick if inevitable joke? A pirated BBC broadcast of Ballard’s latest atrocity fiction? For a few peculiar moments I felt I had been translated onto the pages of some hyper-realist sequel to Crash. The scene was so familiar: the crumpled Mercedes, the oozing fluids, the broken body of a celebrity known to me, with peculiar intimacy, only through media images. And the photographers, the real makers of the immortal Princess Di: brutes clutching sinister mechanisms by pistol grips trained upon her corpse. The imputation of their responsibility came as a supreme banality. Of course. The logic of the life of signs requires their perpetration of this sacrifice. The surprise is not that Princess Di is dead, or that she died in a car crash, or that photographers had a hand in it. These are the simple facts of our semiotic life. The surprise is how perfectly Ballard documented it all twenty years in advance. He is the prophet of the new life of signs, the vita nuova of crash and camera. The remaining question, the darker question, is how the death of Princess Di will affect us sexually. Are we, with Vaughan, at one with her in the cockpit of that fated Mercedes?

Works Cited

• Ballard, J. G. The Atrocity Exhibition. 1969. San Francisco: RE/SEARCH Publications, 1990.
• —. Crash. 1973. New York: Vintage, 1995.
• Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1962.
• Lewis, Jeremy. “An Interview with J. G. Ballard.” Mississippi Review 20.1-2 (1991): 27-40.