POSTMODERN CULTURE

Month: September 2013

  • Marketing / Reading Males

    Charles Stivale

    Wayne State University
    <cstival@cms.cc.wayne.edu>

     

    Joseph A. Boone and Michael Cadden, eds. Engendering Men: The Question of Male Feminist Criticism. New York: Routledge, 1990.

     

    Laura Claridge and Elizabeth Langland, eds. Out of Bounds: Male Writers and Gender(ed) Criticism. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1990.

     

    While pondering different lines of approach for a review of two collections of essays on the implications of “(male) feminist criticism” and on the “gender(ed)” construction of canonical male writers, I stare at the front covers of each. The title Engendering Men–on a black background in sharp, white script, the letters of MEN in bold print, with the subtitle under and slightly alongside MEN, in much smaller, uniform blue print–contrasts with the Claridge/Langland cover: a wide band of gray on the left and a thin band of gray on the right border a central strip in pink hue containing the same photograph twice, at top and at bottom. Within and across the top of the upper left rectangle, next to the word “OUT,” are the black letters “OF BOUNDS,” under which, in thinner black letters on the pink background, is the subtitle Male Writers and Gender(ed) Criticism. As for the cover illustrations on each, over one-third of the cover above the names “Boone and Cadden” shows a reproduction of a painting by Joaquin Sorolla entitled Children at the Beach. The subject, three naked boys lying on their stomachs, legs spread and buttocks exposed, on wet sand and in extremely shallow water, is a scene of youthful repose that contrasts with the images on Out of Bounds: the photograph by Eadweard Muybridge, reproduced twice and overlaid with a pink hue, depicts the right body profile of a naked, muscular male climbing (or descending) a barely visible ladder, with a fully loaded bricklayer’s basket weighing down heavily on the right shoulder and its pole extending vertically downward along the body beyond the bottom of the photo.

     

    My contemplation of these “packages” relates not only to the strategies of these editions themselves, but also to the act of reviewing collections on (en)gender(ed) males and their criticism within the “cyberspace” of PMC. Assuming my role as electronic pitchman, I wish to re-view these texts in terms of their valence as products of the marketplace, to draw on overlaps and interweaves between the projects, to locate dissonances within and between them, in short, to study these collections as assembled productions. The Boone/Cadden title relates directly to marketing strategies announced in the introduction: with momentum provided by a “friendly push from Elaine Showalter, an established feminist critic who had the savvy to recognize a good opportunity for her less experienced colleagues” (1), the editors’ goal is “to make more visible the efforts of all those individual men throughout the academy who have already begun the task . . . of reconceptualizing themselves as men and hence as critics of the literary and cultural texts that we have inherited and are in the process of recreating. In engendering ourselves, in making visible our textual/sexual bodies, we thus acknowledge our part in a movement whose time, we hope, has come” (7). In form and content, then, this title is explicit about seizing the time and need for the product, and the cover illustration emphasizes this move: boys nakedly displayed and bonding in enjoyable (perhaps even productive) repose. Furthermore, inside facing the title page is another painting in black, white and gray tones (George Platte Lynes’s Charles Nielson with J. Ogle (behind glass)) presenting a rear view of a naked standing male figure, the right arm slightly bent and touching a translucent glass. Behind this, facing the first naked male is a second; his left hand meets the first male’s right on the glass in a mirror effect, and the male gaze that we can see is trained directly at the face opposite him, the other gaze remaining invisible to the viewer.

     

    Mirror images, male bonding, bodies and gazes reaching yet separate, in confident repose yet prepared for activity–the package enveloping and preceding Engendering Men relates directly to the contributors’ stance vis-a-vis feminism as articulated by the editors: “Feminism has engendered us, even as we strive to engender a practice that might not always be the same as feminist practice, but that remains in contiguity with its politics” (1). Just as the editors are careful to note that the “we” invoked in the introduction “does not and cannot always encompass the variety of voices and opinions gathered here under the aegis of ‘engendering men’,” they also insist that the subtitle points to an ongoing process of reaching while not yet touching, “work that by its very nature is yet in search of is own (im)proper ‘name’” (2). Citing Adrienne Rich, the editors see feminism as “a matter of vision and revision,” entailing “new ways of interacting with our worlds and our lives, our literatures and our cultures” and constituting a “revolutionary task in which both men and women can–indeed must–participate if we are to create a nonsexist future” (3). This activity, however, remains distinct from feminism, drawing on multiple methodologies, enunciated in multiple voices, seeking “to create a field of study that, as yet, remains amorphous and . . . a question” (3), much like the relations of male bodies in the two liminary illustrations.

     

    The strain of such exertion is illustrated much more evidently on the cover of Out of Bounds: under a certainly brutal weight and ungainly means of transport, the photographs bordering the pink rectangle from above and below depict the message that progress is slow and painful, hampered by the male’s limited means and burden. Curious, then, that in the introduction, what the women editors describe is their own conceptual exertion throughout the successive definitions of their project. Following the 1986 special MLA session on “Male Feminist Voices,” they had to revise the original assumption that antipatriarchal activity, e.g. male writer’s resistance to the phallic mode, “would necessarily encompass feminism” (3), choosing a new title, Out of Bounds, to indicate the possibilities of “liberation of both sexes from gender proscriptions” (5). However, since no uniform feminist methodology for inquiry unites the collected essays, the editors had to move beyond the old subtitle, Male Writers and Feminist Inquiry, and adopt the current one to foreground the main thesis of “gender in the writings of male canonical authors sensitive to the limitations of language in their culture” as well as the project’s context, “criticism offered up by women and men inscribed, inevitably, by same conditions they seek to question” (5).

     

    The cover illustrations would correspond, then, to this collection’s explicit “justification”: that “whereas ‘man’ has indeed functioned as the nodal point for traditional literary criticism of the past centuries, man as a gendered, cultural creature has received precious little attention. And to take feminist criticism seriously as a method that places gender at the heart of things is to insist that to ignore the question ‘What is it to be a man?’ is to imperil both the rigor and the integrity of feminist theory and practice” (7). Although not sharing a single feminist methodology, these essays address the focal issue of selected male canonical writers: “What do male writers who feel fettered by the patriarchal literary tradition do to escape a language implicitly– often explicitly–defined as their own?” (11). The editors argue that “the generative–we would call it ‘feminist’–act for the male writers of our study, then, is . . . breaking down or dismantling the terms and forms that have preserved the status quo of two genders” (12). We can view the cover as illustrating acts of male exertion with its feminist tinge that the essays emphasize, the cover figure enveloped by a pink haze in the difficult and careful process of “dismantling” linguistic limitations and gender proscriptions imposed by their culture.

     

    That the editors of Out of Bounds choose to include treatments only of canonical writers engaged in or in conflict with this dismantling process is, to my mind, a strength of the collection for its marketing strategies, but possibly a source of frustration for scholars and students seeking pat answers to questions on gender and patriarchy. For the editors insist that another goal of the collection is to find a way to discuss dualities, “masculine/ feminine, female/male, male feminist/female feminist, homosexual/ heterosexual” without “reinforcing, at however a covert level, a dualism that always, in the end, keeps people in their place” (9). One strategy to achieve this goal is “to allow to stand, in this volume, multifarious uses of these gender/sexual terms, pinned down through the context of each individual essay.” It is up to the individual essayists and, by extension, the readers to cope with/against “terms that would succeed in polarizing– or simplifying–their arguments” (9). So this collection, organized in chronological reference to the writers studied, offers numerous possibilities for mixing, matching and confronting the essays, approaches, and definitions: to name but a few, James Phelan (on masculine voice in Thackerey’s Vanity Fair) vis-a-vis Margaret Higonnet (on woman’s voice in Hardy’s Tess); Claridge (on the Romantic female as situated by Shelley) vis-a-vis William Veeder (on the Realist Henry James’s identification with the feminine); and two strange volume-fellows (more on this later), Frank Lentricchia (on Frost) and Joseph A. Boone (on Durrell).

     

    In contrast, the organization of the Boone/Cadden collection emphasizes a definite solidarity, even confidence, in grouping its essays into four thematic clusters. While I could quibble about what seems to be the editors’ arbitrary assignment of some essays to a specific section rather than to another, this collection is clearly of the utmost interest for seminars and scholarly research, providing needed definitions of diverse positions and extensive questioning that scholars and critics must henceforth pursue in future feminist research. However, some uneasy tensions arise in the editors’, and especially Boone’s, introductory essays regarding the field (male feminist criticism) that they hope in some way to delineate. In a bracketed preface to his essay “Of Me(n) and Feminism: Who(se) Is the Sex That Writes?,” Boone explains that the essay originally expressed, in 1987, his “uneasiness about the way in which men’s relation to feminist criticism was at the time being politicized in academic circles” (11). Despite Boone’s relief at discovering “that some of my most immediate worries seem less relevant in light of the two [sic] years that have intervened” thanks to current work contributing to the constitution of “male feminist criticism,” the editors still rely on “the reappearance” of Boone’s essay (previously published in Linda Kauffman’s 1989 Gender and Theory [Blackwell] edition) and its “less relevant” anxiety. In fact, they state that this essay serves as “an overview of the whole phenomenon of ‘male feminist criticism’ as it has evolved at conventions and in anthologies over the last few years” (4, my emphasis). This claim for the essay’s breadth is astounding in itself and all the more so given the volume in which it appears, one that includes essays that question the very possibility of such an essentializing gesture. Moreover, Boone’s essay itself reproaches one critic (Elaine Showalter) for such generalizing moves (15) and constructs its own narrative of exclusion and difference in relation to the emergence of the field that the essays purport to outline.

     

    The depiction of this “whole phenomenon of ‘male feminist criticism’” relies on Boone’s identification of a “gap between the ‘me’ and ‘men’ in ‘me(n)’” (13), and through its exposure, “we can perhaps open up a space within the discourse of feminism where a male voice professing a feminist politics can have something to say beyond impossibilities and apologies and unresolved ire” (12). Thus, the “reappearance” of this essay allows Boone to recycle a limited and privileged narrative of “the debate surrounding men and feminism in [his] own ‘workplace’” (13). The five steps of this experience are posed as “seemingly random moments”: Elaine Showalter’s now canonical 1983 essay, “Critical Cross-Dressing”; the 1984 MLA sections on “Men in Feminism”; “another MLA panel on ‘male feminist voices’ in which [Boone] participated in 1986” (13); the Alice Jardine/Paul Smith Men in Feminism collection; the aforementioned Kauffman collection “for which this essay was conceived.” Boone ostensibly seeks to render visible the “‘me(n)’ gap” as a “discontinuity that has in turned inspired me to question the discursive formations in the literary critical institution whereby the concept of men and feminism, transformed into a territorial battlefield, has attained an ‘impossible’ status” (13). “Impossible” for whom? With the quotation marks retained, Boone refers to Stephen Heath’s assertion in Men in Feminism, “Men’s relation to feminism is an impossible one.” Yet if, as Boone suggests and to which the following essays bear witness, these anxieties are no longer entirely relevant to the emergence of this field, recycling this essay must serve other ends than to describe the “whole phenomenon.”

     

    To this strategy, I apply Boone’s own criticism of “the hidden, or not-so-hidden, agendas” of “many of the contributors to Men in Feminism,” i.e. the “use of the subject ‘male feminism’. . . as their[/his] pretext to wage other critical wars,” male feminism then becoming “the ultimately expendable item of exchange that merely gets the conversation going” (20). Boone’s own agenda and “unresolved ire” are suggested, in fact, by the “moments” chosen as constitutive of the emergence of the “whole phenomenon.” Consider the fifth moment, the “kind of coda” in which Boone discusses “the form– and formulation” of the Kauffman collection. The invitation letter to contribute to this collection “inevitably” reproduced, says Boone, the discomfort of a division between “male essayists” answered by “female theorists.” For his “peace of mind” both in the original and now in the recycled essay, Boone cleverly chooses to “include [him]self among the ‘female theorists’ . . . in hopes of creating a bit of healthy confusion, a field of imaginative play that might contribute to the liberation of our current discourses on and around the subject of ‘men and feminism’” (21). How this self-inclusion accomplishes this goal was and is still not entirely clear, but a significant gap in the later, revised version is Boone’s omission of any mention that, following Gender & Theory‘s format, Toril Moi articulated therein a pithy response to his original text. However, rather than employ this revised version to respond to Moi’s criticism–notably, of the essay’s anecdotal “parochialism,” of its sub-text “structured over a series of oppositions: old/young, visible/invisible, known/unknown, speaking/silent and so on” Gender and Theory 186)–Boone (and Boone/Cadden in the introduction) simply elide any reference to this response, relieving the “unresolved ire” instead through criticism of Kauffman’s volume.

     

    This dissonance in Boone’s essay emerges in another example of his experience of the “‘me(n)’ gap” that occurred as sole male participant not just in any MLA special session, but the one from which Claridge and Langland’s volume resulted. Boone bases his critique first on “the very construction of the panel” (“reinstat[ing], once again, a male-female opposition,” 17), then on questions that the organizers “might have opened up” (18) that he gladly provides. But Boone’s return to another source of “unresolved ire,” the personal circumstances of the panel’s constitution, suggests that his objections are not so much theoretical (“man” was there reconstituted as “a homogeneous entity”) as personal, that this man was the fall-guy (18). Although not yet published at the time Boone revised the essay on “Me(n) and Feminism,” the Claridge/Langland volume nonetheless receives an oblique shot: while the volume, says Boone, “promises to move beyond its panel format in exciting directions”– for example, “several male contributors, none easily assimilable to the other, are being included, and at least some will be talking about men’s experiences” (21)– the transition sentence preceding Boone’s comments on Kauffman’s collection still provides a warning (to whom?) related if only by contiguity to the Claridge/Langland volume: “The danger is always there of reinstating those potentially blinding symmetries that a feminist understanding of difference should instead encourage us all as feminists to unravel, to move beyond” (21).

     

    The overlap of Boone’s participation in each volume offers an further possibility of textual juxtaposition. A contemporary male critic undergoing particular scrutiny in the Boone/Cadden volume is Frank Lentricchia; in “Redeeming the Phallus: Wallace Stevens, Frank Lentricchia, and the Politics of (Hetero)Sexuality,” Lee Edelman examines not only Lentricchia’s predominantly heterosexual reading of Stevens, but also the critic’s polemic with Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar on feminist criticism. About Edelman’s fine reading that employs Wallace Stevens’s poetry as a strategic textual exemplar–“an instrument of analytic leverage that can help to articulate a critique of those gestures whereby criticism refuses or denies its own positioning within a framework that a gay theory might enable us to read” (37)–, Boone/Cadden comment: “Edelman’s essay takes a recent interview with Frank Lentricchia as its point of departure in order to analyze one way in which feminism has been attacked so as to appropriate for straight men a universal copyright on cultural subversiveness” (4, my emphasis). One notices here a distinct shift of Edelman’s focus, away from gay theory and toward the attack on feminism, away from Stevens toward Lentricchia. Boone/Cadden continue: “Edelman counters this strategy with one of his own–a reading of Wallace Stevens that critiques Lentricchia’s male sexual positioning and posturing) from an explicitly gay perspective” (5, my emphasis). Quite true, if understandably reductive, but why the unnecessary parenthetical editorial comment?

     

    The implicit agenda of the editors is explicitly provided in Boone’s bracketed preface to his essay: having been relieved of some “worries” by the new productivity in the field of “male feminist criticism,” Boone also concludes that the earlier emphasis on “the issue of naming–whether to take on the label, for instance, of ‘male feminism’–now strikes me as perhaps less urgent than measuring the degree of commitment to a feminist politics demonstrated in these men’s newly engendered methods of analysis” (11, my emphasis). What the tools of this “measurement” might be are not clear, but whereas the contributors to Engendering Men, by dint of the inclusion of their essays, no doubt “measure up” to the standards of the emergent field, Lentricchia clearly does not. It is understandable, then, that from Boone’s perspective, “none” of the male contributors to the Claridge/ Langland volume are “easily assimilable to the others” since the demonstration therein of “the degree of commitment to a feminist politics” would no doubt be found wanting, especially given the implicit requirement of discussing “men’s experiences” met only by a few of those contributors (men and women). However, in light of Lentricchia’s “privileged” position in Engendering Men as anti-feminist fall-guy, an added textual confrontation available in Out of Bounds for classroom debate would be Lentricchia’s “The Resentments of Robert Frost” with Boone’s essay on Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, if only for their distinct approaches for exploring the focal authors’ expression of male desire.

     

    To return to the liminary illustrations of Engendering Men, there is clearly much more going on than meets the eye underneath the placid surface of males in the solidarity of contemplative repose. One suggestion for readers of this collection is to move from Boone’s essay to the final one by Robert Vorlicky, “(In)Visible Alliances: Conflicting ‘Chronicles’ of Feminisms,” on the need for and possibilities of alliances (male/female, hetero-/homosexual). This essay serves as a splendid statement of the complex relations addressed throughout the volume and would have been a more fitting opening essay. While both volumes speak to questions vital to postmodern concerns, they market these in distinct ways that respond to perceived demands from readers/consumers and also create choices for their engagement with each set of texts. On one hand, the consumer might read essays in each volume as isolated from the others and reap certain, if limited, benefits; on the other hand, through the juxtaposition and confrontation of the volumes’ essays, the reader will encounter the tension inherent to the emergence of new fields of inquiry. However, as I have suggested, one also discovers the multiple difficulties of alliances and the distinct, often irreconcilable, differences in the processes of (en)gender(ing) due in no small part to the collision of ethical concerns with personal agendas.

     

  • Privacy And Pleasure: Edward Said on Music

    Dan Miller

    North Carolina State University
    <dcmeg@ncsuvm>

     

    Said, Edward W. Musical Elaborations. New York: Columbia UP, 1991. 109 pp. $19.95.

     

    Edward Said’s 1989 Wellek Library Lectures in Critical Theory at the University of California at Irvine, published as Musical Elaborations, are meditations on classical music in the Western tradition. They confront a sharp antinomy: on one hand, music is an intensely solitary and subjective experience for the performer or listener; on the other hand, music is also public occurrence, fully implicated in the social and cultural world. Said sets out to resolve the antinomy; he intends to show that, however private the experience of music may seem, it never escapes social context and functions. But as Said pursues that resolution, difficulties arise. He often moves from the private to the public dimensions by modulations that are themselves more musical than logical. Some of the most assured passages in the book assert the solitary, not the social, pleasures and powers of music. Said is often more successful at describing the ways in music eludes social appropriation than he is at demonstrating how it serves social ends. As a result, the argument of Musical Elaborations is strangely, powerfully at odds with itself: it wants to hold that classical music is a fully social enterprise, but it cannot help celebrating music in solitude. But while these lectures tend to undermine their own conclusions, they also succeed in a way that Said did not intend. His case for the socially determined nature of music actually serves to diagnose weaknesses in current, socially-oriented cultural analysis.

     

    Musical Elaborations is a richly varied book. It mixes theoretical speculations in both musicology and literary theory with autobiography. Foucault and Adorno mingle with Brahms and Wagner. Music criticism, sometimes technical and sometimes impressionistic, joins with literary criticism, and both intertwine with narrative and remembrance. These are personal essays, loose in structure, unapologetic in their subjectivity. While Said calls himself an amateur in musicology, he is clearly among the most expert amateurs. His columns on music have appeared for several years in The Nation, and, as he delivered these lectures, he played brief passages on the piano to illustrate his points.

     

    At issue throughout the book is the postmodern insistence, exemplified by Foucault, on the social construction of art and individuality. Ostensibly nonrepresentational and highly formal, highly individualized in its composition and its performance, classical music offers the most challenging test case for social analysis. Said notes that music writing, governed by the assumption that classical music develops according to its own internal and formal logic, independently of social history, has been relatively untouched by recent developments in literary and cultural theory. His goal is to treat music as a cultural field and to see (or hear) music as always implicated in social distinctions and roles, in questions of national and regional identity, in its own institutions, in the dispositions of cultural power. For Said, music is marked by the fluidity of its affiliations: it always has a social setting and role, but settings and roles are always changing, always temporally and spatially variable. What Said calls the “transgressive” character of music–“that faculty music has to travel, to cross over, drift from place to place in a society, even though many institutions have sought to confine it” (xix)–is its ability constantly to re-affiliate itself and establish new connections. Music plays a central role in the constitution or, in a term Said borrows from Gramsci, “elaboration” of a social order, and as such it normally works to preserve social power and relations. But it does so through its transgressive ability to break from its social context and function in other contexts.

     

    For Said, the essential, and most paradoxical, instance of music is the performance. Said points out repeatedly how rare moments of musical transcendence take place only in one of the most socially ritualized, unchanging, often stultifyingly conservative institutions imaginable: the concert itself, with its highly restricted performance repertory, with its absolute separation of roles (performers are not composers, listeners are usually not performers themselves, and composers are not performers, in part because they are, almost as a rule, dead), and with the long, specialized training of performers aimed at a level of sheer expertise far beyond ordinary musical abilities. Performance is an “extreme occasion,” an irreproducible event, divorced from normal life, highly ritualized and specialized, devoted to almost superhuman virtuosity. It is at once social and solitary: both performer and listeners are, when the performance succeeds, alone with the music, yet all are alone together, by virtue of the social institutions that make performance possible. Said recognizes that, in many ways, the modern concert represents a profound de-socialization of music since it rests upon a debilitating division of musical labor among performers, listeners, and composers. Yet, for Said, only at the moment of overpowering performance can music break out of the very social constraints that make it possible.

     

    Said is fascinated by musicians who seek extreme control, who dominate both the music and the conditions of performance. While Said notes how appropriate Arturo Toscanini’s style was for an American broadcasting corporation intent on creating a mass audience for classical music, it is the rigorous logic of Toscanini’s musical vision that attracts Said’s attention: “What Toscanini seems to me to be doing . . . is trying to force into prominence, or perhaps enforce, the utterly contrary quality of the performance occasion, its total discontinuity with the ordinary, regular, or normative processes of everyday life” (20). In the music and career of Glenn Gould, Said finds again the power of discontinuity and the force of individual will effecting the break. In his “retirement” from public playing and withdrawal into exclusively filmed and recorded performance, Gould created “a sort of airless but pure performance enclave that in turn paradoxically kept reminding one of the very concert platform he had deserted” (23). As in Toscanini’s control, so in Gould’s almost mathematically precise fingering, Said discovers a world apart, almost redemptively divorced from normal life. Said notes that Gould’s ideals of “repose, detachment, isolation” (29) are symptoms of an art condemned to social marginality, yet Said is himself drawn to these ideals.

     

    Said extols those moments–points of completion in a composer’s musical evolution, times of mastery in performance, instants of complete absorption in listening–when nothing else but music in its purity remains. And at those moments, music breaks free of the social field: there are “a relatively rare number of works making (or trying to make) their claims entirely as music, free of the many of the harassing, intrusive, and socially tyrannical pressures that have limited musicians to their customary social role as upholders of things as they are. I want to suggest that this handful of works expresses a very eccentric kind of transgression, that is, music being reclaimed by uncommon, perhaps even excessive, displays of technique whose net effect is not only to render music socially superfluous and useless–to discharge it completely–but to recuperate the craft entirely for the musician as an act of freedom” (71). Said’s cases in point are interesting: Webern’s Variations, Bach’s “Canonic Variations,” and a work that normally seems immersed in cultural context and value, Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte. Absolute virtuosity, rigorous musical development (though variations and elaborations), “pure musicality in a social space off the edge” (72) that is hardly still social at all–these represent escape and freedom. There is, Said allows, some truth to the Romantic view “that music to a consummate musician possesses a separate status and place . . . that is occasionally revealed but more often withheld” (xix-xx).

     

    While much of Musical Elaborations is an argument against Theodor Adorno and the view that modern music, exemplified by Schoenberg, represents a fatal rift between culture and society, Michel Foucault makes his presence felt throughout the book. Said acknowledges the Foucauldian nightmare of a social order shaped and dominated by power even in its apparently most secret and individual recesses, producing opposition only to manage and contain it. Yet here, as in other books and essays, Said works toward a social vision that allows real possibilities of change and some degree of escape. For Said, both Foucault and Adorno are guilty of a totalizing theory does little to contest the totalizing society it confronts. “No social system,” Said writes, “no historical vision, no theoretical totalization, no matter how powerful, can exhaust all the alternatives or practices that exist within its domain. There is always the possibility to transgress” (55). Even Wagner’s Die Meistersinger, epitome of musical elaborating a social order, contains its own transgression: “Read and heard for the bristling, tremendously energetic power of alternatives to its own affirmative proclamations about the greatness of German art and culture, Die Meistersinger cannot really be reduced to the nationalist ideology of its final strophes stress” (61). Music itself is the last and best hope, it seems, for transgression.

     

    The extraordinary performance, the virtuoso as master, the singular event and individual, absolute music, the moment of complete transgression–these are the motifs of Romanticism, musicological idealism, and individualist aesthetics, exactly the targets of Said’s polemic. Said confesses that the language of idealism tinges these lectures, but he never acknowledges the degree to which the book is divided against itself:

     

    Let the word "melody" . . . serve as a name both for an actual melody and for any other musical element that acts in or beneath the lines of a particular body of music to attach that music to the privacy of a listener's, performer's, or composer's experience. Here I want to emphasize privacy and pleasure, both of them replete with the historical and ideological residue of that bourgeois individuation now either discredited or fully under attack. (96)

     

    For Said, there is no music without melody, that intensely particularized utterance that is “authorial signature” (95)–even of a composer for whom melody in the normal sense is not primary–and mark of all that is least social and most a departure from the cultural field. Even Glenn Gould, archly anti-Romantic in style and repertory, is, as Said describes him–the eccentric genius who turns his back on the world and any trace of normal life, who constructs for himself a life of pure art and, in so doing, creates (and destroys) himself–a perfect instance of late Romanticism. Musical Elaborations is clearly not a defense of individualist aesthetics, but it does suggest that much of the traditional language of music’s (and perhaps, by extension, art’s) inwardness, autonomy, originality, and uniqueness cannot be jettisoned without substantial loss. Said’s recourse to idealism, in an intellectual climate (created in large part by Said himself) dominated by programmatic anti-idealism, indicates something more interesting and powerful than a lapse in logic. The postmodern vocabulary may allow Said no language to describe musical interiority other than traditional Romanticism, even though what he strives to say may no longer be Romantic.

     

    Said begins his third chapter, “Melody, Solitude, and Affirmation,” by invoking Proust’s remembrances of music past and of memories brought to life by music:

     

    Proust's recurrences inevitably point away from the public aspects of an occasion--sitting in a concert hall or salon, for instance--to its private possibilities; for example, the recollection, often shared, often lonely, of pains, anguish, bodies, miscellaneous as well as musical sounds, and so on. I find this characteristic tendency in Proust very moving, obviously because in its poignancy and psychological richness it has helped me to comprehend a great deal about my own experiences of music, experiences that seem to me like an unceasing shuttle between playing and listening privately for myself and playing and listening in a social setting, a setting whose constraints and often harsh limitations . . . only suddenly and very rarely produce so novel, so intense, so individualized, and so irreducible an experience of music as to make it possible for one to see in it a lot of its richness and complexity almost for the first time. (76)

     

    He recounts how hearing Alfred Brendel play Brahms’ “Theme with Variations for Piano” led him, through a complex, apparently private and idiosyncratic course of associations, to other music (theme-and-variation pieces by Mozart, Beethoven, Liszt, Elgar), to other performances and versions of the same music (including part of a Louis Malle film score), to comparable musical effects (in Schumann, Wagner, Strauss), finally to “the voice and even the pianistic gestures of an old teacher, Ignace Tiegerman, a Polish Jew who had come to Egypt (which is where I met him in the 1950s), after he had discovered the impending portent of fascism for him as a European musician and performer during the 1930s,” to his playing of a Brahms concerto, and then to “a whole tradition of teaching and playing that entered into and formed my relationship with Tiegerman, as it must have between him and his colleagues and friends in Europe” (90-91).

     

    There is an obvious point about this narrative, but it is one that Said never quite makes. The most moving private moment has shown itself to be fully social, though not social in the way Said has been using that term. Throughout the book, Said treats public and private, solitary and social, as simple, polar opposites. Inwardness and musical meditation are, almost by definition, non-social, anti-social. But his own story demonstrates that seemingly private experience is social at its heart. Even at the instant of greatest isolation and involvement, it is exactly the music of another being heard. Music here illustrates an extreme sociality, where self and other are so intimately tied and interwoven that it becomes difficult to distinguish the two. In addition, the most private inevitably reveals itself as the most social and the most painfully historical (the story of Ignace Tiegerman resonates with Said’s references, elsewhere in the book, to the Palestinian dispossession and the role played in it by elements of European fascism). Said resolves the antinomy of public and private not in the way he had intended, through analysis of musical institutions and settings, but exactly where it seemed a resolution was least likely to be found, in what seemed to be pure inwardness and formal pleasure.

     

    Pushed to an extreme, “public” and “private” are no longer opposites. If we attend to what Said’s discussion actually shows, rather than what it asserts, we see that the tension between public and private remains, even as both are, in effect, different inflections of the social. Here social forces are refracted through individual experience and, unlike the obviously institutional dimensions of the concert, are powerfully interior. It is far from clear what sort of social analysis could genuinely illuminate the domain of inwardness, but Said has at least suggested the poverty of a postmodernism incapable of accounting for privacy and musical pleasure. If our concern, after Foucault, is with what is genuinely transgressive, then music and interiority and a certain kind of individualism cannot be discounted. Of course, what kind of individualism makes a considerable difference. There is a great difference between holding the individual and private experience are of value because they transcend social determinations and because they represent the complexity, hence the variability, of social structures. And the same holds true when the private experience is that of an artwork, musical or literary.

     

  • Confronting Heidegger

    Gerry O’Sullivan

    University of Pennsylvania

     

    Zimmerman, Michael. Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, Politics, Art. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990. 306 pp.

     

    In the wake of the “affaire Heidegger,” prompted by the publication in 1987 of Victor Farias’s Heidegger et le nazisme, Michael Zimmerman poses a fundamental question in his recent book, Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, Politics, Art–how can students of Heidegger continue to assert the value of his thought given his “postwar refusal to abandon what seems such a reactionary understanding of Western history and his equal failure to renounce unequivocally a political movement that wrought such unparalleled misery”?

     

    Such an inquiry is nothing new for Zimmerman, whose 1981 book, Eclipse of the Self: The Development of Heidegger’s Concept of Authenticity dealt directly with the issue over the course of a cogent chapter entitled “National Socialism, Voluntarism, and Authenticity.” In fact, the seeming novelty of the “affaire” itself testifies to an unfortunate lack of historical perspective on the part of many of its leading participants.

     

    For years prior to the public debates surrounding the Farias study, many of Heidegger’s own students (among them Otto Poggeler, Heinrich Ott and Paul Huhnerfeld) pointed out the often disturbing consistencies between the philosophical project of their mentor and the political project of National Socialism. Indeed, as early as 1970, Joachim Fest had discussed Heidegger’s outright complicity with the NSDAP in The Face of the Third Reich.

     

    But as David Carroll has suggested in his foreword to Jean-Francois Lyotard’s Heidegger and the “jews”, the most recent French version of the Heidegger affair may not have been so much prompted by the Farias book as “programmed”– designed to undermine the work and thought of all those in any way indebted to the Heideggerian critique of metaphysics.

     

    While Carroll’s take on the timing of the debate may seem a bit too intentional, he raises some rather interesting institutional, political and historical questions about the “place” of Heidegger in contemporary scholarship. Given the shape and focus of the discussion in France, it would seem that–in many ways–Heidegger’s ignominious affiliation with the Nazis and his silence on the Holocaust may not have been the point of the polemic, but merely an occasion to attack those cast as heirs. In this case, one must deal with the seeming indecency of an intentional “double-forgetting.”

     

    Zimmerman’s book, on the other hand, begins with what must be one of the clearest and most thoroughgoing considerations of Heidegger’s historical and political context written to date, relating Heidegger’s critique of “productionist metaphysics” and his thinking on technology to his affiliation with National Socialism. But Zimmerman, unlike Farias, does not reduce the whole of Heidegger’s writings to a mere expression or reflection of Nazism. While clearly identifying the various fascist and reactionary strains running throughout the writings, Zimmerman also undertakes a retrieval or recuperation of what he believes to be still valuable insights on Heidegger’s part–a kind of “what-is-living, what-is-dead” exercise.

     

    To this end, Zimmerman engages the texts of Heidegger both on their own terms and in relation to the writings of his contemporaries, an interpretive gesture which allows him to, in his own words, step outside of “the one-dimensional hermeneutic circle that is typical of the way in which most of Heidegger’s commentators have explained his concept of modern technology” (249).

     

    As Zimmerman points out, most of Heidegger’s readers have chosen to ignore the political implications of his thinking on technology in favor of a continual reading and rereading of the early and later writings, granting a kind of suprahistorical character to the works and allowing the corpus to dictate the conditions of its own perception. Zimmerman sidesteps this kind of hermeneutic self- foreclosure by decentering Heidegger as merely “one important voice in a cultural conversation into which Heidegger himself had been ‘thrown’.”

     

    This is not to say that Heidegger’s politics are themselves construed by Zimmerman as a manifestation of Geworfenheit or “throwness.” Rather, his reflections on modernity, technology and the work of art are placed within the setting of what Jeffrey Herf has described as “reactionary modernism,” the technological-romantic branch of German conservatism which sought to replace the calculative rationality of the Enlightenment with the self-sacrifice and spirit of an individualistic, though properly Germanic, Volkstechnik.

     

    Heidegger’s views on technology and industrial society underwent significant changes between the publication of Being and Time and the writings which appeared after the so-called Kehre or “turn.” As Zimmerman points out, the ambiguity of Heidegger’s account of “everydayness” in Being and Time was largely attributable to his unwillingness, or inability, to delineate between an account of everyday life which purported to reveal its timeless, essential and “transcendental” features and one which amounted to a politically charged critique of everydayness under the historically specific circumstances of capitalism and urban-industrial society.

     

    Read in this way, then, Being and Time provided a negative evaluation of life in industrial society while attempting to retain its tacit claim to being a work of phenomenological description. It also, in the assessment of Winfreid Franzen, appealed to conservative intellectuals “because it addressed them theoretically, personally, and existentially without calling upon them to do anything specific.” In fact, Heidegger’s thematization of the frailty of individual Dasein in the face of the omnivorous they-self commended total secession as the only possibility of self-assertion.

     

    But Zimmerman’s analysis of the reactionary, albeit addled, agenda of Being and Time stops there, and he moves (perhaps too quickly) onto a consideration of Heidegger’s debt to the writings of Ernst Junger. Zimmerman neglects to make explicit the problematic of Heidegger’s “conservative revolution” in philosophy as identified by Pierre Bourdieu in The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger. Heidegger’s attempt to overthrow Kant’s overthrowing of metaphysics was, according to Bourdieu, typical of a strategy peculiar to “conservative revolutionaries” like Junger, a strategy which consisted in “jumping into the fire to avoid being burnt, to change everything without changing anything, through one of those heroic extremes which, in the drive to situate oneself always beyond the beyond, unite and reconcile opposites verbally, in paradoxical and magical propositions.”

     

    Hence, says Bourdieu, Heidegger sought to escape historicism by asserting the essential “historicity” of the existing, and then inscribed history and temporality within Being which remains, even in Heidegger, both ahistorical and eternal. Such a seemingly radical overcoming as that accomplished by Heidegger simply “allows everything to be preserved behind the appearance of everything changing, by joining opposites in a two-faced system of thought, which is therefore impossible to circumvent, since, like Janus, it is capable of facing challenges form all directions at once: the systematic extremism of essential thought enables it to overcome the most radical theses . . . by moving to a pivotal point where right becomes left, and vice versa.” Therefore, there may have been more to the fundamental inaction encouraged by Being and Time than that allowed, or interrogated, by Zimmerman.

     

    Zimmerman’s discussion of Heidegger’s relationship to the writings of Ernst Junger is, however, both elegant and persuasive. Heidegger, according to Zimmerman, drew upon representations of technology and the machine age contained in the essays and fictions of Junger who, like Spengler, had sought to discover metaphysical principles behind history which were “deeper” than those suggested by Marxism– mythical, elemental and irrational forces beyond the alleged determinism of scientific materialism or bourgeois economism.

     

    Between 1934 and 1944, Heidegger developed his own conception of technology in constant and ongoing dialogue with Junger’s work, which argued that the industrial transformation of the earth was the empirical manifestation of a hidden, world-transforming power akin to the Spenglerian version of Nietzsche’s will to power. This power, according to Junger, currently took the form of the Gestalt of the worker (Junger alternately defined Gestalt as a stamping, imprinting, typing, or symbolic “totality” which embraced “more than the sum of its parts”).

     

    For Junger, as for Spengler, world history was a spectacle. And the central figure in the then-unfolding drama of “total mobilization” was the worker-soldier, a passionate yet steely character ever willing to surrender to the atavastic will, whether on the factory floor or the battlefield. Junger, like the Futurists, developed a full-blown aesthetics of horror. Writing in War as Inner Experience (1922) and elsewhere, he sought to discover the “truth” of warfare as something done for its own sake, thus justifying both the horrors of modern warfare and Germany’s defeat in World War I as components of the same grand design and the upsurging of primordial will.

     

    Heidegger both appropriated and transformed Junger’s masculinist rhetoric. While approving of Junger’s critiques of both Marxism and bourgeois decadence, his affirmation of a new and elite humanity and the necessity for an authoritarian Gemeinschaft, Heidegger rejected his internationalism and saw the dream of the world factory as simply being the final phase of the “productionist metaphysics” inaugurated by the Greeks. In response, Heidegger began to develop his own notions of spiritual work, national work service and the need for an “authentically” German science as early as the famed Rectoral address of 27 May 1933.

     

    Heidegger’s later reflections on technology, work and art continued to be influenced by his dialogue with Junger’s writings, according to Zimmerman. Just as Junger had seen the work of the eternal will in the horrors of technological warfare, Heidegger glimpsed the “self-concealing being of entities in the horrifying meaninglessness of entities in the technological era,” whereby everything was reduced to “the same undifferentiated raw material for industrial production.”

     

    Likewise, Heidegger responded to Junger’s rhetoric of the irresistable upswelling of primal Will by arguing that the “power” confronting humanity was, in fact, the “overwhelming being or presencing of entities,” the overwhelming force (Walten) of physis as presencing or being. This force, claimed Heidegger, brought about the almost martial struggle to “found” a world, to delimit the overpowering presencing of entities in order to let them “stand forth” as determinate, whether through the handiwork of technology or art, or the intervention of the poet, thinker or–at least prior to the late 1930s–politician.

     

    Heidegger’s language in 1935, following that of Junger, was decidedly martial in tone: “To apprehend . . . means to let something come to one, not merely accepting it, however, but taking a receptive attitude toward that which shows itself. When troops prepare to receive the enemy, it is in the hope of stopping him at the very least, of bringing him to stand [zum Stand bringen]” (79).

     

    Junger’s failure to grasp the nature of this presencing, and his confusion of the “fluid ‘motion’ of the synchronic event of presencing (Anwesen)” with the diachronic “hardening” of this presencing into specific historical modes of “being present” (Anwesenheit), led Heidegger to reject Junger’s notion of Gestalt (as epochal “imprinting”) as yet another master name in the history of metaphysics.

     

    So, says Zimmerman, Heidegger’s response to Junger’s essay, “Uber ‘Die Linie‘” in The Question of Being, was to discount the writer’s failure to grasp the nature of the ontological difference while recapitulating many of the same themes found in his works: “While Heidegger spoke of the history of being, and Junger of the history of the Will to Power, both believed that the ‘multifarious transformations’ assumed by being or the Will to Power in different epochs presented ‘the heroic spirit with an engrossing drama.’” Both also believed that they were equipped to bear witness to this historical “play” of transformations while the rest of humanity blindly succumbed to the imperatives of the imprinting of the age of the worker.

     

    It was through Junger’s “aesthetics” of history and the Gestalt of the worker, claims Zimmerman, that Heidegger was led to consider Nietzsche’s thinking on the nature of art. In his lectures on Nietzsche, Heidegger came to thematize the Greek conception of art as techne, or measure-giving disclosure, in response to the “degenerate” modes of modern art and industrial production.

     

    Not surprisingly, Heidegger read the first version of “The Origin of the Work of Art” in 1935, not long after Hitler’s Nuremberg address, “Art and Politics.” Both Hitler and Heidegger stressed the importance of Greek art as a model for a “restored” and authentic aesthetic practice. And insofar as Heidegger believed that the art of the Greek temple opened or disclosed the world of the polis “in which entities could first manifest themselves in their own specific shapes and forms, and in which Greek humanity could make the decisions that would determine its destiny,” writes Zimmerman, both Hitler and Heidegger agreed on the relationship between art and political life.

     

    Where Heidegger parted company with Hitler, however, was on the point of art’s relationship to history and eternity. Hitler’s vision of the thousand-year Reich was to be embodied in planned public works of art, totalitarian “temples” attesting to the permanence of the Nazi vision. Zimmerman points out that for genuine art to “work,” according to Heidegger, it must reveal the fragility and mortality of human existence. Hence, Hitler remained, in the estimation of Heidegger, under the sway of foundationalist metaphysics.

     

    Against such myths of eternity and pure presence, Heidegger turned to the “originary” Greek conception of art as techne, a work of the hand which resists reduction to a “mere product” by virtue of its self-sufficiency and disclosive power. Such “authentic” production and “freeing” disclosure gave way, eventually, to the distortions inherent in “productionist metaphysics” which, states Zimmerman, casts the world as little more than a “standing-reserve” awaiting subjugation.

     

    Like the National Socialists, the reactionaries and fascists, Heidegger was concerned with the inherent or essential relationship between poetry and production. The cure for rootlessness, social fragmentation, nihilism and alienation was not to be found in a workers’ revolution, but rather in a workers’ state transformed by the saving and disclosive power of art as handicraft. In such a situation, the ills and evils of modernity–associated in Heidegger’s mind with the industrialism and rootlessness of Bolshevism (and, concomitantly, “cosmopolitan Judaism”) and the inauthentic freedoms of the liberal welfare state–would be forever swept away by the power of authentic art and authentic technology to disclose new worlds and possibilities.

     

    Apart from its political pedigree, Heidegger’s critique of instrumental rationality is appealing to Zimmerman, and for several reasons. His anti-foundationalism, which denies a rational basis for the technological way of life, suggests to Zimmerman that things could be otherwise: “Discovering the groundlessness of the technological era makes possible the openness–and the anxiety–necessary for the arrrival of a new, post-modern era.” Zimmerman also sees continuity between Heidegger’s attention to handiwork and the analysis of “micropractices” in Foucault, both of which, he believes, offer alternatives to the homogeneity of the technological world.

     

    Zimmerman concludes Heidegger’s Confrontation With Modernity with a hopeful, though cautious, call for dialogue among feminists, deep ecologists and students of Heidegger’s work, all of whom are involved, according to Zimmerman, in developing new narratives about non-alienated, and non-oppressive, social and ecological relationships. Much can be learned, claims Zimmerman, from the Heideggerian concept of Gelassenheit and the hermeneutical insistence upon the finitude, and contingency, of knowing. But Heidegger’s failures remain in the foreground: “Sensitive to the dangers of nihilism posed by the dissolution of previous foundations, Heidegger attempted to find a non-absolute, historical ‘ground’ to guide his own people. Unfortunately, this attempt ended in disaster.”

     

    This is as comprehensive an overview of Heidegger’s views on modernity, technology, politics and art as one will find anywhere, and an extremely valuable contribution to recent scholarship on Heidegger and the debates occasioned by his commitment to National Socialism. But several questions remain.

     

    Zimmerman tends, often in passing, to include Marxism among the various manifestations of “productionist metaphysics” at work in the history of the forgetting or “oblivion” of being–what Heidegger termed the Seinsvergessenheit. At this point Zimmerman himself can be said to succumb to a totalizing or hypostasizing gesture regarding the disputed character of production in Marxist theory. Marx recognized that the capitalist mode of production was a system of multiple determinations, demanding multiple logics. One can read Marx himself against the kind of conceptual identity attributed to him by Zimmerman, via Heidegger.

     

    Zimmerman also fails to indicate what it is that he means by “mode of production.” To use shorthand developed by Harold Wolpe in The Articulation of Modes of Production, this could be a “restricted” use, covering only forces and relations of production, or an “extended” use, including forces and relations of production and their conditions of existence. Only the latter tends toward the kind of economic reductionism slighted by both Zimmerman and Heidegger, and assumes that the economy is, always and already, the predetermined site of primary contradiction.

     

    Neglected, too, is Marx’s point–underscored by Marcuse –that neither nationalization or socialization alter, by themselves, technical rationality as embodied (often irrationally) in the productive apparatus. A shift in ownership does not bring alienation to an end, as Zimmerman seems to imply in his critique of Marxism. The technological structure itself must change. At this point, one wishes that Zimmerman had included more recent Marxist theory in his dialogue, as it might have added some specificity to the Heideggerian critique.

     

    But perhaps specificity remains, and will always remain, the glitch in the Heideggerian machinery. Heidegger’s fundamental inablity to account for social institutions may stem from the reactionary tendencies identified by Bourdieu in Being and Time, including the impulse to always cast “the social” negatively, interms of das Man or the they-self. (Adorno’s underthematization of the social leads to similar problems for his analyses, as Axel Honneth has recently shown). One wonders how and where the world-disclosing, world-transforming power of authentic art and technology can finally work if not across the social field.

     

  • Spew: The Queer Punk Convention

    Bill Hsu

    University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana
    <hsu@csrd.uiuc.edu>

     

     

    SPEW. The first queer punk fanzine convention. May 25 1991. Randolph Street Gallery, Chicago.

     

    "NO panels. NO workshops. NO keynote address. VANLOADS of noisy dykes and fags."

     

    While hardcore in the early ’80s was mostly a straight white male phenomenon, gender-bending had often been a feature of punk in the ’70s. Queer punks were ostracized by both the mainstream gay communities (for being punks) and the mainstream hardcore communities (for being queer). Letters from queer-identified punks began appearing in punk fanzines in the mid-80s, usually provoking responses from homophobic punks. Queer versions of the traditional punk fanzines started soon after.

     

    Maximum Rock ‘n’ Roll, the bastion of politically progressive hardcore culture, has occasional columns by Tom Jennings of HOMOcore (one of the first queer punk zines), and gave some coverage to the queer punk scene in its April 1989 “Sexuality” issue. The original plan was to devote a full issue to queer punks, but apparently lip service is all the hardcore establishment is willing to give.

     

    Queer punks built their own network, with their own fanzines and events. There are still relatively few openly queer punk/hardcore bands, but some established bands are supportive; Fugazi and MDC have played at HOMOcore benefits. Queer punks have encountered only limited acceptance in the hardcore establishment. Some have found more support from gay activist groups such as ACTUP and Queer Nation, and the more radical arts communities.

     

    The queer punk “movement” is not as strong in Europe as it is in North America, perhaps because the punk fanzine network is stronger in the US and Canada, and it was through this network that queer punks started organizing. Also, the European hardcore scene has strong ties to anarchist youth movements and tends to be less homophobic; perhaps queer punks in Europe have found a more supportive environment in European hardcore communities, and do not feel the need to establish their own network. Most of the queer punk fanzines that I’m aware of (and that attended SPEW) are based in the US or Canada.

     

    For SPEW, Randolph Street Gallery was divided into a display area for zines and merchandise, a video area and a performance area. Most of the major queer punk zines were in attendance: JDs (one of the first and most visible, usually featuring G.B. Jones’ stylish photographs and graphics and Bruce La Bruce’s gritty and affecting writing), the exuberant and ornery Bimbox, the campy and literate Thing, Vaginal Creme Davis’ hilarious Fertile LaToyah Jackson, etc. Most zines that were not attending sent recent issues and merchandise for display. Chicago’s ACTUP and Queer Nation both had tables.

     

    The performance area buzzed all afternoon with readings and music. Novelist Dennis Cooper, who had performed earlier that week at Club Lower Links and Medusa’s, read again from his brilliant new book Frisk and from older work. He was a nervous reader, shuffling his feet around and stubbing his toes on the floor (“from a distance people think I’m a kid.”) The delivery was mostly deadpan and lowkey, and he was charming and funny.

     

    The other readings were not as interesting. Many of the readers are excellent writers, but they were not very careful about how their texts came across when read, and what kind of delivery was necessary for good effect. Drag was once again subversive and dangerous rather than merely polite: Joan Jett Blakk (Chicago “mayor” in drag) and Elvis Herselvis (the female Elvis impersonator) performed to backing tapes, and Vaginal Creme Davis (a 6’6 African-American self-styled “blackstress”) did her usual hilarious cabaret song-and-dance routine, with boisterous gospel and blues wailing. Club Lower Links regular Andy Soma was a religious icon almost with that Pierre et Gilles gloss.

     

    I missed most of the videos (spending more time in the performance room and at the tables), except for Bruce LaBruce’s No skin off my ass, which has been making the rounds at gay film festivals all over. Unfortunately the sound was very bad and I couldn’t understand much of the voice-overs. The film is in grainy black-and-white and very well-crafted. Bruce plays a hairdresser (GB Jones is his “sister”) who has a fling with a skinhead with the usual attitude (“I can’t be a fag, I’m a skinhead” etc etc). The usual comparisons have been with Warhol but the camera in No skin is much more active: there are some really nice tracking shots and very effective montages. More a punk Mala Noche with ear and nipple-piercing sequences than, say, Flesh or Chelsea Girls.

     

    The post-convention party at Hot House Gallery featured house and hiphop grooves from Thing dj’s, and performances from Joan Jett Blakk, Vaginal Creme Davis and Toronto all-female post-punk band Fifth Column. Fifth Column was without a guitarist and the first few songs with G.B. Jones on guitar and guests on lead guitar and drums (and supporting drum machine) were a little ragged, but the band really came together when G.B. Jones switched to drums. Fifth Column started sounding like their tight, vicious first album. At their best, they recall a raw garage-y Throwing Muses with more interesting rhythms. The set ended with their strongest songs, Kangaroo Court with the nervous jerky rhythms and their “hit”, Fairview Mall Story (about police entrapment of gay men in Toronto bathrooms).

     

    The event ended on a sour note: Steve Lafreniere, one of the main organizers, was stabbed in the back by passing gay-bashers. (He has since recovered.)

     

    I found it interesting that very few people from the traditional hardcore crowd were at SPEW. Instead, more of the attendees were from the “new allies” of the queer punk movement: ACTUPers, Queer Nationals, and radical queer artists and performers. Apparently, despite all the rhetoric about liberal/progressive politics, the hardcore establishment still has to come to terms with its homophobia.

     

  • Play It Again, Pac-Man

    Charles Bernstein

    State University of New York at Albany

     

    Your quarter rolls into the slot and you are tossed, suddenly and as if without warning, into a world of controllable danger. Your “man” is under attack and you must simulate his defense, lest humanity perish and another quarter is required to renew the quest.

     

    Drop in, turn on, tune out.

     

    The theories of video games abound: poststructuralist, neomarxian, psychoanalytic, and puritanical interpretations are on hand to guide us on our journey through the conceptual mazes spawned by the phenomenon. Acting out male aggression. A return, for adolescent boys, to the site of mom’s body. Technological utopia. As American as auto-eroticism. The best introduction to computer programming. No more than an occasion for loitering in seedy arcades. A new mind-obliterating technodrug. Marvelous exercise of hand-eye coordination. Corrupter of youth. Capital entertainment for the whole family. Not since the advent of TV has an entertainment medium been subjected to such wildly ambivalent reactions nor such skyrocketing sales.

     

    If the Depression dream was a chicken in every pot, today’s middle class adolescent’s dream is a video game in every TV.

     

    More and faster: better graphics and faster action, so fast you transcend the barriers of gravity, so vivid it’s realer than real.

     

    A surprising amount of the literature on video games has concerned the social context of the games: arcade culture, troubled youth, vocational training for tomorrow’s Top Gun. So much so that these scenarios seem to have become a part of video game culture: Nerdy kid who can’t get out a full sentence and whose social skills resemble Godzilla’s is the Star of the arcade; as taciturn as a Gary Cooper’s Sheriff, he gets the job done without designer sweaters or the girl.

     

    In the Saturday Night Fever of Computer Wizardry, achievement with your joy stick is the only thing that counts; success is solitary, objectively measured, undeniable.

     

    Or, say, a 1980s Horatio Alger. A failure at school, marginal drug experimenter, hanging out on the wrong side of the tracks with a no-future bunch of kids, develops $30 a day video game habit, can’t unplug from the machine without the lights going out in his head. Haunts the arcade till all hours, till the cops come in their beeping cruisers, bounding into the mall like the beeping spaceships on the video screen, and start to check IDs, seems some parents complained they don’t know where Johnny is and it’s pushing two. Cut to: young man in chalk-striped suit vice-prez for software devel. of Data Futurians, Inc. of Electronic Valley, California; pulling down fifty thou in his third year after dropping out of college. (Though the downside sequel has him, at 30, working till two every morning, divorced, personal life not accessible at this time, waiting for new data to be loaded, trouble reading disk drive.)

     

    Like the story boards of the games, the narratives that surround video games seem to promise a very American ending: Redemption though the technology of perseverance and the perseverance of technology. Salvation from social degeneracy (alien menace) comes in the form of squeaky clean high tech (no moving parts, no grease). Turns out, no big surprise, that the Alien that keeps coming at you in these games is none other than Ourselves, split off and on the war path.

     

    The combination of low culture and high technology is one of the most fascinating social features of the video game phenomenon. Computers were invented as super drones to do tasks no human in her or his right mind (much less left brain) would have the patience, or the perseverance, to manage. Enter multitask electronic calculators which would work out obsessively repetitive calculations involving billions of individual operations, calculations that if you had to do by hand would take you centuries to finish, assuming you never stopped for a Coke or a quick game of Pac-Man. Now our robot drones, the ones designed to take all the boring jobs, become the instrument for libidinal extravaganzas devoid of any socially productive component. Video games are computers neutered of purpose, liberated from functionality. The idea is intoxicating; like playing with the help on their night off, except the leisure industry begins to outstrip the labors of the day as video games become the main interface between John Q. and Beth B. Public and the computer.

     

    Instruments of labor removed from work-a-day tasks, set free to roam the unconscious, dark spaces of the Imaginary– dragons and assault asteroids, dreadful losses and miraculous reincarnations.

     

    If a typewriter could talk, it probably would have very little to say; our automatic washers are probably not hiding secret dream machines deep inside their drums.

     

    But these microchips really blow you away.

     

    Uh, err, um, oh. TILT!

     

    Okay, then, let’s slow down and unpack these equations one by one, or else this will begin to resemble the assault on our ability to track that seems so much at the heart of the tease of the games themselves.

     

    Spending Time or Killing It?

     

    The arcade games are designed, in part, to convince players to part, and keep parting, with their quarters. This part of the action feels like slot-machine gambling, with the obvious difference that there is no cash pay off, only more time on line. Staying plugged in, more time to play, is the fix. The arcade games are all about buying time and the possibility of extending the nominal, intensely atomized, 30-second (or so) minimum play to a duration that feels, for all impractical purposes, unbounded. Clearly the dynamic of the ever-more popular home games is different enough that the two need to be considered as quite distinct social phenomena, even though they share the same medium.

     

    Like sex, good play on an arcade video game not only earns extra plays but also extends and expands the length of the current play, with the ultimate lure of an unlimited stretch of time in which the end bell never tolls: a freedom from the constraints of time that resembles the temporal plenitude of uninterrupted live TV (or close-circuit video monitoring) as well as the timeless, continuous present of the personal computer (PC). In contrast, a film ticket or video rental buys you just 90 or 120 minutes of “media,” no extensions (as opposed to reruns) possible. Meanwhile, the home video game, by allowing longer play with greater skills, simulates the temporal economy of the arcade product while drastically blunting the threat of closure, since on the home version it costs nothing to replay.

     

    Video games create an artificial economy of scarcity in a medium characterized by plenitude. In one of the most popular genres, you desperately fight to prolong your staying power which is threatened by alien objects that you must shoot down. There’s no intrinsic reason that the threat of premature closure should drive so many of these games; for example, if your quarter always bought two minutes of play the effect of artificial scarcity would largely disappear. Is this desire to postpone closure a particular male drive, suggesting a peculiarly male fear? It may be that the emphasis on the overt aggression of a number of the games distracts from seeing other dynamics inherent in video game formats.

     

    Another dynamic of the arcade games is the ubiquitous emphasis on scoring. These games are not open-ended; not only do you try to accumulate the most points in order to extend play and win bonus games but also to compete with the machine’s lifetime memory of best-ever scores. If achievement-directed scoring suggests sex as opposed to love, games more than play, then it seems relevant to consider this a central part of the appeal of video games.

     

    An economy of scarcity suggests goal-oriented behavior: the desire for accumulation; this is what George Bataille has dubbed a “restricted” economy, in contrast to an unrestricted or “general” economy, which involves exchange or loss or waste or discharge. The drive to accumulate capital and commodities is the classic sign of a restricted economy. Potlatch (the festive exchange of gifts) or other rituals or carnivals of waste (“A hellava wedding!,” “Boy, what a Bar Mitzvah!”) suggest a general economy.

     

    While the dominant formats and genres of video games seem to involve a restricted economy, the social context of the games seems to suggest features of a general– unrestricted–economy. For while the games often mime the purposive behavior of accumulation/acquisition, they are played out in a context that stigmatizes them as wastes of time, purposeless, idle, even degenerate.

     

    These considerations link up video games with those other games, in our own and other cultures, whose social “function” is to celebrate waste, abandon, excess; though the carnival or orgiastic rite is clearly something that is repressed in a society, like ours, where the Puritan ethic stills hold powerful sway. What redeems many sports from being conceived as carnivals of waste is the emphasis on athletics (improvement of the body) and the forging of team or group or community spirit (building a community, learning fair play)–two compensatory features conspicuously absent from solitary, suggestively antiphysical video gaming.

     

    In a society in which the desire for general economy is routinely sublimated into utilitarian behaviors, the lure of video games has to be understood as, in part, related to their sheer unproductivity. Put more simply, our unrestricted play is constantly being channeled into goal-directed games; how appealing then to find a game whose essence seems to be totally useless play. Yet it would be a mistake to think of the erotic as wed to de-creative flows rather than pro-creative formations: both are in play, at work. Thus the synthesis of play and games that characterizes most available video games addresses the conflictual nature of our responses to eros and labor, play and work.

     

    So what’s really being shot down or gobbled up in so many of the popular games? Maybe the death wish played out in these games is not a simulation at all; maybe it’s time that’s being killed or absorbed–real-life productive time that could be better “spent” elsewhere.

     

    If The Massage Is The Medium and the Genre Is the Message, Who’s Minding the Store?

     

    Like movies, especially in the early period, video games are primarily characterized by their genre. The earliest arcade video game, Pong, from 1971, is an arcade version of ping-pong, and so the progenitor of a series of more sophisticated games based on popular sports, including Atari Football, Track and Field, 720 [degrees] (skateboarding), and Pole Position (car racing). (Perhaps driving simulation games are a genre of their own; they certainly have the potential to be played in an open-ended way, outside any scoring: just to drive fast and take the curves.)

     

    Quest or “fantasy” adventures, typically using a maze format, is another very poplar genre, especially in the home version. Arcade versions include Dragon’s Lair, Gauntlet, and Thayer’s Quest. Dragons, wizards, and warriors are often featured players, and each new level of the game triggers more complex action, as the protagonist journeys toward an often magical destination at the end of a series of labyrinths. In the home versions, where there may be up to a dozen levels, or scenes, the narrative can become increasingly elaborate. Still, the basis of this genre is getting the protagonist through a series (or maze) of possibly fatal mishaps. In its simplest form, these games involve a single protagonist moving toward a destination, the quest being to complete the labyrinth, against all odds. So we have Pac-Man gobbling to avoid being gobbled, or Donkey Kong‘s Mario trying to save his beloved from a family of guerrillas who roll barrels at him, or, in Berzerk, humanoids who must destroy all the pursuing robots before reaching the end of the maze.

     

    But the genre that most characterizes the arcade game is the war games in which successive waves of enemy projectiles must be shot down or blown up by counterprojectiles controlled by joystick, push button, or track ball. Some of the more famous of these games included Star Wars (a movie tie-in), Space Invaders (squadrons of alien craft swoop in from outer space while the player fights it out with one lone spacecraft that is locked in a fixed position), Asteroids (weightless, drifting shooter, lost in space, tries to blast way through meteor showers and occasional scout ship), Defender (wild variety of space aliens to dodge/shoot down in spaceman rescue), Galaxian (invaders break ranks and take looping dives in their attacks), Stratovox (stranded astronauts on alien planet), Centipede (waves of insects), Missile Command (ICBM attack), Robotron: 2084 (robots against humanity), Seawolf (naval action), Zaxxon (enemy-armed flying fortress), Battlezone (so accurately simulated tank warfare, so the press kit says, that the Army used it for training), and, finally, the quite recent “total environment” sit-down, pilot’s view war games–Strike Avenger, Afterburner, and Star Fire.

     

    A related, newer genre is the martial arts fighting-man video games, such as Double Dragon and Karate Champ, where star wars have come home to earth in graphically violent street wars reminiscent of Bruce Lee’s mystically alluring Kung Fu action movies: another example of film and video game versions of the same genre.

     

    Discussions of video games rarely distinguish between medium and genre, probably because the limited number of genres so far developed dominate the popular conception of the phenomenon. But to imagine that video games are restricted to shoot-’em-ups, quest adventures, or sports transcriptions would be equivalent to imagining, seventy years ago, that the Perils of Pauline or slapstick revealed the essence of cinema.

     

    A medium of art has traditionally been defined as the material or technical means of expression; thus, paint on canvas, lithography, photography, film, and writing are different media; while detective stories, science fiction, rhymed verse, or penny dreadfuls are genres of writing. This is altogether too neat, however. Since we learn what a medium is through instances of its use in genres, the cart really comes before the horse, or anyway, the medium is a sort of projected, or imaginary, constant that is actually much more socially and practically constituted than may at first seem apparent.

     

    When trying to understand the nature of different media, it is often useful to think about what characterizes one medium in a way that distinguishes it from all other media–what is its essence, what can it do that no other medium can do? Stanley Cavell has suggested that the essence of the two predominant moving-image media–TV and movies–are quite distinct. The experience of film is voyeuristic–I view a world (“a succession of automatic world projections”) from a position of being unseen, indeed unseeable. TV, in contrast, involves not viewing but monitoring of events as its basic mode of perception–live broadcast of news or sports events being the purest examples of this property.

     

    It’s helpful to distinguish the video display monitor from TV-as-medium. Several media use the video monitor for non-TV purposes. One distinction is between broadcast TV and VCR technologies that, like PCs, use the television screen for non-event-monitoring functions. Video games, then, are a moving-image medium distinct from TV and film.

     

    In distinguishing medium and genre, it becomes useful to introduce a middle term, format. Coin-op and home-cassette video games are one type of–hardware–format distinction I have in mind; but another–software– difference would be between, for example, scored and open-ended games, time-constrained and untimed play. Similar or different genres could then be imagined for these different formats.

     

    The Computer Unconscious

     

    The medium of video games is the CPU–the computer’s central processing unit. Video games share this medium with PCs. Video games and PCs are different (hardware) formats of the same medium. Indeed, a video game is a computer that is set up (dedicated) to play only one program.

     

    The experiential basis of the computer-as-medium is prediction and control of a limited set of variables. The fascination with all computer technology–gamesware or straightware–is figuring out all the permutations of a limited set of variables. This accounts for the obsessively repetitive behavior of both PC hackers and games players (which mimes the hyperrepetiveness of computer processing). As a computer games designer remarked to me, working with computers is the only thing she can do for hours a day without noticing the time going by: a quintessentially absorbing activity.

     

    Computers, because they are a new kind of medium, are likely to change the basic conception of what a medium is. This is not because computers are uniquely interactive–that claim, if pursued, becomes hollow quite quickly. Rather, computers provide a different definition of a medium: not a physical support but an operating environment. Perhaps it overstates the point to talk about computer consciousness but the experiential dynamic in operating computers–whether playing games or otherwise–has yet to receive a full accounting. Yet the fascination of relating to this alien consciousness is at the heart of the experience of PCs as much as video games.

     

    Video games are the purest manifestation of computer consciousness. Liberated from the restricted economy of purpose or function, they express the inner, nonverbal world of the computer.

     

    What is this world like? Computers, including video games, are relatively invariant in their response to commands. This means that they will always respond in the same way to the same input but also that they demand that the input be precisely the same to produce the same results. For this reason, any interaction with computers is extremely circumscribed and affectless (which is to say, all the affect is a result of transference and projection). Computers don’t respond or give forth, they process or calculate.

     

    Computers are either on or off, you’re plugged in or your out of the loop. There is a kind of visceral click in your brain when the screen lights up with “System Ready,” or your quarter triggers the switch and the game comes on line, that is unrelated to other media interactions such as watching movies or TV, reading, or viewing a painting. Moreover–and this is crucial to the addictive attraction so many operators feel–the on-ness of the computer is alien to any sort of relation we have with people or things or nature, which are always and ever possibly present, but can’t be toggled on and off in anything like this peculiar way. The computer infantalizes our relation to the external, re-presenting the structure of the infant’s world as described by Piaget, where objects seem to disappear when you turn your back to them or close your eyes. For you know when you turn your PC on it will be just like you left it: nothing will have changed.

     

    TV is for many people simulated company, freely flowing with an unlimited supply of “stuff” that fills up “real time.” Computers, in contrast, seem inert and atemporal, vigilant and self-contained. It’s as if all their data is simultaneously and immediately available to be called up. It is unnecessary to go through any linear or temporal sequence to find a particular bit of information. No searching on fast forward as in video, or waiting as in TV, or flipping pages as in a book: you specify and instantly access. When you are into it, time disappears, only to become visible again during “down time.” Even those who can’t conceive that they will care about speed become increasingly irritated at computer operations that take more than a few seconds to complete. For the non-operator, it may seem that a 10-second wait to access data is inconsequential. But the computer junkie finds such waits an affront to the medium’s utopian lure of timeless and immediate access, with no resistance, no gravitational pull–no sweat, no wait, no labor on the part of the computer: a dream of weightless instantaneousness, continuous presentness. The fix of speed for the computer or video game player is not from the visceral thrill of fastness, as with racing cars, where the speed is physically felt. The computer ensnares with a Siren’s song of time stopping, ceasing to be experienced, transcended. Speed is not an end in itself, a roller coaster ride, but a means to escape from the very sensation of speed or duration: an escape from history, waiting, embodied space.

     

    The Anxiety of Control/The Control of Anxiety

     

    Invariance, accuracy, and synchronicity are not qualities that generally characterize human information processing, although they are related to certain idealizations of our reasoning processes. Certainly, insofar as a person took on these characterizations, he or she would frighten: either lobotomized or paranoid. In this sense, the computer can again be seen as an alien form of consciousness; our interactions with it are unrelated to the forms of communication to which we otherwise are accustomed.

     

    Many people using computers and video games experience a surprisingly high level of anxiety; controlled anxiety is one of the primary “hooks” into the medium.

     

    Since so many of the video game genres highlight paranoid fantasies, it’s revealing to compare these to the paranoia and anxiety inscribed in PC operating systems. Consider the catastrophic nature of numerous PC error messages: Invalid sector, allocation error, sector not found, attempted write-protect violation, disk error, divide overflow, disk not ready, invalid drive specification, data error, format failure, incompatible system size, insufficient memory, invalid parameter, general failure, bad sector, fatal error, bad data, sector not found, track bad, disk unusable, unrecoverable read error; or the ubiquitous screen prompts: “Are you sure?” and “Abort, Retry, Ignore?”

     

    The experience of invoking and avoiding these, sometimes “fatal” errors, is not altogether unlike the action of a number of video games. Just consider how these standard PC software operating terms suggest both scenarios and action of many video games and at the same time underscore some of the ontological features of the medium: escape and exit and save functions (“You must escape from the dungeon, exit to the next level and save the nuclear family”), path support (knowing your way through the maze), data loss/data recovery (your “man” only disappears if he gets hit three times), defaults (are not in the stars but in ourselves), erase (liquidate, disappear, destroy, bombard, obliterate), abandon (ship!), unerase (see data recovery), delete (kill me but don’t delete me), searches (I always think of John Ford’s The Searchers, kind of the opposite of perhaps the most offensive of video games, “Custer’s Revenge”), and of course, back-ups (i.e. the cavalry’s on its way, or else: a new set of missiles is just a flick of the wrist away).

     

    The pitch of computer paranoia is vividly demonstrated in the cover copy for a program designed to prevent your hard drive from crashing: “Why your hard disk may be only seconds away from total failure! Be a real hero! Solve hard disk torture and grief. You don’t need to reformat. You don’t need to clobber data. How much these errors already cost you in unrecoverable data, time, torture, money, missing deadlines, schedule delays, poor performance, damage to business reputation, etc..”

     

    Loss preventable only by constant saving is one PC structural metaphor that seems played out in video games. Another one, though perhaps less metaphoric than phenomenological, revolves around location. Here it’s not loss, in the sense of being blipped out, but rather being lost–dislocation–as in how to get from one place to another, or getting your bearings so that the move you make with the controls corresponds with what you see on the far-from-silver screen. Or else the intoxicating anxiety of disorientation: vertigo, slipping, falling, tumbling….

     

    What’s going on? The dark side of uniformity and control is an intense fear of failure, of crashing, of disaster, of down time. Of not getting it right, of getting lost, of losing control. Since the computer doesn’t make mistakes, if something goes wrong, it must be something in you. How many times does an operator get a new program and run it through just to see how it works, what it can do, what the glitches are, what the action is. Moving phrases around in multiple block operations may not be so different from shooting down asteroids. Deleting data on purpose or by mistake may be something like gobbling up little illuminated blips on the display screen of a game. And figuring out how a new piece of software works by making slight mistakes that the computer rejects–because there’s only one optimum way to do something–may be like learning to get from a 30-second Game Over to bonus points.

     

    If films offer voyeuristic pleasures, video games provide vicarious thrills. You’re not peeking into a world in which you can’t be seen, you are acting in a world by means of tokens, designated hitters, color-coded dummies, polymorphous stand-ins. The much-admired interactiveness of video games amounts to less than it might appear given the very circumscribed control players have over their “men.” Joy sticks and buttons (like keyboards or mice) allow for a series of binary operations; even the most complex games allows for only a highly limited amount of player control. Narrowing down the field of possible choices to a manageable few is one of the great attractions of the games, in just the way that a film’s ability to narrow down the field of possible vision to a view is one of the main attractions of the cinema.

     

    Video games offer a narrowed range of choices in the context of a predictable field of action. Because the games are so mechanically predictable, and context invariant, normal sorts of predictive judgments based on situational adjustments are unnecessary and indeed a positive hindrance. The rationality of the system is what makes it so unlike everyday life and therefore such a pleasurable release from everyday experience. With a video game, if you do the same thing in the same way it will always produce the same results. Here is an arena where a person can have some real control, an illusion of power, as “things” respond to the snap of our fingers, the flick of our wrists. In a world where it is not just infantile or adolescent but all too human to feel powerless in the face of bombarding events, where the same action never seems to produce the same results because the contexts are always shifting, the uniformity of stimulus and response in video games can be exhilarating.

     

    In the social world of our everyday lives repetition is near impossible if often promised. You can never utter the same sentence twice not only technically, in the sense of slight acoustic variation, but semantically, in that it won’t mean the same thing the second time around, won’t always command the same effect. With video games, as with all computers, you can return to the site of the same problem, the same anxiety, the same blockage and get exactly the same effect in response to the same set of actions.

     

    In the timeless time of the video screen, where there is no future and no history, just a series of events that can be read in any sequence, we act out a tireless existential drama of “now” time. The risks are simulated, the mastery imaginary; only the compulsiveness is real.

     

    Paranoia or Paramilitary?

     

    Paranoia literally means being beside one’s mind. Operating a computer or video game does give you the eerie sensation of being next to something like a mind, something like a mind that is doing something like responding to your control. Yet one is not in control over the computer. That’s what’s scary. Unlike your relation to your own body, that is being in it and of it, the computer only simulates a small window of operator control. The real controller of the game is hidden from us, the inaccessible system core that goes under the name of Read Only Memory (ROM), that’s neither hardware that you can touch or software that you can change but “firmware.” Like ideology, ROM is out of sight only to control more efficiently.

     

    We live in a computer age in which the systems that control the formats that determine the genres of our everyday life are inaccessible to us. It’s not that we can’t “know” a computer’s mind in some metaphysical sense; computers don’t have minds. Rather, we are structurally excluded from having access to the command structure: very few know the language, and even fewer can (re)write it. And even if we could rewrite these deep structures, the systems are hardwired in such a way as to prevent such tampering. In computer terms, to reformat risks losing all your data: it is something to avoid at all costs. Playing video games, like working with computers, we learn to adapt ourselves to fixed systems of control. All the adapting is ours. No wonder it’s called good vocational training–but not just for Air Force Mission Control or, more likely, the word processing pool: the real training is for the new regulatory environment we used to call 1984 until it came on line without an off switch. After that we didn’t call it anything.

     

    In the machine age, a man or woman or girl or boy could fix an engine, put in a new piston, clean a carburetor. A film goer could look at a piece of film, or watch each frame being pulled by sprockets across a beam of light at a speed that he or she could imagine changing. A person operating a threshing machine may have known all the basic principles, and all the parts, that made it work. But how many of us have even the foggiest notion–beyond something about binary coding and microchips and overpriced Japanese memory–about how video games or computers work?

     

    Yet, isn’t that so much Romantic nonsense? Haven’t societies always run on secrets, hidden codes, inaccessible scriptures? The origins of computers can be traced to several sources. But it was military funding that allowed for the development of the first computers. Moreover, the first video game is generally considered to be Spacewar, which was developed on mainframes at MIT in the late 1950s, a byproduct of “strategic” R&D (research and development), and a vastly popular “diversion” among the computer scientists working with the new technology.

     

    The secrecy of the controlling ROM cannot be divorced from the Spacewar scenario that developed out of it, and later inspired the dominant arcade video game genre. Computer systems, and the games that are their product, reveal a military obsession with secrecy and control, and the related paranoia that secrets will be exposed or control lost. Computers were designed not to solve problems, per se, not to make visually entertaining graphics, not to improve manuscript presentation or production, not to do bookkeeping or facilitate searches through the Oxford English Dictionary. Computers have their origins in the need to simulate attack/response scenarios. To predict trajectories of rockets coming at target and the trajectory of rockets shot at these rockets. The first computers were developed in the late 1940s to compute bombing trajectories. When we get to the essence of the computer consciousness, if that word can still be stomached for something so foreign to all that we have known as consciousness, these origins have an acidic sting.

     

    Which is not to say other fantasies, or purposes, can’t be spun on top of these origins. Programs and games may subvert the command and control nature of computers, but they can never fully transcend their disturbing, even ominous, origins.

     

    So one more time around this maze. I’ve suggested that the Alien that keeps coming at us in so many of these games is ourselves, split off; that what we keep shooting down or gobbling up or obliterating is our temporality: which is to say that we have “erring” bodies, call them flesh, which is to say we live in time, even history. And that the cost of escaping history is paranoia: being beside oneself, split off (which brings us back to where we started).

     

    But isn’t the computer really the alien–the robot– that is bombarding us with its world picture (not view), its operating environment; that is always faster and more accurate than we can ever hope to be; and that we can only pretend to protect ourselves from, as in the Pyhrric victory, sweet but unconvincing, when we beat the machine, like so many John Henrys in dungarees and baseball hats, hunching over a pleasure machine designed to let us win once in while?

     

    The Luddites wanted to smash the machines of the Industrial Revolution–and who can fail to see the touching beauty in their impossible dream. But there can be no returns, no repetitions, only deposits, depositions. Perhaps the genius of these early video games–for the games, like computers, are not yet even toddlers–is that they give us a place to play out these neo-Luddite sentiments: slay the dragon, the ghost in the machine, the beserk robots. What we are fighting is the projection of our sense of inferiority before our own creation. I don’t mean that the computer must always play us. Maybe, with just a few more quarters, we can turn the tables.

     

  • A Dialogue on Dialogue, Part I

    Georg Mannejc, Anne Mack,

    J.J. Rome, Joanne McGrem,

    and Jerome McGann

    University of Virginia
    jjm2f@prime.acc.virginia.edu

     

                Gilbert:    Dialogue . . . can never lose for the
                        thinker its attraction as a mode of
                        expression.  By its means he can both
                        reveal and conceal himself . . . .  By
                        its means he can exhibit the object from
                        each point of view . . . or from those
                        felicitous after-thoughts . . . give a
                        fuller completeness to the central
                        scheme, and yet convey something of the
                        delicate charm of chance.

            Ernest:     By its means, too, he can invent an
                        imaginary antagonist, and convert him
                        when he chooses by some absurdly
                        sophistical argument.

            Gilbert:    Ah! it is so easy to convert others.  It
                        is so difficult to convert oneself.  To
                        arrive at what one really believes, one
                        must speak through lips different from
                        one's own.  To know the truth one must
                        imagine myriads of falsehoods.
                                --Oscar Wilde, "The Critic as
                              Artist.  A Dialogue.  Part II."

                        That mask!  That mask!  I would give one
                        of my fingers to have thought of that
                        mask.
                                --Denis Diderot, Rameau's Nephew76

    GM: And so we will find it possible to get beyond the magical idea of knowledge–the idea of knowledge as control and mastery, the ideal of that idea. Instead we shall have this display and celebration of our differences.

     

    AM: Our differences about what?

     

    GM: About any subject we choose to take up. This talk of ours, these conversations, what are they grounded in? Not the pursuit of truth (that old ideal of philosophy and science), not the pursuit of power (that old ideal of magic and technology). They are grounded in the pursuit of meaning, in hermeneutics and the desires of interpretation. And interpretation proceeds according to a dialogical rather than a systems-theoretical or systems- correcting model. Dialogues are governed by rules of generosity and ornamentation, not rigor and method.

     

    AM: Who today would challenge the virtues of a dialogic model? The star of Bakhtin stands in the ascendant. But what are you saying, exactly? Is this a call for an unrestricted play of interpretation? Does anything go? Will all the Lord’s people be queueing up for a haruspicator’s license?

     

    GM: That’s a cheap sneer I’d expect from Hilton Kramer, not from you. In fact, our most ancient and sophisticated interpretive traditions call for nothing less than the reader’s complete freedom. In Hebrew midrash, as we know, reading is “divergent rather than convergent . . . moving rather than fixed . . . always opening onto new ground . . . always calling for interpretation to be opened up anew.” Many still “understand the conflict of interpretation as a deficit of interpretation itself, part of the logical weakness of hermeneutics.” This “prompts the desire to get `beyond interpretation’ to the meaning itself . . . . [But] my thought is that this very [desire] implies a transcendental outlook that has, in Western culture, never been able to accept the finite, situated, dialogical, indeed political character of human understanding, and which even now finds midrash to be irrational and wild.”1

     

    The need to possess the truth, the fear of doubt and uncertainty. It is the fear from which Arnold fled, in the middle of the nineteenth-century–the fear of a democratic conversation that would proceed without the benefit of governing touchstones. Its psychological form appeared to Arnold as the spectrous dialogue of the mind with itself. And he had reason to fear such a dialogue, for it can be unnerving or even worse. It can overthrow altogether what one takes to be the truth: the soul of the world’s culture suddenly brought face to face with the mask of the god’s anarchy–and with that mask appearing, in its most demonic guise, as a polished surface reflecting back the image of one’s own self, the hypocrite lecteur loosed upon the occidental world in Arnold’s day by Baudelaire.

     

    JJR: [speaking to GM] You call this a “celebration” of differences, but to me it seems more a clash, and thus a struggle toward that truth you are so ready to dispense with. Dialogue is less a carnival than a critical exchange in which the errors and limits of different ideas are exposed by their conflict with each other. It is all very well to float above this struggle, observing it as a rich display of energy, a celebration of itself. Thus we become the romantic inheritors of the deities of Lucretius. I sit as God holding no form of creed, But contemplating all. (Tennyson, “The Palace of Art,” 21-12) But in the world where our talk goes on, we are not gods; we are, as you suggested, political animals. Your ivory tower of interpretation is a particular political position, and the fact is that I do not agree with it. Unlike yourself, I believe these conversations are grounded in the pursuit of truth, and do involve the struggle of power.

     

    GM: I am not interested in the contemplative life. Dialogue involves various persons and is, as I say, necessarily political. What I mean to “celebrate”–and I don’t apologize for it–is the power of dialogue to harness ideas, to generate new and interesting forms of thought.

     

    JJR: But you don’t seem inclined to make the necessary distinctions or discriminations. Some “forms of thought” are more interesting than others, some are trivial, some are not. What is important about dialogue is that it helps to expose those distinctions, to sort them out. For instance, I wouldn’t say that your ideas about dialogue are trivial or uninteresting; but I would say they are wrong. There’s the difference between us. Would you say I was wrong in these ideas–are you prepared to argue that I am wrong in my judgments about your judgments?

     

    GM: Yes, you are wrong.

     

    JJR: Why, how? Indeed, on your showing, how could I be wrong?

     

    GM: Because what I was saying has nothing to do with being right or being wrong. That’s another matter entirely.

     

    JJR: Another “language game”?

     

    GM: Perhaps–why not?

     

    JJR: Because under those conditions, as I said before, “anything goes.” Shift the language game and what was “wrong” becomes something else–it becomes, perhaps, “interesting” or “uninteresting,” or perhaps even “right.”

     

    Don’t misunderstand me. I am as aware as you are that context alters the status and even the meaning of what we see and what we think. The “pursuit of truth” is towards an imaginable (as opposed to an achievable) goal. We have to be satisfied with what we can acquire– knowledge, the historical form of truth. Nevertheless, that goal, “the truth,” must be imagined if certain kinds of intellectual activities are to be pursued.

     

    AM: Truth as a necessary fiction? You are as unscrupulous as Georg when you try to manipulate us with that metaphor of “knowledge, the historical form of truth.” Does the “truth” you want to “imagine” exist in the same order as the “knowledge” you say we can gain? If it doesn’t, how do we get it?

     

    JJR: We don’t “get” it, as if by a process of discovery. We construct the truth, we imagine it. Or do you imagine that the work of imagination is somehow less real–less human and historical–than the work of knowledge?

     

    And what about your metaphor: “necessary fiction”! The implication being, apparently, that what we imagine is somehow less substantial than what we labor to discover and construct. How did Keats put it? “What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be Truth–whether it existed before or not.”2 Created work, whether primary–like the material universe–or secondary–like history itself, or Plato’s dialogues, or the bible: these are not fictions in the sense you seem to suggest. They are original forms of Being–and in the case of secondary creations like poetry, original forms of Human Being. Knowledge–science–is not their source, could not bring them into existence. Rather, knowledge takes these things (as well as itself) for its subject.

     

    And this is why I stand with Plato and Socrates on the matter of dialogue and conversation. Dialogue is how we pursue the truth through the clash of different views. It is our oldest tool for testing–and correcting–the limits and the powers of our ideas.

     

    AM: But there are important “intellectual activities” in which “the truth” will not be, must not be, “imagined.”

     

    JJR: You mean, I suppose, things like scientific or technological acts of construction.

     

    AM: I have no competence to speak about such matters, and I wasn’t thinking about them at all. I had in mind Plato’s dialogues, the bible: creative and poetical work in general.

     

    JJR: Well, if you wanted to surprise me, you have. I would have thought it obvious that these works are the very and perhaps even the only ones in which “the truth” will and must be “imagined.”

     

    AM: You are so obsessed with the idea of “the truth” that you impoverish your own imagination. And so you misunderstand me–as usual.

     

    I wasn’t suggesting a distinction between poetry and imagination, but between imagination and truth. And by that distinction I was asking you to re-think the way imagination acts in a poetical field. What the imagination seizes as beauty is not, cannot, and must not be “truth.” Rather, it seizes appearances, phenomena, facticities. The physique of the poetical event: from the elementary phonic values of the letters and syllables, through the entire array of verbal imagery, to the shape of the scripts and all the physical media–material as well as social–through which poetry is realized. What the imagination seizes as beauty is not truth, it is the image of a world. The question of truth may and will be brought to bear on that world, as it is always brought to bear on our larger world; but that question is not brought to bear in or by the poetry itself. God does not put questions of truth to his creations, and neither do poets. As Blake’s prophet of the poetical, Los, says: “I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create” (Jerusalem 10:21).

     

    JJR: Perhaps divine creation may be imagined as a seizure of pure beauty. Man’s creations, in any case, are nothing of the sort. Poetry, for instance, being a form of language, comes to us (as one might say) “legend laden” with the conflicts of truth and error, good and evil. Whatever one thinks of primary worlds, all secondary ones are ideological.

     

    GM: And interpretation is the method we have for engaging these kinds of acts–just as science and philosophy are ways we have for engaging with other kinds of human activities.

     

    AM: [speaking to GM] What nonsense. Poetry, Interpretation, Science, Philosophy: these are medieval distinctions in that kind of formulation. They will get us nowhere.

     

    Besides, there is a difference, even on your showing, between poetry and its interpretation–between, for instance, the bible and its commentators. Or don’t you think so? Is there not an inspired text–the poem–that is different from the reading of that text–the interpretation?

     

    GM: Of course, but it is not a difference whose “truth” we can ever be clear about. Because it is a difference which is always being defined ex post facto, that is, under the sign of its interpretation. The bible itself– every poem we engage with–already comes to us under hermeneutical signs. “When composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline”: Shelley’s famous remark involves a profound understanding of the nature of texts.3 If we ask of the bible, for example, “where in this work can the Word of God be found,” we will not get a clear answer. Because the concept of location is a secondary and interpretive concept. When skeptics debunk the bible’s pretension to be “the Word of God” by pointing out the endless diaspora of its texts, their insight– though not their conclusion–is acute. The Word of God is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.

     

    The same must be said of all imaginative works–of every work that comes before us under the sign of creation. The bible is merely the master work of all those works–the originary revelation of “the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am.”4

     

    JJR: If that’s so, then ideology–good and evil, truth and error–must be involved in that eternal act of primary creation. Which makes perfect sense since–as Blake saw so clearly–god and the gods are creatures of Man’s imagination.5 Stories to the contrary–like the story in Genesis–are just exactly that–stories to the contrary.

     

    But I’m digressing into theology and maybe even deconstruction, and neither discipline interests me very much. What does interest me is another, related implication I see in your remarks. I put it as a question: what is the status of error, evil, failure in poetical work? Like yourself, most are happy to imagine the carnival of interpretation, the dialogue of endless errant reading. But if the primary texts are themselves errant and ideological, how are we to read them? Certainly not as transcendent models. They seem, in this view, more like images of ourselves: confused, mistaken, wrong–and perhaps most so when we imagine them (or ourselves) reasonably clear and correct. If poetry delivers the best that has been known and thought in the world, it falls sadly short of our desires.

     

    GM: Perhaps what Arnold meant was that it gave us the best of all possible worlds–where the possibilities are understood, from the start, as finite and limited. That, in any case, seems to be Shelley’s point in his remarks about composition and inspiration.

     

    JJR: And perhaps the optimal of this possibility comes not from poetry’s “perfection” so much as from the completeness of its self-presentation? Then the shortfall of desire would arrive without the illusion that it could have been otherwise. And it would arrive that way because the message and the messenger–the poems themselves–are implicated in that shortfall of desire. So we come to Shelley once again: when composition begins, inspiration is already on the wane–you know the rest.

     

    GM: Ah yes, the mind in creation is as a failing code.

     

    AM: But suppose, as Jay said earlier, that the poems are “errant and ideological”–just like the interpretations of the poems? Shelley was never happy about the didactic aspects of his own work, even though he–quite rightly too–could never abandon his didacticism. His theory of inspiration waning through composition seems to me part of the long-playing record he left us of his uneasiness on this score.

     

    Most professors tend to read his theory in a Kantian light–by which I mean they hold out an ideal of poetry that transcends ideology and didacticism. Look at the way Browning is read, for instance. His dramatic monologues, we are told, escape the didactic subjectivism of Browning’s early romantic mentor. So a poem like “My Last Duchess” becomes a model of poetic objectivity.

     

    GM: Quite rightly too.

     

    AM: Well, to me the poem is nothing but a little Victorian sermon.

     

    GM: You can’t be serious.

     

    AM: I couldn’t be more serious. “My Last Duchess,” for instance, is largely constructed as a critique of aristocratic pride, which Browning associates with the desire to possess and control. The villainy is especially heinous, according to this poem, because of its object: an adorable woman. But note that the poem is completely uncritical in its association of the woman with beauty. Her value comes from her beauty–which is why the Duke has enshrined her in, and as, a work of art.

     

    Implicit here is the notion–one finds it all over Browning’s poetry–that life (as opposed to art) is a primary value, and that art’s office is to celebrate and broadcast this primary value.

     

    GM: Do you have any problem with that?

     

    AM: I’m not devaluing the poem, I’m just reading it. But I could point out that some excellent readers– Baudelaire comes immediately to mind, and so does Lautreamont–would surely find Browning’s sermon insufferable, and would just as surely choose to take the Duke’s part.

     

    But leaving that aside, I have to point out another implication of the poem. The Duke is judged harshly by the text because he wants to keep the Duchess to himself. This desire is seen as especially wicked because of the way the Duchess is presented: as a lovely and spontaneous creature who enjoys and is enjoyed by the company of all classes. Now this representation of the Duchess is not so different from the Duke’s representation in one crucial respect: both take her as a thing of beauty that might be a joy forever, both take her–essentially– as an aesthetic image. The poem does not judge the Duke harshly for thinking her adorable–Browning’s poetry never does that–but only for wishing to keep her for his private pleasure.

     

    GM: In short, the poem seems to you sexist.

     

    AM: No question about it. It is not a bad poem because of its sexism, of course. But it is ideological for that (and other) reasons–by which I simply mean it is a poem that makes moral representations which someone might reasonably acknowledge. . . .

     

    JJR: And contest. * * * *

     

    JM: Sorry about that–the tape ran out. But I’ve put in a new one now, so let’s go on.

     

    AM: Just as well too, that interruption. We started talking about dialogics and interpretation and then wandered off into Browning and the ideology of poetic form.

     

    GM: But we also started with Bakhtin in our minds, and in his work dialogism is a function of the (primary) fictions, not of the (secondary) interpretations. Hermeneutics as dialogical is our appropriation of Bakhtin.

     

    AM: Don’t say “our,” say “your.” To me there is a sharp difference between the poetical and the interpretive field, though the two interact. But it is not a dialogical interaction because–as Socrates once pointed out to Protagoras–the texts of the poets don’t talk to us.6 We interrogate them. For their part–like Arnold’s Shakespeare–they abide our question. Of course we can choose to imagine our primary texts as “intertexts” and thus treat them as if they were “dialogical.” This is what Bakhtin does with novels, and he does it very well. But we should be clear about the metaphoric license he is taking when he treats fictional works as dialogical.

     

    GM: And so we find ourselves in a wonderfully Derridean situation. Interpretation–like this conversation of ours–is dialogical, and now reveals itself as the prior (substantive?) ground for the metaphoric extension of dialogics to fictional work and poetry.

     

    JJR: Composition as prior to inspiration?

     

    GM: Why not? It’s simply another way of saying that scripture is philosophically prior to Logos.

     

    JM: May I ask a question? It may seem absurd, I realize, and somewhat beside the point of what you’re talking about. But I don’t see how we can not ask this question now that the conversation has completed a kind of Heideggerian circle.

     

    What is a dialogue? I have a tape in my hand with an electronic record of the first part of this conversation.7 And as I listen to you talk, I watch the turning of the new spool, I watch a record being made of people talking. It makes me think a distinction has to be drawn somewhere that is not being drawn–perhaps a distinction between what we might call “conversation” on one hand and “dialogue” on the other.

     

    Maybe what we’re doing now is not “dialogue.” At any event, it seems very different from the following. Here, read this. * * * * AN ABC OF INTERDISCIPLINARITY. A DIALOGUE. by SHERI MEGHAN

     

    A: As Moses Hadas always used to say: “The only interesting talk is shop talk.”

     

    B: All shops are closed shops, more or less. Suffocating. If you’re not a professor and you find yourself, by circumstance, dropped among a bunch of professors at lunch, how interesting do you imagine you will find their conversation?

     

    C: Well, suppose you came there as an ethnographer. Then the shop talk might seem very interesting indeed.

     

    A: But it wouldn’t be shop talk anymore it would be ethnographic information. And if the professors were conscious of themselves as ethnographic subjects, even they would not be producing shop talk any longer.

     

    B: A blessed event, the coming of the ethnographer to the ingrown conversations of the closed shop. And more blessed still should she come to the smug halls of late- 20th century academe. Enlightened halls, open–or so their citizens like to think–to every kind of talk.

     

    A: And so they are.

     

    B: Only if the talk is framed in a certain way. The academy is the scene where knowledge has been made an object of devotion. Its two gods, or two-personed god, are science (positive knowledge) and philology (the knowledge of what is known). It is a cognitive scene, a scene of calculations and reflections. It is the country for old men. Children, whether of woman or of Jesus born, do not come there–unless it be to leave behind their childlikeness.

     

    C: They do not come because the knowledge of the childlike person is experiential rather than reflective.

     

    B: Socrates in his trance, Alcibiades in his cups?

     

    C: They will do nicely as signs of what both justifies and threatens every symposium, every state–the Outsiders that are within. Admired and hated, sought and feared; finally–because every state, every closed shop, is what it is–expelled.

     

    B: And what then of your ethnographer, that darling of the modern academy? Is it not the ultimate dream of Wissenschaft that all things should submit to reflection, that experience itself should become–field work? In the ancient world of Plato that sick dream appeared as the Socratic philosopher; more recently it came as the nightmare of the positive scientist, mystified forever in the figure of Wordsworth’s Newton, “voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.” Mary Shelley lifted his mask and we glimpsed the haunted face as Victor Frankenstein, whose monstrous creature is the index of Frankenstein’s soul as it has been observed through the lens of an outsider’s–in this case, a woman’s–sense of the pitiful.

     

    C: So you don’t care for ethnographers either.

     

    B: Well, they are our latest Faustian types. Benevolent colonialists. Today their shop talk–it is called Cultural Studies–has given the modern academy some of its most effective means of self-mystification. As if the academy could harbor within itself its own outsider, its own critical observer.

     

    A: That “critical observer” you are imagining is the real illusion. All observers are inside the shop. If they weren’t they wouldn’t even know about the shop, couldn’t see it, and hence couldn’t talk at all. Shop talk is “interesting” because people share their differences.

     

    C: So for you it is not merely that “The only interesting talk is shop talk”; more than that, “Shop talk is all there is!”

     

    A: Exactly. But some shop talk is more interesting than other shop talk.

     

    C: And what makes it more interesting?

     

    A: Every shop has many conversations going on inside of it all the time. The most interesting conversations are those that get everybody else talking–talking about them, or talking in their terms.

     

    B: But where do those new and interesting conversations come from? Inside the shop?

     

    A: Evidently.

     

    C: Why “evidently”? Is the rapt Socrates inside or outside? And what about Alcibiades–drunk or sober? We all remember how, and where, he died.

     

    B: Inside or outside, it doesn’t matter. The point is that every shop must be something other than what anyone, inside or outside, could think or imagine it to be. The shop must be, in some sense, beside itself. Irrational. Other than itself. Otherwise it cannot accommodate–either conceptually or experientially– anything “new.”

     

    A: Put it that way if you like. Shop talk is often irrational. Just so you don’t bore us with ideas about absolute critical differentials.

     

    B: Have it so if you like. Just so you don’t insult us with ideas about knowing or accommodating otherness. No shop–no academy–can do so. Otherness comes like a wolf to a sheepfold. Later, when the damage is done, the priests–let us say, the professors–will indulge their shop talk of explanations.

     

    * * * *

     

    JM: This dialogue was originally presented in the spring of 1990, at a conference on Herder that was held in Charlottesville, Virginia. Meghan presented it at a panel discussion that took up the (very Herderian) question of interdisciplinarity.

     

    JJR: It seems to be a kind of position paper making an ironical critique of the form, or idea, of position papers as such. Perhaps in order to ask that critical reflection precede the taking of positions.

     

    GM: Or perhaps to make a game of critical reflection as such. I was at the conference, Joanne, and I think you ought to tell everyone that the dialogue was not given by anyone named Sheri Meghan. It was written and delivered by Jerome McGann. Sheri Meghan is just a mask– part of the dialogue’s ABCs.

     

    JM: I wasn’t trying to conceal that fact. The masquerade is crucial.

     

    GM: Maybe so, maybe not. But what about McGann? Was he just playing around, making a parade of cleverness?

     

    AM: Right. If it’s all just a masquerade, what’s the point? The dialogue’s ironies just get more ingrown. And look at the conclusion, where nothing is concluded: C stands altogether silent at that point, while A and B simply make a pair of smart, dismissive remarks.

     

    JM: You’re all missing my point. I ask again: what is a dialogue, what is this dialogue? Or suppose I ask: where is it? Right now we have been reading it as a printed text I passed out. In 1990 it was delivered orally by McGann (in his Meghan masquerade) at the Herder conference. It seems to me that the dialogue is not at all the same thing under those two different conditions. When it was orally presented, it was–surely–part of McGann’s way of taking a position–whatever that position was, however we define it.

     

    GM: The position of not taking a position.

     

    JM: If that’s what he was doing, it’s a position. But let me set your question aside for a moment–only for a moment, I promise. Whatever McGann was doing at the Herder Conference, here the dialogue has become part of my taking a position. Those two positions–whatever they are–may be symmetrical, but they probably aren’t. At least they don’t seem so to me. I introduced McGann’s text here because I wanted to interrogate the idea of dialogue–to get us to interrogate it–in a different light.

     

    It’s the tape machine that set me thinking this way. Here we’re talking and there our talk is being gathered and edited and turned into something new. I want to say this: our talk is being translated from conversation into dialogue.

     

    GM: Of course. Because the talk is being given a secondary, as it were a literary, form.

     

    JM: But the point is that every secondary world, every mimetic construction, comes to us under the watchful eyes of its recording angel. Isn’t this what the ancients meant when they said that memory is the mother of the muses?

     

    Let’s assume that the splendid dialogues of Oscar Wilde have no originary “conversational moment.” Let’s assume, in other words, that they neither carry nor erase the memory of such a moment. Let us assume they are pure inventions. Even so, they cannot escape their recording angel. For they will always be a record of themselves. Even as pure invention they set down a documentary record of what went into the construction of their fictionality.8

     

    Nor must we imagine that this documentary moment can be separated off from the fictional moment. An abstract separation can be made for special analytic purposes. Whatever the usefulness of such an abstraction, it will obscure and confuse the record that the fiction is making of itself–and hence will obscure and confuse the fiction.

     

    GM: I don’t understand exactly what you’re talking about, Joanne. What’s this idea about fiction making a record of itself?

     

    JM: Simply that all imaginative work appears to us in specific material forms. Many people–even many textual scholars–don’t realize the imaginative importance of those material forms. Blake’s work reminds us that the way poems are printed and distributed is part of their meaning. That process of printing and distribution is essential to “the record that fiction makes of itself.” It locates the imagination socially and historically. When Emily Dickinson decided not to publish her poems, when she decided to gather her handwritten texts into a series of “little books” which she kept to herself, those acts and their material forms comprise part of the record her work makes of itself. They are a crucial framework which Dickinson constructed for making her meanings, and which we need if we are to understand and respond.

     

    I could give you similar examples from all the writers I know well. Which is why I say that a recording angel presides over the transcendental imagination. Her descent to earth in the twentieth-century came, as usual, in masquerade. She once appeared, for example, as Bertolt Brecht, whose great project was to re-establish the theatrical unity of knowledge and pleasure, truth and beauty, instruction and entertainment. His guiding principle–it took many practical material forms–was what he called “the alienation effect.” By it he wanted to encourage the audience’s critical awareness of the entire fictional presentation. This required the theatrical event to document itself at the very moment of its dramatization. “Footnotes, and the habit of turning back to check a point, need to be introduced into playwriting” in order to break the hypnotizing spell of aesthetic space, where spectators (or readers) are not encouraged “to think about a subject, but within the confines of the subject.”9

     

    Brecht called his project “epic theatre” because it introduced what he called a “narrative” element into the dramatic space. This narrative documents what is happening on the stage, adds footnotes to the action, supplies references. Now it seems to me that dialogue might be distinguished from conversation along similar lines. Dialogue puts conversation in a literary frame, and by doing this it documents its own activities: literally, gives them a local habitation and a set of names.10

     

    GM: There’s nothing especially novel about all this. What you describe is just the “moment of reflection” that hermeneutics has always recognized in literary work. It’s the moment that interpretation seeks to extend and develop through the (re)generation of meanings.

     

    JJR: No, it’s much more than that. Brecht’s (or is it Joanne’s?) recording angel operates according to Feuerbach’s eleventh thesis, where the point is not simply to “interpret the world” but to “change it.” Brechtian theatrics are socialist and polemical throughout–as we see in the following passage, which Joanne did not choose to quote, even though it is the continuation of one of the texts she was reading to us. Brecht distinguishes between the (old, passive) “dramatic” theatre and the (new, engaged) “epic” theatre: The dramatic theatre’s spectator says: Yes, I have felt like that too–Just like me–Only natural–It’ll never change–The sufferings of this man appal me, because they are inescapable–That’s great art . . .–I weep when they weep, I laugh when they laugh. The epic theatre’s spectator says: I’d never have thought it–That’s not the way. . .–It’s got to stop–The sufferings of this man appal me, because they are unnecessary–That’s great art. . .–I laugh when they weep, I weep when they laugh. (Brecht on Theatre, 71) Brecht’s documentation is not positivist–a matter of keeping good records; it’s interventionist. The recording angel is a figure of judgment and even apocalypse, a figure come to reveal secrets of good and evil that have been hidden, if not from the beginning of time, at least throughout human history. The angel opens up the book of a new life, turns the world upside down. The outcome is anything but the pluralist heaven of hermeneutics.

     

    GM: Well, you could have fooled me. Here I’m talking in a dialogue that labels itself as such, in the best Brechtian fashion. Joanne makes a parade of her self- consciousness about dialogues and conversations; she wonders “what” a dialogue is, “where” it is? But what and where am I? Surely I’m plunged in the very “heaven (or hell) of hermeneutics” itself–a paradise of pluralism and shop talk.

     

    I mean, whose play are we acting in here? Joanne tells us in a charming metaphor that “a recording angel” made “her descent to earth . . . in masquerade.” But all this is no metaphor, my friends. All this is a masquerade! Let’s set the record straight about that at any rate. Let’s add another Brechtian label and get everything out front. We’ll call this “The Puppet Theatre of Jerome McGann.”

     

    JEROME MCGANN: Did you think I was trying to conceal myself? Surely it’s been evident right along that all of this–you four in particular–are what Blake used to call the vehicular forms of (my) imagination. Masquerade allows us to turn concealment into purest apparition. It is manifest deception.

     

    GM: Fair enough, but then what is this masquerade all about, what are you trying to get across? You may say you’re not trying to conceal yourself, but you let us go on arguing and discussing different ideas and we begin to forget all about you. We even begin to think that we are different–different from each other, different from you. But we’re not, we all come out of the same rag and bone shop.

     

    JEROME MCGANN: Well, just knowing that is pretty interesting. Especially today when “the star of Bakhtin has risen in the West.” People and texts are supposed to be the repositories of conflicting voices–or at any rate different voices. Rainbow coalitions and so forth. Richness in diversity. But there is always (what did Ashbery call it?) a “Plainness in Diversity” and it’s just as well to be aware of it, don’t you think?

     

    GM: Who cares what I think–“I” don’t think at all. The question is, what do you think!

     

    JEROME MCGANN: I think you’re more involved in thinking than you realize.

     

    GM: I’m just a textual construct.

     

    JEROME MCGANN: So you say–a puppet in a puppet theatre. Whereas I’m flesh and blood, of course.

     

    AM: Sometimes I think we have more life than we realize– or at least that we might have more. Thou wert not born for death, immortal bird, No hungry generations tread thee down. I’m that bird, I think. What did Shakespeare say? Not marble nor the gilded monuments Of princes shall outlive this pow’rful rhyme. Flesh and blood is all very well, but texts have their own advantages.

     

    GM: We don’t think, we have no identities. He does. Whatever we do is done for us. Someone will read me and tell me what I mean. It’s true that different people might make me mean different things. We’ve all been told about the openness of the text and the freedom of the reader. But what do I care about reader responses? They make us seem little more than empty tablets, waiting to be written on.

     

    JEROME MCGANN: As I said, I think you’re more involved in thinking than you realize.

     

    GM: What are you getting at?

     

    JEROME MCGANN: Thinking only gets carried out in language, in texts. We sometimes imagine that we can think outside of language–for instance, in our heads, where we don’t exteriorize the language we are using in language’s customary (oral or scripted) forms. But the truth is that all thought is linguistically determined.

     

    You whine about being a textual construct. But you’re able to think for precisely that reason. And so am I, and so are we all. We’re all textual constructs.

     

    GM: What sophistry.

     

    JM: On the contrary, what truth! We really do think because we are textual constructs, and we do so because thinking is the play of different ideas, the testing of the limits and the possibilities of ideas. Why complain that this masquerade seems, in one perspective, a professor’s monologue? It’s not the only way to see it. In any case we are testing limits and possibilities.

     

    GM: No we’re not. He is–if anyone is.

     

    JM: What about someone listening to all this, or reading it?

     

    GM: Sure, but they’re flesh and blood too. It’s people who think, not texts, not the masks that people fashion and put on.

     

    JEROME MCGANN: But my idea is that texts are the flesh and blood of thought–that we are all masked creatures. I’ve written this dialogue–constructed even an ingrate like yourself–to pursue that thought, or perhaps I should say to have it pursued, maybe to be pursued by it.

     

    Take yourself, for instance. You’re always surprising me. You think you’re just a puppet, but the truth is that I often don’t know what you or I or anybody else here might do or say next. This whole last five minutes of conversation we’re having. I never planned it, never even thought about it until a friend of mine read what you called my puppet theatre and queried its masquerade in ways I hadn’t thought about. And then she challenged me about it, and we talked back and forth, and I came back at last to you. And so I started writing some more–writing what we’re arguing about now.

     

    How did those changes happen? There’s a writer– let’s call him me; and there’s a reader–my friend; and then there’s all of us, we textual constructs. Don’t we have any responsibility in this masquerade?

     

    AM: But you’re not one of us! And the answer is no, we don’t. The responsibility is all yours, yours and your friend’s, and all the other (re)writers and (re)readers of texts.

     

    But I agree with you in this much anyhow: we aren’t blank tablets or empty signs. We are characters, we have histories. If masks are disguises, they take particular forms. It makes a big difference what face you put on when you engage in masquerade.

     

    JEROME MCGANN: So, Georg, don’t ask me what I think about all this. Interrogate the masks if you want to know that. The question is not: “Why do you move in masquerade?” We all do. The question is: “Why does your masquerade take the form that it does? Why these characters and not others?”

     

    AM: But there are other questions as well. Odd as it might seem, Jerome, one might not be especially interested in what you thought about this dialogue, or what you had in mind for it. The dialogue isn’t yours, isn’t even your friend’s. The dialogue is an independent textual construct and has a life of its own–indeed, has many lives of its own. All texts do. Dialogue is interesting because it dramatizes the presence of those multiple lives and their competing voices.

     

    Bakhtin used to say that novels were dialogical but poems were monological. But he was wrong in this. In a sense, poetry is far more “dialogical” (in Bakhtin’s sense) than fiction just because poetry asks us to pay attention to the word-as-such, to focus on the text as it is a textual construct. Poetry thus makes us aware of the masquerade that is being executed by even the most apparently transparent of texts. By this text, for instance–Robert Frost’s well known jingoist lyric “The Gift Outright.” The land was ours before we were the land’s. She was our land more than a hundred years Before we were her people. She was ours, In Massachusetts, in Virginia, But we were England’s, still colonials, Possessing what we still were unpossessed by, Possessed by what we now no more possessed. Something we were withholding made us weak Until we found out that it was ourselves We were withholding from our land of living. Such as we were we gave ourselves outright (The deed of gift was many deeds of war) To the land vaguely realizing westward, But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced, Such as she was, such as she would become. That was written during the height of the Second World War–a pretty piece of patriotism. But the text says much more than it realizes because language always stands in a superior truth to those who use the language. Blood spilled in this poem’s land becomes the sign of the right of possession. But who is the “we” of this poem, what are those “many deeds of war”?

     

    One word in this text–“Massachusetts”–reminds us that this supremely Anglo-American poem cannot escape or erase a history that stands beyond its white myth of Manifest Destiny. That central New England place, Massachusetts, is rooted in native american soil and language, where the very idea of being possessed by land– rather than possessing it or conquering it in martial struggles–finds its deepest truth and expression. Unlike “Virginia,” “Massachusetts” is native american, red- skinned. Colonized by another culture and language, that word (which is also a place and a people, red before it could ever be white) preserves its original testimony and truth;11 and when it enters this poem, it tilts every white word and idea into another set of possible meanings and relations. “Virginia,” for example, which is a lying, European word12–a word whose concealments are suddenly revealed when we read it next to “Masssachsetts.” When I read this poem, those “many deeds of war” include the Indian Wars that moved inexorably “westward.” In this poem, I think, all blood is originally red.

     

    Where do such different voices come from? Language speaks through us, and language, like Tennyson’s sea, moans round with many voices. In “The Gift Outright” we see how some voices come unbidden–come, indeed, as outright gifts so far as the intentionality of the authored work is concerned. Because the poem’s rhetoric is preponderantly and unmistakably Euro-American, “Massachusetts” sends out only a faint signal of the (otherwise great) hidden history the word involves. And it is important that we see the signal come so faintly and obliquely–so undeliberately, as it were–when we read the poem. The faintness is the sign of important historical relations of cultural dominance and cultural marginality. The whole truth of those relations, imbedded in this text, would not be able to appear if Frost had not given his white, European mythology over to his poem’s language, where it finds a measure of release from its own bondage. A measure of release.

     

    This is why I care about what you think, Jerome–and also about what you don’t think. Because you’re one among many–in the end, one of us. As you say, a textual construct.

     

    JEROME MCGANN: “Zooks, Sir! Flesh and blood, that’s all I’m made of.”

     

    Notes

     

    1. See Gerald L. Bruns,”The Hermeneutics of Midrash,” in The Book and the Text: The Bible and Literary Theory, ed. Regina Schwartz (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 196-7.

     

    2. See Keats’s letter to Benjamin Bailey, 22 Nov. 1817, in The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins (Harvard UP: Cambridge, MA, 1958), I. 43.

     

    3. See “A Defence of Poetry”, in Shelley’s Prose, or The Trumpet of a Prophecy, ed. David Lee Clark (U. of New Mexico Press: Albuquerque, 1954), 294.

     

    4. See S.T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (Princeton UP: Princeton, 1983), I. 304.

     

    5. See The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plate 11.

     

    6. See Plato’s Protagoras 347c-348a.

     

    7. The text here is not based directly on the tape referred to by McGrem, but upon the printer’s-copy typescript. The latter may or may not give an accurate and complete record of the original conversation. Our text appears to begin in medias res, so it may not represent the whole of “the first part” of the conversation that was apparently on the tape McGrem mentions.

     

    8. None of Joanne McGrem’s interlocutors queried her on this point. But one would like to know if she meant that the documentary record is complete. To us, such completion seems hardly possible.

     

    9. Brecht on Theatre. The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. by John Willett (Hill and Wang: New York, 1964), 44. The emphasis here is McGrem’s, not Brecht’s.

     

    10. At this point one might hazard the following descriptions of the different positions being taken in the dialogue. Mannejc sees interpretation as dialogue; Rome sees criticism (critique) as dialogic; Mack seems to regard poetry, or imaginative writing generally, as dialogical; and finally McGrem turns the distinction completely around and argues that dialogue is poetry, or at any rate that it is a non-informational form of discourse.

     

    11. The word names the tribe which ranged the Boston area, and it means something like “near the great hill.” The reference is, apparently, to the Great Blue Hill south of the city.

     

    12. I believe the phrase “a lying, European word” must be an allusion to Laura Riding’s great poem “Poet: A Lying Word” (the title piece in the volume Poet: A Lying Word [Arthur Barker Ltd.: London, 1933], 129-34).

     

  • “A Suspension Forever at the Hinge of Doubt”: The Reader-trap Of Bianca In Gravity’s Rainbow

    Bernard Duyfhuizen

    Univ. of Wisconsin–Eau Claire
    <pnotesbd@uwec>

     

    No matter how much we work on Gravity’s Rainbow, our most important interpretive discovery will be that it resists analysis–that is, being broken down into distinct units of meaning. To talk about Bianca is to talk about Ilse and Gottfried; to try to describe the Zone is to enumerate all the images of other times and places that are repeated there. Pynchon’s novel is a dazzling argument for shared or collective being–or, more precisely, for the originally replicative nature of being.
     

    –Leo Bersani

     

    Leo Bersani is right about Gravity’s Rainbow‘s resistance to analysis, yet if we pursue the “dazzling argument” in the particular case of Bianca, we find not only more than Bersani acknowledges but also elements for a strategy for reading Thomas Pynchon’s postmodern text. This strategy rests on the formal element of the “reader-trap”: stylistic and thematic techniques that on the one hand court the conventional readerly desire to construct an ordered world within the fictional space of the text, but that on closer examination reveal the fundamental uncertainty of postmodern textuality. Rather than reducing a reader-trap to a “distinct unit of meaning,” readers must adopt for GR a postmodern strategy of reading in which the reader avoids privileging any specific piece of data because the text, in its implied poststructuralist theory of reading, thematically attacks the tyranny of reductive systems for knowing the world. The reader must engage the play of differance encoded in GR‘s textual signs to avoid falling into traps of premature narrative closure.

     

    What makes Bianca a reader-trap? First, she is part of a matrix of intersecting stories that could be labeled the “Tales of the Shadow-Children,” a matrix which produces the stories that readers construct about Bianca, Ilse Pokler, Gottfried, and by analogy Tyrone Slothrop. She becomes simultaneously a represented character(complete with genealogical relations) and a trace of textuality (an arrangement of semiological relations that is never totally fixed). This double nature of her character is figured the first time we hear of her when Slothrop, under the alias of Max Schlepzig (Bianca’s putative father), reenacts with Margherita Erdmann the moment of Bianca’s conception during the rape scene at the end of the movie Alpdrucken (393-97). As a shadow- or movie-child, Bianca maps onto these other children; thus what we know about one (both from referential and semiological epistemologies) depends on what we know about the others. Bianca’s mother, for instance, sees “Bianca in other children, ghostly as a double exposure…clearly yes very clearly in Gottfried, the young pet and protege of Captain Blicero” (484). As readers, if we want to avoid the trap of correspondences, we must mark the intersections and the double exposures, even though the effect produced is often an increased undecidability.

     

    Second, Bianca is coded as one of Pynchon’s examples of the dehumanizing effects of perverse fetishism:

     

    Of all her putative fathers--Max Schlepzig and masked extras on one side of the moving film, Franz Pokler and certainly other pairs of hands busy through trouser cloth, that Alpdrucken Night, on the other--Bianca is closest [. . .] to you who came in blinding color, slouched alone in your own seat, [. . .] you whose interdiction from her mother's water-white love is absolute, you, alone, saying sure I know them, omitted, chuckling count me in, unable, thinking probably some hooker... She favors you, most of all. You'll never get to see her. So somebody has to tell you.1
     
    (472; bracketed ellipses added)

     

    As is often the case in GR, the passage closes off by shifting to a second-person address that may be directed at Slothrop, who has just left her after their sexual encounter, but also seems to address–through images of sexual imperialism and a reference to Pokler that could not yet be part of Slothrop’s consciousness–the text’s male narratees and ultimately its male reader/voyeurs. I will defer until the final section of this essay the significant questions of gender and reading presented by this passage and others like it.2 Indeed, this issue may itself be one of the most problematic aspects of Pynchon’s writing. The question–Who are the narratees of this text?–cannot be left unanswered.

     

    Lastly, Bianca is a reader-trap because of her relationship with Slothrop. If GR has, besides the V-2 rocket, a “central” protagonist around whom readers try to construct systems of meaning by following his picaresque adventures, Slothrop is it. Bianca is one of his many sexual experiences, one that is doubly coded by its analogy to Gottfried’s launch in rocket 00000 and her alignment with the “lost girls”–the Zonal shapes he will allow to enter but won’t interpret (567)–who haunt his journey through the Zone. Bianca must be read, therefore, within yet another play of representational and semiological doubling–a mapping onto that is both the same-and-different from shadow-child mapping–as she maps onto Darlene, Katje Borgesius, Geli Tripping, and even her own mother, Margherita. The text underwrites this process of mapping when Bianca is viewed as “silver” (484), the same color as Darlene’s star on Slothrop’s map (19) and as her mother’s “silver and passive [screen] image” (576), or with Greta’s (Margherita’s) mapping onto or merging into “Gretel” and finally “Katje” within Blicero’s sado-masochistic fantasy (482-86), which maps in turn onto Slothrop’s relations with both women. Bianca holds a special place within this metonymic play of sameness and difference, because her loss produces the most profound change in Slothrop’s behavior–he is finally freed of the will to erection that has dominated his psychological life ever since his childhood conditioning by Laszlo Jamf. Paradoxically, however, at the moment he might have a chance to formulate his own identity, Bianca’s loss prefigures Slothrop’s ultimate dissolution–indeed, after his encounter with Bianca, “Slothrop, as noted, at least as early as the Anubis era, has begun to thin, to scatter” (509). His experience with Bianca and his subsequent loss of her bring him, as we will see, face-to-face with his unconscious fears of his own death and bring the reader to confront the deconstruction of the semiotic codes that form Slothrop’s and Bianca’s textual representations.

     

    Bianca appears on the stage of the narrative in two consecutive episodes of GR (3.14-15). We meet her aboard the Anubis as seen through Slothrop’s eyes:

     

    He gets a glimpse of Margherita and her daughter, but there is a density of orgy-goers around them that keeps him at a distance. He knows he's vulnerable, more than he should be, to pretty little girls, so he reckons it's just as well, because Bianca's a knockout, all right: 11 or 12, dark and lovely, wearing a red chiffon gown, silk stockings and high-heeled slippers, her hair swept up elaborate and flawless and interwoven with a string of pearls to show pendant earrings of crystal twinkling from her tiny lobes...help, help. Why do these things have to keep coming down on him? He can see the obit now in Time magazine--Died, Rocketman, pushing 30, in the Zone, of lust.(463)

     

    The text’s focalization through Slothrop codes Bianca as a fetish, a “Lolita” if you will, and we later learn these heels are “spiked” (466), and the silk stockings are connected to “a tiny black corset” with “Satin straps, adorned with intricately pornographic needlework” (469). As the narrator comments later–in a passage metonymically structured to connect Bianca, Margherita, Blicero, the S-Gerat (a rocket part Slothrop has been seeking), Laszlo Jamf, Imipolex (the plastic from which the S-Gerat was made), and the Casino Hermann Goering (where Slothrop lost Katje)–“Looks like there are sub-Slothrop needs They know about, and he doesn’t” (490).

     

    Yet from a different perspective, Bianca’s fetishized outfit is a repetition of her mother’s outfit during her first encounter with Slothrop, when they reenact Bianca’s conception on the torture-chamber set of the film Alpdrucken:

     

    All Margherita's chains and fetters are chiming, black skirt furled back to her waist, stockings pulled up tight in classic cusps by the suspenders of the boned black rig she's wearing underneath. How the penises of Western men have leapt, for a century, to the sight of this singular point at the top of a lady's stocking, this transition from silk to bare skin and suspender! It's easy for non-fetishists to sneer about Pavlovian conditioning and let it go at that, but any underwear enthusiast worth his unwholesome giggle can tell you there is much more here--there is a cosmology: of nodes and cusps as points of osculation, mathematical kisses...singularities! (396)

     

    But the transition to the mathematical context leads this meditation on fetishism to an unsettling metaphor: “Do all these points imply, like the Rocket’s, an annihilation? [. . .] And what’s waiting for Slothrop, what unpleasant surprise, past the tops of Greta’s stockings here?” (396-97).3 What’s waiting first is “his latest reminder of Katje”–whose sexuality is figured in the text as both metaphor and metonymy of the rocket: “Between you and me is not only a rocket trajectory, but also a life,” Katje told Slothrop (209)–but more significantly, it is Bianca who waits to teach Slothrop and the reader something about the trajectory of annihilation.

     

    Slothrop’s vulnerability “to pretty little girls” is foregrounded early in GR when he comforts a little girl rescued from a V-2 hit, comfort she returns by smiling “very faintly, and he knew that’s what he’d been waiting for, wow, a Shirley Temple smile, as if this exactly canceled all they’d found her down in the middle of” (24). The moment of kindness, so crucially redemptive in Pynchon’s fiction, figures as Slothrop’s primal response, and while in London, before his paranoia has gone out of control, Slothrop can care directly. Once he reaches the Zone, however, his ability to connect becomes problematic as in the opening of part 3 when, by burning human/doll’s hair, he conjures out of the shadows a dancing child he maps onto Katje: “he turned back to her to ask if she really was Katje, the lovely little Queen of Transylvania. But the music had run down. She had vaporized from his arms” (283). Both these children prefigure Bianca, but the empirical reality of the first has been replaced by the hallucination of the second, a slippage between fantasy and reality that dogs Slothrop through the rest of the text and especially in his encounter with Bianca. Neither is the reader immune to this slippage which s/he may seek to repress by evoking the trap of an overtly mimetic strategy of reading.

     

    However, before Bianca takes center stage, Slothrop wanders off to listen to some gossip about Margherita, told by the woman whose handy cleaver almost dumped him into the river. But what he hears sounds like the voice of the text’s narrator offering a simple binary solution to the problems of narrativity and signification in the text:

     

    "Greta was meant to find Oneirine. Each plot carries its signature. Some are God's, some masquerade as God's. This is a very advanced kind of forgery. But still there's the same meanness and mortality to it as a falsely made check. It is only more complex. The members have names, like the Archangels. More or less common, humanly-given names whose security can be broken, and the names learned. But those names are not magic. That's the key, that's the difference. Spoken aloud, even with the purest magical intention, they do not work." "That silly bitch," observes a voice at Slothrop's elbow, "tells it worse every time." (464)

     

    If the “silly bitch” can be seen dialogically as a reflexive figuration of the narrator, then this “voice” may be, for a brief and estranged moment, Pynchon dialogically and reflexively commenting on his own text. We soon discover that the voice belongs to Miklos Thanatz who serves as a figure of narrative intersection: Margherita’s husband, Bianca’s stepfather, and–though we don’t know it yet– witness to the firing of rocket 00000. Indeed, Thanatz begins to tell Slothrop precisely what he and the reader have been desiring to hear, the magical names of Gottfried and Blicero, but….

     

    “About here they are interrupted by Margherita and Bianca, playing stage mother and reluctant child” (465). Margherita forces Bianca to perform a Shirley Temple imitation, and when she refuses to perform again, Bianca is publicly punished with a steel-rulered-bare-bottomed spanking–which triggers one of GR‘s set pieces: the everything’s connected orgy on board the Anubis. Bianca’s representation of “Shirley Temple,” in contradistinction to that “Shirley Temple smile” that warmed Slothrop’s heart in London, is a grotesque infantilization that ironically seeks to erase the war years and their horror, yet its perverse eroticism (accentuated by cultural contexts of sexual vulnerability that come through Slothrop’s point of view) precisely makes manifest the war/perversion dynamic explored in various other scenes that test the edge of a reader’s erotic tolerance. Clearly Bianca’s exploitation as a sexual object is a same-but-different version of Katje’s exploitation by Blicero or Pointsman, or Bianca’s mothers by von Goll for the film Alpdrucken.

     

    The public humiliation of Bianca is one of GR‘s many moments of theatre. Indeed, Slothrop wonders whether “somebody [is] fooling with the lights” as Bianca “grunts” through her Shirley Temple routine (466). The lights are, in fact, being fooled with: Slothrop’s perceptual creation of Bianca as an overtly fetishized Shirley Temple is the emblem in the text of errant reading. Slothrop’s specular projection of Bianca as infantile nymphet is a mise en abyme for the reader-trap the text is about to spring, a trap that this piece of theatre–focalized so thoroughly through the gaze of a male spectator–helps to mask.

     

    Throughout GR Pynchon demarcates the public and the private stages. On the public stage the character performs for others, even when the character is unaware of an audience (Slothrop under surveillance, for instance). The public performance usually originates from some form of coercion, manipulation, or exploitation. Since many of these performances align with what prevailing cultural formations would define as deviant sexuality, we can discern an analogy with “pornography,” but only at the level of story (although occasionally Pynchon has been accused of pornography at the level of discourse) and with a clear recognition of how conditioned Western patriarchal culture is to the semiotics of pornographic representation. Although “Pavlovian conditioning” may explain part of the dynamics of response to the pornographic, unwholesome pornography in GR is not necessarily in the sexual act itself or in its textual representation; it is, instead, in the systems of power and control that motivate the act–the ubiquitous “They” who operate just outside of view. This public stage is contrasted with the private moment, the free exchange of comforts–but this too is a conflicted stage, as the conventional entrapped reading between the private moment of Slothrop and Bianca makes clear.

     

    When Slothrop wakes up the next day (and in the next episode), Bianca is with him, offering herself as a manifest wish-fulfillment to his lust. This private “performance” for Slothrop nearly closes the “distance” between himself and Bianca, who now replaces her mother in a liaison that is not free from metaphoric and metonymic overtones of incest (Slothrop, impersonating Max Schlepzig, has already reenacted Bianca’s conception). But Bianca’s gift of sexual intercourse is also a plea for help. She suggests they “hide,” “get away,” quit the game which for Slothrop has ceased to be fun. For him, this act of kindness activates his socialized guilt–to be offered “love” is more than the Zone will allow. So Slothrop “creates a bureaucracy of departure, inoculations against forgetting, exit visas stamped with love-bites” (470). In leaving Bianca he makes a mistake that he will not realize until after he hears “Ensign Morituri’s Story” (474-79), but by then it is too late.

     

    Importantly, before he leaves Bianca, Slothrop’s consciousness is the nearly exclusive narrative filter for this tryst in which something “oh, kind of funny happens [. . .]. Not that Slothrop is really aware of it now, while it’s going on–but later on, it will occur to him that he was–this may sound odd, but he was somehow, actually, well, inside his own cock” (469-70). Of course the mediated narrative discourse that shifts Slothrop’s “later” thoughts into the present of this scene estranges the text and marks it as more hallucination than representation. Yet this startling image has trapped more than one reader into a perspectival blindness. Because Bianca’s character is primarily focalized through Slothrop, she functions at that edge of textual consciousness between fetishized objectification and hallucination. Bianca may “exist” (470) for Slothrop at this moment, but she, more quickly than Slothrop himself, soon slips into the textual unconscious, only to be recalled by dream and hallucination.

     

    If we grant that we cannot know Bianca because of the narrative filters of fetish and hallucination, can we even be sure–in a perfectly pynchonian paradox–of the certainty of our fantasy? It turns out we cannot because the text set this reader-trap long ago, and it is only by reading the cross mapping of her textual representation that we can see how the reader might misperceive Bianca and why many critics have misread her. More significantly, uncovering this reader-trap also uncovers the questions of gender and reading in GR.

     

    * * * * *

     

    When Bianca first appears, Slothrop calculates her age–an amazing feat in itself, given her get-up at the time–as “11 or 12.” Many readers hardly question this incongruous perception because the fetishistic plot, its theatrical representation, and its semiotic codes overdetermine the narrative at that moment. Moreover, the narrative concretizes our perception of a “preadolescent Bianca” by its descriptive references to her: “the little girl,” “a slender child,” “little Bianca [. . .] tosses her little head [. . .], her face,round with baby-fat,” and her “baby breasts working out the top of her garment” (469-70). Bianca is not the only female character who is perceived by Slothrop and other men in child-like terms. From the very first references to Slothrop’s map–“perhaps the girls are not even real” (19; emphasis added)–to his meeting again with Darlene (115), to his first sight of Katje (186), to his first awareness of Geli Tripping (289), to Trudi and Magda (365), to Stefania Procalowska and others aboard the Anubis (460, 466-68), and eventually to Solange/Leni Pokler (603) Slothrop encounters females as girls. Even Margherita, who is clearly older than Slothrop, is introduced as “his child and his helpless Lisaura” (393).4 In the semiosis of reading, these “girls” engage in a play of mapping that lays bare the repetition compulsion of the narrative as it underwrites the sexual politics of the Zone which finally come to a crisis in Slothrop’s encounter with Bianca, and it underwrites the sexual politics of reading.

     

    What does this infantilization signify? Could it be a collective fear of coming-to-age during the war and the later post-war systems of arrangement? One reading, a rather romantic one, might have it that to be young is still to hold a piece of innocence, but examined more closely, even this hopeful image rings hollow. If we accept Bianca’s age as Slothrop gives it, an incongruity emerges: Bianca’s erotic and sexual maturity (she, like many of Slothrop’s lovers, is more active than he is) dislocates these child-like representations. On the one hand, these images may be exaggerations projected from Slothrop’s fetishizing focalization; on the other hand, Bianca symbolizes the “child of the War,” the darling of those permitted to view Goebbel’s private film collection (461). She is one of Pynchon’s most poignant emblems of the human destruction caused by war. However, if we dislocate our reading and consider Bianca through cross-mapping with Ilse,her shadow sister, we discover that she was most likely born in 1929 and is much closer to 16 or 17 than she is to “11 or 12.”5

     

    If uncovering her likely age resituates our reading in one direction, freeing us from the trap set by Slothrop’s peculiar point of view, Bianca’s disappearance from the fictional universe after her liaison with Slothrop is equally vexed; indeed, McHoul and Wills state that “The fate of Bianca highlights the problem with reading Gravity’s Rainbow…. One will never know just what does happen to her” (31).6 Bianca has told Slothrop she knows how to hide (470), but her next “appearance” is brief and problematic:

     

    Slothrop will think he sees her, think he has found Bianca again--dark eyelashes plastered shut and face running with rain, he will see her lose her footing on the slimy deck, just as the Anubis starts a hard roll to port, and even at this stage of things--even in his distance--he will lunge after her without thinking much, slip himself as she vanishes under the chalky lifelines and gone, stagger trying to get back but be hit too soon in the kidneys and be flipped that easy over the side. (491; emphasis added)

     

    What actually happens here is hard to say–Slothrop does end up over the side, but does Bianca? Slothrop only “think[s]” he sees her–she is becoming insubstantial already–and her vanishing is a symbolic erasure. But is it she who “vanishes under chalky lifelines” or Slothrop who “slip[s] . . . under” while she “vanishes”?7 As McHoul and Wills note, it “hinges on how one reads the syntax” (31).

     

    All life lines in GR are subject to erasure, but traces are left in the mind–especially Slothrop’s– and in the text. The traces are sometimes known only by their absence; for instance, 170 pages after this scene, in a passage that challenges how readers produce meaning in GR, we read: “You will want cause and effect. All right. Thanatz was washed overboard in the same storm that took Slothrop from the Anubis” (663). Bianca is missing from this passage if one wants a textual construction (a statement from the here dramatically foregrounded narrator) that will affirm that Bianca did indeed go over the side during the storm; at the same time this passage suggests a natural causality–“the same storm”–for Slothrop going overboard, putting into question but not necessarily overturning the likely possibility that someone had “flipped” him over the side. However, in the deconstructionist logic of the reader-trap, Bianca’s absence from this textual representation cannot definitely tell us whether she remained on the Anubis either.

     

    Bianca’s traces always test our readerly desire for causality. After Frau Gnahb rescues Slothrop from his trip overboard, he falls asleep and “Bianca comes to snuggle in under his blanket with him. ‘You’re really in that Europe now,’ she grins, hugging him. ‘Oh my goo’ness,’ Slothrop keeps saying, his voice exactly like Shirley Temple’s, out of his control. It sure is embarrassing. He wakes to sunlight” (492-93). Momentarily we breathe a sigh of relief “thinking” that she has made it, but her speech pattern is identifiably Slothrop’s and he has adopted her Shirley Temple voice. Something’s not right, and when “he wakes,” he is alone, and we see this trace of Bianca as a dream. Later that morning, when Slothrop meets von Goll, he “fills von Goll in on Margherita, trying not to get personal. But some of his anxiety over Bianca must be coming through. Von Goll shakes his arm, a kindly uncle. ‘There now. I wouldn’t worry. Bianca’s a clever child, and her mother is hardly a destroying goddess’” (494). Meant to “comfort” Slothrop, von Goll’s characterizations allow Slothrop to repress his anxiety for the moment, but as we will see, the return of the repressed is not far away. Given the text’s compulsion to repeat within a same-but-different logic of mapping, the reader aligns this Bianca/Slothrop escape fantasy with the Ilse/Pokler escape fantasy (420-21). In that startling scene at Zwolfkinder, the narration does not signal its shift into a fantasy mode, and some critics have been trapped and have taken literally the scene of “amazing incest” that precedes the escape fantasy–a reading that would seriously undermine Pokler’s eventual moral position in the text.

     

    The most disturbing trace of Bianca re-enters the narrative when Slothrop returns to the Anubis to pickup a “package” for von Goll (530-32).8 As he returns to the site of his tryst with Bianca, Slothrop descends into the private hell of his own consciousness. Motivated by a return of his repressed “Eurydice-obsession” (472), Slothrop seemingly discovers the dead Bianca’s body, but like Orpheus he cannot bring his Eurydice back from the dead. But does he discover her? Nearly the entire scene takes place in total darkness (the specular image is unrepresentable), but the psychic reminders force Slothrop to confront his betrayal of Bianca and his fears of her death, and his possible implication in that death. Through a gauntlet that metonymically repeats Brigadier Puddings ritual approach to the Mistress of the Night (Katje)–“the pointed toe of a dancing pump,” the “ladder,” “stiff taffeta,” “slippery satin,” “hooks and eyes [. . .] lacing that moves, snake-sure, entangling, binding each finger.”

     

    He rises to a crouch, moves forward into something hanging from the overhead. Icy little thighs in wet silk swing against his face. They smell of the sea. He turns away, only to be lashed across the cheek by long wet hair. No matter which way he tries to move now...cold nipples...the deep cleft of her buttocks, perfume and shit and the smell of brine...and the smell of...of... (531)

     

    “When the lights come back on” (532) (recall Slothrop’s earlier concern that someone was “fooling” with the lights), we receive no confirmation that the text represented whatever actual events Slothrop experienced–indeed, I would argue he only experiences this nightmare psychologically. The confusion of sensory images conflates two deaths for Bianca: death by drowning and death by hanging. But the text never deploys the signifier “Bianca” in this scene; instead, the text offers a set of metonymies that may or may not signify the “presence” of Bianca’s body. “When the lights come back on,” Slothrop does not directly see her; he sees only the “brown paper bundle” he was sent to retrieve, its enigmatic contents a mise en abyme for his experience and an emblem for the best way to read this scene. The scene closes with a last challenge to specular acts of reading: “But it’s what’s dancing dead-white and scarlet at the edges of his sight…and are the ladders back up and out really as empty as they look?” (532). As with the two ellipses that mark the close of the longer passage just quoted, the ellipsis points here mark the site of absence, the dead-white page showing through the text and yet another site of repetition if we recall the opening of Bianca and Slothrop’s tryst: “In the corner of his vision now, he catches a flutter of red” (468). But can the text and its reading, linear like a ladder “back up and out,” be “really as empty” as it looks? The reader can let this scene either remain enigmatic or decide the undecidable–to paraphrase Tchitcherine much later in the text: “[It] could be anything. I don’t care. But [it’s] only real at the points of decision. The time between doesn’t matter” (702). Bianca last “existed” for Slothrop at the moment of decision when he climbed the ladder to leave her (470-71) and at the moment on deck when he “lunge[s]” to save her (491) only to lose her–does she exist elsewhere?

     

    Many readers read mimetically the scene of Slothrop’s return to the engine-room of the Anubis, stating that he does in fact discover Bianca’s body; some are even convinced that Margherita has murdered her daughter. Yet reading in this way misses the psychological dynamic the text builds around Slothrop’s anxiety over the intersection of sexuality and death that haunts his experience. It misses the text’s implicit questioning of Western culture’s perverse fetishization of the child. It is no stray detail that Slothrop dreams of a conversation with the White Rabbit of Alice in Wonderland when Bianca comes to him–as Henkle observes, “we all know about Lewis Carroll’s supposedly illicit feelings toward little girls; we all understand what Shirley Temple’s fetching little dance steps aroused” (282).9 Moreover, a mimetic reading misses the postmodern narrative function of Bianca’s decharacterization to the level of a cipher and trap for readers who want teleologically to complete her story by a represented death scene.

     

    After Slothrop’s return to the Anubis, Bianca’s trace enters the narrative only four more times. The first trace appears when the text lists some of the wishes Slothrop, now headed for Cuxhaven, makes upon evening stars. The seventh wish is “Let Bianca be all right [. . .]” (553). Either Slothrop has no certainty of Bianca’s fate or he is repressing what he knows; the case is complicated by the coupling of the Bianca wish with “[. . .] a-and–Let me be able to take a shit soon.” The text seems to be laying a trap for the Freudian reader–the ass-bites of their first encounter (469) and the smell of “perfume and shit” that Slothrop calls up in the engine room (531)–who may want to argue that Bianca’s memory has become cathected with Slothrop’s anal fixation. Can any reader ever forget Slothrop’s hallucinatory journey down the toilet in 1.10? That drug-induced nightmare, which occurred because of Pointsman’s involvement, connects back to Slothrop’s childhood conditioning by Laszlo Jamf (when he should have been moving through the anal stage of his psychosexual development, Jamf may have been displacing the smell of Slothrop’s own feces with the smell of Imipolex–if indeed that was the stimulus used).10 I suggest this set of connections may be a trap because reading GR through Freud calls for paradigms of totalization that the text will inevitably undercut even though structures of wish-fulfillment and dreamwork proliferate in the narrative. Interestingly, however, the Bianca wish is preceded by a significant Slothrop wish, although it is at the same time a bad pun on the shit-wish: “Let that discharge be waiting for me in Cuxhaven.” This wish (ultimately to return home to his mother?) will not come true in its literal form, but the quest for it leads Slothrop almost into Pointsman’s plot for his castration and to his last dream of Bianca.

     

    The second trace of Bianca occurs when Slothrop meets Franz Pokler:

     

    Well, but not before [Pokler] has told something of his Ilse and her summer returns, enough for Slothrop to be taken again by the nape and pushed against Bianca's dead flesh.... Ilse, fathered on Greta Erdmann's silver and passive image, Bianca, conceived during the filming of the very scene that was in his thoughts as Pokler pumped in the fatal charge of sperm--how could they not be the same child? She's still with you, though harder to see these days, nearly invisible as a glass of gray lemonade in a twilit room...still she is there, cool and acid and sweet, waiting to be swallowed down to touch your deepest cells, to work among your saddest dreams. (576-77)

     

    This time Slothrop’s memory contravenes his wish only 23 pages earlier as he is “taken again by the nape and pushed against Bianca’s dead flesh.” This passage appears to confirm Bianca’s death. However, while we come upon this cross-mapping alert to the alignment of Ilse and Bianca, for Slothrop this is a new coincidence that, because of Pokler’s significance to the S-Gerat plot, instantly feeds his paranoid paradigm of reading: “how could they not be the same child?” Moreover, “She” (Bianca/Ilse) will now, if not already, “work among your [Slothrop/Pokler/the reader’s] saddest dreams.”

     

    The third trace is in the cross-mapping dreams of Slothrop and Solange/Leni Pokler: “Back at Putzi’s,” after Slothrop has unwittingly escaped castration but not received his wished-for discharge,

     

    Slothrop curls in a wide crisp-sheeted bed beside Solange, asleep and dreaming about Zwolfkinder, and Bianca smiling, he and she riding on the wheel, their compartment become a room, one he's never seen, a room in a great complex of apartments big as a city, whose corridors can be driven or bicycled along like streets: trees lining them, and birds singing in the trees. And "Solange," oddly enough, is dreaming of Bianca too, though under a different aspect: it's of her own child, Ilse, riding lost through the Zone on a long freight train that never seems to come to rest. She isn't unhappy, nor is she searching, exactly, for her father. But Leni's early dream of her is coming true. She will not be used. There is change, and departure: but there is also help when least looked for from the strangers of the day, and hiding, out among the accidents of this drifting Humility, never quite to be extinguished, a few small chances for mercy.... (609-10)

     

    This is one of the text’s most positive images–Leni’s early dream (156) seems to be moving from the story to the discourse as the dialogic narrative erases the distinction between the character and a narrator who appears to extend to the reader the small comfort of knowing Ilse will be all right. Ironically, Leni will never know within the space of the text what the narrator says (nor will Franz know it), but the small chances for mercy are crucial to holding back the bleakness that is otherwise so pervasive in this fictional universe. If Ilse makes it, does Bianca? It depends on how much plot producing power we grant to textual cross-mapping and dreaming in our readerly formation. As we will see with Thanatz’s ordeal riding “the freights,” this hopeful image of “a few small chances of mercy” might vanish. We’ll never know for certain either way; our reading decisions on such points may say more about our readerly desires than about what the text says.

     

    Slothrop’s dream clearly maps onto Pokler’s experience with Ilse at Zwolfkinder in 3.11, but its shift into the unknown room (significantly not where “Once something [the Imipolex conditioning?] was done to him, in a room, while he lay helpless” [285]) seems to be a shift to a life-affirming set of natural images–trees and singing birds. Slothrop’s greater attention to nature and its restorative powers has been building since the time of his wishes on evening stars (“Slothrop’s intensely alert to trees, finally” [552]), and it will become his distinctive emblem in the fourth part of GR. Lastly, Bianca maps onto Leni’s dream because, in a passage I will examine in the next section, she too has a dream that shares the central image of the “passage by train” (471), but the narrator here has no discourse of comfort and we know Bianca has been “used.” Her traces are problematic because they cannot be disentangled from Slothrop’s psychic processes of coping with his experience of betraying her confidence and not providing her a small chance for mercy. Thus the experience takes different shapes in his mind, which is then mediated for the reader by the narrative discourse that arranges sets of textual associations and intersections that establish paradoxes at best. The last traces of Bianca, however, do not come to us through Slothrop’s consciousness–Thanatz, Bianca’s step-father, provides the last traces, and although these cannot confirm her life or death, they deepen her character and extend the textual network of her narrative function as shadow-child.

     

    Thanatz first recalls Bianca while he “rides the freights” with other DP’s and longs to molest “a little girl”–he fantasizes the event using Bianca as a reference: “pull down the slender pretty pubescent’s oversize GI trousers stuff penis between pale little buttocks reminding him so of Bianca take bites of soft-as-bread insides of thighs pull long hair throat back Bianca make her moan move her head how she loves it” (669-70). The passage recalls Slothrop’s encounter with Bianca (469-70), though it may represent only Thanatz’s desire to molest and not a memory. Thanatz then recalls his experiences with Blicero on the Heath and the firing of rocket 00000 (the story he tried to tell Slothrop), but this leads him to make a connection Margherita had also made: “He lost Gottfried, he lost Bianca, and he is only beginning, this late into it, to see that they are the same loss, to the same winner. By now he’s forgotten the sequence in time. Doesn’t know which child he lost first, or even [. . .] if they aren’t two names, different names, for the same child [. . .] that the two children, Gottfried and Bianca, are the same” (671-72). As his confusion grows he conjures up one last (and the text’s last) specular image of Bianca, returned to the fetishistic coding of a masculine gaze: “a flash of Bianca in a thin cotton shift, one arm back, the smooth powdery hollow under the arm and the leaping bow of one small breast, her lowered face, all but forehead and cheekbone in shadow, turning this way, the lashes now whose lifting you pray for…will she see you? a suspension forever at the hinge of doubt, this perpetuate doubting of her love–” (672). The shift to the second person problematizes this last image; is it addressed to Thanatz or to the reader?

     

    What do we gain by discovering Bianca’s age, questioning her textual appearance and disappearance, and reading her last traces–her “suspension forever at the hinge of doubt”? First we see that characters in GR are semiotic systems as much as they are represented entities produced by characterological reading. Moreover, they are constructs produced by other characters; Bianca is always a hallucination, a movie-child of others’ fantasies and fetishes. Second, individual plots are the result of characters mapping onto one another to form a semiotic matrix of representation. Third, we must reread Slothrop’s relationship to Bianca and to the other women in the text. And lastly, the concept of the reader-trap allows us to read the differance at play in GR and to see conventional strategies of reading deconstructing as patterns of stable meaning dissolve amid fragmented and conflicting traces. The reader-trap reveals Pynchon’s text as multi-layered and multi-dimensional, proclaiming its aesthetic and narrative richness in the uncertainty generated by its complexity, but the question of gender and reading, of GR, still remains.

     

    * * * * *

     

    If we grant that GR encodes a narrative transaction between mimetic representation and fantasy, then we must also ask whose fantasies are these? and, Do these fantasies evoke different reading responses? As the example of Bianca shows, Slothrop’s (and in the end Thanatz’s) fantasies and hallucinations overdetermine her representation until she loses personality and becomes a fetish, a figure of cultural formation: the child as erotic object. Although recognizing and avoiding the reader-trap allows a reader distance to read beyond the fetish, to attempt to read character as a system of signs that mean only in relation to other signs, we must ask how this strategy of rationalizing textualization engages the reader’s sensibility, and specifically how it interacts with the reader’s gender formation.11

     

    If the reader-trap of Bianca’s representation in GR, as I have argued, is to read her as a fetish–a representation similar to those associated with her mother and with Katje–then we must also recognize the predominantly masculine gender perspective in the text. Cast in the role of male voyeur (figured in the text by Ensign Morituri), the reader is presented with the dilemma of becoming complicit or resistant. The textualization that limits Bianca to only the role of fetish underwrites a sexual politics that operates at different levels in our acts of reading. There is no denying that Bianca gets “used” in and by the text, but in the power struggle between fetishistic and resistant reading, a struggle the reader-trap helps to stage, we can discover a dialogic strategy of reading GR.

     

    Although reading GR teleologically can lead to misreadings, it is hard to ignore the power of plot as a means of organizing textual material. Thus one way of reading Bianca is to see her as a projection of Slothrop’s needs–innocence and fetish all mixed up. His abandonment of her after their encounter (just as he has abandoned all the other women before) is in a metonymic sequence that underwrites the dysfunctional nature of his sexuality caused by his childhood conditioning. He stays longest with Margherita because she represents a mother who both satisfies his Oedipus complex and satisfies his need– through a logic of transference–to punish his real mother for the conditioning she allowed his father (“pernicious pop”) to submit him to. The subtext of incest in his encounter with Bianca overloads his psyche to the point that he recalls the event as a moment of becoming totally phallic and being fully incorporated into the object of desire. Their mutual orgasm symbolically represents a rebirth for Slothrop though he realizes this (if at all consciously) too late to save Bianca.

     

    Slothrop must first hear Ensign Morituri’s story (474-79), which tells him of Margherita’s pre-war alter ego of Shekhinah–a destroying Angel who psychotically murdered Jewish boys–an alter ego Morituri believes Slothrop has resurrected when he was brought on board the Anubis. Slothrop’s immediate response is to worry about Bianca: “‘what about Bianca, then? Is she going to be safe with that Greta, do you think?’…. But where are Bianca’s arms, her defenseless mouth[?]…. There is hardly a thing now in Slothrop’s head but getting to Bianca” (479-80). But she has disappeared, and although he believes she is only hiding and that he will find her, he must also listen to Margherita’s story (482-88). Her story takes him as close as he will come to the truth of the S-Gerat and Imipolex, but also to the truth about Katje and Blicero and Gottfried. When she tells of her last days on the Heath, the various metonymic chains of plot clash, allowing Slothrop to break through a barrier of dependency. Slothrop doesn’t enact his own talking cure; instead, he experiences a listening cure as the stories of Margherita finally extinguish his will to erection. But it is too late:

     

    He's lost Bianca. Gone fussing through the ship doubling back again and again, can't find her any more than his reason for leaving her this morning. It matters, but how much? Now that Margherita has wept to him, across the stringless lyre and bitter chasm of a ship,s toilet, of her last days with Blicero, he knows as well as he has to that it's the S-Gerat after all that's following him, it and the pale ubiquity of Laszlo Jamf. That if he's seeker and sought, well, he's also baited, and bait. (490)

     

    Although granted this realization, Slothrop is in too far, and try as he might, he cannot quit the game; he cannot extricate himself from Their trap.

     

    But that does not mean that he is not changed by his experience. The loss of Bianca breaks the metonymic chain of Slothrop’s womanizing. When he joins Haftung’s dancers– who comment like a Greek chorus on the apparent sexism in the text: “‘Tits ‘n’ ass,’ mutter the girls, ‘tits ‘n’ ass. That’s all we are around here’” (507)–he does not have one of his trademark, hyperbolic sexual encounters. The same goes for the girl (“about seventeen,” Bianca’s age) he encounters when he becomes the archetypal pig hero, Plechazunga (571-73), and for his encounter with Solange/Leni at Putzi’s (603, 609-10). As far as Slothrop is concerned, Bianca marks a closure of the sexual excess that has been a major pattern of his character.12 But seeing how she has changed Slothrop is only half the story; we must still look at the one moment in the text that seemingly represents Bianca’s consciousness–a moment in which she achieves subjectivity and steps beyond her figuration as fetish.

     

    As Slothrop hesitates on the ladder leading away from Bianca, the text marks his “Eurydice-obsession,” but more importantly this leads to a meditation (possibly in Slothrop’s consciousness, at least focalized through him) on representation: “‘Why bring her back? Why try? It’s only the difference between the real boxtop and the one you draw for Them.’ No. How can he believe that? It’s what They want him to believe, but how can he? No difference between a boxtop and its image, all right, their whole economy’s based on that…but she must be more than an image, a product, a promise to pay” (472). The passage raises the issue of Bianca’s representation and our ability to tell the difference among the various images of her that complicate our readerly process for assigning her signifiers a referential signified, what one might be tempted to call “the real thing.” If we read “They” in this passage as the patriarchy, then the sexual “economy” of objectification and fetish is uncovered. The cover story of the erotic nymphet must be turned aside to understand the “differ[a]nce between a boxtop and its image.” The pun here is crude; the “boxtop” metaphorically represents Bianca’s hymen that has been torn open, not simply to get at what was inside but also to be transferred into another system of exchange–a system that claims correspondence between a signifier (boxtop) and a representation of a signifier (“the one you draw for Them”). No purchase necessary. Void where prohibited by law. The law of the patriarchy prohibits the reading of the void–the “suspension forever at the hinge of doubt”–because to read the void is to find the text inscribed on the image, a text that is different from the one They allow.

     

    Bianca’s text is hard to read. As I have been arguing, the textual set of signifiers that stage her representation is a trap, one we can now delineate as the production of a nearly exclusive patriarchal gaze and the phallocentric addresses to a male narratee. This male narratee, like Slothrop at first and constituted by the text’s limited focalization through Slothrop, construes “Bianca” as a fetish and fails to construe her “true ontological being” (a representation we can only speculate about). One might well ask if such a construal is possible in postmodern texts or necessary to postmodern reading; I would say “yes” if one senses, as I do in reading “Bianca,” that the text represents, however inconclusively, another set of signifieds. There is a textual moment that, although problematic in many respects, may let us finally see “Bianca” (the inverted commas now marking this sign’s differance from the phallocentric sign that has dominated reading so far). As Slothrop turns his back on Bianca and heads up the ladder, “The last instant their eyes were in touch is already behind him….”

     

    Alone, kneeling on the painted steel, like her mother she knows how horror will come when the afternoon is brightest. And like Margherita, she has her worst visions in black and white. Each day she feels closer to the edge of something. She dreams often of the same journey: a passage by train, between two well-known cities, lit by the same nacreous wrinkling the films use to suggest rain out a window. In a Pullman, dictating her story. She feels able at last to tell of a personal horror, tell it clearly in a way others can share. That may keep it from taking her past the edge, into the silver-salt dark closing ponderably slow at her mind's flank...when she was growing out her fringes, in dark rooms her own unaccustomed hair, beside her eyes, would loom like a presence.... In her ruined towers now the bells gong back and forth in the wind. Frayed ropes dangle or slap where her brown hoods no longer glide above the stone. Her wind keeps even dust away. It is old daylight: late, and cold. Horror in the brightest hour of afternoon...sails on the sea too small and distant to matter...water too steel and cold.... (471)

     

     

    The cross-references to Margherita are overt, and the repetition of Leni’s dream for Ilse is one more piece of their joint semiotic matrix. But “Bianca”‘s dream is less hopeful and symbolically more complex. Again we confront the problematic boundary between image (“nacreous wrinkling the films use”) and the real (“rain”), but in the paragraph’s modulating play of light, this cinematic metaphor forces a double displacement. What does it mean not only to dream in “black and white” (if we can conflate “visions” and “dream”), but also to dream in the overt stylization of German Expressionism? One almost expects her to dream through the film Emulsion J (387-88). But this is no dream of being in a movie; instead, it is the dream of the storyteller who dictates a tale of a “personal horror, tell[ing] it clearly in a way others can share.” In a text that most consider anything but “clear,” we might rationalize this tale’s absence; however, we must see that “Bianca” now represents the untellable, the feminine text that patriarchy tries to cover with such mythologies as the lunchwagon-counter girl Slothrop nostalgically recalls to place distance between himself and Bianca (471-72). Although “Bianca”‘s dream collapses that distance textually by setting itself in a “Pullman,” in an American context, we never know if it is enough to keep her from “the edge” and the “silver-salt dark” of drowning.

     

    A piece of “Bianca”‘s dictation does appear to reach us: “…when she was growing out her fringes, in dark rooms her own unaccustomed hair, beside her eyes, would loom like a presence….” Set off by the text’s ever-present ellipses, this passage of narrated monologue suggests a representation of “Bianca” different from the fetishized image that has deluded our readerly senses to this point. If this is a fragment of her tale of “personal horror,” then possibly we have a dictation of her initiation to sexuality, the first violation of her childhood at the moment of puberty, a rape by someone (by Thanatz? we cannot know for certain, but we might be able to justify reading differently his trace of her quoted earlier [670]) who “loom[s] like a presence.” To produce such a reading is to see “Bianca”‘s tale as coming through the body, but in this case, rather than being the text others write upon, her represented dreamwork marks a differant layer to the textual formation of her character. From this angle, the “11 or 12” projection Slothrop estimated for her age could now be seen as a displaced image from the textual unconscious–an image that her abuser(s) have inscribed over the real signifier of “Bianca.” Furthermore, by engaging the play of differance, this brief passage stages the problematic of presence/absence for character formation: if “Bianca” is already absent, replaced by Bianca, and even Bianca “vanishes,” replaced only by traces formed by the sexual memories of men (the first male narratees of the text of her body), the gendering of “presence” and the power of formulating the Real is placed under question. Significantly, this placing under question is not only an extratextual interpretive move of GR‘s readers, but it is figured in the text by Slothrop’s own scattering and Thanatz’s existential breakdown over Blicero and the “reality” of Gottfried’s fate.

     

    Reading Bianca through the fetishized image of the body has been the dominant interpretation of her textual ontology, but the fragment of her dictation can guide us to reread these textual representations. One example should suffice to show how such a rereading may be deployed. Earlier I quoted the oft-cited passage of Slothrop’s memory of total phallicization–“he was [. . .] inside his own cock“; this sort of phallic writing of Slothrop’s body pervades the text and inevitably produces phallocentric strategies of reading. The penis-eyed view that follows, complicated by the sexual ideologies (displaced incest, sexual abuse, pornographic staging) that converge at this moment, leads the text to one of its most symbolically significant orgasms: “she starts to come, and so does he, their own flood taking him up then out of his expectancy, out the eye at tower’s summit and into her with a singular detonation of touch. Announcing the void, what could it be but the kingly voice of the Aggregat itself?” (470). The focalization is through Slothrop, and the arresting slippage into the discourse system of the rocket stages once again the play of metaphor and metonymy, but this time with the inanimate rocket that has served as the center of Slothrop’s quest. Although Bianca “come[s]” too, the representation of her orgasm is absent–the “void” announced is the absence of the feminine voice that will counterbalance the “kingly voice” of annihilation by the most phallic weapon of war yet conceived.

     

    “Bianca”‘s dream takes us not to her orgasm, but to its aftermath, to “her ruined towers.” The “tower” is a pervasive metaphor and symbol in GR, and to pursue it would take this essay off on another set of tangents and cross-references. Nevertheless, we must observe in the last part of “Bianca”‘s passage (whether we are now in her dictation or again experiencing the mediation of the narrator is impossible to decide) that the symbols of “tower” and “light” will recur in the third line of the text’s closing hymn: “Till the Light that hath brought the Towers low / Find the last poor Pret’rite one…” (760). There are many ways to read these lines, one of which is to see an apocalyptic foreshadowing of either total annihilation or final judgment and redemption of the Preterite–the ellipsis points again ask us to engage the space of signification and the dynamic process of readerly desire: which reading do we want it to be? For “Bianca,” “the brightest hour of afternoon” has already passed, her textual trace has long vanished.

     

    Notes

     

    I would like to thank John M. Krafft, Terry Caesar, and Brian McHale who read earlier versions of this essay and provided helpful suggestions.

     

    1. For a thorough reading of this passage, see McHale, “You Used to Know,” 107-08.

     

    2. Pynchon has at least one passage, in which the narratee “you” is gendered as female, although the passage itself may refer analeptically to Leni Pokler’s childhood (she grew up in Lubeck [162]) and proleptically to Ilse’s trips with her father Franz to Zwolfkinder (398).

     

    3. Gravity’s Rainbow contains many meditations on fetishism; see in particular the nearly textbook description on 736 (cf. Freud). This description sets up Thanatz’s argument for “Sado-anarchism,” a reclaiming from the State of the resources of “submission and dominance” (737). Pynchon also explored fetishism in V. in the chapter “V. in Love” (see Berressem for a thorough reading of this chapter). Of course, Pynchon always places such meditations on the edge, slipping either into what McHale terms “stylization” Postmodern Fiction 21) or into parody, as Thanatz’s intertextual parody (though we might interpret Thanatz as unconscious of the implications of his parody) of “Freud” and Marx: “I tell you, if S and M could be established universally, at the family level, the State would wither away” (737).

     

    4. Although Gravity’s Rainbow here and on 364 clearly identifies Margherita as “his Lisaura,” Bianca is also signified in this allusion to the character in Wagner’s Tannhauser, an opera which organizes yet another of the text’s semiotic matrices.

     

    5. Newman is the only reader I have come across that comes close to dating Alpdrucken (during the filming of which Bianca was conceived) as 16 years before the text’s present time (107), and Weisenburger dates Pokler’s recollection of Ilse’s conception as “ranging back over sixteen years, its analepsis beginning in the late twenties, in Berlin, where the German rocket program began as an apparently innocent club, the Society for Space Travel” (194).

     

    6. McHoul and Wills read many of the same passages I examine here, yet their characterological reading that suggests “it may be Bianca who mugs Slothrop when he boards the Anubis again later, that is if she hasn’t hanged herself” (31) is problematic to say the least.

     

    7. This issue is further complicated by the fact that a ship’s crew during a storm often rig “life lines” about the deck to keep people from being forced too close to the side during a “hard roll.”

     

    8. Kappel suggests this package is the S-Gerat (236) and Hume and Knight suggest it is a piece of Imipolex G (304); neither of these suppositions strikes me as convincing although they play on the symbolic matrix of Slothrop’s possible conditioning to the odor of the plastic. Nevertheless, both suppositions underscore the readerly desire for enigmas to be resolved.

     

    9. See De Lauretis for a reading of the Alice image in terms of the sexual politics encoded in film, and by extension, the power of desire in the male gaze–the primary determinant of the framed image of women in the cinema.

     

    10. At some point I hope to write about the noses in Gravity’s Rainbow; one only has to recall Slothrop’s “nasal hardon” (439) to see another thread of cross-references (my guess is that, maybe under the influence of Nabokov at Cornell, Pynchon has developed a deep affinity with Gogol, especially his short story “The Nose”–a clear forerunner of postmodernism–and his technique of skaz narration). As for “shit” in Gravity’s Rainbow see Caesar and Wolfley.

     

    11. Although a definitive feminist reading of Pynchon’s writing is yet to be done, see the following early formulations of gender questions: Allen 37-51, Jardine 247-52, Kaufman, and Stimpson.

     

    12. See my essay, “Starry-Eyed Semiotics,” for an account of how readers are trapped into reading Slothrop as a personification of sexual excess.

    Works Cited

     

    • Allen, Mary. The Necessary Blankness: Women in Major American Fiction of the Sixties. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1976.
    • Berressem, Hanjo. “V. in Love: From the ‘Other Scene’ to the ‘New Scene.’” Pynchon Notes 18-19 (1986): 5-28.
    • Bersani, Leo. “Pynchon, Paranoia, and Literature.” Representations 25 (1989): 99-118.
    • Caesar, Terry. “‘Trapped inside Their frame with your wastes piling up’: Mindless Pleasures in Gravity’s Rainbow.” Pynchon Notes 14 (1984): 39-48.
    • Clerc, Charles, ed. Approaches to Gravity’s Rainbow. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1983.
    • De Lauretis, Teresa. Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984.
    • Duyfhuizen, Bernard. “Starry-Eyed Semiotics: Learning to Read Slothrop’s Map and Gravity’s Rainbow.” Pynchon Notes 6 (1981): 5-33.
    • Freud, Sigmund. Fetishism. 1927. Trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth, 1961. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. James Strachey. Vol. 21.
    • Henkle, Roger. “The Morning and the Evening Funnies: Comedy in Gravity’s Rainbow.” Clerc 273-90.
    • Hume, Katherine, and Thomas J. Knight. “Orpheus and the Orphic Voice in Gravity’s Rainbow.” Philological Quarterly 64 (1985): 299-315.
    • Jardine, Alice A. Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985.
    • Kappel, Lawrence. “Psychic Geography in Gravity’s Rainbow.” Contemporary Literature 21 (1980): 225-51.
    • Kaufman, Marjorie. “Brunnhilde and the Chemists: Women in Gravity’s Rainbow.” Levine and Leverenz 197-227.
    • Levine, George, and David Leverenz, ed. Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon. Boston: Little, Brown, 1976.
    • McHale, Brian. “‘You Used to Know What these Words Mean’: Misreading Gravity’s Rainbow.” Language and Style 18.1 (1985): 93-118.
    • —. Postmodernist Fiction. New York: Methuen, 1987.
    • McHoul, Alec, and David Wills. Writing Pynchon: Strategies in Fictional Analysis. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1990.
    • Newman, Robert D. Understanding Thomas Pynchon. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1986.
    • Pearce, Richard, ed. Critical Essays on Thomas Pynchon. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1981.
    • Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity’s Rainbow. New York: Viking, 1973.
    • —. V. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1963.
    • Stimpson, Catharine R. “Pre-Apocalyptic Atavism: Thomas Pynchon’s Early Fiction.” Levine and Leverenz 31-47.
    • Weisenburger, Steven. A Gravity’s Rainbow Companion: Sources and Contexts for Pynchon’s Novel. Athens, GA: U of Georgia P, 1988.
    • Wolfley, Lawrence. “Repression’s Rainbow: The Presence of Norman O. Brown in Pynchon’s Big Novel.” Pearce 99-123.

     

  • Derek Walcott and the Poetics of “Transport”

    Rei Terada

    University of Michigan at Ann Arbor
    <rei.terada@um.cc.umich.edu>

     

    Most North American critics and reviewers have come to see Derek Walcott as a deservedly celebrated poet, “natural, worldly, and accomplished” (Vendler, 26).1 Yet this very appreciation of the orthodox values of Walcott’s work–its learning, assurance, and metrical proficiency–has obstructed consideration of Walcott’s place in the postmodern era. Enthusiastic critics usually discuss Walcott as a “literary” poet and an imitator of the poetic past who perpetuates rather than reverses a traditional formalism.2 Indeed, the surface of Walcott’s language does not seem postmodern. Yet Walcott is obviously also a late twentieth-century postcolonial obsessed on the thematic level with cultural and linguistic displacement–a concern sometimes held to be a hallmark of postmodern literature.3 The vast majority of the small body of critical literature concerned with Walcott’s poetry dwells upon this dilemma, straining to reconcile the subversive postcolonial with the relatively conventional versifier.4 His readers most often argue that Walcott ponders displacement on the thematic level, but on the rhetorical level nostalgically denies it.5 By this logic, rhetoric and content in Walcott’s poetry fulfil contradictory psychological demands: either his forms speak the truth or his themes do, but not both. Other readers, meanwhile, believe that Walcott synthesizes perceived oppositions, or adopts the space between them as his own.6

     

    The difficulty in categorizing Walcott’s poetry is more interesting, however, for what it discloses of our own persistent discomfort at discrepancies between form and content. While most of postmodernism’s would-be definers do attempt to correlate formal and thematic properties, the uneasy relation between rhetoric and principle in Walcott prompts one to question the correspondences between rhetoric and principle that attempts to locate postmodernity may assume. If Walcott’s poetry dramatizes the postmodern knowledge of displacement without enacting it, this could indicate either that Walcott’s poetic contradicts itself (and thus that Walcott is only halfheartedly postmodern), or that definitions of postmodern language in terms of its estrangement from “ordinary” language are inadequate. Indeed, defining postmodernity by estrangement poses problems. It usually means, in practice, identifying postmodernity with literary language. The expectation that postmodern poets enact difference by manifest verbal dislocution also demands an orderly mutual echoing of content and rhetoric–precisely the kind of correspondence that postmodern literature tends to disavow.

     

    Walcott avoids separating “poetic” from “ordinary” language, but not by trying to make poetry sound ordinary. The poems do not aspire to transparency; they are as insistently figurative and artificial as they are intelligible. Indeed, James Dickey complains that Walcott seems at times unable “to state, or see, things without allegory” (8). Walcott acknowledges and at times even rues his dependence on allegory. He also fails, however, to find transparency in any kind of language whatsoever. Beginning with the intuition that poetry can only be allegorical, Walcott extends this knowledge to language as a whole. Although the poems reveal the inexorability of allegorical displacement without benefit of conspicuously postmodern linguistic disfiguration, the knowledge that perception can only be figurative–“allegorical” in de Man’s sense–and unstably so, is itself an essential insight of post- modernity. Walcott’s turns of thought here do infact resemble de Man’s. In Allegories of Reading de Man locates the poetic by means of figuration and in opposition to nonpoetic language, but in the same breath “equat[es] the rhetorical, figural potentiality of language with literature itself” (10, italics mine), and in no time asserts that “Poetic writing . . . may differ from critical or discursive writing in the economy of its articulation, but not in kind” (17). Walcott demonstrates what postmodern poetry might look like if it lived by these words. The overt disfigurations we associate with the poetry of an Ashbery or a Palmer would seem redundant in light of any real conviction that the disfigurations of allegory necessarily occur in all language. Walcott abstains from radically conspicuous forms of rhetoric not because he seeks transparency, but because of his conviction that any and all language depends upon rhetoric.

     

    Although Walcott does not confuse simplicity with transparency at any point in his career, his later poetry more explicitly dramatizes the ubiquity of “poetic” rhetoric–often because revaluation of the poet’s own work itself becomes a theme. “The Light of the World” The Arkansas Testament, 48-51), a wonderful example of tt’s late style, is more nearly Walcott’s ars poetica than any other single lyric. “The Light of the World” also considers the problems I’ve been discussing–the poet’s inevitable social and linguistic displacement and the relation of poetic to nonpoetic language–more completely than any other single lyric. The poem once again addresses Walcott’s persistent fear–expressed as early as “Homecoming: Anse la Raye” (1970; The Gulf, 84-86)–that poetry may be tragically removed from popular language (and indeed, from material life). But while Walcott more often deliberates this fear in terms of the poet’s social separation from his culture–by virtue of linguistic choice, or of his public’s literacy–“The Light of the World” assumes that poetry is based upon figuration, and inquires whether poetry’s reliance upon figuration divorces it from other linguistic forms.

     

    The poem’s aim to revaluate Walcott’s poetic is transparent, since Another Life, which first comprehensively narrates Walcott’s choice of vocation, turns upon its title phrase: “Gregorias, listen, lit / we were the light of the world!”7 Indeed, “another life” metamorphoses, in that volume, into “another light”: “another light / in the unheard, creaking axle . . . / in the fire-coloured hole eating the woods” (12.III.13-14, 17). In Another Life these phrases, “the light of the world,” “lux mundi,” “another light,” signify the passion, med by mortality, which drives both desire and creativity. In the course of the poem Walcott’s protagonist learns to sublimate passion into art which acknowledges its own origins in anxiety and ephemerality. Gregorias’ “crude wooden star, / its light compounded” by the “mortal glow” consuming it (23.IV.22-23), symbolizes such art in Another Life. “The Light of the World” even more explicitly represents Walcott’s art as a combination of transience and transport. Here the poet is a “transient” or tourist in his own culture, and the entire poem literally takes place in a “transport,” or van, between Castries and Gros Ilet. Although Walcott has not altered his own position regarding the value of these qualities, “The Light of the World” now asks whether reliance on figuration severs the poet from the community and the communal language with which he would most like to share transport.

     

    The poet is first inspired to think of the title phrase when he sees a beautiful woman sitting in the “transport” with him:

     

              Marley was rocking on the transport's stereo
          and the beauty was humming the choruses quietly.
          I could see where the lights on the planes of her cheek
          streaked and defined them; if this were a portrait
          you'd leave the highlights for last, these lights
          silkened her black skin; I'd have put in an earring,
          something simple, in good gold, for contrast, but she
          wore no jewelry. . . .
             . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
          and the head was nothing else but heraldic.
          When she looked at me, then away from me politely,
          because any staring at strangers is impolite,
          it was like a statue, like a black Delacroix's
          Liberty Leading the People, the gently bulging
          whites of her eyes, the carved ebony mouth,
          the heft of the torso solid, and a woman's,
          but gradually even that was going in the dusk,
          except the line of her profile, and the highlit cheek,
          and I thought, O Beauty, you are the light of the
                                                    world! (48)

     

    Although the poet perceives her at first as an individual woman, “the” beauty–“the beauty was humming the choruses quietly”–in the next moment he begins trying ways of seeing her as art, manipulating her image in a series of framings and figurations: “If this were a portrait . . . . the head was nothing else but heraldic . . . . like a statue, like a black Delacroix’s / Liberty Leading The People . . . the carved ebony mouth.” At the end of this sequence of figures, the poet finally addresses her as Beauty itself. The unnamed woman is now named “Beauty” with a capital B, and seems completely assimilated to the poet’s conception of her. Indeed, Walcott’s deepening aesthetic possession of the woman coincides with the gradual disappearance of her physical self in deepening darkness. In the moment before she becomes Beauty, nothing remains but a “profile” and a highlight. It is entirely possible that in the moment Walcott apotheosizes her, she completely disappears. Beauty may be “the light of the world,” but the apotheosizing capacity of Walcott’s own language is firmly associated with darkness.

     

    Although in his address Walcott’s comparison attains to metaphor–the woman is Beauty–the similes leading up to this transfiguration had been conscious of the tension between the individual woman and Beauty: “if this were a portrait”; “you’d leave the highlights”; “she looked at me, then away from me politely”; “I’d have put in an earring, / . . . but she / wore no jewelry” (italics mine). Walcott’s conjunction in “the heft of her torso solid, and a woman’s,” marks an uneasy nexus of formal strength with individual vulnerability, and of solidity with femininity (the sense of straining double consciousness, of near-paradox, is even stronger in an earlier version8 where Walcott writes, “solid, but a woman’s”). Yet the woman’s individual vulnerability, her mortality–“even that [solidity] was going in the dusk”–itself reminds the poet of art. Another Life had celebrated precisely that art which allows one to perceive its temporality, its “going in the dusk.” Even though the poet apprehends the woman’s apartness (“she wore no jewelry”), he still can’t completely distinguish, at least on temporal grounds, between her mortal, breathing beauty and his own also fragile idea of Beauty. On the other hand, if he cannot hold on to the distinction between the two, neither can he grasp their identity. His momentary metaphorization of her slips at the very moment at which it is apparently achieved. He names her “O Beauty,” but only in “thought,” in darkness, and in the ambivalent rhetorical figure of (de Manian) prosopopoeia. Even the triumphant moment of her naming requires its highly conventional capitalization of “Beauty” and interjection of “O” in order to ensure its recognition as poetic triumph. The presence of the beholder intrudes between the reader and the ostensible triumph, and between the reader and the object supposedly completely beheld. In the next moment it is no longer enough that the woman be Beauty. Beauty itself needs renaming by a further figure, “the light of the world,” and disappears into this figurative excess. In later references the woman is once again only “the woman by the window,” “her beauty.”

     

    Walcott’s correlation between the poet’s expanding transport and expanding darkness magnifies the connotations of “transience.” The poet passes from town to a hotel “full of transients like [him]self” (51),9 and at the same time voyages from life toward death. If this protagonist is a tourist, however, we are all tourists, since this is “the town / where [he] was born and grew up” (49). As tourist, he travels through a society itself transient: St. Lucia, since it is now so “full of transients,” may not last much longer in its present form. Walcott represents St. Lucia at large by means of the female figures in “The Light of the World,” just as he calls the Antillean population by a series of female names in “Sainte Lucie” Collected Poems 1948-1984, 309-323). Luce, of course, means “light,” and Beauty in the poem is also tied to light. The woman in the transport therefore represents St. Lucia, which for Walcott coincides with Beauty. Walcott underscores the fragile temporal development of St. Lucia by depicting a series of women at various stages of life, moving from “the beauty” to “drunk women on pavements” and a thought of his mother, “her white hair tinted by the dyeing dusk” (49).10 These secondary women seem even more exposed, more obviously mortal than “the beauty.” These elegiac thoughts further give rise to a reminiscence of the Castries market in Walcott’s childhood, in which the poet-figure of a lamplighter prominently appears: “wandering gas lanterns hung on poles at street corners . . . the lamplighter climbed, / hooked the lantern on its pole and moved on to another” (49). In the earlier draft, Walcott accents the fragility of the lamplighter’s art–“the light . . . was poised to be lit / on the one hand, and on the next to go out,” like that of the “fireflies” which act as “guides” later in the poem.11 Finally, the transport’s forward motion gives the sensation (as in Bishop’s “The Moose” or Frost’s “Stopping by Woods”) that everyone inside the transport is being carried toward death: “The van was slowly filling in the darkening depot. / I sat in the front seat, I had no need for time.”

     

    At the same time that the transport functions as a sort of Charon’s ferry, however, “transport” is also a synonym for “metaphor,” whose etymology includes the notion of “carrying.” Moreover, it’s clear that Walcott means “metaphor” in its larger sense, to include all figuration, and accepts figuration as a defining feature of poetry–so that “metaphor” functions, as usual, as a figure for figuration. Then too, “transport” can mean “ecstasy,” which bears the connotation of sexual desire as well as of rapturous lyric inspiration. In other words, the poet’s desire for “the beauty” and his aspiration toward poetic and formal Beauty simultaneously carry him–and all kinds of “beauty” with him–toward equally simultaneous would-be possession and oblivion. The poem begins with an epigraph from Bob Marley, “Kaya now, got to have kaya now . . . For the rain is falling”; the earlier version shows that Walcott originally misheard Marley, believing, charmingly enough, that Marley was singing “Zion-ah, / I’ve got to have Zion- ah”–a rendering which magnifies the apocalyptic character of the transport. “Kaya” is marijuana, as it happens, but whether the desired object be marijuana or Zion, “kaya” functions tautologically here, simply as “the desired,” as whatever it is one has “got to have.” “Kaya” also functions, like poetic transport, as a vehicle toward the destination of simultaneous heightened elevation and oblivion. By this point Walcott has accomplished more than a delineation of concurrent desires. He has asked whether metaphorical transport, in its ecstasy, either leaves its supposed subjects behind to unecstatic life and death, or carries them to oblivion by sweeping them up with it. The potential conflict is particularly obvious and painful when the inspired poet’s subjects are St. Lucian, poor and, in this case, mostly female.

     

    Yet another female figure enters the scene at this point–an old woman qualified by experience to speak for “her people,” whose voice alone the poet represents:

     

              An old woman with a straw hat over her headkerchief
          hobbled towards us with a basket; somewhere,
          some distance off, was a heavier basket
          that she couldn't carry.  She was in a panic.
          She said to the driver: "Pas quittez moi a terre,"
          which is, in her patois: "Don't leave me stranded,"
          which is, in her history and that of her people:
          "Don't leave me on earth," or, by a shift of stress:
          "Don't leave me the earth" [for an inheritance];
          "Pas quittez moi a terre, Heavenly transport,
          Don't leave me on earth, I've had enough of it."
          The bus filled in the dark with heavy shadows
          that would not be left on earth; no, that would be left
          on the earth, and would have to make out.
          Abandonment was something they had grown used to.
          And I had abandoned them, I knew that now. . . . (49-50)

     

    Several things are surprising about Walcott’s development of this metaphor (this transport). First, a North American critical audience will probably associate “transport” with politically undesirable transcendence and forgetfulness. But the old woman believes transport is “Heavenly,” a relief from her burdens, and so begs to be transported-and-not- abandoned–even though “abandon” is itself a synonym for “transport” when both mean “rapture.” At the same time, “abandon[ment]” in the negative sense inevitably accompanies figuration, since writing–substituting figuration for presence–marks the site of perpetually abandoned presence. Walcott further highlights the constitutional ambivalence of these words in his self-reversing line about shadows “that would not be left on earth; no, that would be left.” The line remains ambiguous in at least three ways. Walcott’s reversal could indicate the passage of time: it at first seems that all the shadowy bodies of villagers (also “shades” crossing between worlds) outside the transport will fit in; after a while, it does not. In addition, the first half of this line is “literal” (the passengers will not be left behind because they will get in the transport), and the second half “figurative” (they will be “left behind” because the poet will abandon them emotionally and linguistically). But, third and finally, “would” can also suggest preference or volition: they wanted transport, they wanted to be left on the earth. And this is what everyone is likely to feel: we want the universal, we want the particular. In “The Light of the World” (as in “The Schooner Flight,” whose protagonist Shabine is “nobody or a nation”), Walcott maintains a fierce consciousness of both poles.

     

    Further, if one believes that figuration is a specialized form of language which abandons the object world by its abstraction, it will confound one’s expectations that, as Walcott’s explication demonstrates, the “poetic” multiplicity of meanings in “transport” and “abandon” also occurs in the old woman’s speech. The old woman’s phrase is figurative to its core, as Walcott’s translation makes clear. “Pas quittez moi a terre” does not “denote” “Don’t leave me stranded.” Besides, “Don’t leave me stranded” is itself figurative, unless one’s friend is sailing away from the beach (as St. Lucia’s colonizers figuratively and literally did sail away). Translation begins by substituting supposed denotations, but can never end. Denotations, too, continually dissolve by mere “shift[s] of stress.” Likewise, poets sometimes do things for purely formal reasons, but Walcott recalls that people in his childhood neighborhood also “quarrelled for bread in the shops, / or quarrelled for the formal custom of quarrelling” (49).

     

    Walcott, rather like Wordsworth, is now moved by his own reflection that he “had abandoned them . . . had left them on earth,” to feel “a great love that could bring [him] to tears” (50). In this ecstatic experience of agape, of course, we reach yet another connotation of “transport.” Contrary to what one hears about agape, the poet’s love actually denies him oneness with the people around him. Instead, it takes the form of “a pity” that makes him feel his own isolation the more, the more hyperconscious he grows of “their neighborliness, / their consideration.” His pity, in other words, pulls him both toward and away from them, following the two directions of language–“tearing him apart,” as we so Orphically say. The poet suffers further when, in accordance with its mission as an engine of time, even those people who fit into the transport begin getting off. Each departure enacts a miniature death, and too clearly foreshadows the poet’s own:

     

                                             I wanted the transport
          to continue forever, for no one to descend
          and say a goodnight in the beams of the lamps
          and take the crooked path up to the lit door,
          guided by fireflies; I wanted her beauty
          to come into the warmth of considerate wood,
          to the relieved rattling of enamel plates
          in the kitchen, and the tree in the yard,
          but I came to my stop.  Outside the Halcyon Hotel.
          The lounge would be full of transients like myself.
          Then I would walk with the surf up the beach.
          I got off the van without saying good night.
          Good night would be full of inexpressible love.
          They went on in their transport, they left me on earth. (51)

     

    Another reversal occurs here, when, after having left his neighbors on earth through his language and his “transience” (his exile), his neighbors in turn leave the poet. One often encounters, in Walcott’s poetry, the idea that home can leave you. In the structurally similar “Homecoming: Anse la Raye,” the narrator already feels like “a tourist.” “Hop[ing] it would mean something to declare / today, I am your poet, yours,” he finds no one to listen to such a declaration except throngs of children who want coins or nothing. Caught in the impasse of this “homecoming without home,” “You give them nothing. / Their curses melt in air” (85). In contrast, fishermen cast “draughts” of nets, “texts” which help the children more ably than the poet’s. The poet can give the children only words, “nothing” in the way of coins; they return him, in kind, words which are curses.

     

    “The Light of the World” also features a mutual abandonment, the poet’s sense of pity and guilt, a confrontation between a “transient” and his people, and jealousy toward another artisan. Many critics, having cast Walcott in the role of “literary poet,” oppose him to the Barbadian poet Edward Brathwaite, a more “folkish” writer. In “The Light of the World,” Walcott compares himself to an apter and stronger competitor, Bob Marley. “Marley” is the poem’s first word; as the poem’s text stands under its epigraph from Marley’s “Kaya,” so Marley’s song–“rocking” (48), “thud-sobbing” (51), popular, choric, mnemonic– suffuses the whole transport. The “beauty was humming” Marley’s choruses, not Walcott’s; when the whole transport “hum[s] between / Gros-Ilet and the Market” (48), Marley’s song becomes indistinguishable from the motor which drives transport forward. This realization, as much as his confrontation with mortality, brings the poet “down to earth” (and leaves him there). The poet leaves his people on earth–that he could bear. What’s worse, he “le[aves] them to sing / Marley’s songs of a sadness as real as the smell / of rain on dry earth” (51), and the thought that they so gladly sing the songs of a competitor drives him to tears. The pill Walcott swallows here is, then, at least as bitter as that in “Homecoming: Anse la Raye.”

     

    But in “The Light of the World,” Walcott’s greater awareness of linguistic ambivalence and of tensions between universals and particulars far more precisely and gently renders a similar experience, without assuming a wishful intimacy or erasing difference. Walcott explores his own universalizing impulse most completely here. And in the end, the poem suggests that the “poetic” language of metaphor cannot be held apart from Marley’s language, from the old woman’s language, from all language. The poet faces insoluble problems of representation; and in a way, it doesn’t help that everyone who uses language faces these same problems and temptations. On the other hand, in the impossibility of controlling language and the inescapability of desiring to do so, as in the inescapability of death, we find a kind of community in poverty. The poem’s last stanza, which takes up after the poet has been “left on earth,” arrives like an extra gift, an unexpected bit of afterlife:

     

    Then, a few yards ahead, the van stopped.  A man
          shouted my name from the transport window.
          I walked up towards him.  He held out something.
          A pack of cigarettes had dropped from my pocket.
          He gave it to me.  I turned, hiding my tears.
          There was nothing they wanted, nothing I could give
                                                            them
          but this thing I have called "The Light of the World." (51)

     

    Again, as in “Anse la Raye,” the poet and his counterpart, representing his community, exchange virtually “nothing.” The man returns the cigarettes, while the poet turns speechless away: “There was nothing they wanted, nothing I could give them.” Walcott revises the Orpheus and Eurydice story here in a manner unflattering to the postmodern Orpheus.12 This Orpheus cannot take his Eurydice home because he is mortal himself, has no particular powers against death, and besides, she doesn’t belong to him and never did. He is too overcome to look back and deliberately leaves without parting, having accomplished nothing. In fact he assumes the passive position, so that the mortals (who have their own transport and their own music) look back at him. Much of this diminishment already occurs in Rilke’s “Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes.,” in which Eurydice reacts to news of Orpheus’ failure by asking, “Who?” As de Man points out,

     

    The genuine reversal takes place at the end of the poem, when Hermes turns away from the ascending movement that leads Orpheus back to the world of the living and instead follows Eurydice into a world of privation and nonbeing. On the level of poetic language, this renunciation corresponds to the loss of a primacy of meaning located within the referent and it allows for the new rhetoric of Rilke's "figure." (47)

     

    In Walcott’s as in Rilke’s version of the story, the poet figure retains little power or tragic dignity.

     

    Yet the two “nothings” the poet and the others in the transport exchange–unlike the “nothing” and “curses” in “Anse la Raye”–mean everything. This is how language works, conveying in spite of itself. The man’s gesture embodies all the warm “neighborliness,” “consideration,” and “polite partings” of his society which have moved the poet to write about it, and Walcott gives that society what he loves most, his lux mundi, beauty, poetry, even though he realizes that is all “but” nothing, and even a repetition of abandonment. Walcott’s description of the poet’s diminished powers sounds characteristically postmodern, if we understand postmodernism as a folding back from Modernism’s totalizing ambitions. But notice that this diminishment does not free the poet from communal responsibilities, or from his aesthetic and sexual desires.

     

    Poetic humility takes paradoxical forms. The more humbly the poet describes her or his own efforts, the greater she or he may believe poetry to be. In a way, Walcott’s recognition of the poet’s limitations makes his task even more ambitious, since it will be more difficult. Without the illusion of mastery over language, the poet still aims for communal relevance, beauty, and “truth”– which in “The Light of the World” means precisely recognizing the inescapability of rhetoric. Paradoxically, Walcott brings every poetic resource to bear upon the task of convincing us that “poetry makes nothing happen.” The performance is convincing–so convincing that it undoes its own point. Rhetoric here struggles to dismiss itself, and, predictably, cannot. Walcott’s last small “but” opens a floodgate through which poetic grandiosity and linguistic transcendence stream. Even by calling his poem “this thing,” he simultaneously metaphorizes and reifies it. By further calling “this thing” (already metaphorized by being called a thing) “The Light of the World,” Walcott enters the realm of undecidability. On the one hand, this last line is figurative and glorious: poems are, after all, the light of the world. On the other, it is merely literal and tautological. The title of the poem is, inarguably, “The Light of the World”; the phrase is a citation, referring us only to itself, and distances itself by its quotation marks from the notion of poetic glory. That is, since the title comprises a proper name, we cannot, as when Derrida writes of Ponge, “know with any peaceful certainty whether [it] designate[s] the name or the thing” (Derrida, 8). The reader cannot stand between these two interpretations to choose one. Neither can we decide whether “The Light of the World” actively produces and undoes these contradictions or whether these contradictions actively produce and undo it, for the process of disclosing the ubiquity of rhetoric also begins in self-knowledge and moves toward generalization, following the route of the universalizing impulse it queries. If Walcott’s interest in this particular query is postmodern, his postmodernity trails behind it Modernism’s tendency to universalize.

     

    But in this too Walcott’s example is at least instructive and at most representative. Attempts to define postmodernism solely by its difference from Modernism themselves echo Modern self-definitions. It may be typical of postmodernism to lose itself in the perspectivism of which it is so fond. According to Linda Hutcheon, postmodernism asks us to see “Historical meaning . . . today,” for example, “as unstable, contextual, relational, and provisional,” and at the same time “argues that, in fact, it has always been so” (67). If this is true, postmodernism can best be defined not as a noun, but as a verb; not as a set of attitudes or a grammar of rhetoric, but as inseparable from the propensity to read postmodernly. And if postmodern poetry characteristically inhabits and describes the circulation of these perspectives, Walcott’s metaphorization of himself as the figure of the contemporary poet will be difficult to assail.

     

    Notes

     

    1. For some representative reviews, see also Calvin Bedient, “Derek Walcott, Contemporary” Parnassus 9 [1981], 31-44); Paul Breslin, “‘I Met History Once, But He Ain’t Recognize Me’: The Poetry of Derek Walcott” TriQuarterly 68 [1987], 168-183); and Rita Dove, “‘Either I’m Nobody, or I’m a Nation’” Parnassus 14 [1987], 49-76).

     

    2. Vendler, for example, remarks that “Hart Crane, Dylan Thomas, Pound, Eliot, and Auden [follow] Yeats in Walcott’s ventriloquism” (23), and Sven Birkerts claims that “[Walcott] apprenticed himself to the English tradition and has never strayed far from the declamatory lyrical line. His mentors . . . include the Elizabethans and Jacobeans, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Yeats, Hardy, and Robert Lowell (who himself sought to incorporate that tradition into his work)” (31).

     

    3. Linda Hutcheon notes that “On the level of representation . . . postmodern questioning overlaps with similarly pointed challenges by those working in, for example, postcolonial . . . contexts” (37), and that “Difference and ex-centricity replace homogeneity and centrality as the foci of postmodern social analysis” (5).

     

    4. Both Vendler’s well-known review of The Fortunate Traveller and James Atlas’ New York Times Magazine story on Walcott, for example, are entitled “Poet of Two Worlds.”

     

    5. For Bedient, for example, Walcott’s language in “Old New England,” a poem in part about Vietnam, “places him curiously inside the dream, insulated there, enjoying it” (33).

     

    6. This last position is most often taken by Walcott’s fellow poets, especially Joseph Brodsky and Seamus Heaney.

     

    7. Another Life, 23.IV.11-12; also 12.III.21-22. I will refer to Another Life by chapter, section and line number.

     

    8. Paris Review 101 (1986), 192.

     

    9. Walcott had written “tourists like myself” in place of “transients” in the earlier draft of “Light.”

     

    10. “[F]ading in the dying dusk” in the Paris Review.

     

    11. Fireflies are among the favorite creatures in Walcott’s bestiary. He first mentions them in poetry in “Lampfall” The Castaway and Other Poems, 58-59), where they represent a fluctuating, delicate curiosity: “Like you, I preferred / The firefly’s starlike little / Lamp, mining, a question, / To the highway’s brightly multiplying beetles” (59). In Ti-Jean and His Brothers, the Firefly “lights the tired woodsman home,” and annoys the Devil by his mercurial gaiety (when “The Firefly passes, dancing,” the Devil barks, “Get out of my way, you burning backside, I’m the prince of obscurity and I won’t brook interruption!” Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays, 151]). In general, Walcott associates fireflies with the short-lived magic of words, whose meaning flashes on and off.

     

    12. Walcott explicitly reworks the Orpheus-Eurydice story in his new musical, Steel (produced at the American Repertory Theater, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1991). There, it is Eurydice (a schoolgirl) who instructs Orpheus (a steel band musician) not to look at her as they revisit their childhood neighborhood.

    Works Cited

     

    • Bedient, Calvin. “Derek Walcott: Contemporary.” Parnassus 9 (1981), 31-44.
    • Birkerts, Sven. “Heir Apparent” [review of Midsummer], The New Republic 190 (1984), 31-33.
    • De Man, Paul. Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.
    • Derrida, Jacques. Signsponge. Trans. Richard Rand. New York: Columbia UP, 1984.
    • Dickey, James. “Worlds of a Cosmic Castaway” [review of Collected Poems 1948-1984]. New York Times Book Review, 2 February 1986, 8.
    • Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge, 1989.
    • Rilke, Rainer Maria. The Selected Poetry. Ed. and trans. Stephen Mitchell. New York: Vintage, 1984.
    • Vendler, Helen. “Poet Between Two Worlds” [review of The Fortunate Traveller], New York Review of Books, 4 March 1982, 23-27.
    • Walcott, Derek. Another Life. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1974.
    • —. The Castaway and Other Poems. London: Jonathan Cape, 1965.
    • —. Collected Poems 1948-1984. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1984.
    • —. Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1970.
    • —. The Gulf and Other Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1970.
    • —. “The Light of the World.” Paris Review 101 (1986), 192-95.

     

  • Notes Toward an Unwritten Non-Linear Electronic Text, “The Ends of Print Culture” (a work in progress)

    Michael Joyce

    Center for Narrative and Technology, Jackson, MI
    <Michael_Joyce@UM.CC.UMICH.EDU>

     

    Adapted from a talk originally given at the Computers and the Human Conversation Conference, Lewis and Clark College, Portland, Oregon, March 16, 1991

     

    For a period of time last year on each end of our town, like compass points, there was a mausoleum of books. On the north end of town a great remainder warehouse flapped with banners that promised 80% off publishers prices. Inside it row upon row of long tables resembled nothing less than those awful makeshift morgues which spring up around disasters. Its tables were piled with the union dead: the mistakes and enthusiasms of editors, the miscalculations of marketing types, the brightly jacketed, orphaned victims of faddish, fickle or fifteen minute shifts of opinion and/or history. There an appliance was betrayed by another (food processor by microwave); a diet guru was overthrown by a leftist in leotards (Pritikin by Fonda); and every would-be Dickens seemed poised to tumble, if not from literary history, at least from all human memory (already gangs of Owen Meanies leer and lean against faded Handmaidens of Atwood).

     

    Upon first looking into such a warehouse–forty miles east of our spare parts, bible belt midwest town, in what we outlanders think of as wonderful Ann Arbor; we thought only a university town could sustain this. When the same outfit opened up in our town, and the tables were piled not with the leavings of Ann Arborites but with towers of the same texts, we knew this was a modern day circus. Ladies and gentlemen, children of all ages! here come the books!

     

    Meanwhile, at the opposite pole in the second mausoleum, a group termed the Friends of the Library regularly sell off tables of what shelves can no longer hold. One hundred years of Marquez is too impermanent for the permanent collection of our county library, but so too– at least for the branches which feed pulp back to this trunk–so too is the Human Comedy, so too are the actual Dickens or Emily Dickinson. The book here must literally earn its keep.

     

    Both the remainder morgue and the friends of the library mortuary are examples of production/distribution gone radically wrong. Books–and films and television programs and software, etc.–have become what cigarettes are in prison, a currency, a token of value, a high voltage utility humming with options and futures. It is not necessary to have read them. Rather we are urged to imagine what they could mean to us; or, more accurately, to imagine what we would mean if we were the kind of people who had read them.

     

    This is to say that the intellectual capital economy has to some extent abandoned the idea of real, material value for one of utility. This abandonment is not unlike the kind that in a depressed real estate market leaves so-called “worthless” condos as empty towers in whose shadowy colonnades the homeless camp. Ideas of all sorts have their fifteen minute warholian half-life and then dissipate, and yet their structures remain. We have long ago stopped making real buildings in favor of virtual realities and holograms. The book has lost its privilege. For those who camped in its shadows, for the culturally homeless, this is not necessarily a bad thing. No less than the sitcom or the Nintendo cartridge, the book too is merely a fleeting, momentarily marketable, physical instantiation of the network. And the network, unlike the tower,is ours to inhabit.

     

    In the days before the remote control television channel zapper and modem port we used to think network meant the three wise men with the same middle initial: two with the same last name, NBC and ABC, and their cousin CBS. Now we increasingly know that the network is nothing less than what is put before us for use. Here in the network what makes value is, to echo the poet Charles Olson, knowing how to use yourself and on what. Networks build locally immediate value which we can plug into or not as we like. Thus the network redeems time for us. Already with remote control channel zapper in hand the most of us can track multiple narratives, headline loops, and touchdown drives simultaneously across cable transmissions and stratified time. In the network we know that what is of value is what can be used; and that we can shift values everywhere, instantly, individually, as we will.

     

    We live in what, in Writing Space, Jay Bolter calls the late age of print (Bolter 1991). Once one begins using a word processor to write fiction, it is easy to imagine that the same techne which makes it possible to remove the anguish from a minor character on page 251 of a novel manuscript and implant it within a formative meditation of the heroine on page 67 could likewise make it possible to write a novel which changes every time the reader reads it. Yet what we envision as a disk tucked into a book might easily become the opposite. The reader struggles against the electronic book. “But you can’t read it in bed,” she says, everyone’s last ditch argument. Fully a year after Sony first showed Discman, a portable, mini-CD the size of a Walkman, capable of holding 100,000 pages of text, a discussion on the Gutenberg computer network wanted to move the last ditch a little further. The smell of ink, one writer suggested; the crinkle of pages, suggests another.

     

    Meanwhile in far-off laboratories of the Military-InfotainmentComplex–to advance upon Stuart Moulthrop’s phrase (Moulthrop, 1989b)–at Warner, Disney or IBApple and MicroLotus, some scientists work on synchronous smell-o-vision with real time simulated fragrance degradation shifting from fresh ink to old mold; while others build raised-text touch screens with laterally facing windows that look and turn like pages, crinkling and sighing as they turn. “But the dog can’t eat it,” someone protests, and–smiling, silently–the scientists go back to their laboratories, bags of silicone kibbles over their shoulders.

     

    What we whiff is not the smell of ink but the smell of loss: of burning towers or men’s cigars in the drawing room. Hurry up please, it’s time. We are in the late age of print; the time of the book has passed. The book is an obscure pleasure like the opera or cigarettes. The book is dead, long live the book. A revolution enacts what a population already expresses: like eels to the Sargasso, 100 thousand videotapes annually return to a television show about home videos. In the land of polar mausolea, in this late age of print, swimming midst this undertow who will keep the book alive?

     

    In an age when more people buy and do not read more books than have ever been published before, often with higher advances than ever before, perhaps we will each become like the living books of Truffaut’s version of Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, whose vestal readers walk along the meandering river of light just beyond the city of text. We face their tasks now, resisting what flattens us, re-embodying reading as movement, as an action rather than a thing, network out of book.

     

    We can re-embody reading if we see that the network is ours to inhabit. There are no technologies without humanities; tools are human structures and modalities. Artificial intelligence is a metaphor for the psyche, a contraption of cognitive psychology and philosophy; multimedia (even as virtual reality) is a metaphor for the sensorium, a perceptual gadget beholding to poetics and film studies. Nothing is quicker than the light of the word. In “Quickness,” one of his Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Italo Calvino writes:

     

    In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single, homogeneous surface, the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of the written language. (Calvino 1988, 45)

     

    Following the true bent of the written language in the late age of print brings us to the topographic. “The computer,” Jay Bolter says,” changes the nature of writing simply by giving visual expression to our acts of conceiving and manipulating topics. “In the topographic city of text shape itself signifies, as in Warren Beatty’s literally brilliant rendering of the city of Dick Tracy. There the calm, commercial runes of marquee, placard, neon and shingle (DRUGS, LUNCHEONETTE, CINEMA) not only map the pathways of meaning and human intercourse, but they also shape and color the city itself and its inhabitants. Face and costume, facade and meander, river’s edge and central square, booth or counter, Trueheart or Breathless. “Electronic writing,” says Bolter

     

    is both a visual and verbal description. It is not the writing of a place, but rather a writing with places, spatially realized topics. Topographic writing challenges the idea that writing should be merely the servant of spoken language. The writer and reader can create and examine signs and structures on the computer screen that have no easy equivalent in speech. (Bolter 1991, 25)

     

    Ted Nelson, who coined the term hypertext in the 1960’s, more recently defined it as “non-sequential writing with reader controlled links.” Yet this characterization stops short of describing the resistance of this new object. For it is not merely that the reader can choose the order of what she reads but that her choices in fact become what it is.

     

    Let us say instead that hypertext is reading and writing electronically in an order you choose; whether among choices represented for you by the writer, or by your discovery of the topographic (sensual) organization of the text. Your choices, not the author’s representations or the initial topography, constitute the current state of the text. You become the reader-as-writer.

     

    We might note here that the word we want to describe the reader-as-writer already exists, although it is too latinate and bulky for contemporary use. Interlocutor has the correct sense of one conversant with the polylogue, as well as the right degrees of burlesque, badinage, and bricolage behind it. Even so, we will have to make do with–and may well benefit by extending–the comfortable term, reader.

     

    We may distinguish two kinds of hypertext according to their actions (Joyce, 1988). Exploratory hypertext, which most often occurs in read-only form, allows readers to control the transformation of a defined body of material. It is perhaps the type most familiar to you, if you have seen a Hypercard stack. (Note here that a stack is the name of the electronic texts created by this Apple product. There are other hypertext systems, such as Storyspace and Supercard for the Macintosh, or Guide for both the Macintosh and MS-DOS machines, and the newcomer ToolBook for the latter.)

     

    In the typical stack, the reader encounters a text (which may include sound and graphics, including video, animations, and what have you). She may choose what and how she sees or reads, either following an order the author has set out for her or creating her own. Very often she can retain a record of her choices in order to replay them later. More and more frequently in these documents she can compose her own notes and connect them to what she encounters, even copying parts from the hypertext itself.

     

    This kind of reading of an exploratory hypertext is what we might call empowered interaction. The transitional electronic text makes an uneasy marriage with its reader. It says: you may do these things, including some I have not anticipated.

     

    It is to an extent true that neither the author’s representations nor the initial topography but instead the reader’s choices constitute the current state of the text for her. In these exploratory hypertexts, however, the text does not transform or rearrange itself to embody this current state. The transitional electronic text is as yet a marriage without issue. Each of the reader’s additions lies outside the flow of the text, like Junior’s shack at the edge of the poster-colored city of Dick Tracy. The text may be seen as leading to what she adds to it, yet her addition is marginal, ghettoized. Stuart Moulthrop suggests that to the extent that hypertexts let a power structure “subject itself to trivial critiques in order to pre-empt any real questioning of authority . . . hypertext could end up betraying the anti-hierarchical ideals implicit in its foundation” (Moulthrop 1989a). Under such circumstances the reader’s interaction does not reorder the text, but rather conserves authority. She moves outside the pathways of meaning and human intercourse, unable to shape and color the city itself or its inhabitants.

     

    Even so, to the extent that the topographical writing of an exploratory hypertext lets readers create and examine signs and structures, it does make implicit the boundary which both marks and makes privilege or authority. In fact it has always been true that the interlocutory reader, let us say brooding alone in the reading room of the British Museum, might come to see this boundary. Attuned to organizational structures of production and reproduction, she might mark with Althusser, “the material existence of an ideological apparatus” of the state (Althusser 1971).

     

    But she might not be able to see quite as clearly or as quickly as she can see in the hypertext how the arena is organized to marginalize and diminish her. This is the trouble with hypertext, at any level: it is messy, it lets you see ghosts, it is always haunted by the possibility of other voices, other topographies, others’ governance.

     

    Print culture is as discretely defined and transparently maintained as the grounds of Disney World. There is no danger that new paths will be trod into the manicured lawns. Some would like to think this groundskeeping is a neutral decision, unladen, de-contextualized, removed from issues of empowerment, outside any reciprocal relationship. For the moment institutions of media, publishing, scholarship, and instruction depend upon the inertia of the aging technology of print, not just to withstand attack on established ideas, but to withstand the necessity to refresh and reestablish these ideas. In fact, hypermedia educators frequently advertise their stacks by featuring the fact that the primary materials are not altered by the webs of comments and connections made by students. This makes it easier to administer networks they say.

     

    Like the Irish king Cuchulain who fought the tide with his sword, they lose who would battle waves on the shores of light. The book is slow, the network is quick; the book is many of one, the network is many ones multiplied; the book is dialogic, the network polylogic.

     

    The second kind of hypertext, constructive hypertext, offers an electronic alternative to the grey ghetto alongside the river of light. Constructive hypertext requires a capability to create, change, and recover particular encounters within a developing body of knowledge. Like the network, conference, classroom or any other form of the electronic text, constructive hypertexts are “versions of what they are becoming, a structure for what does not yet exist” (Joyce 1988).

     

    As a true electronic text, the constructive hypertext differs from the transitional exploratory hypertext in that its interaction is reciprocal rather than empowered. The reader gives birth to the true electronic text. It says: what you do transforms what I have done, and allows you to do what you have not anticipated. “It is not just that [we] must make knowledge [our] own,” says Jerome Bruner in Actual Minds, Possible Worlds, but that we must do so “in a community of those who share [our] sense of culture” (Bruner 1986).

     

    A truly constructive hypertext will present the reader opportunities to recognize and deploy the existing linking structure in all its logic and nuance. That is, the evolving rhetoric must be manifest for the reader. She should be able to extend the existing structure and to transform it, harnessing it to her own uses. She should be able to predict that her own transformations of a hypertext will cause its existing elements to conform to her additions. While not merely taking on but surrendering the forefront to the newly focused tenor and substance of the interlocutory reader, the transformed text should continue to perform reliably in much the same way that it has for previous readers.

     

    Indeed, every reading of the transformed text should in some sense rehearse the transformation made by the interlocutory reader. If a reader, let us call her Ann, has read a particular text both before and after the intervention of the interlocutory reader, Beatrice, Ann’s experience of the text should have the familiar discomfort of recognition. Ann should realize Beatrice’s reading.

     

    Not surprisingly, the first efforts at developing truly constructive hypertexts have taken place in (hyper)fictions. afternoon (Joyce 1990) attempts to subvert the topography of the text by making every word seem as if it yields other possibilities, letting the reader imagine her own confirmations. This “letting” likely signifies a partially failed attempt, a text which empowers more than it reciprocates. In situating and criticizing afternoon, Stuart Moulthrop speculated, “a writing space [which] presumes a new community of readers, writers, and designers of media . . . [whose] roles would be much less sharply differentiated than they are now “(Moulthrop, 1989a).

     

    In attempting to develop such a community it becomes clear to hyperfiction writers that unless roles of author and reader are much less sharply differentiated, the silence will have no voice. Even interactive texts will live a lie. “In all claims to the story,” writes the Canadian poet Erin Moure,

     

    There is muteness.  The writer as
          witness, speaking the stories, is a lie, a liberal
                                                  bourgeois lie.
          Because the speech is the writer's speech, and each
                                                  word of the
          writer robs the witnessed of their own voice, muting
                                                  them. (Moure 1989, 84)

     

    Increasingly hyperfiction writers consider how the topographic (sensual) organization of the text might present reciprocal choices that constitute and transform the current state of the text. How, in the landscape of the city of text, can the reader know that what she builds will move the course of the river? How might what she builds present what Bruner calls an invitation to reflection and culture creating. In her poem, “Site Glossary,: Loony Tune Music,” Moure says

     

    witness as a concept is outdated in the countries of
          privilege, witness as tactic, the image as completed
          desktop publishing & the writer as accurate, the names
                                                  are
          sonorous & bear repeating tho there is no repetition
                                                  the
          throat fails to mark the trace of the individual voice
                                                  which
          entails loony tune music in this age (Moure 1989, 115)

     

    Hyperfictions seek to mark the trace with their own loony tune music. In Chaos Stuart Moulthrop has speculated a fiction which is consciously unfinished, fragmentary, open, one of emotional orientations and transformative encounters. John McDaid’s hyperfiction Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Fun House is an electronic world of notebooks, scrap papers, dealt but unplayed Tarot cards, souvenirs, segments, drafts, and tapes, unfinished in the way that death unfinishes us all (McDaid, 1991). In Izme Pass, their hyperfictional “deconstruction of priority,” Carolyn Guyer and Martha Petry seek “to weave . . . [a] new work made not of the parts but the connections . . . [in order] to unmurk it a little, to form connection in time and space, but without respect to those constraints “(Guyer 1991b).

     

    While this may seem the same urge toward a novel which changes each time it is read, what has changed in the interim between novelist-at-word-processor and hyperfiction writer is that computer tools to accomplish these sorts of multiple texts have been built. Moreover hyperfiction writers have not only imagined and rendered them, but also and more importantly have begun to set out an aesthetic for a multiple fiction which yields to its readers in a reciprocal relationship.

     

    This sort of reciprocal relationship for electronic art has a conscious history in the late 20th century. In Glenn Gould’s essay “Strauss and the Electronic Future” (1964) he envisions a “multiple authorship responsibility in which the specific functions of the composer, the performer, and indeed the consumer overlap.” He expands this notion in his extraordinary essay, “The Prospects of Recording” (Gould 1966): “Because so many different levels of participation will, in fact, be merged in the final result, the individualized information concepts which define the nature of identity and authorship will become very much less imposing.”

     

    What joins the concerns of many of writers working with multiple fictions is nothing less than the deconstruction of priority involved in making identity and authorship much less imposing. “The fact in the human universe,” says Charles Olson, “is the discharge of the many (the multiple) by the one (yrself done right . . . is the thing–all hierarchies, like dualities, are dead ducks)” (Olson, 1974).

     

    These writers share a conviction that the nature of mind must not be fixed. It is not a transmission but a conversation we must keep open. “If structure is identified with the mechanisms of the mind,” says Umberto Eco, “then historical knowledge is no longer possible” (Eco, 1989). We redeem history when we put structure under question in the ways that narrative, hypertext and teaching each do in their essence. Narrative is the series of individual questions which marginalize accepted order and thus enact history. Hypertext links are no less than the trace of such questions, a conversation with structure. All three are authentically concerned with consciousness rather than information; with creating and preserving knowledge rather than with the mere ordering of the known. The value produced by the readers of hypertexts or by the students we learn with is constrained by systems which refuse them the centrality of their authorship. What is at risk is both mind and history.

     

    In Wim Wenders’ (and Peter Handke’s) film, Wings of Desire, the angels walk among the stacks and tables of a library, listening to the music within the minds of the individual readers. It is a scene of indescribable delicacy and melancholy both (one which makes you want to rush from the theatre and into the nearest library, there to read forever), into the midst of which, shuffling slowly up the carpeted stair treads, huffing at each stairwell landing, his nearly transparent hand touching on occasion against the place where his breastbone pounds beneath his suit and vest, comes an old man, his mind opening to an angel’s vision and to us in a winded, scratchy wheeze.

     

    “Tell me muse of the story-teller,” he thinks, “who was thrust to the end of the world, childlike ancient . . . .” The credits tell us later that this is Homer. “With time,” he thinks, “my listeners became my readers. They no longer sit in a circle, instead they sit apart and no one knows anything about the other . . . .”

     

    Homer’s is for us increasingly an old story. When print removed knowledge from temporality, Walter Ong reminds us, it interiorized the idea of discrete authorship and hierarchy. Ong envisioned a new orality (Ong 1982). In this case it is a film which restores the circle; likewise the “multiple authorship” of hypertext offers an electronic restoration of the circle.

     

    Although hypertext is an increasingly familiar cultural term, its artistic import is only beginning to be realized. In novels whose words and structures do not stay the same from one reading to another, ones in which the reader no longer sits apart but by her interaction, shapes and transforms.

     

    Shaping ourselves, we ourselves are shaped. This is the reciprocal relationship. It is likewise the elemental insight of the fractal geometry: that each contour is itself an expression of itself in finer grain. We have been talking so long about a new age, a technological age, an information age, etc., that we are apt to forget that it is we who fashion it, we who discover and recover it, we who shape it, we who literally give it form with how we use ourselves and on what.

     

    This organic reconstitution of the text may be what makes constructive hypertext the first instance of what we will come to conceive as the natural form of multimodal, multi-sensual writing: the multiple fiction,the true electronic text, not the transitional electronic analogue of a printed text like a hypertextual encyclopedia. Fictions like afternoon, WOE, Chaos, IZME PASS, or Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse can neither be conceived nor experienced in any other way. They are imagined and composed within their own idiom and electronic environment, not cobbled together from pre-ordained texts.

     

    For these fictions there will be no print equivalent, nor even a mathematical possibility of printing their variations. Yet this is in no way to suggest that these fictions are random on the one hand or artificial intelligence on the other. Merely that they are formational.

     

    What they form are instances of the new writing of the late age of print, what Jane Yellowlees Douglas terms “the genuine post-modern text rejecting the objective paradigm of reality as the great ‘either/or’ and embracing, instead, the ‘and/and/and’” (Douglas, 1991). The issues at hand are not technological but aesthetic, not what and where we shall read but how and why. These are issues which have been a matter of the deepest artistic inquiry for some time, and which share a wide and eclectic band of progenitors and a century or more of self-similar texts in a number of media.

     

    The layering of meaning and the simultaneity of multiple visions have gradually become comfortable notions to us, though they form the essence underlying the intermingled and implicating voices of Bach which Glenn Gould heard with such clarity. We are the children of the aleatory convergence. Our longing for multiplicity and simultaneity seems upon reflection an ancient one, the sole center of the whirlwind, the one silence.

     

    It is an embodied silence which the multiple fiction can render. We find ourselves at the confluence of twentieth century narrative arts and cognitive science as they approach an age of machine-based art, virtual realities, and what Don Byrd calls “proprioceptive coherence” (Byrd, 1991). The new writing requires rather than encourages multiple readings. It not only enacts these readings, it does not exist without them. Multiple fictions accomplish what its progenitors could only aspire to, lacking a topographic medium, light speed, electronic grace, and the willing intervention of the reader.

    Works Cited

     

    • Althusser, Louis. (1971) “Ideology and the State.” In Lenin, Philosophy and Other Essays, translated by Ben Brewster, New York and London: Monthly Review Press.
    • Bolter, Jay D. (1991) Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum and Associates.
    • Bruner, Jerome. (1986) Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
    • Byrd, Don. “Cyberspace and Proprioceptive Coherence.” Paper presented at the Second International Conference on Cyberspace, Santa Cruz, Ca, April 20, 1991.
    • Calvino, Italo. (1988) Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
    • Gould, Glenn. (1964) “Strauss and the Electronic Future.” Saturday Review, May 30, 1964. Reprinted in The Glenn Gould Reader, Tim Page, ed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf (1989).
    • —. (1966) “The Prospects of Recording.” High Fidelity, April,1966. Reprinted in The Glenn Gould Reader, Tim Page, ed.
    • Guyer, Carolyn and Martha Petry. “Izme Pass, a collaborative hyperfiction,” Writing on the Edge, 2 (2), bound-in computer disk, University of California at Davis, June 1991.
    • —. “Notes for Izma Pass Expose.” Writing on the Edge, 2 (2), University of California at Davis, June 1991.
    • Douglas, Jane Yellowlees. “The Act of Reading: the WOE Beginners’ Guide to Dissection,” Writing on the Edge, 2 (2).
    • Joyce, Michael. (1990a) afternoon, a story. Computer disk. Cambridge, MA: The Eastgate Press.
    • –. (1988) “Siren Shapes: Exploratory and Constructive Hypertexts.” Academic Computing 3 (4), 10-14, 37-42.
    • McDaid, John. (1991) Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse. Unpublished computer fiction.
    • Moulthrop, Stuart. (1991) CHAOS. Hyperfiction computer program, Atlanta, GA, 1991.
    • —. (1989a) In the Zones: Hypertext and the Politics of Inaphy on America, Proprioception, and Other Essays. Bolinas, CA: Four Seasons Foundation, 17 &19.
    • Moure, Erin. (1989) “Seebe” and “Site Glossary: Loony Tune Music.” In W S W (West Southwest) Montreal: Vehicule Press, 84 & 115.
    • Nelson, Ted. (1987) All for One and One for All. Hypertext ’87. Chapel Hill: ACM Proceedings.
    • Ong, Walter J. (1982) Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. New York: Methuen.
    • Thurber, D. (1990) “Sony to Make Electronic Books: ‘Data Discman’ Player Will Use 3-Inch CDs.” Washington Post, (D9, D13) May 16.

     

  • The Marginalization of Poetry

    Bob Perelman

    University of Pennsylvania
    bperelme@pennsas

    If poems are eternal occasions, then 
the pre-eternal context for the following

was a panel on "The Marginalization
of Poetry" at the American Comp.

Lit. Conference in San Diego, on 
February 8, 1991, at 2:30 P.M.:

"The Marginalization of Poetry"--it almost 
goes without saying. Jack Spicer wrote, 

"No one listens to poetry," but 
the question then becomes, who is 

Jack Spicer? Poets for whom he 
matters would know, and their poems

would be written in a world
in which that line was heard,

though they'd scarcely refer to it. 
Quoting or imitating another poet's line 

is not benign, though at times 
the practice can look like flattery. 

In the regions of academic discourse,
the patterns of production and circulation

are different. There, it--again--goes 
without saying that words, names, terms

are repeatable: citation is the prime
index of power. Strikingly original language

is not the point; the degree 
to which a phrase or sentence 

fits into a multiplicity of contexts 
determines how influential it will be. 

"The Marginalization of Poetry": the words 
themselves display the dominant lingua franca 

of the academic disciplines and, conversely, 
the abject object status of poetry: 

it's hard to think of any 
poem where the word "marginalization" occurs. 

It is being used here, but 
this may or may not be 

a poem: the couplets of six 
word lines don't establish an audible 

rhythm; perhaps they haven't, to use 
the Calvinist mercantile metaphor, "earned" their

right to exist in their present
form--is this a line break 

or am I simply chopping up 
ineradicable prose? But to defend this 

(poem) from its own attack, I'll 
say that both the flush left 

and irregular right margins constantly loom 
as significant events, often interrupting what 

I thought I was about to 
write and making me write something 

else entirely. Even though I'm going 
back and rewriting, the problem still 

reappears every six words. So this, 
and every poem, is a marginal 

work in a quite literal sense.
Prose poems are another matter: but 

since they identify themselves as poems
through style and publication context, they 

become a marginal subset of poetry, 
in other words, doubly marginal. Now 

of course I'm slipping back into 
the metaphorical sense of marginal which, 

however, in an academic context is 
the standard sense. The growing mass 

of writing on "marginalization" is not 
concerned with margins, left or right 

--and certainly not with its own. 
Yet doesn't the word "marginalization" assume 

the existence of some master page 
beyond whose justified (and hence invisible) 

margins the panoplies of themes, authors, 
movements, general objects of study exist 

in all their colorful, handlettered marginality? 
This master page reflects the functioning 

of the profession, where the units
of currency are variously denominated prose: 

the paper, the article, the book.
All critical prose can be seen 

as elongated, smooth-edged rectangles of writing, 
the sequences of words chopped into 

arbitrary lines by typesetters (Ruth in 
tears amid the alien corn), and 

into pages by commercial bookmaking processes. 
This violent smoothness is the visible 

sign of the writer's submission to 
norms of technological reproduction. "Submission" is 

not quite the right word, though: 
the finesse of the printing indicates 

that the author has shares in 
the power of the technocratic grid; 

just as the citations and footnotes 
in articles and university press books

are emblems of professional inclusion. But 
hasn't the picture become a bit 

binary? Aren't there some distinctions to 
be drawn? Do I really want 

to invoke Lukacs's antinomies of bourgeois 
thought where rather than a conceptually 

pure science that purchases its purity 
at the cost of an irrational 

and hence foul subject matter we 
have the analogous odd couple of 

a centralized, professionalized, cross-referenced criticism
                                                         studying
marginalized, inspired (i.e., amateur), singular poetries? 

Do I really want to lump 
The Closing of the American Mind, 

Walter Jackson Bate's biography of Keats, 
and Anti-Oedipus together and oppose them

to any poem which happens to 
be written in lines? Doesn't this 

essentialize poetry in a big way?
Certainly some poetry is thoroughly opposed 

to prose and does depend on 
the precise way it's scored onto 

the page: beyond their eccentric margins, 
both Olson's Maximus Poems and Pound's 

Cantos tend, as they progress, toward 
the pictoral and gestural: in Pound 

the Chinese ideograms, musical scores, hieroglyphs, 
heart, diamond, club, and spade emblems, 

little drawings of the moon and 
of the winnowing tray of fate; 

or those pages late in Maximus 
where the orientation of the lines 

spirals more than 360 degrees--one 
spiralling page is reproduced in holograph. 

These sections are immune to standardizing 
media: to quote them you need 

a photocopier not a word processor. 
In a similar vein, the work 

of some contemporary writers associated more 
or less closely with the language 

movement avoids standardized typographical grids and 
is as self-specific as possible: Robert 

Grenier's Sentences, a box of 500 
poems printed on 5 by 8 

notecards, or his recent work in 
holograph, often scrawled; the variable leading 

and irregular margins of Larry Eigner's 
poems; Susan Howe's writing which uses 

the page like a canvas--from 
these one could extrapolate a poetry 

where publication would be a demonstration 
of private singularity approximating a neo-Platonic
 

vanishing point, anticipated by Klebnikov's handcolored, 
single-copy books produced in the twenties. 

Such an extrapolation would be inaccurate 
as regards the writers I've mentioned, 

and certainly creates a false picture 
of the language movement, some of 

whose members write very much for 
a if not the public. But 

still there's another grain of false 
truth to my Manichean model of 

a prosy command-center of criticism and 
unique bivouacs on the poetic margins 

so I'll keep this binary in 
focus for another spate of couplets. 

Parallel to such self-defined poetry, there's 
been a tendency in some criticism 

to valorize if not fetishize the 
unrepeatable writing processes of the masters

--Gabler's Ulysses where the drama of 
Joyce's writing mind becomes the shrine 

of a critical edition; the facsimile 
of Pound's editing-creation of what became 

Eliot's Waste Land; the packets into 
which Dickinson sewed her poems, where  

the sequences possibly embody a higher 
order; the notebooks in which Stein 

and Toklas conversed in pencil: having 
seen them, works like Lifting Belly 

can easily be read as interchange 
between bodily writers or writerly bodies 

in bed. The feeling that three's 
a crowd there is called up 

and cancelled by the print's intimacy 
and tact. In all these cases, 

the particularity of the author's mind, 
body, and situation is the object 

of the reading. But it's time 
to dissolve or complicate this binary.

What about a work like Glas? 
--hardly a dully smooth critical monolith.

Doesn't it use the avant-garde (ancient 
poetic adjective!) device of collage more 

extensively than most poems? Is it 
really all that different from, 

say, the Cantos? (Yes. The Cantos's 
incoherence reflects Pound's free-fall writing situation; 

Derrida's institutional address is central. Derrida's 
cut threads, unlike Pound's, always reappear 

farther along.) Nevertheless Glas easily outstrips 
most contemporary poems in such "marginal" 

qualities as undecidability and indecipherability--not 
to mention the 4 to 10 margins 

on each page. Compared to it, 
these poems look like samplers upon 

which are stitched the hoariest platitudes. 
Not to wax polemical: there've been 

plenty of attacks on the voice 
poem, the experience poem, the numerous 

mostly free verse descendants of Wordsworth's 
spots of time: first person meditations 

where the meaning of life becomes 
visible after 30 lines. In its 

own world, this poetry is far 
from marginal: widely published and taught, 

it has established substantial means of 
reproducing itself. But with its distrust 

of intellectuality (apparently indistinguishable from
                                             overintellectuality)
and its reliance on authenticity as 

its basic category of judgment (and 
the poems principally exist to be 

judged), it has become marginal with 
respect to the more theory-oriented sectors 

of the university, the sectors which 
have produced such concepts as "marginalization." 

As a useful antidote, let me 
quote Glas: "One has to understand 

that he is not himself before 
being Medusa to himself. . . . To be 

oneself is to-be-Medusa'd . . . . Dead sure of 
self. . . . Self's dead sure biting (death)." 

Whatever this might mean, and it's
possibly aggrandizingly post-feminist, man swallowing woman,

nevertheless it seems a step toward 
a more communal and critical way 

of writing and thus useful. The 
puns and citations that lubricate Derrida's 

path, making it too slippery for 
all but experienced cake walkers are 

not the point. What I want 
to propose in this anti-generic or 

over-genred writing is the possibility, not 
of genreless writing, but rather of 

a polygeneric, hermaphroditic writing. Glas, for 
all its transgression of critical decorum 

is still, in its treatment of 
the philosophical tradition, a highly decorous 

work; it is marginalia, and the 
master page of Hegel is still 

Hegel, and Genet is Hegel too. 
But a self-critical writing, poetry, minus 

the shortcircuiting rhetoric of vatic privilege, 
might dissolve the antinomies of marginality.

  • Literary Ecology and Postmodernity in Thomas Sanchez’s Mile Zero and Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland

    Daniel R. White

    University of Central Florida
    <fdwhite@ucf1vm>

     

    Images are more real than anyone could have supposed. And just because they are an unlimited resource, one that cannot be exhausted by consumerist waste, there is all the more reason to apply the conservationist remedy. If there can be a better way for the real world to include the one of images, it will require an ecology not only of real things but of images as well.

     

    –Susan Sontag, On Photography (180)

     

    Renaissance humanist Giordano Bruno argued in the persona of the god Momus that “the gods have given intellect and hands to man and have made him similar to them, giving him power over other animals. This consists in his being able not only to operate according to his nature and to what is usual, but also to operate outside the laws of nature, in order that by forming or being able to form other natures, other paths, other categories, with his intelligence, by means of that liberty without which he would not have the above-mentioned similarity, he would succeed in preserving himself as god of the earth” (205). It was in the spirit of this quest to become “god of the earth” that the Father of Francis Bacon’s utopian Salomon’s house explains, “The end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes, and the secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of the human empire, to the effecting of all things possible” New Atlantis 210). The epistemology of the new human empire was to be founded on a combination of Cartesian rationality seated in the individual human reason–the cogito–and Baconian empiricism. The cogito is the unit of mind, the subject, which endeavors to understand and control the supposedly material and mechanistic realm of nature. But is this definition of mind correct and is the Modern project stemming from the Renaissance–for the technological domination of nature–taking us where we want to go? The modernist project has been challenged by two important bodies of theory, which I have elsewhere argued (White 1991) are intrinsically related: postmodernity and ecology. Here I intend to argue that there is a new, literary contender.

     

    The literary challenge to the modernist view of man and nature comes in the form of what I would like to define as a new genre: literary ecology.1 It is a species, or perhaps I should say with Deleuze and Guattari a rhizomic offshoot, of that broad critique of modernism known as postmodernity. (Postmodern-“ism” sounds hopelessly modernist.) It is a “literature” that fundamentally undermines the premises of modernity at their foundation– the subject of power–and by implication would tumble the entire domain circumscribed by the Enlightened entrepreneur of the West. It is a literature of guerilla warfare amidst the Thousand Plateaus of the ecological mind, whose textual strategies, like those of the Viet Cong, threaten at least the self-image, the simulacrum, of the great American technological utopia, the one which is reflected in Baudrillard’s sunglasses at Disney World. Thomas Pynchon probably defines the genre best by his work in Vineland, just as he exemplified postmodernity in Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) after which the sensitive “reader” gleaned, if she or he were still sufficiently undecentered to navigate, with Pynchon’s imago of Dorothy: “Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas any more . . . ” (279). Now with Vineland and Thomas Sanchez’s Mile Zero, another originary work in the genre, we are entering a new post. WHAT IS LITERARY ECOLOGY?

     

    Literary ecological theory stands, like Pynchon’s work itself according to some critics, with one foot on traditional metaphysical ground and one in the postmodern void.2 What is traditional in literary ecology is the acceptance of a value hierarchy, namely the Great Chain of Being, stemming from the classical and medieval worlds. The most salient feature of the Chain for the human condition, Dwight Eddins argues following Eric Voegelin, is that it represents a metaxic tension between spiritual order and material chaos:

     

                                 Divine--Nous
                            Psyche--Noetic
                           Psyche--Passions
                             Animal Nature
                           Vegetative Nature
                    Apeiron--Depth [the limitless]

     

    The Divine Nous represents the upper limit of the human quest for spiritual fulfillment, not attainable in the flesh but a necessary eschaton or goal for human striving. “The substitution of a finite, purely ‘human’ eschaton for the infinitely receding nousmeans the negation of the spiritual (noetic) quest that produces the real order of the human,” Eddins explains. “The metaxic tension collapses, and man is pulled by apeirontic vectors through lower and lower levels of his being . . . ” (22). The Gnostic quest is to appropriate the Nous to attain the all-too-human goals of power and control, on the part of an elite–THEM in Pynchon–possessed of Gnosis, over lower orders of being, the Preterite–US. The quest to become a noetic power elite sets up a paranoid cycle of oppression:

     

    For the gnostic elite . . . the alien world is a thing to be "overcome" . . . the elite experience, ironically, a preterite paranoia that drives them to seek mastery through their elite gnosis; but in so doing they define a new preterite in those who are not privy to this plexus of knowledge and power, but are pawns to be manipulated in its service. This preterity, in turn, can escape preterition only by adopting the power techniques of their masters; but in the very act they naturally tend to become--in Wordsworth's phrase--"Oppressors in their turn." (23)

     

    Eddins’ discussion is too early to have included Vineland, but what better description of the relationship between its oppressor and oppressed, Brock Vond and Frenesi Gates, and their victims?

     

    What is new in literary ecology’s appropriation of the old paradigm is that this description of the traditional hierarchy and its demise is also employed, even while it foregrounds human beings and their immediate concerns, as a paradigmatic description of an ecological crisis: of what communication theorist Anthony Wilden, commenting on the emerging Cartesian and Lockean ideas of the individual, calls “splitting the ecosystem”3:

     

    One of the truly representative characteristics of the Lockean individual, as of the Cartesian one, is that it replicates in its own organization that SPLITTING OF THE ECOSYSTEM . . . with which the Age of Discovery opened the world to colonialism and to the specifically modern domination of nature. . . . It is a splitting of the subject in this world in which the supposedly dominant part--mind--not only 'controls' the rest (it is believed)--i.e., the body--but mind actually OWNS the body. (xli)

     

    Capitalism, Wilden argues, splits the ecosystem not only by bifurcating the individual into mind and body, the one controller and the other to be controlled, but also by dividing society into bourgeoisie and proletariat, the modern social and economic form of owner and owned. Furthermore, Wilden argues, the traditional hierarchic relation between “nature” and “culture” or “nature” and “society” is as follows:

     

                             Land (Photosynthesis)
                  Labor Potential (Creative Capacity)
                               Capital.
     Land precedes and makes possible labor potential which
     precedes and makes possible the extraction of capital.  But
     capitalism through "commoditization" inverts the hierarchy:
                                Capital
                            Labor Potential
                             Land. (xxxv)

     

    Capital is used to control labor potential which is used to exploit land. Underlying this system is the entrepreneurial persona, the new “god of the earth” envisioned by Bruno, and perhaps even more vividly by Francis Bacon: “I am come in very truth leading Nature to you, with all her children, to bind her to your service and to make her your slave . . . . So may I succeed in my only earthly wish, namely to stretch the deplorably narrow limits of man’s dominion over the universe to their promised bounds . . . ” (from The Masculine Birth of Time, or the Great Instauration of the Domination of Man over the Universe [1603], cited in Wilden xxxv-xxxvi). Nature is, of course, female and her children are the proletariat, the third world, whatever can be bought. Luckily, preterite like St. Cloud in Mile Zero and Zoyd in Vineland stubbornly resist: thus the socialist ecological stance of literary ecologists, evident both in Pynchon and Sanchez.

     

    The gnostic, entrepreneurial splitting of the hierarchy of being also breaks down the metaxy, in ecological terms the dynamic equilibrium, of the Great Chain. In cybernetic language ecosystems may be viewed as hierarchies, or heterarchies, which exhibit tendencies toward both homeostasis and runaway. As Gregory Bateson explains,

     

    All biological and evolving systems (i.e., individual organisms, animal and human societies, ecosystems, and the like) consist of complex cybernetic networks, and all such systems share certain formal characteristics. Each system contains subsystems which are potentially regenerative, i.e., which would go into exponential "runaway" if uncorrected. (Examples of such regenerative components are Malthusian characteristics of population, schismogenic changes of personal interaction, armaments races, etc.). (447)

     

    Consider population, for example. Prey, unconstrained by traditional predators, will increase in population until limited by some other factor, perhaps disastrously by overpopulation which can decimate the population. So too, if man sprinkles his produce with DDT and kills off the bird population, the insects which were the original target of the poison will increase all the more rapidly unconstrained by their original predator and have to be “exterminated” by more toxin.

     

    This kind of degenerative cycle is what Eddins calls, in language which echoes cybernetics, “modes of slippage inherent in the noetic distortions of gnosticism [which] are peculiarly relevant to the metaphysical force fields of Pynchon’s cosmos: the instability of the elite-preterite dichotomy and the distinction between secular and religious constructs” (23). In other words, Brock and Frenesi and those that he, then she, betrays are caught in the logic of ecological runaway, what Joseph Slade Thomas Pynchon 125) has called “excluded middles and bad shit” in reference to the plight of Oedipa Maas in The Crying of Lot 49: under the Reagan-Bush version of the Entrepreneurial New World Order, you must either become a pawn of the new gnostic elite or sink more deeply into preterition. And if you want to fight back, you must also become like the gnostic elite: you must split the mental/cultural/social/natural ecosystem for the sake of power, to switch roles from Oppressed to Oppressor so that the original split in the human ecology escalates in what Bateson called the Romano-Palestinian System.4 This is the koan with which many of Pynchon’s worthy characters are presented.

     

    What is postmodern in literary ecology is that its strategy for escaping from the impossible polarities of the koan is to step out of the traditional ego of the West and into an expanded and more fluid definition of “mind.” This new definition of mind, explicit in the texts of Bateson, is what in effect gives literary ecology its deep-ecological dimension.

     

    Bateson developed mental ecology in part as a critique both of Darwin and of the premises of the Western episteme mentioned at the outset. His argument is that if we accept the cybernetic theory of “self-correctiveness as the criterion of thought,” and the information-theoretical notion that an idea is definable as a “difference,” then these criteria are not limited to the human individual. Consider a man with a computer, Bateson argues.

     

    What "thinks" and engages in "trial and error" is the man plus the computer plus the environment. And the lines between man, computer and environment are purely artificial, fictitious lines. They are lines across the pathways along which information or difference is transmitted. (491)

     

    The result of this critique is a fundamental redefinition of the unit of mind:

     

    If, now, we correct the Darwinian unit of survival to include the environment and the interaction between organism and environment, a very strange and surprising identity emerges: the unit of evolutionary survival turns out to be identical with the unit of mind. (491)

     

    If this is true, Bateson concludes, then we are faced with a number of important changes in our thinking, especially in ethics. It means, for instance, that mind–the Nous of the Great Chain–becomes immanent in the entire ecological and evolutionary structure (466)5 and that, “Ecology, in the widest sense, turns out to be the study of the interaction and survival of ideas and programs (i.e. differences, complexes of differences, etc.) in circuits” (491).6 It also turns out that epistemological error is ecological error:

     

    When you narrow down your epistemology and act on the premise "What interests me is me, or my organization, or my species," you chop off consideration of other loops of the loop structure. You decide that you want to get rid of the by-products of human life and that Lake Erie will be a good place to put them. You forget that Lake Erie is part of your wider eco-mental system--and that if Lake Erie is driven insane, its insanity is incorporated in the larger system of your thought and experience. (492)

     

    In other words epistemological and ecological error are identical with the modernist paradigm and its industrial project. The literary-ecological correction of the error in Vineland is arguably an extension of what Eddins calls “Orphic Naturalism” in Gravity’s Rainbow: “a counterreligion to the worship of mechanism, power, and– ultimately–death” (5).

     

    Plumwood (1991) criticizes deep ecology from an ecofeminist perspective in terms reminiscent of those I have used to characterize the literary ecological attack on the Cartesian cogito. She argues that

     

    In inferiorizing such particular, emotional, and kinship-based attachments [e.g. those emphasized by Pynchon and Sanchez], deep ecology gives us another variant on the superiority of reason and the inferiority of its contrasts, failing to grasp yet again the role of reason and incompletely critiquing its influence . . . . we must move toward the sort of ethics feminist theory has suggested, which can allow for both continuity and difference and for ties to nature which are expressive of the rich, caring relationships of kinship and friendship rather than increasing abstraction and detachment from relationship. (16)

     

    Literary ecology arguably provides exactly this rich sense of connectedness and particularity, as the texts discussed below suggest.

     

    Bateson’s language reveals the instrumental bias of Western science, as he describes nature in terms of a computer metaphor involving “circuits,” “units” and “system.” Yet he suggests what is fundamental to a more viable, ecological philosophy based on a genuine recognition and respect for the ecological other: the attribution of mind to nature. As Plumwood argues, “Humans have both biological and mental characteristics, but the mental rather than the biological have been taken to be characteristic of the human and to give what is ‘fully and authentically’ human. The term ‘human’ is, of course, not merely descriptive but very much an evaluative term setting out an ideal: it is what is essential or worthwhile in the human that excludes the natural” (17). This attribution of “mind” to “man” and materiality to “nature,” characteristic of the Cartesian dualism of res cogitans as the human cogito and res extensa as the objective world, and further expressed in the masculine subject of power dominating “mother” nature, as it is in the entrepreneurial persona who owns the world as his “real estate,” is arguably one of the principal targets of the literary ecological critique. Thus literary ecology embodies a synthesis of ecosocialist, deep ecological and ecofeminist concerns, but approaches them in terms of a postmodern ecological rubric which steps past the traditional either-or of the Oppressor and Oppressed, Elite and Preterite, Sacred and Secular, as deftly as Pynchon’s Ninjette DL (Darryl Louise Chastain) slips past Brock Vond’s guards.

     

    The Origins of Literary Ecology7

     

    “The Age of Ecology began on the desert outside Alamogordo, New Mexico on July 16, 1945, with a dazzling fireball of light and a swelling mushroom cloud of radioactive gasses,” argues Donald Worster in Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas. The genesis of literary ecology is part of the larger history of ecological ideas, and will require a separate discussion. Here let me at least make of few suggestions about its origins. The Ecological idea stems from the 18th century, as Worster has demonstrated, but it rose into popular consciousness startled by the perception, evoked by the Bomb, that nature itself is vulnerable like the frail human beings within it. Worster continues, “As that first nuclear fission bomb went off and the color of the early morning sky changed abruptly from pale blue to blinding white, physicist and project leader J. Robert Oppenheimer felt at first a surge of elated reverence; then a somber phrase from the Bhagavad-Gita flashed into his mind: ‘I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds’” (339). Popular ecology, as Worster also demonstrates, has roots in Romanticism and, indeed, the intuition of the Romantic writers formed the basis upon which the clearer outlines of ecological science would be patterned. As Goethe wrote, in the character of Young Werther,

     

    When the mists in my beloved valley steam all around me; when the sun rests on the surface of the impenetrable depths of my forest at noon and only single rays steal into the inner sanctum; when I lie in the tall grass beside a rushing brook and become aware of the remarkable diversity of a thousand little growing things on the ground, with all their peculiarities; when I can feel the teeming of a minute world amid the blades of grass and the innumerable, unfathomable shapes of worm and insect closer to my heart . . . ah, my dear friend . . . but I am ruined by it. I succumb to its magnificence. (24)

     

    This is not unlike the feeling which drew the “flower children” back to nature in the 1960’s, articulated and sustained in the writings of Edward Abbey and Annie Dillard. Romantic writing was in direct response to the urbanization and mechanization of life effected by the Industrial Revolution, just as popular ecology is largely a response to what Mumford called the Megamachine of modern technology, economy, society and polity which has destroyed and displaced much of the human lifeworld, of “Earth House Hold” in the words of poet Gary Snyder. An incipient ecological sensibility is also evident in the “persistent modernist nostalgia for vanished axiological foundations in the midst of vividly experienced anomie” which Eddins finds in the work of Pynchon and is perhaps most vividly expressed, virtually in ecological dimension, by T.S. Eliot in The Waste Land. Here images of a fouled, poisoned environment merge with those of human spiritual and physical demise–

     

                                 Unreal City,
                 Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
              A Crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
              I had not thought death had undone so many.

               A rat crept softly through the vegetation
                 Dragging its slimy belly on the bank
                 While I was fishing in the dull canal

                           The river sweats
                           Oil and tar . . .

     

    –amidst a culture which is shattered but whose very shards inspire hope of renewal: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” Additionally, the fusion of human imagination with nature’s images, as well as the adamant leftist politics, characteristic of Magical Realism, for example in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Autumn of the Patriarch, is arguably an important forebear, and Carlos Fuentes’ recent Christopher Unborn I might well have included with Mile Zero and Vineland as an example of literary ecology, except for its problematic representation of gender. African literature is also a likely ancestor of the genre, for example Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart where the fragmentation of tribal society under the impact of European colonialism is explored, as it is in American literature by Peter Matthiessen, with regard to South American Indians, in another likely progenitor, At Play in the Fields of the Lord. Doris Lessing’s Briefing for a Descent into Hell presents a profound fusion of the human mind with nature’s, as her Golden Notebook reflects on feminist and socialist alternatives, both dimensions of which come together and are uplifted and transformed (Aufhebung) in her Canopus in Argos: Archives, especially Shikasta. Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions and Galapagos should not be overlooked in the search for LitEcol ancestors and, particularly where Pynchon is concerned, I would look up from these printed artifacts and seriously review the adventures of Tweety and Sylvester Vineland22).

     

    More broadly, however, I suggest that the genealogy of literary ecology includes photography, film, painting, architecture and other arts, especially video, as well as the sciences, especially information theory and cybernetics. I suggest that this is true because literary ecology is a new communicational form, a new language practice, which has evolved or leapt into being through the postmodern “trialectic” of ecology, neomarxism, and feminism in the context of what Mark Poster has defined as The Mode of Information. Going beyond Marshall McLuhan’s axiom that “the medium is the message,” which he argues is based on Locke’s “‘sensorium’ of the receiving subject,” Poster contends,

     

    What the mode of information puts in question, however, is not simply the sensory apparatus but the very shape of subjectivity: its relation to the world of objects, its perspective on that world, its location in that world. We are confronted not so much by a change from a "hot" to a "cool" communications medium, or by a reshuffling of the sensoria, as McLuhan thought, but by a generalized destabilization of the subject. (15)

     

    In this new mode the modernist Cartesian rationalist subject, as well as his empiricist Lockean conterpart, is, like Tyrone Slothrop, dispersed into more dynamic, nomadic kind of mind, the very one animating literary ecology. As Poster continues,

     

    In the mode of information the subject is no longer located in a point in absolute time/space, enjoying a physical, fixed vantage point from which rationally to calculate its options. Instead it is multiplied by databases, dispersed by computer messaging and conferencing, decontextualized and redefined by TV ads, dissolved and materialized continuously in the electronic transmission of symbols. In the perspective of Deleuze and Guattari, we are being changed from "arborial" beings, rooted in time and space, to "rhizomic" nomads who daily wander at will (whose will remains a question) across the globe . . . . (15)

     

    Literary Ecology in Mile Zero & Vineland

     

    Postmodern, as Charles Jencks defines it in relation to architecture but with clear ramifications for the other arts, refers to

     

    double coding: the combination of Modern techniques with something else (usually traditional building) in order for architecture to communicate with the public and a concerned minority, usually other architects. (14, Jencks' emphasis)

     

    Certainly Gravity’s Rainbow is at least doubly coded, employing multiple genres and styles, tragedy and comedy, narrative and song, even a character Tyrone Slothrop who does not win or lose or live or die in the end but is, like the subject of the mode of information, dispersed; a plot which is superimposed on the trajectory of a V2 rocket; chapter headings which are fitted with (pictures of) sprocket holes; and a closing apocalyptic poem over which we, suddenly transformed from solitary readers to a crowd of movie-goers, are supposed to envision a bouncing ball.

     

    Literary ecologists, as postmodernists, use traditional literary forms in new ways. Both Sanchez and Pynchon employ regional realism, for instance, through their sense of place particularizing and enriching their larger ecological sensibility. Sanchez focuses on the rich biotic and human community of Key West and the Caribbean; his book is peopled with human folkways and natural life forms which are depicted sympathetically and in careful detail. The invaders from the North are also present, the focus of Sanchez’s historical, social, cultural and ultimately ecological critique. “It is about water,” his novel begins:

     

    It was about water in the beginning, it will be in the end. The ocean mothered us all. Water and darkness awaiting light. Night gives birth. An inkling of life over distant sea swells toward brilliance. Dawn emerges from Africa, strikes light between worlds, over misting mountains of Haiti, beyond the Great Bahama Bank, touching cane fields of Cuba, across the Tropic of Cancer to the sleeping island of Key West, farther to the Gold Coast of Florida, its great wall of condominiums demarcating mainland America. (3)

     

    Characterization is also given significant human- ecological dimension. Consider Sanchez’s representation of Justo–the African-Cuban cop who is Sanchez’s best candidate for heroism–typical of the literary-ecological concern not only with nature but also with human history and genealogy. Like Pynchon in Vineland, Sanchez gives his character dimension by tracing his connections over the generations of an extended family. This family connects Justo, not only socially, but also politically, with the oppressed, and ecologically, with the environment which has meant their livelihood. As Justo makes his way down Olivia street in Key West, the sight of a vanished Cuban groceria prompts him to reminisce about his boyhood, his grandfather, Abuelo, and grandmother Pearl, and her father: “Pearl’s father was an Ibu, brought to the Bahamas as a boy in chains from West Africa and freed fifteen years later in 1838 by the British. Freed by the very ones who had enslaved him, given a dowry of no money and a new name in a white man’s world, John Coe” (69). Sanchez characterizes Coe in part by his livelihood:

     

    John Coe became a student of the sea when freed. The sea became John's new master. Turtles attracted him first, their gliding nonchalance, so few flipper strokes needed to navigate through a watery universe, an economy of effort worth emulating, which bespoke ancient liberation from the here and now. John felt kinship with his marine creature's abiding sense of ease, its deep breadth of freedom. John was as simple man who knew not the turtle's source of symbolic power, he understood only the animal's daily inspiration. John learned the ways of the thousand-pound leatherback and loggerhead turtles . . . . He studied eight- hundred-fifty-pound gentle greens . . . . He gained respect for the small fifty-pound hawksbill . . . . (69)

     

    Coe’s sense of loving “familiarity,” in the original sense of this term, with the sea and its creatures overlaps with his love and respect for his wife, Brenda Bee. John chances upon her as she is being sold at a slave auction. When “The Well-dressed gentlemen in the crowd from Charleston and Mobile didn’t see anything of value in Brenda” because she is ill and half starved, “John Coe bought himself a wife in a town where a man of dark skin was not allowed to walk the streets after the nine-thirty ringing of the night bell, unless he bore a pass from his owner or employer, or was accompanied by a white person” (74). And he plays the role of healer and nurturer for her:

     

    As John bathed Brenda's bony body with the humped softness of his favorite sheepswool sponge he vowed to treat this woman with kindness, drive the unspeakable terror from her eyes. John spoke to Brenda in a tongue she could understand, touched her only in a healing way. John brought Brenda red cotton dresses, strolled with her hand in hand on saturday eves down the rutted dirt length of Crawfish Alley, stopping to tip his cap to folks cooling themselves on the front wooden steps of their shacks. John planted a papaya tree behind his shack and a mango in front, for on sundays the preacher man swayed in the stone church before the congregation tall as an eluthera palm in a high wind, shouting his clear message that the Bible teaches to plant the fruiting tree. (74)

     

    The “particular, emotional, and kinship-based attachments” which Plumwood (above) argues are “inferiorized” by Cartesian rationality are cultivated here and carefully interwoven with images of nature and of the sacred. Remember that all of this is, furthermore, in the memory of Justo, giving the character full human-ecological dimension.

     

    Women are not always the needy recipients of male nurture in Mile Zero. Another of Sanchez’s major characters, St. Cloud, a Vietnam veteran who begins and ends his days imbibing “Jamaica’s finest” rum, and who at one time “was still a happily married and cheating husband” (112), now must contend with being cuckolded by a woman who has clearly replaced him in his wife, Evelyn’s, affections. He also turns voyeur, watching like a latter-day Adam deserted by Eve, from her garden:

     

    He leaned against the smoothed trunk of a banyan, deep in shadow. Through the open shutters of Evelyn's bedroom a ladder of light was cast into the garden, its last bright step falling at St. Cloud's feet . . . Images of two women inside flickered insistent as a silent movie through slatted shutters. (98)

     

    The erotica in this “cinematic” display are empowered with speech, however, and the ability to shatter St. Cloud’s filmic illusions.

     

    The shutters flew open in the rainy breeze, scorpions slithered up bedroom walls. Evelyn rose from the swell of a female sea. Intruding rain mixed with sweat of exposed skin. She leaned forward to claim the banging shutters, arms outstretched from the swing of her breasts. She paused. Her words cast into rain hissing across the garden before the shutters enclosed her. "Good night, St. Cloud." (99)

     

    Sanchez repeatedly identifies women with the powers of nature, not with passive real estate to be exploited. In this regard, both Evelyn and Angelica, another prominent character, have significant tattoos:

     

    St. Cloud followed the heave of Evelyn's breathing. The green and red bloom of a tattooed rose blossomed at the top of her breast in dawn light stabbing through the salt-streaked glass porthole above the narrow berth." (5)

     

    Angelica moved her body in a single fluid motion, unassuming as a woman stepping from a bath, an improbable Aphrodite rising from a quivering sea of light in high heels. The octopus tattoo on her right breast spread its tentacles as she exhaled a slight breath.(112)

     

    What, in addition to kinship between women and the living beings of the natural world–the rose, the octopus–do these tattooed breasts signify? Angelica is modeling for an artist who admits, in response to his homosexual son, Renoir’s, request in their discussion of women, “‘Why don’t you ask Angelica what she feels?’”:

     

    "I don't have to ask her anything. I know what women think about me. They teach me in history of Women's art. College after college they hold me up as the enemy. Because I know their secret they stalk me through seminars, eviscerate my virility, study the fetid male entrails." (115)

     

    St. Cloud, also present at this transformation of the female body into art, is not so sure that the artist knows the “secret” at all, and sees something quite different in the figure:

     

    In the glittering bedroom light Angelica's breasts held the naked thrust of challenge St Cloud witnessed years before in the submarine pen. It was an unsettling recognition of sexual origins, when civilizations were controlled by women. Watching Angelica turn slowly in the room, totally exposed within a circle of men, St. Cloud groped for meaning through the alcoholic swamp of his steaming brain. Maybe it was man's desire never to let woman rise again. Keep her under heel and thumb. Never allow Pandora to release the awesome power from the box. (114)

     

    The power of femininity is combined, as the images in the foregoing passages suggest, with that of nature, and both are conjoined with the political cause of the oppressed. St. Cloud, by the way, as his feminist epiphany above suggests, is a respectable schlemiel, like Zoyd in Vineland, who finds a way out of self-pity by working as a translator for Haitian refugees.

     

    Pynchon’s regional realism is set in the Pacific Northwest, the great redwood forests of Northern California, in Vineland, and in the varied culture of the local inhabitants, most of whom are victims and refugees, ex- hippies, Thanatoids, the North American tribe who attempted to get back to the land and ended up on a kind of political reservation sandwiched between suburbs and overshadowed by government surveillance. His specific focus is on the remnants of the American radical tradition, those elements of the great European Invasion of North America who–from Thoreau to Bob Dylan–more or less sided with the Indians and wanted to call the whole thing off. Now they watch T.V. Vineland, the name given to the North American wilderness by the Vikings, is a place of very special significance, a territory upon which different stages of civilization have imposed their maps, but which holds a primitive mystery resistant to interpretation or translation into urban sprawl.8

     

    Someday this would be all part of Eureka--Crescent City--Vineland megalopolis, but for now the primary sea coast, forest, riverbanks and bay were still not much different from what early visitors in Spanish and Russian Ships had seen . . . log keepers not known for their psychic gifts had remembered to write down, more than once, the sense that they had of some invisible boundary, met when approaching from the sea, past capes of somber evergreen, the stands of redwood with their perfect trunks and cloudy foliage, too high, too red to be literal trees--carrying therefore another intention, which the Indians might have know about but did not share. (317)

     

    Both novelists use traditional literary devices in new ways which constitute double coding. By far the most interesting of these is narrative. Both Sanchez and Pynchon reframe the perspective of traditional human narrators to include what Gregory Bateson would call the mind of nature. Sanchez speaks explicitly from the standpoint of a persona, almost like the deep self of Hinduism, Atman, identical with the unmanifest spiritual power underlying the manifest world, Brahman, except with a this-worldly ecological twist. (Pynchon’s character Weed Atman, mathematics professor and circumstantial radical leader, similarly adds a transcendental dimension, satirically drawn, in Vineland.) For the narrator employs a host of images and apocalyptic forebodings as if spoken directly from the person of the earth which not only condemns American civilization but also, paradoxically, turns out to be none other than you and I. Thus we are also telling the story, both reader and author, both critic and castigated, finding the natural diversity of our larger selves in the variegated patterns of human, plant, animal, amphibian, and fish life while at the same time finding the mirror of ourselves in their destruction. But is this a transcendence of self which ultimately identifies “man” and “nature” in an overarching holism, or rather, what Plumwood calls for, a feminization of the human sensibility connected empathetically with and respectful of the variegated “other” of nature? Literary ecology, clearly opting for the latter alternative, differs from deep ecology in its regional realism and heterological sense of connectedness not only with nature but also with the social and political concerns of human life.

     

    Pynchon opens Vineland with the image of shattering glass, just as he began Gravity’s Rainbow with the fall the Crystal Palace, but instead of the ominous streak of the V-2 Rocket heralding the crash, we get the human trajectory of Zoyd Wheeler, “transfenestrating” through plate-glass in order to prove his mental instability and insure his government disability check.9 In both books fragmentation spreads from image, to narrative, to character, and to a broader idea of mind.

     

    The narrative fragmentation of Vineland is precisely into paranoia in the old Greek sense, ramified by schizophrenia in a defiant new sense. It is worth noting, in this regard, that the musical tome of favorite Italian songs, used in desperation by Billy Barf and the Vomitones, an alternative rock band dressed in “glossy black short synthetic wigs, the snappy mint-colored matching suits of Continental cut, the gold jewelry and glue-on mustaches,” to provide entertainment for a Godfather-like celebration at the estate of one Ralph Wavony, is none other than the Italian Wedding Fake Book by Deleuze and Guattari, authors of Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia and A Thousand Plateaus. The image of shattering glass becomes the structural, or is it poststructural, device of the novel as a whole. As in schizophrenic discourse, image metonymically transforms the logic of the plot into a spiral nebula of fragments, a look into any one of which reveals a monadic world itself about to fracture, as if the book were a person thinking beside himself, deranged, deterritorialized, splitting into multiple selves.

     

    Thus Pynchon’s fragmented characters inhabit his fragmented narratives. A look into the world of Frenesi, for example, must be refracted through her daughter Prairie’s quest for her mother, and with her ex-husband’s Zoyd’s broken life, not to mention his transfenestrations. It also connects to the Aggro World, “‘a sort of Esalen Institute for lady asskickers” (107) and so to Ninjettes DL and Sister Rochelle, to G-man and principal adversary Brock Vond, and thus to the interstices of what Hayles calls the “snitch system” and the “family system” (78). The former, centered around Brock, is the hand of Government repression which tries to unravel the latter, the web of kinship, and certainly the 24fps film collective, where image and reality are fractured like the collective itself. Frenesi too is fractured through the machinations of Brock to have her destroy Weed Atman by imaging him as the snitch he is not:

     

    Beginning the night she and Rex had publicly hung the snitch jacket on Weed, Frenesi understood that she had taken at least one irreversible step to the side of her life, and that now, as if on some unfamiliar drug, she was walking around next to herself, haunting herself, attending a movie of it all. If the step was irreversible, then she ought to be all right now, safe in a world-next-to-the-world that not many would know how to get to, where she could kick back and watch the unfolding drama. (237)

     

    Brock’s seduction of Frenesi fractures the microcosm of her consciousness, so that she sees herself schizophrenically as in a film; but it also penetrates every level of the macrocosm, the social and ecological dimensions of Pynchon’s Great Chain, as a phallocentric rubric of aggression: “Men had it so simple,” Frenesi muses.

     

    When it wasn't about Sticking It In, it was about Having The Gun, a variation that allowed them to Stick It In from a distance. The details of how and when, day by working day, made up their real world. Bleak, to be sure, but a lot more simplified, and who couldn't use some simplification, what brought seekers into deserts, fishermen to streams, men to war, a seductive promise. She would have hated to admit how much of this came down to Bock's penis, straightforwardly erect, just to pick a random example. (241)

     

    Brock has caused Frenesi literally to think beside herself, to experience paranoesis, “as the Nixonian Reaction continued to penetrate and compromise further what may only in some fading memories ever have been a people’s miracle, an army of loving friends, as betrayal became routine . . . leaving the merciless spores of paranoia wherever it flowed, fungoid reminders of its passage. These people had known their children, after all, perfectly” (239).

     

    But just as fragmentation can be destructive shattering of human and natural worlds, so too it can be welcome “noise” that allows regenerative reorganization of a living system at a more complex and resilient level: evolution as human ecological self-correction. Brock’s neofascist attempt to impose order on America, especially on the anarchic Left, is a phallocentric attempt to “split the ecosystem,” in Wilden’s terms. But the entropy which results from the split can also be the seed of new growth:

     

    one last point on entropy, inflexibility, and disorder, it is important to recognize that the counter-adaptive inflexibility of socioeconomic systems in decline is not merely or simply the 'social disorder' which is experienced by their inhabitants at the time. At the moment of its greatest social disorder, the salient informational characteristic of the system would seem to be, not lack of organization lack of order, but OVER-ORGANIZATION and over-order. It is this very over-organization which threatens its survival, and the social disorder involved is invariably a more or less successful attempt to renormalize the system, in the interests of survival. (367)

     

    Which is why Slade argues that “Communication ordinarily helps maintain a healthy balance between order and change, so that the system remains stable but also flexible, or, in the case of a culture, tolerant of diversity” (“Communication” 129). In other words, Brock generates the very diversity, the Orphic fragments, which he seeks to suppress by attempting to routinize, in Max Weber’s terms, the counter culture. And it is this diversity out of which a successful human-ecological renewal can be shaped.

     

    The relationship between entropy and order, systemic decline and renewal, has long been a concern in Pynchon’s texts. His “Entropy,” for example, ends with Meatball Mulligan’s attempts “to keep his lease-breaking party from deteriorating into total chaos” by reviving and reorganizing his guests (97), on the one hand, and Aubade who, after smashing the window of their “hermetically sealed . . . enclave of regularity in the city’s chaos” (83), “turned to face the man [Callisto] on the bed and wait with him until the moment of equilibrium was reached, when 37 degrees Fahrenheit should prevail both outside and inside, and forever, and the hovering, curious dominant of their separate lives should resolve into a tonic of darkness and the final absence of all motion” (98), on the other. The movement toward entropy can signal renewal or death. As “Entropy” was mostly about the descent toward death, at the other end of a parabolic arc spanning Pynchon’s career, Vineland is about the ascent to life.

     

    Katherine Hayles has argued that the “framing narrative” of Vineland is Zoyd’s daughter, Prairie’s, search for her estranged mother, Frenesi Gates. Frenesi’s absence is partly due to the social engineering of betrayal by the novel’s chief antagonist, Brock Vond, and partly due to her own desire, mirrored later by Prairie herself; for Frenesi is “seduced” and thus “separated” by Brock from her family (the Latin root of “seduced,” seducere, can mean separate, as Hayles points out [80]), and Prairie sometimes longs to be seduced, as she calls after Brock as he is borne aloft by the post-Vietnam deus ex machina of the helicopter, “You can come back, . . . . It’s OK, rilly. Come on, come in. I don’t care. Take me anyplace you want” (384). What Brock would separate them from is their family–nuclear, including Zoyd, Frenesi and Prairie, extended, including the entire Becker-Traverse clan, and ecological, including the web of human and natural lives in Vineland–a multi-dimensional reunion:

     

    The pasture, just before dawn, saw the first impatient kids already out barefoot in the dew, field dogs thinking about rabbits, house dogs more with running on their minds, cats in off of their night shifts edging, arching and flattening to fit inside the shadows they found. The woodland creatures, predators and prey, while not exactly gazing Bambilike at the intrusions, did remain as aware as they would have to be, moment to moment, that there were sure a lot of Traverses and Beckers in the close neighborhood. (323)

     

    The meadow where the gathering takes place Zoyd, focusing the overall narrative on this pastoral setting, calls “Vineland the Good” (322). The quest of daughter for mother feminizes the traditionally masculine art of storytelling, reconnecting it, again in Plumwood’s phrase, to those “particular, emotional, and kinship-based attachments” emphasized by Sanchez. The feminist dimension of literary ecology is given further depth, as Cowart argues, by Ninjette Sister Rochelle:

     

    "Back then, long ago, there were no men at all. Paradise was female. Eve and her sister, Lilith, were alone in the Garden. A character named Adam was put into the story later, to help make men look more legitimate, but in fact the first man was not Adam--it was the Serpent." (166)

     

    Thus the political and social power of Women is associated both with the pristine condition of earth before “man” and with the spiritual condition of Grace, before the Fall. Recall the garden in which St. Cloud stands, displaced voyeur of women who don’t need him. Furthermore, the above text suggests, as does Foucault in The Order of Things, that “man” is more a socially constructed myth than a biological reality, interchangeable with the Serpent, the Faustian version of the Cartesian persona questing for knowledge and power, as with the Gnostic who tries to extricate himself from and gain dominion over nature.

     

    As Cowart argues, “Sister Rochelle subjects the myth of Eden to a feminist reading that complements the novel’s larger deconstruction of the apocalyptic myth” (186). The foreboding Revelatory close of Gravity’s Rainbow with rocket poised above our film-entranced heads, itself the culmination of what Edward Mendelson has called an “encyclopedic narrative,” is replaced in Vineland by a literary ecological return to earth that is less explosive but a little more optimistic.10 The return is in part constituted by what Cowart calls a “feminist genealogy”: “a genealogical plenitude that centers on women, a generational unfolding that proceeds matriarchally from Eula to Sasha to Frenesi to Prairie” and “search for the mother” which “reverses–indeed deconstructs–the conventional search for the father, for patriarchal authority, reason, and order– for the familial and communal principle itself” (187). It is this success of plenitude which draws the new Counterforce–leftist, feminist, green–into resolution at the aforementioned reunion which Cowart describes as “a fine evocation of an extended and diverse family spread out over a rich California landscape–fields of strawberry and Elysian–that is a transparent symbol of America. This, after all, is the millennium: humanity as family” (187). An even broader, ecological dimension of this renewal is suggested by Eddins in regard to narrative fragmentation and Orphic naturalism in Gravity’s Rainbow:

     

    But the fragmentation of narrative in Pynchon's Text also has a positive function. It both symbolizes a shattering that is loss and incarnates a poignant lyricism that preserves what is lost from oblivion. As the novel and its world fall to pieces more and more rapidly, the pieces continue to sing like those of the dismembered Orpheus, insisting on that larger continuity of Earth that redeems and enshrines the preterite shards. (151-152)

     

    Dwight Eddins, and David Porush in “‘Purring into Transcendence’: Pynchon’s Puncutron Machine,” have pointed to the paradoxical nature of Pynchon’s texts. Eddins argues that “in a coup de grace of reflexivity” Gravity’s Rainbow becomes a Real Text, like the one that can lead the Hereros back to the Holy Center, “a Torah of Orphic naturalism, revealing the nature of gnostic evil at the same time that it reveals the Way Back to communion with Earth” (150). But this reflexivity, as the logic of Pynchon’s narrative indicates, leads to paradox:

     

    The positing of Gravity's Rainbow as the Real Text involves us, of course, in the paradoxical notion of an Orphic Word. If preverbal Earth represents in some sense a transcendental unity, the mere existence of an immanentizing Word--however normative--violates that unity. The paradox is, in its most literal sense, unresolvable, and is the principal source of the stress that cracks the novel into fragments of narrative . . . . (151)

     

    Similarly, Porush argues regarding Vineland that “Pynchon often makes us feel as if we are caught in a servo- mechanical loop of interpretation with the text” (102). Consider this description of the Puncutron Machine, for example:

     

    It was clear that electricity in unknown amounts was meant to be routed from one of its glittering parts to another until it arrived at any or all of a number of decorative-looking terminals, "or actually," purred the Ninjette Puncutron Technician who would be using it on Takeshi, "as we like to call them, electrodes." And what, or rather who, was supposed to complete the circuit? "Oh, no, "Tekeshi demurred, "I think not!" (164)

     

    As Porush concludes, “the machinery of Pynchon’s plot aids the reader in crossing between worlds, just as the Puncutron aids the reader’s avatar, Takeshi, in striking a karmic balance” (102). This paradoxical reflexivity splits the ecosystem of Pynchon’s text only to reconstitute it at a more complex and resilient level: that of the Orphic god reconstituted.

     

    The art of paradoxical communication is also evident in the phenomenon of play and in the playful Zen koan. Both prompt a kind of transcendence from paradoxical alternatives. The message “This is play,” Bateson argues, in expanded form means roughly, “These actions in which we now engage do not denote what those actions for which they stand would denote” (180). If we take the phrase “for which they stand” as a synonym for the word “denote,” the passage may be further expanded to, “‘These actions, in which we now engage, do not denote what would be denoted by those actions which these actions denote.’ The playful nip denotes the bite, but it does not denote what would be denoted by the bite” (180). The message “This is play” is therefore paradoxical, in terms of the Theory of Logical Types, Bateson concludes, “because the word ‘denote’ is being used in two degrees of abstraction, and these two uses are treated as synonymous” (180). Bateson argues that play marks a leap–a kind of transcendence–in the history of mammalian communication from the analog realm of kinesic and paralinguistic signals toward the denotative coding of human languages, for “Denotative communication as it occurs at the human level is only possible after the evolution of a complex set of metalinguistic (but not verbalized) rules which govern how words and sentences shall be related to objects and events”(180)–as in the nip “standing for” the bite in play. But this transcendence can be Gnostic, Cartesian, entrepreneurial, and require an Orphic or ecological corrective. The play of Pynchon’s satire, I argue, provides just this.

     

    The koan, too, is a form of paradoxical communication which prompts a form of transcendence. The Zen Master, Bateson argues, may lead his student to enlightenment by logic of the koan, which is verbal and non-verbal. Holding a stick over the pupil’s head, he says vehemently, “‘If you say this stick is real, I will strike you with it. If you say this stick is not real, I will strike you with it. If you don’t say anything, I will strike you with it” (208). The Zen student, Bateson points out, might simply take the stick from the Master, thereby transcending the paradoxical alternatives of the koan. Interestingly, Bateson further points out that this is precisely the logic of the Double Bind, which characterizes schizophrenic communication, except that the schizophrenic cannot transcend the terms of the paradox, indeed is systematically punished by his/her parents for communicating about the bind, and so oscillates among a medley of conflicting terms indefinitely (206-208).

     

    The related phenomena of play, the koan, and schizophrenia all suggest the function of logical typing, the formal rubric of the Great Chain, in Pynchon’s text especially, for he sustains the air of play–satire, irony, absurdity, lampoon–throughout Vineland. Safer’s article, subtitled “Humor and the Absurd in a Twentieth-Century Vineland,” argues that Zen is broadly parodied in the novel. Safer points to the New Age music played in the Log Jam bar as well as the “change of consciousness” mentioned by the bartender (6-7), where Zoyd displays his petite chain saw, to the Bodhi Dharma Pizza Temple where Prairie works, to the Sisterhood of Kuniochi Attentives, etc. as examples. While the parody of New Age spirituality is no doubt evident, what is more interesting from the viewpoint of literary ecology is Pynchon’s simultaneous use of Zen and of humor as forms of transcendence–not of nature but of the repressive and impossible alternatives imposed by the Gnostic order of Brock and his cohorts: transcendence of fragmentation as reconstitution of the Orphic god and his ecology.

     

    These various modes of transcendence in Vineland are explored by Porush in his “Purring into Transcendence.” The Puncutron machine, discussed above as an analog for Pynchon’s text itself, is “designed to ‘get that Chi flowing the right way’” (Porush 102, Pynchon 163). Notice that Takeshi is “all hooked up with no escape” from the Machine, just as the Zen student is caught in the paradoxical alternatives of the koan. Also notice that the passage clearly has a comic tone and even, as Porush points out, parodies Kafka’s grimmer Sentence Machine in “The Penal Colony,” the Puncutron fitted with an “inkjet printer” which moves “along the meridians of his [Takeshi’s] skin” (382) instead of Kafka’s grimmer needles, prompting what Porush calls “a happier transcendence” (103). Pynchon, in an inversion of the original tendency of play, seems to prefer a descent, or better yet a landing, from the digital to the analog (cf. Porush 100). So too, the comic elements in Pynchon’s text promote a benevolent deliverance from the paradoxes of a split ecology and a recursive return to nature not only neo-primitive, as in the modernist art of Gauguin or Picasso, but also postmodern as in the ecological art of Cristo, the archologies of Paolo Soleri, the ecological designs of Ian McHarg’s Design With Nature, and the doubly coded use of artificial intelligence to interface with traditional ritual in agriculture described in a recent Omni article entitled “The Goddess and The Computer.”11

     

    Typical of Pynchon’s sense of play, the glass transfenestrated by Zoyd turns out to be candy in this instance, to Zoyd’s simultaneous disappointment and relief, and his performance appreciated by an old gun for the FBI, Hector Gonzales. Play here adds both to the postmodern question of simulation–the double coding of reality and image–and of the paranoid schizophrenia which its double bind can evoke: are images new sorts of things and, if so, which is simulation or dissimulation? Image? Reality? And who’s in control? For Plato as for the philosophical tradition he started, noesis, the contemplation of pure form by the rational subject, and dianoia, the discursive processes of mathematical and logical thinking, are ways of escaping the realm of appearances, the images in the Cave. The subject exercises “self-control” and can distinguish between appearance and reality. But paranoia, the subject’s thinking amiss or literally beside or outside itself, is a state metonymically coded in terms of images not stabilized by an underlying reality. The self loses control, cannot stand apart from the flux of images, experiences fragmentation, the “split psyche” of schizophrenia, madness. But what if the images are controlled by an unseen hand, possibly Hector’s? The paranoid collapse of the personality, or the Peace movement, becomes the occasion for imposing political control. Madmen, like hippies or ecosystems, have no apparent defense against the designs of progress, the Cartesian subject’s quest for power.

     

    The paranoiac logic of Vineland‘s plot, its rhizomically connected thousand plateaus, is simultaneously an “eco-logic,” the deconstructive architecture of a mental ecology. This is its most important intersection with the logic of Mile Zero and fundamentally what makes them both literary ecology. Sanchez uses narrative, and most significantly an ecological narrator, to tie the various strands of his feminist and leftist characters and themes together in a deep-ecological web. It is from the wider perspective of the ecological mind that Sanchez’s narrator ultimately speaks, and it is into the loops of a larger social and ecological fabric that the fragments of Vineland circulate. In both novels, moreover, the ecological and paranoetic minds ultimately converge. Sanchez’s narrator is the most immediate and striking example of this perspective and convergence, for in the “grey pages” of the novel the voice addresses the reader directly, breaking from the plot and characters yet enveloping them:

     

    My moist hand is in yours, a stillborn turtle growing virtuous. You want to leave me, don't you? You don't like my chat, are fearful of fact. . . . You don't know who I am, do you? . . . My brain is like the Gulf Stream Twelve miles offshore, a vast blue river cutting through green ocean, its current pulsing seventy-five million tons of water through it each second, a force greater that the combined sum of all your earthly rivers. I am a torrent of thought flowing within society's surrounding sea, stream of ideas surging with plankton and verbs, a circular countercurrent fury . . . . (88)

     

    The ecological mind speaks in the persona of a great power, which identities itself as Zobop–

     

                   You-bop
               He-bop
               She-bop
               They-bop
               We bop
               To-Zobop. (259)

     

    It is an ecological discourse “surging with plankton and verbs.” Plankton are the expression and animating power of the marine ecosystem just as verbs are of human language. This convergence between natural and human rubrics is most profound when Zobop reveals your/his/her/their/our ultimate secret:

     

    You don't like it, do you? If I am everything you are not, then you are everything I am. We see Eye through I now. You knew you were me all along, didn't you?

     

    We are articulations of consciousness inscribed in the heterogeneous “conversations” of the ecological mind, whether we like to hear it or not, and whether we dare to contemplate its implications. To take this seriously is, in terms of the Western notion of self, especially as it has become externalized in what Lewis Mumford called the Megamachine of industrial technology, precisely madness: paranoesis.

     

    Pynchon’s shattered characters inhabit a latticework of worlds tied together by the panopticon of Federal surveillance. His ecology is stranger and more enigmatic than Sanchez’s, one forested not only by redwoods but by new generations of high technology–like the Puncutron Machine or the “creatures” of the Media Lab at MIT. It’s as if the implicit question in Vineland as in Gravity’s Rainbow is, “What is nature that it could have invented the computer by means of man?” Appreciative of the complexities and ironies of science, Pynchon seems less sure where to draw the line between “nature” and “technology.” As Frenesi reasons, “If patterns of ones and zeros were ‘like’ patterns of human lives and deaths, if everything about an individual could be represented in a computer record by a long string of ones and zeros, then what kind of creature would be represented by a long string of lives and deaths? It would have to be up one level at least–an angel, a minor god, something in a UFO . . . . We are digits in God’s computer, she not so much thought as hummed to herself to a sort of standard gospel tune” (91). This perspective is implicit in Sanchez’s final identification of the ecological and human personae but, in Pynchon, Bateson’s assertion–that lines drawn across the system bounding man, computer, and environment are purely artificial–is a working definition of mind.

     

    “Man,” in Pynchon’s vision, is destroying the biosphere including his own ecology and biology but is simultaneously replacing himself with rarefied machinery. “‘We are approaching the famous Chipco ‘Technology City,’ home of ‘Chuck,’ the world’s most invisible robot,” a PA monitor explains to Japanese karmic adjuster Takeshi Fumimota during a helicopter flight across Japan. “‘How invisible,’the voice continued, ‘you might wonder, is ‘Chuck’? Well, he’s been walking around among you, all through this whole flight!’” (146). But the point is not some neutral positivist one about the evolution of machines to replace people; it is rather a political one: the Modern machinery that the Western and now the Eastern world have created is insidious, mean spirited, power hungry, a kind of Death Star. In this regard Sanchez’s opening images in Mile Zero are also instructive. For as a boat carrying dying Haitian refugees drifts toward Key West, it crosses paths with a speedboat race, causing an accident, while above a space shuttle hurtles upward:

     

    Seabirds fly into new day, beneath them a watery world of mystery equal to the airy one above, where a man- made bird of steel streaks atop a pillar of flame. Only moments before the steel bird shook off an umbilical maze of flight feeders, its capsule head inhabited by six humans, their combined minds infinitely less than the bird's programmed range of computerized functions. (3)

     

    The technological supersession of the natural world, here figured in the image of the “man-made bird” with computerized intelligence enveloping the astronauts, has made some dubious characters gods of the earth. It must be countered, in Pynchon, by a combination of radical green- anarchist-feminist-ninjettes, accompanied by kids and dogs, along with computer hackers, paranoids and rock-‘n-rollers– a schizo-coalition that sounds like the cultural and political analog of biodiversity. In Sanchez one finds a more “serious” but nevertheless analogous coalition of rainbow socialists, feminists and ecologists as a counterforce.

     

    The adversary in Vineland, Brock Vond, has a special talent for splitting the human and natural ecologies. “Brock Vond’s genius was to have seen in the activities of the sixties left not threats to order but unacknowledged desires for it. While the Tube was proclaiming youth revolution against parents of all kinds and most viewers were accepting this story, Brock saw the deep–if he’d allowed himself to feel it, the sometimes touching–need only to stay children forever, safe inside some extended national Family” (269). Accordingly Brock, a career G-man from the Nixon through the Reagan Administrations, subverted the peace movement for the former and attempts to destroy the remnants of the counter culture, under the banner of the most defensible of campaigns, for the latter: “Brock’s Troops had departed after terrorizing the neighborhood for weeks, running up and down the dirt lanes in formation chanting ‘War-on-drugs! War-on-drugs!’ strip-searching folks in public, killing dogs, rabbits, cats, and chickens, pouring herbicide down wells that couldn’t remotely be used to irrigate dope crops, and acting, indeed, as several neighbors observed, as if they invaded some helpless land far away, instead of a short plane ride from San Francisco” (357). But as Johnny Copeland is quoted as saying in the frontispiece to Vineland, “Every dog has his day, / and a good dog / just might have two days.”

     

    And so Pynchon’s novel culminates in the aforementioned family reunion, with ecological dimensions, of Jess Traverse and Eula Becker, great-grandparents in the American radical tradition, where a new movement falls together like the fragments of Zoyd’s window would if we watched a video of his performance in reverse. The movement is as schizophrenically diverse as Vineland‘s characters, and one of retribution in the spirit of Emerson “read by Jess from a jailhouse copy of The Varieties of Religious Experience“: “‘Secret retributions are always restoring the level, when disturbed, of the divine justice. It is impossible to tilt the beam. All the tyrants and proprietors and monopolists of the world in vain set their shoulders to heave the bar. Settles forever more the ponderous equator to its line, and man and mote, and star and sun, must range to it, or be pulverized by the recoil’” (369). This is the self-correction of the human ecological mind.

     

    “Lack of systemic wisdom is always punished,” Bateson warns. “We may say that the biological systems–the individual, the culture, and the ecology–are partly living sustainers of their component cells or organisms. But the systems are nonetheless punishing of any species unwise enough to quarrel with its ecology. Call the systemic forces ‘God’ if you will” (434). If there is a new religiosity implicit in literary ecology, it is not animistic or deistic; it does not naively personify or project a super mind transcending nature. The ecological mind is as immanent in nature as our own mental processes are in the brain. Therefore, in spite of the rich diversity and resilience of life forms in which mental processes are inscribed, they can like Lake Erie or Zoyd be driven “insane.” This insanity, however, is only the wisdom of the ecology correcting epistemological error. Literary ecology is an expression in human letters of the larger writing of genotypes into phenotypes in the biosphere, poesis as a creative extension of morphogenesis. Like the woge whom the Yurok people along the river in Vineland understood to be “creatures like humans but smaller” (186), and who local hippies believe have returned to the ocean as porpoises, “to wait and see how humans did with the world,” literary ecologists “would come back, teach us how to live the right way, save us . . .” (187).

     

    Notes

     

    1. There are various strains of ecological philosophy in the current literature, the most important of which are deep ecology, popularly associated with the journal Earth First!, socialist ecology, probably best represented by the journal Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, and ecological feminism, the most recent scholarship in which appears in a special issue of Hypatia, 6.1, Spring 1991. Literary ecology, as it is expressed in the work of Pynchon and Sanchez, involves a cross-section of these strains.

     

    2. See, especially, David Cowart, “Continuity and Growth”; Cowart argues that “The postmodern hoops through which the animals [circus animals, Pynchon’s characteristic images and themes] jumped–the self-reflexivity of structures that mocked structure, the representation of representation, the brilliant demonstrations that ‘meaning’ is always projective–seem to have given way to a simpler, less mannered displays” (177), the central theme of which is the quest for justice (179), a solid Enlightenment master narrative supposedly undermined, as Lyotard has argued, by the postmodern condition. See also Dwight Eddins, who attempts to formulate a “‘unified field theory’ that will account for both modern and postmodern Pynchon–the Pynchon whose world-view is suffused by acute nostalgia for vanished foundations and values, an the Pynchon whose field of vision seems occupied with discontinuities and absurdities that threaten our sense of a comprehensible, mappable, even affirmable existence” The Gnostic Pynchon xi).

     

    3. While Eddins employs the writings of Hans Jonas and Eric Voegelin with their concept of gnosticism to explicate Pynchon’s texts, he does not claim that Pynchon has been directly influenced by them but rather that, “The crucial commonality is a sort of philosophical force field that finds its origin the Judaeo-Christian Gnostics of antiquity (with whom Pynchon is demonstrably familiar) and spreads into modern (and very Pynchonian) concerns with such issues as existentialist vacuity and the cabalistic manipulation of history” (xi). Similarly, I am not claiming that Pynchon or Sanchez has read and been directly influenced by Wilden, Bateson or other writers mentioned below, but rather that they explicitly define concerns– socialism, cybernetics, information theory, feminism, mysticism etc.–that are shared, often implicitly, by literary ecologists.

     

    4. See “Conscious Purpose Versus Nature,” 11.Steps 432-445, citation 433.

     

    5. “You see,” Bateson explains, “we’re not talking about the dear old Supreme Mind of Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, and so on down through ages–the Supreme Mind which was incapable of error and incapable of insanity. We’re talking about immanent mind, which is only too capable of insanity . . . .” Steps 493).

     

    6. It is important to note that Bateson’s theory of difference, characteristic of cybernetics and information theory, tends to be synchronic and static, purely formal. It therefore is subject to the Derridean criticism that it invokes a metaphysics of presence to describe what, even in Bateson’s own terms, is an “evolutionary” living system. What is called for is a postmodern ecology based not on the paradoxical notion of a stable, “identical,” system preserving the idealized structure of a set of differences, or “the truth of set of descriptive propositions about the variables of the system,” as I’ve quoted Bateson as saying, above, but a neo-structuralist ecology based on Derrida’s generative notion of differance. This, of course, will make the “ground” of ecological and hence of literary- ecological theory more like quicksand.

     

    7. Parts of this section are taken, in modified form, from my essay “Postmodern Ecology”; see Works Cited.

     

    8. “The novel’s title . . . recalls the discovery of America by Leif the Lucky and his fellow Vikings. For these Norsemen exiled from their homeland, Vineland represented an opportunity for a new life in a land with rich woods, white sandy beaches, grapes and vines, and a good climate,” Elaine B. Safer explains in “Pynchon’s World and its Legendary Past” (110).

     

    9. In “On the Tube,” Pynchon has a panel of experts, “including a physics professor, a psychiatrist, and a track- and-field coach . . . discussing the evolution over the years of Zoyd’s technique, pointing out the useful distinction between the defenestrative personality, which prefers jumping out of windows, and the transfenestrative, which tends to jump through, each reflecting an entirely different psychic subtext . . .” (15).

     

    10. “Encyclopedic narratives attempt to render the full range of knowledge and beliefs of a national culture, while identifying the ideological perspectives from which that culture shapes and interprets its knowledge,” among other things, Mendelson explains in “Gravity’s Encyclopedia” (30).

     

    11. See Omni Vol. 12, No. 9, June 1990: 22, 96. This project in artificial intelligence nicely illustrates the virtually ecological relationships among various modes of discourse. The Goddess and the Computer project demonstrates how the religious ceremonies of traditional Balinese culture, partly supplanted by the language and practice of Western development, turned out to be a valuable commentary on and careful regulator of the local ecology. This was discovered, as usual, after the society and human ecology had been so disrupted by “development” that agriculture became counterproductive and government agronomists wanted to know why. With the help of a computer model developed by a team at the University of Southern California, they discovered that development involved over- farming, and that traditional farming had been kept at an optimum level by the restraints of the ceremonies which in turn were based on careful observation of rain in the highlands and water flow to the cultivated lowlands. When the signs from Goddess, Dewi Danu, were right, the high priest said “yea” to farming. The domain of Dewi Danu happened to be that of a volcanic lake in the Balinese highlands which feeds a complex water system branching into rice fields divided by dams in the lowlands. In each group of fields, called a subak, there is a temple dedicated to a local god and overseen by a priest. Before letting water into the subak, local farmers would consult a priest who would give permission to irrigate only if he had the word from the priest of Dewi Danu’s lake “on high.” In this way water was equitably distributed by means of a complex system of rituals and signs, which themselves served diverse purposes other than “water management.” Now farmers consult both the priest and the Macintosh computer; this is double coding in the practical arts.

    Works Cited

     

    • Bacon, Francis. Advancement of Learning, Novum Organum, New Atlantis. Chicago: Benton, 1952.
    • Bateson, Gregory. Steps to An Ecology of Mind. Rpt. 1972. Northvale, N.J.: Aronson, 1987.
    • Bruno, Giordano. The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast. Trans. and Ed. A.D. Imerti. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1964.
    • Cowart, David. “Attenuated Postmodernism: Pynchon’s Vineland. Critique XXXII, 2 (Winter 1990): 67-76.
    • —. “Continuity and Growth.” Kenyon Review (New Series) XII, 4, 176-190.
    • Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Vol. II. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987.
    • —. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Vol. I. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983.
    • Eddins, Dwight. The Gnostic Pynchon. Bloominington and Indianapolis: Indiana U P, 1990.
    • Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land. Ed. Valerie Eliot. New York: Harvest/HBJ, 1971.
    • Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. The Sorrows of Young Werther. Trans. Catherine Hutter. New York: NAL, 1962.
    • Hayles, N. Katherine. “‘Who was Saved?’ Families, Snitches, and Recuperation in Pynchon’s Vineland.” Winter 1990: 77-92.
    • Jencks, Charles. What is Post-Modernism? New York: St. Martin’s, 1989.
    • Mendelson, Edward. “Gravity’s Encyclopedia.” Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Modern Critical Interpretations. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. 29-52.
    • —. “Levity’s Rainbow.” Rev. of Vineland. New Republic 9 and 16 July 1990: 40ff.
    • Mumford, Lewis. The Myth of the Machine, Vol. 2: The Pentagon of Power. New York: HBJ, 1970.
    • Plumwood, Val. “Nature, Self, and Gender: Feminism, Environmental Philosophy, and the Critique of Rationalism.” Hypatia Spring 1991: 3-27.
    • Porush, David. “‘Purring into Transcendence’: Pynchon’s Puncutron Machine.” Critique. Winter 1990: 93-106.
    • Poster, Mark. The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990.
    • Pynchon, Thomas. “Entropy.” Slow Learner. Boston: Little, Brown, 1984. 79-98.
    • —. Gravity’s Rainbow. New York: Viking, 1973.
    • —. Vineland. New York: Little Brown, 1990.
    • Safer, Elaine B. “Pynchon’s World and its Legendary Past: Humor and the Absurd in a Twentieth-Century Vineland.” Critique. Winter 1990: 107-125.
    • Sanchez, Thomas. Mile Zero. New York: Knopf, 1989.
    • Slade, Joseph. “Communication, Group Theory, and Perception in Vineland.” Critique. Winter 1990: 126-144.
    • —. Thomas Pynchon. New York: Warner, 1974.
    • Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Dell, 1977.
    • Starr, Douglas. “The Goddess and the Computer.” Omni Vol. 12, No. 9, June 1990: 22, 96.
    • White, Daniel R. “Postmodern Ecology.” Proceedings of Earth Ethics Forum ’91. Earth Ethics Research Group & St. Leo College, Florida. 10-12 May 1991.
    • Wilden, Anthony. System and Structure: Essays in Communication and Exchange. Second Edition. London: Tavistock, 1980.
    • Worster, Donald. Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas. Rpt. 1977. London: Cambridge, 1985.

     

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              Announcing SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES #55
              (Volume 18, number 3 = November 1991)

                POSTMODERNISM AND SCIENCE FICTION

Editorial Introduction: Postmodernism's SF/SF's Postmodernism (ICR)

Jean Baudrillard. Two Essays
     1. Simulations and Science Fiction  
     2. Ballard's _Crash_

In Response to Jean Baudrillard (N. Katherine Hayles, David Porush,
  Brooks Landon, Vivian Sobchack) and to the Invitation to Respond
  (J.G. Ballard)

Christopher Palmer: The Birth of the Author in Philip K. Dick's
  _Valis_

Scott Bukatman: Postcards from the Posthuman Solar System

Roger Luckhurst: Border Policing: Postmodernism and Science Fiction

David Porush: Prigogine, Chaos, and Contemporary Science Fiction

Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. The SF of Theory: Baudrillard and
  Haraway

Review Articles:

Roy Arthur Swanson. Postmodernist Criticism of Pynchon

Peter Ohlin. SF Film Criticism and the Debris of Postmodernism

Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. The McCaffery Interviews
                           Chaos and Culture
                           Gane's Baudrillard

New subscribers for 1992 (## 56,57, 58) will receive #55 gratis.

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-----------------------------------------------------------------------
OCTOBER 1991             ISSUE  001               VOLUME 1   NUMBER 1
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

This is an announcement for Thinknet, an on-line magazine forum 
dedicated to thoughtfulness in the cybertime environment. Thinknet 
covers philosophy, systems theory, and meta-theoretical discussions 
within disciplines. It is your interdisciplinary window on to what 
significant information sources are available to foster thought-
provoking discussion.

*CONTENTS*

Publication Data

     Scope of newsletter.
     Rationale for newsletter.
     Subscriptions and Submittals address.
     Bulletin Boards where it may be found.
     Services offered by newsletter.
     Staff of this edition.
     Coda: call for participation.

About Thinknet

     Discussion of goals of Thinknet Newsletter.

Prospect for Philosophy and Systems Theory in Cybertime

     Is there a possibility for a renaissance for philosophy?

The Philosophy Category on GEnie

      Review by Gordon Swobe with list of topics.

Philosophy on the WELL

      Review by Jeff Dooley with list of topics.

Origin Conference on the WELL

      Review by Bruce Schuman with list of topics

Internet Philosophy Mailing Lists

      A review of all know philosophy oriented mailing lists 
      by Stephen Clark.

Books Of Note

      THE MATRIX

      !%@:: A DIRECTORY OF ELECTRONIC MAIL ADDRESSING & 
      NETWORKS

Other Publications

      BOARDWATCH MAGAZINE

      SOFTWARE ENGINEERING FOUNDATIONS [a work in progress]

Books, Electronic Newsletters, and Cyber-Artifacts Received

      ARTCOM NEWSLETTER

      FACTSHEET FIVE

Protocols for Meaningful Discussions: ARTICLE by Kent Palmer

       A consideration of how philosophy discussions might 
       be made more useful and their history accessible by 
       using a voluntary protocol.

Thoughtful Communications: EDITORIAL

    Closing remarks.

<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>
>>>>>>>>

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3)--------------------------------------------------------------

                   P U B L I C   C U L T U R E

                                                    CENTER FOR
Shaping The Debates                              TRANSNATIONAL
About The Tensions Between                    CULTURAL STUDIES
Global Cultural Flows And
Public Cultures In
A Diasporic World

                        Recent Contributors:
                   Marilyn Ivy, Steve Feld, Gayatri
                         Chakravorty Spivak,
                 Elizabeth Traube, Robert Rosenstone,
                  Charles Taylor, Hamid Naficy, Ella
                      Shohat, Partha Chatterjee,
                      Dan Rose, Manthia Diawara

USA:  individuals $10.00, institutions $20.00.
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CULTURAL STUDIES.  CTCS at the University of Pennsylvania is an 
outgrowth of the interests of several individuals and groups, both
within and outside theUniversity, in coordinating and stimulating
research that focuses on transnational cultural flows, while 
encouraging communication, debate, and collaboration between 
scholars and scholarly groups concerned with these issues, 
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CTCS coordinates and supports research, multi-locale roundtables, 
and transnational collaborative projects, while publishing relevant 
reports, essays, and extracts from the media in its journal, PUBLIC 
CULTURE. Enquiries regarding the Center may be addressed to its 
Co-Directors, Arjun Appadurai and Carol A. Breckenridge at:

                    CTCS
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                    33rd & Spruce Streets
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4)------------------------------------------------------------------

                         *_differences_*

              A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies

             Edited by Naomi Schor and Elizabeth Week

                        Volume 3, Number 1
Politics/Power/Culture:  Postmodernity and Feminist Political Theory
       Edited by Kathy E. Ferguson and Kirstie M. McClure

                        Volume 3, Number 2
           Queer Theory:  Lesbian and Gay Sexualities
                  Edited by Teresa de Lauretis

                        Volume 3, Number 3
      Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak:  Feminism in Colonization
                    Joan W. Scott:  Commentary
   Ann-Louise Shapiro:  Love Stories: Female Crimes of Passion 
                    in Fin-de-siecle Paris.
Mary Lydon:  Calling Yourself a Woman: Marguerite Yourcenar and Colette
 Eric O. Clarke:  Fetal Attraction: Hegel's An-aesthetics of Gender
Neil Lazarus:  Doubting the New World Order: Marxism and the Claims of
                   Postmodern Social Theory
   Interview with Antoinette Fouque, Femmes en mouvements: hier, 
                        aujourd'hui, demain

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Order from:  INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS, 601 N. Morton, Bloomington, IN 
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5)---------------------------------------------------------------------

                                *%Discourse%*

                   THEORETICAL STUDIES IN MEDIA AND CULTURE

               Edited by Roswitha Mueller and Kathleen Woodward

*D I S
C O U R S E*        Volume 14, Number 1

                    *Jean-Francois Lyotard* "Voices of a Voice" 
(trans.George Van Den Abbeele)   *Meaghan Morris* "Ecstasy 
and Economics" *Kathryn Milun* "(En)countering Imperialist 
nostalgia: The Indian Reburial Issue"   *Christina von Braun* 
"Strategies of Disappearance" *Gloria-Jean Masciarotte "The 
Madonna with Child, and Another Child, and Still Another Child 
. . . : Sensationalism and the Dysfunction of Emotions"  *Tara 
McPherson and Gareth Evans* "Watch this Space: An Interivew with 
Edward Soja"

BOOK REVIEWS:  *Susan Willis* %Consumer Culture and Postmodernism% 
by MikeFeatherstone   *James Schwoch* %The Mode of Information: 
Poststructuralism and Social Context% by Mark Poster   *Tara 
McPherson* %Feminism and Youth Culture: from Jackie to Just 
Seventeen% by Angela McRobbie   *Mark Rose* %Contested Culture: 
The Image, the Voice, and the Law% by Jane Gaines  *Elizabeth 
Francis* %Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant- 
Garde% by Susan Rubin Suleiman   *Marilyn Edelstein* %Sexual 
Subversions: Three French Feminists% by Elizabeth Grosz

                    Volume 13, Number 2

*Lynne Kirby* "Gender and Advertising in American Silent
Film: From Early Cinema to the Crowd"   *Maureen Turim* "Viewing/
Reading %Born to be Sold: Martha Rosler Reads the Strange Case of
Baby S/M% or Motherhood in the Age of Technological Reproduction"
*Roswitha Mueller* "Screen Embodiments: Valie Export's %Syntagma%
*Robert J. Corber* "Reconstructuring Homosexuality: Hitchcock and
the Homoerotics of Spectatorial Pleasure"   *Virginia Carmichael*
"Death by Text: The Word on Ethel Rosenberg"   *Susan Jeffords* 
"Performative Masculinities, or 'After a Few Times You won't Be 
Afraid of Rape at All'"

BOOK REVIEWS:  *Bethany Hicok and Pamela Lougheed* %Visual and 
Other Pleasures% by Laura Mulvey   *Andrew Martin* %The 
Remasculinization of America% by Susan Jeffords   *Linda 
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*Robin Pickering-Iazzi* %Sexual Difference% by The Milan Women's 
Bookstore Collective   *Linda Schulte-Sasse* %Joyless Streets% by
Patrice Petro

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6)----------------------------------------------------------------

 Journal of Ideas, Vol 2 #2/3 -- contents

 Journal of Ideas - ISSN 1049-6335 is published quarterly by

 the Institute for Memetic Research, POB 16327, Panama City,
 Florida 32406-1327.

 [For more information contact E. Moritz at moritz@well.sf.ca.us]

 OF IDEAS
 John Locke

 ENERGY FLOW AND ENTROPY PRODUCTION
 IN BIOLOGICAL SYSTEMS
 Brian A. Maurer
 Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah 84602
 Daniel R. Brooks
 University of Toronto, Ontario M5S 1A1, Canada

 ON THE ROAD TO CYBERNETIC IMMORTALITY:
 A Report on the First Principia Cybernetica Workshop
 Elan Moritz
 The Institute for Memetic Research, Panama City, Florida

 THE ORIGINS OF THE CAPACITY FOR CULTURE
 Jerome H. Barkow
 Dalhousie University, Halifax, N.S. B3H 1T2, Canada

 FOLK PSYCHOLOGY, FREE WILL AND EVOLUTION
 Jerome H. Barkow

7)----------------------------------------------------------------

                              BOOK ANNOUNCEMENT:

                           MUSIC AND CONNECTIONISM
                                  edited by
                       Peter M. Todd and D. Gareth Loy

MUSIC AND CONNECTIONISM is now available from MIT Press.  This 
280-pp. book contains a wide variety of recent research in the 
applications of neural networks and other connectionist methods to
the problems of musical listening and understanding, performance, 
composition, and aesthetics.  It consists of a core of articles 
that originally appeared in the Computer Music Journal, along
with several new articles by Kohonen, Mozer, Bharucha, and others, 
and new addenda to the original articles describing the authors' 
most recent work. Topics covered range from models of 
psychological processing of pitches, chords, and melodies, to 
algorithmic composition and performance factors.  A wide variety 
of connectionist models are employed as well, including back-
propagation in time, Kohonen feature maps, ART networks, and 
Jordan- and Elman-style networks.  We've also included a 
discussion generated by the Computer Music Journal articles on 
the use and place of connectionist systems in artistic endeavors.

We hope this book will be of use to a wide variety of readers, 
including neural network researchers interested in a broad, 
challenging, and fun new area of application, cognitive scientists 
and music psychologists looking for robust new models of musical 
behavior, and artists seeking to learn more about a potentially 
very useful technology.

Please drop me a line if you have any questions, and especially if 
you take up the gauntlet and pursue research or applications in 
this area!

8)-----------------------------------------------------------------


  +----------------------------------------------------------------+
  | PREMIERES FALL 1991 . . .                                      |
  |                                                                |
  |          JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL MULTIMEDIA AND HYPERMEDIA      |
  |                                                                |
  |                         Published by the                       |
  |     Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education  |
  +----------------------------------------------------------------+

Editor: David H. Jonassen (University of Colorado-Denver)
Associate Editor: Scott Grabinger (University of Colorado-Denver)

The Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia is designed to 
provide a multi-disciplinary forum and serve as a primary information 
source to present and discuss research and applications on Multimedia 
and Hypermedia in education.  The main goal of the Journal is to 
contribute to the advancement of the theory and practice of learning 
and teaching using these powerful technological tools that allow the 
integration of images, sound, text and data.

Reviewed by leaders in the field, this international quarterly 
Journal is published for researchers, developers, professors, 
teachers, teacher educators, curriculum coordinators, and all 
interested in the educational research and applications of 
Multimedia and Hypermedia at all levels.

Journal articles include any educational aspect of Multimedia and
Hypermedia and take the form of:

       o Research papers               o Case studies
       o Experimental studies          o Review papers
       o Book/courseware reviews       o Tutorials
       o Courseware experiences        o Opinions

Departments include:
-------------------
Viewpoint - examines ideas and their relationships in the field.

Multimedia Projects: Issues and Applications - discusses the 
practical and theoretical problems and issues associated with 
current state-of-the-art multimedia/hypermedia projects (Edited 
by Greg Kearsley, George Washington University)

Developers' Dialogue - examines interesting, unexplored, broad 
themes, issues and decisions faced by developers (Edited Carrie 
Heeter, Michigan State Univ.)

Educational Multimedia/Hypermedia Abstracts - abstracts 
noteworthy researchappearing in journals and databases.

Product Reviews - provides in-depth reviews with screen images of
multimedia/hypermedia products (Edited by Robert Beichner, SUNY-
Buffalo)

Book Reviews - provides critical reviews of books in the field 
Edited by Philip Barker, Teesside Polytechnic)

--------------------------------------------------------------------
To request subscription/membership information or Author Guidelines,
contact:
     AACE
     P.O. Box 2966
     Charlottesville, VA 22902 USA
     E-mail: aace@virginia.edu
     Phone: (804) 973-3987

                 ------------------------------------
The Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE) 
is an international, educational organization whose purpose is to 
advance the knowledge and quality of teaching and learning at all 
levels with computing technologies through the encouragement of 
scholarly inquiry related to computing in education and the 
dissemination of research results and their applications.

AACE consists of five membership divisions.  And each division 
provides members with an annual conference and publications.  The 
following respected journals represent the topic areas of these 
divisions:

   - Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia
   - Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education
   - Journal of Computing in Childhood Education
   - Journal of Computers in Mathematics and Science Teaching
   - Journal of Technology and Teacher Education (premieres Fall 
     '92)

9)-----------------------------------------------------------------

                            CLINAMENS
                
                      E.N.S. Fontenay/St Cloud
                         31 Avenue Lombart
                      92266-Fontenay-aux-Roses
                    Tel : 47-02-60-50, poste 530
                         Fax : 47-02-34-32

              L'E.N.S. annonce la creation de CLINAMENS
(CLearinghouse INterdisciplinaire `Anglicisme et Methodologie' de 
                     l'Ecole Normale Superieure)

Pourquoi "clearinghouse" ?

     Parce que l'ambition de cette structure n'est pas d'etre 
seulement un "centre de recherches", mais aussi un centre de 
rencontres, de partage, d'information et de critique constructive 
mutuelles, de mise au point et de clarification.  _Webster's_ 
partage sa definition du terme entre "le fait de clarifier" et un 
lieu de "collection, de traitement et de distribution de 
l'information"; le lieu, autrement dit, non seulement d'une 
reflexion solide et formatrice mais aussi d'une definition 
disciplinaire collective.

Pourquoi "Clinamens" ?  

     Parce que l'entreprise ne pourra, dans cette optique, avoir 
sens et valeur que si chacun accepte le detour, le "pas de cote", 
l'ecart qui, l'eloignant un peu de ses preoccupations les plus 
directes ou quotidiennes,  le rapprochera de ceux qui, dans des 
domaines adjacents, auront consenti le meme effort et renforcera 
ainsi son entreprise.
     Lucrece decrivait par le terme de "clinamen" la "legere 
deviation des atomes" qui permet leur rencontre et leur 
"accrochage".  Ce detournement de vocation, cet "ambitus", cette 
declinaison, Marx y lisait le signe d'une volonte  arrachee au 
destin, d'une liberte plus forte que les determinismes...  Faire 
travailler ensemble des "anglicistes" et les inviter a fertiliser 
mutuellement leur travail en prenant conscience des savoirs qui
les rassemblent et des interrogations qu'ils ont en commun plutot 
qu'en se renfermant sur le champ clos de leur stricte specialite 
-pratique un peu trop repandue- n'est pas une mince ambition.  
Il peut sembler qu'uelle vaille la peine de s'en donner les 
moyens.

     A terme, Clinamens organisera

          - Des seminaires de methodologie critique
          - Des seminaires de "work-in-progress"
          - Des cycles de conferences
          - Des debats contradictoires
          - Des equipes de recherches "sous-disciplinaires"
          - Une equipe de recherche theorique interdisciplinaire
          - Des colloques

     Des cette annee debutent le cycle de conferences et les 
actvites de quatre equipes de recherches.  (Voir le calendrier 
reproduit au verso.)  On se renseignera sur le detail de ces 
dernieres en prenant l'attache des responsables:

          1) "Incidences de la psychanalyse sur les etudes 
              anglicistes"  Responsable Patrick Di Mascio  
              (Tel : 43-38-56-47)
          2) "Episteme" (Epistemologie et litterature 16e-18e 
               siecles)
               Responsable Gisele Venet  (Tel : 60-46-56-63)
          3) "Telos" (Linguistique)
               Responsable Laurent Danon-Boileau  (Tel : 
               43-26-98-78)
          4) "Irlande"
               Responsable Alexandra Poulain  (Tel : 
               45-24-05-09)

     L'assistance aux conferences est libre dans la limite des 
places disponibles.  *Les specialistes d'autres disciplines 
sont les bienvenus.* La participation aux equipes de recherche 
est possible apres contact avec le responsable de l'equipe 
concernee.

     Tous renseignements complementaires (horaires, salles, 
dates ou sujets non encore determines) peuvent etre obtenus 
aupres du responsable de CLINAMENS : 

                                Marc Chenetier
                            ENS Fontenay/St. Cloud
                                  Bureau 105
                              31 Avenue Lombart
                           92266-Fontenay-aux-Roses
                            47-02-60-50, poste 530

10)--------------------------------------------------------------

00000000000000000000000000  RD: Graduate Research in the Arts
00000000000000000000000000
00000000000000000000000000  A CALL FOR PAPERS AND READERS
00000000000000000000000000
00000000:::::::::::0000000  RD: GRADUATE RESEARCH IN THE ARTS is 
000000:       DDDDD:000000  a refereed journal dedicated to 
0000:         DDDDDDD:0000  publishing the work of graduate scholars 
000:  RRRRR   D     DD:000  in the Arts.  It provides an appropriate 
00:   R    R  D DDDD DD:00  forum for their scholarly work and a
0:    RRRRR   D DDDDD DD:0  collective voice for their issues and 
0:    R   R   D DDDDD DD:0  interests.
00:   R    R  D DDDD D:000  Papers for RD are now being solicited 
000:  R     R D     DD:000  from graduate students in the Arts, Fine 
0000:         DDDDDDD:0000  Arts, andHumanities in any of the 
00000:::      DDDD:::00000  following areas:    
0000000::::::::::::0000000      * language, literature and other        
00000000000000000000000000        artifacts/artefacts
00000000000000000000000000      * constructions of the self, gender,  
00000000000000000000000000        class and race
00000000000000000000000000      * the academy itself and its 
                                  institutional imperatives.

Multidisciplinary and collaborative work isencouraged.

Address two copies of each paper to the editors with a SASE and proof 
of current enrollment in a graduate programme (for instance, photocopy 
of a student card or letter from the programme).  Submissions can 
also be sent on disk (DOS or Macintosh format) or by e-mail.  If you 
intend to send papers by e-mail, please contact the editors to receive 
guidelines for indicating foreign or special characters and italics. 
All submissions should conform to the _MLA Style Manual_.

RD is also presently accepting applications from graduate students to 
act as readers of papers. Volunteers should include a CV, or a brief 
summary of their scholarly work and publications.

DEADLINES:

Submissions for RD 1 (Spring 1992) must be postmarked by 15 December 
1991.

Submissions for RD 2 (Fall 1992) will be accepted until 31 August 
1992.

SUBSCRIPTIONS:
                        1 Year  2 Years
Student                 $16.00  $30.00
Individual/Institution  $24.00  $44.00
Please add 7% for GST.  Made checks payable to RD.

Individuals who have access to e-mail can receive electronic versions 
of the journal free of charge by sending their name, status (student, 
faculty, other) and e-mail address to the editors.

ADDRESS:

Editors, RD
York University
c/o Graduate Programme in English
215 Stong College
4700 Keele Street
North York, Ontario
CANADA  M3J 1P3

bitnet: RD@WRITER YORKU.CA

EDITORS:
         Stephen N. Matsuba
         Rod Lohin

EDITORIAL BOARD:
         Clint Burnham
         Cecily Devereux
         Mark Dineen
         Gayle Irwin
         Sherry Rowley
         Glenn Stillar
         Scott Wright

11)------------------------------------------------------------------
                         CALL FOR PAPERS

LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE is a new international journal to be 
published by Longman U.K. in June. It brings together the work of 
those interested in the field of stylistic analysis, the elucidation 
of literary and non- literary texts and related areas.  It explores 
the connections between stylistics, critical theory, linguistics, 
literary criticism and their pedagogical applications.

Interested contributors should write to:

M.H.Short
Department of Linguistics and Modern English Language
University of Lancaster
LANCASTER
LA1 4YT
U.K.

e-mail enquiries to Tony Bex, University of Kent at Canterbury:
arb1@ukc.ac.uk

12)------------------------------------------------------------------

            *************CALL FOR PAPERS*************

                 An International Conference On
         The Sociology and Anthropology of Performance:
           Public and Private, May 29-31, 1992, Ottawa

Submissions are invited for an international symposium which
explores "performance" with reference to both public and private
domains as well as the links between the two.  Scholars with an
interest in the performing arts (e.g. dance, music, media etc.)
as well as those with interest in private performance (e.g.
ritual, meditation, shamanism etc.) are invited to attend a
three-day symposium at Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario,
Canada.

With regard to public performance, our focus is on the social
science of the performing arts (i.e. demonstrative acts involving
skills).  Examples would include:

- dance choreography as a special form of communication
- theatre as a vehicle of social expression
- music and musicology as social expression or elitism
- media and performing arts
- sacred Vs. the secular in performing arts
- public ritual performance (Puja, ritual-drama etc.)

Private performance focuses on the social science of the use of
demonstrative acts in the private domain and includes:

- meditation
- sadhana, personal ritual-drama
- physical and mental yogas
- the ritual control of experience
- ritual transformation
- ritual or transpersonal epistemologies
- esoteric epistemologies

     These categories are neither mutually exclusive or
exhaustive.  You are welcome to suggest topics in relation to our
broad outline by email or snail mail.  Please include a title and
a short abstract.  We also require a brief C.V. which is needed
to bolster our funding applications.

Mail your submissions to:             Email submissions to:

                                      BRIAN_GIVEN@CARLETON.CA

V. Subramaniam                        Brian J. Given
Political Science                     Sociology and Anthropology
Carleton University                   Carleton U.
Ottawa, Ont.                          Ottawa, Ont.

13)------------------------------------------------------------------

           I'M THINKING OF SOMETHING ROUND: BEUYS' CHALKBOARDS

                       CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS

I am a San Francisco artist interested in art as experimentation. I 
am soliciting individuals who are interested in participating in a
telecommunications art experiment/project.  This project will attempt
to gather ideas from around the world.  I have created a file that
I would like to have forwarded around the world, where each individual
me,involved would add an idea to a list.  Once the file is returned to 
I will attempt to execute an idea from the list.

Those who are interested in this project, please send me your address
and I will mail you the file and detailed instructions.

Elliot Anderson
San Francisco State University
eliota@sfsuvax1.sfsu.edu

"An Equal Opportunity Artist...""

14)------------------------------------------------------------------

                               dis*Klo'zher

                              call for papers

The editorial collective of disClosure is pleased to announce that it 
is now accepting submissions for its second issue.  disClosure is a 
social theory journal edited by graduate students at the Uniersity of 
Kentucky, and is designed to provide a forum of multi-disciplinary 
dialogue between the humanities and the the social sciences. By 
exploring alternative forms of discourse, our goal is to address 
contemporary intellectual concerns through a rigorous examination 
of history, space, and representation. As our title suggests, we 
encourage fresh perspectives that trancend the strictures and 
structures set in place by traditional disciplary boundaries.
______________________________________________________________________
    Issue 2- "The Buying and Selling of Culture"
    Deadline - 1 March 1992
    Submissions for the second issue could address the following 
    issues:

Commodifactions of: PLACE, HERITAGE, PRACTICE, the IMAGE, EDUCATION,
                    IDEAS, CONTRACEPTION, RELIGION, the "SELF" &
                    "POTENTIAL",the SPECTACLE, ART
Aesthetics and:     TECHNOLOGY/RESISTANCE/COMMODIFCATION/THEORY/
                    DOMINATION
Resistance:         AVANT GARDE? POSTMODERN? GRASS ROOTS? SUICIDAL?
                    AUTONOMY?
______________________________________________________________________
We accept submissions from all theoretical perspecitves and all genres
(essay, interview, review, poetry, artwork and others), from both 
inside and outside the academy. disClosure is a refereed journal whose
selections are based solely on quality and originaltiy. Graduate
studetns, factulty and nonacademics are equally encouraged to submit
works.  Send three copies of manuscripts fromated to MLA guidlines,
double-spaced, and less than 10,000 words to:

disClosure
106 Student Center
University of Kentucky
Lexington, KY  40506-0026
PHONE: 606/2572931
EMAIL: DISCLOSURE@UKCC.UKY.EDU

to order an issue, please send $5 (individual) or $10 (library) in the
form of a check or money order payable to disClosure.

15)-------------------------------------------------------------------

             NEW JOURNAL: STUDIES IN PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY

STUDIES IN PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY, a journal devoted to the study
of psychoanalysis and cultural criticism in the humanities, social
sciences, and fine arts, invites the submission of manuscripts in
either current MLA or APA style.  Psychoanalytic here is used in the
broadest sense to include Freudian, neo-Freudian, Lacanian, Jungian,

British school, ego psychology, etc., etc., perspectives.

We are also interested in locating people interested in reviewing books
for us. If you would like more information, please contact me via
e-mail at ra471av@tcuamus or via "snail mail" at

Christina Murphy, Editor
STUDIES IN PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY
Box 32875
Texas Christian University
Fort Worth, TX 76129
(817) 921-7221

Thanks.  I look forward to hearing from you and receiving subscriptions
and submissions.

16)--------------------------------------------------------------------

                      CALL FOR PAPERS

     *   SYMPOSIUM:  THE PRINCIPIA CYBERNETICA PROJECT       *
     *      computer-supported cooperative development       *
     *        of an evolutionary-systemic philosophy         *

                        as part of the

            13th International Congress on Cybernetics
               NAMUR (Belgium), August 24-28, 1992

After the succesful organization of a symposium on "Cybernetics and 
Human Values" at the 8th World Congress of Systems and Cybernetics 
(New York, June 1990), and of the "1st Workshop of the Principia 
Cybernetica Project" (Brussels, July 1991), the third official 
activity of the Principia Cybernetica Project will be a Symposium 
held at the 13th Int. Congress on Cybernetics. The official congress 
languages are English and French.

The informal symposium will allow researchers interested in 
collaborating in the Project to meet. The emphasis will be on 
discussion, rather than on formal presentation. Contributors are 
encouraged to read some of the available texts on the PCP in order 
to get acquainted with the main issues (Newsletter available on 
request from the Symposium Chairman).

Symposium Theme

Principia Cybernetica is a collaborative attempt to develop a 
complete and consistent cybernetic philosophy, moving towards a 
transdisciplinary unification of the domain of Systems Theory and 
Cybernetics. PCP is meta-cybernetical in that we intend to use 
cybernetic tools to develop and analyze cybernetic theory. These 
include the computer-based tools of hypertext, electronic mail, 
and knowledge structuring software.

PCP is to be developed as a dynamic, multi-dimensional conceptual 
network. The basic architecture consists of nodes, containing 
expositions of concepts using different media, connected by links, 
representing the associations that exist between the nodes. Both 
nodes and links can belong to different types expressing different 
semantic and practical categories.

PCP will focus on the clarification of fundamental concepts and 
principles of the cybernetics and systems domain. Concepts include:  
Complexity, Information, Variety, Freedom, Control, Self-
organization, Emergence, etc. Principles include the Laws of 
Requisite Variety, of Requisite Hierarchy, and of Regulatory 
Models.

The PCP philosophy is systemic and evolutionary, based on the 
spontaneous emergence of higher levels of organization or control 
(metasystem transitions) through blind variation and natural 
selection. It includes:

 a) a metaphysics, based on processes or actions as ontological 
primitives,

 b) an epistemology, which understands knowledge as constructed 
by the subject, but undergoing selection by the environment;

 c) an ethics, with the continuance of the process of evolution 
as supreme value.

Philosophy and implementation of PCP are united by their common 
framework based on cybernetic and evolutionary principles: the 
computer-support system is intended to amplify the spontaneous 
development of knowledge which forms the main theme of the 
philosophy.

Papers can be submitted on one or several of the following 
topics:

The Principia Cybernetica Project
Cybernetic Concepts and Principles
Evolutionary Philosophy
Knowledge Development
Computer-Support Systems for Collaborative Theory Building

Submission of papers

People wishing to present a paper in the Principia Cybernetica 
symposium should quickly send the application form, together 
with an abstract of max. 1 page, to the addresses of the 
Symposium chairman AND of the Congress secretariat (IAC) below. 
They will be notified about acceptance not later than 2 months 
after receipt, and will receive instructions for the 
preparation of the final text. In principle, all application 
forms should be received by December 31, 1991, but it may be 
possible to come in late. People wishing to present a paper 
in a different symposium can directly submit their abstract 
to the secretariat.

For submissions of papers to, or further information about, 
the Principia Cybernetica symposium, contact the symposium 
chairman:

Dr. Francis Heylighen
PO-PESP, Free Univ. Brussels, Pleinlaan 2, B-1050 Brussels, 
Belgium
Phone +32 - 2 - 641 25 25   Email  fheyligh@vnet3.vub.ac.be
Fax   +32 - 2 - 641 24 89   Telex  61051 VUBCO B

For congress registration, or further information about the 
congress, contact the secretariat:

International Association for Cybernetics
Palais des Expositions, Place Ryckmans, B-5000 Namur, 
Belgium
Phone +32 - 81 - 73 52 09   Email  cyb@info.fundp.ac.be
Fax   +32 - 81 - 23 09 45

17)-------------------------------------------------------------

 PERFORATIONS, an Atlanta-based journal of language, art, and 
technology, is seeking contributors for a special issue with the 
theme: AFTER THE BOOK. This issue will be devoted to work about 
the demise of The Book As We Knew  It, the rise of hypertext, and 
the possibilities for writing in the world post-ink-and-linearity. 
We're particularly interested in in work approaching hypertext 
from film and video theory, in critical work on hyperfiction, in
hypertexts on-disk or in print extracts, and in work challenging 
our position that hypertext, in its transcendence of the 
restrictions of the paper book and the one-way movie, represents 
writing's first true step beyond Sterne/Joyce and film/video. 
Essays, print and graphic collages, fictions, or hybrids of any 
sort are welcome. No restrictions on style, no minimum or 
maximum length; we're hoping that contributors will send us 
serious and adventurous work that they might hesitate to submit 
to a more traditional journal.

 Deadline: March 15, 1992 (negotiable for authors preceding 
submissions with queries). Macintosh-readable disks preferred, 
all formats acceptable. Send queries and submissions to: 
libgess@emuvm1.bitnet/Richard Gess, Guest Editor, PERFORATIONS, 
428 Oakview Rd, Decatur, GA 30030.

   About PERFORATIONS: Atlanta's Public Domain alternative arts 
collective published the first issue of PERFORATIONS in September 
1991. PEFORATIONS is a journal where theorists, critics, and 
artists contrbute equally to examinations of current issues in 
language, art, and technology. Issues are theme-oriented: Fall 
1991 was about "The Post-mortem Condition," and Winter 1992 
(now in press) is about "Conspiracies, Esthetics and Politics," 
and features an interview with Jean-Francois Lyotard and a 
hyperfiction disk. Spring 1992, due in May, will be "After the 
Book;" issues beyond will consider "Dreams, Bodies, and 
Technologies," "Multi-, Mini-, and Quasi-Culturalisms," and 
"Virtual and Performative Architectures." PERFORATIONS is 
distributed regionally to a growing audience of working artists 
in all genres and scholars in all disciplines; publication in
PERFORATIONS is a way of communicating beyond the usually 
suspected readers for both artists and academics. For 
subscription/back issue information, contact 
libgess@emuvm1.bitnet.

18)--------------------------------------------------------------

The next issue of the CTI (Computers in Teaching Initiative) 
Centre for Textual Studies newsletter _Computers & Texts_ 
will be centred on the use of computing in the areas of 
Philosophy/Logic. This is a preliminary call for submissions 
by anyone interested in this subject. Format and deadline details
are available upon request. 

The areas we are hoping to cover in the issue are: 

        An overview of the use of computers and Philosophy 
        Electronic Texts: their availability and usefulness 
        Simulation packages 
        Review of Ethics software
        Review of Logic Software 
        Bulletin Boards, Electronic mail, and other computer
        -based resources of use to Philosophers 

Please feel free to suggest other areas which you think should 
be included. 

Thanks in advance, 

Stuart Lee 
Research Officer 
CTI Centre for Textual Studies 
Oxford University Computing Service 
13 Banbury Road 
Oxford 
OX2 6NN 
Tel:0865-273221 
Fax:0865-273275 
E-mail: STUART@UK.AC.OX.VAX 

19)------------------------------------------------------------

                          TO ALL GRADUATE STUDENTS: 

                               CALL FOR PAPERS 

The Frontenac Review 
Dept. of French Studies 
Queen's University 
Kingston, Ontario 
Canada  K7L 3N6 
Telephone: (613) 545-2090 
Fax: (613) 545-6300 

Email: warderh@qucdn.queensu.ca 

January 1992 

The Frontenac Review invites you to submit articles on The 
'Nouveau Roman'for its winter 1991 edition (number 8) and on 
Acadian literature for its Fall 1992 edition (number 9).  
Initial submissions should follow the guidelines  established 
by the M.L.A.  If your article is accepted we will ask you to 
submit the same article on diskette (IBM compatible), in 
Wordperfect 5.1 
format. 

The committee will not be responsible for returning articles.  
All candidates will be informed of the committee's decision 
within a reasonable time limit. 

The Frontenac Review is searched annually by the Bibliographie 
der Franzoesischen Literaturwissenschaft and by the MLA 
International Bibliography. 

                       DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS: 

         ** The Nouveau Roman (no. 8) -- January 30, 1992 ** 

           Acadian Literature (no. 9) -- September 1, 1992 

20)-------------------------------------------------------------
                          CALL FOR PAPERS

The ACH will be organising two sessions at the 1992 MLA 
Convention, to be held December 27-30, 1992, in New York City, 
around Mark Olsen's position paper proposing a new direction 
for computer-aided studies of literature (summary below).  
Please contact Paul Fortier -- FORTIER@UOFMCC.BITNET .

Deadline for submission of paper or abstract March 1, 1992 to
FORTIER@UOFMCC.BITNET.  People presenting papers at the the MLA
Convention MUST be members of the MLA.  Announcement of 
acceptance April 1, 1992.

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

            Signs, Symbols and Discourses:  A New Direction
                 for Computer-aided Literature Studies.

                              Mark Olsen*
                         University of Chicago
                         mark@gide.uchicago.edu
Abstract

     Computer-aided Literature Studies have failed to have a
significant impact on the field as a whole.  This failure is
traced to  a  concentration  on  how  a  text  achieves  its
literary  effect  by  the  examination of subtle semantic or
grammatical structures in single texts or the works of indi-
vidual  authors.   Computer  systems  have proven to be very
poorly suited to such refined analysis of complex  language.
Adopting  such  traditional  objects  of study has tended to
discourage researchers from using the tool to ask  questions
to  which  it  is  better  adapted, the examination of large
amounts of simple linguistic features.   Theoreticians  such
as  Barthes,  Foucault  and  Halliday show the importance of
determining the lingusitic and semantic  characteristics  of
the  language  used  by  the  author  and  her/his audience.
Current technology, and databases like  the  TLG  or  ARTFL,
facilitate   such  wide-spectrum  analyses.   Computer-aided
methods are thus capable of opening up new areas  of  study,

which  can potentially transform the way in which literature
is studied.

[ ... ]

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

[A complete version of this paper is now available through the 
HUMANIST fileserver, s.v.  OLSEN MLA92.  You may obtain a copy 
by issuing the command -- GET filename filetype HUMANIST -- 
either interactively or as a batch-job, addressed to 
ListServ@Brownvm.  Thus on a VM/CMS system, you say 
interactively:  TELL LISTSERV AT BROWNVM GET OLSEN MLA92 
HUMANIST; if you are not on a VM/CMS system, send mail to 
ListServ@Brownvm with the GET command as the first and only 
line.  For more details see the "Guide to Humanist".  Problems 
should be reported to David Sitman, A79@TAUNIVM, after you 
have consulted the Guide and tried all appropriate 
alternatives.]

21)------------------------------------------------------------

                     NEW JOURNAL FOR 1992

          COMPUTER SUPPORTED COOPERATIVE WORK (CSCW)
                   An International Journal

Editorial Team:

LIAM BANNON                         JOHN BOWERS
Copenhagen Business School          Dept. of Psychology
Institute of Computer &         Univ. of Manchester
Systems Sciences, Denmark           U.K.

CHARLES GRANTHAM                    MIKE ROBINSON
Dept. of Organizational Studies     Centre for Innovation&
Univ. of San Francisco              Cooperative Technology
USA                                 Univ. of Amsterdam
                                    The Netherlands

KJELD SCHMIDT                       SUSAN LEIGH STAR
Cognitive Systems Group             Dept. of Sociology &
Ris~ National Laboratory            Social Anthropology
Denmark                             University of Keele
                                    U.K.

Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW):  An International
Journal  will be devoted to innovative research in Computer
Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). It will provide an
interdisciplinary forum for the debate and exchange of ideas
concerning theoretical, practical, technical and social issues
in CSCW.

The journal arises as a timely response to the growing
interest in the design, implementation and use of technical
systems (including computing, information, and communications
technologies) which support people working cooperatively.
Equally, the journal is concerned with studies of the process
of cooperative work itself - studies intended to motivate the
design of new technical systems, and to develop both theory
and praxis in the field. The journal will encourage
contributions from a wide range of disciplines and
perspectives within the social, computing and allied human and
information sciences.

In general, the journal will facilitate the discussion of all
issues which arise in connection with the support requirements
of cooperative work. It is intended that the journal will be
of interest to a wide readership through its coverage of
research related to - inter alia - groupware, socio-technical
system design, theoretical models of cooperative work,
computer mediated communication, human-computer interaction,
group decision support systems (GDSS), coordination systems,
distributed systems, situated action, studies of cooperative
work and practical action, organisation theory and design, the
sociology of technology, explorations of innovative design
strategies, management and business science perspectives,
artificial intelligence and distributed AI approaches to
cooperation, library and information sciences, and all manner
of technical innovations devoted to the support of cooperative
work including electronic meeting rooms, teleconferencing
facilities, electronic mail enhancements, real-time and
asynchronous technologies, desk-top conferencing, shared
editors, video and multi-media systems. In addition, we
welcome studies of the social, cultural, moral, legal and
political implications of CSCW systems.

CALL FOR PAPERS
Manuscripts (5 Copies) relating to any of the above-mentioned
themes and topics are invited for submission. Manuscripts
should be submitted to the Journals Editorial Office at the
address below:

          Editorial Office (COSU)
          Kluwer Academic Publishers
          P.O. Box 17
          3300 AA Dordrecht
          The Netherlands

Detailed instructions for authors and other information (such
as submission via email or on disk) can be obtained from the
above address or by electronic mail on: HUSOC@KAP.NL (Please
mark your message CSCW).
______________________________________________________________

INFORMATION REQUEST FORM
Please fill in the information form and send to:

KLUWER ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS
Att. M. van der Linden
P.O.Box 989
3300 AZ Dordrecht
The Netherlands
Email: husoc@kap.nl

O    Please send me a FREE SAMPLE COPY of Computer Supported
     Cooperative Work

O    Please send me your brochure listing publications in
     Cognitive Science/Artificial Intelligence

NAME:_______________________________________________________
ADDRESS:____________________________________________________
CITY:________________________________ STATE:________________
COUNTRY:____________________________________________________
POSTAL CODE:_________________________ DATE:_________________
EMAIL:______________________________________________________

            PLEASE TYPE OR PRINT IN BLOCKLETTERS

IF YOU REPLY BY EMAIL, PLEASE INCLUDE YOUR FULL NAME AND
POSTAL ADDRESS.

22)--------------------------------------------------------------

                          NC92 TELENETLINK CONGRESS
                A Collective, Ubiquitous, Congress In Progress

          Networking dialogue has been central to mail art and
telecommunication art projects.  Telecommunciation artists, for 
example, use personal computers to download work for modification, 
detournement, or appropriation into other artworks--creative 
authorship is shared.  Mail artists also share co-authorship in 
postal exchanges.  The recycled surfaces or contents of mailing 
tubes, envelopes, and parcels travel thousands of miles around 
the world as many artists alter a single item.  Gradually, a
global collage of artist postage stamps, rubber stamped images, 
cryptic messages, and slogans emerge.

          As NC92 facilitator, I have formed a "Telenetlink 
Congress" whose purpose is centered on reaching readers and the 
telematic community through magazines, bulletin board services 
like NYC's "Echo," Chicago's "Artbase" BBS, and by accessing 
internationally distributed USENET newsgroups such as alt artcom, 
and rec arts fine.  I view these collective efforts as a
ubiquitous "congress in process" extending throughout the 
1992 Networker Congress year.

          Participation may involve any form of 
telecommunication exchange, e-mail, fax, video phones, etc. Send 
your Telenetlink Congress statements and project proposals via 
(e)mail to Cathryn L. Welch@dartmouth.edu. or fax to Chuck 
Welch, Telenetlink Congress (603) 448-9998.

Participating in the NC92 Telenetlink Congress begins when 
readers send a brief one page statement about "how you envision 
your own role as a networker."  Proposals and projects that 
would interconnect the mail art and telematic communities are 
also welcome.  Periodic updates concerning telenetlink project 
initiatives will be posted over Usenet newsgroups rec. arts 
fine and alt. artcom.    All statements received from artists 
in the telematic community will be part of the NC92 "Networker 
Database Congress," a collection that will be made available 
for research at the University of Iowa's "Alternative 
Traditions in the Contemporary Arts Archive."

*Art that networks explores and expands the communication 
process as it encourages democratic access to free 
communication.  By cutting through social, cultural and 
political hierarchies, we can dissolve boundaries and discover 
corresponding worlds of mail and telecommunications art.*

# # # # *** Further information about scheduled NC92 events is 
available by writing to these facilitators:

H.R. Fricker, Buro fur kunstlerische Umtriebe, CH 9043 Trogen, 
Switzerland Peter W. Kaufmann, Bergwisenstrasse 11, 8123 
Ebmatingen, Switzerland Netlink South America: Clemente Padin, 
Casilla C. Central 1211, Montevideo,Uruguay
Netlink East: Chuck Welch, PO Box 978, Hanover, NH 03755
Netlink South: John Held Jr. 7919 Goforth, Dallas, Texas 
75238
Netlink Midwest: Mark Corroto, PO Box 1382, Youngstown, Ohio 
44501
Netlink Subspace: Steve Perkins, 221 W. Benton, Iowa City, Iowa 
52246
Netlink West: Lloyd Dunn, PO Box 162, Oakdale, Iowa  52319 *** 
# # # #

23)-------------------------------------------------------------
________________________________________________________________
|                     LITERATURE, COMPUTERS AND WRITING:       |
|                                                              |
|                   FORGING CONNECTIONS IN THE HIGH SCHOOL     |    
|                                                              |
|                      AND COLLEGE ENGLISH CLASSROOMS          |    
|                                                              |
|                                April 3, 1992                 |    
|______________________________________________________________|

    The fifth annual Computers and English Conference for high 
                                school and
                        college teachers of writing.
     Sponsored by the Program in English New York Institute of 
                            Technology

The conference has two primary themes:
     o  how computers and specifically computer networks can be 
        used to ally high school and college teachers of English, 
        and
     o  how computers are changing the way literature is created, 
        taught,understood and written about.

Possible Topics

     o  Computer access in a muliticultural environment
     o  Computers and the changing definitions of literacy
     o  Growing interest in desktop publishing for students and
        faculty
     o  Teleconferencing and distance learning
     o  Classroom uses of on-line databases and searches
     o  Classroom uses of hypertext and hypermedia
     o  Computer discussion groups for students and/or teachers
     o  Varied features of personal contact in an electronic
        environment
     o  Computers and the learning-disabled student
     o  Continuing teacher education and telecommunications
     o  Demonstrations of software programs you have designed
     o  Effects of computers on testing and assessing
        individually or collaboratively composed writing

Send requests for information to:

                            Department of English
                       New York Institute of Technology
                         Old Westbury, New York 11568
                     Att: Ann McLaughlin  (516) 686-7557.

Conference Fee:  $50.00 (prior to conference date) $35.00 for 
matriculated graduate students.  Fee includes coffee and buffet 
luncheon.  Hotel accomodations available near campus at East 
Norwich Inn (East Norwich, NY).
 ________________________________________________________________
|Pre-Registration Form                                           |
|                                                                |
|Please register me for the Fifth-Annual NYIT Computers and      |
|Writing Conference:                                             |
|                                                                |
| Name:     _________________________________________________    |
| Address:  _________________________________________________    |
|           _________________________________________________    |
|           _________________________________________________    |
| E-Mail:   _________________________________________________    |
| School:   _________________________________________________    |
| Amount Enclosed:  $ ___.___                                    |
| Mail completed form to                                         |
|  Department of English                                         |
|  New York Institute of Technology                              |
|  Old Westbury, New York 11568                                  |
|  Att: Ann McLaughlin  (516) 686-7557.                          |
|________________________________________________________________|

24)--------------------------------------------------------------- 

SECTION on SCIENCE, KNOWLEDGE, AND TECHNOLOGY at the
SOUTHWESTERN SOCIAL SCIENCE ANNUAL MEETINGS in AUSTIN, TEXAS
MARCH 27-31, 1992.

CONTACT: Raymond Eve  

****PLEASE FORWARD TO ANYONE WHO MIGHT BE INTERESTED****

     I would like to mention to you (somewhat belatedly, I
fear), the upcoming section on "Science, Knowledge, and
Technology" to be held at the Southwestern Social Science
Association Annual Meetings in Austin, Texas.  Dates for the
meeting's paper sessions will be March 27 - 31, 1992.  The
S,K, and T paper sessions will probably be scheduled on
Thursday and/or Friday of that week.
     Unfortunately, the SWSA forgot to include the listing
of the "Science, Knowledge, and Technology" section (and a
section organizer -- yours truly) in the initial call for
papers.  This was an oversight, and you may be sure that the
section will exist again in '92.
     The section has only existed for two previous years,
but the response has been truly outstanding, and
interestingly, excellent papers of common interest were
given by scholars as diverse as sociologists, arts and
literature faculty, anthropologists, and physical science
faculty.
     I would also like to take this opportunity to draw your
attention to a "Workshop for the Disciplines" session I've
been asked to organize on Friday morning at 10 a.m. of the
meetings.  It will be entitled "Postmodern Culture:
Convenient Myth or Imperative Paradigm?".  This session has
several very well known people scheduled for it, and their
disciplines include: literature, architecture, political
science, and sociology.  We should have on hand many
individuals interested in most postmodern theory and in
chaos theory, as well as many other interesting S, K, and T
topics.
     Hope we will see you in Austin in the spring!

25)-----------------------------------------------------------------

         POSTECH@WEBER.UCSD.EDU -- DISCUSSION GROUP ON 
               POST-STRUCTURALISM AND TECHNOLOGY

Phil Agre (UC San Diego) and John Bowers (Univ. of Manchester) have 
started a netmail discussion group on post-structuralism and 
technology. (You can define those terms however you like.)  To be 
added, send a  short note to postech-request@weber.ucsd.edu.  Make 
sure to include a  network address that's accessible from the 
Internet (me@here.bitnet, uucpnode!me@gateway.somewhere.edu, 
me@machine.here.ac.uk, me@ibm.com,  whatever).  We'll collect 
addresses for a month or so and then we'll  invite everyone to send 
a note to the group introducing themselves and advertising their 
work.

26)-----------------------------------------------------------------
          ****************************************************
          *                                                  *
          *               East-West Conference               *
          *  on Emerging Computer Technologies in Education  *
          *                                                  *
          *                 April 6-9, 1992                  *
          *                   Moscow, Russia                 *
          *                                                  *
          *           SECOND REVISED ANNOUNCEMENT            *
          *                                                  *
          *             CALL FOR PARTICIPATION               *
          *                                                  *
          ****************************************************

     The aims of  the  East-West  Conference  on  Emerging  Computer
Technologies in Education are to provide a forum for the exchange of
ideas between Eastern and Western scientists and to present  to  the
Soviet  educational  community  the  current state-of-the-art on the
theory and practice of using emerging computer-based  technology  in
education.   The   Technical   Programme   includes  invited  talks,
presentations  of  about  80 research/development and review papers,
posters, and demonstrations. An exhibition of  educational  hardware
and software products is also anticipated.

     The conference is designed to cover the  following  subfields  of
advanced research in the field of computers and education:

-  Artificial Intelligence and Education
-  Educational Multi-Media and Hyper-Media
-  Learning Environments, Microworlds and Simulation

     The Conference is organised and sponsored by: Association for the
Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE), International Centre for
Scientific and Technical Information (ICSTI), and  Soviet  Association
for Artificial Intelligence (SAAI).

     The Conference will take place in the ICSTI Building in Moscow.

Information
~~~~~~~~~~~

For further information please contact:

Conference content and program:
              Dr Peter Brusilovsky (eastwest@plb.icsti.su)
Accomodation and visa support:
              Mr Vladislav Pavlov (use the conference FAX number).

Registration: Dr Viacheslav Rykov (use the conference FAX number).

Exhibition:   Dr Jury Gornostaev  (enir@ccic.icsti.msk.su)

Conference addresses
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
East-West Conference on Emerging Computer Technologies in Education
International Centre for Scientific and Technical Information
Kuusinen str. 21b, Moscow 125252, Russia
E-mail: eastwest@plb.icsti.su or  eastwest%plb.icsti.su@ussr.eu.net
Telex: 411925 MCNTI
FAX: +7 095 943 0089

27)------------------------------------------------------------------

                ENVIRONMENT AND THE LATINO IMAGINATION
                   * * Conference announcement * *

Cornell University will host a conference on "Environment and the 
Latino Imagination" that will involve the participation of 
environmentalists, artists, poets, activists, and other invited 
speakers who will address one of the holes in mainstream environmental 
research--the persectives of U.S. Latinos and their ways of imagining 
their relationship to their environment. 

The conference will take place April 30-May 2, l992.  
Please direct inquiries to:

Debra A. Castillo                 or     Barbara Lynch
Dept. Romance Studies                    Environmental Toxicology
Goldwin Smith Hall                       Fernow Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY  14853

or bitnet to bgcy@cornella

28)------------------------------------------------------------------

                                 SWIP-L

Announcing the formation of a new e-mail list called the SWIP-L, an
information and discussion list for members of the Society for Women 
in Philosophy and others who are interested in feminist philosophy.

To subscribe to this list send the following one-line message to
LISTSERV@CFRVM or LISTSERV@CFRVM.CFR.USF.EDU

    Subscribe SWIP-L 

To post messages to the list send them to SWIP-L@CFRVM or to SWIP-L@
CFRVM.CFR.USF.EDU

   The idea of the list is to have a place to share information about 
SWIP meetings and other feminist philosophy meetings, calls for papers, 
jobs for feminist philosophers, as well as to engage in more substantive
discussion of issues related to feminist philosophy.  While it is open 
to people who are not SWIP members, this is a list meant for feminist 
philosophers; please don't subscribe unless that is a description you 
are comfortable applying to yourself.

LINDA LOPEZ McALISTER    DLLAFAA@CFRVM.CFR.USF.EDU (Internet)
Women's Studies Dept.    DLLAFAA@CFRVM_(Bitnet)
University of South Florida, Tampa 33620   (813)974-5531

29)-------------------------------------------------------------------

                   AMERICAN FOLKLORE SOCIETY

     Founded in 1888, the American Folklore Society is the
American learned and professional society for folklorists.  It
offers an intellectual and social forum for the field of
folklore through an annual meeting, publications, specialized
activities of interest-group sections, various prizes and awards,
and other services to its membership.

     The JOURNAL OF AMERICAN FOLKLORE is a lively forum for
recent work in this field.  Recent issues have treated such
topics as Gospel quartets, the Greenwich Village Halloween
Parade, the zombi, cowboy poetry gatherings, Latinismo and
heritage politics, nocturnal death syndrome among the Hmong,
folklore in Richard Wright's "Black Boy", and reviews of a wide
range of books, exhibitions, films, and records.

     The Annual Meeting will be held October 15-18, 1992 in
Jacksonville, Florida.  The call for papers will appear in the
February Newsletter.

           MEMBERSHIP DIRECTORY AND GUIDE TO THE FIELD

     The DIRECTORY has been compiled from members' responses and
submissions from folklore programs and organizations throughout
North America.  The DIRECTORY contains:

     *    alphabetized name and address entries for 1200
          folklorists, most of which also contain telephone and
          E-mail information and areas of interest

     *    detailed descriptive entries for academic and public
          programs in folklore

     *    indexes to the member directory entries by interest
          area and place of residence

The Directory is available for $10 to members of the American
Folklore Society, and for $15 to nonmembers, with a 10% discount
on orders of 10 copies or more.

To order the Directory:  Send a check made payable to the
American Folklore Society and marked "1992 AFS Directory" to

     Book Orders Department (EM)
     American Folklore Society,
     1703 New Hampshire Ave. NW,
     Washington, DC 20009.

-----------------------MEMBERSHIP INFORMATION--------------------

Membership in the American Folklore Society brings the following
benefits:

     *    JOURNAL OF AMERICAN FOLKLORE (quarterly)

     *    NEWSLETTER (bimonthly)

     *    reduced registration rates for the Annual Meeting

     *    discounted prices on volumes in the PUBLICATIONS OF THE
          AMERICAN FOLKLORE SOCIETY series; the Society's
          MEMBERSHIP DIRECTORY AND GUIDE TO THE FIELD; and the
          "Folklore" volume of the annual MLA INTERNATIONAL
          BIBLIOGRAPHY

     *    right to vote in Society's elections and to hold
          Society office

     *    right to be considered for Society prizes and awards

     *    access to various kinds of low-cost insurance offered
          to Society members by outside insurers

To become a member of the American Folklore Society:

     regular member      $50
     student member      $20
     partner member      $20 (partners of members do not receive
                              publications)
     sustaining          $75
     patron              $100
     life member         $800.

Send a check made payable to the American Folklore Society to

     Membership Department (EM)
     American Folklore Society,
     1703 New Hampshire Ave. NW,
     Washington, DC 20009.

30)------------------------------------------------------------------

                                 MEANING HOLISM
                               NEW SUMMER SEMINAR

                     Directors: JERRY FODOR & ERNIE LEPORE
                Location: Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ
                 Dates: June 29 - August 14, 1992 (seven weeks)

     Holism about meaning and intention content has shaped much of 
what is most characteristic of contemporary philosophy of language and 
philosophy of mind.  The seminar is devoted to the question whether 
the individuation of the contents of thoughts and linguistic 
expressions is inherently holistic. For example, we will discuss 
arguments that are alleged to show that themeaning of a scientific 
hypothesis depends on the entire theory that entails it, or that the 
content of a concept depends on the entire belief system of
which it is a part. Implications of holistic semantics for other
philosophical issues (intentional explanation, translation Realism,
skepticism, connectionism, etc.) will also be explored. Authors to be 
read include Quine, Davidson, Lewis, Block, Field, Dummett, Dennett, 
Churchland and others. In addition, we will use Holism: a Shopper's 
Guide, Fodor, J. and E. LePore, 1992, Basil Blackwell.

     The National Endowment for the Humanities will provide a summer 
stipend of $3,600 for travel, book and living expenses, to those 
selected as participants in this seminar. Applications must be 
postmarked not later than 2 March, 1992.

For further information and for application forms, please write to:

                             Meaning Holism Seminar
                             Philosophy Department
                                 Davidson Hall
                      Douglass Campus, Rutgers University
                         New Brunswick, NJ 08903 (USA)

31)------------------------------------------------------------------

ADDICT-L is an electronic conference for mature discussion of the 
many types of addictions experienced by a large portion of society. 
The focus of this list is to provide an information exchange network 
for individuals interested in researching, educating or recovering 
from a variety of addictions.  It is not the intent of this list to 
focus on one area of addiction, but rather to discuss the phenomena 
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  -- All individuals with an interest in the topic area are welcome. 
  -- Subscriptions of those interested will be added by the listowner 
  -- Subscribers should look forward to educating themselves about 
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     and recovery. 
  -- Intended as an information exchange network and discussion group 

Possible Appropriate Subjects: 

  -- Discussion of etiology of addictions 
  -- Effects of addictions 
  -- Recovery from addiction and 12 Step Programs 
  -- Recent article publications relevant to addiction literature 
  -- Networking with others having related interests 

Drug/Alcohol addiction has a way of becoming an easy topic of
discussion.  It is the intent of this list to broaden the awareness of
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devoted to drug/alcohol use for those interested only in that area 

Subscription  Procedure: 

To subscribe from a bitnet account send an interactive or e-mail 
message addressed to LISTSERV@KENTVM.  Internet users send mail to 
LISTSERV@KENTVM.KENT.EDU (In mail, leave the subject line blank and 
make the text of your message the following: 

      SUB ADDICT-L Yourfirstname  Yourlastname 

   Questions can be addressed to listowner: 
      David Delmonico   Ddelmoni@kentvm.kent.edu 

32)----------------------------------------------------------------

PJML on LISTSERV@UTXVM.BITNET      Progressive Jewish Mailing List 
or LISTSERV@UTXVM.CC.UTEXAS.EDU 

The Progressive Jewish Mailing List (PJML) is an educational forum, 
providing accurate information on a variety of Jewish concerns in 
ways that inspire us to action.  Using electronic mail and computer 
networks, PJML connects activist Jews and our allies from across the 
globe.  We come from many traditions;  if we have differences, let us 
talk about them openly.  But let us continue in the tradition of 
_tikkun olam_, the just repair of the world. 

To subscribe to PJML, you will need an electronic mail account that 
accesses either BITNET or INTERNET.  Simply send the following 
message to either LISTSERV@UTXVM.CC.UTEXAS.EDU or 
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  SUB PJML yourfirstname yourlastname 

List Moderator:     Steve Carr 
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   U.S. Post:       3911-A Ave. F 
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33)---------------------------------------------------------------

BUDDHA-L on LISTSERV@ULKYVM.LOUISVILLE.EDU 
         or LISTSERV@ULKYVM.BITNET 

   An electronic discussion group called BUDDHA-L has recently been 
   formed towards the end of providing a means for those interested in 
   Buddhist Studies to exchange information and views.  It is hoped that 
   the group will function as an open forum for scholarly discussion of 
   topics relating to the history, literature and languages, fine arts, 
   philosophy, and institutions of all forms of Buddhism.  It may also 
   serve as a forum for discussion of issues connected to the teaching 
   of Buddhist studies at the university level, and as a place for 
   posting notices of employment opportunities. 

   The primary purpose of this list is to provide a forum for serious 
   academic discussion.  It is open to all persons inside and outside 
   the academic context who wish to engage in substantial discussion of 
   topics relating to Buddhism and Buddhist studies.  BUDDHA-L is not to 
   be used for proselytizing for or against Buddhism in general, any 
   particular form of Buddhism, or any other religion or philosophy, nor 
   is it to be used as a forum for making unsubstantiable confessions of 
   personal conviction. 

   The discussion on the list is to be moderated, not in order to 
   suppress or censor controversies on any topic, but rather to limit 
   irrelevant discussions and idle chatter, and to redirect or return 
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   be altered by the moderator, whose only responsibility will be to 
   forward all appropriate postings to the list. 

   If you wish to subscribe to BUDDHA-L, send an e-mail message to 
   LISTSERV@ULKYVM.LOUISVILLE.EDU, or BITNET nodes can send to 
   LISTSERV@ULKYVM.  The message should contain only the following 
   command (ie. in the body of the mail): 

      SUBSCRIBE BUDDHA-L  

   Owner: 
      James A. Cocks 
      Senior Consultant Research/Instruction 
      University of Louisville 
        Internet:  JACOCK01@ULKYVM.LOUISVILLE.EDU 
          Bitnet:  JACOCK01@ULKYVM 

34)---------------------------------------------------------------------

              PENN STATE UNIVERSITY SEMINAR SERIES 
                       ISSUES IN CRITICISM 

                         Summer Seminar 

          Seminar on Historicisms and Cultural Critique 

                        June 25-30, 1992 

                   State College, Pennsylvania 

WAI-CHEE DIMOCK, Department of English, University of California, 
San Diego.  Author of Empire for Liberty: Melville and the 
Poetics of Individualism (1989) and Symbolic Equality: Political 
Theory, Law, and American Literature (forthcoming); co-editor of 
the forthcoming Class and Literary Studies.  Professor Dimock 
will focus on the shifting configurations of gender and history. 

MARJORIE LEVINSON, Department of English, University of 
Pennsylvania.  Editor of Rethinking Historicism (1989) and author 
of Keats's life of Allegory: the Origins of Style (1988) and 
other monographs treating Romantic poetry.  Professor Levinson 
will concentrate on cultural materialism. 

BROOK THOMAS, Department of English and Comparative Literature, 
University of California, Irvine.  Author of Cross-Examination of 
Law and Literature (1987) and The New Historicism and Other 
Old-Fashioned Topics (1991).  Professor Thomas's central topic 
will be the crisis of representation. 

The Penn State Seminar on Historicisms and Cultural Critique 
offers faculty members in departments of English and modern 
languages the opportunity to survey the major issues in and 
freshen their knowledge of approaches to literature that 
emphasize the relations between text and culture, including those 
presently identified under the broad label of the New 
Historicism.  Seminar participants will hear presentations by 
three well-known scholar-critics--Wai Chee Dimock, Marjorie 
Levinson, and Brook Thomas--and engage in seminar-type 
discussions organized by these leaders.  Registrants are asked to 
indicate their first and second choices for morning seminar 
groups.  The schedule and atmosphere are intended to encourage 
informal discussions among participants. 

For further information contact: 

Wendell Harris 
Department of English 
Pennsylvania State University 
University Park, Pennsylvania 16802 
Telephone: 814-863-2343 or 814-865-9243 

35)------------------------------------------------------------------------

AFRICA-L on LISTSERV@BRUFPB.BITNET    Forum Pan-Africa

   A Pan-African forum for the discussion of the interests of African
   peoples (in Africa, and expatriate), and for those with an interest
   in the African continent and her peoples.  Of special interest will
   be ways to help facilitate the flow of communications (electronic and
   other) to and from Africa.  News, light-hearted discussions, and
   cultural and educational items are welcome.

   To subscribe to AFRICA-L send the following message to
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      SUBSCRIBE AFRICA-L your name and your African interests
      SET AFRICA-L REPRO

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                     set africa-l repro

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   africa-l" to LISTSERV@BRUFPB.BITNET .

   List Owner:   Carlos Fernando Nogueira  (CTEDTC09@BRUFPB)

36)------------------------------------------------------------------------

                      FEMREL-L on LISTSERV@UMCVMB.BITNET

   FEMREL-L is an open discussion and resource list concerning women 
   & religion and feminist theology.  Our goal is open, stimulating
   discussion on any and all issues pertaining to these topics.  All
   religions, creeds, beliefs, opinions, etc. are welcome, although we
   do ask that participants respect differences.

   To subscribe, send the following command to LISTSERV@UMCVMB via mail
   or interactive message:

      SUB FEMREL-L your_full_name

   where "your_full_name" is your name.  For example:

      SUB FEMREL-L Joan Doe

   Submissions to the list should be sent to:

      FEMREL-L@UMCVMB.BITNET

   Owners:  Cathy Quick 
            Bonnie Vegiard 

37)------------------------------------------------------------------------

AN ON-LINE CATALOGUE OF THE GEORGETOWN CENTER FOR TEXT AND TECHNOLOGY

Since April 1989, the Center for Text and Technology of the
Academic Computer Center at Georgetown University has been
compiling information about projects in electronic text in the
humanities.  Currently we have details on over 300 projects in 27
countries.

Because this information is constantly being updated, any printing
would be obsolescent.  Consequently, we have created an on-line
Catalogue that is searchable through Internet and dial-in access.
Thus far, response has been gratifying; last month we logged over
100 inquiries.

An illustrated User's Guide to the Catalogue of Projects in
Electronic Text is available free of charge through surface mail.
In addition, a public-domain version of KERMIT and a keyboard-
mapping program can be obtained through file transfer protocol
(ftp).  For further information, please contact me personally at
the address below, rather than sending to the list.

James A. Wilderotter II
Project Assistant
Center for Text and Technology
Academic Computer Center
Reiss Science Building, Room 238
Georgetown University
Washington, DC 20057
Tel. (202) 687-6096

BITNET: Wilder@Guvax
Internet: Edu%"Wilder@Guvax.Georgetown.Edu"

38)------------------------------------------------------------------------

          ARL DIRECTORY OF ELECTRONIC JOURNALS, NEWSLETTERS, 
          AND SCHOLARLY DISCUSSION LISTS  (hard copy version)

Although many journals, newsletters, and scholarly lists may be
accessed free of charge through Bitnet, Internet, and affiliated
academic networks, it is not always a simple chore to find out
what is available.  The Directory is a compilation of entries for
over 500 scholarly lists, about 30 journals, over 60 newsletters,
and 15 "other" titles including some newsletter-digests.  The
directory gives specific instructions for access to each 
publication.  The objective is to assist the user in finding
relevant publications and connecting to them quickly,  even if
not completely versed in the full range of user-access systems.

Content editor of the journals/newsletters section is Michael
Strangelove, Network Research Facilitator, University of Ottawa.
Editor of the scholarly discussion lists/interest groups is Diane
Kovacs of the Kent State University Libraries.  The printed ARL
directory is derived from widely accessible networked files
maintained by Strangelove and Kovacs.  The directory will point
to these as the principal, continuously updated, and
free-of-charge sources for accessing such materials.

Michael Strangelove's directory of electronic journals and 
newsletters  is now available from the Contex-L fileserver and 
consists of two files. These may be obtained, if you are at a 
Bitnet site, by sending the interactive commands:

Tell Listserv at UOttawa Get EJournl1 Directry
Tell Listserv at UOttawa Get EJournl2 Directry

or, from any e-mail site, by sending a mail message to 
LISTSERV@UOTTAWA.BITNET with the text:

Get EJournl1 Directry
Get EJournl2 Directry

No blank lines or other text should precede these lines, and no 
other text should follow them.  For further information, 
contact Michael Strangelove at 441495@UOTTAWA

Diane Kovacs' directory of scholarly discussion groups is 
available from LISTSERV@KENTVM and consists of eight files.  
These may be obtained, if you are at a Bitnet site, by 
sending the interactive commands:

Tell Listserv at Kentvm Get Acadlist Readme
Tell Listserv at Kentvm Get Acadlist Index
Tell Listserv at Kentvm Get Acadlist File1
Tell Listserv at Kentvm Get Acadlist File2
Tell Listserv at Kentvm Get Acadlist File3
Tell Listserv at Kentvm Get Acadlist File4
Tell Listserv at Kentvm Get Acadlist File5
Tell Listserv at Kentvm Get Acadlist File6

or, from any e-mail site, by sending a mail message to 
LISTSERV@KENTVM.BITNET with the text:

Get Acadlist Readme
Get Acadlist Index
Get Acadlist File1
Get Acadlist File2
Get Acadlist File3 
Get Acadlist File4
Get Acadlist File5
Get Acadlist File6

No blank lines or other text should precede these lines, and no 
other text should follow them.  For further information, 
contact Diane Kovacs at DKOVACS@KENTVM

Both directories are also now available in print and on 
diskette (Dos/WordPerfect and Macintosh/MacWord).  For further 
information contact:

Office of Scientific & Academic Publishing
Association of Research Libraries
1527 New Hampshire Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20036    USA

or

Ann Okerson
ARLHQ@UMDC.Bitnet
(202) 232-2466 (voice)
(202) 462-7849 (fax)

     

  • Pee-Wee Herman and the Postmodern Picaresque

    Melynda Huskey

    Department of English
    North Carolina State University

     

    “Heard any good jokes lately?”

     

    –Pee-Wee at the MTV Music Awards

     

    It’s been six months since “Pee-Wee’s Big Misadventure” was released to an eager public; the July 26th arrest of Paul Reubens for indecent exposure spurred renewed interest in what had been a fading cult. Only die-hards were still taping Saturday morning “Playhouse” episodes, and “Big Top Pee-Wee” had disappointed fans hoping for another jeu d’esprit on the model of “Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure.” Even a blissful cameo in the otherwise pedestrian “Back to the Beach” (Pee-Wee, balanced precariously on a surfboard, was borne shoulder-high by avatars of Tito, the Playhouse’s hunky lifeguard) failed to spark real interest. According to Peter Wilkinson’s rather solemn post-mortem, “Who Killed Pee-Wee Herman?” Rolling Stone, 3 October 1991), Paul Reubens himself was weary of being Pee-Wee; he was ready to branch out. So Pee-Wee Herman is not likely to reappear except in re-runs for some time. MTV has picked up the five years’ worth of “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse” episodes; both “The Pee-Wee Herman Show,” a taped version of the club act that started the Pee-Wee story, and “Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure” enjoy moderate rentals in video stores. But Paul Reubens is no longer the post-industrial Casabianca, standing at attention on the burning deck of “Entertainment Tonight,” and his hip-hop claque has gone home.

     

    With Pee-Wee out of the way, I can finally justify a valedictory consideration of the supreme moment in his career, “Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure.” There is no denying that “Big Adventure” is the zenith of the Herman oeuvre; it is the central text in Pee-Wee criticism. “Big Top Pee-Wee,” in comparison, is an embarrassment–hardly worth a mention.

     

    Of course, one does not discount the importance of “The Pee Wee Herman Show.” The nightclub act which, astonishingly, sparked the children’s television show merits some consideration. Only the reckless would dismiss without reflection the amazing hypnotism dummy, Dr. Mondo, encouraging Joan the audience volunteer to disrobe, or Jambi’s eye-rolling delight over that new Caucasian pair of hands (“There’s something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time”). Not to mention Pee-Wee himself, crooning his anthem, “I’m the Luckiest Boy in the World.” In this version of the Playhouse, the keynote is struck by the opening words of the theme song: “Where do I go / When I want to do / What I know I want to do? / Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, Pee-Wee’s Playhouse.” The Playhouse draws visitors; there are no permanent residents except the furnishings–Jambi, Clockie–and Pee-Wee himself (if he does live there). Everyone else is a transient. The Playhouse is a liminal region. We see this theme taken up in the television version as well, with its elaborate closing sequence of Pee-Wee mounting his scooter for the dangerous leap onto the desert freeway. On television, though, everyone but Pee-Wee lives around or in the Playhouse. It’s still Pee-Wee’s place, but it is located firmly in the center of a neighborhood which is some distance from Pee-Wee’s primary home. In the nightclub version, all roads lead to Pee-Wee. Neighbors like Hammy are allowed to visit on sufferance, until Pee-Wee chooses to dismiss them. When Kap’n Karl and Miss Yvonne begin to like one another too much, Pee-Wee hustles them out of the Playhouse with realistic gagging gestures. But they all come back eventually. Pee-Wee is the center of this universe, the luckiest boy in this world.

     

    It is difficult to imagine that anyone who had seen the nightclub act agreed to let Pee-Wee have five years’ worth of Saturday kids’ programming. The focus of “The Pee-Wee Herman Show” is lipsmackingly infantile sexuality. Looking up skirts may be Pee-Wee’s most common behavior; in the course of one hour he uses shoe mirrors to reflect Hammy’s sister’s panties, holds Dr. Mondo (the aforementioned hypnotism dummy) under Joan’s dress before using his hypnotic powers to undress her, takes advantage of a graceful arabesque to peek up Miss Yvonne’s fluffy skirts. But the polymorphously perverse being what it is, there’s also the shyly masculine Hermit Hattie, courting Miss Yvonne with perfume and kind words, the swishily high-camp Jambi, the achingly Aryan, almost albino good looks of Mailman Mike, and M’sieur le Crocodile’s “Gator Mater Dating Service.” Without sexual attraction, there is no Playhouse; the show’s plot derives from Pee-Wee’s unselfish decision to share his wish with Miss Yvonne (that Kap’n Karl should really like her) rather than use it for himself. Not only does Pee-Wee give up his chance to fly, which he tells Pteri he’d rather do than shave, even, but he is abandoned by both Miss Yvonne and Kap’n Karl once they discover each other. The dreadful consequences of this amorous misdirection can be resolved only by Kap’n Karl admitting that he already liked Miss Yvonne. The childish sexuality which seeks pleasure not only through speculative consideration of the mysteries of sex, but also through wordplay (“I said your ear, not your rear!”) and sublimation, such as the wish to fly, is fully dramatized in the Playhouse.

     

    But for the Real Thing, the rich substance of Pee-Wee’s amorous being, we must leave the liminal world of the Playhouse and examine Pee-Wee’s everyday life, the life dramatized in “Pee Wee’s Big Adventure.” In that text the obvious and playful concern over child sexuality is discarded for a much more complexly developed world of sexual behavior.

     

    I have a theory about Tim Burton. I believe that he is recreating the great works of the English Romantics in suburban (or urban) American settings. Before you laugh, I submit for your consideration: “Batman,” the post-modern “Manfred.” Instead of the Alps, we have Gotham City skyscrapers. Instead of a guilt-ridden, incestuous relationship with a dead sister, a guilt-ridden, pointless relationship with brain-dead Vicki Vale. And most important, the cape, blowing back in the obediently melodramatic wind. Bruce Wayne, a Byronic hero for our time.

     

    And what about “Edward Scissorhands,” possibly the best version of Frankenstein committed to film in the last ten years? True, the Arctic wastes over which the horrifying creation wanders are reduced to blocks of ice in the Avon Lady’s backyard, but such is the postmodern condition. “Beetlejuice”? The merging of “This Old House” and Coleridge’s visionary (and characteristically incomplete) “Christabel.”

     

    And finally, I offer you “Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure.” “Childe Harold” and “Don Juan” both; a Byronic double-header for the big screen–a picaresque vision of the poet-lover as outcast filmed through a screwy postmodern lens. From the moment we see Pee-Wee cast his eyes impatiently to Heaven and say, “Dottie, there are things about me you wouldn’t understand. Things you couldn’t understand. Things you shouldn’t understand. I’m a loner, Dottie. A rebel,” we know that we are in the presence of Byronic greatness. And when, out of love beyond the ken of rich fat-boy Francis, Pee-Wee refuses to part with his bike–even for money–we know that tragedy must follow.

     

    Vladimir Propp offers us an elegant two-part summation of narrative: Lack, Lack Liquidated. The plot of “Big Adventure” recapitulates those terms. Pee-Wee loses his bike, goes to the Alamo to find it, and ends up in Hollywood, where he recovers it. While searching for his lost vehicle, he discovers his true place in the world through adventures with many new friends. But no summary can do justice to the picaresque sublime of the adventure. Pee-Wee travels from East to West Coast, from self satisfied isolation to integration, from wealth to poverty (and back), and from obscurity to celebrity. He is by turns a cowboy, a Hell’s Angel, a dishwasher, a hitchhiker, a hobo. He befriends a truckstop waitress with a jealous boyfriend, an escaped convict, a ghostly truck driver. And in the end, he returns triumphantly justified to his home town, with his bike, his new friends, and enlightenment. He turns his back on self aggrandizement with the words, “I don’t need to see it, Dottie. I lived it.”

     

    Like Don Juan, Pee-Wee is plagued throughout his adventures by unwelcome attentions. Dottie, the bikeshop mechanic, wants to go on a drive-in date with him. Simone-the-waitress’s jealous boyfriend Andy tries to kill him with a plaster of Paris dinosaur bone for watching the sun rise with her. The Queen of the “Satan’s Helpers” motorcycle gang wants to destroy him herself. But Pee-Wee is never moved by these desiring women–nor by the men who admire him, notably Mickey the convict and a jovial policeman who yearns for Pee-Wee in drag. He loves only his bike.

     

    The bicycle functions, in fact, as the true woman of the narrative. An object of extraordinary beauty, attended by falling cherry blossoms and ethereal music, the bike is supremely desirable. Francis, unable to obtain the bike legitimately, is forced by the excess of his need to have it stolen. But having taken it, he dares not keep it; the rest of the film is taken up with Pee-Wee’s unceasing quest for it. True love triumphs; Pee Wee’s journey is, although perilous, not fruitless. His dream visions of its destruction, his dead-end trip to the (nonexistent) basement of the Alamo at the instigation of Madame Ruby the fraudulent clairvoyant, are all submerged, in the end, in his daring rescue of the captive bike from a Hollywood studio. Reunited, Pee-Wee and bike are then revised for the big screen. The love story of a boy and his bike becomes, with only a few alterations, the love story of a top spy and his super motorcycle. Pee-Wee himself plays a bell-boy.

     

    The bike, like the vision which Shelley’s Poet follows in “Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude,” is most clearly present in its absence. It inspires, provokes, and closes the narrative without ever acting alone. It must depend entirely on the actions of others–the perfect heroine. Dottie, by contrast, is too forward: she asks Pee-Wee out. She is too active: she has a job. And she is most closely identified with Pee-Wee’s other close friend, Speck the dog. The bicycle is the Neo-Platonic ideal of womanhood, beautiful, unattainable, distant. She must be earned by a hero willing to suffer greatly in her service. Francis cannot fulfill the task; he pays a greasy j.d. to steal her. Pee-Wee is willing to dress as a nun to rescue her from a mean-spirited child star.

     

    The picaresque adventure which forces Pee-Wee into heroic stature ends with his re-integration into ordinary life. Back in his hometown, he greets all his friends at a special screening of “his” movie. He passes through the crowd dispensing largesse–a foot-long hot dog concealing a file for his friend the convict, french-fries for Simone and her French sweetheart, candy for the Satan’s Helpers to scramble for. At last, seated on his bike, he pedals silently, eloquently, across the bottom of the drive-in screen, a man at peace with himself, ready to return to the quiet life he once shared unthinkingly with his darling bike, a wiser boy. Or man. Whatever he is.

     

    “Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure” articulates a central premise of post-modernism–the impassioned, erotic, inevitable love affair with technology. And it does so using an elegant pastiche of film and literary versions of the Neo-platonic, dream-visionary, questing romance–what we might call the true romance, with all that phrase’s resonance of cheap drugstore magazines as well as medieval poetry. The Playhouse offers us escape into the safe space of regression; the Big Adventure propels us–literary parachute firmly strapped on–into the strange desert freeway of the Future.

     

  • Impossible Music

    Susan Schultz

    Department of English
    University of Hawaii
    <schultz@uhccvm>

     

    Ashbery, John. Flow Chart. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991.

     

    Bronk, William. Living Instead. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1991.

     

    I was in a large class at USC when he [Schoenberg] said quite bluntly to all of us, ‘My purpose in teaching you is to make it impossible for you to write music,’ and when he said that I revolted.
     

    — John Cage

     

    William Bronk and John Ashbery, despite their radical stylistic differences, both face what critic John Ernest has termed “a metaphysical stalemate.” Although Ernest is writing about Bronk, his description of that poet’s paradoxical project resonates for the reader of Ashbery’s work as well: “he is passionately devoted to the belief that there are no grounds for belief, and to the conviction that all convictions are ultimately fictions” (145). Both write what one might call “postmodern spiritual autobiographies” (145), memoirs of minds that are alienated from the very divinities that they sometimes invoke. And the two poets who take so much from Wallace Stevens–Bronk a snowman, Ashbery a comedian of the letter A–share that poet’s sense that supreme fictions can only be approached, but never achieved. Even more radically than Stevens (but in accord with Emerson, who believed that poets took dictation), Bronk and Ashbery locate the wellsprings of their poetry outside themselves. Ashbery writes toward the end of Flow Chart: “I’m more someone else, taking dictation / from on high, in a purgatory of words, but I still think I shall be the same person when I get up / to leave, and then repeat the formulas that have come to use so many times / in the past[.]” Bronk’s version is more direct; when asked in a rare interview if “the poem exists outside of you and you’re transcribing it,” he responded, “Of course, where else? Do you think it’s something in your goddamned head?” (39).

     

    Bronk and Ashbery both fulfill Robert Pinsky’s injunction, in The Situation of Poetry (1976), that poetry be discursive. Yet Pinsky’s definition of discursiveness also goes to the heart of what divides them. “On the one hand,” he writes, “the word describes speech or writing which is wandering and disorganized; on the other, it can also mean explanatory–pointed, organized around a setting forth of material” (134). Bronk’s material, however spontaneously it comes to him (his notebooks are apparently clean of revision), is always organized and explanatory, written in a poetic legalese that alerts the reader more to the necessity of silence than to that of speech. Ashbery’s poetry, on the other hand, has always wandered and seemed to argue for the value of language as a fruitful noise–a field of possibility rather than a fixed matrix.

     

    Bronk’s three recent volumes, Manifest; and Furthermore (1987), Death Is the Place (1989), and Living Instead (1991), have been what the poet himself has called “freeze-dried Bronk”–his severe deconstruction of the actual demands that his language become more spare, his poems shorter than they were (and they were never epic in length or intention). Bronk’s version of poetic self-destructionism follows; here he satirizes the social world of appearances:

     

           In a presence vast beyond size, a presence that seems
       an absence, we hide and play with us as dolls.
       We give us names and addresses, dress
       us up in clothes, make loves and resumes,
       battles, furtively say where we came from
       and tell each other stories about ourselves. ("Playtime," 73)

     

    In “The Camera Doesn’t Lie” he goes further: “We are, of course, without any areness at all / and that’s the only way we are.” Thus for Bronk “there are no ideas in things,” to which he feistily adds, “Take this, William Carlos” (27). Unlike Williams and Whitman, whose poetry he does not admire, Bronk turns to Thoreau at his most ascetic and most Baudrillardian: “Whitman liked the image, and Thoreau didn’t care for the image; that’s a big difference between the two of them. Whitman’s idea was to erect a pretty picture and pretend that was reality. Which God knows is as American an idea as there is: we keep doing it over and over again” (19).

     

    Even Bronk’s favorite structure, the house, lacks the permanence readers of poetry associate with images, since “No form we make is a form we can live in long” (“Formal Declaration”). Instead, we are our own, haunted, houses: “We are like houses to live in. / It lives in us; we are the house. / We thought we were tenants. That was all wrong,” and “There aren’t any people; there are houses that house. // Tenant, I am haunted by your presences” (“Habitation”). Likewise, he demystifies the places that we have used traditionally to define ourselves:

     

           Eden too, even Eden, we
       made up.  It means we always wanted a place
       and never have one--had to make them up
       and stories about them: Troy, Jerusalem,
       old world, new world, once found, believed, then
            lost. ("Homecoming," 73)

     

    Bronk’s vision is so focused, so certain, that he writes the same poem time and again. This can be seen as a virtue, if indeed it be the truth, but the reader may grow impatient, finally, with so many approaches to the same impasse. The images provided in “Walleted” and elsewhere, which only occasionally appear in Bronk’s work, are the field in which Ashbery operates, though Ashbery’s suspicions are probably no less strong than Bronk’s–suspicions that the truth is concealed, rather than revealed, in particulars.

     

    If the obvious question about Three Poems (1972) was why they were written in prose, then it’s fair to ask of Flow Chart why Ashbery wrote it as a poem, albeit in long Whitmanic lines. (Ashbery, doubtless, prefers Whitman to Thoreau.) Ashbery told an interviewer who asked about the genre-problem in Three Poems: “I wrote in prose because my impulse was not to repeat myself” (quoted in Howard 41). This anxiety about self-repetition earlier inspired Ashbery to make his most radical experiment, the Tennis Court Oath volume. Flow Chart takes a different tack, rather like Gertrude Stein’s when she claims that she markets not in repetition but in “insistence.” Ashbery acknowledges his repetitions, but typically denies that repetition is what we think it is (I am reminded of Ashbery’s remark that his work is not private, but about everyone’s privacy). Instead, he finds novelty in what gets repeated; “one is doomed, / repeating one self, never to repeat oneself, you know what I mean?” (7). And much later, a Steinian adage: “Repetition makes reputation.” Even instances of forgetting do not faze Ashbery, for “one can lose a good idea / by not writing it down, yet by losing it one can have it: it nourishes other asides / it knows nothing of, would not recognize itself in, yet when the negotiations / are terminated, speaks in the acts of that progenitor, and does / recognize itself, is grateful for not having done so earlier” (115). Thus one repeats even what one has forgotten.

     

    Repetition anxieties also contributed to Ashbery’s early refusals to write an autobiography; he once told an interviewer that, “My own autobiography has never interested me very much. Whenever I try to think about it, I seem to draw a complete blank” (Bellamy 10). Ashbery’s poetry has for the most part evaded his biography. What distinguishes Flow Chart from much of Ashbery’s previous work is its frank approach to the progress of Ashbery’s career.

     

    Yet Ashbery does not, finally, repeat himself in Flow Chart; if his wandering discourses bear structural similarities to previous work, then the vocabularies he uses are richer still than any to which we’ve become accustomed. Flow Chart, true to its title, includes the languages of Wall Street, guerrilla war, the wild west, big government (at times he sounds like a lyrical Alexander Haig), and sports (“If he wants to / wind up sidelined, in the dugout, that is OK with me”) (169). The final third of the poem employs archaic language, the “thee’s” and “thou’s” of Hart Crane and John Donne. In addition, Ashbery admits new situations to his poetry; one section introduces a mentally retarded woman in a hospital.

     

    The contemporary political situation also presents itself more overtly in Flow Chart than it has in Ashbery’s past work: “Each year the summer dwindles noticeably, but the Reagan / administration insists we cannot go to heaven without drinking caustic soda on the floor / of Death Valley” (175-6). So much for “morning in America.”

     

    So much, also, for Ashbery’s harshest critics, whose calls to arms Ashbery answers in Flow Chart. Frederick Pollack’s attack on Ashbery, in the New Formalist anthology of criticism, Poetry After Modernism, is typical. Pollack claims that Ashbery is “a consumer,” not an “investment broker,” like Stevens (one assumes he means a broker of taste).

     

    Endlessly eclectic, it thrives on attempts to anticipate it, and creates an atmosphere of unfocused irony which dissolves satire and corrodes values. It destroys the past by senti- mentalizing it until memory itself becomes first questionable, then laughable. Finally, when there is no value, anything can be equated with (sold for) anything. I am describing, among other things, a poetic. (24-5).

     

    If, as I am suggesting, the book is about the history of one poet’s mind, and engages almost all of the discourses of his time, these criticisms sound more hysterical than reasonable. Ashbery’s self- consciousness is ironic, but not valueless. Pollack’s uneasy conflation of “value” with “investments” is precisely the misuse of language that Ashbery habitually points to–not through polemics, but by exploding the cliches he so ably repeats.

     

    Ashbery’s promiscuities of language suggest a radical suspicion of its powers; one trades at times in things one distrusts. Yet Ashbery does not share Bronk’s repulsion to the surface languages that divert us from a silent truth; he does not blame the messenger, as several of his passages about language attest. Ashbery finds the search for the Logos as inherently doomed a project as any: “They all would like to collect it always, but since / that’s impossible, the Logos alone will have to suffice. / A pity, since no one has seen it recently” (33-4). Ashbery re-validates the image, though not as a stable construct. In a beautiful section of the poem, he writes:

     

                      You may contradict me, but I see life
      in the dead leaves beginning to blow across the carpet,
            paraffin skies, the beetle's forlorn
      wail, and all at once it recognizes me, I am valid
                                                      again,
            the chapter can close
      and later be mounted, as though on a stage or in an
                                                      album.(91)

     

    His account of his earlier days reflects his enjoyment of appearances, something I find lacking in much of Bronk’s work. He begins a section in a library, then recounts his exit, ending this cross-section of the poem with typical humor:

     

     
          Sometimes an important fact would come to light
      only to reveal itself as someone else's discovery,
            while I felt my brain getting chafed
      as everything in the reading room took on an unreal,
            somber aspect.  But outside, the streetscape
      always looked refreshingly right, as though scene-
            painters had been at work, and then,
      at such moments, it was truly a pleasure to walk along,
            surprised yet not too surprised
      by every new, dimpled vista.  People would smile at me,
            as though we shared some pleasant
      secret, or a tree would swoon into its fragrance,
            like a freshly unwrapped bouquet
      from the florist's.  I knew then that nature was my
            friend. (94)

     

    That this vision of nature includes its imitations by artists–the scene-painters of this passage–hardly matters to Ashbery, whose sense of beauty depends on accretion, not on diminution. Ashbery, unlike Bronk, absolutely revels in simulacra, the world as seen through bad movies about the world. This section ends with an encomium to the (real) real:

     

     
            I have only the world to ask for, and,
      when granted, to return to its pedestal, sealed,
            resolved, restful, a thing
      of magic enmity no longer, an object merely, but
            one that watches us
      secretly, and if necessary guides us
      through the passes, the deserts, the windswept
            tumult that is to be our home
      once we have penetrated it successfully, and all else
            has been laid to rest.(96)

     

    The poet’s prime temptation, according to Ashbery, is not language, but careerism; Ashbery is “a sophisticated and cultivated adult with a number of books / to his credit and many other projects in the works” (177). He is also a celebrated poet, one who knows the temptations of self-promotion: “All along I had known what buttons to press, but don’t / you see, I had to experiment, not that my life depended on it, / but as a corrective to taking the train to find out where it wanted to go” (123). He pokes fun at others’ impressions of him as a descendent to Whitman, with his “barbaric yawp”:

     

     
      Then when I did that anyway, I was not so much charmed
            as horrified
      by the construction put upon it by even some quite
            close friends,
      some of whom accused me of being the "leopard man" who
            had been terrorizing
      the community by making howl-like sounds at night, out
            of earshot
      of the dance floor. (123)

     

    This “old soldier” (124) confesses to the power of the critic (“an old guy”) to read his mind, a power that forces him back on himself: “you suddenly / see yourself as others see you, and it’s not such a pretty sight either, but at / least you know now, and can do something to repair the damage” (124). The creation of a reputation, with the collusion of the critics, is “a rigged deal” (125), but one that the poet earns responsibility for by “looking deeper into the mirror, more thoroughly / to evaluate the pros and cons of your success and smilingly refuse all / offers of assistance” (124).

     

    Where Bronk disdains Whitman, who markets in images, Ashbery sees himself as a less-tyrannical bard, one whose identity accrues through the voices around him, rather than one who demands that his reader share his every assumption. Continuing the train metaphor, he writes, “I see I am as ever / a terminus of sorts, that is, lots of people arrive in me and switch directions but no one / moves on any farther” (127). The poet is merely an “agent” (216), in all nuances of the word, from ticket agent to co-conspirator, who directs us to the now open bridge that ends the poem as inconclusively as Whitman did when he left his “Song of Myself” without a final period:

     

                                              We are
      merely agents, so
      that if something wants to improve on us, that's fine,
            but we are always the last
      to find out about it, and live up to that image of
            ourselves as it gets
      projected on trees and vine-coated walls and vapors in
            the night sky: a distant
      noise of celebration, forever off-limits.  By evening
            the traffic has begun
      again in earnest, color-coded.  It's open: the bridge,
            that way. (216)

     

    If Bronk maintains the Cartesian dichotomy between body and mind, with the sole proviso that the mind is not ours, then Ashbery purposefully confuses the division, acknowledging no separation between thoughts and the images that help us to think them, or that think through us. Douglas Crase is doubtless right when he claims that Ashbery’s poetry is strange to us only because it gives us back the world in which we live (30). That is also–paradoxically–why his poetry is more “habitable” than Bronk’s, which is far simpler (in the best sense of the word). Ashbery’s vision, however difficult, is inclusive, Bronk’s exclusive, swearing its audience to a silence every bit as strenuous as his own. His refusal to be shaped by that world means that he is at once less and more radical than Ashbery; that his revolution is also a reaction (as poetry approaches silence) means in a practical sense that Bronk’s career may be foreshortened in ways that Ashbery’s is not.

     

    Works Cited

     

    • Bellamy, Joe David. American Poetry Observed: Poets on Their Work. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1984.
    • Crase, Douglas. “The Prophetic Ashbery.” In Beyond Amazement. New Essays on John Ashbery, Ed. David Lehman. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1980. 30-65.
    • Ernest, John. “William Bronk’s Religious Desire.” Sagetrieb. 7.3 (Winter 1988): 145-152.
    • Howard, Richard. “John Ashbery.” In Modern Critical Views: John Ashbery. Ed. Harold Bloom. NY: Chelsea House, 1985. 17-47.
    • Pinsky, Robert. The Situation of Poetry: Contemporary Poetry and its Traditions. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1976.
    • Pollack, Frederick. “Poetry and Politics.” In Poetry After Modernism. Ed. Robert McDowell. Brownville, Oregon: Story Line Press, 1991. 5-55.
    • Weinfield, Henry, ed. “A Conversation with William Bronk.” Sagetrieb. 7.3 (Winter 1988): 17-44.

     

  • Comedy/Cinema/Theory

    James Morrison

    Department of English
    North Carolina State University

     

    Comedy/Cinema/Theory. Edited by Andrew Horton. Berkeley: U of California P, 1991.

     

    Comedy’s not pretty–as the title of an early-eighties Steve Martin album instructed us–and to judge from Comedy/Cinema/Theory it’s not very funny either. Peter Brunette on the Three Stooges: “In the refusal to have meaning, to make sense, the Stooges’ violence in fact constitutes an anti-narrative. It is precisely their violence, as an ‘originary’ writing, that both allows for and destroys narrative . . .” (178). Dana Polan on Hitchcock’s Mr. and Mrs. Smith: “Screwball comedy bears the traces of confusions and contradictions in a later moment of capital when this commodification of desire reaches new extremes” (146). Scott Bukatman on Jerry Lewis: “The feeling of entrapment and of the impossibility of action or change arises agonizingly. Within such spatiotemporal distension, the physical dominates character, as the individual is reduced to automaton . . . ” (195).

     

    Bound to become a standard in university film-comedy courses, this collection of essays eschews Lubitschean epigrams or Stoogean banana-peels in favor of Derridean stencils or Heideggerean slip-knots. The volume is necessary and useful, and some of the essays are brilliant, but the effect is at times one of unmistakable homogeneity. In his introduction, the book’s editor, Andrew Horton, makes much of the “non-essentialist . . . thus open-ended” (3) theoretical approaches the contributors favor, but by the time this panel of unreconstructed post-structuralists get through with it po-mo comedy looks a lot like any other po-mo genre (if post-modernism can be said to leave any genres in its wake, a question the contributors here never ask). It represses the feminine/maternal (as Lucy Fischer suggests); it articulates the phallocentrism of Hollywood’s unconscious (as Peter Lehman claims); its carnivalesque potential is either triumphantly realized (as in Horton’s own essay) or self-consciously stymied (as in Ruth Perlmutter’s), thereby either subverting dominant ideology (as in Stephen Mamber’s) or reproducing it (as in Dana Polan’s). Unapologetically recuperating the genre for post-structuralism (hereafter PS), the versions of comedy constructed in this volume tell as much about contemporary academic film criticism as they do about comedy itself. What the book most forcefully proves, finally, is that you can put the same top-spins on comedy that you can on, say, melodrama or horror or soap-opera–as if anyone ever doubted it.

     

    In fact, some may well have doubted it, and a book like this one is comparatively late in coming, after a line of similar anthologies dealing with less problematic genres, perhaps because of an assumption that comedy does not readily lend itself to PS analysis since, in effect, comedy beats the critic to it. Much eighties criticism of popular culture is heavily dependent on a conception of the text (and to a lesser extent of its consumer) as naive. Theories of comedy, though, tend to emphasize the selfconsciousness of the genre, claiming that comedy by its very nature draws attention to its own stylistic operations, explicitly positions its audience in relation to it, catalogues all its own intertexts–performs, that is, the very functions criticism of popular-culture ordinarily arrogates to itself. Lucy Fischer’s psychoanalytic discussion of “comedy and matricide,” “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” in itself a fine essay, also exemplifies the effect of such critical claims to apprehending the “unconscious” level of a naive text in cultural criticism. Her analysis of the Howard Hawks film His Girl Friday (1940) finds in that text a particularly striking instance, because “the humorous text does not mandate [the mother’s] presence through the exigencies of plot” (65), of the “elimination of the maternal” she sees as endemic to Hollywood comedy. The “devaluation of the maternaI” (66) emerges here as, if not exactly unconscious, at least “gratuitous” (65) in Fischer’s view. But Fischer’s argument depends on her repression of the text’s keen self-consciousness about gender in, for example, its satirical references to the historical personae of its male actors, Cary Grant and Ralph Bellamy, or–more importantly–in its overt parody of its source, Hecht and MacArthur’s The Front Page (1928), by switching the gender of Hildy (male in the original) and thereby commenting on the homosocial potential of the prior text. Moreover, Fischer’s survey of “gratuitous comments that malign motherhood” (66) culminates with the most literal rendering in the film of the repression of the maternal:

     

    Finally, when Hildy's mother-in-law appears on the scene, Walter orders his cronies to cart the lady away, at which point she is bodily carried from the room. These images (of kidnapping, sudden death, and hanging) are resonant metaphors for the fate of the mother in comedy itself. (66)

     

    Fischer significantly fails to mention the return of the repressed mother (in the name, of course, of the Law of the Father) to seek revenge, a turning point in the film insofar as it is the mother who transgresses the text, insistently revealing what the narrative has concealed (an escaped prisoner in a roll-top desk). My point that Fischer effaces the self-consciousness of the text itself hardly invalidates her argument or undermines its gravity. The question is whether such effacement is required of a certain mode of criticism and whether, in that case, such criticism can answer without concession the special demands of an especially self-conscious genre.

     

    Indeed, a number of the essays in this book, either explicitly or implicitly, present comedy as the decisive link between Classical Hollywood and the impulses of modernism/ post-modernism. Brian Henderson’s study of “Cartoon and Narrative in the Films of Frank Tashlin and Preston Sturges” argues that Tashlin’s cartoon-like ellipses open, on what must be seen as a most unexpected site, a “gateway to the modern cinema” (158). Henderson’s argument pivots on comedy’s presumed greater formal liberty: Initially unavailable to other genres, the adventurous, brazen ellipses or paralipses of a Tashlin or a Sturges, licensed for comic purposes by the genre itself, trickle down to those other genres or movements, gradually eroding the stodgy “classicism” of the whole tradition. One of Henderson’s examples:

     

    Tashlin condenses the journey from Chicago to Las Vegas by cutting to various background locations behind (and around) the characters . . . it recalls in this respect Chuck Jones's remarkable Duck Amuck (1953) in which the backgrounds keep changing behind an increasingly frustrated Daffy Duck. (Godard's multiple cuts to Jean Seberg against ever-changing backgrounds in a car trip across Paris in Breathless is both cartoonlike in technique and a specific evocation of Hollywood or Bust [the Tashlin film].) (160)

     

    A more obvious precursor would be Keaton’s hyper-reflexive Sherlock Jr. (1923), but in fact Henderson may be essentializing this technique in his analysis. After all, an example of the same device appears in no less a film than Casablanca (1942), a movie often cited as the key example of Hollywood’s “classicism.” In the flashback sequence of that film, the dissolves among shifting backgrounds of Paris (in a close-up of Rick and Elsa driving) similarly condense their journey–but rather than reading the shots as a modernist elision, the audience is likely to read them simply as an instance of visual shorthand. Since, then, it would seem that such a device can be accommodated by classicism, the question becomes whether the distinction between “classical” and “modern” remains a useful category for film theory. Yet it is a distinction on which Henderson, like most of the contributors to the volume, insists, contrasting Tashlin with Sturges through it, for example: “[Sturges’s] ellipses are also classical: carefully built up to and returned from, never disrupting the viewer” (161). Or again:

     

    Several Tashlin ellipses lie somewhere between the classical and the modern. As a result, like Tashlin's work generally, they can be dismissed by classicists and dogmatic champions of modernism and valued by makers of cinematic modernism (Godard) and those as much interested in the becoming of a movement as in its achievement (right-thinking critics). (157)

     

    The binarism raises another question: Is Tashlin’s work of interest chiefly as an antecedent of Godard, the High- Modernist? The implication that it may be is redolent of an ethics of modernist self-formation, along the lines of earlier studies such as those of the English music-hall tradition claiming legitimacy from T.S. Eliot’s interest in that hitherto “low” tradition.

     

    The first half of the book consists of broad surveys of issues in film comedy: Fischer’s essay; Noel Carroll’s hectic encyclopedia of the sight-gag; a catalogue by Peter Lehman of penis-jokes in movies; Stephen Mamber’s “In Search of Radical Metacinema”; and Charles Eidsvik’s survey of Eastern European comedy films. The title of Mamber’s essay indicates one of the recurrent concerns of the section, crucial to every essay but Carroll’s: Is comedy “radical,” in some way inherently subversive of an established order? In the introduction, Horton implies that the question has already been settled in his reference to “comedy’s . . . subversion of norms” (8). Yet Fischer and Lehman see comedy’s claim to subversive potential as illusory. Lehman’s thesis is that “one of the most important functions of comedy in cinema is to sneak a joke by almost unnoticed, make us laugh, and then allow us to forget that we ever thought something was funny” (58), while Fischer, as we have seen, traces the process in comedy by which “woman–once the core of the joke structure (as the target of sexual desire)–is eventually eliminated from the scene entirely and replaced by the male auditor” (62). Mamber and Eidsvik are readier to grant comedy its radical force, Eidsvik by way of the overtly political nature of Eastern European comedy and Mamber through the route of post-modern parody, finding the signifiers of Kubrick’s parodic The Shining, for example, pointing “not to a failed horror film, as so many reviews stupidly labeled it, but to a deliberately subverted one” (84).

     

    In the book’s second half, contributors focus on individual films or important comic figures. William Paul’s “Charles Chaplin and the Annals of Anality” argues that previous critics have ignored the “vulgar humor” that is “central to Chaplin’s vision” (120), failing to emphasize “the raucously insistent lover body imagery” (117) of his work. Replacing such imagery in what he takes to be its properly privileged place, Paul finds that the key questions raised by Chaplin’s work are “How can upper and lower body be made whole? How can the spiritual grace we accord the eyes be made commensurate with the other organs that bring us into contact with the outside world . . . ?” (125). Dana Polan’s “The Light Side of Genius” reads Mr. and Mrs. Smith through the paradigms of screwball comedy as much as through those of Hitchcockian authorship, concluding that “in the classical mode of Hollywood production, it may well be that too much emphasis on the singularities of a career may lead us to overvalue the individual director as someone special, a figure outside the dominant paradigms” (150). Ruth Perlmutter’s essay on Woody Allen’s Zelig sees it as an example of parody as “autocritique” (207); Bukatman’s on Lewis sees him as a key example of male hysteria; Brunette’s on the Three Stooges and Horton’s on Dusan Makavejev find varying degrees of comic subversion in these texts, while the volume is rounded out by Henderson’s fine essay on Tashlin and Sturges.

     

    It is possible to point to weaknesses in individual contributions: Carroll’s is simply inconclusive; Perlmutter’s repeats without citation much of Robert Stam’s treatment of the same film in his book on Bakhtin and cinema, Subversive Pleasures (1989); Horton’s idealizes the carnivalesque: “Makavejev shows us that innocence can be protected through knowing laughter” (232). It is more useful, however, to identify assumptions shared across the range of contributors that confer on the book, for all the varied inflections of each critic, a certain ideological sameness, even perhaps a certain intellectual complacency. Here the figure of Bakhtin emerges as crucial, for well over half the contributors draw upon Bakhtin’s ideas to illuminate film comedy. It is not surprising at this stage in the evolution of PS to find Bakhtin constructed as the touchstone for theories of the comic in popular culture: the surprise, I suppose, is that Bakhtin does not figure prominently in every essay collected here. What is striking about the use made here of Bakhtin–that enemy of the totality of genre, that celebrator of the disruptive potential of laughter–is how fully domesticated he has become in this book’s version of him. After painstaking exegeses of Bakhtin by Horton, Fischer, Paul, Brunette and others, we come to the one authentically comic moment in this volume when Perlmutter blithely introduces us at the outset of her essay to one “Mikhail Bakhtin, Russian literary theorist” (206)–which in this context falls on the ear rather like “Gustave Flaubert, the noted French author.” Reading this book, one is re-introduced to Bakhtin so many times, each time as if it were the first, that one begins to dread the inexorable approach of this wan specter with its steady tread and its joyless homilies!

     

    It’s (possibly) unfair to criticize a collection for the uniformity of its critical practices (if it’s a crime, nearly every anthology in film studies is guilty); and it’s philistine to suppose that a book about comedy should be spirited or exuberant–that it’s the task of criticism to share or even to be responsive to the superficial predispositions of its object. This book is an excellent contribution to film studies, and in pointing to its moral gravity and its analytic earnestness one risks being identified with a slob who grouses that those insufferable pointy-heads are at it again, ruining the belly-laughs for the rest of us. But the question I’m really asking is whether PS–especially given its enthusiastic valorization of carnival–is ever going to be capable of having any fun.

     

  • Sliding Signifiers and Transmedia Texts: Marsha Kinder’s Playing with Power

    Lisa M. Heilbronn

    Department of Sociology
    St. Lawrence University
    <lhei@slumus>

     

    Kinder, Marsha. Playing with Power in Movies, Television and Video Games; From Muppet Babies to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Berkeley: U of California P, 1991.

     

    What are we talking about when we talk about media “effects”? This may be one of the most pressing questions to face those who want to approach the media from an interdisciplinary (and in the case of communications studies one might also say intradisciplinary) perspective. Are we addressing behavior? ideology? psychology? Playing With Power is an ambitious attempt to discuss children’s media use in the broadest possible theoretical, social and economic contexts. Marsha Kinder attempts to connect the behavior effects of these media (absorption in the video game or television program, consumption patterns, eye-hand coordination, etc.) with their ideological effects (consumerism and patriarchy chief among them) by linking both to the psychological and cognitive effects of video on developing children. She does this using an approach which combines consideration of entertainment industry policy and decision-making with the decoding of cultural texts. This is laudable, particularly when the analysis also attempts to take into account consumer interaction with the text as both commodity and symbol system.

     

    The book has five chapters and a substantial appendix detailing two field study/interview situations with children. The subject matter covered in the chapters spirals out from a core of psychoanalytic, cognitive, and cultural theory through increasingly complex media situations to break off with a consideration of global political economics. Its fundamental goal is the exploration of “how television and its narrative conventions affect the construction of the subject” (3). The structure is designed to represent the “strategy of cognitive restructuring” it studies.

     

    This is, to a degree, a personal quest. Kinder uses her son Victor’s development of narrative and involvement with interactive video as the keystone of her study, and includes his friends among her interview subjects in the appendixes. Her son and other “postmodern” children value the interactivity of Saturday morning television and video games, and the commodities associated with them and are bored by the unified subject represented by conventional film. This interests and concerns Kinder. Much of her discussion is implicitly organized around the contrast between “the unified subject, associated with modernism and cinema; and the decentered consumerist subject, associated with postmodernism and television” (40). She weighs each subject in terms of its position relative to this dichotomy. Transmedia intertextuality, for example, “valorizes superprotean flexibility as a substitute for the imaginary uniqueness of the unified subject” (120).

     

    Kinder suggests that “readers who are less interested in theory” skip over the theoretical section of the first chapter. This section is only a scant twenty-three pages as it is. This may represent a bid for a popular audience more interested in reading about the toys which fascinate their children and the industry which produces them than in the differences between Kristeva and Piaget. However, this leaves the reader with a slim foundation for much of the later analysis. For example, the theoretical section states that “intertextual relations across different narrative media” (2) are the primary focus of the book, but the reader is given only one paragraph with quotations from Bakhtin and Robert Stam on intertextuality. There is even less information provided on the meaning of signs, signifiers, and what Kinder calls “sliding signifiers.” There seems to be an implicit assumption that the reader is already familiar with such concepts, and with the work of Beverle Houston and Susan Willis which informs the discussion.

     

    More space is devoted to stitching together Piaget’s theory of genetic epistemology, (6-9) and psychoanalytic theory (9-15). However, Kinder leaves certain key questions unresolved. After pointing out that cognitive theory “does not perceive gender differentiation as the linchpin to subject formation within the patriarchal symbolic order,” and that she believes this “`naturalizes’ patriarchal assumptions” (9), Kinder states that she will “position this cognitive approach within a larger framework of post- structuralist feminism” (10). How will she do this? By appropriating “from both models . . . ideas particularly useful for theorizing this dual form of gendered spectator/player positioning at this moment in history” (10). This begs the question: Kinder makes a flurry of allusions to the work of David Bordwell, Edward Branigan, Louis Althusser, and Jacques Lacan, but there is no sustained argument to demonstrate that her two theoretical models can be reconciled.

     

    Without a strong theoretical foundation, Kinder’s claim in Chapter Two–that Saturday morning television creates a gendered, consumerist subjectivity–becomes problematic. Her analysis of the intertextual content of shows such as “Garfield” and “Muppet Babies,” and the programming strategies behind them is very enjoyable. But does a commercial for a building set specifically for girls really imply “that all other similar toys are intended exclusively for boys,” so that “if the young female viewer already owns a set of building blocks, then, it instantly becomes inappropriate and therefore obsolete” (50-51)?

     

    Kinder also develops the concept of “animal masquerade” in which we

     

    alleviate anxiety and gain an illusory sense of empowerment by bestowing our conception of human individuality onto animals . . . by letting them substitute for missing members of the dysfunctional family

     

    and which she claims “help[s] us see beyond the waning nuclear family and the growing influence of the single mother by ‘naturalizing’ alternative models for human bonding” (73-4). The discussion as a whole is often quite compelling, but disturbingly ahistorical. What of Aesop, Winnie the Pooh, Uncle Remus, Coyote Trickster and other names associated with animal tales throughout history? How much can we hang on consumer society and postmodernism? The argument would be stronger if it differentiated between earlier types of animal masquerade and the particular type of commodified animal figure she is discussing.

     

    The strongest chapters are Three, on the Nintendo Entertainment System, and Four, which focusses on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and their transmedia success. Kinder gives a lucid and gripping account of the development of the video game and particularly of Nintendo’s success in implementing “`razor marketing theory’ . . . a strategy of focusing on the development and sale of software (whether a game cartridge, a Barbie outfit, or a razor blade) that is compatible only with the company’s unique hardware” (91). The cognitive perspective works well here. Kinder’s discussion of Vygotsky’s “zone of proximal development,” and her argument that video game-playing can cause cognitive acceleration, are convincing (111-119). The feminist psychoanalytic theory in the section on “Oedipalization of Home Video Games” is less convinving. Kinder jumps from the highly qualified assumption that the “marketing of video games seems to be primarily to those with, potentially, the most intense fear of castration” (102), to a unqualified assertion that video games are “oedipalized.” By this she seems to mean that their violent content appeals more to boys than girls because (although she offers no evidence) it “can help boys deal with their rebellious anger against patriarchal authority” (104). But the “oedipalization” becomes causal–it “accounts for certain choices within its system of intertextuality” (104). Although Kinder states her belief that “within our postmodernist culture and at various developmental stages of this ongoing generational struggle between parents and child, other media situated in the home such as television and video games substitute for the parents” (22) the book needs far more evidence before it can support this claim.

     

    Kinder then turns to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles supersystem, defining a supersystem as a network which

     

    must cut across several modes of image production; must appeal to diverse generations, classes, and ethnic subcultures, who in turn are targeted with diverse strategies; must foster `collectability' through a proliferation of related products; and must undergo a sudden increase in commodification, the success of which reflexively comes a `media event' that dramatically accelerates the growth curve of the system's commercial success. (123)

     

    She makes excellent use of journalistic sources, and makes the phenomena comprehensible. The gender analysis in this section–discussing male and female masquerade and the ways in which TMNT as “the ultimate sliding signifiers” (135) reveal masculinity to be culturally constructed–seems well supported.

     

    The final chapter, which discusses the growing “network of commercial intertextuality” (172) formed by CNN global news coverage, Japanese acquisition of American “software,” and HDTV was interesting. It is subtitled an afterword, and as such seems somewhat tentative and tangential to her argument. It lacks discussion of the claims that international marketing leads to a declining emphasis on dialogue and a focus on the visual and violent as the commodities reach a transnational audience with little in the way of a shared culture.

     

    Kinder includes two appendixes which cover small “empirical studies” she conducted in July of 1990. Although she states explicitly that the studies (one based on eleven interviews with children from five to nine, the other on twelve interviews with children from six to fourteen) “provide neither a solid basis for the ideas expressed in this book nor an adequate test of them” (173), she notes that they are included because they “raise new issues (such as the effect of ethnic, racial, class and gender differences on children’s entrances into supersystems like the Teenage Mutuant Ninja Turtle network)” (173). In fact, there is nothing in the interviews themselves which raises issues of ethnicity, race or class. These dimensions are raised by Kinder earlier in the book when she introduces the concern that if video games do contribute to an acceleration of certain stages of cognitive development, the middle class who are better able to afford Nintendo systems and other computer systems in the home, will be differently advantaged. I would say that, as presented, the studies supply no information on this point. (For example, there is no information on how the class status of her second group of subjects, approached at a video game arcade, was collected.) Gender differences are more apparent from the data. Were I the researcher, I believe I would have opted to omit the material.

     

    This book is extremely ambitious. It is to be commended for its open-minded approach to what some observers find the greatest item of concern regarding interactive video–the child’s absorption in the system and the commodity culture which surrounds it, and for its attention to the “latent” effects which are less commented on–reinforcement of patriarchal gender roles and global economic systems. It contains some excellent references, provocative theory, and excellent program and film analysis. It raises interesting questions, and should stimulate the reader to review and challenge the assumptions s/he holds about children and media.

     

  • Technoculture: Another, More Material, Name for Postmodern Culture?

    Joseph Dumit

    History of Consciousness Program
    University of California-Santa Cruz
    <jdumit@cats.ucsc.edu / jdumit@cats.BITNET>

     

    Penley, Constance, and Andrew Ross, eds. Technoculture. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1991.
     

    “If we want technology to liberate rather than destroy us, then we–the techno/peasants–have to assume responsibility for it.”

    –The Techno/Peasant Survival Manual 1

     

    Perhaps the question is, what isn’t technoculture? The two parts of this word, techno(logy) and culture are actively contested in contemporary social criticism. Donna Haraway, for instance, has read the logos of techne as “translatable/transferable technique,” and then more closely as “frozen labor”.2 Haraway draws attention to the accountable, though usually unaccounted for, aspects of “our” artifacts, our shirts, our computers, our words. She asks: “How is the world in the object, and the object in the world?”3 With regard to culture, it is precisely these webs of interconnection and constructed barriers of individuation which are under attack within and without anthropology: “culture” as a signification of privilege, by the privileged. Under these lights, technoculture points toward a world where the high and low speed technique-transfers are the common culture, and where “culture” is a technology.

     

    Technoculture, the book, looks in this and other directions. Penley and Ross use technoculture in their introduction almost always in the phrase “Western technoculture” and situate technocultural situations as stemming from technology transfer problems and creative appropriations. “The essays collected in Technoculture are almost exclusively focused on what could be called actually existing technoculture in Western society, where the new cultural technologies have penetrated deepest, and where the environments they have created seem almost second nature to us” (xii). While Western now apparently includes Japan, it is important to reflect on the role of this monster word, “technoculture,” and the world it invokes.

     

    The terrain claimed by Technoculture has been approached from a variety of angles. Cultural studies is the most obvious one, though this field has often shied away from emphasizing machines. Social studies of science has a long history of looking at what has come to be called technoscience–in Bruno Latour’s terms, “all the elements tied to the scientific contents no matter how dirty, unexpected or foreign they may seem.”4 Technoscience, and therefore science studies, should be looking at more than laboratory science. Sal Restivo has most vigorously challenged science studies and cultural studies by reintroducing C. Wright Mills’s sociological imagination and calling for a revisioning of the relations of science and society, for seeing science as a social problem and thinking towards what Sandra Harding calls “successor science.”5 Books such as Cyborg Worlds, Women, Work, and Technology, Technology and Women’s Voices, and the Anthropology of Technology, address concerns which readily fit under the title of Technoculture and should be seen as complements to it.6

     

    The contents of Technoculture range from traditional American cultural studies (reading texts and commenting on culture), literary genre criticism, and ethnography, to historical and practical activist manuals. Ignoring Penley and Ross’s prescriptions that “it is the work of cultural critics, for the most part, to analyze that process [of cultural negotiation] and to say how, when, and to what extent critical interventions in that process are not only possible but also desirable” (xv), the contributors have a wide variety of takes on what it means to be a cultural critic writing an edited book section. We can situate Technoculture then in a busy intersection7 of academic interests and note some special needs to which it points and which it begins to address: (1) building on the cultural studies subversion of the high/popular split, it expands studies of technology in society to everyday appropriations; (2) it pays attention to the media’s role in scientizing us as well as in selling science;8 (3) parts of it draw upon fieldwork and provide practical histories and analyses, pushing in the direction of applied cultural studies; and, (4) by refusing to posit monstrous enemies in control of technology (especially of communications technologies), it provides models for rethinking intellectual technophobia.

     

    Technoculture begins with an interview of Donna Haraway, “Cyborgs at Large,” followed by her postscript to the interview, “The Actors are Cyborg, Nature is Coyote, and the Geography is Elsewhere.” Returning to the “Cyborg Manifesto,” the questions and imperatives of naming complex and contradictory situations are humorously, seriously foregrounded. Do we “cultural critics” still want to name Malaysian factory workers cyborgs, and why? Figuring out how to be accountable for naming while still speaking (English, in this case) is the challenge put forth by Haraway: “My stakes are high; I think ‘we’–that crucial riven construction of politics–need something called humanity and nature” (25).

     

    In conversation with this question of the politics and stakes of naming is Valerie Hartouni’s important, nightmarishly optimistic analysis, “Containing Women: Reproductive Discourse in the 1980s.” Carefully examining the issues and language of such articles as “Brain-dead Mother has Baby,” Hartouni skillfully unravels the frustrated attempts of journalists, scientists and judges to re-normalize the new biotechnologies of human reproduction. What she finds among admittedly conservative nuclear-family rhetoric are the open possibilities left in the “instability and vulnerability of privileged narratives about who we are . . . Naming and seizing these possibilities however, require imagination, a new political idiom, as well as a certain courage–to eschew a lingering attachment to things ‘natural’ and ‘foundational’” (51). By paying so much attention to how media constructions, anti-abortionists, senate subcommittees, infertility clinics and women’s movements materially interact with each other, Hartouni is able to show places where naming can reorder parts of the world and reconfigure rights and reproduction. “Containing Women” sets an important challenge for cultural critics.

     

    In another kind of media analysis, “‘Penguin in Bondage’: A Graphic Tale of Japanese Comic Books” by Sandra Buckley takes on the history of Japanese mass-erotica and pornography. Deftly drawing out the subversive uses and ruses of girl and boy comic books, Buckley shows how popular media can challenge and even change gender and sexuality configurations. She contrasts these adventurous books with technoporn, which unfortunately is given an extreme determinism; it “insinuates the reader into the graphics of the narratives . . . [and] literally captures the imagination and the fantasy of the male consumer” (192). Still, her discussion of pornography and the struggles over it in Japan are insightful, and her analysis of how the books are consumed and discussed as well as of their content is valuable.

     

    A different set of articles reports on current cultural phenomena, looking for signs of resistance and subversion. Peter Fitting, Andrew Ross, Jim Pomeroy and Reebee Garafalo are poised to judge the politics of new cultural arenas. Understanding their audience to be other left critics, they array their examples to defeat other, more limited theories. Fitting begins with a close genre reading of cyberpunk science fiction (crystalized in William Gibson and Bruce Sterling) as a brave but misguided attempt to come to terms with the postmodern corporatist present. Drawing on Fredric Jameson and Haraway, “The Lessons of Cyberpunk” charts the seductions and difficulties of postmodern critics in using this brand of science fiction. Fitting acknowledges that Gibson’s is a corporatist, “violent, masculinist future” which is not to his liking (307), but insists, nevertheless, in finding “some potentially contestatory options” in it (311). Unfortunately, after dismissing a self-defined cyberpunk subculture, the only “readers” Fitting acknowledges seem to be other left critics. How cyberpunk is read and used by others, contestory or not, seems not to matter.

     

    Andrew Ross’s contribution, “Hacking Away at the Counterculture,” takes on the media construction of hackers, people who use computer systems and networks innovatively, extracurricularly, and illegally. He sensitively tracks their construction as deviant boys who with better rearing will serve the country well, which most of them did. Most interesting is his plea for expanding the definition of hackers to include on-the-job slow-ups, minor and major sabotage, and other forms of resistance to corporate and government surveillance and scientific management. His equally intriguing, though unconnected, concluding call is for making cultural critics’s “knowledge about technoculture into something like a hacker’s knowledge.” He goes on recklessly, however, to makeover this cultural hacking into redemptive practice, into “rewriting the cultural programs and reprogramming the social values that make room for new technologies” (132).

     

    Garafalo and Pomeroy discuss mega-musical events (e.g. Live Aid) and techno-artists (e.g. Mark Pauline of Survival Research Laboratories). Both looking hard for politics, each finds only ambivalence, ambiguity and contradictions. Garafalo, for instance, assesses mega- events as political leaders in the 1980s “in the relative absence of [political movements]” (249), but misses the “World Beat” curatorship of non-American music by such artists as Paul Simon,9 any mention of such musical forces as reggae and rap as political (Public Enemy is mentioned but only for its contribution to Do the Right Thing), and acknowledgement of 1980s political movements: gay and lesbian rights, anti-nuclear, environmentalism, anti-apartheid as movements in spite of mega-events.

     

    Houston A. Baker Jr. takes a more critical, nuanced turn at ambivalence in “Hybridity, the Rap Race, and Pedagogy for the 1990s” with a rich and rhythmic tribute to rap’s innovational history and its liberating possibilities: “Rap is the form of audition in our present era that utterly refuses to sing anthems of, say, white male hegemony” (206). Controversial perhaps, as he tells of teaching Shakespeare’s Henry V as a rapper, he also raises but leaves untouched issues of homophobia and “macho redaction,” leaving the reader waiting to hear the next verse.

     

    Most appealing to my activist and anthropological sensibilities are the articles by The Processed World Collective, DeeDee Halleck, Constance Penley and Paula Triechler. Each of these essays traces current empowering interventions which make use of mass media tactics and create new ways of living. “Just the Facts, Ma’am: An Autobiography” tells the story of Processed World magazine. Started by a small collective of dissident office workers in 1981, PW’s “purpose was twofold: to serve as a contact point and forum for malcontent office workers (and wage workers in general), and to provide a creative outlet for people whose talents were blocked by what they were obliged to do for money” (231). By detailing the ways in which the PW collective organized itself, disseminated information (conversations on the street, expos, tours of Silicon Valley), published, and thought–“Rebellion can be fun, humor subversive . . . make people feel good about hating their jobs” (238)–“Just the Facts” inspires and informs by providing workable suggestions.

     

    DeeDee Halleck provides a similar contribution regarding Paper Tiger Television in “Watch Out, Dick Tracy! Popular Video in the Wake of the Exxon Valdez.” Critically examining the trickle-down theory of communications technology, Halleck poses the question, “Is it possible to have a populist vision of the process of electronic production?” (216). She answers by showing first that active audio-video technology (camcorders and VCRs over laser disks) has always been preferred by consumers and has been incorporated into organizations and groups readily. Second, and most importantly, she provides a history of the public-access movement wherein local groups produced and aired their own shows. Halleck was one of the founders, in 1981, of Paper Tiger Television and the Deep Dish Satellite Network which have provided encouragement, models, and funding for critical, responsive, low-budget programs. She continues that tradition here.

     

    Other consumers of the active VCRs have formed their own communities based on humorous, subversive rereadings and re-presentations of mass culture. In “Brownian Motion: Women, Tactics, and Technology,” Constance Penley reports on slashers: groups of women who have taken the Star Trek series and produced fiction, graphics, videos, fanzines and conventions around a Kirk/Spock homosexual story. “Slasher” notes the slash between Kirk and Spock (K/S). These groups have retooled passive TV and masculinity with the appropriate technology of science fiction, copiers, mailing lists and VCR editing. Penley’s close observation of and participation in this community is rewarded with a thought-provoking account of their insights and their struggles.

     

    Paula Triechler focuses on a larger scale retooling, that of human access to health, the medical establishment, and the FDA. In “How to Have Theory in an Epidemic: The Evolution of AIDS Treatment Activism,” she tells an inspiring history of AIDS drug regulation and approval processes, ACT UP, and the ongoing negotiations of persons with AIDS and people at risk for it (everyone) within our bureaucratic media-organized world. “This version of AIDS treatment activism, probably best exemplified in real life by ACT UP, invokes several essential elements of the movement: a vision of the power structure that calls for unleashing the power and knowledge of resistant forces; expertise about technology and science, the politics of the federal bureaucracy, biomedical research, and economics; self-education; and the use of tactics including civil disobedience, lawbreaking, infiltration, and seizing control of the media” (71). “Evolution” needs the complement of books like Women, AIDS and Activism by The ACT UP/NY Women and AIDS Book Group, which tells the many stories of continuing absence of care and concern over communities of color and women.10 Nevertheless, Triechler’s article demonstrates both the effectiveness of new kinds of struggles and the enormity of the challenge: “these negotiations . . . involve significant renegotiations of the geography of cultural struggle–of sources of biomedical expertise, relations between doctor and patient, relationships of the general citizenry to science and to government bureaucracies, and debate about the role and ownership of the body” (97).

     

    Halleck’s, Penley’s, Triechler’s and the Processed World Collective’s pieces are important because they provide evidence of what people have done, and can do, with mass-produced culture by using the tools which produce that culture, thereby revising their world. This approach, which tells how things are done, which disseminates information in an age run by information, but more by the privatization of information, makes the most of a collected work’s format.

     

    Each of the articles in Technoculture tells the story of communities which are perhaps best described as virtual.11 These communities are constituted not around face-to-face meeting, but around common access to newsletters, TVs, books, computer bulletin boards and music. These media and their accompanying machines– desktop publishing, fax, copiers, modems, VCRs, record players, tape players, satellite transponders–are as much part of these communities, part of the everyday, as language. Documenting ways of living, surviving, multiplying (converting and disseminating) and helping others to do the same is the laudable aim of this book. Missing, however, is a questioning and situating of how technophobia and technophilia are in the world, how they are differently positioned and engendered in people, and how they often may be appropriate responses and survival strategies. Too often, in proposing a “middle path,” relations to machines and jobs are simply pathologized, dismissed as errors.

     

    Returning to the other technocultural analyses mentioned at the beginning, we note that some of the so- called luddite responses to nuclear power, to certain surveillance technologies, and to various attempts at industrialization and automation may be a reaction against a technological meliorism which ignores those whose ways of living are being disrupted or placed under siege. The technophilic embrace of scientific professions, medical science, and even weapons systems, must be moderated by an understanding of the implications of such things for race, class, gender, morbidity, and the international community. Studying technoculture, as opposed to studying technology or studying culture, should mean addressing the variable configurations of lives and forms of life which are involved in our nuclear (post-WWII) world.

     

    In this milieu then, in Technoculture, we find cyborgs, women’s reproductive systems, ACT UP, hackers, slashers, pornography, rappers, public access groups, office anarchists, mega-musicians, techno-artists and cyberpunks. Most of these are defined by their relation to electronic media; they are also, by and large, recent popular media personalities, and all but Triechler focus on the U.S. In this sense, Technoculture locates and names itself as American high-tech pop-culture studies, and it is in this sense that technoculture and postmodern culture are used interchangeably. In the intersection of cultural studies, anthropology, history of technology and social movements, and science studies, it draws attention to this mass cultural realm. But often this is a different topos, a different sense of place, from the “technoculture” of world-webs bound by accountability to frozen labor named at the beginning. The best parts of Technoculture do succeed in this accounting, aiding in envisioning and living better lives, presenting new and successful communities, and doing so with a critical optimism.

     

    Notes

     

    1. Print Project, 1980, The Techno/Peasant Survival Manual, New York: Bantam Books, 5.

     

    2. Donna Haraway, 1991, Science and Politics lectures, UCSC.

     

    3. How materially, historically, politically, economically, mythologically, semiotically do these objects persist, what sorts of labor produced it, transported it, marketed it, consumed it, disposed of it, what are the histories of these labors, what labor supports those laborers . . .

     

    4. Latour, Bruno, 1987, Science in Action, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 174.

     

    5. Restivo, Sal, 1988, “Modern Science as a Social Problem,” Social Problems, Vol. 35, No. 3, June; Harding, Sandra, 1986, The Science Question in Feminism, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

     

    6. Levidow, Les, and Kevin Robbins, ed., 1989, Cyborg Worlds: The Military Information Society, London: Free Association Books; Wright, Barbara Drygulski, ed., 1987, Women, Work, and Technology: Transformations, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press; Kramarae, Cheris, ed., 1988, Technology and Women’s Voices: Keeping in Touch, London: Routledge and Keagan Paul; Hess, David, 1992, Anthropology and Technology.

     

    7. The metaphor of culture as a busy intersection belongs to Renato Rosaldo (1989, Culture and Truth, Boston: Beacon Press.)

     

    8. Nelkin, Dorothy, 1987, Selling Science: How the Press Covers Science and Technology, New York: W.H. Freeman and Company.

     

    9. Cf. Stephen Feld, 1990, “Curators of World Beat: An Ethnomusicological Approach”; a paper presented at Society for Cultural Anthropology Meeting.

     

    10. The ACT UP/NY Women and AIDS Book Group, 1990, Women, AIDS and Activism, Boston: South End Press.

     

    11. Cf. Allequere Rosanne Stone, 1992, “Virtual Systems: The Architecture of Elsewhere,” in Hrazstan Zeitlian, ed., Semiotext(e) Architecture.

     

  • Metadorno

    Neil Larsen

    Department of Modern Languages
    Northeastern University
    <nlarsen@lynx.northeastern.edu>

     

    Jameson, Fredric. Late Marxism: Adorno, or the Persistence of the Dialectic. London: Verso, 1990.

     

    My first encounter with the writings of Fredric Jameson occurred when I was a graduate student in Comparative Literature. At that time the older, New Critical, T.S. Eliot-ized curriculum was rapidly crumbling before the onslaught of “theory.” The moment was uniquely exhilarating, but also charged with a peculiar anxiety, not unlike that experienced by an ‘uneducated’ consumer about to buy a new refrigerator or, say, a compact disk player. Doing “theory” meant not only becoming familiar with a range of available critical paradigms–from the many varieties of poststructuralism and feminism, to psychoanalysis, to reception theory, etc., etc.–but also, inevitably, taking one home. Extenuating factors, for the most part extra-academic, predisposed me to Marxism, which happened to be in stock, and I remain, I must confess, a most satisfied customer. The decision, however, was greatly facilitated by reading books such as Marxism and Form and the then recently published Prison-House of Language. The latter work in particular fell upon us like a godsend. Here, at last, was a critique of formalism, structuralism and poststructuralism, setting out from clearly articulated theoretical and political positions of its own, but at the same time satisfying the collateral need for an introduction to a whole range of thinkers–from Shklovksy and Jakobson to Levi-Strauss, Greimas, Lacan and Kristeva–whose many individual works one simply hadn’t the time or the training to assimilate. With the then constant appearance of new works of theory–a process still unabating–it was easy to become dismayed at the prospect of falling further and further behind. But Jameson’s books made life easier–indeed, made the career of many a struggling apprentice to critical theory a possibility where it might otherwise have succumbed to burn-out or inane and unwanted specializations. I think I am not far off in saying that Jameson played a unique role in educating an entire generation of Marxist literary and cultural critics (and perhaps not a few non-Marxists), not only in the tradition of the Western Marxism of a Lukacs or a Benjamin, but also in virtually all of the important schools of critical theory to have emerged since roughly the 1920s. To say this is in no way to disparage Jameson’s contributions as an original critical theorist. One thinks especially here of his central position within current discussions of postmodernity. But perhaps his most original contribution is precisely the method of interpreting ‘rival,’ non-Marxist theories and interpretations in such a way as to expose their falsifying implications at the same time that their specific ‘truth content’ is preserved–a method variously identified as “meta-commentary” and as “transcoding.” There can, in my estimation, arise genuine doubts about the ultimate political effect of metacommentary–as to whether, in fact, it is the Marxist frame and not the array of ‘rival’ discourses that is finally severed from its ‘truth-content’ as a result of this operation. But I don’t think there can be any about the vastly productive heuristic force of Jamesonian interpretation. Metacommentary has, pretty much alone it seems to me, worked towards an intellectual-critical synthesis within the humanities, without which the quality of present day intellectual discourse and analysis would probably be far poorer.

     

    It is against this rather special standard of expectation that Jameson’s 1990 work, Late Marxism, seems both disconcerting and somewhat disappointing. Here, somehow, metacommentary, while never more sophisticated and sensitive to every conceivable nuance and possibility lurking within its intellectual object, seems oddly static. An exhausting labor of reading–for Late Marxism is, uncharacteristically, a book whose initial threshold of difficulty, beyond which the effort of comprehension becomes continuously self-rewarding, seems never to be reached–leaves the reader finally bereft of the expected synthesis. Why is this?

     

    Perhaps it is simply my own local need or desire for metacommentary that has lapsed here. But I suspect my response to Late Marxism–at least among those who have themselves been schooled by Jamesonian Marxism–is not atypical. What I want to suggest in what follows is that the peculiar density and tendency to hypostasis detected in Late Marxism by its readers stems not from any intrinsic decay of metacommentary, but rather from what may be the essential unfeasability of the task that the method here sets for itself.

     

    That task involves the substantiation of two claims: first, that Adorno’s own claim to Marxism (whether or not Adorno himself in fact bothers to make it) is a valid one; second, that “Adorno’s Marxism may be just what we need today” (5). To substantiate the former, Jameson observes that “the law of value is always presupposed by Adorno’s interpretations” (230) as well as pointing to the “omnipresence” in Adorno of the “conceptual instrument called ‘totality’” (ibid.). The latter is purportedly established by the very “success” of contemporary, “late” capitalism at “eliminating the loopholes of nature and the Unconscious, of subversion and the aesthetic, of individual and collective praxis alike . . .” (5). That is, Adorno’s continual “emphasis on the presence of late capitalism as a totality within the very forms of our concepts . . .” (not to mention its presence within all our less cerebral modes of being), while perhaps still tending to untruth for his time, has now been verified for ours. The problem with contemporary, non-dialectical theories of culture and society is–or so Jameson implies here–that in banishing the concept of totality in the ethical belief that this somehow frees them from the danger of complicity with “totalitarian” ideology and politics, such theories in fact fall all the more hopelessly under the spell of the real totality, which has long since found ways of insinuating itself into even the most anti- “totalitarian” acts of consciousness.

     

    Adorno, that is, is the Marxist trump card in the postmodern deck. It’s an interesting, not to say attractive notion. The problem, as I see it here, is that to be convinced of this would require more than a general reference to “late capitalism” coupled with the passing observation of the “melting away” of “really existing” socialism and the “drying up” of “Liberation struggles” (249-50)–accurate as these observations may be in themselves. If the claim that “late capitalism” has eliminated the “loopholes . . . of individual and collective praxis alike” (a succinct but quite precise restatement of Adornian political philosophy) is to be defended as one consistent with Marxism, then there would have to be some attempt here–on the level of both political economy and of politics as ideology and hegemony–to account for this change. I don’t wish to rule out the possibility that such an historically and materially grounded account is possible, but if it is, I see no evidence of it in Late Marxism, or, for that matter, in any of Adorno’s works. The Adornian retort here, as Jameson formulates it, is to question whether or not “history” itself, on this plane, is “thinkable” at all except as a “present absence” that can be pointed out but not subjected to any further conscious mediation (see 89). But if it isn’t, then how did we come up with the theory of “late capitalism” in the first place? What explains our ability to register its “success”? All of this, moreover, leaves aside the critical question of agency in Adornian social dialectics–unless we are meant simply to accept it on faith that it is only monadic “works of art”–and the exceptional Critical Theorist–that are empowered to resist totality.

     

    These, at any rate, are the sorts of questions that a defense of Adorno as Marxist would have to confront. (It does no good here to fall back on the recognition of Marxism itself as a “cultural phenomenon” that “varies according to its socioeconomic context” (11)l. That is certainly true on one level. But this makes Adorno’s Marxism a “cultural phenomenon” as well, in which case it is hard to see how its particular “truth” is truer than that of the others.)

     

    But Late Marxism proceeds instead to an exhaustive re-reading of Adorno more or less in keeping with the method of metacommentary. So, for example, Jameson will object to Habermas’s charge that,in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer revert to a non-Marxist irrationalism by arguing that this work can in fact be read as a sort of “natural historical” supplement to Marx’s social historical genealogy of capitalist modernity (108). Depending on one’s particular take on Adorno, one will or will not be persuaded by Jameson’s local interpretations. No one, I think, will want to dispute their truly awesome virtuosity and brilliance as readings of the Adornian texts themselves–above all Jameson’s mapping out of Adornian concepts in their all important Darstellung. As noted above, the only complaint that might be registered here is against the unrelieved difficulty of following Jameson’s own Darstellung throughout much of Late Marxism. It’s a rare experience to come upon an extended citation from the Negative Dialectics and feel a sense of relief at being able to relax for a moment one’s effort of concentration!

     

    Supple and erudite as these reflections are, however, they somehow don’t add up to a conclusive defense of Adorno as today’s Marxist. And, indeed, how could this be the result of a Jamesonian metacommentary, which presupposes that a Marxism endowed with a consciousness of the totality is already in place at the outermost and “ultimate horizon” of interpretation? How can Adorno, who has already been explicitly identified as the bearer of Marxian truth in the era of postmodernity, be both subject and object of metacommentary all at once? In such a situation, metacommentary would seem to lose its very source of motivation. And this, I suggest, is what finally explains the readerly difficulty here, not in following the motion of the ‘transcoding’, but in decoding the ‘transcoding’ itself.

     

  • The Constructive Turn: Christopher Norris and the New Origins of Historical Theory

    Renate Holub

    Massachusettes Institute of Technology
    <rholub@garnet.berkeley.edu>

     

    Norris, Christopher. Spinoza & the Origins of Modern Critical Theory. Oxford: Basic Blackwell, 1991.

     

    For those readers familiar with Christopher Norris’s intellectual trajectory, his most recent publication, dealing with Baruch Spinoza, a major seventeenth century exegete of Descartes and a contemporary of Locke and Puffendorf, of Newton and Leibniz, might come as a–perhaps unsettling– surprise. After all, most if not all of Norris’s critical work in the eighties made it its province to discuss what is known as “deconstruction,” a present-day form of critique intent upon discrediting, according to many of its critics, questions concerning origins, historical contingencies, ideological implications and other such forms of outdated inquiry. Yet even a cursory reading of the present book should quickly restore peace to temporarily unsettled minds. For one, Norris has no intention of leaving deconstruction behind, of betraying “theory,” to use reductionist speak, in favor of “history.” And for another, Norris is not in the least inclined to subvert his major research paradigm, which is, roughly speaking, the relation of literary theory to philosophy. Nonetheless, there are two aspects of Norris’s Spinoza which I find novel in his critical practice. One is his shift in emphasis from literary interests, or his interest in questions of reading, to the terrain of the epistemological, the ethical, and the ontological, a shift in emphasis from the literary to the philosophical that is. This shift is perhaps best reflected in the choice of a philosopher, such as Spinoza, and in the very title of the book.

     

    The other related aspect concerns Norris’s explicit insistence on the political nature of his critical project. Indeed, he aligns himself, throughout the volume, not with the “political” %tout court%, but with a quite specific model of politicality, namely with the unfinished project of Enlightenment thought. What is then remarkable about this shift is that Norris appears %nolens volens% as a conscious historical agent, so dear to the marxist and idealist tradition, one who intentionally intervenes in or makes history (history of critical theory) as he is writing about it. Theory’s task is here to affect history. This gesture strikes me, if I may say so, as thoroughly non-postmodern. Simultaneously, the tracing of Spinoza’s role in the formative pre-history of critical theory, and the historical reconstruction of Spinoza’s arguments, amounts to nothing less than Norris’s equally strikingly non-postmodern turn towards explicitly constructionist practices. Given that recently Norris had directed his attention, in his What’s Wrong With Postmodernism?, to what is wrong with postmodernism, it might not be difficult for some readers to read his even more recent Spinoza as a sequel which now essays that which is right with modernity. His reiteration of the necessity of interventionism in human affairs, of strategically relating theory to politics, and of subscribing to an enlightenment paradigm surely lends itself to such a reading. Other readers might simply reflect, in more than one way, on the historical contingencies of critical theory in general. Specific cultural, institutional, and political contexts, or specific structures and substructures of everyday life, seem to effect the way in which critics raise or avoid social questions. Time, place, and other such structurally configurative contingencies seem to figure in the forms of social critique, of politics, of non-literary and literary critics alike. So it is apparently not only theory which can or should effect history. This is the story Norris is about to tell with his Spinoza. History also apparently effects theory, not only in Spinoza’s, but also in our time. It is to his credit that this is a standpoint which Norris, all formidable postmodernist pressures to the contrary, does not suppress.

     

    Norris, I think, might be quick to point out that he himself never had a problem with the relation between theory and history, or history and theory, or with non-postmodern critical strategies for that matter. His books on deconstruction were above all political books, carefully designed to emphasize the political edge of the deconstructionist project in the face of all those intellectuals who either breezily embrace historical (marxist and idealist alike) solutions to social problems, or who legitimate such problems by pointing to their inexorably ontological/ physiological roots (Nietzschean epigones, Foucault, Deleuze, Lyotard). Deconstruction, or rather, and here Norris is always precise, the capital proponents of this movement of thought–Derrida, de Man–offer an irresistible political program. So Norris pointed out throughout his books in the eighties. Their political program consists not in adjudicating matters of truth and falsehood. Rather, the political program of genuine, non-vulgar deconstruction, such as theirs, consists in not attaching truth value to any question, answer, or method or things of the sort but rather in attaching truth value to %the right% to raise questions. In short, Norris claims that what Derrida and de Man are about is freedom of speech, and, moreover, that genuine deconstruction amounts to a libertarian project, and, finally, that freedom of knowledge, opinion, and belief, good old enlightenment habits of thought, are part and parcel of what is right with postmodernism: its modern legacy. For this reason, Norris makes sure to disassociate those postmodern thinkers from deconstruction–such as Foucault, Deleuze, and Lyotard–whose inordinately positive disposition towards the powers of the body, powerfully disguised in their rejection of the transcendental subject and in their abandonment of critical reason, concedes little to an egalitarian and democratic project. For the same reason, Norris now upholds Habermas, whose theory of communicative action promotes free and equal discourse of various interest-groups, political viewpoints, or specialized communities of knowledge. Yet if Habermas’s theory represents “a limit-point of speculative reason which as yet has no model in the history of social institutions,” why not experiment for starters with his model, with a critical theory of old modernity, rather than with that of Spinoza, originating in the young days of modern theory? Norris explicates: Habermas “pitches his claims at the highest level of abstract generality, and offers little help toward a better understanding of nuances, the detailed practicalities, or the essentially contingent character of real-life ethical choice” (183). In other words, Habermas runs up against having too much mind and not enough body, like most philosophers of the modern kind, among whom Norris places not only Descartes and Kant but also Hegel. Feminist critiques of Habermas, such as those of Nancy Fraser and Iris Marion Young, have raised quite similar objections, and justifiably so. Spinoza, on the other hand, is of a different philosophical lineage. In his non-dualist, non-phenomenological, and non-dialectical philosophy, the material (%res extensa%) and the ideal (%res cogitans%) appear to amalgamate into a complex process in which the dualist and the phenomenological co-exist, yet where the dialectical, and this is what Norris does not tell his readers, does not yet exist. “Substance thinking substance extended are one and the same substance, comprehended now through one attribute, now through another,” is one of the Spinozist propositions Ethics II, p. 7) Norris cites (32) in a chapter significantly entitled “Spinoza versus Hegel.” Claims to the superiority of Spinoza over Hegel, the leitmotif of much of French structuralist and poststructuralist interpellations, seem to propel Norris’s enterprise as well.

     

    So it seems that Norris takes recourse to Spinoza because his theory makes allowances for the powers of the mind as well as of the body, because his epistemology is grounded not in a simple but in a complex ontology, because his metaphysical rationalism grounds emotions and reason alike. Surely, Norris could not have taken recourse to this seventeenth century philosopher because he relates epistemology to ethics, because Spinoza reflects on and theorizes the implications of a theory of knowledge on the ways in which humans run or should run their social affairs. Reflecting on the dangerous relation of knowledge to political power, on theory and politics, or epistemology and ethics, is the key not only to Spinoza and his philosophy but to all those critical intellectuals who were faced with certain persecution or even with death when going public with their ideas. The relation of knowledge to freedom, prominently placed in Norris’s interpretation of Spinoza’s significance, is a relation which commands structure and substructure of most critical texts written at the dawn of modernity, if by critical we mean oppositional, subversive, liberational attitudes vis-a-vis %auctoritas%. The texts of Descartes, Kant, and, yes, also Hegel, fall into this category.

     

    If critical theory is above all libertarian philosophy, as Norris would have it, why Spinoza over Hegel, or are we again treated to a displaced replay of Spinoza over Marx? A reader would be quite mistaken to assume that Norris rejects the Hegelian project because of its adherence to an absolute or transcendental spirit gradually evolving from and ultimately commanding historical matter. For Norris’s Hegel is not the one who almost flunked the entrance exams to the Frankfurter Schule, but the one who graduated with honours from the Ecole Normale. It is Kojeve’s Hegel and Hyppolite’s, the Hegel of those two formidable scholars who have brought to the surface the tendentially self-propelling materialist drives of Hegelian phenomenology, such that reason’s unbound desire remains always already challenged by natural bounds not of a physical but of a social kind. It is also that process that Althusser sees, beyond Hegel, in Marx Lire Le Capital). Both systems are unable to resist mechanical structurations of history which true science alone is able to discern, to adjudicate in matters of historical relevance and irrelevance, and to challenge. Similarly, one of the greatest Italian Spinoza interpreters, Antonio Negri, first established the determinist character of Marx’s Grundrisse before offering Spinoza not as a libertarian but as a radically liberational solution to self-propelling systematizations in his L’anomalia selvaggia. Saggio su potere e potenza in Baruch Spinoza (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1981). But what if neither Hegel nor Marx qualifies for an unqualified determinist reading of his texts, and what if Spinoza’s intransigent materialism does? What if we choose Marx’s theses on Feuerbach, where he addresses epistemological problems not dissimilar to Norris’s concerns, namely how to think a materialism without falling prey to an idealist transcendence, and without falling prey to an equally transcendent mechanical immanence based on the laws of atomism and physics? Part of Marx’s solution to the problem was the notion of human or social (material) practice for one, and its dialectical nature for another. While material or general practice produces or effects certain conditions, it is also the effect of ideal or individual practice:

     

    The materialist doctrine that human beings are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed human beings are products of other circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is human beings who change circumstances and that it is essential to educate the educator him/herself. [. . .] The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity can be conceived and rationally un- derstood only as revolutionising practice. (Marx, Third Thesis on Feuerbach)

     

    Educating the educator is of course also what Norris has in mind with the liberational project inscribed in his Spinoza, but why plead for free will, intentionality, and choice on the basis of an author who categorically denied the existence of free will? Norris’s answer is prompt: Spinoza not only discussed the origins and nature of emotions, thereby anticipating the ultimate materialism (desiring bodies) of Deleuze and Guattari and other such French poststructuralist thinkers intent on effacing moral accountability. Spinoza also discussed the origin and the nature of the mind in ways which anticipate Husserl’s epistemological processes of eidetic inspection, uncontaminated by contingent factors of historical time and place. In short, what Norris would like to argue is that there are two Spinozas in one, such that Spinoza’s ethical and determinist program does not contradict but co-exists with his liberatory epistemology, since this seventeenth-century precursor of critical theory apparently corrects present-day, over-confident rationalism and delusionary nihilism at one and the same time.

     

    Norris has, as is his style, competently, elegantly, and honestly directed his attention to what mattered to him: that which mattered to Spinoza, and the extent to which his contribution to critical theory should matter to us. Spinoza is, as are most of Norris’s books, a pleasure to read. It is extraordinarily informative and knowledgeably relates the discussion of Spinoza’s complex writings on epistemology and ethics to major twentieth century movements of thought (speech act theory, deconstruction, structuralism, universal pragmatics and so forth). The question I would like to raise in conclusion is the extent to which Spinoza’s philosophical preoccupations are politically relevant for us to the degree Norris claims. That Spinoza’s philosophy emerges at the beginning of modernity, also known as the beginnings of the capitalist mode of production and the bourgeois liberal state, is a historical detail which I consider relevant in determining the political dimensions of his thought. His discussion of the emotions in relation to divine truth, human knowledge and human action I see as one of many attempts of critical movements of thought–from humanism of the proto-capitalist era in Italy to German, French, and English rationalisms of the seventeenth and eighteenth century–to gradually subvert the apparently inexorable fetters of the ideological and philosophical hegemony of the church. Questions of epistemology and their relation to ethics, and questions related to the conditions of possibility of an individual’s access to knowledge and action were, at the origins of modernity, mostly political questions, and, therefore, inherently dangerous, as long as the relation of %civis% to %auctoritas% remained uncontracted, as long as the individual philosopher/scientist was subject to unmediated power, that is. Accordingly, intellectuals directed much effort to disguising their true opinion of the relation of knowledge to politics (Vico), and they continued to reflect on this relation when immediate danger had passed (Newton). Critical theory today does not work under similar conditions (pace Norris’s discussion of Salman Rushdie). Questions concerning the relation of epistemology to ethics in the larger sense are, therefore, not so much of political interests, but mostly of historical and philosophical ones. A political project which elaborates on the various paths to knowledge and action I am afraid cannot explain why some groups (or classes, or nations), all normative epistemological and ontological equality to the contrary, have privileged access to action and others do not. Critical theory, so Horkheimer wrote a while ago, is critical to the extent that it reflects on the social function of its project. What I would like to add to this is that critical theory today is critical to the extent that it reflects on its position not in relation to old orders of inquiry and knowledge, however radical and revolutionary, but rather on its relation to the recently pronounced and enacted New World Order. I would not be surprized that this is indeed one of the motivating forces behind Christopher Norris’s Spinoza. By relating Spinoza’s story, originating at the beginnings of modernity, to our time, Norris evokes the historicity of all theory. What is critical in different historical epochs and places, and what might, can, or should become political in our place and our time is the historical challenge critical theory faces at a moment when critique has all but surrendered to the violence of present-day hegemonic rationality.

     

  • Recovering the Mask of Ordinary Life: Encounters with Nihilism and Deconstruction

    Sharon Bassett

    Department of English
    California State University-Los Angeles
    Los Angeles, CA 90032

     

    Desmond, William. Art and the Absolute: A Study of Hegel’s Aesthetics. Albany: SUNY UP, 1986;

     

    Desire, Dialectic, and Otherness. New Haven: Yale UP, 1987;

     

    Philosophy and Its Others: Ways of Being and Mind. Albany: SUNY UP, 1990.

     

    Comedy has, therefore, above all, the aspect that actual self-consciousness exhibits itself as the fate of the gods. These elementary Beings are, as universal moments, not a self and are not equal. They are, it is true, endowed with the form of individuality, but this is only in imagination and does not really and truly belong to them; the actual self does not have such an abstract moment for its substance and content. It, the Subject, is raised above such a moment, such a single property, and clothed in this mask it proclaims the irony of such a property wanting to be something on its own account. The pretensions of universal essentiality are uncovered in the self; it shows itself to be entangled in an actual existence, and drops the mask just because it wants to be something genuine. The self, appearing here in its significance as something actual, plays with the mask which it once put on in order to act its part; but it as quickly breaks out again from this illusory character and stands forth in its own nakedness nd ordinariness, which it shows to be not distinct from the genuine self, the actor or from the spectator.

     

    –G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit

     

    It is as if the people who speak out of, and, (whom we understand to be speaking) on behalf of, postmodernity and those who speak out of and on behalf of its totalizing and totalitarian antagonists have lived different histories and now speak from incongruent and incommensurate experiences. The gulfs which separate them, even leaving aside the polemics of the popular press, resist the most subtle tuning of “difference.” How many twentieth centuries have there been? How many modernities have there been? How many perspectivisms have been arrayed against how many differently construed traditional monisms? The trajectory of unacceptable differences, that escape even the playful category of difference, can hardly be traced without creating a filigree. One thinks of one definition of lace: a thousand holes tied together with string. It is not surprising that in the midst of these rhetorical questions, to which everyone has an answer, three books that situate the question of the nature of postmodernity within a poetics rather than within a rhetoric of history should be rather overlooked, especially by people working in literature.

     
    The three books by William Desmond, Art and the Absolute: A Study of Hegel’s Aesthetics (Albany: SUNY, 1986); Desire, Dialectic, and Otherness (New Haven: Yale UP, 1987); and Philosophy and Its Others: Ways of Being and Mind, (Albany: SUNY, 1990), constitute a picture of the world that has refused to reduce history to a series of catastrophes and which maintains instead a sense of tragic meaningfulness in art and in the natural world constructed by and inhabited by humanity.
     
    Desmond offers a thoughtful and richly articulated account of what he calls “metaxological mindfulness”, a kind of intermediary life of consciousness, in-between-ness that rescues thought from the mania of the one and the frenzy of the many; in addition his project moves towards a poetic visionary coda, a vision on which inhabitants of this brazen planet of postmodernity have long since given up: for both of these reasons he rewards an encounter by Postmodern Culture.

     
    Metaxological in-between-ness substitutes for the edgy life on the edge that Desmond sees as the corrosive outcome of deconstruction, which was itself an outcome of Heidegger’s [deliberate?] misunderstanding of Hegel. While he does not engage his adversaries directly, the shadows of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida and to a lesser extent Lyotard fall continually across his page. The most striking difference between Desmond and the masters of suspicion against whom he arrays his forces is that, unlike them, he has not taken the linguistic turn. By this I mean that when both Desmond and Derrida struggle with the process by which art (literature?) can penetrate philosophy–a process which each regards as both essential and inescapable–Desmond argues (or “does philosophy,” what he would call “being mindful”) against the death of art. At the same juncture and for the same cause Derrida refashions the philosophic text itself, and puts the literary text directly adjacent to it. Derrida explains that he does it since the “agency of Being” (by which I understand him to mean ordinary metaphysics) alwaysappropriates, eats up and digests or “interiorizes” every limit that is put against it. By installing the texts of literary writers (Jean Genet, Michel Leiris) in the margins or blank spaces that surround philosophic texts, Derrida makes typographically possible what is metaphysically impossible. I will come back to a further consideration of the relation between literature and philosophy and the difference between metaphysics and typography that Derrida offers.

     
    Hegel is the icon of wholeness and totality that sustains the tradition of western thought; Hegel is, at the same time, the (unacknowledged) father of the iconoclastic flight from wholeness and totality that characterizes postmodern thought. We are not lacking in philosophical and critical efforts to defend either icon or iconoclast and refute the other; we are at a loss for efforts to square the circle and have a Janus-faced Hegel seeing before and after. In his first book, Art and the Absolute: A Study of Hegel’s Aesthetics, Desmond sets out to use Hegel’s view of art as a way of denying that “a movement to wholeness must be identified with totalitarian closure.” While one can not say in the end that Desmond’s project is entirely successful (because he lacks the power to evoke the sensuous self- knowledge with which he credits art) his is a serious, thoughtful effort to maintain the contemporaneity of Hegel while at the same time offering a way for philosophy to be open to art specifically because it represents an absolute that does not inevitably erode into totalitarian closure.

     
    For Desmond, Hegel’s system is fueled by an aesthetic vision. The Hegelian philosophic practice constitutes a quest or adventure organized and narrated in such a way as to expose the interaction between the panorama of choices and the active choosing by the mind operating in time. Rather than being a historicized version of the rationalist’s engine, Hegel offers a journey, a pilgrimage, or a quest as representations of wholeness. The journey is whole in the sense that it reflects the continual and multiple actualization of the faculty of choice, and it is open since the process is an ongoing effort to concretize or articulate the circumstances and actions that constitute the choosing. As Desmond explains in the process of characterizing deconstruction, “the issue of dialectic has to do with the question of the teleological thrust of articulation” (88). To see Desmond working the philosophical implications of articulation as a teleological enterprise, full of action and coherence, is to see him at his strongest and best. And, curiously enough, it is also to see a limitation in his project that in the end deprives it of having the polemical and rhetorical power it clearly intends to have.
     
    To be articulate is to open up the spaces between words in speech, it is to allow silence into the undifferentiated stream of sound that is “noise”; and, especially, in the language of electronic transmission, it is to add the colors of rhetoric to the “white noise” of an untuned radio. It is a joint or hinge that must be itself motionless, empty, inactive so that the gate or door that is hung from it can move. It is the vulnerable part of the animal’s body that in life makes motion possible, but which in death enables the butcher’s knife to transform the body into convenient segments for eating. The aura that a word like “articulation” brings into a particular usage in discourse is immensely rich and diverse. Because Desmond is himself suspicious of the power of language, especially literary language, he does not seem to understand that to call upon this multiplicity is not to encounter a series of refutations or contradictions (what he would call an “equivocal” series). Nor does one find that claim in the theoretical texts written by the deconstructionists against whom he is writing.

     
    While the Hegelian dialectic and the work of deconstruction have in common an interest in the teleological thrust of articulation, Desmond distinguishes between them in the following way:

     

    where deconstruction seems to give us analysis without synthesis, dialectic insists that we return again to the original synthesis, now with the enrichment of having passed through the analysis. (98)

     

    For Desmond, the implications of diversity and openness which seem on the surface to be the special contribution of deconstruction are in fact already implicit in the Hegelian dialectic. He offers a contribution to a “positive ‘deconstruction’ of the deconstructionist’s often too closed and fixed view of Hegel.”

     

    Desmond’s defense of Hegel, learned and useful as it is, does not really respond in a serious way to the readings of Hegel that he finds inadequate in Heidegger and Derrida. And yet one finds in Heidegger and Derrida quite genuine appreciations of what Desmond says they reject in Hegel. In his late Identity and DifferenceHeidegger describes the “active nature of Being” which is itself an “unprecedented exemplar” with the following example from Hegel:

     

    Hegel at one point mentions the following case to characterize the generality of what is general: Someone wants to buy fruit in a store. He asks for fruit. He is offered apples and pears, he is offered peaches, cherries, grapes. But he rejects all that is offered. He absolutely wants to have fruit. What was offered to him in every instance is fruit and yet, it turns out, fruit cannot be bought. (66)

     

    One may grant that this is one of Heidegger’s more rudimentary evocations of Being. It is full of the unspecifiability that belongs to deconstruction, and, at the same time it is full of the unspecifiability that is characteristic of the concept of beauty that Desmond evokes. Fruit cannot be bought, beauty can not be . . . . What is the proper predicate for a sentence of which beauty is the subject?

     

    The much reiterated, without being particularly understood, linguistic turn is precisely what is at stake when Desmond offers beauty as an alternative to nihilism. He sees “beauty” as an alternative to the closed wholeness which the deconstructionists seem to attribute to Hegel. The problem with beauty is the problem that Heidegger’s shopper has when he asks for fruit: beauty, like fruit, cannot be bought, cannot be parsed.

     
    For Desmond, “beauty is the sensuous image of being“; [it] “presents us with a bounded harmonious whole, hence limited whole.” Desmond gathers up and makes use of Kant’s observations from Critique of Judgment that “art produces a second natureover and above the first nature of externality.” And finally, “Every merely escapist aesthetics of beauty must be derided; beauty rather must seek to accept and include within itself the divisive, destructive forces of complex conflicts.” The artist testifies to and verifies his or her honesty by being able to release and articulate the ugly (from within beauty) in a movement toward a “complex affirmation.”

     
    This is the point at which one must raise essential questions about how and in what register it is appropriate to engage with and offer alternatives to either “deconstruction” or the work of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, and Nihilism. Is there a protocol? Is there a methodological context from within which a respectful engagement is possible? Is the “complex affirmation” either complex or affirming? How can a writer undertake a defense of Hegel against the negative and the denying (in order to offer a defense of the positive and the affirming), do so in the very rhetoric of the polarities that the tradition against which he argues calls into question. Moreover, how can he undertake, as Desmond does in his last volume, a defense of art, without–even if only to dismiss it–raising the question of the status of the literary text? Without, in fact, being really concerned with the fundamentally linguistic aspect of deconstruction?

     
    When Desmond writes that “deconstruction is inextricably tied up with articulation” he has a perfect opening to the issue of the status of the text. And it is a point at which it would be possible to distinguish among the variety of issues and points of view that are collapsed into “deconstruction.”1

     
    Desmond’s thesis is that “the dialectical way represents an approach to the art work which preserves what I have called the principle of wholeness, while not necessitating us to discard the deep complexities and polarities disclosed by deconstruction” (96). Indeed he writes that, “the present chapter might be seen as contributing to a positive ‘deconstruction’ of the deconstructionist’s often too closed and fixed view of Hegel” (99).

     
    But this very project of finding Hegel’s (self- generated) double, of finding the “absolving” and the “releasing” in Hegel’s Absolute rather than merely the “dissolving” and “enclosing”–of inviting us to read The Phenomenology of Spiritin a liberating and multivalent way–is undercut when Desmond goes on to read Foucault, for example, in a univocal, denatured way. He indicates that Foucault’s “post-Nietzschean announcement of the ‘death of man’” is a representation of modernity as a world in which, “man is played out, obsolete . . . harmony is dead . . . randomness and calculated purposelessness are to be the final gesture in the denunciation and dismantling of traditional art.” This view of Nietzsche, Foucault and assorted aspects of postmodernism are derived from a not exactly objective source, Jacques Barzun.

     
    My point here is not to castigate Desmond for relying on secondary sources for his characterization of the “aesthetics of annihilation,” but rather to reproach him for missing an opportunity to link the reading of Hegel he offers with Foucault himself. One thinks of Foucault’s “Preface to Transgression.” This essay is fully as much an effort to de-totalize the dialectic and to open up the possibilities of affirmation as is Desmond’s own work:

     

    Transgression opens onto a scintillating and constantly affirmed world, a world without shadow or twilight, without that serpentine "no" that bites into fruits and lodges their contradictions at their core. It is the solar inversion of satanic denial.2

     

    And even when Foucault writes in the final paragraph of requiem of The Order of Thingsthat,

     

    Taking a relatively short chronological sample within a restricted geographical area--European culture since the sixteenth century--one can be certain that man is a recent invention within it . . . As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.3

     

    Foucault’s “archaeology” is read as “the denunciation and dismantling of traditional art” instead of as an attempt to understand and to know the relationship between traditional and modern art and experience. Foucault’s sense of crisis in the areas of community, nature, and gender does not mean that Foucault’s writing has causedthe crisis. One cannot help feeling that indeed the philosophical writers who write so urgently against nihilism are experiencing the same or collateral crises. It might be useful to distinguish the writers who attempt to understand or point the way toward the crisis from those who offer a solution to it. It is my own feeling that such solutions are premature and that understanding, pointing, and indicating the lived experience of our crises–in whatever form it takes–needs some answer besides dismissal.
     
    If Desmond’s first book offers a revisited and doubled Hegel, a Hegel whose sense of the negative, whose cultivation of the negative is substantial and long-lived enough to put the post-Nietzschean, post-Heideggerian nihilists of our era to shame, his second book, Desire, Dialectic and Othernessis an extended and intricate defense of ontotheology. But again, while the attention given to an articulation and an unfolding of a rejection of nihilism is both engaging philosophically and lyrical in its envisioning of what he calls “desire’s tenacious witness to the primordial power of the yes” there is, in the reader, nevertheless a residue of doubt. And one’s doubt derives not so much from a sense that the affirming argument for the generative power of desire is inadequate, but rather from a sense that insufficient attention is paid to the urgency of the position against it.

     
    For Desmond, “desire introduces disjunction into this submersion [in passivity, before the Fall] and sows the seed of a determinate self through the sense of difference and dissatisfaction” (21). The desiring self is both original and originating and at its best “tries to point not simply to what is specified but, more deeply to what does the specifying.” It is very much the Hegelian self who, as subject knowing the object, at the same time recognizes itself as a knowing object; it is the process by which the self individuates itself from itself in the act of knowing the world. But Desmond’s notion of origin is no more a fixed point in time than it is a fixed limit in space:

     

    [The original self] is the movement between fixed beginnings and ends and, in the middle between them, is an end and a beginning, more radically moving, powerfully positive, and indeterminably rich. (65)

     

    One needs to pull back for a moment: Deconstruction is tied up with “articulation,” Hegelian dialectic is the drive toward articulating the absolute, and the absolute (or originary) self (which comes up toward the end of Desire Dialectic and Otherness) is fueled by (the same?) urgent move toward articulation. In the case of the last or originary self it comes to know itself because its openness to otherness makes it possible for it to know itself. At this stage of his argument Desmond is concerned with ways in which deconstruction and the Hegelian dialectic share concerns and outcomes. It is essential for his case to show that deconstruction arises out of and subsides into nihilism while his own position, deriving from a development of the Hegelian position which he calls metaxologydoes not. The “metaxological” is that middle ground in which “the community of originals” comes into being. He finds the experience of the aesthetic, the sublime and agapeic love to be examples of living in the middle, in some new territory which is neither self nor other but somehow both at once, without there being any impairment of either element.

     
    Earlier on, Desmond had used the example of Narcissus whose mistake is not that he falls in love with his image on the surface of the water but the fact that he makes no distinction between himself and other. He cannot have a self until he identifies in some way with that which is not him. For Desmond, Sartre and Hobbes are blood brothers with Narcissus: “in the war of all against all, the Leviathan who would tame all does not bear the olive branch, unfortunately, only the apotheosis of the ailment. When we hiss at this hell, we succeed only in stoking its chill fires” (174). The ailment in each case is the notion of the univocal, hence undifferentiated, self.

     
    Desire, Dialectic and Othernessconcludes with a notion of what Desmond calls, following Hegelian terminology, “a post-Romantic symbol.” As I understand it, the “post-Romantic symbol” is an alternative to the images of totalization that are associated with the classical humanist or Judeo-Christian world and similarly an alternative to the radical inwardness of the Romantic or post-Cartesian world. Desmond makes each of these traditions serve as a lens of a binocular, in such a way that the overlapping of their lines of sight produces a three-dimensional, in the middle, or, finally “metaxological,” vision:

     

    [A post-Romantic symbol] emerges from the metaxological intermediation of more than one infinity, the interior infinity of the original self and the suggestion of another infinity emergent in being itself. (201)

     

    But Desmond is cautious not to equate this multitude of infinities with the Hegelian absolute. It will not tend, as Hegel had directed his absolute, toward the identity of identity and difference. The persistence of “otherness,” instead of being the sense of malaise that afflicts and paralyzes the Cartesian self, is fundamental, for Desmond, to the idea of being itself. Otherness is not the alternative to being, it is the necessary circumstance of being.

     

    By pluralizing wholeness and infinity, Desmond sets the stage for his “community of originals.” He recognizes that there can be no claims for an explicit or ultimate explanation of the community he envisions. He aims instead toward “a kind of periphrastic philosophical image, culminating not in absolute knowledge, but in the acknowledgment of a radical enigma” (206). But language itself, the medium to which the Herculean efforts of “articulation” are confined, threatens continually to congeal again into the very imprisoning structures from which it had, with so much difficulty, seemed to have escaped. In embracing this limitation, this danger inherent in rhetoric if not in language itself, it may well be that Desmond puts himself in more intimate alliance with the deconstructive theorists against whom he has written his books than he realizes:

     

    I have tried to minimize this drift by discerning the metaphor in the structure, thereby turning this limitation to some positive use. For our limits may be an indirect image of the ultimate otherness, a kind of ontological salutation of what is always beyond us. Facing into this final difference, one may consent to the community of being and seek to be divided oneself no longer. For we become patterned after what we love as ultimate. (206-207)

     

    I recognize that there is very little in the work of, say, Derrida about what we may love as ultimate.4 But it does seem to be the case that for both Derrida and Desmond the struggle toward affirmation is a struggle with, against, and for the elements of rhetoric and poetry that both convey and cloud meaning. They choose different poems and different rhetorical moments. Desmond reads Hopkins, Yeats, Shakespeare and Hegel; Derrida reads Mallarme, Valery, Genet and Hegel. And when we come to look at their readings, at how they perform as readers, we come to understand the real problem that arises when one tries philosophically to refute or out-flank deconstruction as it is specifically and concretely practiced. For Desmond “aesthetic objects” (usually poems) come to exist as unambiguous and thematic messages to the world. The danger and possibility of the metaphor, the metaphor as metamorphosis, the power of which Desmond is entirely clear about in his own use (it enables him to minimize drift) seems to escape him when he uses literary texts like Learto justify and support his philosophical claims. He calls the argument of his book a “periphrastic philosophical image . . . culminating in the acknowledgment of a radical enigma.”

     
    But is this not where deconstruction starts? Once the recognition occurs, in the conscious tradition of the tragic genre, the analytic modality is mobilized not just to perform a reductive expose but, in Desmond’s fine word, to “articulate” the enigma. Not that that is the end of the story, poem or figure. In a sense it is only the beginning. He writes in conclusion:

     

    For here what is enigmatic is not a rationalization of ignorance too lazy to root out its own lack. It has nothing to do with a lack that we ourselves could will away. The world in its otherness is opened out, and we cannot will its closure. The over determined power of being invades us within and surrounds us without. We encounter a limitation, the confession of which need occasion no lamentation. Again, it is not enough just to say brusquely that the enigma is there and then go on as before, as if it made no difference. The talent is not for burial or for rusting, but for our ripe, originating return. (207)

     

    Desmond’s final book, Philosophy and Its Others: Ways of Being and Mind sets out to conceptualize without conceptualizing (that is, without fixing and freezing) the pluralized metaxological community of otherness for which Desire, Dialectic and Othernesshad established the possibility. It might be useful at this point to distinguish two issues which occupy Desmond throughout his work and which finally do not seem to have much to do with each other. They are not in any case interdependent. The double project that I understand being under taken is 1) a refutation of the “nihilism” of post-Heideggerian “deconstructive” philosophical thinking and 2) a fleshing out of a community based on a radical embracing of otherness in which the self, obeying the charge to “be other,” becomes instead itself. This is what Desmond calls the metaxological community of intermediation. Intermediation I understand to be a point of intersection between a pure “mediation” (which is the loss of self for the sake of the other) and an equally pure “immediation” (which is loss of the other for the sake of the self). In separating Desmond’s double project it is possible to dismiss the first part as being of minor interest. Nihilism and deconstruction are so feebly envisioned that one feels that Desmond himself has hardly met a living practicing nihilist. On the other hand the second aspect of Desmond’s work, particularly his extensively developed characterization of the community of postmodernity, rewards closer attention.
     
    The first part of Philosophy and Its Others, like Plato’s Republic or Dante’s Divine Comedyor other efforts to envision a thoughtful or philosophical community, indicates the most significant roles that individuals play. Each of the roles is envisioned vis-a-vis philosophy since philosophy can only fully become itself by “thinking its others” rather than merely thinking itself. While the exemplary figures of Socrates and Spinoza exist as tentative guides, Desmond wants other “configurations of human possibility that have been and still are crucial for philosophy.” He selects: the scholar, technician, scientist, poet, priest, revolutionary, hero, and sage.

     
    The first half of the book consists of thinking through or living the intermediation between philosophy and each of these human possibilities. And each of them offers something concrete and essential that is missing from, and yet in some sense dependent on, philosophy. They are the other to philosophy that philosophy must encounter and at the same time they are themselves a kind of blindness. As he explains it:

     

    If philosophy involves the mindful thought of being as metaxological, it deals with what as other is always, as it were, too much for it. But it is just this excess of otherness that we must patiently try to think. Likewise, since I see philosophical thought together with its others, I find it impossible hermetically to seal the mode of philosophical discourse itself. If philosophy is thought thinking itself and its others, just to that extent to be truly welcoming of the voice of the other means on occasion to be willing to voice one's own thought in the voice of the other. (11)

     

    We can see here an amplification of one of Desmond’s significant themes. The multiplicity of his post-Hegelian community is one that is not based on the univocity of naive belief, nor on the equivocity of skeptical analysis, nor on the absorbing or dissolving power of the dialectic, but rather “to take seriously Aristotle’s saying that to on legetai pollachos, being is said in many ways.” The philosopher is the one who articulates and seemingly makes possible the conditions of what Desmond calls “middle mindedness.”

     

    The philosopher knows middle thought to be an incessant alternation between extremes, endless conversation between thought and its others. Thinking mediates with itself but also makes war on itself, on its own perennial seduction to closure against otherness. Failing incitement from elsewhere, from external others, the philosopher is the type who picks a quarrel with himself. He make himself other. (60)

     

    Having rerooted philosophy as a way of being, not in its own certainty but in its own self doubt, in its own “genial doubt,”5Desmond goes on to elaborate three ways in which it is possible to live such a life. He offers Being Aesthetic, Being Religious, and Being Ethical. The final, ethical, chapter leads us most directly to concerns about the nature of the metaxological community of otherness.

     
    The underlying presence of Hegel’s work of art as absolute is everywhere present in this chapter. For example, when Desmond works with the idea of desire and its place in the ethical community he must find a way of moving from desire’s self-insistence to desire’s ability to “turn to the other as other.” He must escape the Nietzschean and Freudian configuration of the will as an absolute in itself. He does not do it by denying the power of will, for this would deprive being ethical of energy and dynamism. Desire itself must be more deeply thought:

     

    To desire is to be driven by internal exigency, yet also it is to reach out to something other than oneself that one needs or lacks or loves. It testifies to the self's power as both demanding its own satisfaction and stretching beyond itself to things or selves other than self. . . . This inherent doubleness grounds the difference between an instrumental relation to the other and one that grants the other its intrinsic worth. (188)

     

    It is characteristic of Desmond’s thought to discuss an entity that is seen from one side (the univocal side) as total and that is seen from the other side (the equivocal/skeptical side) as empty and meaningless, and to fashion some space in the middle within which the entity in question can function like an Hegelian work of art. So that, in other words, while it passionately tends toward completed wholeness, it is, by virtue of this very tending, always never whole.
     
    This section on the possibilities of desire Being Ethical links up with the final movement of Desire, Dialectic, and Otherness where Desmond suggests that what he is doing is authorizing the “post-Romantic symbol.” And it is a symbol not in the fixed iconic or plastic sense but rather in the dynamic verbal sense that he attaches to the metaxological. It is the movement, in fact, from first love (“every being affirms its own being . . . this I am and this I will to continue to be”) to second love (“I know that my own being does not, cannot exhaust the fullness of being”). And we see that this post-Romantic symbol carries with it an even more Hegelian aura when Desmond links the many kinds of passion available to the image with which Hegel brings the Phenomenology of Spiritto a finale:

     

    The Golgotha of the ethical will is the self- transformation of first love into second love. This transformation answers the question "What am I to be?" with a dread command: "Be other! You must change utterly!" But strangely, being other is just to be what we are, to become our promise. (190)

     

    There is a final section called “Being Mindful: Thought Singing Its Other” where Desmond’s uncertain yet wholehearted commitment to the power of the aesthetic cannot help but disappoint after so much that has been skillful, deft and eloquent. But instead of dwelling on its deficiencies, I would rather look at the immediately preceding part of Philosophy and Its Otherswhich is itself (as its title suggests) an exemplification of “Being Mindful: Thought Thinking Its Other.”

     
    Here Desmond turns his attention to three issues that are rarely as significantly present in contemporary thoughtful discourse as they are here: Logic, Solitude and Failure6. It is much more likely that we would read and write about Intuition, Intimacy with Others, and (perhaps) the Fear of Success. But for Desmond these three former and more somber concerns represent the determining otherness of philosophy; they are in fact the crucial alien others against which triumphalistic thought would inoculate us. But just as Desmond reminds us of Dostoyevsky’s remark that to know the quality of justice in a country it is necessary to visit the prisons, so, in this case, to know the quality of thinking it is necessary to visit what is ordinarily excluded from thought and penalized for existing. The meditation on logic speaks to the intractable order of the world of the other; the meditation on solitude speaks to the penal condition of solitary confinement where “to be alone with oneself thus is to be alone with nothing“; while the meditation on failure addresses “the fact that the outer action does not, cannot fulfill completely the intention of the inner self. Thus it is never enough to separate the inner and outer. This separation, in fact, is only a redefinition of failure” (252). So the efforts at totalization can never realize themselves in any kind of practice. And the philosophical world, because its way of being is so deeply implicated in the world of practice, is able to shield itself against what might otherwise imperil it.

     
    But the figure of Narcissus returns. And it seems that the crucial other to the un-systematic systematic philosopher is the chimerical reality of language and rhetoric. The philosopher cannot examine his own tools. His words stand out on the surface with all the problematic stainless steel shimmer Desmond attributes to the Cartesian self. He trusts his words and so he has not met the adversary who combines and exemplifies logic, solitude, and failure: the language with which he works. Narcissus drowns not because he falls in love with himself, but because he does not recognize what is not him.

     
    It is easy to understand why a philosopher who truly means to move philosophy away from the nihilistic and as well as the facilely therapeutic, who has already dealt with the poverty of the linguistic philosophers and who has set out to present an alternative to deconstruction, would not be in the mood to disassemble the very means without which his project seemingly could not exist.

     

    Notes

     

    1. See Desmond’s earlier article, “Hegel, Dialectic, and Deconstruction.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 18 (1985), 244-263. While Desmond’s view of deconstruction is rather limited and second-hand (he relies on anthologies like Deconstruction and Criticism from 1979), he is alert to the subtle presence of Nietzsche and Heidegger and to the implications of that presence.

     

    2. Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 37.

     

    3. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), 386-87.

     

    4. Consider the remarkable material collected in his Memories for Paul de Man: Revised Edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). See, for example, Derrida’s defense of de Man against the charge of nihilism. He gives him the plural affirmation of Molly Bloom (a formula of affirmation that Desmond also uses against nihilism):

     

    Underlying and beyond the most rigorous, critical, and relentless irony, within that "Ironie der Ironie" evoked by Schlegel, whom he would often quote, Paul de Man was a thinker of affirmation. By that I mean--and this will not become clear immediately, or perhaps ever--that he existed himself in memory of an affirmation and of a vow: yes, yes. ( 21)

     

    5. In his unlikely comparison of Chicken Little with the Buddha, Desmond makes the point that what ennobles the Buddha is that he is moved by genial doubt rather than anxious faith: “Where he can know the truth, he refuses only to believe. But his searching can cause disquiet” (144).

     

    6. These are the three areas of concern to which Desmond devotes the final part of his study. I understand that for him it is the failure of modernist philosophy to encounter these issues, and by virtue of this failure the inability of modernist philosophy to speak to human exigency, that accounts for its fundamental nihilism.

     

  • Nietzsche as Postmodernist

    Robert C. Holub

    Department of German
    University of California Berkeley
    <rcholub@garnet.berkeley.edu>

     

    Clayton Koelb, ed. Nietzsche as Postmodernist: Essays Pro and Contra. Albany: SUNY P, 1990.

     

    Since his death in 1900, Friedrich Nietzsche has been associated with almost every major movement in the twentieth century. No other writer has succeeded as well as Nietzsche in impressing such an array of subsequent thinkers. Putatively opposing ideologies have competed for his patronage; traditions that otherwise admit nothing in common find Nietzsche an ally in their endeavors. On the political front he has been considered a promoter of anarchism, fascism, libertarianism, and–despite his pointed polemics against the most modern manifestation of slave morality– socialism. In the realm of culture he has been viewed as an inspiration for aestheticism, impressionism, expressionism, modernism, dadaism, and surrealism. In philosophical circles he has allegedly influenced phenomenology, hermeneutics, existentialism, poststructuralism, and deconstruction. This remarkable record of affinities and effects may be less a tribute to the fecundity of Nietzsche’s actual oeuvre than to the resourcefulness of his various interpreters. Nietzsche touched on a wide variety of topics over the two decades in which he wrote, and the manner in which he expressed himself, the elusively suggestive and vibrant style in his mostly aphoristic oeuvre, has been obviously seductive for succeeding generations of intellectuals. Postmodernism is thus only the latest movement to claim Nietzsche as its spiritual progenitor, and it is to the credit of Clayton Koelb that in the volume under review here he has collected fourteen contributions that explore various and often antagonistic aspects of this possible affiliation.

     

    Actually, most of the essays in Nietzsche as Postmodernist have less to do with postmodernism as an artistic or general cultural phenomenon than with “postmodern theory,” i.e., contemporary philosophical and theoretical tendencies generally subsumed under the rubric of poststructuralism. In this regard there are three recurrent strategies for connecting Nietzsche with recent French and Francophilic tendencies. The first of these is heavily reliant on Paul de Man’s essay on Nietzsche and rhetoric found in Allegories of Reading (New Haven: Yale, 1979, 103-18). De Man focuses his attention on a particular phase in Nietzsche’s career when the young classical philologist at Basel was preparing a course on rhetoric for the winter semester in 1872-73. Citing fragmentary lecture notes for this course (which had only two students in attendance) and the unpublished essay “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense,” which was likely composed at about the same time, de Man presents us with a Nietzsche sensitive to the undecidabilities of language. The instability of all linguistic utterance becomes for the deManized Nietzsche his seminal philosophical insight. Since according to de Man Nietzsche establishes that all language is inextricably bound to figures and tropes, the traditional notions of the philosophical heritage–identity, truth, causality, objectivity, subjectivity–can no longer be trusted. As de Man writes, “the key to Nietzsche’s critique of metaphysics . . . lies in the rhetorical model of the trope, or, if one prefers to call it that way, in literature as language most explicitly grounded in rhetoric” (109). This reading thus situates Nietzsche at the source of a deconstructive enterprise culminating in the work of Derrida and de Man.

     

    The problem with interpreting Nietzsche’s philosophy in as “postmodernist” is that it compels us to valorize one small portion of his work over almost everything else that he wrote and then to ignore most of his mature philosophical work. Indeed, as Maudemaire Clark demonstrates in her essay “Language and Deconstruction: Nietzsche, de Man, and Postmodernism” (75-90), de Man’s notions about language and rhetoric were not Nietzsche’s, and if in his early writings Nietzsche did in fact flirt with such propositions, he quickly abandoned them as unsatisfactory. Clark argues convincingly that de Man’s assertion that all language is figural is incoherent, and that his confusion of literal meaning with word-for-word translation leads to an unnecessary divorce of truth from all utterance. Relying on Donald Davidson’s holistic view of language and meaning, she shows that de Man’s appreciation of the “inscrutability of reference” is not accompanied by a sufficiently developed notion of truth conditions. Unlike Nietzsche, therefore, whose early views were supplanted by more mature reflections, de Man remains fixated on a simplistic, skeptical conception of language as metaphor. What is perhaps more astounding than de Man’s obsession, however, is that his thesis about Nietzsche (and about language in general) has gained such widespread currency in recent years. That Nietzsche found it inadequate over a century ago is clearly indicated by his suppression of the essay on “Truth and Lie,” as well as his abandoning of such a linguistically oriented concept of truth and values in his subsequent work. In short, this de Man-inspired contention about Nietzsche’s views on language, rhetoric, and truth, despite its currency among deconstructive acolytes, provides no firm connection between Nietzsche and “postmodernism.”

     

    A second and frequently cited aspect of the “postmodern” Nietzsche is a bequest from the work of Michel Foucault, in particular from Foucault’s influential essay “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” (cited below from Language, Counter-Memory, Practice [Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977]). Foucault’s central concern is to delineate two different ways to conduct historical research. Traditional historiography is identified with the search for origins (Ursprung), while Nietzsche’s genealogical approach prefers the examination of emergence (Entstehung), lineage (Herkunft), birth (Geburt), and descent (Abkunft). This neat distinction is then elaborated in subsequent discussion: genealogy, we are told, depends “on a vast accumulation of source material” LCP, 140), eschews essences and identities, explores discontinuities, “attaches itself to the body” LCP, 147), and “seeks to reestablish the various systems of subjection, . . . the hazardous play of dominations” LCP, 148). Without objections or criticism, Foucault’s claims have been well received by contemporary critics. Thus it is not surprising that Gary Shapiro, in his essay on “Foucault, Derrida, and The Genealogy of Morals,” adopts these putatively Nietzschean distinctions and clarifies as follows:

     

    To be concerned with Ursprung, or origin, is to be a philosophical historian who would trace morality--or any other subject matter-- back to an original principle that can be clarified and recuperated. The genealogist will, however, be concerned with the complex web of ancestry and affiliations that are called Herkunft, those alliances that form part of actual family trees, with all their gaps, incestuous transgressions, and odd combinations. (39-55)

     

    It is unimportant that Shapiro will try to show that Derrida is a more consistent genealogist than Foucault; what is significant is that Foucault’s version of Nietzsche has become a staple of postmodern theory.

     

    If we look at Foucault’s essay critically, however, we find without much effort that most of the views he imputes to Nietzsche are not supported by what Nietzsche actually professed. In the first place the distinction between Ursprung and Herkunft, even in the preface to the Genealogy of Morals (where Foucault claims the distinction is most pronounced), is not maintained consistently. Moreover, not only does Nietzsche never discuss the difference between Ursprung and Herkunft, he obviously uses the words interchangeably. For example, at the beginning of the second paragraph he states that his topic is the heritage (Herkunft) of our moral prejudices, while in the third paragraph he writes about the origin (Ursprung) of our notions of good and evil; the fourth paragraph begins with a statement about his “hypothesis about the origin (Ursprung) of morality.” Perhaps more importantly, the various characteristics Foucault assigns to Nietzschean genealogy do not actually describe it. In the Genealogy Nietzsche does not collect a great deal of source material, but proceeds primarily on the basis of psychological observations, intuition, and a few scattered philological clues. Nietzschean genealogy does not prefer discontinuities; in fact, Nietzsche is at pains to show that slave morality has continuously manifested itself from Socrates in the Greek world, through the various “priests” of the Judeo-Christian tradition, to its latest manifestations in democratic and socialist political movements. Foucault’s putatively Nietzschean approach to history is transparently Foucauldian and at best tangentially Nietzschean. The concern with the body, with domination, and with archives are all characteristics of Foucault’s archaeological phase. Like de Man’s “postmodern” Nietzsche, who was compelled to parrot de Man’s own obsession with rhetoric, Foucault’s “postmodern” Nietzsche is a ventriloquist’s dummy through whom Foucault himself speaks.

     

    The third commonly cited connection between Nietzsche and postmodern thought involves the philosopher’s notion of perspectivism. While six of the contributions mention “perspectivism” (Nietzsche, by the way, used the term only twice according to Schlechta’s index), Debra Bergoffen’s essay “Nietzsche’s Madman: Perspectivism without Nihilism” is perhaps the most interesting treatment of perspectivism as a philosophical issue. Bergoffen contends that perspectivism should be separated from the related doctrine of relativism and from the implied stances of nihilism and anarchism. She argues that our traditional understanding of perspectivism has been falsified because we have approached it as “centered subject[s] in a metaphysically anchored world.” Nietzsche, she claims, does not propound perspectivism as truth, but maintains rather “that decentered perspectivism is less repressive than the absolute perspective of the center” (57). Using Lacanian theory, which Nietzsche anticipates (62), she interprets the madman passage from Joyful Wisdom to be a proclamation of a “polytheistic pluralism” in which there is “no longing for the lost absolute” (68). “The philosophy of perspectivism,” Bergoffen concludes, “is a philosophy of pluralist textuality. In replacing Kierkegaard’s either/or with his own either . . . or, Nietzsche rejects the logic of exclusive disjunction for a logic which affirms dejoined [sic] terms” (70).

     

    Once again, however, we have a series of contentions which, no matter how we may judge their logical rigor, have little basis in Nietzsche’s own works. The passage that Bergoffen cites from the third book of Joyful Wisdom (aphorism 125) contains absolutely no mention of the perspectival or of perspectivism: the word “perspective” is totally absent. It deals solely with the death of god, and although it is plausible that one can relate the death of god to Nietzschean perspectivism, Nietzsche does not specifically do so here, nor, as far as I can tell, anywhere else. How Bergoffen can cite a passage from the middle of this particular aphorism and then abruptly proclaim that “With these words Nietzsche introduces us to his doctrine of perspectivism” (68) remains a (philo)logical mystery. If we actually examine passages in which Nietzsche himself writes about perspectivism or the perspectival we find that, for him, perspectivism involves not the demise of the theocentric universe, but rather issues of epistemology. In the fifth book of Joyful Wisdom, for example, Nietzsche suggests strongly that “perspectivism” (Perspektivismus) is synonymous with what he calls “phenomenalism” (Phenomenalismus); both involve the notion that although perception may be conceived as individual, once it is made conscious, it becomes generalized and thus in some sense falsified, flattened, superficial, and corrupted. From this passage we can conclude that consciousness for Nietzsche is not an individual possession, but part of our herd mentality. At other points, of course, Nietzsche writes of perspectival seeing and the impossibility of achieving an objective stance for cognition. In these passages he affirms a multiplicity of meanings and interpretations, usually viewed as supraindividual and often serving the preservation of a supraindividual entity. (In both cases the point is that there is no single, higher, hidden, Platonic reality or meaning behind the phenomenological world.) These latter discussions of “perspectivism” come closer to Bergoffen’s notion of a pluralistic, decentered, benign relativism, but even if we take this to be what Nietzsche really meant with the term, it would be inaccurate to ascribe to Nietzsche himself the tolerance and eclecticism that reside in Bergoffen’s discussion. From at least Zarathustra on, Nietzsche was a “dogmatic” philosopher, maintaining, at least implicitly, that some ethical values were superior to others. Who can read the Genealogy and still believe that Nietzsche does not consider the slave morality of good and evil inferior to the good-and-bad value system of the blond beasts? As Robert Solomon, a more careful and judicious reader of Nietzsche, correctly notes, the “mature Nietzsche was no perspectivist, not much of a pluralist, and consequently not much of a postmodernist either” (276).

     

    The three most popular accounts of Nietzsche as postmodernist all fail, therefore, because their advocates are too quick to attribute their own views to Nietzsche. Although some evidence can be mounted for each case of postmodern affiliation, the readings, when examined closely, are too selective, too partial (in both senses of the word), and too inaccurate to secure a connection. This does not mean, of course, that there are no other possible aspects of Nietzsche’s works that one can identify with the protean term “postmodern,” nor does it mean that Nietzsche cannot be solicited as an analyst of what we call postmodernism. In perhaps the most provocative essay in the volume, “Nietzsche, Postmodernism, and Resentment” (267-293), Solomon suggests that we might understand academic postmodernism and its attendant theories as varieties of Nietzschean ressentiment. In this view, “postmodernism” would be regarded as a symptomatic reaction on the part of those who are outside of the mainstream of society. The theorists of postmodernism thus have something in common with the zealots of the New Right, who are similarly estranged from the centers of culture. It does not matter that these two groupings are politically and ideologically antagonistic, Solomon argues; Nietzsche himself has shown how contradictory phenomena issue from a common source. Of course, if we conceive of postmodernism as “the resentful projection of too many self-important smart people feeling slighted by the Zeitgeist” (289), then Nietzsche could very well be an example, as well as a diagnostician, of the postmodern. Indeed, Nietzsche was perfectly capable of analyzing a decadent feature of contemporary society and then labeling himself its most extreme proponent.

     

    Ultimately, however, Solomon opts for discarding the entire issue of Nietzsche’s connection with postmodernism. In answer to the question that informs the entire volume (“Is there a postmodern Nietzsche?”), he replies: “I think our answer should be that this question is neither important nor interesting” (293). He may be correct, and not simply because of his contention that what Nietzsche had to say is intrinsically so important that we should return to the “texts.” The notion of Nietzsche as postmodernist, like the most of the vast American scholarship on Nietzsche’s thought, has tended to place him and his works everywhere except where he was historically situated: in nineteenth- century Germany. Failure to mention the names, places, movements, themes, and relationships to which Nietzsche responded and in which he was involved characterizes much Nietzsche scholarship, but is particularly evident in this collection. This volume unfortunately reinforces the tendency to regard Nietzsche as the great anticipator of later movements, the untimely philosopher whose genius could only be understood by those living in a wiser and more welcoming epoch. Most contributions buy into the self-fashioned image of the lonely, solitary thinker who, like Zarathustra, is compelled to offer his revelatory pronouncements to uncomprehending and unworthy disciples. No thinker, however, is ahead of his or her times– although quite a few are behind them. If we could learn to ignore Nietzsche’s own rhetoric and consider him as, in large part, the product of seminal discourses in nineteenth-century Europe, then we might come a lot closer to answering one of the questions Koelb posits in his introduction: “What is `Nietzsche’?” And in responding to this query with greater historical sensitivity than has traditionally been the case in American Nietzsche criticism, we could then disregard Koelb’s other question–“What is `postmodernism’?”–as an irrelevance that is itself the product of a misguided effort in scholarship.

     

  • BOOK REVIEW OF: What’s Wrong with Postmodernism?

    Robert C. Holub

    Department of German
    University of California-Berkeley
    <rcholub@garnet.berkeley.edu>

     

    Norris, Christopher. What’s Wrong With Postmodernism? Critical Theory and the Ends of Philosophy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990.

     

    From the outset two features of the title of Christopher Norris’s latest book need clarification. First, it is not insignificant that, despite the possibility of an interrogatory “What,” the title is not a question, but a declaration. Norris knows what’s wrong with postmodernism, and he does not hesitate to impart his diagnosis to the reader. Second, the term “postmodernism” does not match exactly the material he covers. He is actually less concerned with postmodernism as a direction in literature and the arts–its more usual field of meaning–than he is with contemporary theory. The title should be understood, therefore, as an assertion about recent directions in theory, not as a query into artistic practices. And what is most interesting about Norris’s survey of the critical terrain is the way in which he divides the turf. Most commentators tend to take a stand either for or against poststructuralism, defined rather generally as anything coming out of France or influenced by the French over the past two decades. By contrast Norris splits French and Francophilic theory into two halves. While he continues to advocate most prominently the work of Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, he is highly critical of Baudrillard, certain aspects of Jean- Francois Lyotard, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s monograph on Heidegger. Joining these French postmodernists on Norris’s roster of adversaries are American neopragmatists, in particular Stanley Fish and Richard Rorty. Making a surprising appearance on the approval list is the German philosopher of communication theory, Jurgen Habermas. Although he devotes a chapter of this book to a reproof of Habermas’s remarks on Derrida–a chastisement whose root cause is Habermas’s carelessness in attributing to Derrida views held by his less philosophically schooled American epigones–he approves of the broad and critical outline of recent French thought found in Habermas’s Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985).

     

    Since these are anything but natural alliances, they deserve further attention. Essentially Norris validates those theorists who he feels continue a tradition of enlightenment critique. There is no difficulty in placing Habermas in this camp since he is perhaps the single strongest voice in contemporary theory to openly and directly declare his allegiance to the progressive heritage of modernity. Norris does not discuss his work in any detail, however, except to point out his errors in dealing with Derrida, and his reference to Habermas’s notion of universal or formal pragmatics as “transcendental pragmatics” indicates at least a possible confusion of Habermas’s current concerns with his abandoned attempt to locate “quasi-transcendental” interests in the late sixties. More difficult to locate in a tradition of enlightened reason are Derrida and de Man. The latter is incorporated into the enlightenment project largely by way of his interest in “aesthetic ideology,” which includes a critique of Schiller and of all subsequent misreadings of Kant’s aesthetic theory. Derrida is likewise assimilated to the enlightenment paradigm through Kant. In Chapter Five, a consideration of Irene Harvey’s Derrida and the Economy of Difference (1986), Norris argues with Harvey (and Rodolphe Gasche) that Derrida is best described as a rigorous Kantian, except that he is “asking what conditions of IMpossibility mark out the limits of Kantian conceptual critique” (200). Indeed, Norris claims that Derrida’s is “the most authentically Kantian reading of Kant precisely through his willingness to problematise the grounds of reason, truth and knowledge” (199). Norris thus opposes both the facile notion of Derridean deconstruction as the authorizing strategy for “free play” as a free-for-all of meaning, a false lesson learned and propagated by inattentive American disciples, and the equally false understanding of Derrida’s work as a dismissal of previous philosophical problems, the tendency found in Fish, Rorty, and French postmodernists such as Baudrillard. Derrida and de Man are for Norris rigorous philosophical minds who question traditional philosophemes and point out their limits. These actions, however, are undertaken in the spirit of Kantian critique, and have nothing to do with the various illicit reductions (of truth to belief, of philosophy to rhetoric, of history to fiction, and of reality to appearance) prevalent in the neopragmatic and the poststructuralist camp.

     

    This is a credible account of contemporary theory. It makes necessary distinctions between Derrida and his American reception and correctly credits de Man with a seriousness of purpose that is not always matched by poststructuralist gamesmanship. It also rightly dismisses the philosophical legitimacy of the “antitheoretical” neopragmatists, who seem to delight more in the sophistry of their own banal arguments than in the pragmatic endeavors they allegedly prefer. What is not very persuasive in Norris’s presentation, however, is the contention that the works of Derrida and de Man carry with them a profoundly ethical and political message that can assist us in combating the entrenched conservatism of the Reagan-Bush-Thatcher- Major era. Indeed, it is precisely in the realm of ethics that Derrida and de Man are most open to attack. Derrida’s very style of debate has proven a barrier to discussion of philosophical and political issues. Although it would be silly not to grant his theoretical points in the debate with Searle, the manner in which he ridicules his adversary, refusing to clarify Searle’s misunderstandings and to confront issues on which they both have something to say, leads to a closing down of discussion. His encounter with Gadamer, a more patient and open interlocutor than Searle, repeats this elusive strategy; one has the impression here as well that Derrida simply does not want to enter into candid and direct debate about his theoretical position. His sarcastic and condescending dismissal of Anne McClintock and Rob Nixon, who criticize Derrida for his analysis of the word “apartheid,” provides a more directly political illustration of an arrogance of argumentation that Derrida has come to epitomize. Finally, one could detail–as I do in a forthcoming book Crossing Borders)–the lack of candor in his response to critics of de Man; in this performance from 1989 his dogmatism about his own position, his haughtiness concerning deconstruction, and his unwillingness to counter opponents’s legitimate objections was obvious except to deconstructive true believers in what has become (unfortunately) a quasi-religious cult.

     

    The afterword to Limited Inc. (1988), the book version containing his essay on Austin and his response to Searle, entitled “Toward An Ethic of Discussion,” thus has something of a hollow ring to it. Although Norris uses this afterword as a counter-illustration to the wayward practices of postmodernist thinking, a careful consideration of it would reveal seminal weaknesses in Derrida’s ethics and politics. Most blatant perhaps is Derrida’s interpretation of his use of the word “police” in his earlier rebuttal of Searle. In the final section of his lengthy response Derrida has written that “there is always a police and a tribunal ready to intervene each time that a rule . . . is invoked in a case involving signatures, events, or contexts.” He continues by hypothesizing a situation in which Searle is arrested by the Secret Service in Nixon’s White House and taken to a psychiatrist. He asserts that there is a connection “between the notion of responsibility manipulated by the psychiatric expert [the representative of law and of political-linguistic conventions, in the service of the State and its police] and the exclusion of parasitism.” He concludes by stating that the entire matter of the police must be reconsidered, “and not merely in a theoretical manner, if one does not want the police to be omnipotent” Limited Inc. 105-6). Searle’s practice, the exclusion of parasitism, is thus connected directly with the State and the police, and for good measure Derrida includes a warning about the possible omnipotence of the police.

     

    For a reader in 1977, when the debate originally occurred, it would have been difficult not to identify the police and the State with repression; it seemed that Derrida was making an openly political statement. But in 1988 he denies this most obvious reading: His statements “did not aim at condemning a determinate or particularly repressive politics by pointing out the implication of the police and of the tribunal whenever a rule is invoked concerning signatures, events, or contexts. Rather, I sought to recall that in its very generality, which is to say, before all specification, this implication is irreducible” Limited Inc. 134). Derrida is of course correct when he writes in 1988 that there is no society without police and no conceptuality without delimiting (or policing) factors. But there are nonetheless two disturbing aspects of his recent self-interpretation. The first is that Derrida seeks to control or limit meaning by clarifying his intention from 1977. He tells us how the word “police” “must be understood” Limited Inc. 136). Thus he would appear here to want his intention to govern the entire scene of meaning, a possibility he attributed to Searle and argued explicitly against in 1977. Second, he seems to argue disingenuously in 1988. Although his 1988 argument makes more philosophical sense, the rhetoric of his arguments in 1977 was certainly meant to suggest a political disqualification of Searle’s position. One cannot connect the police and the State–traditional buzz words, among the left, for repressive instances—with an adversary’s stance, and not expect that connection to be understood as a political attack. That Derrida denies this dimension of his 1977 essay appears simply as dishonesty. But in that same “ethical afterword” Derrida also seals himself off from any political criticism. Deconstruction, he tells us, if it has a political dimension, “is engaged in the writing . . . of a language and of a political practice that can no longer be comprehended, judged, deciphered by these codes [the traditional Western codes of right or left]” Limited Inc. 139). We are left with the conclusion that only deconstruction can comprehend, judge, and decipher what it is doing. Those who stand outside the light of its eternal truth have no right to pass political judgment. If a self-policing notion of deconstruction is thus the upshot of Derrida’s “ethic of discussion,” then Norris might want to reconsider its political usefulness.

     

    The case for de Man’s political usefulness is even weaker. It rests, in Norris’s view of things, on the notion of “aesthetic ideology.” Following de Man’s lead, Norris locates “aesthetic ideology” in post-Kantian philosophers who confound the realm of language, conceptual understanding, or linguistic representation with the phenomenal or natural world. No doubt this topos has been consistently thematized in de Man’s writings; it accounts for his placement of allegory above symbolism, his critique of romanticisms, and even his objections to literary theories such as Jauss’s aesthetics of reception. But the schema of intellectual history propagated by de Man and repeated by Norris is both undifferentiated and ahistorical. Friedrich Schiller, to whom Norris constantly refers as the first “misreader” of Kant and therefore the perpetrator of the original sin of “aesthetic ideology,” certainly differed from the author of the Critique of Judgment on matters of aesthetics. But Schiller’s relationship to Kant should not be categorized as a misreading, although Schiller undoubtedly misunderstood various aspects of Kantian thought. Rather, Schiller was trying to go beyond Kant in establishing an objective realm for aesthetic objects. He did this consciously and openly, and his purpose in doing so had to do not only with philosophy, but also with reactions to the French revolution. To wrench Schiller out of his historical moment and make the resulting abstraction responsible for a wayward tradition in aesthetic thought, which encompasses all major tendencies from the Romantics to the New Critics, is to propagate a type of black-and-white portrayal that recalls Heidegger’s totalized picture of Western philosophy since the pre-Socratics. Norris criticizes Lacoue-Labarthe for refusing to entertain socio- historical discussions of Heidegger’s work, but he himself consistently steers the reader away from a historical situating of theory that could lead to a more differentiated understanding.

     

    Even if we accept the schema informing “aesthetic ideology,” however, it is difficult to see why it has to be connected with political critique. It may be true that the organic worldview of Romanticism can lend itself to various political abuses, among them nationalism and fascism. But it can also have affinities with various sorts of ecological consciousness or with a “principled and consistent” socialism that Norris defends in his introduction. Norris offers no argument for political affiliations either. Instead he contends that “collapsing ontological distinctions is an error that all too readily falls in with a mystified conception of Being, nature and truth” (268), and that “there is no great distance” (21) between the notion of an organic state and an authentic nationalism. These juxtapositions masquerading as arguments serve only to discredit anything not associated with de Manian thought, but in their undifferentiated, schematic, and ahistorical formulation they are only persuasive to those already convinced of their correctness. In short, there is no reason–and Norris supplies none–to connect de Man’s mode of operation with anything politically progressive, nor any grounds for finding his objects of criticism inherently regressive. It is probably worth noting that de Man’s own theoretical position did not move him toward any great political activity during his three decades of teaching in the United States, and that the short speeches at his funeral (found in Yale French Studies in 1985) contain no references to political inspiration he supplied. Most of the talk about “aesthetic ideology” surfaces only after his wartime journalism came to light, although Norris did develop this line of thought somewhat earlier to defend de Man against political attacks by Frank Lentricchia and Terry Eagleton. The notion that de Man enunciates a coherent and powerfully progressive political program is thus something totally absent from comments about him during his lifetime.

     

    Unless we buy Norris’s line on de Man, however, his endeavor in the final chapter to save de Man while simultaneously criticizing Lacoue-Labarthe and Heidegger is an empty gesture. While the differences between Heidegger and de Man with regard to National Socialism are not trivial, we should not ignore the obvious similarities. Most notable among these is their postwar attitude of repression and prevarication. Neither man owned up publicly to his actions, and there is much evidence to suggest that de Man misled people with regard to his activities during the war. To suggest, as Norris does, that de Man’s postwar writing must be read as a determined effort to resist the effects of the very ideology that had entrapped him is simply not supported by common sense. Antifascist and political essays are not de Man’s preferred genre; he produced no body of significant statements on any directly political matter as an academician. Moreover, when political topics suggested themselves he consistently turned away from them. Norris himself points to his essay on Heidegger from 1953 in which the context of Heidegger’s interpretations of Holderlin–World War II and national destiny–are written off as a “side issue that would take us away from our topic.” The bulk of the writings we have at our disposal indicates that Norris is performing the same function for de Man as Lacoue-Labarthe does for Heidegger. Both claim that the best way to understand the phenomenon to which de Man/Heidegger succumbed is to look at de Man/Heidegger’s theory. Norris writes: “What Lacoue-Labarthe cannot for a moment entertain is the idea that Heidegger’s philosophical concerns might not, after all, have come down to him as a legacy of `Western metaphysics’ from Plato to Nietzsche, but that they might–on the contrary–be products of his own, deeply mystified and reactionary habits of mind.” If we substitute “Norris” for “Lacoue-Labarthe,” “de Man” for “Heidegger,” “aesthetic ideology” for “Western metaphysics,” and “from Schiller to Jauss” for “from Plato to Nietzsche,” we can see that the parallelism Norris seeks to escape is unwittingly retained.

     

    In this most welcome and perceptive book on contemporary theory Norris thus fails to step back far enough from the critics he has discussed in the past. De Man and Derrida are powerful and interesting voices in theory, and they are certainly a cut above many who would emulate their deconstructive strategies. But their political and ethical valence remains clouded by the undecidabilities of the very practices they exhibit in their writings. There is also a theoretical dimension to their inability to offer a sustained ethical vision. The preference for viewing language as a system rather than as speech acts, for looking at semantics and semiology rather than at pragmatics, for remaining in the realm of virtual language rather than its actualization in the world–in short, for valorizing everywhere langue over parole–prevents de Man, Derrida, and Norris as well from theorizing ethics and politics. We only have to look at Derrida’s initial remarks on Austin to see why deconstruction has such difficulties in connecting theory and practice. Instead of examining Austin from the potentially radical reorientation that Austin himself offers–language as action–Derrida shifts the discussion back to the “non-semiotic,” to the level of linguistic meaning that Austin wanted to leave behind. A similar unwillingness to conceive language pragmatically, as always infused with ethical substance, is evident in Derrida’s confrontation with Gadamer. In this regard, as Gadamer points out, Derrida’s point of departure is retrograde. Norris’s attempt to make the deconstructive strategies of de Man and Derrida the basis for a political opposition is thus a questionable undertaking. In this his most overtly political volume to date he might have done better to explore more thoroughly those theories that take language-as-action as their starting point.

     

  • The Power and the Story. Review of Nye, Andrea. Words of Power: A Feminist Reading of the History of Logic. London: Routledge, 1990; Gross, Alan G. The Rhetoric of Science. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1990.

    John Batali

    Department of Cognitive Sciences
    University of California-San Diego
    <Batali@cogsci.ucsd.edu>

     

    Nye, Andrea. Words of Power: A Feminist Reading of the History of Logic. London: Routledge. 1990.

     

    Gross, Alan G. The Rhetoric of Science. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1990.

     

    Andrea Nye begins her “reading” of the history of logic by recounting how the 6th century BC philosopher Parmenides describes a poetic journey “past the towns of knowing men” in search of ultimate reality. Driven by desire and led by “maidens of the Sun,” he passes through imposing gates and down forbidding caverns and is ultimately allowed to inspect “being” which turns out to be a perfectly round and smooth sphere. But what is more important, and what Parmenides can take back to the practical world of life, is what Dike, the female keeper of being, says about it: “it is and to not be is not.” The principle of Being is what it is: eternal, simple, unchanging, true. Everything else is not.

     

    In this vision of Parmenides’s lie nascent two of the most venerated products of western thought: science and logic. Science as the investigation of being, the nature of nature. Logic as the codification of truth, the articulated norms of thought. And in Parmenides vision, the two lie together. Being inheres in thoughts about it, so that

     

    It is the same thing to be thought as to be a thought. For not without something of what is, in what is expressed, can there be thinking. (Nye, 16, translating Parmenides fragment 7)

     

    This theme, the relation between the true and thoughts about it and paths to it, is the subject of the books under review. Andrea Nye traces the history of logic from Parmenides through the approaches of Plato and Aristotle, thence to the theo-logic of the middle ages, and finally to the modern mathematical form of logic invented by Frege. Along the way, as conceptions about logic change, and the social uses to which logic is put change, the connection between logic and the truth of being becomes weaker and weaker, to the point where modern logicians take it as a virtue that their systems are absolutely “formal” and totally disconnected from reality (but are nonetheless adequate means of representing that reality).

     

    Gross, in his study of science, examines not the ideal path to truth that logic allegedly provides, but the actual workings of scientific persuasion, the “rhetoric” of science. He too begins with Aristotle, taking the “Rhetoric” as his “master theoretic text,” but putting it to a use Aristotle would not have liked. For Aristotle, science was the realm of the absolute and the unchanging, about which knowledge was available to all (all male Greek land owning citizens, at least). Rhetoric was for the law-court or the political assembly or the drinking party, where passion and prejudice prevail and could be molded to the desired shape. But Gross reminds us that passion and prejudice prevail everywhere in human activity, and even more so in the swirl of ego and power that is science.

     

    In both books, the truth and validity claims of logic and science are bracketed, are put on hold–not to be denied, or even diagnosed, but simply put aside. What interests Nye is not the truth of logic but the different conceptions of logic that appear in different moments of history, the different uses for logic of different societies, with different concerns and different notions of power and truth. And for Gross it is not the nature of being that interests him in the quests of scientists, but those quests themselves. Both Nye and Gross work with the truths of history: this happened, these people said this, wrote that, about science or about logic. Whether what they said was true or not is not the issue. Instead the issue is what happened and how they felt about it.

     

    For Andrea Nye, logic is not to be taken as a single thing towards which progress can be made. And, though her reading is feminist, she does not seek to show that logic is some specifically male syndrome. She presents and distances herself from a number of claims that she is not making:

     

    Logic, one current argument goes, is the creation of defensive male subjects who have lost touch with their lived experience and define all being in rigid oppositional categories modeled on a primal contrast between male and female. Or another: logic articulates oppressive thought-structures that channel human behavior into restrictive gender roles. Or: logic celebrates the unity of a pathological masculine self-identity that cannot listen and recognizes only negation and not difference. (Nye, 5)

     

    Instead, the word `logic’ points to the complex set of attitudes that any society has towards thought and truth and validity in argument. That such topics could form the subject matter of an academic, more or less technical domain, says a great deal about a society right away. But the specific form that logic takes in any society will depend as much on the historical and material circumstances of that society as it will depend (if it does at all) on the ultimate nature of truth.

     

    Therefore logic is no more male than society is. But then, societies often are dominated by males, if not thereby characteristically “male.” Certainly some of the societies that Nye is examining, societies which by coincidence or not were the ones where logic flourished–Classical and Hellenist Greece, and the Medieval Catholic church–were rigidly male enterprises. As a set of attitudes about truth and as a set of norms of thought, a society’s logic thereby forms part of the discourse in which power is channelled. It may not be that there is anything masculine about logic; however, it is one of the many tools by which the male elite can and does maintain and extend its power.

     

    “Reading” logic means that Nye is not going to treat the history of logic as a steady march of progress. She is going to take seriously the widely divergent things that its originators said about what they were doing, and the different uses to which it is put. In looking at what a society says about logic and how it makes use of its products, one gets a glimpse of what that society thinks about thinking and argument and how they are related to the exercise of power.

     

    In each of the chapters of her book she examines the logic produced by particular thinkers in specific historical circumstances. She examines how the society’s “need” for a logic was met or not met by what was produced. The specifically feminist aspect of her account is developed in her view of the history of logic as an outsider. She refuses to accept the different logics as anything more than what they historically are:

     

    There is no one Logic for which [a single critique] can account, but only men and logics, and the substance of these logics, as of any written or spoken language, are material and historically specific relations between men, between men and women, and between them and the objects of human concern. (Nye 5)

     

    Gross begins his account of the rhetorical aspects of science by reminding us that scientists in fact spend a great deal of time persuading. They must persuade other scientists of the validity of their claims and the correctness of their theories. They must persuade granting agencies and promotion committees of the importance of their work. They must persuade the general public that their enterprise has value.

     

    But I think that the general feeling is that the practice of persuasion is somehow not the real job. Certainly writing grant proposals is a pain, and many scientists probably would agree with the sentiment expressed by Galileo, that if their colleagues would just look at the results, they would see that they are correct. People have to be persuaded to see the truth only because they are unwilling or unable to see it directly.

     

    Gross considers “entertaining [the possibility] . . . that the claims of science are solely the products of persuasion.” Accordingly, his method is to follow the lead of Aristotle in analyzing scientific texts, “to find out in each case the existing means of persuasion.” He looks at a wide variety of scientific texts: published papers, the correspondence of the early days of the Royal Society of London, drafts and peer-review responses of papers, newspaper editorials written during the recent debate about recombinant DNA. In all cases the procedure is to attempt to understand the rhetorical techniques that are being applied. Sometimes the arguments appeal to explicit methodological principles, such as falsification, or an appeal to the evidence. Sometimes the arguments are by analogy, or are based on elegance or simplicity of a theory or an account. Rather than take any single one of these as the ultimate foundation of scientific truth, Gross wants to understand which ones are used, and which ones work. For Gross, the Parmenidean injunction that “what is is” would be taken, were it to appear in a scientific text, as just another rhetorical technique, sometimes convincing, sometimes not.

     

    Throughout his book, Gross has to deal with the claim that science is really about external reality, that there are “brute facts of nature” and all of this persuasion is just a detour on the path to it:

     

    The rhetorical view of science does not deny "the brute facts of nature"; it merely affirms that these "facts," whatever they are, are not science itself, knowledge itself. Scientific knowledge consists of the current answers to three questions, answers that are the product of professional conversation: What range of "brute facts" is worth investigating? How is this range to be investigated? What do the results of these investigations mean? Whatever they are, the "brute facts" themselves mean nothing; only statements have meaning, and of the truth of statements we must be persuaded. These processes, by which problems are chosen and results interpreted, are essentially rhetorical: only through persuasion are importance and meaning established. As rhetoricians we study the world as meant by science. (Gross 4)

     

    By studying the means of persuasion, especially as used in some important texts in the history of science that turned out to be persuasive, we can understand more about the process of science. Does this tell us more about its product, the supposed truths of science itself, the spherical essence about which all of this persuasive practice goes on?

     

    Both Nye and Gross might be seen to be committing either or both of two well-known logical errors, the “genetic fallacy” and the “ad hominem” argument. The genetic fallacy is the claim that the origins of an idea are relevant to its truth or falsity. An ad hominem argument is one that attempts to deny a claim by attacking the maker of the claim. But to accuse either Nye or Gross of these mistakes is to misunderstand what they are trying to do. It is to suppose that they are entering into the debate about the claims of logic or of science. But that is exactly what they are not doing. They are trying to understand the workings of those claims, to see where they come from and where they go. In some sense this ought to be an interesting enterprise purely from a historical point of view.

     

    But the enterprise assumes more importance when we remember how highly valued both logic and science are in this, our ultra-technological world. There is simply no reason to believe that any particular “meta-narrative” about the ultimate nature of either logic or science is right, or there is no reason to believe it without a careful look at what logic and science really are and have been. Much of the philosophy of science has defined the enterprise either in terms of its ultimate goal (e.g., to describe nature), or in terms of formal aspects of its performance (e.g., as following a hypothetico-deductive method, or as making falsifiable claims). Whether or not these characterizations made any internal sense, the question still remained as to whether they described anything, in particular whether they described what it is that people who call themselves scientists actually do. The emerging “sociological” approach to the history of science, as exemplified by Gross, illustrates that it is possible to put these a priori claims on hold, at least for a while, and look closely at the way the scientific world works.

     

    As for logic, remember that logic is explicitly a prescriptive discipline. Every writer in the history of logic has had to deal with the fact that people just don’t “think logically.” At best, logics are developed such that the axioms or rules are intuitive, or at least they are with a little thought. (Or with a lot of thought, as Nye points out, as the Stoic philosophers wrestled with the right way to characterize the meaning or function of “if,” a question which has not been really solved two thousand years later.) Logics are developed as ways to organize and perhaps restrict thinking, so it would seem crucial to examine the purposes that such organization and restriction are meant to serve.

     

    One of the problems that we have in assessing logic today is that in the post-Fregean world logic has attained a status not quite imagined by many of its developers. On the one hand logic has achieved a level of mathematical sophistication, yet in its technical sophistication it has become a domain of expertise. A solid grounding in logic is no longer considered part of the “well-rounded” education expected of our society. How many members of the US Senate, compared, let us imagine, with the Athenian assembly or the senate or Rome, know what modus ponens is? It is not that this is in any sense a step back, that our Senators would be more competent with a solid grounding in logic, but it is true that until the 20th century it was felt to be so.

     

    In the hands of Nye and Gross, the histories of logic and science become histories of the relations between persuasion and power. Clearly if you can persuade someone of something, however you do so, you have thereby a measure of power over that person. Likewise, having power over someone is a good way to get them to agree with you. Logic was an attempt to codify the means of argument, but of course a certain amount of power needed to be vested in those doing the codification. Hence the extreme urgency of the increasingly worldly medieval church’s interest in the nature of logic.

     

    And the technical, mathematical, applicable science in the 17th century brought a new kind of power over nature. With that power came the potential for wealth and fame, this coming at the same time as the rise of a mercantile class ready to plunder the new knowledge. One of Gross’s best chapters treats the events leading to the formation of the Royal Society of London, and the subsequent “invention” of the idea of priority of discovery. Isaac Newton comes off in a particularly bad light when the Royal Society formed a committee to decide whether Newton or Leibniz had discovered the calculus first. Given that the committee was formed of Englishmen, it was unlikely for Leibniz’s side to get a fair hearing, but the final “Account” condemns him in such harsh terms that, reading it, it is difficult to believe that Leibniz understood even simple arithmetic. It turns out, however, that Newton had managed to subvert the committee and had written the “Account” himself!

     

    Interesting as it is for its treatment of the historical characters, the episode illustrates how the structures and concerns and methods of a society develop as the society deals with real issues and problems. The importance of priority and the precise way it would be assigned were topics of considerable debate in Europe at the time, with some believing that priority was of no consequence at all, and others offering elaborate means for securing priority without actually publishing results (e.g., writing the result in code, or posting a sealed letter to the Royal Society). But Newton’s behavior and evident concern for absolute priority helped force the issue. And, finally, established as the unquestioned discoverer of the calculus, Newton’s personal authority was enhanced even further.

     

    These movements back and forth of power and argument and discovery point out that no fundamental dispute takes place entirely within a pre-existing logical framework. For one thing, one can’t prove the correctness of a specific logic or the correctness or appropriateness of logic itself, within logic. Logic only “works” within some sort of scaffolding in which its axioms are defined, its rules of inference set down. This was implicitly understood in Classical Greece. Parmenides presents being and the path to it as revealed by the goddesses, the ultimate forms of Plato, whose properties, dimly remembered, form the basis for our understanding of the world, were presented to us before we were born. For Aristotle, more empirical then these two, the ultimate logic had to be the “logic” visible in the biological world–of genus and species and essences and differentia.

     

    Once this alogical basis is in place, once the members of the society are convinced that logical thinking is a worthy goal, they can then proceed. Medieval logic interestingly splits the justification for logic in two. On the one hand is the revealed truth of God, on the other the logics of classical Athens. Characteristically, this split of the form of logic and its “premises” led to the extreme nominalism of William of Occam in which logic involve relations among arbitrary “meanings,” with no necessary connection between those relations and what they were about. The Bible would do as a source of premises just as well as would the Koran or the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Now of course this view was not very comforting to the established Church. The separation of the form and the meaning of logic is always a difficult one to maintain. Medieval realism attempted to connect more tightly the logical relations between predicates and the ultimate reality for which they stood, culminating perhaps in Anselm’s argument that God must exist because of logical properties of Its description.

     

    In many ways Gottlob Frege is the main character of Nye’s book. He stands at the beginning of the 20th century literally scared by the changes in the intellectual world around him: imaginary numbers, non-Euclidean geometries, transfinite sets. Did such things make any sense? Which ones? They all seemed to make sense, the derivations and proofs that involved them seemed to have the proper rhetorical form for mathematics but this seeming wasn’t enough. Could there be a way to determine which kinds of mathematical arguments are valid and which not, and thus be more confident of which kinds of mathematical entities exist? That is: could there be a logic of mathematics?

     

    I hope that at least part of the urgency of this question is clear. Before the 19th century mathematics seemed to be describing reality. The truths of mathematics seemed to be truths about the world, that ultimately one could go out and check. The formula for the volume of a sphere could be verified by immersing the sphere in water and measuring the displacement. Parallel lines could be seen never to meet (sort of). But now entities and claims were being made that it would seem could never be checked. Mathematics seemed to have slipped from being, but the new results seemed, when viewed the right way, to be relatively natural (if surprising) extensions of the old.

     

    As it turned out, Frege was unable to satisfy himself with his attempt to make mathematics logical, and had to be content with making logic mathematical. Others have solved some of the technical questions that stymied Frege, but the question of the ultimate foundation of mathematics still remains open.

     

    Nye then considers the attempts of the various philosophers and scientists influenced by Frege to make use of the new creation in other arenas. Perhaps the precision of the new mathematical logic could be used to separate scientific questions from meaningless “metaphysical” ones. Perhaps one could use logic to understand the form of moral or aesthetic arguments as if proving that it is wrong to kill one’s mother is the same as proving that 2+2=4.

     

    Furthermore it might be possible to use the mathematical logic to understand and perhaps to make some sense of the meaning of language itself. Perhaps, under all of the flower and emotion and fuzz of language there is a pure “logical form” which expresses the basic or pure or literal meaning of a sentence. Valid combinations of sentences (valid arguments) could be understood as combinations of sentences whose logical forms were valid.

     

    Now I should say that when treated as a technical tool this approach has had a great deal of success. Certain facts about language and about language use are well illustrated when sentences of mathematical logic are used to gloss certain of their semantic properties. But it is a long way from that observation to the argument that what we are doing when we use language is to dress up a crystalline logical form with tinsel and fluff.

     

    Consider the steps involved here: First, language is observed to allow for specious arguments as well as valid ones. Second, certain arguments can be seen to be valid on the basis of their form. Third, a tiny subset of those arguments, about a particular domain, namely mathematics, are given a precise, formal characterization. Finally this formal characterization is claimed to hold at the center of language.

     

    Gross attempts to draw more philosophical conclusions from his studies. He realizes that a focus on the rhetorical aspects of scientific practice might make it seem as if science is just rhetoric. He argues that his analyses leave room for a sort of “rhetorical realism.” However, he seems to stumble here since he has shown that the only actual role such “meta- narratives” of science play is in the rhetoric that they can support. It is not clear what rhetorical role “rhetorical realism” could play except in favor of the very relativism he professes concern about.

     

    Nye accepts that one “logical” response to her history is to suggest that perhaps some different sort of logic might be developed, a “feminist” or at least a “female” logic that would perhaps alleviate some of the problems. But of course it is not logic that has kept women and “other” races and nationalities and classes subordinated, it was and is political and social interests and institutions. Logic was and is only one of the many tools toward that end. However a very important tool, since the attitudes and roles of logic in a society are very centrally tied up with the attitudes toward thought and argument. Nye argues against the idea of a feminist logic and for a society that values “reading” instead of the sort of categorical “registering” that logic involves. It seems to me that “reading” is exactly what Gross is doing in his rhetorical analysis of science, and indeed rhetoric, conceived classically, is a field whose time ought to come.

     

    What is the sense in which these two books deserve to be called “postmodern”? I think that the first step in the answer has to do with the fact that neither seeks to overturn or replace the disciplines they are examining. While it may be possible to build a case for reform out of some of the authors’ charges, it is also possible that a practitioner or true-believer could be unmoved. The obvious response would be to claim that both Nye and Gross spend their time examining the scaffolding, and not returning later to see the finished building, but that in fact a good study of scaffolding is necessary and important and perhaps even quite interesting. (Consider, for example the biological community’s response to “The Double Helix.”)

     

    As I mentioned above, it would seem that to take Nye’s and Gross’s points any further, to take them as actual challenges to science or to logic, would be to accept either or both of the ad hominem argument and the genetic fallacy. It is here that I think the postmodernism of the approach comes in. Nye and Gross both stand on what ought to be an unstable point. They are both working well within a tradition of careful scholarship and even an Enlightenment-style respect for the centrality of Ancient Greek thought. Both of them, but perhaps Gross more then Nye, seem to view their subjects with respect. For Gross this is explicit, in using rhetorical techniques originating with Aristotle to analyze science (a practice that, as he admits, Aristotle wouldn’t have initially approved of). Nye, as a feminist, as a woman reading logic, is less willing to adopt the tradition as beneficial, but she does adopt, in a more or less ironic way, the commitment that certain standards of argument ought to apply.

     

    How far can the process be removed from the product? How much can the history of an institution or a practice be divorced from its present state? The modernist position might be that the tradition is baggage, it needs to be shed as soon as it gets in the way. For Gross and Nye, as perhaps it is for the postmodern view, we cannot free ourselves so easily from that baggage; it is not in fact baggage, it is us. The stories of logic and science are our stories, and we are still making them up as we go along. It is ironic perhaps to use the method of classical rhetoric to analyze scientific discourse; after all, what status does a rhetorical analysis have after the claims of science are shown to be rhetorical? I mean it would have seemed that science’s claims are the strongest. But now it seems not so clear.

     

    It isn’t a challenge to logic or science that Nye and Gross offer, but an account of how those enterprises actually are. It is only when those accounts are viewed against the self-descriptions that they seem to be challenges. Logic is not wrong or invalid or even incomplete because it was developed for the promulgation of the faith, nor is biology wrong because it works by means of persuasion and consensus. The challenge is felt only by those who believe that in fact the process does matter to the product.

     

    But–and perhaps I am finally showing myself here–the process does matter, it has to matter. Only if we somehow think that either science or logic is somehow complete or close to complete, can we take any of its products as assured. Now perhaps the method of truth-tables in propositional logic can be felt to be relatively sound and perhaps it is, perhaps it is as sound as the methods we have for predicting eclipses; but such examples are relatively sparse. We just don’t know, in a century filled with challenges to the accepted views in both science and logic and everything else, where the next challenge will arise. Our understanding of how such challenges might develop, and what we ought to expect to do about them, can only be enhanced with a better understanding of science as process. It is a process with its roots in tradition, but not its foundation. Nothing can be done without the tradition, without the history, but anything in that tradition can be overturned, probably based on a challenge supported by some other traditional view or mode of argument or example.

     

    It almost seems that Parmenides’s insight remains, except that where it has been traditionally taken as the foundation of knowledge, it now serves as the fulcrum of irony.

     

  • Review of Flax, Jane. Thinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary West. Berkeley: California UP, 1990.

    Susan Ross

    Department of Speech Communication
    Pennsylvania State University
    <sxr5@psuvm>

     

    Flax, Jane. Thinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary West. Berkeley: U California P, 1990.

     

    In the opening chapter of her book, Thinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary West, Jane Flax states that “the conversational form of the book represents my attempt to find a postmodern voice, to answer for myself the challenge of finding one way (among many possible ways) to continue theoretical writing while abandoning the ‘truth’ enunciating or adjudicating modes feminists and postmodernists so powerfully and appropriately call into question.” Flax does many things with her book, but she never attains such a voice, a problem which I think is related to the difficulty of resolving the relationship of the chosen themes and to the absence of personal experience within the book.

     

    What it seems Flax wants to do is something akin to what Chris Weedon did in her foundational book, Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory–explicate and critique the three schools of psychoanalysis, feminism, and postmodernism, and show how they interrelate to achieve a kind of cohesive whole. What Flax lacks, particularly in comparison with Weedon, is any political agenda that spurs the arguments in some positive direction. Her aptly named final chapter, “No Conclusions,” seems sadly accurate as she weaves aimlessly in her “search for intelligibility and meaning.”

     

    Flax’s seeming lack of focus is, ironically, rooted in the strength of the book, which is the comprehensive treatment of the writings of Freud, Winnicott, Lacan, Chodorow, Lyotard, Derrida, Rorty, Dinnerstein, and Foucault to show how each has contributed to Western thinking and culture. Thinking Fragments is exhaustive in fleshing out the basic tenets and contradictions of each thinker. Flax also understands and reminds us of the tension of the postmodern writing task: the tendency, in the process of presenting theoretical constructs, of reifying them in the very way postmodernist thinking encourages us not to.

     

    If Flax wishes us to use the book as a basic primer in the origins of poststructuralist thinking, it would be helpful for her to provide more explicit signposts for the reader, such as chapter/book part headings that match the chosen theoretical categories, and more guidelines for the reader as to what purpose the incessant questioning serves. In other words, if the sections “The Selves Conceptions,” “Gender(s) and Dis-contents,” and “Knowledge in Question” carried the more explicit and accessible titles of “Psychoanalysis,” “Feminism,” and “Postmodernism,” then the book would serve as a more useful reference and less like a wandering journey. If the book is indeed intended to be an open-ended, less organized journey of sorts, then the form needs to be opened up more completely. Flax swims somewhere in between, and it is not always clear what the issues are, except that she allows each sentence to bounce off of itself–the book is riddled with disclaimers of “yet,” “however,” and “but” that follow firm assertions.

     

    Flax claims in her early chapter on “Transitional Thinking” that her muddiness results from the fact that when she discusses one theoretical category “the other two voices will interrogate and critique the predominant one.” Thus, she excuses herself from rigorous, decisive explication of the “voices” and of inherent issues. How psychoanalysis fits into “transitional thinking,” given its conservative tradition of biological focus, seems an important issue to address–feminists have been questioning such essentialist viewpoints for awhile. The tension of Enlightenment-based theories and the feminist deploring of rationalism and its rigidity needs also to be addressed. It is not that Flax is unaware of these tensions, but she assumes that they have been addressed elsewhere, finished, and discarded. Her assumption, for instance, that the reified categories of Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism justify themselves as a chosen framework for such a book is unspoken and suspect. Why do they represent “our own time apprehended in thought” and why are they the crucial “voices” necessary to address issues of self, gender, knowledge, and power?

     

    One of the most important questions for women, and yet one of the hardest for them to answer, is WHAT DO YOU WANT? Since the impetus of feminism originally grew out of women’s need to have choices and options in response to that question, any book that claims to be feminist should follow that spirit without resorting to what may look on the surface like an appropriately postmodern, open-ended, but actually despairing uncertainty of purpose. Flax’s final chapter, “No Conclusions,” is so convoluted and directionless that it is difficult to pull any sound philosophical or even interesting basis out of it. She says, “a fundamental and unresolved question pervading this book is how to justify–or even frame–theoretical and narrative choices (including my own) without recourse to “truth” or domination. I am convinced we can and should justify our choices to ourselves and others, but what forms these justifications can meaningfully assume is not clear to me.” That’s a good question. Does the reader have the right to call Flax to account and try to answer it? While her admission of her own lack of clarity is healthily postmodern, it lacks commitment. Does a dynamic, pluralistic sense of self imply that it disappears totally? The implications for women, whose selves have long been absent from discussions of society, history, and thought, seem ominous.

     

    Perhaps my insistence on such a goal-oriented focus might be rooted in comparison with other postmodern articles where women’s issues don’t disappear under the rubric of seemingly “neutral” categories that actually themselves carry baggage resembling the “absolute” forms of knowledge and power Flax supposedly denounces. Flax herself wrote, for instance, an essay in 1980 which appeared in The Future of Difference. The essay described mother-daughter relationships, and offered a personal case history which excitingly showed the political implications of private struggles for women. The article also matched in form as well as content the feminist notion that personal struggles are indeed political realities. Similarly, Teresa Ebert’s recent article in College English, “The ‘Difference’ of Postmodern Feminism,” describes the search for an ideal feminist model, one that incorporates the notion of social struggle within language, and serves to demonstrate the global implications of combining feminism and postmodernism. Ebert discusses the exciting potential for using language and all its inherent significations to dissect social conflicts. Ebert’s skepticism of the “uncritical rejection of totality” because of its lack of global perspective seems more productive for feminists than Flax’s reluctance to look too far beyond established postmodernist categories and discussions, seemingly in order to avoid any hint of totalization in her discourse. In short, Flax lacks the necessary political element of a feminist work, perhaps because of her stated lack of belief in “inexorable, inner logic,” or more ominously, perhaps because her commitment to the idea of “these transitional times” leaves no room for any overarching sense of meaning other than the endless open-endedness of things.

     

    In these exciting times of theoretical upheaval, a book like Flax’s should take advantage of its multidisciplinary grounding and move beyond the level of explication of theoretical bases, particularly since her explanations are not clear-cut enough to serve the beginning user (she isn’t strong on definition of terms, for instance) and are too stream-of-consciousness to be of much use to seasoned fans of postmodernist thinking. Since deconstruction seeks to unearth the nature of power relations, a postmodern work is allowed the loose style of Flax’s book only if it adapts a future-oriented focus necessary for any feminist work–that of reclaiming power and creating alterantive sources of knowledge/power relations. Postmodernism should not be used as an excuse to avoid commitment to a political vision, nor should its emphasis on absences be used to side-step the validity of our own personal experiences (particularly a feminist project) or our responsibility of coming to terms with crises in our society.

     

    Works Cited

     

    • Ebert, Teresa L. “The ‘Difference’ of Postmodern Feminism.” College English 53 (December 1991): 886-904.
    • Flax, Jane. “Mother-Daughter Relationships: Psychodynamics, Politics, and Philosophy.” The Future of . . .. Hester Eisenstein and Alice Jardine Eds. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1980. 20-40.
    • Weedon, Chris. Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987.

     

  • What Can She Know?

    Rose Norman

    Department of English
    University of Alabama-Huntsville
    <rnorman@uahvax1>

     

    Code, Lorraine. What Can She Know? Feminist Theory and the Construction of Knowledge. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991.

     

    When it comes to “knowing,” does it matter who does the knowing? Is knowing independent of the knower, and if not, what is it about the knower that affects the knowing? Canadian philosopher Lorraine Code argues persuasively that whether the knower is a man or woman matters so much that understanding why requires a feminist epistemology. That project involves a paradigm shift in epistemology, from valuing autonomy and objectivity (“pure reason”) to valuing interdependence and subjectivity (communal knowledge); from focusing on the relation of a proposition to reality, to focusing on the interrelationship of subject and proposition in creating knowledge/power.

     

    What Can She Know?, a book collecting and synthesizing work begun in Code’s 1981 paper “Is the Sex of the Knower Epistemologically Significant?” Metaphilosophy 1981), is an important step toward articulating the feminist epistemology needed to theorize the interaction of knower and knowing. I suspect the book will be most useful to feminists and to those who already accept postmodern views about the instability of the subject and the constructed nature of reality (as we “know” it). What is characterized as “malestream” philosophy, by far the bulk of what is published and taught about philosophy, is the epistemology against which Code marshals evidence in a complex, nuanced, and deeply engaging argument. Code’s most effective rhetorical aid is her own evenhandedness and clarity in synthesizing a broad array of often-contradictory philosophical positions, from Immanuel Kant to Carol Gilligan, from Aristotle to Sara Ruddick, from Hans Georg Gadamer to Mary Field Belenky.

     

    Code manages this in what I would describe as a non-combative discourse that resolutely avoids dichotomizing. She steps into the discursive gap between a deconstructive practice emphasizing undecideability, and the traditional practice emphasizing universality and gender neutrality. Her own practice weaves a web of understanding between those polarities, with gender as her chief point of departure. In staking out an epistemological territory she eventually describes as “middle ground,” Code positions herself between such dichotomizing debates as nature/nurture and essentialism/constructionism, debates that currently occupy many feminist theorists as well as philosophers of all kinds. Her position, moreover, is dynamic, not static, and emerges developmentally in succeeding chapters of the book. For example, her use of “sex” instead of “gender” in the early chapters turns out to be a deliberate retention of the language she and others used when first theorizing these issues. (In a footnote, Code defends this usage on historical grounds, “gender” being a relatively recent usage, “sex” being the term used by epistemologists discussed in her early chapters.) Conceptually, “middle ground” may be the wrong metaphor for establishing a new paradigm for thinking about thinking. “Common ground” seems to be what Code is seeking and what she most successfully achieves. Her critique establishes this common ground chiefly by articulating key feminist theories that challenge widely held beliefs about the procedures for defining and attaining knowledge. Often, she integrates feminist theory with what is useful from such non-feminists as Aristotle, Kant, Nietzsche, and Foucault. Code is especially effective in adducing what is useful in traditional philosophy, wasting little time attacking what is not useful, except in establishing the ways that what counts as knowledge has traditionally been defined so as to exclude women. Most of her opening chapter is devoted to showing how any claim for “women’s knowledge,” knowledge from a domain assigned to sterotypically-defined “women,” has been declared not-knowledge. Furthermore, she argues, the exclusion does not work symmetrically for men; that is, knowledge from a domain assigned to men has been assumed to be gender-neutral. Men define the norm for defining knowledge.

     

    These and other ideas about gendered knowledge, and Code’s debunking of claims for gender-neutrality, are familiar in women’s studies. In fact, Code’s careful documentation of these ideas makes the book very valuable as a bibliographic guide to scores of feminist essays over the last twenty years. But they are not new ideas, and Code’s contribution is more one of synthesizing than of formulating a procedure or practice for the feminist epistemology she sees as a desirable goal. Her accomplishment is to prepare a site for this new epistemology, lay groundwork for the paradigm shift needed for re-visioning the world in ways that no longer contribute to political oppression of women and other devalued groups.

     

    Code’s critique of received thinking about epistemology makes four major points:

     

    1) Dichotomous thinking polarizes ideas and creates an underclass, the less desirable side of the dichotomy. Dichotomizing also feeds into modes of argumentation that emphasize winning more than understanding, thereby perpetuating political oppression of the underclass. Code avoids dichotomy in various ways, notably by defining knowledge as “inextricably, subjective and objective,” the two supposed opposites being in dynamic interplay in the “creation of all knowledge worthy of the label” (27).

     

    2) Objectivity is overemphasized in inquiry. Code recommends reclaiming subjectivity and re-valuing the subject of inquiry. She warns against “autonomy-of-reason thinking,” a style of thinking that claims reason can operate independently of the thinker’s personal locatedness.

     

    3) We are all interdependent, our subjectivity formed in relation to others. In this respect, we are “second persons,” a term Code takes from philosopher Annette Baier Postures of the Mind: Essays on Mind and Morals, 1985), and applies broadly as a counter to the prevailing autonomy-of-reason mode. Our own personal locatedness in a particular time, place, class, etc., should be our point of departure for analysis.

     

    4) Ideology is a driving force in creating knowledge/power in the Foucauldian sense that the construction of knowledge perpetuates power relations.

     

    What counts as knowledge in mainstream philosophy is derived from the sciences, where the focus is on what can be known about “controllable, manipulable, predictable objects” in the physical world (175). Epistemologists have theorized paradigmatic knowledge in terms of object-oriented simples, using the formula “S knows that P” to locate “objective” truth in the physical world in situations like “S knows that the door is open.” Testing the proposition then focuses on the relation of P (the door is open) to physical reality, and ignores the relation of S to P, since the epistemic agent is assumed to be merely a placekeeper, not affecting the truth of what is known. Code challenges both 1) the use of simples tied to physical reality as sources of paradigmatic knowledge, and 2) the notion that the epistemic agent has no bearing on physical reality. Her most telling point in this critique is that the knowledge gained from object-oriented simples is so shallow as to be not worth knowing, and, furthermore, is inadequate for inference into more complex realms.

     

    Code’s alternative to the subject-object paradigm is a complex one, friendship (human-human interaction), a paradigm that she proposes as a better relational model than Sara Ruddick’s “maternal thinking” for achieving feminist goals. A feminist epistemology, she argues, is best carried out as an ongoing dialogue between thoughtful and mutually respectful friends. But what of women’s experience, of women as makers of knowledge? Here Code runs head-on into Belenky et al.’s well known Women’s Ways of Knowing (1986; co-authored with Blythe McVicker Clinchy, Nancy Rule Goldberger, and Jill Mattuck Tarule), a book imbued with an essentialism that Code carefully avoids throughout her text. Code argues that “in the conceptions of knowledge and of subjectivity it presupposes, Women’s Ways of Knowing is epistemologically and politically more problematic than promising” (253) because it is as asymmetric as the “malestream” epistemology it refutes. In the “S knows that P” terminology, the malestream concentrates too much on P, while Belenky et al. concentrate too much on S–so much so that it’s “not easy to determine what their subjects know” (253). They conflate “subjective knowing” with “subjectivism” and consider subjectivism “a permanent epistemological possibility” (254).

     

    Code considers this to be “radical relativism” where anything goes; she prefers “mitigated relativism,” her phrase for considering knowledge both subjective and objective, not wholly one or the other. Code is more directly critical of Belenky et al. than of any other scholars whose work she uses, since Belenky’s approach resembles her own in critical ways that Code explicitly identifies, e.g., in having an interest in “second personhood,” valuing connectedness and interpersonal behavior, and locating sources of knowledge in human behavior, rather than in subject-object behavior. Code’s analysis is more nuanced, more postmodern (in denying the possibility of a unified self, etc.), and more political in its recognition of Foucauldian knowledge/power links. Code is exploring the uncharted territory between polarities, the power in “mitigated relativism.” Belenky et al. construct knowing as a progress, through stages, toward increasingly more valued “ways of knowing.” Code suggests a different way of using this material, calling these ways of knowing “strategies” or “styles” of knowing, different positions that can be taken, thus making them more useful for theorizing places for political action. Code’s articulation of an ecological model for “Remapping the Epistemic Terrain” (chapter 7) is the most useful part of the book in addressing key issues feminists are currently debating and in defending “ecofeminism” against criticism of the ideal of community. Code begins the chapter with a description of a board game called The Poverty Game, developed by six Canadian women who depend on public assistance. These “welfare women” become a continuing focus (almost a litmus test) for discussing epistemic privilege, how knowledge is circulated (as well as constructed), and how privileged women and men might learn from a dialogic form of epistemology based on an ecological model. For Code, this ecological model proposes a society that is in dynamic balance, like an ecosystem. Such a society would be “community- oriented, ecologically responsible[,] would make participation and mutual concern central values and would structure debates among community members as conversations, not confrontations” (278).

     

    This communal ideal is widespread in women’s spirituality movements today, but has found less support among academics, who are more likely to see only romanticism or idealism in it. Code’s approach to a feminist epistemology reaches out to that ideal in ways that academics can value. She avoids essentializing women’s “nature” by bringing in Teresa de Lauretis’s influential views on “identity politics” and the importance, for feminist projects, of resisting the ideal of a unified self. De Lauretis valorizes “a multiple, shifting, and often self-contradictory identity . . . ; an identity made up of heterogeneous and heteronomous representations of gender, race, and class” Feminist Studies/Critical Studies 9). Code places this dynamic identity in an ecological context, emphasizing fluidity across various boundaries (as in an ecosystem) in creating and acquiring knowledge. In her ecological model, as I read it, people communally and conversationally create knowledge through “dialogic negotiations . . . across hitherto resistant structural boundaries” (309). In this view, thinking itself is “conversational,” and for it to be productive these “conversations have to be open, moving, and resistant to arbitrary closure” (308).

     

    While the ecological model is for me Code’s most appealing metaphor–suggesting friendly “conversation” standing in for such natural processes as rivers flowing and life-cycle processes–the ecosystem metaphor is inexact, or, I should say that Code does not herself elaborate the metaphor as I have done. Further, an ecological model holds within itself a potentially essentializing gesture toward “natural” systems that can easily lead to validating the status quo. Code’s resistance to essentialism is most evident in her critique of texts like Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice (1982), Sara Ruddick’s Maternal Thinking (1989), and Belenky et al.’s Women’s Ways of Knowing, to all of which she gives considerable (and perceptive) attention. To achieve the feminist goals Code articulates, what is needed is not a “model” (essentialist or otherwise), but a paradigm shift, a completely different way of thinking about thinking. Gilligan, Ruddick, and Belenky et al. are all, in their own ways, more successful in establishing new paradigms for thinking than is Code.

     

    Where Code will draw most fire from critics (those who do not dismiss her project out of hand) is in the attempt to stake out a middle ground, neither wholly essentialist nor wholly constructionist. “Mitigated relativism” is neither a catchy name nor an easily grasped philosophical position, nor is “middle ground” an obvious position of strength, as Code claims it to be. It is simply the place we are left once dichotomous thinking is recognized as a patriarchally constructed double bind: essentialism demands belief in primacy of difference, the very basis on which women have been oppressed; relativism (there is no external, objective reality, only individual realities) stalls political action, there being no external reality to change. So it is the choice that oppresses, or the belief that one must choose. In opting for middle ground, Code is refusing to make that ultimately oppressive choice.

     

    The choices Code does make are complex and dynamic, challenging and invigorating to anyone willing to enter the dialogic she invites. There is a quicksilver element to the issues raised: feminist epistemology seems capable of rapidly assuming many shapes, of weaving through narrow and twisting passages, of rising and falling in response to atmospheric pressures. But that is my own metaphor. Code’s figurative language emphasizes analytical (“malestream?”) processes. The metaphor of “remapping the epistemic terrain” suggests the feminist epistemologist as a cartographer systematically pacing through a territory of disputed boundaries and recording results to guide others who choose to come that way. My own metaphor of Code’s “drawing fire from critics” reveals my sense of that terrain as dangerous territory, with enemies in every bush and landmines artfully concealed on the path. In making her way through that dangerous terrain that she calls “middle ground,” Code strikes me as both gutsy and careful– and well-armed.

     

  • Belling Helene

    Douglas A. Davis

    Department of English
    Haverford College
    <D_Davis@Hvrford>

     

    Cixous, Helene. “Coming to writing” and other essays. Ed. Deborah Jenson. Trans. Sarah Cornell, Deborah Jenson, Ann Liddle, Susan Sellers. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991.

     

    We have learned from Freud (who found the lesson hard to keep in mind) that if one would read the unconscious, one must attend to silence as to sound. I come to be writing of Helene Cixous through her writing of “Dora,” the girl who so obsessed Freud in the months after his own writing of The Interpretation of Dreams that she called forth his most (in)famous (counter)transference and thereby enticed Sartre, Lacan, and H.C.–enough distinguished literary and psychoanalytic reinterpreters to fill a curriculum–to retell her-story. In all these re-visions of the young lady it is of course never Ida Bauer who speaks, but “Dora” who is overheard voicing another’s thoughts. Cixous’s take on the nuclear moment in Freud’s 1905 “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria” opens with the good doctor pressing his adolescent patient for the details of the encounter by the lake, where her father’s mistress’s husband may have kissed her, where she may have desired him, may have felt his aroused body, may have slapped his face:

     

     
          Freud's voice (seated, seen from behind)
          "...these events project themselves like a shadow
          in dreams, they often become so clear that we feel
          we can grasp them, but yet they escape
          interpretation, and if we proceed without skill
          and special caution, we cannot know if such a
          scene really took place."

          DORA
          (a voice which rips through silence--half
          threatening and half begging--is heard)
            If you dare kiss me, I'll slap you!
                         (becoming more tenderly playful)
                         (all of a sudden, close to his ear)
          FREUD
            Yes, you will tell me in full detail.
                         (voice from afar)
          DORA
            If you want.
                         (voice awakens)
            If you [vous] want.  And after that?
          FREUD
            You will tell me about the incident by the lake,
            in full detail.
          DORA
            Why did I keep silent the first days after the
            incident by the lake?
          FREUD
            To whom do you think you should ask that
            question?
          DORA
            Why did I then suddenly tell my parents about
            it?
          FREUD
            Do you know why?
          DORA
                         (Does not answer but tells this
                          story in a dreamlike voice) 
            As father prepared to leave, I said that I would
          not stay there without him.  Why did I tell my
          mother about the incident so that she would repeat
          it to my father? (Cixous, 1983, 2-3)

     

    Thus Freud, quintessential modern (and arguably the first post-modern) thinker, meets H.C. across the gaps, pauses, and ellipses of “Dora”‘s discourse. And in the glimpses of H.C.’s work of the past fifteen years collected in this slim volume, there are analogous puzzles aplenty for the reader who seeks a personage behind the texts, who would lead Cixous onto a stage and examine her about time, place and person: who did what, and with what, and to whom?

     

    Freud is not present in this collection of six of Cixous’s essays spanning 1976-89, though we imagine him squirming at the “Requiemth Lecture on the Infeminitesimal,” in “Coming to Writing” (35), which parodies his masochistic Lecture 33, on “Femininity.” H.C. shares Freud’s problem in that infamous pseudolecture, viz., to discover by writing her “how a woman develops out of a child with a bisexual disposition” (Freud, 1933, 116); but she has also read his uneasymaking strange tribute to his daughter Anna, “A Child is Being Beaten” (“A Girl Is Being Killed,” 8), and she wants us to understand that the self- mother-loving woman who comes to her writing is

     

    not the "beautiful woman" Uncle Freud speaks of, the beauty in the mirror, the beauty who loves herself so much that no one can ever love her enough, not the queen of beauty. (51)

     

    The avuncular presence of “Coming to Writing” is rather a “capitalist-realist superuncle,” who annually attempts her critical domestication:

     

    The unknown just doesn't sell. Our customers demand simplicity. You're always full of doubles, we can't count on you, there is otherness in your sameness. (33)

     

    The six translations are bookended by fine interpretive pieces by Susan Rubin Suleiman (“Writing Past the Wall, or the Passion according to H.C.”) and Deborah Jensen (“Coming to Reading Helene Cixous”), the latter an effective Baedeker to the terrain covered by Cixous in the fourteen years represented by these pieces.

     

    These essays all treat of love, of passion discovered, created by the act(s) of reading/writing. For Cixous this process is most thoroughly experienced in relation to the Brazilian author Clarice Lispector, who occasions two of the pieces included. The second, “Clarice Lispector: The Approach: Letting Oneself (be) Read (by) Clarice Lispector: The Passion According to C.L.” articulates for H.C. the paradigmatic relationship with an author and her text:

     

    How to "read" Clarice Lispector: In the passion according to C.L.: writing-a-woman. What will we call "reading," when a text overflows all books and comes to meet us, giving itself to be lived? Was heisst lesen? (What is called reading?) (58)

     

    Without Lispector’s own text juxtaposed (H.C. sets a paragraph of C.L.’s Portuguese in her essay, and sprinkles quoted phrases throughout), it is the exuberant love-letter quality of this essay that is paramount, as Cixous is moved to verbigerative wordplay (much of it in German) with Lispector’s name and concepts. The textual courtship of Lispector suffuses the last three essays as well: “The Last Painting or the Portrait of God,” “By the Light of an Apple,” and “The Author in Truth.” Together, these constitute a powerful paean to self-discovery through literature, in which the ego takes on the imagined persona of the beloved writer as mentor. This time-honored process, Cixous show us by contrast, has traditionally been a matter between men, and within a dominant cultural-political context:

     

    If Kafka had been a woman. If Rilke had been a Jewish Brazilian born in the Ukraine. If Rimbaud had been a mother, if he had reached the age of fifty. If Heidegger had been able to stop being German, if he had written the Romance of the Earth. (132)

     

    The other piece included is “Tancredi Continues,” H.C.’s response to Rossini’s opera, featuring Clorinda, “woman singing as a woman pretending to be a man,” of which Susan Rubin Suleiman asks/answers:

     

    Is this poetry? Critical commentary? Autobiography? Ethical reflection? Feminist theory? Yes. (xi)

     

    If this volume is one’s point of entry to Cixous’s writing, biographical questions will echo at each paragraph. H.C. locates her sense of otherness, of “Jewoman,” German-French self-consciousness, in her Algerian childhood. Yet despite a nod to the archangel who gave the Prophet dictation and the people of the Book a new religion (“The attack was imperious: ‘Write!’ Even though I was only a meager anonymous mouse, I knew vividly the awful jolt that galvanizes the prophet, wakened in mid-life by an order from above” [9-10]), no recognizable North African Arab appears on her mental stage, only a glimpse of what might be shadow, as little H.C. lures a remembered little French girl into a corner of Algiers’ Officers’ Park:

     

    I beat up children. The Enemy's little ones. The little pedigreed French. . . . Not a trace of a beggar, not a shadow of a slave, of an Arab, of wretchedness. (CtW 19)

     

    Not of, but in, French North Africa, and, later, France itself, is H.C., an outsider to Freud’s avuncular heterosexism, to the “Sacred Garden of French literature,” to patripolitics generally. She writes of Jerusalem, abode of peace contended by two passionate peoples–Arab and Jew, male and female, West and East –but without telegraphing her political wishes for it/them. Is the new Jerusalem for everyone? Is Cixous’s writing?

     

    H.C.’s fluency in what Lacan pronounced the unconscious Discourse of the Other, the unconscious that speaks the conscious, resounds in these translations. Translating Cixous (like translating Freud) is a special challenge, because puns, cliched French and German usages, klang associations, and alliteration play such a role in her writing. Sarah Cornell, Deborah Jenson, Ann Liddle, and Susan Sellers seem to have met this challenge, giving us a text that often entices and seldom merely puzzles, inviting the reader to speculate over the sound and psychodynamics of H.C.’s original. The footnotes are indispensable, since “from the point of view of the soul’s eye: the eye of a womansoul” (4) is not “du point de vue de l’oeil d’ame. L’oeil dame” (197n). Yet the joyous, erotic, metonymic quality of Cixous’s words survives the change of sound.

     

    Works Cited

     

    • Cixous, Helene. “Portrait of Dora.” Diacritics (1983): 2-32.
    • Freud, Sigmund (1905). Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria. Ed. and trans. James J. Strachey, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud SE), vol 7. London: Hogarth.
    • Freud, Sigmund (1919). “‘A child is being beaten’: A contribution to the study of the origin of sexual perversions.” SE, vol 17, 175-204.
    • Freud, Sigmund (1933). “Femininity.” SE, vol 22, 112-135.
    • Lacan, Jacques [1951]. “Intervention on transference.” Ed. Juliet Mitchell and Janet Rose. Feminine Sexuality. New York: Pantheon Books, 1982.
    • Sartre, Jean-Paul (1959/1984). The Freud scenario. Ed. J.-B Pontalis. Trans. Q. Hoare. Chicago: U Chicago P, 1985.

     

  • White Male Ways of Knowing

    Clifford L. Staples

    Department of Sociology
    University of North Dakota
    <ud153289@ndsuvm1>

     

    hooks, bell. Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics. Boston: South End, 1990.

     

    About two years ago my friend Mike sent me bell hooks’s review of Spike Lee’s “Do The Right Thing,” which was published in Zeta Magazine.1 Mike’s photocopy budget is even worse than mine, so I figured if he went to the trouble of smuggling these pages out to me then he really wanted me to read them. So I did. I had seen the film prior to reading the review, and, just like hooks’s white male colleagues, I too had “loved it” (10). Her critical review challenged me to rethink my initial response to the film, and got me interested in reading more of her work. So I sent a check to South End Press for copies of Ain’t I a Woman (1981), Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (1989), and Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (1990). Here I will focus on Yearning. This book in particular has encouraged me to join with her in interrogating the racism and sexism of postmodern American culture. Yearning consists of twenty-three short essays, including a dialogue with Cornel West on relationships between black men and black women, and a concluding piece in which she playfully interviews herself. Like her review of “Do The Right Thing,” a number of the remaining essays initially appeared elsewhere: in Zeta Magazine, Inscriptions, Art Forum, Sojourner, Framework, Emerge. Pulling these essays together in one volume has undoubtedly made her cultural criticism available to a much larger audience than the few readers of these publications.

     

    The essays cover a lot of territory and are not easily classified. Some chapters (e.g., “Stylish Nihilism,” “Representing Whiteness,” “Counter-Hegemonic Art,” “A Call For Militant Resistance”) might be fairly called film criticism. In several other places (e.g., “Liberation Scenes,” “Postmodern Blackness,” “Culture to Culture,” “Critical Interrogation”) she discusses and evaluates trends in cultural criticism. And then, from another direction (“The Chitlin Circuit,” “Homeplace,” “Sitting at the Feet of the Messenger,” “Aesthetic Inheritances,” “Saving Black Folk Culture”) she remembers and celebrates African-American culture and politics. But one shouldn’t put too much weight on these categories. You are as likely to find autobiographical reflections in the film reviews as in the more properly autobiographical pieces, and references to films, novels, theoretical trends and biographies turn up everywhere. As she writes in the last essay, “There are so many locations in this book, such journeying” (229). Hooks’s excursions erase all boundaries, leave all genres blurred.

     

    For hooks, radical cultural criticism is rooted in a commitment to black liberation struggle. She examines representations of black people and black life in literature and popular culture to understand how such representations enhance and undermine the capacity of African-Americans to determine their own fate. She focuses, in particular, on the ways in which such representations work to either enslave or liberate blacks, reinforce or challenge racism in whites, and sustain or subvert white supremacy. She also remains critical of the ways in which both women’s liberation and black liberation continue to be practiced as if black women did not exist.

     

    OK. What you’ve mostly gotten so far is the dust-jacket perspective of Anyreader–the sort of “view from nowhere” I was taught to write in graduate school. It’s also the kind of “review” I might have written before reading Yearning–before getting my lesson in racial awareness. Hooks won’t let me forget who I am. So, as it turns out, I’m not Anyreader. I’m a white guy.

     

    Many of hooks’s readers are white guys; certainly most of the subscribers to Postmodern Culture are. And have you ever considered the volume of material and cultural capital upon which this discourse rests? To participate in this e-mail discussion one not only has to have a modem, but also a position of some status in or near the state bureaucracy. And you also have to know how to talk the postmodern talk. Hooks knows where postmodern theory comes from and approaches it warily. In “Postmodern Blackness” she writes:

     

    My defense of postmodernism and its relevance to black folks sounded good, but I worried that I lacked conviction, largely because I approach the subject cautiously and with suspicion. Disturbed not so much by the "sense" of postmodernism but by the conventional language used when it is written or talked about and by those who speak it, I find myself on the outside of the discourse looking in. As a discursive practice it is dominated primarily by the voices of white male intellectuals and/or academic elites who speak to and about one another with coded familiarity. Reading and studying their writing to understand postmodernism in its multiple manifestations, I appreciate it but feel little inclination to ally myself with the academic hierarchy and exclusivity pervasive in the movement today. (23-24)

     

    Certainly, many of the essays in Yearning were written for and about black intellectuals. And you often get the feeling hooks would prefer to write primarily for other blacks, particularly black women. Yet, much of what she has to say seems addressed to whites, or at least it’s written with the knowledge that whites are likely to be looking over her shoulder. For example, “Postmodern Blackness,” one of the essays in the book, was published in the first volume of this journal. And Hooks is also on the editorial board. Thus, she may not want to ally herself with me and my fellow white male travellers, but I know she wants us to hear what she has to say.

     

    What she has to say, fundamentally, is that she is a black woman intellectual working in a white male supremacist culture. Her work can be seen as a self-conscious confrontation with, and exploration of, this fact. She constantly positions and repositions herself in relation to this culture and to her specific audience. By pushing positionality to its limits, hooks makes visible the on-going ways in which racism and sexism shapes cultural production–including, reflexively, the writing and reading of her own texts. She forces the white male reader in particular into self-consciousness and self-criticism.

     

    Her stance also raises the question of just exactly what a “review” of her work by me might mean. After thinking it over, I have found myself coming to rest in a problematic place somewhere between criticism and self-criticism. So my “review” is also, of necessity, something of a confession.

     

    From one paragraph to the next, I never know how I’m going to feel reading hooks. One moment I’ll feel angry and frustrated and the next happy and empowered. Sometimes I’m also afraid; there’s always the chance that she’s going to name one more prejudice I’m carrying around with me. Confronting and sorting out these conflicting feelings about race is hard work. Not having to do this work until now, in my late-thirties, says a lot about what it means to be a white male. Hooks, on the other hand, never felt she had choice. For black people, particularly black women, thinking critically about race has always been a matter of survival.

     

    Reading hooks’s critiques of the way black people are portrayed in white culture has forced me to question much of what I knew or thought I knew about African-Americans. It has also made me realize how most of what I know about blacks is manufactured; it does not arise spontaneously out of my day to day experiences with black people.2 This is equally true for me living in North Dakota as it is for my parents living in New Jersey. The black people most white Americans know best are on TV.

     

    By focusing critical attention on the cultural production of blackness, hooks points to the hyperreality of racial politics in postmodern America. On average, white lives and black lives are probably just as segregated today as ever. Now, however, we watch a lot of images of black people on TV and in other media. The presence of such images creates an illusion of familiarity, a kind of simulated integration. Yet few of these images are produced by black people, or challenge stereotypes of black people, and almost all of them are constructed with profit in mind.

     

    It is not simply the case that representations of black people “influence” or “distort” white perceptions. Such a view belongs to a time, no longer with us, when most people recognized and acted as if there were a difference between reality and representations of it. Now, there are few if any white perceptions of black people for mass media to “influence” that are not already the product of mass media.

     

    Of course, as a white American sociologist I have been trafficking in these same commodified images of blackness every day for a number of years now. Whether I’m teaching introductory sociology or a senior seminar in “race, class, and gender,” my white students and I talk about “the black family,” “unemployed black men,” or whomever as if we know what we are talking about– as if black people were speaking instead of being spoken about.

     

    Participating in these conversations has always left me feeling anxious and troubled, but it has been difficult until recently to figure out why. Now I can see that the problem lay in the one-dimensionality of our conversations. Immersed in a white culture that stretches from horizon to horizon, like the snow outside my window, our conversations created only the illusion that we knew black people’s lives. In this respect white sociology and CNN are indistinguishable; in one way or another, it’s just white people talking about black people. And yet, it’s as if we had convinced ourselves that by starting to talk about black people we had somehow stopped talking like white people.

     

    Thus, like many other whites, I have often found myself adrift in a sea of images–signs of “blackness” that have no signifiers; signs that refer only to other signs. Hooks is on to this when she notes how Spike Lee’s film was made mass-marketable to whites by relying on commodified images of blacks:

     

    Practically every character in Do The Right Thing has already been "seen," translated, interpreted, somewhere before, on television, sitcoms, evening news, etc. Even the nationalism expressed in the film or in Lee's interviews has been stripped of its political relevance and given a chi-chi stance as mere cultural preference. (178)

     

    Despite the fact that these commodified images of blackness often “work” with white audiences, I think many whites are deeply dissatisfied with the way we are taught to think about black people. There is a nagging feeling that something isn’t right, isn’t even close to being right. This is the ontological anxiety of the postmodern self–a self shaped by watching representations of experience rather than a self shaped by experience. We are so cut off from the lives of black people that we have no vantage point from which to assess the images of black people created by others.

     

    Hooks finds cause for optimism in the deep dissatisfaction of the postmodern self. In “Postmodern Blackness” she writes:

     

    The overall impact of postmodernism is that many other groups now share with black folks a sense of deep alienation, despair, uncertainty, loss of a sense of grounding even if it is not informed by shared circumstance. Radical postmodernism calls attention to those shared sensibilities which cross the boundaries of class, gender, race, etc., that could be fertile ground for the construction of empathy--ties that would promote recognition of common commitments, and serve as a base for solidarity and coalition. (27)

     

    I wish I could share her optimism. Unfortunately, the insecurity that plagues the postmodern self also makes whites a target for clever marketing strategies that prey upon our ignorance and uncertainty. This, I think, is one reason why so many of us watched “Do The Right Thing” uncritically.

     

    As hooks points out in her review, “Do The Right Thing” was sold to white America as a “radical” film (77). This was going to be an in-your-face slam-dunk film about black people doing black stuff in black ways made by that “bad” black guy Spike Lee. This hype implied that other representations of black life available to white America were inauthentic, thereby constructing Lee’s film as a “true” insider account. And if Lee thought white America would be “uncomfortable” watching his film then, by God, those of us who fancied ourselves multicultural would show him and everyone else we could hang with this film and this militant black. We’d be so comfortable watching “Do The Right Thing” we’d all probably fall asleep. Of course, by default, those whites who shied away from the film, who didn’t get into its aesthetic, or at least didn’t act like they did, could be defined as racist cretins, or worse: unfashionable. Thus, to understand the white response to Lee’s film it is important to realize how whites read white responses to blackness as signs of hipness.

     

    There is more than just a little bit of macho sexism in all of this. As hooks points out, black authenticity is defined in large part by black masculinity. And, in our racist imaginations, black masculinity is all about danger and sexuality. Thus, for white males “loving” Lee’s film is a kind of male-bonding. We may not be able to identify with the “black thing” but we can sure identify with the “male thing.” In this way, white men strive to bond with black men around our supposedly shared interest in sexual exploitation. Our deepest hope is that this connection to black men will deflect their rage away from us and toward someone else–black women, perhaps.

     

    Realizing the danger in the lack of critical response to the film, hooks reminds us that in a world suffused with manufactured images of “blackness,” what is black is not necessarily subversive:

     

    Overwhelmingly positive reception to "Do The Right Thing" highlights the urgent need for more intense, powerful public discussion about racism, the need for a rejuvenated visionary black liberation struggle. Aesthetically and politically, Spike Lee's film has opened another cultural space for dialogue; but it is a space which is not intrinsically counter-hegemonic. Only through progressive radical political practice will it become a location for cultural resistance. (184)

     

    By forcing me to rethink why I liked the film, hooks reminds me how unhappy I am with the way I have learned to think about black people, how my lack of critical response sustains a racist and sexist culture, and how important it is to develop the capacity to make the kind of “critical interventions” she advocates. It is the kind of analysis that is not only rooted in a political commitment to black liberation, and women’s liberation, but is also grounded in an understanding of the nature of postmodern society and the lonely and desperate people who live in it.

     

    Thus, while reading hooks I often feel good, even if at first I get angry and defensive. I feel like I am learning new ways to think about black people, as well as new ways to think about myself. This is empowering. With these new ways of thinking I feel like I have the capacity to resist and undermine the sexist and racist life I’m being asked to live. Take, for example, this passage from “Critical Interrogation”:

     

    One change in direction that would be real cool would be the production of a discourse on race that interrogates whiteness. It would just be so interesting for all those white folks who are giving blacks their take on blackness to let them know what's going on with whiteness. In far too much contemporary writing--though there are some outstanding exceptions--race is always an issue of Otherness that is not white; it is black, brown, yellow, red, purple even. Yet only a persistent, rigorous and informed critique of whiteness could really determine what forces of denial, fear and competition are responsible for creating fundamental gaps between professed political commitment to eradicating racism and the participation in the construction of a discourse on race that perpetuates racial domination. (54)

     

    Reading this passage allowed me to see those class discussions of “social inequality” in a new way. This led me to a deeper understanding of what I was struggling to do and to discover better ways to do it. I began to imagine ways of overcoming the meaninglessness of our discussions of “the black family” by reading commodified images of blackness not as signs of blackness, but as signs of whiteness. We began this discussion by tracing the images of blackness we watch (either in our textbooks or on TV) back to the white men who overwhelmingly control the production of them. Once we did this it was possible to see how our own talk about black people simply built upon these racist stereotypes. Though it is hardly profound, we now respect the distinction between talking about black people and having black people talk to us. This feels like a move in the right direction.

     

    There are times, however, when I sometimes feel betrayed by hooks. These are the times when she seems to want to take back what she has given me. As a result I feel set up, and I find myself not wanting to trust her. It also suggests that she feels at least ambivalent about the postmodern possibilities for empathy and solidarity which she otherwise puts forth as liberating.

     

    Ever mindful of the extent to which contact with white people has meant suffering for blacks, hooks watches whites very closely. To her, my yearning to escape commodified images of black experience–a yearning given shape and direction by reading her work–often seems predatory. In “Radical Black Subjectivity” she writes:

     

    Such appropriation happens again and again. It takes the form of constructing African-American culture as though it exists solely to suggest new aesthetic and political directions white folks might move in. Michele Wallace calls it seeing African-American culture as "the starting point for white self-criticism." (20-21)

     

    Reading this makes me angry and frustrated. I think to myself, “She’s never happy. She anticipates every response to her or to African-American culture and defines it and me as incurably white and essentially racist.” My anger eventually subsides, but the frustration remains, and I find myself gradually slipping back into feelings of powerlessness and despair. What else can I do?

     

    I don’t think African-American culture exists solely for my benefit, but I see no alternative to my reading it, reading her, as a starting point for self-criticism. Hooks has to give us that at least. Flirting with essentialism, as she seems to do here, leads inevitably to a politics of separatism. If whites are racist by nature then we have nothing whatsoever to discuss. I have no choice but to read her self-critically, and if the results look to her like another kind of theft, then that’s a chance I’ll have to take.

     

    It took me awhile to get to this position. In fact, for the reasons discussed above, I almost gave up on this essay. I bet others have also thought about responding to hooks, but abandoned the idea. For example, none of the four reviews I have found of Yearning were written by men. And while I think a lot of other white men ignore hooks because they can, I also think there are a lot of men who might read her work critically, but feel there is no way to respond to her that she has not already foreclosed.

     

    The bottom line, however, is that I don’t think hooks is unreasonable. She is just very demanding. Take, for example, the issue of positionality raised earlier. Initially I was feeling proud of myself that I had stepped out from behind the Anyreader persona to proclaim my status as a “white guy.” Then, going back through Yearning a second or third time, I ran into the following passage in “Critical Interrogation”:

     

    Many scholars, critics, and writers preface their work by stating that they are white, as though mere acknowledgement of this fact were sufficient, as if it conveyed all we need to know of standpoint, motivation, direction. I think back to my graduate school years when many of the feminist professors fiercely resisted the insistence that it was important to examine race and racism. Now many of these very same women are producing scholarship focused on race and gender. What processes enabled their perspectives to shift? Understanding that process is important for the development of solidarity; it can enhance awareness of the epistemological shifts that enable all of us to move in oppositional directions. Yet, none of these women write articles reflecting on their critical process, showing how their attitudes have changed. (54)

     

    As I read this I felt as if she were, once again, trashing a position she had led me to adopt only a few pages ago. I felt this way a number of times reading Yearning. Yet, upon reflection, I could see her point. Acknowledging one’s status is only meaningful as a result of what comes after it. In my case, I came to see this essay as an occasion for self-reflection and analysis. Stating that one is a “white male” won’t, in itself, do that more difficult work. In fact, it might inhibit it to the extent that it serves as a sort of politically correct gesture in the sense hooks means above. This essay may still be such a gesture, but it’s a more meaningful gesture to me than it would have been had hooks not been so insistent.

     

    The kind of self-disclosure hooks is pushing for here is, of course, risky business. Power and status are at the heart of it. Western Academics and intellectuals are reluctant to open up about our own intellectual development because doing so reveals that we have not always been as smart as we’d like others to think; crediting those who have influenced us exposes the social nature of intellectual achievement– evidence that runs counter to our sacred individualism; and admitting that we have been affected by another is also to grant that someone a certain kind of power over us. This latter point is something particularly difficult for men to do; we are supposed to be the movers and shakers, we are not supposed to be moved and shaken–at least not in other than a rigidly defined heterosexual way. Homophobia, sexism, and racism all play apart in determining who it is we are willing to admit to having moved us, depending upon who it is we need to ignore at the time.

     

    On this issue I think hooks herself could be more forthcoming. On the one hand she does write about herself a lot (in Yearning and elsewhere), yet I don’t get a very clear sense of self-transformation from these writings. I understand that she has always been a black woman, but has she always been a militant, feminist, socialist black woman? Very little that she writes would lead one to believe otherwise. Thus, while I was interested and impressed by her description of the way that her family critiqued white representations of black people on TV in the 1950s (3), I was also left with the impression that she has always been as militant as she is now, and that she (among other black women) has always been in the place that everyone else is just now discovering. Maybe these things are true. Even so, by her own admission, even if she is way out ahead of me then it’s important that I understand how she got there. I would like to read more autobiography from hooks that shows the intellectual turning points in her life.

     

    There is another problem. It’s about that business of whites reading other whites’ responses to blackness as signs of hip status. A reader of this essay wondered whether white readers of hooks, such as myself, might fall into the trap of approaching her work uncritically for the same reasons that we watched “Do The Right Thing” uncritically–out of an effort to signify that we were hip to her militant stance. The result being a kind of racist spectacle in which black intellectuals duke it out while whites sit on the sidelines, bet on the outcome, and root for the most radical team around. I mean, if hooks thinks Spike Lee’s work is conservative, then she must really be “bad.” This isn’t hooks’s problem, though she may be implicated in it. As much as she might try at times, she can’t control how she is going to be read and the meaning her work might come to have. The problem is the river of white racism that flows deep and strong through our culture and our lives. At times it’s hard for me to imagine what it might be like to be white and not be racist.

     

    Many of my friends, those on the left in particular, are trashing postmodern theories and theories of postmodernity. They are concerned, and in some cases rightly so, about the political and personal nihilism that seems to surround some postmodernist thinkers. Hooks is critical of the elitist origins of postmodern thinking, but she would rather use it than trash it. Hooks takes from postmodern thinking what newfangled ideas look useful, and at the same time boldly affirms a commitment to such unfashionable notions as “black liberation,” “women’s liberation” and “revolution.” Yes, even revolution. Hooks is committed to that old-fashioned idea that we should be leaving this world a better place than we found it and reads postmodernism with this goal in mind. I read her with the same commitment. No one should fear succumbing to nihilism from reading Yearning.

     

    And despite the obvious problems involved, I want white men and women to read hooks. We won’t find our way through these problems if we don’t confront them, and reading hooks is a good place to start. I found that she pushed me to go beyond my tired and self-serving responses to racial issues. I’m pretty sure reading her work will do the same for others. I’d also like to see a lot more sustained commentary on her work by both blacks and whites. What little that exists is superficial. Wrestling with the issues that hooks raises for white readers will propel us toward ways of responding to black authors that are not racist; ways of responding that move between criticism and self-criticism in an effort to expose, not bury, the problematic nature of reading and writing in black and white.

     

    Notes

     

    1. My thanks to Julie Christianson, Jim English, Janet Rex, and Mike Schwalbe for reading and commenting on an earlier version of this essay.

     

    2. I particularly like this way of describing postmodern culture. I am paraphrasing Dorothy Smith, in The Everyday World As Problematic: Toward a Feminist Sociology (Boston: Northeastern UP), 19.

     

  • The China Difference

    Chris Connery

    Department of Chinese Literature
    University of California-Santa Cruz
    <Chris_Connery@FACULTY.UCSC.edu>

     

    Chow, Rey. Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading Between West and East. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1991.

     

    British Prime Minister John Major went to Beijing in the summer of 1991 to talk with China’s leaders about Hong Kong–duty-free port, international city, and capitalist success story. As 1997 approaches–the year of the colony’s reversion to Chinese sovereignty– fears of total collapse have attenuated as Hong Kong has emerged as the banking and financial center for the growth of export-oriented capitalism and overseas investment in China’s most rapidly developing region– its southeastern coast. Hong Kong’s continuing status as financial and transportation hub for Southeast China will depend on construction of its new airport, and the details of the airport’s financing were the main items on the British PM’s agenda. Since he was the first Western leader to visit post-June 4, 1989 Beijing, though, PM Major also made the obligatory register of “concern” for the Chinese government’s violations of human rights that have continued in the wake of the Tiananmen Square incident.

     

    The airport discussion was concluded to China’s and Britain’s satisfaction. On the matter of human rights, though, PM Major got a stern dressing down from Chinese Prime Minister Li Peng. The British leader, argued Li Peng, was singularly unqualified to comment on China’s treatment of its citizens. Britain had been the major player in imperialist aggression against China, in the Opium Wars (referred to in Britain as the first and second “Anglo-Chinese Wars”), in forcing unequal treaties on China, including extraterritorial rights and privileges for British subjects on Chinese soil, and in the colonial occupation of Hong Kong and adjacent territory. And moreover, added PM Li, Chinese and Western standards for human rights are not the same. The situation was a curious one. Both leaders were intent on maintaining Hong Kong’s status as an international and a Chinese city. Britain’s government has clear economic interest in preserving Hong Kong’s present character as completely as possible, but perhaps has an even larger stake in insisting on its Chineseness, stemming from the fear of the influx of hundreds of thousands of post-1997 refugees–whose legal status is currently “British Dependant Territories citizen”–“back home” to Britain. In admonishing China’s government on human rights, though, PM Major was castigating China for failure to adhere to international, i.e. Western, standards. Beijing in the spring of 1989 was the first counter- revolution to be televised. After Berlin, Bucharest, Prague, and Moscow showed how History should operate, though, China’s exceptionalism–its teleological failure–became more egregious.

     

    In the summer of 1991, local news coverage in Hong Kong was dominated by the massive effort to raise funds for disaster relief in the wake of central China’s disastrous summer flooding and by the upcoming elections to Hong Kong’s legislative council (18 out of 60 seats are chosen by direct election). The capacity of the Hong Kong population to identify and sympathize with the sufferings of the Chinese people was indicated in the enormous success of the fund-raising drive– over six million dollars collected in a few weeks from a population of 3.5 million. (I will refer again to this capacity in a different context below.) The election in September resulted in a decisive defeat of candidates associated with either the Chinese Communist Party or with British colonial authority. The low voter turn-out–under 40%–also belied the colonial government’s claim that “voting is power.” Hong Kong’s citizens, in their rejection of the politics of both the Prime Ministers who met in Beijing, and in their identification with some idea of “Chineseness,” thus enacted the ambiguity of the soon-to-be-ex-colony and international city.

     

    This ambiguity is symptomatic of the ambiguities which surface whenever “China” is enacted in contemporary discursive formations. It is from within this kind of ambiguity that Rey Chow writes. Rey Chow is originally from Hong Kong and is now Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota. Her own situation–“a ‘Westernized’ Chinese woman who spent most of her formative years in a British colony and then in the United States” (xv)–informs her writing in the deepest way, a writing whose project is “an attempt to hold onto an experience whose marginality is embedded in the history of imperialism, a history that includes precisely the ‘opening up’ of Chinese history and culture for ‘objective’ and ‘neutral’ academic research that thrives by suppressing its own conditions of possibility” (xvii). She is the only theoretically engaged scholar to have published widely on China in recent years in journals outside the East Asian Studies field, in writings on modern Chinese literature, Chinese and Western film, the Tiananmen Square massacre, and Chinese popular music. Her book is a multiple interrogation: of theory’s resistance to China, of the China field’s resistance to theory, and of the location of “those ethnic peoples whose entry into culture is, precisely because of the history of Western imperialism, already ‘Westernized’” (xi) within the larger critique of Western cultural and discursive hegemony.

     

    Her project is thus allied with much recent work in post-colonial theory and subaltern studies. It raises familiar questions: Whose history is China’s? Who speaks it, and to whom? In what language? Do abstractions like “human rights”–and by analogical extension, Theory in general, posit their own rights of extraterritoriality? Work in cultural studies and post-colonial theory that proceeds from a critique of foundationalism and Western hegemony–political, theoretical, discursive, and subjective–naturally centers largely on particular locations where Western hegemony was and is most conspicuously practiced. This re-turning of theory has been situated in important work on and from Latin America, South Asia, Africa, and in minority cultures in Britain, Europe, and the United States. China, however, is curiously under- represented–in theoretical formations and as a site for application of theoretical constructs. Japan, whose status vis-a-vis the West precludes many of the analogical possibilities present in the areas above, has recently been constructed both in theoretical and popular discourse as a primary site of the postmodern (see, for example, Postmodernism and Japan , edited by Masao Miyoshi and H.D. Harootunian. Durham: Duke University Press, 1989), and thus has a certain discursive prominence. Not so, China. Is this simply because, quoting George Bush, “China is different”?

     

    Edward Said’s Orientalism, which, based on the monumental binarism of West and Other, would seem to brook no geographical limitation, is restricted in scope to “the Anglo-French-American experience of Arabs and Islam” Orientalism 17): it eliminates a large part of the Orient–India, Japan, China, and other sections of the Far East–not because these regions were not important (they obviously have been) but because one could discuss Europe’s experience of the Near Orient, or of Islam, apart from its experience of the Far Orient (17). The shift within this sentence from “Far East” to “Far Orient” underscores the merely practical character of the limitation. It is implied that China could have been in this book had the book been longer. There is, however, a political and strategic character to his limitation of the discussion of the West to Britain, France, and the USA: it seemed inescapably true not only that Britain and France were the pioneer nations in the Orient and in Oriental studies, but that these vanguard positions were held by virtue of the two greatest colonial networks in pre-twentieth-century history; the American Oriental position since World War II has fit–I think, quite self-consciously–in the places excavated by the two earlier European powers (17). The West is thus the colonizing West.

     

    One of the most important critiques of Said’s binarism comes from Homi Bhabha, who faults the monolithic character of colonial power as represented in Orientalism: “There is always, in Said, the suggestion that colonial power is possessed entirely by the colonizer, which is a historical and theoretical simplification” (Bhabha 200). Bhabha’s work, strongly informed, like Rey Chow’s, by psychoanalytic theory, posits a multiplicity of strategies by which colonial discourse is seen as a site of anxiety, slippage, displacement, and conflict. Yet Bhabha, like Said, takes as his object a specifically colonial discourse– a discourse that by its very nature functions concurrently in representation and administration. The Law of the Colonizer is the Law of the Father. Bhabha’s figures of resistance–mimicry, hybridity, and other effects that derive from the psychoanalysis of colonial discourse, are a re-turning of this Law. He is able to accomplish this because the Law functions not simply on the level of a discursive structure, but in the specific practices of colonial administration.

     

    One conceivable location of the “China difference” is in the fact that, with the significant exception of Hong Kong and adjacent territories, China was never a Western colony. (Japanese colonization of China, which began with Taiwan in 1895, is a separate issue.) Western countries had “concessions” and monopoly rights in certain regions, and the British defeat of China in the Opium Wars, left the Qing dynasty government with limited ability to control its tariff and duty structures and other aspects of its economic relations with the West. The unequal treaties forced on China also granted Western missionaries certain inalienable rights to operate without significant governmental interference. But the central functioning of the Law of the Colonizer was not in administration per se, but in extra-territoriality. Extraterritoriality, whereby a foreign national in China was subject only to the law of his/her native country, has the effect of rendering problematic Bhabha’s “repertoire of conflictual positions that constitute the subject in colonial discourse” (204).

     

    The Law of the Colonizer functions within the specific legal practice of colonial administration to underscore the verticality of domination. This vertical structure lends itself quite easily to Bhabha’s psychoanalytic framework. Crude parallels between colonial administrative structures and the psyche–the imperial super-ego and the native id– suggest one framing of the colonial subject’s contested terrain. Extraterritoriality’s positioning of two legal systems side-by-side, however, resists the strict simple verticality of the oppressor and the repressed. The spatializing project implicit in the term “extraterritoriality” effected a displacement of China’s legal and administrative structures into a position alongside the West’s, notwithstanding the structures of domination that marked China’s role in the global capitalist economy. Legally and administratively, China was not a colony, but it was hardly “China” either. “The empire speaks back” is one way of representing post-colonial discourse psychoanalytically as the “return of the repressed”; China’s horizontal displacement, figured in extraterritoriality, allows for a more complete “othering,” one which might help explain the continued absence of China in post-colonial theorizing and the non-allegorizability of China’s modern history.

     

    Extraterritoriality was a central constitutive element of China’s experience of imperialism. The memory of extraterritoriality can help to explain much in recent history, including the Sino-Soviet split in the 1960s, the character of the negotiations over Hong Kong and the future of its political system after 1997, PM Li Peng’s resistance to admonitions about human rights, and government outrage over foreign journalists’ interference in China’s internal affairs during the 1989 student movement. The applicability of “Western” theoretical formulations or “Western feminism” to analyses of Chinese social and cultural formations is a subject of current debate in Chinese studies in China and in the West, and one cannot help but feel the traces of the extraterritorial in that debate as well. Extraterritoriality, marking China’s status as a “semi-colony” (the term used in official PRC historiography) is one potential marking of China’s difference. And with its long history of a literati-dominated elite bureaucratic culture, with its status as the victim primarily of Japanese rather than of Western military aggression in the twentieth century, and as the site of the world’s second major successful communist revolution, China would indeed resist many of the paradigms developed in cultural studies and post-colonial theoretical discourse.

     

    My articulation of these markings of China’s difference, however, is not the same as a claim for a Chinese exceptionalism. Rather, it is an attempt to account for the absence of China in post-colonial theory, which is marked by its origins in the study of specific and localized colonial practices. Chow repeatedly emphasizes the point that Westernization is the materiality of Chinese modernity. The physical experience of modernity, and the terrible brutality that the West’s Othering always implies, is felt by the “semi-colonized” subject as acutely as by the colonized. And as can be demonstrated in the case of Hong Kong, the full experience of colonialism is not at all foreign to many Chinese. The polemical import of Chow’s book, indeed, is targeted far less on the absence of China in theory than on the dangers of proceeding from a positing of China’s exclusivity.

     

    Chow’s project here is the predicament of a Chinese subjectivity whose entry into culture is always already Westernized. She explores this in readings of modern literature, and in her conception of the figure of the “ethnic spectator,” a position central to the book’s argument, and one to whose significance I will return later. The Westernized Chinese subject, though, is not only the content of the book, but Chow herself. Her analytical and political project is always presenced in large part as the enactment of that particular subject position. In a brilliant dialectical reading of theories of masochism, which she sees as constitutive of the Chinese reading of modernity, she traces the structure of masochism from Freud’s accordance of ontological primacy to sadism over masochism, through Laplanche’s revision which situates sadism as always belatedly constructed within masochism, to Deleuze’s location of masochism in the preoedipal, ideal fusion with the mother, and finally uses Laplanche again, on Deleuze this time, to free the mother from her Deleuzian immobility and construct her as passive and active simultaneously, while remaining within the Deleuzian maternally operated framework. Chow’s figuration of masochism has topical application in her discussion of literary tropes of sentimentality and self-sacrifice. But it also is an enactment of resistance to the denial of the complexity of Chinese subjectivity.

     

    For Chow’s entry into academic culture is, by virtue of her subject matter, also determined by the institutional character of China studies, which has its own particular set of discursive characteristics and its own historical and ideological determinations. Although her work on psychoanalysis, film theory, “woman,” and subjectivity has much to offer any audience, many in the China field will ask, “But why do you use Western theories to explain China?” Chow’s justifiable antagonism toward nearly all aspects of China studies in the West permeates her book.

     

    One target is Sinology, the location of classicists who combine their adherence both to the philological rigor of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Orientalists and to the conservative textual-verification practices of late Qing dynasty philologists with an Orientalist love for dynastic China and a concomitant disdain for China’s fallen, impure, modern state. Sinology, with its fetishization of “Chineseness,” conspires to deny the materiality of modern China, which, since “Westernized,” cannot be “Chinese.” As an example of this Chow cites the late James J.Y. Liu, who, in Chinese Theories of Literature, refuses to discuss modern literary theory since it has been “dominated by one sort of Western influence or another . . . and [does] not possess the same kind of value and interest as do traditional Chinese theories, which constitute a largely independent source of critical ideas” (Chow 29). Sinologists, self-designated conservators of a vanished great tradition, have an investment in their very marginality, a marginality they try to enforce in their concerted attacks on any incursions of Theory into their domain. Sinology’s ideological character, however, is becoming more and more clear. Although I never cease to be amazed at the readiness of many younger scholars of classical Chinese literature to reproduce Sinology’s hoary ideologies and prejudices, job vacancies in Chinese literature in American Universities have shifted in favor of modern literature in recent years, while many classically trained younger scholars, particularly those who are more engaged with theory, have branched out into modern literary or cultural studies. What has significantly altered the study of pre-modern China in recent years, though, particularly in the field of history, has been social science methodology. Demographic, economic, and data-driven social history are the latest transformative “advances” in the pre-modern field.

     

    The hegemony of social sciences in the China field, particularly in studies of modern China, is another instance for Chow of Western discursive dominance. Social science’s domination of the field is evident in the most material ways–in publications like the Journal of Asian Studies, in research and conference funding, and in the preponderance of social science at annual meetings of the Association for Asian Studies. Social science’s “cognitive hegemony of information” serves to colonize all of modern China. This is even witnessed in most studies of modern literature, which is read primarily for its “information,” and thus for its instrumental value. The second chapter of Chow’s book, “Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies: An Exercise in Popular Readings,” is a revisionist account of late Imperial and early Republican melodramatic fiction, which, along with translations from Western literature, was the most popular literature of its time. It is part of an important re-reading of the whole project of modern fiction, which I will discuss further below. Part of her project is to recuperate the study of “Butterfly literature” from its earlier Western defenders, who saw in it “unmediated access to the views of the non-elite” (quoted in Chow, 48). This sociological approach to popular fiction is condemned as imperialistic, because in an apparently well-intentioned attempt to salvage canonically obscure materials, the historian seems only to have neutralized those materials for the extension of that empire called “knowledge,” which is forever elaborated with different “national” differences. This means that the specificities of a complex cultural form would always be domesticated as merely “useful” by a method that claims to be scientifically objective simply because it is backed up by “factual” data (48- 49). The colonization of modern Chinese literature by valorizations of “knowledge” and instrumentality is particularly lamentable, because it is only through a consideration of language and representation that instrumentality can be problematized.

     

    Another critique within the China field of the hegemony of Western discourse can be found in the decentering of Western feminism and the concomitant positioning of a “Chinese feminism” conceptualized around a notion of female identity rooted in Chinese culture. Chow cites a Western scholar who, in her work on the modern female author Ding Ling, disparages Ding Ling’s earlier fiction’s concerns with a bourgeois, Westernized feminism centered on issues of sexuality, in favor of later work, marked more clearly by nationalist and revolutionary goals and privileging a more “Chinese” feminism centered on political sisterhood and kinship. The danger here is of course that any positioning of the category “Chinese women” as a site of political agency will preclude the emergence of women on their own terms. The repression of the sexual, which is as analyzable in Ding Ling’s later work as in her earlier overt treatments, has the same consequences as the de-privileging of psychoanalysis as a tool for the analysis of Chinese modernity: “a non-West that is deprived of fantasy, desires, and contradictory emotions” (xiii).

     

    Chow’s multiple interventions in the West’s discursive construction of “China” or “Chineseness” serve to problematize “China” as a determinable category, and show the consequences of “the China difference,” which, whether posited from a nostalgic margin, an area of nationally defined “knowledge,” or a progressive-minded though essentializing critique of Western discursive hegemony, is always reducible to a gesture of denial. Those in the West who defend China against the assault of “Western theory” are inveighing against theory’s extraterritoriality. Within the curious logic of extraterritoriality, however, to invoke it is to inscribe it.

     

    By titling her book “Woman…” rather than “Chinese women,” Chow is already signaling her rejection of other totalizing categories. It is in this figure of Woman that her book’s most productive and enabling interventions lie. That Chow is talking about “woman” not as a category but as a strategic constitution of subjectivity is evident in her first chapter’s lengthy analysis of Bertolucci’s film, The Last Emperor, whose subject is the “feminized” emperor Pu Yi. In a re-working of Laura Mulvey’s classic essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Chow extend[s] the interpretation of image-as-woman to image-as-feminized space, which can be occupied by a main character, Pu Yi, as much as by a woman. Once this is done, “femininity” as a category is freed up to include fictional constructs that may not be “women” but that occupy a passive position in regard to the controlling symbolic (18). Bertolucci’s feminizing gaze accords with his “love” for Chinese civilization, a love based on a positing of absolute difference. For Bertolucci, the Chinese people exist “before consumerism, before something that happened in the West” (quoted in Chow, 4). Bertolucci’s admiration for “Chinese passivity” partakes of the same allochronism. Chinese are passive because, being so intelligent and sophisticated by nature, they have no need for macho virility. In this context of her discussion of Bertolucci, Chow also demonstrates how Julia Kristeva, in About Chinese Women, otherizes and feminizes China in the service of her challenge to Western metaphysics. It would be inappropriate, however, to condemn Bertolucci and Kristeva for their mere sympathetic Orientalism. Kristeva’s China, an instrument in a critique of the West, is thus subsumed under the West in an instancing of the power relationship her project purports to condemn.

     

    Chow operates from the notion of gender as the structuring of relations of power. The discursive prominence of the figure of “woman” in Chinese modernist writings, a modernity whose materiality is Westernization, is thus no surprise. Yu Dafu’s “Sinking,” published in 1921, was one of the most popular short stories of the decade. Its hero, an alienated, Romantic aesthete studying in Japan, mourns for weak, humiliated, distant China “like a husband mourning the death of a young wife” (quoted in Chow, 141). Impotent with Japanese women, ashamed of his voyeurism and masturbation, the hero longs for a self-strengthening through a strong China. Chow identifies the hero’s masochistic nationalism as being implicated in an ever-shifting array of psychic positionings. “China” is the mother to whose strength the hero would like to submit, but is also identified as object of desire, and thus with the actual women in whose presence our hero is impotent. The idealization of woman in Yu Dafu’s story is “at once active, passive, longing, and resentful–also at once masculine, feminized, and infantile” (144).

     

    Chow’s consideration of Yu Dafu’s story in her book’s final chapter, “Loving Women: Masochism, Fantasy, and the Idealization of the Mother,” is one of three readings of stories by male writers who share an idealist yearning for fusion with the mother, but in resorting to varied strategies of disavowal or dissociation, enact the masculinist fetishization project which divides woman into the familial and revered or the exciting and degraded. The cogency of this structure of masochism and fetishization is supported by the notion of feminine self-sacrifice, which is also the major support of “traditional” Chinese culture. This masculine idealism, then, though finding affecting representations in the figures of women–society’s most oppressed–is both a reading and a re-enactment of the primacy of female self-sacrifice. In readings of two female authors, Bing Xin and Ding Ling, Chow sees, through Kaja Silverman’s elaboration of the negative Oedipus complex, a way to position a masochistic identification with the mother similar to Yu Dafu’s, but without the idealism. In reading the stories themselves, a reader, unless she has a taste for bourgeois sentimental excess, would find Chow’s claim somewhat extravagant. It is precisely the ideological character of “great” literature, though, that is deconstructed through Chow’s readings of these two writers, whose personal and social limits are precisely what give rise to their sentimental excesses.

     

    Part of Chow’s re-reading of Bing Xin’s and Ding Ling’s stories is predicated on her positioning of reading. The phrase “loving women,” from her chapter title, is understood, through this positioning of a feminized reading, as a means to apprehend the complexities of identification and desire that center on the social demand for women’s self-sacrifice; but it also presents the possibility for an alternative aesthetic that is based on a sympathetic feminine interlocutor/spectator/reader (169). It is ultimately on the enabling and subjectivity-constitutive politics of reading and spectatorship that Chow’s project is centered. These politics are implicated in the objects of her analysis and in the enactment of subjectivity which her analysis performs. They are developed most fully in the book’s first chapter, “Seeing Modern China: Toward a Theory of Ethnic Spectatorship.” Should her book gain the wide audience outside the China field which it deserves, it will probably be due in large part to her elaboration of the theory of ethnic spectatorship.

     

    The Westernized ethnic subject’s “givenness” is constituted in her position in world history and in her entry into “culture.” Writing of The Last Emperor, but in a language applicable to all of Chow’s readings, she states the problematic of analyzing The Last Emperor for a Chinese audience; the question is how “history” should be reintroduced materially, as a specific way of reading–not reading “reality” as such but cultural artifacts such as film and narratives. The task involves not only the formalist analysis of the producing apparatus. It also involves re- materializing such formalist analysis with a pregazing–the “givenness” of subjectivity–that has always already begun (19). The Last Emperor was tremendously popular among Chinese audiences. It might be tempting to attribute this popularity to a false consciousness. The global political economy of the entertainment industry is such that only with Hollywood’s backing can such lavish spectacles be produced. The popularity of The Last Emperor among Chinese audiences could then be read as another instancing of domination–of the power of the spectacle to authorize an othering in which even the “others” are passively complicit. Yet just as Teresa de Lauretis challenged Mulvey’s dichotomizing of the masculine gaze and feminine spectacle through her elaboration of female spectatorship, Chow similarly problematizes the Chinese reception of The Last Emperor.

     

    Her argument for an ethnic spectatorship draws largely on Teresa de Lauretis’s Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema. It retains the strategic value of Mulvey, and draws on a particularly Althusserian reading of Kaja Silverman’s notion of “suture.” It is an argument far too complex to be adequately summarizable, but its contours can be indicated in Chow’s analysis of her mother’s reaction to The Last Emperor: “It is remarkable that a foreign devil should be able to make a film like this about China. I’d say, he did a good job!” (24). Chow’s mother identifies unproblematically with the film’s narrative movement (recalling de Lauretis’s positioning of woman as the figure of narrative movement) even while she, in the phrase “foreign devil,” resists the structures of domination that frame its production. Her play of illusion, which, according to de Lauretis, enables spectatorship to serve as a site for productive relationships, is the site of “a desire to be there, in the film” (25), in all of Imperial China’s resplendent glory, in the unrecoverable state prior to dismemberment. The imaginary nationalism with which Chow’s mother identifies with Bertolucci’s spectacle is the very condition of the always belatedly recognized subjectivity of the Westernized Chinese subject.

     

    In her discussion of ethnic spectatorship, Chow refers to the critic C.T. Hsia’s characterization of modern Chinese literature’s “obsession with China.” For Hsia, until recently the single most prominent scholar of Chinese fiction in the West, this is a marking of its parochialness. For Chow, it is the very result of “the experience of ‘dismemberment’ (or ‘castration’) [which] can be used to describe what we commonly refer to as ‘Westernization’ or ‘modernization’” (26). Chow’s reading of modern Chinese literature through the figure of “woman,” and her attention to the empowering potential of the ethnic spectator, leads to a major re-casting of modern Chinese literary history. The May Fourth Movement, the student-led protest in 1919 against Japanese Imperialism and the Chinese government’s collaborationism, which shortly afterward came to stand for a vast array of socially and culturally progressive reform movements, is the defining monument of Chinese literary modernity. This view is universal in Chinese studies, and is held equally strongly in Hong Kong, Chinese, Taiwanese, and Western academies.

     

    China’s modernist canon, though, was very much a programmatic affair. It was fashioned throughout the twenties in literary societies, of which there were hundreds, in manifestoes prescribing form, content, voice, grammar, person . . . , in seemingly endless debates. Chow reads representatives of the modernist canon–Ba Jin, Lu Xun, and Mao Dun–through Butterfly literature, which she recuperates through the strategic operation of the figure of “woman.” Butterfly literature is the repressed of modern Chinese literature, for a variety of reasons. Its melodrama and overt sentimentality, and consequent huge popularity, relegate it to the uncanonizable. As a genre that, in language, content, and style has significant continuities with “pre-modern” popular fiction, it threatens the rigid break between “modern” and “pre-modern” that was the basis of the May Fourth modernizers’ self-conception and on which China studies’ division of labor depends. Chow demonstrates through several representative readings that Butterfly literature indeed constituted a “reading” of Chinese modern society and ideologies. Butterfly literature’s fragmentary and parodic character–its wild improbabilities of plot, its near contemporaneous salaciousness and moral didacticism, are read by critics as signs of its inferiority: Within the hierarchy of Chinese letters, Butterfly literature thus occupies a feminized position that carries with it the ironies of all feminized positions. While in its debased form it reveals the limits of the society that produces it, it is at the same time devalued by that society as false and deluded…. The visible “crudities” of Butterfly literature constitute a space in which the parodic function of literature is not smoothed away but instead serves to reveal the contradictions of modern Chinese society in a disturbingly “distasteful” manner (55).

     

    Although she finds in the reading practices opened up by Butterfly literature an empowering critique, the more self-avowedly critical and reformist May Fourth writers, precisely through their overt self- positioning, offer the reader more limited possibilities. She demonstrates convincingly how two central platforms of May Fourth literature–its nationalism and the new nation’s requirements of a national literature–served in to establish a continuity between May Fourth writers and the classical literati elite. The performance of a national literature was in a sense a structural replacement for the imperial examination system, which gave classical scholars their ruling positions. The “nation” did not have the same problematics for classical literati as it did for modern intellectuals, though. Always constructed in the belated context of Westernization, where a modern nation was seen as requiring a modern literature, and where a modern literature depended on access to the “real,” and where the “real” was programmatically located in “inner life” (hence the profusion of autobiographical and confessional forms), May Fourth literature always came up against the uncommensurability of subject and nation. How can writing both determine membership in the literati class and serve the revolution? Writing itself is thus always ironic, and the deconstruction to which it lends itself also invites deconstruction of its potential for subversion.

     

    The most relentless self-deconstructions in the May Fourth canon are found in the short stories of Lu Xun. In his stories there are no intellectual heroes; there are no proletarians or peasants who think in the language of educated Chinese. There is a constant presencing of the complicity with social injustice that is implicit in both the practice of representation and the position of the spectator. For Chow, this ironic horizon marks the intellectual impasse of all of May Fourth writing, though in no other writer is it recognized so explicitly. Her re-writing of modern literary history, where the failures and closures of May Fourth writers are judged in part against the strategic possibilities opened up to the reader of popular melodrama, is an important enabling tactic. I wonder, though, how Chow would read Lu Xun’s activities during the last few years of his life, after a decisive move to the left and a total commitment to the proletarianization of literature, a move which led to his canonization in the PRC.

     

    One aspect of China conspicuously absent in Chow’s book is the 1949 revolution. Since one could view this revolution as one of twentieth-century Western hegemony’s most resounding defeats, it is an absence not without significance. I understand that it is under the Western banner of “revolutionary China” that China’s “difference” continues to be positioned in some quarters, and am sympathetic with Chow’s analysis which shows how that particular positing of China’s exclusivity replays old patterns of domination and denial. Her book is an extremely important attack on the destructiveness inherent in that othering, which not only structures “China studies” in the West, but which was the material condition of Chow’s own upbringing in colonial Hong Kong. But while Chow was being educated in Hong Kong in the late 1960s, many of her coevals across the border in China were throwing their teachers out of windows, burning books, setting up schools for peasants in the remote countryside, and dying for their faith in the revolution. It is important not to deny her experience, but neither should we deny theirs. If Westernization is the materiality of Chinese modernity, of what is revolution the materiality? It might be interesting to follow Chow’s recuperation of Butterfly literature, the most popular literature of China’s early twentieth-century modernity, with a recuperative exploration of the psychic life of the most poplular cultural productions of the late 1960s–revolutionary operas like The Red Detachment of Women, The White-Haired Girl, or Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy.

     

    It was indeed within the context of China’s modernization in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that categories like “China,” “the nation,” “the West,” and “woman” become problematized for the first time. This period is also the point at which China studies in the West divides China into “modern” and “pre-modern,” with the consequences Chow documents so forcefully. Chow’s book centers on that moment and its particular consequences, and I am not faulting her for failure of coverage. I cannot help feeling, though, that the revolution’s absence marks a particular strategic choice. Her reading of Butterfly literature, a sophisticated and empowering reading, resonates with the tendency in many current studies of the productive possibilities inherent in the reception of popular culture to locate a capacity for resistance-in-givenness in popular strategies of appropriation of mass culture. Here in the New World Order, perhaps one should be grateful for resistance where one can find it. It is the smallness of this resistance’s social scale, though, that leaves me sometimes pessimistic. Is revolution really unimaginable after Tiananmen Square, Eastern Europe, and 1991 Moscow? Given the state of many of the West’s Others, I hope not. Events in China over the last fifteen years should not cause us to forget China’s revolution, for the 1949 revolution was not just a marking of the China difference. It was also the hope of a global possibility.

     

    Works Cited

     

    • Bhabha, Homi. “Difference, Discrimination, and the Discourse of Colonialism.” The Politics of Theory. Ed. Francis Barker, et al. Colchester: U of Essex P, 1983.
    • Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon, 1978.

     

  • BOOK REVIEW OF: Past The Last Post

    Roger Berger

    Department of English
    Witchita State University
    <Berger@twsuvm>

     

    Adam, Ian, and Helen Tiffin, eds. Past the Last Post: Theorizing Post-Colonialism and Post-Modernism. Calgary: U Calgary P, 1990.

     

    In a recent review in Transition 53 of Patrick Brantlinger’s Crusoe’s Footprints: Cultural Studies in Britain and America, Benita Parry distinguishes two methodologies–the post-colonial and the post-modern –that currently dominate literary and cultural theorization. On one side, she asserts, are those who recognize that texts are “involved necessarily in the making of cultural meanings which are always, finally, political meanings,” but who insist that “culture does not (cannot) transcend the material forces and relations of production” and that texts are “inseparable from the conditions of their production and reception in history”; on the other side are those who (in Stuart Hall’s phrase) would want to expand the territorial claims of the discursive infinitely, and therefore privilege textual strategems as in and of themselves the location of gathering points for solidarity.1 It is difficult to accept–and many of the essays in the volume under review here consider this fundamental problem–that a connection can be made between these two “posts.”

     

    To a degree, of course, terminological imprecision makes difficult such a project. Post-modernism, for instance, has been variously troped as “hyperreal,” “excremental,” “inflationary,” “wilfully contradictory,” skeptical of all metanarratives yet located in a “perpetual present”–the contradictory nature of which seems to define the post-modern itself. Post-modernism is simultaneously (or variously) a textual practice (often oppositional, sometimes not), a subcultural style or fashion, a definition of western, postindustrial culture (Gibson’s “the matrix”), and the emergent or always already dominant global culture. At the same time, post-colonialism is simultaneously (or variously) a geographical site, an existential condition, a political reality, a textual practice, and the emergent or dominant global culture (or counter-culture). For me, the post-colonial and the post-modern can be heuristically understood as metonyms for larger, irreconcilable positions, as Parry suggests. On the one side, there is a limit to textuality–call it Raymond Williams’s sense of “lived” experience; on the other, an infinite textuality, Derrida’s “there is nothing outside the text,” in which subjectivity is a textual matter–pain and oppression merely tropes. The question thus is clear: is there any formal or political relationship between post- modernism and post-colonialism or is post-modernism yet once more instance of colonization–a contemporary moment of western textual imperialism? That is, what does, say, the collapse of critical space between the western media spectacle and the production of a post-modern subjectivity have to do with the the lived realities of oppression in the dominated world–with the lack of health care, food, electricity, education and an abundance of western appropriation of labor, raw materials, and imposition of a cultural imperialism?

     

    In Past the Last Post: Theorizing Post-Colonialism and Post-modernism,” Ian Adam and Helen Tiffin assemble an impressive, international cadre of theorists who offer daring and inventive (though on occasion irrelevant or incomprehensible) responses to these questions. These essays, as Helen Tiffin suggests in her introduction, “seek to characterise post-modernist and post-colonial discourses in relation to each other, and to chart their intersecting and diverging trajectories” (vii). To that end, the anthology succeeds brilliantly: it articulates in many of the essays resonant homologies that suggest the possibility of a strategic alliance between post-modern and post-colonial discursive strategies.

     

    Yet, after completing this inaugural volume addressing these two salient cultural and literary theories, I am left with a sense of the forced and even–from a political perspective–counter-productive nature of the project. That is, this volume, much like another project that attempts to reconcile earlier manifestations of the post-colonial and the post-modern, Michael Ryan’s interesting though often plodding Marxism and Deconstruction: A Critical Articulation, expends massive amounts of critical energy with little to offer for ongoing oppositional and post-colonial struggles. In many of the essays, theorists admit the problematic nature of the project–the fundamental incompatibility of post-modernist textuality and the lived realities of the post-colonial (or really, neo-colonial) experience. At the same time, however, most of the essays assert that useful parallels between post-colonialism and post-modernism can be identified. Various images are deployed to suggest this: “conjunctions of concern” (Hutcheon), “a working alliance” (Huggan), “a rapprochement” (Carusi), “contamination” (Brydon), and so on between oppositional discursive strategies–and they thus derive their conclusions from the pragmatic political principle that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Without a doubt, many oppositional features of post-modernism resemble those of post-colonialism. However, my sense–at least at the current historical moment–is that while many of the parallel elements have theoretical valence, the telos of each project is so fundamentally different that the parallels are accidental rather than significant. As Diana Brydon suggests, at the end of the collection, in something of a “minority” report, “When directed against the Western canon, post-modernist techniques of intertextuality, parody, and literary borrowing may appear radical and even potentially revolutionary. When directed against native myths and stories, these same techniques would seem to repeat the imperialist history of plunder and theft” (195-196). Ultimately, it must be noted, post-modernism would seem to need post-colonialism far more than post-colonialism needs post-modernism; and thus, once again, after another “treaty,” the West (rather than its Others) ends up with far more in the exchange.

     

    The intellectual heart of this project in this anthology may be located in three essays–Stephen Slemon’s “Modernism’s Last Post,” Ian Adam’s “Breaking the Chain: Anti-Saussurean Resistance in Birney, Carey and C.S. Pierce,” and Linda Hutcheon’s “‘Circling the Downspout of Empire’”–which are strategically positioned near the beginning, middle and end of the collection. Slemon argues, for example, that the “disidentificatory reiteration across the various national post-colonial literatures” (4)–that is, the post-colonial “rewriting the canonical ‘master texts’ of Europe” (4) and tropic appropriation of Eurocentric history (e.g., in the “plagiarizing” strategems of Yambo Oulogeum)–strongly resembles Linda Hutcheon’s notion of a post-modern “intertextual parody.” He does admit to some fundamental problems with the connection between post-modernism and post- colonialism–among them the tendency of “Western post-modernist readings” to “so overvalue the anti-referential or deconstructive energetics of post-colonial texts that they efface the important recuperative work that is also going on within them” (7) and “the universalizing, assimilative impulse . . . of post-modernism” that appears to continue “a politics of colonialist control” (9). However, Slemon ends his essay with a hopeful vision: in post-modernism’s contradictory need to appropriate and exclude post-colonialism, “there could perhaps reside a fissuring energy which could lay the foundation for a radical change of tenor within the post-modern debate” (9). Slemon’s mixed metaphor here could perhaps be understood as a post-modern ironic discursive strategy, but it seems to reveal, as I shall presently suggest, the fundamental irreconcilability of post-modernism and post-colonialism. Linda Hutcheon, similarly, in “‘Circling the Downspout of Empire,’” points out the “considerable overlap” in the “concerns” of post-colonialism and post-modernism (168). The deployment of “magic realism,” subversions of Eurocentric master narratives (historical and literary), and, above all, the strategic use of “irony as a doubled or split discourse” (170) constitute points of convergence. I need to say that these attempts to contribute to a poetics of resistance literature–what Chidi Amuta in A Theory of African Literature terms a “poetics of the oppressed”–without question offer imperatives for examining this collection.

     

    Localized applications of this theory may be found in Simon Gikandi’s excellent “Narration in the Post-Colonial Moment: Merle Hodge’s Crick Crack Monkey” and Annamaria Carusi’s interesting “Post, Post and Post. Or, Where is South African Literature in All This?” These essays argue that that post-colonial literature often finds in formal (post-modern) strategies a means of rupturing the discourse of imperialism. Gikandi asserts that while many Caribbean women writers–often excluded from the canon of West Indian literatures–would seem to oppose the project of post-modernism, nevertheless “they increasingly fall back on post-modernist narrative strategies–such as temporal fragmentation, intertextuality, parody and doubling” (14)–to contest both the imperial narrative and the modernist impulses of male Caribbean writers. To that end, Gikandi explains, Merle Hodge’s Crick Crack Monkey both recovers a voice of difference long suppressed by the colonial planatation society and combines the creative aspects of “creole and colonial cultures as opposed sites of cultural production” (19). Carusi argues that both poststructuralism and resistance literature–at least within the oppressive context of apartheid South Africa–have encountered limits of theoretical achievement: poststructuralism with its “affirmation of difference as pure negativity” (103) cannot sever its discursive connection with Western textuality, while the South African literature of liberation privileges a dead-end humanist subject, discursively sutured into an imperialist subjectivity. She sees a way out of this paralyzing aporia in a “radical heterogeneity” (of the Foucauldian variety) that permits political agency without reinstalling “positivity” and abandoning difference. Carusi ultimately seeks “a rapprochement” between post-modernism and post-colonialism in which the subject–what she terms “a discursive instance”–is “embedded in a socio-historical configuration” (104). “The heterogeneity,” she writes, would thus be a difference that does make a difference, but it is not, for all that, a difference that can or should be named. The Other, theorized from a post-structuralist perspective (and at present time we have no viable alternative), is irretrievable, unlocatable, refractory and by definition unnameable; it is not there as a positivity, but as an effect. (104)

     

    Yet it is precisely at points such as this one that a very real political anxiety about the theoretical aims of post-modernism manifests itself. Indeed, these theorists–apprehensive about re-enacting the epistemic violence and ethnographic appropriation accompanying the colonial project– appear inordinately defensive about the connection between post-coloniality and post-modernity. Consider, for example, Annamaria Carusi’s rejection of a political critique concerning the irrelevancies of a theoretical intervention in the post-colonial:

     

    There are many who will point out that what I have said, and what anything theory may say to the struggle against apartheid, has nothing to do with people living in the squatter camps, or under detention without trial. This argument, arising from the political urgency of opposition, is however, specious.(105)

     

    To support her position, Carusi (equally speciously) offers Foucault’s notion of the circularity of power, but earlier she asserts “the central position of cultural production in the attainment” by “colonized or subjugated people [of] an identity and . . . self- determination” (96). It is difficult, however, to reconcile her privileging at this moment a post-colonial identity with her later insistence on the impossibility of naming a post-colonial subjectivity. Even more telling, of course, is Carusi’s too quick dismissal of what seems an inconvenient political critique. As Diana Brydon points out, “Literature cannot be confused with social action” (196). Or at least post-modern literature cannot be understood as exemplifying by itself a fundamental threat to the hegemony of apartheid. Carusi indeed suggests that in South Africa “almost every other path [other than the cultural] of resistance and reconstruction is criminalized” (96). Even given its racist pathology, the criminal apartheid state understands difference between real and meaningless threats to its power.

     

    A related political problem concerns Slemon’s relocation of post-colonialism in the West, as part of Western discourse, as he writes:

     

    The concept [post-colonialism] proves most useful not when it is used synonymously with a post-independence historical period in once-colonized nations but rather when it locates a specifically anti- or post-colonial discursive purchase in culture, one which begins in the moment that colonial power inscribes itself onto the body and space of its Others and which continues as an often occulted tradition into the modern theatre of neo-colonialist international relations. (3)

     

    Slemon, who in many ways is not wholly sympathetic with the project of post-modernity, nonetheless conveniently redefines post-colonialism not as an actual, locatable activity but as a Western discursive practice. Agency is given wholly over to the colonizers who initiate in essence not only the colonial project but also the post-colonial one. All too often in this collection post-colonialism is understood in Western terms, perhaps unintentionally incorporating into an entirely Western drama the everyday struggles of dominated people to free themselves.

     

    The best–most daring and oppositional–essay in the collection is Hena Maes-Jelinek’s “‘Numinous Proportions’: Wilson Harris’s Alternative to All Posts.” Harris, Maes-Jelinek suggests, rejects for the most part both post-colonial and post-modern practice –the first for its adoption of a realistic textuality, the second for its nihilistic construction of textuality. Harris imagines, according to Maes-Jelinek, an affirmative, cross-cultural (emphatically not multi-cultural) “web of space,” a site of creative engagement with the past, colonialism and language, a site not of difference but of convergence. Harris’s project thus invents a third way rather than effecting any kind of synthesis between post-colonialism and post-modernism.

     

    In addition, any review of this collection must acknowledge the compelling, though (in terms of the stated project of this anthology) misplaced, essays by Simon During and John Frow. During’s “Waiting for the Post: Some Relations Between Modernity, Colonization, and Writing” and Frow’s misnamed “What Was Post- Modernism?” both attempt to open a theoretical space in which a discussion of the interrelationship between post-colonialism and post-modernism might be initiated, but ultimately their essays would seem better located in a discussion of modernism and colonialism.

     

    In the “final” analysis, it is difficult to know if this collection represents a milestone or a tombstone (a postmortem) for the project. Knowing the tendency of the Western academy to appropriate any form of knowledge or human agency–especially in Said’s sense of travelling theory: to remove a revolutionary, disruptive theory from its historical context and thus domesticate it–one would expect any number of future volumes of this sort. Yet I think that the very considerable analytical skills of these theorists would be better deployed on behalf of the post-colonial project, making use of whatever theoretical strategies (post-modern or otherwise) that seem helpful in the ongoing struggle against domination and neo-colonialism. (Tiffin’s work, in conjunction with Bill Ashcroft and Gareth Griffiths in The Empire Writes Back [London: Routledge, 1989], seems much more a model in this regard.)

     

    As world history enters into a new and perhaps decisive moment of the colonial encounter, it is imperative that culture workers–particularly those positioned in what Mary Louise Pratt terms the “contact zones” (most of the writers in this collection are located in post-colonial settler colonies: Canada, South Africa, Australia)–clearly align themselves with the wretched of the Earth. Given John Frow’s astute description of the fundamental changes marking modernization and late capitalism (hyperflexible capital being pursued by mass migrations of poor people, as well as the insidious effects of such a situation: totalized mapping of the globe, state intervention on behalf of capital, massive urbanization, the triumph of instrumental reason, and the “secularization and automatization of the spheres of science, art and morality” (140), we need public intellectuals willing to challenge what appears to be heretofore unimaginable domination and human exploitation. Past the Last Post, for all its valuable contributions to a poetics of post-colonial literature, doesn’t appear fully to participate in this great challenge. As Fanon concludes his great anti-colonial manifesto, The Wretched of the Earth,

     

    [I]f we want humanity to advance a step further, if we want to bring it up to a different level than that which Europe has shown it, then we must invent and we must make discoveries. If we wish to live up to our peoples' expectations, we must seek the response elsewhere than in Europe. Moreover, if we wish to reply to the expectations of the people of Europe, it is no good sending them back a reflection, even an ideal reflection, of their society and their thought with which from time to time they feel immeasurably sickened. For Europe, for ourselves, and for humanity, comrades, we must turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man. (315-316)

    Note

     

    1. 44. Parry is not alone in describing the fault lines that have manifested themselves in contemporary political and textual theory: one might also look to Simon During’s important work, “Postmodernism or Postcolonialism” or “Postmodernism or Post-colonialism Today,” Henry Louis Gates’s “Critical Fanonism,” Anthony Appiah’s “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?”, Benita Parry’s own “Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse” or my own “The Return of Fanon: Recent Anglophone Literary Theory” for further elucidation of this current battle of the books.

     

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          Barreca; Gordon and Breach Publishers
8)   _New Left Review_: The Claims of Equality, NLR 190
9)   _Nomad_: An Interdisciplinary Journal of the Humanities,
          Arts, and Sciences
10)  _Representations_
11)  _Studies in Popular Culture_
12)  _Science as Culture_
13)  _Capitalism, Nature, Socialism_: A Journal of Socialist
          Ecology
14)  _Rethinking MARXISM_: A Journal of Economics, Culture, and
          Society
15)  _Communication Theory_: A Journal of the International
          Communication Association
16)  _Public Culture_
17)  _Journal of Beckett Studies_ (New Series) 
18)  _Strategies_: A Journal of Theory, Culture and Politics
19)  _ Theory, Culture and Society_
20)  _Poetics Today_
21)  _Surfaces_, an electronic journal 
22)  _Discourse_, v.15, n.1--Flaunting It: Lesbian and Gay
          Studies
23)  _U.S. Latino Literature_: An Essay and Annotated
          Bibliography; March/Abrazo Press

     Calls for Papers and Participants:

24)  _The Electronic Journal of Communication/La Revue
          Electronique de Communication_--call for papers on
          computer-mediated communication
25)  The Principia Cybernetica Project--a call for papers on
          cybernetic concepts and principles, evolutionary
          philosophy, knowledge development, computer-support
          systems for collaborative theory building
26)  The Disembodied Art Gallery Exhibition, Brighton, England,
          Summer 1992    
27)  Arts and Technology Symposium--a call for compositions,
          presentations, papers and artwork 
28)  ECHT '92, Fourth ACM Conference on Hypertext--a call for
          papers, technical briefings, tutorials, panels,
          demonstrations, videos, and posters on hypertext and
          hypermedia

     Conferences and Societies:

29)  Penn State University Seminar Series, Issues in Criticism.
          Historicisms and Cultural Critique, June 25-30, 1992
30)  Penn State Conference on Rhetoric and Composition, July
          8-11, 1992 
31)  Theory, Culture and Society, 10th Anniversary Conference,
          August 16-19, 1992
32)  Marxism in the New World Order: Crises and Possibilities at
          University of Massachusetts-Amherst, November 12-14,
          1992
33)  Society for the Advancement of Games and Simulations in
          Education and Training and The International Simulation
          and Gaming Association Conference, August 18-21, 1992  

     Networked Discussion Groups:

34)  VIOLEN-L, a networked discussion group for the study of
          violence, human rights, and public policies on violence
35)  SOVHIST, a networked discussion group for the study of
          Soviet history from 1917-1991
36)  AMLIT-L, a networked discussion group for the study of
          American literature 
37)  INMYLIFE, a networked discussion group for the study of
          Beatle era popular culture 

1)--------------------------------------------------------------

                          _CONTENTION_
            Debates in Society, Culture, and Science

     IS:
". . . simply a triumph from cover to cover."
                              *Frederick Crews*

". . . extremely important."
                              *Alberta Arthurs*

". . . the most exciting new journal that I have ever read."
                              *Lynn Hunt*

". . . superb."
                              *Janet Abu-Lughod*

". . . an important, exciting, and very timely project."
                              *Theda Skocpol*

". . . an idea whose time has come."
                              *Robert Brenner*
". . . serious and accessible."
                              *Louise Tilly*

Subscriptions (3 issues) are available to individuals at $25.00
and to institutions at $50.00 (plus $10.00 for foreign surface
postage) from the Journals Division, Indiana University Press,
601 N. Morton, Bloomington, IN 47404.  Phone: 812-855-9449.  Fax:
812-855-7931.

2)--------------------------------------------------------------

                         *_differences_*

             A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies

            Edited by Naomi Schor and Elizabeth Week

                       Volume 3, Number 1
Politics/Power/Culture: Postmodernity & Feminist Political Theory
Edited by Kathy E. Ferguson and Kirstie M. McClure

                       Volume 3, Number 2
            Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities
                  Edited by Teresa de Lauretis

                       Volume 3, Number 3
      Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: Feminism in Colonization
                    Joan W. Scott: Commentary
   Ann-Louise Shapiro: Love Stories: Female Crimes of Passion
                     in Fin-de-siecle Paris.
             Mary Lydon: Calling Yourself a Woman: 
                 Marguerite Yourcenar & Colette.
                Eric O. Clarke: Fetal Attraction:
                Hegel's An-aesthetics of Gender.
           Neil Lazarus: Doubting the New World Order:
       Marxism and the Claims of Postmodern Social Theory.
                Interview with Antoinette Fouque

Subscriptions:  $28 (individuals), $48 (institutions), $10
(foreign surface post).

Order from:  INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS, 601 N. Morton,
Bloomington, IN 47404.  Phone: 812-855-9449; fax: 812-855-7931.

3)--------------------------------------------------------------

                             GENDERS

                       Ann Kibbey, Editor
                 University of Colorado, Boulder

Since 1988, _Genders_ has presented innovative theories of gender
and sexuality in art, literature, history, music, photography,
TV, and film.  Today, _Genders_ continues to publish both new and
known authors whose work reflects an international movement to
redefine the boundaries of traditional doctrines and disciplines.

                      Number 14, Fall 1992
*Lynda Hart*   Karen Finley's Dirty Work: Censorship, Homophobia,
               and the NEA
*Samir Dayal*  The Subaltern Does Not Speak: Mira Nair's _Salaam
               Bombay_ as a Post-Colonial Text
*Silvia Tubert*     How IVF Exploits the Wish to be a Mother: A
                    Psychoanalyst's Account
*Mary A. Favret*    A Woman Writes the Fiction of Science: The
                    Body of _Frankenstein_
*Karen Brennan*     Anais Nin: Author(iz)ing the Erotic Body
*Albaraq Mahbobah*  Reading the Anorexic Maze
*Muriel Dimen*      Theorizing Social Reproduction: On the
               Origins of De-Centered Subjectivity

_Genders_ is published triannually in Spring, Fall, Winter
Single copy rates:  Individual $9, Institution $14
Foreign postage, add $2/copy
Yearly subscription rates: Individual $24, Institution $40
Foreign postage, add $5.50/subscription

               University of Texas Press Journals
                  Box 7819, Austin, Texas 78713

4)--------------------------------------------------------------

_WOMEN'S STUDIES_

edited by *Wendy Martin*

Interdisciplinary and international in scope, the journal
publishes papers from a broad range of fields, including
literature, language, art, and history, as well as political
science, economics, sociology, anthropology, psychology, law and
the sciences

4 issues per volume -- ISSN: 0049-7878
Current subscription: Volume 21 (1992)

For journal prices please contact the publisher.  All prices are
subject to change without notice.  The US dollar price applies in
North America only.

GORDON AND BREACH PUBLISHERS
P.O. Box 786 Cooper Station, New York, NY 10276
US orders: call 1-800-545-8398 * fax 212-645-2459
All other countries contact the UK: call 44 (0734) 568316 * fax
44 (0734) 568211

5)--------------------------------------------------------------

_LIT_
LITERATURE INTERPRETATION THEORY

edited by *Lee A. Jacobus* and *Regina Barreca*

Placing equal emphasis on theoretical and interpretive positions,
_LIT_ offers the best in current literary controversy and debate.

Forthcoming issues focus on Helene Cixous as Critic, the Future
of Marxist Criticism, and the Politics of Popular Fiction.

4 issues per volume -- ISSN: 1043-6928
Current subscription: Volume 4 (1992)

For journal prices please contact the publisher.  All prices are
subject to change without notice.  The US dollar price applies in
North America only.

GORDON AND BREACH PUBLISHERS
P.O. Box 786 Cooper Station, New York, NY 10276
US orders: call 1-800-545-8398 * fax 212-645-2459
All other countries contact the UK: call 44 (0734) 568316 * fax
44 (0734) 568211

6)--------------------------------------------------------------

_CITY IMAGES_
Perspectives from Literature, Philosophy, and Film

edited by *Mary Ann Caws*

Offering glimpses of the city as it appears in films, novels,
photographs, poems, architecture, stagings and journals, _CITY
IMAGES_ collects essays by twenty of today's finest urban
landscape writers.  Among the distinguished contributors are
Christopher Prendergast, Richard Kuhns, Alfred Kazin and Charles
Molesworth.

1991 * Pages: 278
Hardcover * ISBN: 2-88124-426-2   *Price: $42.00
Softcover * ISBN: 2-88124-464-5   *Price: $16.00

Orders for books do not include postage and handling.  All prices
are subject to change without notice.  The US dollar price
applies in North America only.

GORDON AND BREACH PUBLISHERS
P.O. Box 786 Cooper Station, New York, NY 10276
US orders: call 1-800-545-8398 * fax 212-645-2459
All other countries contact the UK: call 44 (0734) 568316 * fax
44 (0734) 568211

7)--------------------------------------------------------------

* * Available--Spring 1992 * *

_New Perspectives on
WOMEN AND COMEDY_

edited by *Regina Barreca*

The original essays in this volume explore the way women have
used humor to break down cultural stereotypes between the
genders.  Examples from literature and the performing and visual
arts deal with humor and violence, humor and disability, humor
and the supposition of women's shame, lesbian and ethnic humor,
and particularly women's response to men's humor.

1992 * Pages: 240
Hardcover * ISBN: 2-88124-533-1  *Price: $39.00
Softcover * ISBN: 2-88124-534-X  *Price: $16.00

Orders for books do not include postage and handling.  All prices
are subject to change without notice.  The US dollar price
applies in North America only.

GORDON AND BREACH PUBLISHERS
P.O. Box 786 Cooper Station, New York, NY 10276
US orders: call 1-800-545-8398 * fax 212-645-2459
All other countries contact the UK: call 44 (0734) 568316 * fax
44 (0734) 568211

8)--------------------------------------------------------------

                        _NEW LEFT REVIEW_

                 NLR 190 THE CLAIMS OF EQUALITY

Introductory Offer--Receive This SPECIAL ISSUE Free!

*G.A. Cohen*        The Future of a Disillusion

*Paul Cammack*      Brazil: Old Politics, New Forces

*Tony Benn*         the Menace of the Secret State

*Roger Taylor*      Surviving the Thatcher Years

*Elizabeth Wilson*       Feminism Without Illusions?

*Julian Stallabrass*     Snapshots of Prague and Berlin

*Terry Bloomfield*       Rock Against the Commodity

*Victor Kiernan*         Marx and the Undiscovered Country

*Dimitris Kyrtatas*      Revelation Revised

*Branka Magas*           Comment on Gellner

   * * Subscribe now and receive this 144-page issue FREE * *

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9)--------------------------------------------------------------

_*NOMAD*_

===AN INTERDISCIPLINARY JOURNAL
======OF THE HUMANITIES,
=========ARTS,
============AND SCIENCES

_NOMAD_ publishes works of cross-disciplinary interest, such as
intermedia artwork, metatheory, and experimental writing.  The
journal is a forum for those texts that explore or examine the
undefined regions among critical theory, the visual arts, and
writing

Submissions: Send manuscripts (2 copies, with SASE) and artwork
(black and white camera-ready, 8.5" by 11" or less) to NOMAD, c/o
Mike Smith, 406 Williams, Florida State University, Tallahassee
FL 32306.

Subscriptions:  $9.00 per year (2 issues) from NOMAD c/o Mike
Smith, 406 Williams, Florida State University, Tallahassee FL
32306.

10)-------------------------------------------------------------
You won't want to miss . . .

                       _*represent*ations_

Number 36 * Fall 1991
     Frances Ferguson on Sade and pornography; Joseph Pequigney
     on sodomy in Dante; Alan Sinfield on Noel Coward; R. Howard
     Bloch on the romance of Old French Letters; T. Walter
     Herbert, Jr., on Hawthorne and Victorian sexuality

Number 37 * Winter 1992
     Dipesh Chakrabarty and Gyan Pandey in a forum on "India and
     the Writing of History"; Thomas Richards on British Museum
     surveys of Tibet; Stephen Tifft on Renoir and the Fall of
     France; Nicholas Dirks on Castes of Mind

Individuals $26.00, Students $18.00, Institutions $52.00. 
Outside U.S. add $6.00 postage.  Send payment to: 
_Representations_, University of California Press Journals, 2120
Berkeley Way, Berkeley, CA 94720

11)-------------------------------------------------------------

STUDIES IN POPULAR CULTURE_ 

_Studies in Popular Culture_, (_SiPC_), The journal of the
Popular Culture Association in the South, publishes articles on
popular culture however mediated: through film, literature,
radio, television, music, graphics, print, practices,
associations, events--any of the material or conceptual
conditions of life.  Its contributors from the United States,
Canada, France, Israel, and Australia, include distinguished
anthropologists, sociologists, cultural geographers,
ethnomusicologists, historians, and scholars in mass
communications, philosophy, literature, and religion. 

_Studies in Popular Culture_ is published in October and April 
by the Popular Culture Association in the South.  Authors are 
urged but not required to join the Association.  All members of 
the Association receive _Studies in Popular Culture_, the PC 
Newsletter, and announcements of the annual meeting in early 
October.  Yearly membership is currently $15.00 (International: 
$20.00).  

Write to the Executive Secretary, Diane Calhoun-French, Academic
Dean, Jefferson Community College-SW, Louisville, KY, 40272, for
information regarding membership, individual issues, back copies,
or sets. 

Direct editorial queries and send manuscripts to the editor:
Dennis Hall, Department of English, University of Louisville,
Louisville, Kentucky, 40292.  Telephone: (502) 588-6896 or 0509. 
Bitnet: DRHALL01@ULKYVM.  Fax: 588-5055.  Please enclose two
double-spaced copies and a self-addressed stamped envelope. 
Black and white illustrations may accompany the text.  Material
also may be submitted for consideration via electronic mail. 

_SiPC_ ordinarily runs short pieces, essays that total, with 
notes and bibliography, less than twenty pages in typescript. 
Documentation may be in the form appropriate for the discipline 
of the writer; the new MLA style sheet is a useful model.  Please
indicate if the work is available on computer disk.  The Editor 
reserves the right to make stylistic changes on accepted 
manuscripts. 

12)-------------------------------------------------------------

_SCIENCE AS CULTURE_

In a society where icons of progress are drawn from science,
technology, and medicine, SCIENCE AS CULTURE examines how these
disciplines relate to the rest of life.  The journal investigates
how particular values are embodied and naturalized in concepts,
techniques, research priorities, gadgets, and advertising.  Much
praised for its evocative articles, _SCIENCE AS CULTURE_
encompasses peoples' experience at the workplace, the cinema, the
hospital, the home, and the theater.  Readable and attractive, it
explores all the ways in which science is involved in shaping the
values that contend for influence over the wider society.

RECENT ARTICLES INCLUDE:

Cleaning Up on the Farm, *Les Levidow*
The Social Side of Sustainability, Class, Gender, and Race,
*Patricia L. Allen* and *Carolyn E. Sachs*
Biodiversity and Food Security, *Alistair Smith*
Alternative Agriculture and the New Biotechnologies, *Jack
Kloppenburg*
Green Meanings: What Might 'Sustainable Agriculture' Sustain?,
*Christopher Hamlin*

SAMPLE COPIES AVAILABLE!

**For more information write: Free Association Books, 26
Freegrove Road, London N7 9RQ; Credit cards (24 hours) 071-609-
5646.  
**In North America: Guilford Publications, Inc., 72 Spring St,
New York, NY 10012, Attn: Journals Dept.  Or call: 212-431-9800. 
Fax: 212-966-6708.  
**Volume 3, 1992 (4 issues); Individuals:  20/US $30;
Institutions:  35/US $65.  Single copy  5.95/US $8.              

13)-------------------------------------------------------------

_CAPITALISM
NATURE
SOCIALISM_

A Journal of Socialist Ecology

Edited by James O'Connor, University of California, Santa Cruz

_CNS_ is the only serious red-green theoretical journal in the
world.  It is edited by a distinguished group of scholars and
scholar activists, half of whom are North American, the other
half from a variety of countries.  _CNS_ seeks to meld the
traditional concerns of labor movements with the ecological
struggles in particular, and demands of the new social movements
in general.  To this end, it publishes articles, reviews,
interviews, documents, and poems that locate themselves at the
site between history and nature, or society and the environment. 

RECENT ARTICLES INCLUDE: Political Economy of the Gulf War, J.
O'Connor  Eco-feminism and Eco-Socialism, Mary Mellor 
Sustainable Agriculture at the Crossroads, Patricia Allen  Green
Cities Politics, Patrick Mazza  Lewis Mumford: The Forgotten
American Environmentalist: An Essay in Rehabilitation,
Ramachandra Guha  Economics of the U.S. Greens, C. Thurner 
Ecology and Regulation Theory, Alain Lipietz  Red Green Movements
in India, Gail Omvedt  Political Ecology of Marx, Manuel
Sacristan  Is Sustainable Capitalism Possible? James O'Connor

SAMPLE COPIES AVAILABLE!

For more information write: Guilford Publications, Inc., 72
Spring St, New York, NY 10012, Attn: Journals Dept.  Or call:
212-431-9800.  Fax: 212-966-6708.  

Volume 3, 1992 (4 issues); Individuals: $20.00, Outside U.S.:
$25.00 (surface mail), $35.00 (airmail); Institutions: $60.00,
Outside U.S.: $75.00 (airmail).  

Also available in better bookstores.

14)-------------------------------------------------------------

                      _Rethinking MARXISM_
          a journal of economics, culture, and society

The aim of this journal is to stimulate interest and debate over
the explanatory power and social consequences of Marxian economic
and social analysis.  To that end, it publishes studies that seek
to discuss, elaborate, and/or extend Marxian theory.  The
concerns of the journal include theoretical and philosophical
(methodological and epistimilogical) matters as well as more
concrete empirical analysis--all work that leads to further
development of a distinctively Marxian discourse.  Contributions
are encouraged from people in many disciplines and from a wide
range of perspectives.

ARTICLES OF INTEREST:  Post-America and the Collapse of Leninism,
Immanuel Wallerstein  On Marx and Freud, Louis Althusser  Louis
Althusser and the Unity of Science and Revolution, Nancy
Hartstock  Race, Culture, and Communications: Looking Backward
and Forward at Cultural Studies, Stuart Hall  Fordism/Post-
Fordism, Marxism/Post-Marxism: The Second Cultural Divide, Julie
Graham  New World Order and Other Art, Sue Coe.

SAMPLE COPIES AVAILABLE!

For more information write: Guilford Publications, Inc., 72
Spring St, New York, NY 10012, Attn: Journals Dept.  Or call:
212-431-9800.  Fax: 212-966-6708.  

Volume 5, 1992 (4 issues); Individuals: $27.50, Outside U.S.:
$32.50 (surface mail), $42.50 (airmail); Institutions: $55.00,
Outside U.S.: $70.00 (airmail); Students: $20.00 (current I.D.
required).  

Also available in better bookstores.

15)-------------------------------------------------------------

_COMMUNICATION THEORY_

A JOURNAL OF THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNICATION ASSOCIATION

Edited by Robert T. Craig
University of Colorado at Boulder

COMMUNICATION THEORY is an international, interdisciplinary forum
for theory and theoretically oriented research on all aspects of
communication.  It is designed to sustain a scholarly dialogue
across disciplinary, methodological, and geographical boundaries.

Holding up a mirror to the field of communication in all its
diversity, stimulating reflection and dialogue on issues of
interdisciplinary significance, encouraging innovations and
experimentation, and at times provoking controversy,
COMMUNICATION THEORY will engage its readers in the
reconstruction of an academic discipline at a crucial juncture in
its history.

ARTICLES OF INTEREST:

Communication Boundary Management: A Theoretical Model of
Managing Disclosure of Private Information Between Marital
Couples, Sandra Petronio
Syntactic and Pragmatic Codes in Communication, Donald G. Ellis
Conversational Universals and Comparative Theory: Turning to
Swedish and American Acknowledgement Tokens-in-Interaction, Wayne
A. Beach & Anna K. Lindstrom
Theories of Culture and Communication, Bradford 'J' Hall
Communication, Conflict, and Culture, C. David Mortensen

SAMPLE COPIES AVAILABLE!

For more information write: Guilford Publications, Inc., 72
Spring St, New York, NY 10012, Attn: Journals Dept.  Or call:
212-431-9800.  Fax: 212-966-6708.  

Volume 2, 1992 (4 issues); Individuals: $30.00; Institutions:
$60.00.  Outside U.S., add $17.50 (airmail included).  

16)-------------------------------------------------------------

                        _PUBLIC CULTURE_

           * * * Volume 4, Number 1 (Fall 1991) * * *

Looking at Film Hoardings, R. Srivatsan  *  Knocking on The Doors
of Public Culture, Pradip Krishen  *  The Meaning of Baseball in
1992, Bill Brown  *  Becoming the Armed Man, J. William Gibson  *

The Function of New Theory, Xiaobing Tang  *  Worldly Discourses,
Dan Rose  *  Voices of the Rainforest, Steven Feld  * 
Anuradhapura, Wimal Disanayake  *  River and Bridge, Meena
Alexander

          * * * Volume 4, Number 2 (Spring 1992) * * *

The Banality of Power and the Aesthetics of Vulgarity in the
Postcolony, Achille Mbembe  *  Take Care of Public Telephones,
Robert J. Foster  *  The Death of History?, Dipesh Chakrabarty  *

The Public Fetus and the Family Car, Janelle Sue Taylor  *  Race
and the Humanities: The "Ends" of Modernity?, Homi Bhabha  * 
"Disappeating" Iraqis, David Prochaska  *  Algeria Caricatures
the Gulf War, Susan Slyomovics  *  Mobilizing Fictions, Robert
Stam  *  Television and the Gulf War, Victor J. Caldarola

             Engaging Critical Analyses of Tensions
            Between Global Cultural Flows and Public
                  Cultures in a Diasporic World

_Public Culture_ is published biannually at The University
Museum, University of Pennsylvania, 33rd and Spruce Streets,
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6324.  A year's subscription for
individuals is $10.00 ($14.00 foreign); institutions $20.00
($24.00 foreign).  Back issues are available.  Write, call 215-
898-4054, or fax: 215-898-0657.

17)-------------------------------------------------------------

The Florida State University Department of English announces the 
           _JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES_ (New Series)  

Beginning with a double issue Vol. I, Nos. 1 and 2 (spring 1992),
the Journal will appear semi-annually thereafter:  Vol. II, No. 1
(autumn 1992) and Vol II, No. 2 (spring 1993). 

The current double issue features two previously unpublished
poems by Samuel Beckett: "Brief Dream," a five-line poem in
English which Beckett sent to publisher John Calder in 1988, and
"L+," a 1987 quatrain in French dedicated to James Knowlson (both
published with permission of Calder Publications).  Vol. 2, No. 1
(autumn 1992) will feature Beckett's revised text for _What
Where_ (with permission of Faber and Faber, Ltd.). 

The Journal is dedicated to printing scholarship, criticism and
theory of the highest quality, reviewing significant books and
productions in a timely fashion, and, on occasion, printing
previously unpublished material by Samuel Beckett.  We cannot
publish regularly, and even, as we hope, expand our publication
with special issues and monographs, without your support.  Please
return the coupon below with your check to help keep the _Journal
of Beckett Studies_ a vital source of Beckett scholarship. 

               Ruby Cohn Prize in Beckett Studies 

The Journal of Beckett Studies is proud to offer the bi-annual
Ruby Cohn Prize for the most significant contribution to the
Journal by an individual who has not previously published on
Beckett.  The winner will be determined by the Editorial Board
from nominations submitted by readers and contributors.  The
award will carry a $250.00 honorarium, be announced in the spring
1993 issue (Vol. 2, No. 2), and thereafter in even numbered
volumes. 

Individual subscriptions are $15.00 
New Series Vol. I, Nos. 1 & 2 (spring 1992)................$15.00
New Series Vol. 2, No. 1 (autumn 1992) 
           Vol. 2, No. 2 (spring 1993).....................$15.00

              Journal of Beckett Studies (New Series) 
Dept. of English, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306

18)-------------------------------------------------------------
_STRATEGIES_
A JOURNAL OF THEORY, CULTURE & POLITICS 

4289 BUNCHE HALL 
UCLA 
LOS ANGELES, CA  90024 

NEW ISSUE NOW AVAILABLE: 

Marx After Elvis:  Politics/Popular Culture 
Issue No. 6 

Susan Buck-Morss        Is There a Common Postmodern Culture? 
Slavoj Zizek            The `Missing Link' of Ideology 
Iain Chambers           Migrant Landscapes 
Laurence A. Rickels     Missing Marx: or, How to Take Better Aim 
Kelly Dennis            Leave it to Beaver: The Object of        

                           Pornography 

Michael Shapiro         American Fictions and Political Culture 
J. Michael Jarrett      Rhapsody in Read: Ishmael Reed and Free  

                           Jazz 
Stathis Gourgouris      Adorno After Sun Ra 
Katrina Irving          Building Equivalences Through Rap-Music 
Sande Cohen             Cultural Use-Value and Historicist       

                           Reduction 

Current Rates: (Make all checks payable--in US Dollars--to
Strategies) 
                                 single          subs 
                                issues          (2 issues) 

Ind.                            $ 7             $12 
For. Ind.                       $ 9             $16 
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Back Issue Rates:
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No. 1   Beyond the Modern . . .         --              --     
$16 
No. 2   Pedagogical Theories, 
        Educational Practices           $10             $12    
$16 
No. 3   In the City                     $10             $12    
$16 
No. 4/5 Critical Histories              $10             $12    
$16 

Special Rate for Individuals 
Ordering Both Nos. 2 & 3                $12 Domestic, $14 Foreign

19)-------------------------------------------------------------

_THEORY,
CULTURE &
SOCIETY_

             Explorations in Critical Social Science

"It seems to me that Mike Featherstone
and his editorial group have done
more than any other sociological group
to move sociology forward into new 
terrains of thought and discourse and
they have done so with power, grace
and insight."  Professor Norman Denzin

_Theory, Culture & Society_ was launched to cater to the
resurgence of interest in culture within contemporary social
science.  The journal provides a forum for articles which
theorize the relationship between culture and society.  _Theory,
Culture & Society_ builds upon the heritage of the classic
founders of social theory and examines the ways in which this
tradition has been re-shaped by a new generation of theorists. 
_Theory, Culture & Society_ also seeks to publish theoretically
informed analyses of everyday life, popular culture and new
intellectual movements such as postmodernism.

The journal features papers by and about the work of a wide range
of modern social and cultural theorists such as Foucault,
Bourdieu, Baudrillard, Goffman, Bell, Parsons, Elias, Gadamer,
Luhmann, Habermas, Giddens and Simmel.

_Theory, Culture & Society_ is published quarterly in February,
May, August and November.

20% Introductory Discount

Enter your new subscription to _Theory, Culture & Society_ at a
special introductory discount.  Subscribe today and you'll save
20% off the cost of your subscription.

Individual: One Year $37 ($46*)
            Two Years $74 ($92*)
Institutional: One Year $99 ($123*)
               Two Years $198 ($248*)

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Send your order to:  Sage Publications Ltd.
                     P.O. Box 5096
                     Newbury Park, CA 91359
                     USA

Ask about the special back issue sale!

20)-------------------------------------------------------------

                         _POETICS TODAY_

   International Journal for Theory and Analysis of Literature
                        and Communication

Editor: Itamar Even-Zohar (Tel Aviv)
Published by Duke University Press in cooperation with the Porter
Institute for Poetics and Semiotics, Tel Aviv University.

Here's how you can benefit from using _Poetics Today_ special
issues in your classroom:  CONVENIENT * ACCESSIBLE * CHEAP *
RISK-FREE

Children's Literature
Zohar Shavit, editor
          This introduction to the field explores questions of
          childhood and children's culture, the teaching function
          of children's literature and current thinking on the
          demarcation of boundaries between children's and adult
          literature.  250 pages.  1992

Disciplinarity
David R. Shumway and Ellen Messer-Davidow, editors
          An examination of the discipline as a historically
          specific form, offering diverse perspectives on the way
          modern disciplines control the organization and
          production of knowledge.  171 pages.  1991

Narratology Revisited I, II, and III
Brian McHale and Ruth Ronen, editors
          In three volumes, narratologists and other scholars of
          narrative reflect on the progress (or lack of progress)
          in narrative theory over the past decade and on the
          current state of the art.  191, 237, 247 pages
          (available singly or as three issues).  1990 and 1991

*Free examination copies* of _Poetics Today_ special issues are
available for course consideration and will be sent upon receipt
of your request on departmental letterhead.  Fax: 919-684-8644.

*Single issue orders* send a check payable to Duke University
Press, $14.00 for each issue.  Or call 919-684-6837 and have
credit card information ready.

*Subscriptions* Individuals can get a 1992 subscription (4
issues) for $28; students pay only $14 with a photocopy of their
current I.D.  Add $8 for postage outside the U.S.  Send a check
payable to Duke University Press or call 919-684-6837 and have
VISA or MasterCard information ready.

Mail orders to:  Duke University Press, Journals Division, 6697
College Station, Durham, NC 27708.

21)-------------------------------------------------------------

_SURFACES_

A New Interdisciplinary Electronic Journal

Published by the Department of Comparative Literature at the
University of Montreal, _SURFACES_ is an open forum oriented
toward the reorganization of knowledge in the humanities.  The
growth of interdisciplinary study in the humanities and the
emergence of new areas of inquiry has reached a point that calls
into question both traditional thematic comparisons and the
pretensions of any one theoretical approach to delimit and
dominate a field of study.  _SURFACES_ aims to provide an
international forum for scholars to address contemporary problems
and questions, using its electronic format to offer services
beyond the reach of traditional journals.

_SURFACES_ is available free of charge through the various
electronic mail networks (Internet, Bitnet, Janet, Earn &
Netnorth).

Submissions welcomed:  Please address articles, reviews, notes,
comments and news items for inclusion to the editors either by e-
mail, on diskette or in hard copy.  We are particularly
interested in essays that address the cultural problematics
engendered by and for new technologies.

All correspondence to:  The Editors, SURFACES, Dept. of
Comparative Literature, University of Montreal, C.P. 6128, succ.
"A", Montreal, Canada, H3C 3J7.

Tel.: 514-343-5683
FAX: 514-343-5684

INTERNET Access via FTP anonymous: harfang.cc.umontreal.ca

22)-------------------------------------------------------------

                            _DIS
                              COURSE_

          Volume 15, Number 1
          SPECIAL ISSUE

          **Flaunting It: Lesbian and Gay Studies**

          Delinquent Desire: Race, Sex, and Ritual in
          Reform Schools for Girls by *Kathryn Baker*

          Lesbian Pornography: The Re-Making of (a)
          Community by *Terralee Bensinger*

          Investigating Queer Fictions of the Past:
          Identities, Differences, and Lesbian and Gay
          Historical Self-Representations by *Scott Bravmann*

          "I Am What I Am" (Or Am I?):  The Making and 
          Unmaking of Lesbian and Gay Identity in _High 
          Tech Boys_ by Sarah Chinn and Kris Franklin

          Nudes, Prudes, and Pigmies: The Desirability 
          of Disavowal in _Physical Culture Magazine_ by 
          Greg Mullins

          Muscling the Mainstream: Lesbian Murder 
          Mysteries and Fantasies of Justice by JoAnn 
          Pavietich

          Obscene Allegories: Narrative Structures in Gay
          Male Porn by David Pendleton

          Applied Metaphors: AIDS and Literature by
          Thomas Piontek

          The Traffic in Dildoes: The Phallus as Camp and
          the Revenge of Genderfuck by June L. Reich

Special Issue: $12.95 individual
               $25.00 institution
               $1.75 post

Subscription (3 issues): $25.00 individual
                         $50.00 institution
                         $10.00 foreign surface post

Send orders to Journals Division, Indiana University Press, 601
N. Morton, Bloomington, IN 47404; Fax to 812-855-7931; Call 812-
855-9449 with credit card orders.

23)--------------------------------------------------------------

_U.S. LATINO LITERATURE_

An Essay and Annotated Bibliography

by Marc Zimmerman

From visions of a reclaimed Aztlan and Borinquen to portrayals of
inner city rural and urban life to the multi-faceted perspectives
of Latina feminists, U.S. Latino literature has developed and
flourished as a new sphere of cultural expression.

Marc Zimmerman's new book introduces the representative Chicano,
Puerto Rican, Cuban and other U.S. Latino writers' key works in
poetry, fiction and drama, the major trends, the pre-history,
history, and possible future of the literature and the diverse
people it represents.

Including a thought-provoking, overview essay, _U.S. Latino
Literature_ is above all the most handy, comprehensive and
economical one-volume reference work in its field.

Marc Zimmerman teaches Latin American Studies at the University
of Illinois at Chicago.  His recent books include _El Salvador at
War_ (MEP, 1988 and with John Beverley, _Literature and Politics
in Central American Revolutions_ (University of Texas Press,
1990).

Order from: MARCH/Abrazo Press * P.O. Box 2890 * Chicago IL 60690
            tel. 312-539-9638
                       ISBN 1-877636-01-0
                       Paperback, 158 pp.
            $10.95 plus $3.00 postage for single copy

24)-------------------------------------------------------------

                      CALL FOR PAPERS
                      ---------------
                       SPECIAL ISSUE

          THE ELECTRONIC JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION/
           LA REVUE ELECTRONIQUE DE COMMUNICATION

         Topic:  "COMPUTER-MEDIATED COMMUNICATION"

Issue Editor:
Thomas W. Benson
Department of Speech Communication
Penn State University
BITNET:   T3B@PSUVM
INTERNET: t3b@psuvm.psu.edu

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

The ELECTRONIC JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION/LA REVUE ELECTRONIQUE DE
COMMUNICATION is seeking original, unpublished manuscripts on the
topic of "Computer-Mediated Communication."  Papers addressing
any issues related to the general topic, based on any conceptual
framework and any methodological approach, are welcome, though we
are interested in approaches that include the human and social
aspects of communication and are not exclusively technical or
technological in content.  Examples might include critical,
discourse analytic, or content analytic studies of computer
networks; historical accounts; considerations of theoretical,
political, or economic issues; user surveys; analyses of policies
about access and use; reviews of literature; and so on.  Book
reviews are solicited; contact the editor with your suggestions. 
International perspectives are encouraged.  The major criterion
is that papers should make a significant contribution to our
understanding of the nature, roles, effects, or functions of
computer mediated communication.  Papers will be reviewed
anonymously.

The final DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSION is September 15, 1992;
manuscripts are now (February 1992) being accepted for review and
the issue will be closed to further manuscripts when the issue is
complete--which may be before September 15, 1992.  Publication is
expected in late Fall, 1992.

SUBSCRIPTIONS TO EJC/REC may be obtained free of charge, by
sending the message:

SUBSCRIBE EJCREC your_name

as in:  Subscribe EJCREC  Jane Smith

to: Comserve@Rpiecs (Bitnet) or Comserve@Vm.Ecs.Rpi.Edu
(Internet).  Subscribers automatically receive each issue's table
of contents, abstracts for each article in the issue, as well as
instructions for how to obtain electronic copies of each article
in the issue from Comserve.  The EJC/REC is supported by the
Communication Studies Department at the University of Windsor,
and Comserve at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, of Troy, N.Y. 
Articles are protected by copyright (c) by the Communication
Institute for Online Scholarship (ISSN # 1183-5656).  Articles
may be reproduced, with acknowledgment, for non- profit personal
and scholarly purposes.  Permission must be obtained for
commercial uses.

25)-------------------------------------------------------------

                      Call For Papers

     *********************************************************
     *   SYMPOSIUM:  THE PRINCIPIA CYBERNETICA PROJECT       *
     *      computer-supported cooperative development       *
     *        of an evolutionary-systemic philosophy         *
     *********************************************************

                        as part of the

            13th International Congress on Cybernetics
               NAMUR (Belgium), August 24-28, 1992

About the Principia Cybernetica Project
_______________________________________
The Principia Cybernetica Project (PCP) is a collaborative
attempt to develop a complete and consistent cybernetic
philosophy.  Such a philosophical system should arise from a
transdisciplinary unification and foundation of the domain of
Systems Theory and Cybernetics.  Similar to the metamathematical
character of Whitehead and Russell's "Principia Mathematica", PCP
is meta-cybernetical in that we intend to use cybernetic tools
and methods to analyze and develop cybernetic theory.

These include the computer-based tools of hypertext, electronic
mail, and knowledge structuring software.  They are meant to
support the process of collaborative theory-building by a variety
of contributors, with different backgrounds and living in
different parts of the world.

As its name implies, PCP will focus on the clarification of
fundamental concepts and principles of the cybernetics and
systems domain.  Concepts include: Complexity, Information,
System, Freedom, Control, Self-organization, Emergence, etc.
Principles include the Laws of Requisite Variety, of Requisite
Hierarchy, and of Regulatory Models.

The PCP philosophical system is seen as a clearly thought out and
well-formulated, global "world view", integrating the different
domains of knowledge and experience.  It should provide an answer
to the basic questions: "Who am I?  Where do I come from?  Where
am I going to?"  The PCP philosophy is systemic and evolutionary,
based on the spontaneous emergence of higher levels of
organization or control (metasystem transitions) through blind
variation and natural selection.  It includes:  

 a) a metaphysics, based on processes or actions as ontological
primitives

 b) an epistemology, which understands knowledge as constructed
by the subject, but undergoing selection by the environment

 c) an ethics, with survival and the continuance of the process
of evolution as supreme values.

PCP is to be developed as a dynamic, multi-dimensional conceptual
network.  The basic architecture consists of nodes, containing
expositions and definitions of concepts, connected by links,
representing the associations that exist between the concepts.
Both nodes and links can belong to different types, expressing
different semantic and practical categories.

Philosophy and implementation of PCP are united by their common
framework based on cybernetical and evolutionary principles: the
computer-support system is intended to amplify the spontaneous
development of knowledge which forms the main theme of the
philosophy.

PCP is managed by a board of editors (presently V. Turchin [CUNY,
New York], C. Joslyn [NASA and SUNY Binghamton] and F. Heylighen
[Free Univ. of Brussels]).  Contributors are kept informed
through the Principia Cybernetica Newsletter, distributed in
print and by email, and the PRNCYB-L electronic discussion group,
administered by C. Joslyn (for subscription, contact him at
cjoslyn@bingvaxu.cc.binghamton.edu).  Further activities of PCP
are publications in journals or books, and the organization of
meetings or symposia.  For more information, contact F. Heylighen
at the address below.

About the Symposium
___________________
After the successful organization of a symposium on "Cybernetics
and Human Values" at the 8th World Congress of Systems and
Cybernetics (New York, June 1990), and of the "1st Workshop of
the Principia Cybernetica Project" (Brussels, July 1991), the
third official activity of the Principia Cybernetica Project will
be a Symposium held at the 13th Int. Congress on Cybernetics. 
The informal symposium will allow researchers potentially
interested in contributing the Project to meet.  The emphasis
will be on discussion, rather than on formal presentation.
Contributors are encouraged to read some of the available texts
on the PCP in order to get acquainted with the main issues
(Newsletter available on request from the Symposium Chairman).

Papers can be submitted on one or several of the following
topics:

The Principia Cybernetica Project
Cybernetic Concepts and Principles
Evolutionary Philosophy
Knowledge Development
Computer-Support Systems for Collaborative Theory Building

About the Congress
__________________
The International Congresses on Cybernetics are organized
triannually (since 1956) by the Intern.  Association of
Cybernetics (IAC), whose founding members include W.R. Ashby, S.
Beer and G. Pask.  The 13th Congress takes place in the "Institut
d'Informatique, Facultes Universitaires Notre-Dame de la Paix, 21
rue Grandgagnage, B-5000 Namur, Belgium".  The official congress
languages are English and French.

Registration fee :
members of the IAC and authors of papers: 6000 BF (about $180)
other participants:                       10000 BF (about $300)
Young researchers under 30 years          2000 BF (about $60)
(with certificate of their university)

The fee covers congress attendance, conference abstracts and
coffee-breaks.

Submission of papers
____________________

==Deadlines==

* for abstract submission:                    March 31, 1992
* for final texts (max 5 pages):              August 28, 1992

 For submissions of papers or further information about the
Principia Cybernetica project, contact the symposium chairman:
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Dr. Francis Heylighen
PO-PESP, Free Univ. Brussels, Pleinlaan 2, B-1050 Brussels,
Belgium
Phone   +32 - 2 - 641 25 25     Email  fheyligh@vnet3.vub.ac.be
Fax     +32 - 2 - 641 24 89     Telex  61051 VUBCO B
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

For congress registration or further information about the
congress, contact the secretariat:
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
International Association for Cybernetics
Palais des Expositions, Place Ryckmans, B-5000 Namur, Belgium
Phone     +32 - 81 - 73 52 09     Email  cyb@info.fundp.ac.be
Fax     +32 - 81 - 23 09 45
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

26)-------------------------------------------------------------

             THE DISEMBODIED ART GALLERY EXHIBITION
                     BRIGHTON, ENGLAND, 1992

        *=*Starting in May and Continuing Until . . .*=*

        England's largest Arts Festival will be taking place in
Brighton again this year.  Each May over one hundred theatre,
dance and comedy events are presented in venues throughout the
town - from traditional opera to experimental dance, classical
Greek plays to world debut performances.

        However little of the Festival spirit seems to overflow
onto the streets and much of the population could be forgiven for
not even noticing when the Festival begins or ends.  
        Participation in the Festival just costs the price of a
ticket, but these often seem prohibitively high to some sections
of the community that the Festival aims to introduce to the Arts.

Few of the scheduled events actually present interesting, new
work TO the people of the town ON the streets.

        By contrast, Edinburgh can barely contain the (much
larger) Festival that it hosts each August - and it is impossible
to walk around the town, day or night, without encountering
street plays, jugglers and buskers from literally all over the
world.

        As a small independent group, we feel that we can do
little to attract international artists to travel to Brighton but
we can attempt to invite a little MAIL ART CULTURAL TOURISM into
our town.

        So, we have decided to hold Brighton's first DISEMBODIED
GALLERY EXHIBITION throughout the town during the month of May. 
We would like to put some new visual artwork onto the streets
instead of inside a gallery space;  distribute original artwork
around the town and give anyone the opportunity in participating
or collecting these artifacts.

        Our aim is to broaden the base of the Festival and to
initiate a much needed debate about the role of this Festival,
and more importantly about the role of the Arts within the
community.

        So we are making a call for original A3 or A4 decorative
artwork, on paper or card, originals or Xeroxes, 1 to 100 copies.

All artwork that we receive will be displayed in the streets of
Brighton in the month of May and into June and beyond if the
artwork keeps coming.  In return for your contribution, we will
photograph the artwork in place and document the comments from
the towns' people about your artwork.  Your pictures will be
fly-posted, hung from bus-stops and distributed around shops,
arcades, pubs and clubs.

        We wish to challenge the concept of Art being a sacred
relic to be worshipped from a distance and be sold as a costly
trophy.  We will ask passersby to comment on the artwork and its
place in THEIR town and encourage them to keep work that they
like.

Although there is no rigid theme to the exhibition, we would
particularly like to encourage you to produce new work that
addresses the issues that are documented above.  Prospective
participants are reminded that their work will be displayed in
full public view and so the subject matter should be chosen with
this fact in mind.

              K. de Mendonca  and M. A. Longbottom,
                     (disembodied curators)

             PLEASE SEND YOUR ARTWORK OR QUERIES TO:

             1992 DISEMBODIED ART GALLERY EXHIBITION
                   FLAT 5, 65 LANSDOWNE PLACE
                    HOVE, SUSSEX, BN3 1FL, UK

27)-------------------------------------------------------------

  =*CALL FOR COMPOSITIONS, PRESENTATIONS, PAPERS AND ARTWORK*=

The Connecticut College Center for Arts and Technology, in
conjunction with the departments of Music, Art, Art History,
Dance, Theater, English, Mathematics/Computer Science, Physics,
Physical Education, Psychology and Linguistics is pleased to
announce: 

        The Fourth Symposium on The Arts and Technology 
                        March 4-6, 1993  

The Symposium will consist of paper sessions, panel discussions,
an art exhibition, and concerts of music, mixed media works, 
video, dance, experimental theatre and interactive performance. 
Selected papers will be published as Proceedings and will be 
available at the Symposium. 

Papers: 

A detailed two page abstract including audio-visual requirements
should be sent to the address below no later than 15 September,
1992.  Approved abstracts will be notified by 15 November 1992. 
Finished papers must be submitted in camera-ready form by 15
January, 1993.  The Symposium encourages research presentations
and demonstrations in all areas of the arts and technology but is
particularly interested in receiving work concerned with
Interactivity, Virtual Reality, Cognition in the Arts,
Applications in Video and Film, Experimental Theater, The
Compositional Process, Speculative Uses of Technology in
Education and examples of scientific visualization.  Other topics
include but are not limited to acoustics, artificial
intelligence, psyhco-acoustics, vision, and imaging.  

Artworks: 

Works of computer-generated or computer-aided art, or computer- 
controlled interactive art are encouraged.  Animation or other
works of computer art on tape will be shown throughout the
Symposium.  Slides or Video Tapes (VHS), and complete
descriptions of works should be submitted no later than 15
September 1993.  Accepted artists will be notified by November
15, 1993.  Black-and-white photographs of accepted works should
be sent by 15 January, 1993.  Selected works will be published as
an insert in the Proceedings.  Funds available for the shipping 
of work are extremely limited.  Call or write the address below
for more information on the transport of artwork. 

Compostions: 

Works for instruments and tape or tape alone are being solicited
at this time.  Available instruments are: flute (doubling on
piccolo), oboe, clarinet (doubling on bass clarinet), bassoon,
trumpet, horn, trombone, percussion (two players), piano, and
strings (2,1,1,1). 

Works should not exceed 15 minutes in length and should be
submitted with accompanying score, where appropriate, before 15
September 1992.  We are especially interested in receiving a
number of interactive performance compositions and video works. 
Dance compositions are also encouraged, as are experimental
theater works using "new technology." 

Tapes for selection purposes should be on cassette or 1/2 inch
VHS.  Tapes for performance should be 15 i.p.s. stereo or
quadraphonic, or DAT.  Video works should be 3/4 inch Umatic or
1/2 inch VHS. 

A self-addressed, preposted envelope should be provided for the
return of materials within the U.S.A.  Foreign materials will be
returned at our expense. 

Send art and science related materials before 15 September 1992
to: 
David Smalley, Co-director 
Center for Arts and Technology 
Box 5637 
Connecticut College 
270 Mohegan Avenue 
New London, CT 06320-4196 
Internet:  dasma@mvax.cc.conncoll.edu 
Bitnet:    dasma@conncoll.bitnet 

Send music and AI related materials before 15 September 1992 to:
Dr. Noel Zahler, Co-director 
Center for the Arts and Technology 
Connecticut College 
Box 5632 
270 Mohegan Avenue 
New London, CT 06320-4196 
Internet:  nbzah@mvax.cc.conncoll.edu 
Bitnet:    nbzah@conncoll.bitnet 

28)-------------------------------------------------------------

                     CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

                            ECHT'92 

               Fourth ACM Conference on Hypertext 

                 NOVEMBER 30 - DECEMBER 4, 1992 
                          MILANO ITALY 

Sponsored by: 
ACM 
SIGLINK 
SIGOIS 
SIGIR 

In cooperation with: 
SIGCHI, POLITECNICO DI MILANO, AICA, LINK-IT!, INRIA 

SUMMARY OF DEADLINES 
***July 13, 1992 -- papers, technical briefings, tutorials,
          panels, demonstrations, videos, and posters 
***September 20, 1992 -- acceptance notification for paper,
          panels, technical briefings, tutorials 
***September 30, 1992 -- acceptance notification for
          demonstrations, videos, posters 
***October 15, 1992 -- final copy of papers imperatively received
          by the conference secretariat 

All submissions must be sent to: CONFERENCE SECRETARIAT,
Enza Caputo, Politecnico di Milano,  Dipartimento di Elettronica,
Piazza Leonardo da Vinci 32, 20133 Milano (Italia). 
E-mail: Caputo@ipmel1.polimi.it 
Telephone: (39) 2-23993405   Fax: (39) 2-23993411 

SCOPE
ECHT'92 is the second in a series of European conferences on 
Hypertext and Hypermedia in alternation with the U.S.-based 
HYPERTEXT conferences, coordinated and sponsored by ACM SIGLINK. 

The conference will include prominent guest speakers, 
presentations of refereed papers, panel sessions, technical 
briefing sessions, poster and video presentations, as well as 
demonstrations of experimental research prototypes and 
commercial products.  The conference will also feature two days
of introductory and advanced tutorials on a variety of topics.
There will be opportunities for informal meetings of special
interest groups. 

You are invited to participate in ECHT'92 and to submit original
papers, proposals for panels, tutorials, technical briefings, 
demonstrations, videos and poster sessions.  All submissions will
be stringently reviewed to ensure the highest levels of 
originality and merit.  We encourage innovative submissions in
any area concerned with Hypertext and Hypermedia research
development and practice.  A non-exhaustive list of suggested 
topics includes: 

Hypertext and Hypermedia 
-Applications 
-Modelling and design 
-Development methodologies and tools 
-Responsive interfaces 
-Evaluation 
-Systems software technologies 
-Authoring 

Hypertext-Hypermedia in connection with: 
-Database management systems 
-Object-oriented systems and languages 
-Operating systems 
-Knowledge-based systems 
-Information retrieval 
-Cooperative work 
-Computer-aided design 
-Software engineering 
-Electronic publishing 
-Technical documentation 
-Presentation, museums, and kiosk systems 
-Fiction 
-Interactive learning and teaching 

INSTRUCTIONS FOR SUBMISSION 

PAPERS 
Technical papers relate original work or integrative review 
(theoretical, empirical, systems).  We discourage simple 
presentations of projects or commercial products.  We encourage 
emphasizing "experiences," "lessons learned," or "integrative 
reviews."  Papers should provide a clear scientific message to 
the audience, place the presented work in context within the 
field, cite related work, and clearly indicate the innovative 
aspects of the work. 

Submission:  Full papers (<6000 words) should be submitted in 
five paper copies.  A separate cover page must contain the title 
of the paper, name(s), affiliation and complete mailing address 
(incl. phone, telefax, e-mail) of the authors together with an 
abstract (about 200 words) and 3 - 5 keywords.  Please send an 
e-mail version of the abstract with title, name, address, and 
affiliation to the conference secretariat as soon as possible. 

Deadline:  July 13th, 1992
For more information, please contact: 
Jocelyne & Marc Nanard - PAPERS CO-CHAIRS 
LIRMM, Universite Montpellier II, France 
Phone: (33) -67148517 or (33) -67148523 
Fax: (33) -67148500 
E-mail: nanard@crim.fr 

TUTORIALS 
Courses should be designed to provide advanced technical 
training in an area, or to introduce a rigorous framework for
learning a new area.  Courses can be proposed for half-day (3
hours) or full-day (6 hours) length. 

Submission: Proposals should describe the content of the course 
and its format (1000-2000 words), should identify the target 
audience, the level of expertise required, and the length (1 or 2
half days).  Qualification and profile of the instructor(s) 
should also be included.  A separate page containing title, 
name(s), affiliation and complete mailing address (incl. phone,
telefax, e-mail) of the instructors must be provided. 

Deadline: July 13th, 1992  
For more information, please contact: 
Franca Garzotto - TUTORIALS CHAIR 
Dipartimento di Elettronica Politecnico di Milano, 
Piazza L. da Vinci 32, 20133 Milano, Italy 
Phone: +39-2-2399 3520 
Fax: +39-2-2399 3411 
E-mail: garzotto@ipmel1.polimi.it 

PANELS 
Panels are meant to provide an interactive forum for involving 
both panelists and audience in lively discussions and exchanges 
of different points of view. 

Submission: Moderators are invited to provide a description of 
the proposed panel by submitting 3 - 5 pages listing the topic, 
e.g., by providing leading questions to be raised by the 
moderator, the specific format intended, the names and 
affiliations of the panelists with their specific backgrounds 
and their positions on the (hopefully  controversial) issues of 
the panel.  Panel statements will appear in the proceedings. 
A separate cover page must contain the title of the panel, 
name(s), affiliation and complete mailing address (incl. phone, 
telefax, e-mail) of the panelists. 

Deadline:  July 13th,  1992  
For more information, please contact: 
Norbert Streitz - PANELS CHAIR 
GMD-IPSI 
Dolivostr. 15, D-6100 Darmstadt, Germany 
Phone: +49-6151 869 919 
Fax: +49-6151 869 966 
E-mail: streitz@darmstadt.gmd.de 

DEMONSTRATIONS, POSTERS, AND VIDEOS 
Demonstrations provide the attendees with the opportunity to 
experience hypertext systems and question the developers of the 
systems.  Poster presentations give researchers the opportunity 
to  present significant work in progress or late-breaking results
and to  discuss their work with those attendees most deeply 
interested in the topic.  Videos are appropriate for illustrating
concepts that are best captured visually. 

Submission: Demonstrations and posters should be submitted in the
form of an extended abstract (approx. 1000 words), describing the
content, the relevance for the conference and what is noteworthy
about the presented work.  Demonstrators are informed that they 
must provide  their own hardware.  Videos should be submitted in 
the form of a 5-10 minutes VHS PAL or NTSC tape, with a 500 
word abstract, describing the content, relevance, and 
noteworthiness as above.  A separate page must contain the title 
of the demo, poster, or video, name(s), affiliation and complete
mailing address (incl. phone, telefax, e-mail) of the author(s). 
Deadline:  July 13th, 1992  
For more information, please contact: 
Paul Kahn - DEMONSTRATIONS, POSTERS, AND VIDEOS CHAIR 
IRIS, Brown University 
P.O.BOX 1946, Providence RD 02912, USA 
Phone: 401 - 863 2402 
Fax: 401 - 863 1758 
E-mail: pdk@iris.brown.edu 
or 
Antoine Risk - EUROPEAN DEMONSTRATIONS  CHAIR: 
EUROCLID 
Promopole 12 Av. des Pres, 78180 Montigny le Bretonneux, France 
Phone: 1 - 30441456 
Fax:     1 - 30571863 
E-mail: antoine.rizk@.inria.fr 

TECHNICAL BRIEFINGS 
Technical briefings aim at presenting details of a concrete
design rather than an empirical or theoretical contribution.
Presentations should emphasize experience in the design and
implementation of hypertext systems or applications, and discuss
decision points and trade-offs. 

Submission: Proposals (approx. 1500 words) should be submitted in
five paper copies and outline the points to be made in the 
briefing.  A separate page must contain the title of the 
briefing, name(s), affiliation and complete mailing address 
(incl. phone, telefax, e-mail) of the author(s). 

Deadline:  July 13th, 1992  
For more information, please contact: 
Norman Meyrowitz - TECHNICAL BRIEFINGS CHAIR 
GO Corporation, 950 Tower Lane- Suite 140 
Foster City CA 94404, USA 
Phone: 415 - 345 9833 
Fax:    415 - 345 7400 
E-mail: nkm@go.com 

For more information or to be added to the ECHT'92 mailing list: 

Paolo Paolini - GENERAL CONFERENCE CHAIR 
Politecnico di Milano, Italy 
Dipartimento di Elettronica, 
E-mail: paolini@ipmel1.polimi.it 
Telephone: (39) 2-2399 3520 
Fax: (39) 2-2399 3411 
or 
Polle Zellweger - U.S. COORDINATOR 
Xerox PARC 
3333 Coyote Hill Rd 
Palo Alto CA 94304 U.S.A. 
Phone: 415-812 4426 
Fax: 415-812 4241 
E-mail: zellweger.parc@xerox.com 
Phone: 415 - 345 9833 
Fax:    415 - 345 7400 
E-mail: nkm@go.com 

29)-------------------------------------------------------------

                   PENN STATE UNIVERSITY SEMINAR SERIES
                            ISSUES IN CRITICISM

                              Summer Seminar

                    HISTORICISMS AND CULTURAL CRITIQUE

                             June 25-30, 1992

                        State College, Pennsylvania

WAI-CHEE DIMOCK, Department of English, University of California,
San Diego.  Author of Empire for Liberty: Melville and the
Poetics of Individualism (1989) and Symbolic Equality: Political
Theory, Law, and American Literature (forthcoming); co-editor of
the forthcoming Class and Literary Studies.  Professor Dimock
will focus on the shifting configurations of gender and history.

MARJORIE LEVINSON, Department of English, University of
Pennsylvania.  Editor of Rethinking Historicism (1989) and author
of Keats's life of Allegory: the Origins of Style (1988) and
other monographs treating Romantic poetry.  Professor Levinson's
general title is "The Dialectic of Enlightenment: To Be
Continued," considering paradigms from the preCartesian to the
present deep ecology movement.

BROOK THOMAS, Department of English and Comparative Literature,
University of California, Irvine.  Author of Cross-Examination of
Law and Literature (1987) and The New Historicism and Other Old-
Fashioned Topics (1991).  Professor Thomas's central topic "The
Turn to History and the Crisis of Representation."

Participants will hear presentations by three well-known scholar-
critics--Wai Chee Dimock, Marjorie Levinson, and Brook
Thomas--and engage in seminar-type discussions organized by these
leaders.  Registrants are asked to indicate their first and
second choices for morning seminar groups.  The schedule and
atmosphere are intended to encourage informal discussions among
participants.

For further information contact:

                              Wendell Harris
                           Department of English
                       Pennsylvania State University
                   University Park, Pennsylvania  16802
                 Telephone: 814-863-2343 or 814-865-9243

30)-------------------------------------------------------------

     The Penn State Conference on Rhetoric and Composition 

                        July 8-11, 1992 

The Penn State Conference on Rhetoric and Composition, now 
entering its second decade, is a four-day gathering of teachers
and scholars.  It offers a generous mixture of plenary and
special-interest sessions in a relaxed atmosphere; a chance for
learning, leisure, and reflection on composition and rhetoric;
and an extended opportunity to discuss professional concerns with
nationally known speakers and interested colleagues. 

Each year the conference features plenary sessions, concurrent 
sessions, workshops, and roundtable discussions on topics of
current interest.  This year, the conference will run
concurrently with the Association of Departments of English (ADE)
regional summer meeting of department heads; several joint
activities are planned. 

***Panel Sessions and Workshops 
Papers this year will concern a wide variety of subjects
involving rhetoric and composition, such as rhetorical theory;
the composing process; technical or business writing; advanced
composition; ESL; writing across the curriculum; the history of
rhetoric; teaching methods; collaborative learning; tutoring and
writing labs; connections among reading, writing, and speaking;
computers and writing; legal, political, or religious rhetoric;
literacy; language and stylistics; basic writing; social
implications of writing; writing in the workplace; rhetorical
criticism; rhetoric and literature; testing and assessment; and
the administration of writing programs. 

Workshops will be offered on multimedia resources for the writing
classroom, portfolio assessment, and teacher development. 

***Saturday Morning Sessions 
On Saturday morning, participants will have a special opportunity
to concentrate for an extended period on one of three important
areas: New Ideas for Integrating Critical Writing and Critical
Reading, Peer Tutoring and Reviewing, and Program Assessment in
English. 

***Plenary Session Speakers 

Donald McCloskey, our keynote speaker, is professor of history
and of economics at the University of Iowa, where he directs the
Project on Rhetoric of Inquiry (POROI).  

Anne Ruggles Gere, professor of English and of education at the 
University of Michigan.   Her research encompasses both the
theory and pragmatics of composition.

Steven Mailloux, professor of English and Comparative Literature
at the University of California at Irvine.  His work examines the
relationships among rhetoric, literary theory, cultural studies,
and hermeneutics.  

***Time and Location 
This conference will begin at 10:30 a.m. on Wednesday, July 8 and
will end at noon on Saturday, July 11.  It will be held on Penn
State's University Park Campus in State College, Pennsylvania. 

***Fee and Registration 
The $100 fee ($75 for graduate students, lecturers, and retired 
faculty) covers registration, materials, and three social events.
It may be paid by check, money order, VISA, MasterCard, or
request to bill employer (accompanied by a letter of
authorization).  We regret that we cannot offer daily rates for
conference registration.  Fees remain the same for all or any
part of the conference.  To register, contact Penn State by June
22.  See below for address and telephone numbers.  Those who
register in advance will be notified of program changes.
Registrations will be acknowledged by mail. 

Refunds will be made for cancellations received by June 22. 
After that, the individual or organization will be held
responsible for the fee.  Anyone who is registered but cannot
attend may send a substitute. 

***For more about program content: 
Davida Charney 
117 Burrowes Building 
The Pennsylvania State University 
University Park, PA 16802 
phone (814) 865-9703 
secretary (814) 863-3066 
FAX (814) 863-7285 
E-mail to IRJ at PSUVM.PSU.EDU 

***About registration and housing:
Chuck Herd 
409 Keller Conference Center 
The Pennsylvania State University 
University Park, PA 16802 
phone (814) 863-3550 
FAX (814) 865-3749 

31)-------------------------------------------------------------

                    THEORY, CULTURE & SOCIETY

                   10TH ANNIVERSARY CONFERENCE
                       AUGUST 16-19, 1992    

                  Seven Springs Mountain Resort
                   Champion, Pennsylvania, USA

The Conference's main plenary themes are: 
          Modernity/Reflexivity/Postmodernity; 
          The Body, Self, and Identity; 
          Cultural Theory and Cultural Change.  

***The themes are continued in six panels and five parallel
streams of sessions.  These are:  The Body, Modernity and
Postmodernity; Cultural Theory; Political Culture and Cultural
Studies.  

***We also have an additional stream in which six postmodern
films will be shown and discussed.  

***To complete the program we have over twenty round tables on a
wide range of topics.

The _Theory, Culture & Society_ Conference will provide a unique
opportunity to participate with leading figures in the discussion
of some of the central issues in social and cultural theory.  

For complete details and a conference packet:

Kathleen White
-Theory, Culture & Society_ Conference
University Center for International Studies
4G22 Forbes Quadrangle
University of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA
telephone:  412-648-7418
fax:        412-648-2199

OR

_Theory, Culture & Society_ Conference
School of Health, Social and Policy Studies
Teesside Polytechnic
Middlesbrough,
Cleveland, TS1 3BA
United Kingdom
telephone:  (44) 0642 342346/7
fax:        (44) 0642 342067

32)-------------------------------------------------------------

                        CALL FOR PAPERS

     ========================
     /    __Rethinking      /
     /      MARXISM__       /
     ========================

         --- Announcing an international conference ---

    MARXISM IN THE NEW WORLD ORDER: CRISES AND POSSIBILITIES
                      November 12-14, 1992
               University of Massachusetts-Amherst

          We encourage papers and, especially, organized panels
          and events on the many dimensions (political, artistic,
          cultural and academic) and in the many traditions with
          which contemporary Marxism can meet the challenges of
          today.

          For conference information: Antonio Callari, Conference
          Coordinator, Economics Department, Franklin and
          Marshall College, Lancaster PA 17604.  Phone 717-291-
          3947; Fax 717-399-4413.

33)-------------------------------------------------------------

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
** *                                                             

  * **     ----------------------                                

        **     Call for participation:  ---------------------    

            **     ----------------------   Joint 1992
conference:  ///////////    **                             
---------------------   S A G S E T    **                        

                             I S A G A     **   Society for the
Advancement of Games and           \\\\\\\\\\\    **  
Simulations in Education and Training                            
**                   International Simulation and Gaming
Association   **                                                 

                  **   Conference theme:        Developing
transferable skills through   **   ----------------              

          simulation and gaming   **                             

                                      **   18-21 August, 1992    

 Napier University, Edinburgh, Scotland   **                     

                                              **   For further
information:                          Fred Percival   **  
                             SAGSET/ISAGA Conference Secretary  
**                                                 Napier
University   **                                                
219 Colinton Road   **   Telephone:  44 / 31-455-4394            

   Edinburgh EH14 1DJ   **   Facsimile:  44 / 31-455-7989        

                 Scotland   **                                   

                                ** *                             

                                  * *  * * * * * * * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
+----------------------------------------------------------------
-------+|  Chet Farmer, Assistant Director   |   English / 103
Morgan           ||  Project IDEALS -- FIPSE, DoE      |  
Tuscaloosa, AL  35487-0244     ||  University of Alabama         

  |   tel 205-348-9494               |

34)-------------------------------------------------------------

From: PSDMSPIN@BRUSP.ANSP.BR
Subject: Announcing a new list

Dear Friends,

We would like to announce the creation of VIOLEN-L, a
discussion group for those devoted to the study of the problem
of violence, Human Rights, and public policies on these
and related subjects.  VIOLEN-L is managed by the Nucleo de
Estudos da Violencia da Universidade de Sao Paulo (Center for the
Study of Violence of the University of Sao Paulo).  Those who
want to subscribe must send the following command:

TELL LISTSERV AT BRUSPVM SUB VIOLEN-L "your true name"

Everybody who would like to join the discussion will be welcomed!

Sincerely yours,

Mario Baldini
(PSDMSPIN@BRUSP.BITNET)

35)------------------------------------------------------------- 

This letter is to announce the formation of and offer a welcome
to a new Listserv discussion list--SovHist--(the discussion of
Soviet history from 1917-1991).

This list will be used as a forum for the reasonable discussion
of any aspect of the history of the Soviet Union from the
"February Revolution" of 1917 to the breakup of the USSR that
occurred 25 December, 1991.

Any element of this period is discussable, so long as the
criteria of being reasonable and polite in one's discourse are
adhered to.  Any questions about suitable topics should be
directed to me, Valentine Smith, at the Internet address
(cdell@vax1.umkc.edu).

Anyone wishing to participate in this list should send the
following command to one of the following Listservs; USCVM,
DOSUNI1, or CSEARN via e-mail in the body of a mail message (not
the "Subject:" line) SUB SovHist (your real name).  To
unsubscribe, send the command UNSUB (your real name).  Other
Listserv commands can be gotten by sending HELP in the message
body to any Listserv.

This is an unmoderated list.  However, I will closely keep an eye
on it, and hope that we can engage in some fruitful discussions
on Soviet history.  All that is asked is reasonable and polite
dialogue--any problems will be first addressed by private mail,
and then removal if that private discussion fails to resolve a
conflict.  This could be an exciting forum, I hope it will be,
and I encourage you to be an active participant.

Enjoy! Valentine Smith (cdell@vax1.umkc.edu)

36)-------------------------------------------------------------

AMLIT-L on LISTSERV@UMCVMB           American Literature
Discussion List
        or LISTSERV@UMCVMB.MISSOURI.EDU

   The American Literature Discussion List has been created for
the discussion of topics and issues in the vast and diverse field
of American Literature among a world-wide community interested in
the subject.  You can expect consultations, conferences, and an
ongoing exchange of information among scholars and students of
American Literature on this list.  In addition, announcements of
relevant conferences and calls for papers are welcome and
encouraged.

     To subscribe send a message to listserv@umcvmb or
     listserv@umcvmb.missouri.edu.  In BODY of the message state:

          SUB AMLIT-L your full name

     eg: SUB AMLIT-L E. Allen Poe

     If you have any questions please contact the owner.

     Owner: Michael O'Conner 
                        or 

37)-------------------------------------------------------------

NEW LIST: INMYLIFE - Beatle era popular culture 

INMYLIFE@WKUVX1.BITNET 

Topics will include but not be restricted to history, politics, 
culture, music, literature, collectibles, comic books, comix,
counter culture, drugs, Vietnam (and the war), Cold War, between
1962 (the first Beatle hit record in England) and 1974 (US out of
Vietnam). 

Interested parties should send a one line command 

                SUB INMYLIFE firstname lastname 

to LISTSERV@WKUVX1.BITNET. 

   Owner: Matt Gore

     

  • The Pressures of Merely Sublimating

    Rei Terada

    Department of English
    University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
    <Rei.Terada@um.cc.umich.edu>

     

    Wilson, Rob. American Sublime: The Genealogy of a Poetic Genre. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1991.

     

    The American academy rediscovered the theoretical force of sublimity about fifteen years ago, mainly through three post-Freudian efforts–Thomas Weiskel’s The Romantic Sublime (1976), Harold Bloom’s “Emerson and Whitman: The American Sublime” (in Poetry and Repression [1976]), and an influential series of essays by Neil Hertz, written over a period of years and eventually collected in The End of the Line: Essays in Psychoanalysis and the Sublime (1985). The emphases of these critics differ, but as Rob Wilson observes at the outset of his own revisionary study, the lowest common denominator of sublimation for all is its participation in an Oedipal “ego-quest,” an individual “struggle for strong selfhood” (8). Since the mid-seventies, however, criticism so devotedly post-Freudian has become more difficult to find. It is a commonplace to assume that individualistically psychological work too easily slights the sociohistorical forces that sustain and restrain the psyche and its potential for genius. In Wilson’s words, “to oedipalize the sublime–as is the dominant mode of Weiskel, Bloom, and Hertz–is to dehistoricize its implied workings” (12).

     

    Yet, in spite of this, the notion of the sublime has lost no currency. In American Sublime, as elsewhere, the sublime outlives the Freudian matrix of its academic rediscovery to the extent that its description of an outer linguistic limit assists explorations of radical otherness and of power. Wilson states that his book is concerned principally with the ideological convenience of the sublime and that he therefore intends his “genealogy” in the Foucauldian sense, as a “historical knowledge of struggles” (14); in practice, American Sublime reorders primarily literary-historical genealogy. Both of these genealogical enterprises are more questionable on grounds of predictability than of controversy; the advantages of an eclectic Postmodern reading of the American sublime are plain to see. But American Sublime does not come close to achieving these aims, in part because the desiderata seem so obviously agreeable that Wilson hardly feels the need to fulfill them.

     

    The first third of American Sublime is composed of three introductions (an “Introduction,” an introductory first chapter entitled “An American Sublime,” and a second chapter entitled “Preliminary Minutiae”), which range from Emerson to Language Poetry to set forth the argument which later, overlapping chapters restate. The “decreative” nature of the American sublime throughout American literary history “voids history and nature of prior presences” (4) in order to cast the reconstruction of the continent as an original, thus more innocent, construction. American emptiness, itself fictive, can then be read as an invitation to produce still more fictions. Wilson also asserts that discussions of the American sublime too often retain a version of poetic genealogy that elevates Bloom’s favorite relentless individualists. The “scenario of the American sublime argued” in 1980s criticism, as Wilson sees it, still begins with Emerson, then moves on to “generate a hugely incarnational son (Whitman), and a fiercely deconstructive daughter (Dickinson), and to filter this power-influx into increasingly self-defensive voices of ‘countersublimity’” (8). Wilson proposes to modify this poetic lineage by attending to Emerson’s lesser-known precursors and by carrying his argument through Modernism–represented here by the work of Wallace Stevens–into contemporaneity with chapters on the “Postmodern” and the “Nuclear” sublime1; Whitman appears in this scheme as “not so much the cause as the effect . . . of this collective will to the American sublime” (10). Throughout, American Sublime suspends the question of the structure of the sublime while stressing its political usefulness (or its “cash-value,” as Wilson calls it): American poets found in the idea of the sublime a ready-made language for the American will to power.

     

    According to the literary-historical narrative which comprises the latter two-thirds of Wilson’s book, Bradstreet introduced the sublime to American literature through the Puritan meditative tradition, which licensed sensual and poetic transport when it “serve[d] the rapture of conversion” (75). Livingston then harnessed the sublime to “an emerging Whig ideology of liberation, on Lockean and Miltonic grounds, evoking the sublime not just as natural but as social/political terror that can be made to work to liberal American purposes” (95), and William Cullen Bryant’s development of a native natural sublime showed “the infinite wealth of this world as transformable to ideal human usages such as poetry” (125). Bryant’s loosely Wordsworthian landscapes also democratized the sublime, proving that “ordinary words and commonplace sites could serve” (125). While Whitman merely embodies more clearly and dramatically the ideals of these precursors, the Modernist sublime exemplified by Stevens “comes to refer less to superlative revelation than to the circumstances in which such a revelation might have taken place” (45). Wilson seems most at home, finally, in the Postmodern era; there, liberated from the obligation to revaluate traditions, Wilson’s restless glances at bits of text are most appropriate, and he can most easily connect “American grandeur” to “that equally vast source of American infinitude reified into power, ‘Capital’” (200). American Sublime is most innovative in its speculations on the “nuclear sublime,” a force “so vast and final in its disclosures of power that it renders the vaunted ‘supreme fiction[s]’ of the Romantic imagination ludicrous or mute” (230).

     

    Wilson’s discussions of Whitman and Stevens, in contrast, expose the shallowness of his revisionism. These chapters tread explicitly on Bloomian ground, but seem contented to rehearse Bloom’s arguments in the midst of their supposed refutation of them. Thus Wilson claims that “Walt Whitman became the American sublime in 1855” (134), that Whitman’s is an “exemplary case” (134), and that “all prior American versions seemed wishful tonality more than earthy fact” (135). American Sublime seems in thrall not only to Bloom’s promotion of Whitman but to his grandiloquently Oedipal emphasis when Wilson maintains that “future disciples such as Allen Ginsberg (or Robert Pinsky) . . . must absorb this transgressive language to become their greatest American selves” (143). Wilson’s would-be containment of Whitman thus finally seems timid, amounting to no more than the tautological assertion that “Leaves is fully ‘autochthonic’ if situated in the context of earlier American poetics of the sublime” (163); and his reading of Stevens, which argues that “the spirit of the sublime . . . can only exist for Stevens through counter-movements of the spirit which negate (‘decreate’) false or prior notions of the sublime, even if they are images from his own earlier poems” (177), is hardly more insurgent. Here and elsewhere, American Sublime fails to construct a truly iconoclastic literary history insofar as it relies instead upon foregone conclusions which all good Postmodernists can be counted upon to believe. Thus, to suggest that A. R. Ammons’s Sphere is tempted by the idea of a traditionally sublime “God-drenched voice” (69), it suffices to point out that “the poem, after all, is written ‘For Harold Bloom’” (69). We all know what that means–“a foreshortened view of literary tradition” (70), of which Wilson firmly disapproves. Yet Wilson’s index devotes fourteen lines to Bryant, twelve to Bradstreet, and eight to Livingston, but seventy lines to Stevens, forty-four to Whitman, twenty-one to Emerson, and ten to Harold Bloom. American Sublime thus substitutes a declarative “decreation” of canonicity–fiat multiplicitas–for the reconfiguration of American poetic genealogy it announces.

     

    This sort of substitution is unfortunately typical of Wilson’s procedure. On page 39, for example, Wilson promises to “return to quarrel with [Terrence] Des Pres’s Bloom-like and inadequately theorized claim that this ‘American sublime’ has exhausted its very power of imaginative resistance in ‘late Stevens.’” On page 235, however, “it is no wonder that, as Terrence des Pres contends . . . ‘the “American Sublime,” as critics call it, has been missing in our poetry since at least late Stevens.’” Indeed, American Sublime makes little distinction between claiming to take a position and taking one, between talking about historicism or cultural criticism and doing any. Marxism and feminism function more as sources of atmosphere than as bodies of knowledge. A discussion of Bradstreet needs, of course, to consider gender. Wilson therefore refers not to Bradstreet’s voice but to her “woman’s voice,” her position as “a Puritan woman given to the very male art of English poetry” (72); for “Bradstreet would be a ‘merry bird’ and sing a sublime lyric of divine praise, in a summer of bliss. Such, however, cannot be her woman’s lot in that sin-conscious version of Christianity disseminated as American Puritanism” (91). And why not? Because “Bradstreet early–indeed first— undergoes what Harold Bloom has termed ‘the anxiety of influence’” (88).

     

    This disinclination to distinguish between a critical stance and its simulacrum extends to Wilson’s very definition of the sublime. It is unclear throughout whether Wilson means by the sublime an experience and its representation, or the representation of a nonexistent experience (the latter would not be a weaker argument, but a different one). On the one hand, “the geographical magnitude of America mythically if not in fact inspired these sublime sensations” (157); on the other, American poets are “convinced by the presence–if not the metaphor–of vast space” (68); and on a third, so to speak, Whitman was “inspired by the scenery if not the sublime of capital” (135). American Sublime finally dissolves into a celebration of the sublime as neither psychological structure nor ideological tool, but as a euphoric “tone” or “mood” far more disembodied and departicularized than anything in Weiskel or Hertz. Wilson refers to “moods of pious arousal” and “literary sublimity” (95), “of moralized rapture” and “self-elected awe” (124), a newer mood of landscape elevation” (94), “a commonsense mood of exaltation” (124), Livingston’s “Protestant-liberal tone” (113), a William Smith lyric “emotive in tone” (103), and so on, until there is no difference between sublimation and making sublime sounds: “Livingston had helped to develop a tradition (or at least tone) of transport” (113).

     

    The same confusion crops up in Wilson’s stylistic mannerisms. Wilson often provides a gloss on a term in parentheses immediately following it (when dealing with quoted material he tends to operate the other way around, glossing the quotation, then referring back in parentheses to the quoted term). The resulting system of equivalences, taken seriously, implies a world of astonishing conceptual sloppiness. In the introduction we find “American vastness (emptiness),” “immensity and wildness (‘power’),” “multiple identifications (‘use’),” “art-empowerment (transport),” “poetic language (art),” “beholding (letting go of),” “subjugating (interiorizing),” “recreate/decreate (alter),” and “fullness (vacancy).” These sound like elements of a nightmarish logic problem: If vastness means emptiness, and immensity (which is usually equivalent to vastness) means power, and vacancy (which is usually equivalent to emptiness) means fullness, how many ways are there of looking at a blackbird? If, on the other hand, we don’t take these pairings as equivalences, what are they? Simulacra of bits of analyses, evoking the “mood” of a critical enterprise. American Sublime comes down to its synthetic atmosphere:

     

    The American landscape, as site of collective sublimity, has transported poets from Bradstreet to Bryant and beyond into whit-manic tropes of expanded power and higher energy. This continental sublimity, signifying at some semiotic bottom line the project of American expansion (will) taking "dominion everywhere" from Florida to India, has helped to entrench the tropes of a liberal nation legitimating it on its own innermost terms. (37)

     

    The critical content of such a passage is hard to perceive, but might be paraphrased, “The landscape encouraged tropes of power that legitimated American expansion.” This is not a moment of summation in particular; open American Sublime to virtually any page and it is saying the same thing.

     

    It’s an understatement to say that American Sublime participates in the metaphorization and generalization of the sublime that has for better and worse preserved its critical vitality. Wilson’s is an extreme case, since he carries that generalization about as far as it can go. Other contemporary modifications of the sublime to which Wilson refers in passing, such as Gary Lee Stonum’s reading of Dickinson2 or Lyotard’s reflections on the sublimity of Postmodern information systems,3 are more engaging and less reductive. Still, the ease with which Wilson’s obviously well-intentioned “more broadly historical description” (27) of the sublime falls into reifications and mystifications greater than those it charges to its predecessors should give pause to Postmodern criticism as it struggles to define itself against the recent past. The political implications of Weiskel’s meticulous meditations (on the way, for example, in which “the price of [sublimation’s] freedom for will or ego–and of this enhanced sense of self–is alienation from particular forms of primary experience”4) are not slight. And Bloom’s inaugural essay on the American sublime does more and better historical work on its second page, surprisingly, than Wilson does in his entire volume:

     

    It is noteworthy, and has been noted, that Emerson's two great outbursts of prophetic vocation coincide with two national moral crises, the Depression of 1837 and the Mexican War of 1846, which Emerson, as an Abolitionist, bitterly opposed. The origins of the American Sublime are connected inextricably to the business collapse of 1837. I want to illustrate this connection by a close reading of relevant entries in Emerson's Journals of 1837, so as to be able to ask and perhaps answer the invariable question that antithetical criticism learns always to ask of each fresh instance of the Sublime. What is being freshly repressed? What has been forgotten, on purpose, in the depths, so as to make possible this sudden elevation to the heights?5

     

    American Sublime is not the Postmodern critique it wants to be because it operates too much by means of its own expedient repressions, “clearing the ground” of contemporary criticism in order to avoid engaging entire schools of thought whose flaws it believes it knows. Wilson never absorbs the point of “American Sublime,” the Stevens lyric he frequently quotes, in which “General Jackson / posed for his statue” and “knew how one feels.”6 The point lies in the immediate necessity of the next question: “But how doesone feel?”

     

    Notes

     

    1. This reorganization is familiar; see, for example, Mutlu Konuk Blasing, American Poetry: The Rhetoric of Its Forms (New Haven: Yale UP, 1987).

     

    2. The Dickinson Sublime (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1990).

     

    3. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984).

     

    4. The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976), 58-59.

     

    5. Poetry and Repression (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1976), 236.

     

    6. The Collected Poems (New York: Vintage, 1982), 130-31.

     

  • Speaking in Tongues: Dead Elvis and the Greil Quest

    Linda Ray Pratt

    Department of English
    University of Nebraska-Lincoln
    <lpratt@unlcdc2>

     

    Marcus, Greil. Dead Elvis: A Chronicle of a Cultural Obsession. New York: Doubleday, 1991.

     

    `You gotta learn how to speak in tongues.’
    `I already know how,’ Elvis says.

     

    –Greil Marcus, Jungle Music

     

    the communication

    Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language

    of the living.

     

    –T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

     

    From the evidence in Greil Marcus’s new book, the dead Elvis is a Postmodern Elvis, a hermeneutic object in whose emptiness even fictions becomes simulacra. Subtitled A Chronicle of a Cultural Obsession, Dead Elvis collects Marcus’s writings on Elvis from 1977 to 1990, but they are inspired by the wide range of representations that make this book more of a cultural conversation than a chronicle. Marcus calls the invention of dead Elvis “a great common art project, the work of scores of people operating independently of each other, linked only by their determination to solve the same problem: who was he, and why do I still care?” The collective representation both legitimizes and subverts “Elvis,” the cultural production that would make discerning who the man was irrelevant were it not for the imagination invested in the project.

     

    For those who still care, the questions are sometimes really, really big ones: is Elvis in Heaven or Hell? (we’ve given up on the K-Mart in Kalamazoo). Is Elvis more like Hitler or Jesus? The questions are openly joking but mask the still unsettled doubt about what it means that we want Elvis, alive or dead. Should we think about him with Melville, Lincoln, and Faulkner (as Marcus did so brilliantly in Mystery Train) or was he just a piece of Southern white trash (as Albert Goldman wishes) or, like Byron, “an epicene and disrupter,” one of the “revolutionary men of beauty” who burn godlike (as Camille Paglia argues). This book doesn’t really explain who he was, or even why we still care. Its strength is in showing how the art project is coming along, what image of Elvis, dead, we are keeping alive. Too recent for the book was the phenomenon of Americans voting on which image to keep alive. The heady choice of young or old Elvis on “the stamp” engaged us more than our political elections and plays like a last ritual of mass investiture, a kind of cultural laying out of the robes in which Dead Elvis will officially ascend, transcend, and return to sender.

     

    The book contains reviews Marcus has written on Nik Cohn’s King Death, Goldman’s Elvis, Peter Guralnick’s Lost Highways, and Nick Tosches’s Hellfire: The Jerry Lee Lewis Story. These reviews are often occasions for Marcus to comment both on the various authors’ uses and abuses of Elvis and on his own continuing fascination with the king who wouldn’t die. Combined with the many visual representations in paintings, album covers, and other less classifiable forms, the book itself becomes part of the art project. Marcus assembles a set of Elvis images that range from the stupid to the clever. The article in Publish! Desktop Publishing on “Clones: The PostScript Impersonators” that is illustrated with computeresque-Elvis clones is an unexpected triple pun in what would otherwise be the dullest of pieces. The exhibition advertisement for “Outside the Clock: Beyond Good and Elvis,” rewrites Nietzsche’s wisdom in a pop vernacular. Holding all of this together is Marcus’s own cultural obsession; more than a decade after his death, “Elvis was everywhere, and each mask was simply the thing the thing wore over its true face, which no one could see” (188).

     

    “The thing” speaks in tongues both vulgar and sublime, and Marcus is struggling with the translation. Questing after what it was in the music that holds us, Marcus writes abstractly of “the grain of his voice.” His Elvis remains an “inner mystery . . . where the secrets are outside of words. . . .” The problem is how to account for the magnitude of Elvis’s “cultural conquest” when it “remains impossible” to believe that Elvis “understood” what he was doing. “Is it possible that Elvis Presley appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show not as a country boy eager for his big chance but as a man ready to disorder and dismember the culture that from his first moment had tried to dismember him, to fix him as a creature of resentment, rage, and fatalism, and that had failed?” (195). But it is not possible to attribute social design to the fallout of an explosion of self, and neither Living nor Dead Elvis yields up his secrets in service to sociology.

     

    Marcus’s book is an intellectual quest by the critic of culture uncomfortable with the Dionysian confusion in the spectacle. Elvis did not plan a cultural revolution, but he did mean to be sexy, and what his intellect did not design, his body knew instinctively. The images of Dead Elvis are often either a defacement of his youthful body or a restoration of it. Paglia talks about the power of his sexual beauty in terms that rock critics (mainly a male world) shy away from. Marcus knows that it was his dazzling sexuality that made Elvis different from other early rockers, but he is more comfortable discussing him in the context of America as a culture than he is as a post- Protestant Dionysian god. Was it the culture of Melville and Lincoln, or even Eisenhower, that Elvis dismembered, or was it the culture which dismembered him in order to consume him sexually? Wouldn’t a book seeking to explain him have to be subtitled, “The Chronicle of a Sexual Obsession”? Or how about “The Culture of a Sexual Chronicle”? “Cultural” reads like an intellectual displacement, just as the comparison of Elvis with Jesus conceals the worship of the body instead of the soul. Marcus calls the Cortez photographs of Elvis among the Munich whores “repulsive and irresistible,” a seedy, corrupt image that makes you “want to turn away.” This won’t “mesh with the Elvis we carry in our heads,” Marcus says, but perhaps what doesn’t mesh is the crude eroticism of these pictures with the myths of Elvis we invented to conceal the thing in the shadow of the thing.

     

    One of those myths that everyone still wants to look away from is that of Elvis’s devotion to his mother. Marcus reviews Elaine Dundy’s Elvis and Gladys, a book designed “to rescue Gladys Presley from her usual dismissal as a dumb, sentimental woman” who drowned her son in overprotection. Dundy’s thesis suggests to Marcus that “Elvis’s infantile adult life had far more to do with class . . . ,” an idea that opens up for Marcus his own interest in “a degeneration of democratic values” from the Southern frontiersman to the sterile aristocrat of modern Memphis. (Marcus has this backwards: in the South, it’s the degeneration of aristocratic values unhinged by urban development and big capital. Elvis came out of the one and made the other, becoming in the process an icon of the “New South.”) But what we’ve learned about Elvis’s sexual identity makes him sound more like an unprotected victim of incestuous abuse than an overprotected beloved child. Gladys Presley was an alcoholic with a weak husband and the most beautiful boy in the world. The legend says that Elvis first recorded “My Happiness” for her birthday, but maybe the record he did for her was “That’s All Right, Mama,” with its combination of angry self-assertion (“I’m leaving town for sure”) and pleasured acquiescence (“That’s alright now Mama, just any way you do”). That “grain” Marcus hears in his voice has the complex emotional intensity that stops us dead with its authenticity, something like the inescapable edge we hear in Sylvia Plath’s. His voice mixes desire and rejection, suffering and rage, that overpowers the conventions of musical form or pop language. Its rhythm is an emotional pulse of inconsolable misery and delighted abandonment. Elvis’s music, like Plath’s poetry, is full of threats of revenge that dissolve in need and sadness: “I’m leaving town for good” and then you’ll be sorry for the way you treated me. When Elvis called Mama every day he was on the road, who was taking care of whom? Did she walk him to school every day to see that he was safe and got his education, or to see that he did not throw her over? Perhaps she never touched her boy, but he came to us profoundly aware of his sexual attractiveness and too damaged to handle the power his body could command. Elvis’s psychological pattern was denial: working to reduce the audience to screaming ecstasy, he told us he wasn’t doing anything “sexual” on stage; consuming handfuls of pills, he flashed his badge as a drug agent; wearing the black leather suit at the peak of his physical beauty, he was sexually dysfunctional with his wife. When he was declaring his love of his mother, what was the rest of the formula?

     

    The question is if any of this matters. Culture’s quest is not to understand “the reality” of its idols but to make them up to fit its needs. Perhaps the cultural obsession is about not wanting to know who the real Elvis was, and so the questions Marcus poses are not really the ones he pursues. Creating Dead Elvis is what we’ve been doing instead of asking, “who was he, and why do I still care?” Those who speak in tongues give voice to messages we can only bear in hints and guesses. The word made flesh moved from the sexual to the excremental, and the body’s beauty was held hostage to the heart’s misery and mind’s decay. The pop representation of Elvis is the lie we tell about this, the collective story that conceals just how well we did know who he was, how much we did translate the “grain” of his voice, and how it felt to see him die. But such knowledge is too elemental, too crude and unrelenting to be borne, and so we deface and adorn to make the thing itself smaller than a man or larger than life.

     

    The cultural joke that is the Dead Elvis is as irrepressible as nervous laughter at a funeral. Marcus tells us of the bold little girl in his fourth grade class in 1955 who “went off to see Elvis.” Nervous and confused by their own responses, the students made her the object of mockery and jealousy and lied to themselves to conceal their own unnameable emotions. Not much has changed in all this, except that the emotions became more complex and her classmate has thought longer and harder. But Marcus is still not easy in his mind about Elvis, and that drives him to ask better questions and play with more suggestive answers than anyone else who thinks about such things. Dead Elvis serves the art project well, mystifying further what it cannot really want to strip away, rewriting a funny ending to an absurd tragedy in which the king died in his bathroom before the town was saved.

     

  • BOOK REVIEW OF: Michel Foucault

    Mark Poster

    Department of History
    University of California at Irvine
    <mposter@orion.oac.uci.edu>

     

    Eribon, Didier. Michel Foucault. Trans. Betsy Wing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1991. $27.95. 374 pp.

     

    Didier Eribon has written an excellent biography of Michel Foucault, one that will probably take its place as the standard for some time. Eribon has done thorough research including extensive interviews with individuals who played significant roles in Foucault’s life from his early childhood and comprehensive reading of his works and private writings. The book is well-informed, judicious without being remote, sympathetic without losing a critical edge. And Eribon understands Foucault’s difficult corpus well enough to take note of the irony of his undertaking. Foucault stood firmly against interpretations that privileged the author’s intentions, unity, authority. So this biography, if it be Foucaultian, cannot contribute to an interpretation of Foucault’s works.

     

    Eribon is especially good on Foucault’s student life, evoking with particular atmospheric verisimilitude French intellectual life after World War II. The rigors of entry into the Ecole Normale Superieure, the teaching of Jean Hyppolite, the circle of friendships with those who would later do important work–all of this makes fascinating reading for anyone interested in the extraordinary efflorescence that in the United States is called poststructuralism. The period of Foucault’s travels to Sweden, Germany, Poland and Tunisia are also illuminating. Eribon devotes separate sections or even chapters to Foucault’s major writings. In these he sketches the reception of the books and Foucault’s reception of the receptions. His attention to the content of the works is adequate but certainly not extensive or novel.

     

    Foucault’s political activity after 1970, during his years at the College de France, his work with the prison information group, and the countless protests and petitions in which he participated, are also extensively recounted. Eribon’s account of Foucault’s advocacy of the Khomeini revolution in Iran, derisively regarded as Foucault’s biggest political blunder, is remarkable in its ability to allow credence for Foucault’s position without pretending that such credence might not require for many a deliberate abandonment of one’s critical faculties.

     

    Foucault’s politics have often been attacked by Marxists for adherence with the positions of the New Philosophers who garnered a certain presence in France in the late 1970s. For these Marxists such an association discredits all of Foucault’s thought as a kind of right-wing liberalism. These tactics are proof enough of the exhaustion of their author’s intellects as well as of the political perspective they attempt to further. For Eribon’s account makes clear the serious dedication of Foucault to a critical politics, one perhaps that does not fit neatly into the categories of the major European parties but certainly one that is in no way conservative. Interestingly enough, Eribon mentions the term “new philosopher” only once, in connection with a review Foucault wrote of a book by Andre Glucksmann. Although in the period before May ’68 Foucault was perceived as politically enigmatic and perhaps “untrustworthy” for those on the left, after 1970 there can be no doubt of his firm commitment to anti-authoritarian politics and of his search for a new style for the politically engaged intellectual, one that would deal more effectively than the French Communists or even the Socialists with a critique of current configurations of domination.

     

    I found only one inaccuracy in Eribon’s Foucault. It concerns the chapter on Foucault’s visits to the United States, which Eribon in general describes very well, with none of that ambivalent snobbery/envy one finds too often in French discussions of this country. The error is a small one, in no way affecting Eribon’s overall discussion, but since I was involved in the incident I feel I should set the record straight. Eribon refers in passing to a lecture Foucault delivered to a huge crowd at UCLA in 1981. Actually this lecture was given at a conference I organized for the Humanities Center at USC on October 31st of that year. On that occasion, before a large audience, Foucault presented an important paper disputing critiques of his view of power and arguing that his concern was with the subject’s relation to truth. The paper later appeared in the paperback edition of Dreyfus and Rabinow’s excellent book on Foucault. The conference was also interesting because Foucault’s hesitations about it illustrate a salient feature of his intellectual work. In September he phoned me to say he would not appear at USC because he learned that the conference had a large audience and he preferred to work in small workshop settings. In fact the conference was organized to have both plenary sessions, of which Foucault’s presentation elicited by far the largest attendance, as well as smaller workshops. In the end he consented and attended many of the workshops, immensely enjoying the discussions.

     

    The incident illustrates the seriousness of Foucault’s dedication to intellectual work. As Eribon’s book indicates, he was relentless in attempting to establish small work situations where scholars could collaborate on projects. In his practice as well as in his theory he consistently opposed the system of the “universal intellectual.” Complicated, troubled at times, Foucault was a person of extraordinary intelligence, whose impact will long resonate in the fields of humanities and social sciences. I regard it as a privilege to have met him and even more of one to be able to read him. Eribon’s book deserves high praise for doing him justice.

     

  • BOOK REVIEW OF: Making Sex

    Meryl Altman and Keith Nightenhelser

    DePauw University
    <maltman@depauw>
    <k_night@depauw>

     

    Laqueur, Thomas. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1990.

     

    Making Sex is an ambitious investigation of Western scientific conceptions of sexual difference. A historian by profession, Laqueur locates the major conceptual divide in the late eighteenth century when, as he puts it, “a biology of cosmic hierarchy gave way to a biology of incommensurability, anchored in the body, in which the relationship of men to women, like that of apples to oranges, was not given as one of equality or inequality but rather of difference” (207). He claims that the ancients and their immediate heirs–unlike us–saw sexual difference as a set of relatively unimportant differences of degree within “the one-sex body.” According to this model, female sexual organs were perfectly homologous to male ones, only inside out; and bodily fluids–semen, blood, milk–were mostly “fungible” and composed of the same basic matter. The model didn’t imply equality; woman was a lesser man, just not a thing wholly different in kind.

     

    However, since the Enlightenment, Laqueur argues, males and females have been seen as different in kind, and many social and political consequences have followed. Where theorists of the “one-sex” model saw all human bodies as if resulting from arrows aimed at the target human, before which the arrows producing females fell short, the new “two-sex” model supposed that male and female were separate, opposed targets. Laqueur first noticed this paradigm shift while examining “the question of disappearing orgasm”: once thought biologically necessary for the conception of a child, female orgasm after the appearance of the “two-sex body” became a contingent or coincidental matter bound up with various political interpretations of “women’s nature.” He does not claim that one model definitively supplanted the other at a given historical moment. Traces of the “two-sex body” can be found in Aristotle, and the “one-sex body” lives on in popular myth even today. And he cautions against giving a causal account of the shift, one that relies on social or political explanations of it, since “the remaking of the body is itself intrinsic” to such explanations (11). Nonetheless Laqueur redraws the map of Western sexuality in a breathtakingly grand gesture.

     

    Laqueur describes his book as a history of “bodies and pleasures” (Foucault’s phrase), and begins by situating his work amid current debates about the epistemological status of scientific and historical narratives. Still, his main techniques of inquiry remain those of traditional intellectual history. He combines a chronological tour through the usual philosophers (beginning of course from Aristotle) with ultraclinical discussion of changing anatomical knowledge and medicalizing fantasy, accompanied by startling illustrations. The argument is sweeping, the narrative lumps centuries together, and national differences are given little importance. Scholars of each subspeciality will be kept busy commenting on his work for years, no doubt, and the common reader who has absorbed it will perceive gender-switching plots differently than before.1

     

    Laqueur often seems more interested in how literate Europeans thought about (and pictured) sex than in how most people actually lived sex and gender. Of course, such experience is notoriously difficult to find out about. So like most recent work on the history of sexuality, Making Sex operates within the Foucaultian claim that “discourses” –sets of culturally maintained representations–organize lived experience and human perception. This stance, by implication, narrows the gap between intellectual and social history.

     

    Laqueur’s work also follows Foucault in finding metaphor where we most expect the literal–in biology, on the body–and in often making a “negative case,” showing that advances in the state of medical knowledge haven’t driven ideological change (though he is sensibly coy about exactly what does drive it). “No set of facts ever entails any particular account of difference”–since, given the wealth of detailed evidence for BOTH similarity AND difference between “women” and “men,” any model of sexual difference must always choose to highlight some issues and ignore others. His account of the Renaissance “poetics of biology” is particularly effective in showing that people didn’t make cultural use of what they might have scientifically known, if only they had cared to know it. Every era, he shows, has invented the science it (politically and culturally) needed within the boundaries set by prevailing epistemologies. Nonetheless, he realizes that actual bodies exist and have existed, and acknowledges “scientific progress”–for example, in fixing the relationship of ovulation to pregnancy and the menstrual cycle. To speak, as he does, of “scientific fictions” is not to say all science is somehow bogus, done with mirrors, purely in the service of ideology.

     

    On the other hand, new scientific discourses may determine which cultural questions can be asked, but they don’t legislate any one answer. So, for example, around the time of the French Revolution the recognition that female orgasm was a contingent, not a necessary, part of reproductive intercourse made possible theories of women’s “passionlessness,” while female organs received new and differentiating names, and Woman took on a whole character derived (in one way or another) from her ovaries, her experience of menstruation, and so forth. Because the testes were different, Woman was a different creature on all levels, from the cellular to the moral-philosophical. But these theories could be and were put to use by anti-feminists and feminists alike–though agreed to be different, woman might still be either physically weaker (unfit for participation in the public sphere) or morally stronger (more suited than men to duties of political governance). In political culture as in science, discourse determines the terms and the vigour of the debate, but not the outcome.

     

    The argument that scientific explanation of the body is socially contingent leads Laqueur to Freud’s revisionary anatomy. It is no news to most of us that Freud’s account of progress from clitoral to vaginal orgasm as a sign of female “maturity” does not correspond to any biological reality. But Laqueur demonstrates conclusively that Freud must have known his progress narrative was social/cultural rather than physiological/biological–must, in other words, have known that it was either fanciful or coercive–because biologists had routinely discussed the centrality of the clitoris to female sexual pleasure, and the absence of physiological bases for sensation in the vagina, for literally centuries. We can now be sure that what Laqueur rather kindly calls Freud’s “aporia of anatomy” was a result of active repression rather than simply a primitive state of medical knowledge; and this has obvious consequences for current feminist debate about Freud.

     

    Laqueur’s perspective relies heavily, as he acknowledges, on developments within “women’s history” and on feminist theory–particularly on the distinction between “sex” and “gender” first made by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex, and developed memorably in Gayle Rubin’s influential essay “The Traffic in Women.”2 Within the second-wave of twentieth century Anglo-European feminism, the concept of “gender” denotes those “observable” differences between women and men that could be argued to be culturally constructed (and thus mutable) rather than eternally, biologically given. Such a division between natural “sex” and cultural “gender” was absolutely crucial in combatting the myth of women’s natural inferiority, of the appropriateness of their subordination to men, and so forth–it was a way of naming and undoing sexual essentialism.

     

    Making Sex explicitly revises this dualism, asserting centrally that “sex, as much as gender, is made” (ix). Under the discursive regime of the one-sex body, it is asserted, there was not (as today) a base-superstructure relationship between sex and gender. Rather, gender was “real”–was constitutive of social relationships–while sex was contingent, an epiphenomenon. Laqueur suggests a paradox: that for the ancients, sex was socially constructed, gender “naturally” given–for example, through an insistence that hierarchical relations between men and women, as between free men and slaves, were eternal, immutable truths to be actualized in social roles, not in anatomical structures.

     

    Does this make a complete hash, then, of the sex/gender dualism? Not necessarily. Feminist theorists Donna Haraway and Judith Butler have both argued that the recent success of feminists and cultural historians at distinguishing “sex” (biological givens) from “gender” (cultural constructions) has had the unfortunate side effect of letting anatomy off the hook, leading us to ignore the potential dangers (and pleasures) of cultural construction within the biological sciences and other discourses about “the body.”3 Laqueur’s work advances this project, and further unsettles biologistic arguments about the differences between women and men.4 It is not clear, however, that unsettling the sex/gender dualism–which has after all proved politically quite useful under the two-sex model we have to live with now–is the best way to criticize biological essentialism. What would be lost if we said, not that “sex” is socially constructed too, but simply that we need to move the boundary a bit–that we’ve been calling some things “sex” that are really, after all, gender?

     

    We might well lose the title of the book, of course, which plays on the equivocation between sexual difference and sexual activity, and (coupled with the naked women on the cover) gives a rather false impression of forthcoming titillation, since the subject of Making Sex is actually quite a sober one. In fact, there is very little discussion here of pleasures–and even less attention to pain. One thing that strikes a feminist as odd about this book is its tone: the emotional distance and the absence of horror while recounting rapes, clitoridectomies, ovarectomies performed for no medical reason but curiosity, death sentences meted out to those of ambiguous gender (or is it sex?), and the general subjection, manipulation, and domination of female bodies by male doctors and other “experts” throughout the long period the book covers. Laqueur does acknowledge, early on, that “the fact that pain and injustice are gendered and correspond to corporeal signs of sex is precisely what gives importance to an account of the making of sex.” He also acknowledges an absence in his book of “a sustained account of experience in the body.” (This he suggests is perhaps appropriate in a man writing about women; it is probably inevitable anyway given his broad schematic approach and his reliance on the methods of intellectual history.) But overall, Laqueur has clearly chosen to write a history of difference rather than a history of oppression.

     

    This is more than a matter of tone: it leads frequently to what we might, borrowing Laqueur’s own term, call an aporia of political consequences. Feminists undertake to study the history of sexuality, for the most part, to understand women’s subordination in order to see whether and how it can be undone. Laqueur does note, from time to time, the social applicability or function of various conceptions of the body. The one-sex model served male power by explaining why men were needed for generation, and established the centrality of paternity; the two-sex model served male power by enabling discourses of female inadequacy. But since (for example) we know already that ancient Greece was an extremely sex-segregated and misogynist society in its social practices, its physicians’ specific conception of the body seems almost irrelevant to the major issue of power. One might contrast Laqueur’s approach to the sex/gender question in ancient Greece with Anne Carson’s in her essay “Putting Her In Her Place: Women, Dirt and Desire.”5 Carson deals with some of the same medical and philosophical texts as Laqueur, but she begins with a discussion of lived gender relations as they can be reconstructed from historical, literary, and juridical sources. This provides a fuller social context for discussion of, say, why women are considered “cooler” and “wetter” than men, and what follows from this in the social sphere.

     

    Laqueur’s underlying point still stands, that ancient relations of gender provided the base for which “anatomy” was the superstructure. But we wonder whether, in directing his attention so exclusively to the “scientific” discourses of the ancient world–rather than to, say, the pre- scientific ideology reflected in Hesiod, Semonides of Amourgos, and Aeschylus, which did elaborate differences of kind between two sexes–Laqueur has been anachronistically motivated by the modern assumption that sex differences really do come “first,” that sexuality is the key to identity.

     

    It also strikes us as curious that Laqueur did not find it important to address alternatives to procreative heterosexuality in any systematic way–either as a history of repression or as a (Foucaultian) history of “incitement to discourse.” “Lesbianism” (the word does not appear in the index, though “tribade” does) is discussed only as it may or may not apply in cases of hermaphroditism; male homosexuality is discussed almost exclusively in sections about ancient Greece. The discussions of hermaphroditism suggest that doctors until quite recently were concerned purely to assign male or female sex to a body, rather than to assign male or female gender to a person–or to lay down moral injunctions about how such bodies might be permitted to behave. These are significant observations, and particularly interesting in light of the recent work on ancient Greek sexuality done by David Halperin and John Winkler.6 But the sketchiness of the discussion is another byproduct of Laqueur’s own decision to focus on bodies rather than people.

     

    None of these criticisms need prevent Laqueur’s argument from being useful in political debate, as a further marshalling of evidence for social constructionism generally. But there is something paradoxical–even when Foucault does it–about “marshalling evidence” for the conclusion that the facts didn’t matter. Laqueur ends with the following sentence: “But basically the content of talk about sexual difference is unfettered by fact, and is as free as mind’s play.” We are uneasy about the use of fundamentally positivist historical argument to make this Foucaultian point.7 We also wonder how to understand his (truth-)claims about the Great Divide between “one-sex theorists” and us, after he observes that “the play of difference never came to rest” (193). Such endless play of signifiers can disarm the counterexamples to his narrative of historical change, such as the eruption of the one-sex theory into “Dear Abby,” or a pattern of ambiguities in Aristotle. The question is whether this freedom is compatible with saying that “in or about the late eighteenth [century] . . . human sexual nature changed” (5).

     

    Twenty years ago, the raw materials of Making Sex would have made an amusing book about the odd persistence of sexual misconceptions. After Foucault, “misconception” might seem a misconception, and such a book would look antiquated and politically naive. Laqueur’s book is more sophisticated and politically aware, but equally lacking in polemical edge. He suggests in passing that Making Sex might be used against sociobiology and against the “science of difference” (21). That he himself does not do so, however, indicates what the history of sexuality has lost in becoming academically respectable.

     

    Notes

     

    1. Laqueur notes how one-sex theory makes possible some new readings of classic texts (23ff), and others are already producing such readings, notably Stephen Greenblatt. See also Susan McClary’s discussion of “erotic friction” in 17th-century vocal music, which cites both Greenblatt’s Shakespearean Negotiations (Berkeley: U of California P, 1988) and an essay by Laqueur Feminine Endings [Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1991], 37).

     

    2. A full and helpful genealogy of this distinction can be found in Donna Haraway, “‘Gender’ for a Marxist Dictionary: the Sexual Politics of a Word,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Routledge, 1991). Rubin’s “The Traffic in Women” can be found most conveniently in Rayna Reiter, ed., Toward a Feminist Anthropology (New York: Monthly Review, 1975).

     

    3. Donna Haraway throughout the book cited above, and Judith Butler in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990).

     

    4. As a historical realist, Laqueur does, however, seem to believe in some immutable sex differences, though he doesn’t state what they are, and in this he may differ from Butler and Haraway.

     

    5. Anne Carson, “Putting Her In Her Place: Women, Dirt, and Desire,” in Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Greek World, ed. D. Halperin, J. Winkler, and F. Zeitlin (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990). Our comment on Carson’s essay applies as well to the other essays in that collection, and to Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985).

     

    6. David Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality: and Other Essays on Greek Love (London: Routledge, 1990), especially “The Democratic Body: Prostitution and Citizenship in Classical Athens”; and Jack Winkler, The Constraints of Desire: The Anthropology of Sex and Gender in Ancient Greece (London: Routledge, 1990).

     

    7. Ironically, Laqueur clings to his conventional methods of intellectual history even as he demolishes other foundational structures, such as the sex=nature/ gender=culture system. If we think of these methods as natural to him, the Foucaultian conclusions become a culture built (unsteadily?) upon them. But this paradox has no easy solution, and we’d rather have our history with evidence than without.

     

  • BOOK REVIEW OF: Thinking Across the American Grain

    Matthew Mancini

    Department of History
    Southwest Missouri State University
    <mjm225f@smsvma>

     

    Gunn, Giles. Thinking Across the American Grain: Ideology, Intellect, and the New Pragmatism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992. xii/272 pp.

     

    Giles Gunn has emerged as a major voice in that cacophonous semi-discipline known as American Studies. Every time the American Studies Association meets, it seems to be seized by a new collective enthusiasm. One year it might be Victor Turner, the next it’s Annette Kolodny, or John Stilgoe, or Henry Louis Gates, Jr., or Nina Baym. Such commotions are in part symptomatic of the Association’s puppy-like eagerness to be identified with changing intellectual fashions. But they also represent a remarkable record of committed intellectual openness and daring. I anticipate that everyone will be discussing Giles Gunn this year.

     

    Thinking that is “aslant” or “cross-hatched,” or that runs “across the grain” or “on the bias” is Gunn’s preferred mode of critical practice. He sees it as a means, if not of escape, then at least of fragmentary and fitful release from the worst constraints of that prison house of language and culture that an assortment of poststructuralists, ideology critics, new historicists, deconstructionists, and neopragmatists from Michel Foucault to Richard Rorty have contended is all that is left of what used to be called the human condition.

     

    Postmodernism’s antifoundationalism has rendered an independent critical perspective unattainable and thrown into question the very possibility of a critique of culture that is not implicated in that culture’s own repressive practices. By thinking across postmodernism, what Gunn seeks to achieve is not a new “grounding,” but something more akin to a fingernail-hold somewhere in the rough, uneven, scratchy grain of cultural experience. For he argues that, contrary to the impression, and often the explicit arguments, made by many of our most compelling contemporary critics, the web of culture, of ideology, of power, is not seamless or monolithic; that “The grain of cultural experience is . . . interwoven and cross-hatched in ways that make it possible for the predications of which it is composed not only to confront but also, as it were, to address one another” (38).

     

    Gunn’s aim, then, is to “complement” rather than to “contest” the recent tide of thought from the Continent (3). And his instrument for doing so is Pragmatism, a method of approaching problems whose formulation at the hands of William James and John Dewey not only anticipates, but, he argues, also addresses directly, precisely those predicaments raised by the postmodern thinkers. Gunn misses no opportunity to reveal the “convertibility . . . of pragmatist motifs into postmodernist preoccupations” (7). Accordingly, he divides his book into two parts, the first concerned with rethinking the pragmatist heritage in light of contemporary cultural critiques, and the second with shedding a pragmatist light on certain vexing, contemporary critical problems.

     

    Quite literally occupying the center of the book is the formidable figure of Richard Rorty. The last chapter of Part One and the first chapter of Part Two can be seen as an extended critique by which Gunn seeks first to challenge, and then perhaps even to some degree to displace, Rorty as the leading contemporary pragmatist theorist of liberal society.

     

    The central issue, for American as for Continental critics, is the Enlightenment and its heritage of liberalism. But for Americans the problem has a somewhat different resonance than it would have for, say, Bataille, Foucault, or Habermas. Gunn thus characterizes Rorty’s project as “the most important political attempt since John Dewey to resituate the tradition of American pragmatism within the broader framework of modern Western liberalism” (96). This effort is noteworthy because

     

    pragmatism, or neopragmatism as it is now called, has come to be associated with cultural currents that are thought to be postliberal, if not antiliberal, in some very specific ways. It aligns itself . . . with the postmodernist and poststructuralist repudiation of culture as an expression of individual consciousness woven into patterns of consensus and dissent, of conformity and conflict, and it prefers to view culture as an intertextual system of signs that can be infinitely redescribed. (96)

     

    In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge UP, 1989), Rorty’s elucidation of the role of contingency in the formation and reception of language and of selfhood, Gunn believes, is masterly. But a third contingent conception, that of community, seems in Rorty’s account to be curiously resistant to the rediscription that Rorty sees as the only remaining object of speculative thought. Thus the project of social restructuring is but poorly served by the thinkers who have shown “how the languages of moral responsibility and social purpose are always contingent” (102). For Rorty, the end of liberal society is to tear us away from the blandishments of metaphysics; to have convictions, to be sure, but to realize at the same time that such convictions cannot be defended with arguments that persons from other communities are constrained to accept.

     

    In the last chapter of Part One, Gunn mounts a Jamesian critique of what he sees as Rorty’s tendency toward the absolutization of opposites when he addresses such questions–what Richard J. Bernstein calls “ethical-political” questions in his recent, exceptionally useful study, The New Constellation (Polity Press, 1991). Rortian oppositions like “justice and love, or irony and common sense, or force and persuasion,” Gunn argues, themselves cry out for deconstruction. Yet Rorty “rarely entertains the possibility that their opposition may itself be a product of contingency” (111). According to Gunn, William James knew better. “In his later thought, experience transcends language by virtue of a conjunctive process of which language itself reminds us” (113).

     

    Starting from this Jamesian perspective Gunn elaborates a different view from Rorty’s about the possibilities of liberal society, and in the strongly argued chapter that opens Part Two, which is the only chapter in the book that has not been published in some form previously (although an unfortunate typo in the Acknowledgements misidentifies it as having appeared elsewhere), he undertakes a reevaluation of the American Enlightenment.

     

    In so doing, Gunn boldly goes to the heart of recent debates about the nature and fate of modernity. Whenever you see someone alive to postmodern ideas seeking to rescue the Enlightenment to even the slightest degree, there, I believe, you will find one of the leading edges of contemporary critical thought. To defend any part of the Enlightenment after the ravages of Foucault and Derrida, not to mention Nietzsche and Heidegger, is to probe for the outer boundaries of postmodernism’s reach. Somewhat curiously, however, especially in light of his obvious erudition, Gunn neglects to situate himself in a wider circle of recent critics hospitable to postmodern currents of thought who nonetheless seek to recover something of value from the dark ruins of the once-heavenly city of Enlightenment discourse. Chief among them is Jurgen Habermas, whose The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (MIT Press, 1987) is a narrative of the history of Enlightenment philosophy and its deconstruction by postmodernists. Habermas’s solution is not to junk the Enlightenment wholesale, but to begin again–this time, however, not with the philosophy of consciousness, with its pernicious subject-object split, but with intersubjectivity instead. For Habermas, objectivity is a chimera, intersubjectivity is prior to the subject-object opposition, and communication thus prior to cognition.

     

    Gunn’s purpose is analogous to Habermas’s. He wishes to argue both for the centrality of the American Enlightenment’s influence–an enormous influence on nineteenth century thought and culture, he contends, which has been obscured by the twentieth century’s focus on Calvinism–and against the notion that such sway as it did enjoy over literary production and criticism was a baneful one. The Great Awakening is the American problem that distorts an assessment of the Enlightenment; because of it “The Enlightenment has become the absent, or at least the forgotten, integer in the American equation of the relationship between faith and knowledge” (131). As Habermas seeks to recover scraps of “the Enlightenment project” from Horkheimer and Adorno and others, so Gunn, facing a peculiarly American version of the same problem, attempts to reclaim the American Enlightenment from those who think the Great Awakening towers over it.

     

    Disputing the standard interpretation of Henry F. May The Enlightenment in America [Oxford, 1976]), Gunn argues that the most important strains of Enlightenment thought in America were those May called the Revolutionary and the Skeptical, rather than the Rational and Didactic varieties. These influences, maturing in the nineteenth rather than the eighteenth century, and in the United States rather than Europe, worked toward a “dismantling of virtually all of the religious assumptions on which American literary culture was then based” (138). And–guess what–this is a form of proto-pragmatism, “proleptically present” in Moby-Dick, which turns out to be “a prefiguration of . . . pragmatic consciousness” (138), perceivable in the shift from the “old consciousness,” as D. H. Lawrence put it, of Ahab, to the “new” of Ishmael. Moreover, this skeptical and revolutionary consciousness leads quite directly to modernism.

     

    Pragmatism thus turns out to be in Gunn’s narrative the connection between the Enlightenment and the postmodern, as well as between Enlightenment epistemology and Calvinism. And so even postmodern literary culture “has not seen the last of the Enlightenment” (145).

     

    In other chapters, on the New Historicism, on interdisciplinarity, and on academic pluralism, Gunn employs his simultaneously rigorous and conversational approach to investigate the “question as to whether the critic can ever escape the ideological contamination of his or her own process of reflection” (168). In the concluding chapter, Gunn observes the ways in which the pragmatists’ concern for further, deeper, richer conversation can be enhanced by careful attention to current critical struggles–struggles that are finally, he writes, over “‘difference,’ politically, socially, sexually, racially, psychologically, religiously” (215). In other words, they are about otherness–“what many people think of as the fundamental problem of our time” (7). The problem is “how to conceive or represent ‘the Other’ without succumbing to the false artificiality of oppositional thinking” (215). The site that should be available for this purpose, space that was or should be public, has been “rendered trivial and vapid” (220) and survives only as a site of self-referential simulacra. The interest in “civil religion,” which seemed for a time to be an attempt to retake that public space, turned out to be “a defense mechanism for shoring up American cultural consensus” (227). And, though such a world that stands “over against the symbolic solipsism of the religion America has made of its own civic celebrations” (230) might still be found in a liminal domain of vulgarity and vernacular humor, Gunn is too unillusioned not to see that domain as an “endangered” one (236).

     

    This, then, is a book of many virtues. Yet one of its central objectives remains incompletely fulfilled, and for reasons that I think are somewhat curious. Gunn wishes to show that the genealogy of postmodern thought reveals a strong American, or at least pragmatic, extraction; and, conversely, that the resurgence of pragmatism is more than a local American phenomenon. He makes the argument with elegance, but, in truth, it does not constitute a revelation. American Studies scholars have been acknowledging these cross-currents and actively engaging the new forms of “Continental” criticism for a decade and more.

     

    What is curious is that Gunn, in arguing for the compatibility of “American” pragmatic and “Continental” postmodern thought, exaggerates the alleged gap between them, and simultaneously–and contrary to his own stated intention–depreciates the “American Studies” side of the alleged dichotomy he seeks to overcome. One symptom of this undervaluing lies in Gunn’s title, for in the beginning, so to speak, there was In the American Grain, William Carlos Williams’s acute, eccentric recovery and appropriation of American foundational themes. The “grain” of Williams’s title connoted seed, texture, weave, and coarseness at once. The book was published in 1925, and remained obscure until its celebration nearly two generations later by American Studies pioneers.

     

    Gunn–like another historian, David Hollinger, who evokes Williams in the title of his 1985 collection, In the American Province–mentions Williams just once, very briefly, in passing. Here is an absence indeed. For critics and scholars seeking to explore the rough texture of the seam between the modern and the postmodern, especially in the United States, might also turn to that poet and physician and contemporary of Gunn’s admired John Dewey. “The American Grain,” in its very multivalence, is made for thinking across. Gunn’s book demonstrates that–but demonstrates it yet again, not for the first time.

     

  • The Text Is Dead; Long Live the Techst

    Edward M. Jennings

    Department of English
    State University of New York at Albany
    <emj69@albnyvms>

     

    Landow, George P. Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Literary Theory and Technology. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992.

     

    [1] This is a review of George P. Landow’s book about a phenomenon almost as outlandish in a paper-based culture as scripture must appear to be when it arrives in societies without records. Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Literary Theory and Technology is part of a series called “Parallax: Re-visions of Culture and Society.” Steven G. Nichols, Gerald Prince, and Wendy Steiner are the series editors. I think it is a marvelous book, and this essay is meant to prod you into reading it from cover to cover.

     

    Hypertext could be the keystone volume in a graduate curriculum where the rhetorics of networking and screen display are scrutinized right beside those of oral and scribal modes, of scroll and codex technologies. But at least four audiences may still be hostile to it: Curmudgeons who don’t know which upsets them more, critical theory or technology; closet word-processors for whom the concept “programming” still smacks of mind control; theorists for whom Barthes and Derrida and Lyotard are old wallpaper against which background some significant struggles are (at last) taking place; and technophiles ashamed of their access to tools that others cannot afford.

     

    The book itself is not a menace, but the technologies it celebrates–or the still unexplored opportunities offered by the hypertext technology–threaten assumptions so deeply held that most people will deny that they can be challenged. After all, these words mean what they mean, don’t they?

     

    Text.
    Author.
    Story.
    Knowledge.

     

    Landow himself issues no directly apocalyptic challenges. No foam around his mouth. His presentation is measured, experiential, lucid, moderate and sensible. He merely points out that the concept “hypertext” lets us test some concepts associated with critical theory, and gracefully shows how the technology is contributing to reconfigurations of text, author, narrative and (literary) education.

     

    As an advocate for the technology Landow describes so clearly, my goal in this review is to tell you enough about it so that you will feel compelled at least to read Hypertext, even if you don’t rush out and invest all at once in the electronic paraphernalia you would need to become acculturated. I will try to describe the phenomenon, and then try to suggest how hypertext demands that we re-place those four self-evident terms. As I perceive it, the technology undermines fundamental assumptions about authority and control of time.

     

    Just what is this “thing,” this “concept,” this technology that has acquired the label “hypertext”? Landow does a good job of explaining it, as do Bolter and Moulthrop and Slatin (emphasizing “Storyspace”), but it’s like trying to describe digital recording to Oscar Wilde or trying to help a fish understand “breathing.” Even readers of PMC need help, I suspect, in spite of their acquaintance with at least two other transforming technologies, word-processing and networking. Not everyone has easy access to the relatively expensive Macintosh platform where most of the writer-artist hypertext software performs.

     

    Please note: We are not discussing the ballyhooed “multimedia” here, nor the pseudo-hypertext built in to the “Help Menus” of commercial software applications. My own experience (limited) is with Eastgate Systems’ “Storyspace” (and a few hours with Ntergade’s “Black Magic,” and a few minutes with Knowledge Garden’s “Knowledge Pro”). George Landow, in sharp contrast, has designed and experienced entire “docuverses” in the “Intermedia” environment developed and installed at Brown University. He has practiced what he preaches, that is. What’s more, he and Paul Delany have already edited Hypermedia and Literary Studies (MIT, 1991), 17 essays whose cluster of perspectives supplements and qualifies the authoritative focus of his 1992 monotext being reviewed here.

     

    Once more, then: What “is” hypertext?

     

    It can be imagined as an endless electronic nesting of “footnotes,” each one enriching all the others, none of them secondary even though one had to be encountered first. You can place them whenever you want, in whichever typeface (or “tone”) you choose, and with whatever coloration you prefer.

     

    Another image is of a book’s index accompanied by a pointer that would let readers wander from one reference to another without having to keep their index finger between index pages. The sequence of assimilation–associative or whimsical or undeviatingly purposeful–rests in the digits of the reader.

     

    A third image starts with pictures, not books. Imagine a handful of cubes connected by straws, a cluster that almost resembles those models of molecules that illustrate articles in National Geographic. These cubes are “lexias or blocks of text” (Landow 52). The straws are electronic links. Hypertext is nothing more than electronically connected chunks of text.

     

    Expand the imaginary handful into a roomful. Consider that those little cubes are not word containers, but receptacles holding whole sentences, paragraphs, scenes, speeches–or photographs, diagrams, songs, symphonies, videotapes of vaudeville acts with barking dogs…. Consider also that those straws, now enlarged to tunnel size, can arch from one corner of the room to another without going through all the neighboring cubes along the way. The designer lays out the linkages. Instead of a neat model molecule, all primary colors and straight lines, we have a web, a Gibsonian Matrix, an elecTRONic habitat.

     

    As “readers” of this space, we who have entered the habitat’s first chamber take our seats and watch the message-performance composed for us. Finished, we take a hint from the options posted on the wall and stroll– together or separately, next door or to the far reaches– stopping off anywhen that looks promising.

     

    The crux of hypertext is where those spatially distinct “cubes” intersect with temporally distinct sequences. Authors compose the cubes.lexias.performances and construct the tunnels.web.links. The audience, having entered the space at cube one, has to choose where to explore next, and has to endure the consequences of the risks implicated in that choosing.

     

    So much for telling fish about breathing. Instead of holding a book, we look at a screen displaying a map of an Index. By now, two of those self-evident terms, “text” and “author,” no longer mean quite what they used to. Instead of being sentences and paragraphs and two-dimensional pages bound as a book or journal or newsletter, what we “read” is distinct, self-contained chunks of performance frozen in a three-dimensional “space.”

     

    As it happens, two of Landow’s chapters are about reconfiguring the text and reconfiguring the author, so we have not strayed too far from his (two-dimensional) text. Another pair of his chapters has to do with narrative and education, so I will have a chance to show how hypertext technology can question “story” (the morality of narrative) and “knowledge” (construct versus instruct) later in this essay. Meanwhile, I trust that the convergence Landow writes about between computer technology and critical theory is beginning to sound plausible and interesting. His own Index (if displayed on your screen) would show about 75 citations for Barthes and Derrida. Foucault, Lyotard, Bakhtin, Miller and four others together match that number. Vannevar Bush leads the techies with 15 citations; Theodor H. Nelson (14) and Jay David Bolter (12) outpoint McLuhan, Ong, Joyce (Michael) and Moulthrop.

     

    After a glance at Landow’s first chapter, about theory, then, I shall cycle through more modulations of writer-reader-text dislocation, stressing control of time and sequence, and press on to try to legitimize narrative disorder.

     

    The first chapter, “Hypertext and Literary Theory,” is for me a clear, succinct and persuasive elaboration of the argument that hypertext actually concretizes a lot of what poststructuralism theorizes. Landow himself is not so insistent. His moderate claim: “What is perhaps most interesting about hypertext . . . is not that it may fulfill certain claims of structuralist and poststructuralist criticism but that it provides a rich means of testing them” (11). Some nexial terms in the early pages are inter-textuality, multi-vocality, de-centering and non-linearity. Central to the “convergence” argument is the quasi-equation of techie Nelson’s “text chunks” and critic Barthes’s lexia: “Hypertext . . . denotes blocks of text–what Barthes terms a lexia–and the electronic links that join them” (4).

     

    Landow finishes this first chapter in the context of Alvin Kernan’s thesis that printing technology virtually created the concepts of “authorial property, authorial uniqueness, and physically isolated text.” The book, the artist, and even “intellectual property” are fragile, socially constructed phenomena. Landow predicts that hypertext will, in its turn, frame and historicize several such heretofore “self-evident” Truths about Art. Hypertext technology thus “has much in common with some major points of contemporary literary and semiological theory, particularly with Derrida’s emphasis on de-centering and Barthes’s conception of the readerly versus the writerly text” (33-4; see also Kernan, Printing Technology).

     

    Even though Landow concentrates on ways that hypertext reconfigures text and author, the role of Reader is inseperable from both, and I shall emphasize the paradox of that role: The reader is no longer subjected totally to the authoritative will of a single mind, and the reader can be a collaborating writer within the hypertext space. BUT each new reader IS still under the previous reader-writer’s control, and NO reader can tamper with the lexias already in place.

     

    There are two ways to unravel these apparent contradictions. The first involves a digression into the way two mutually exclusive words are being juxtaposed. Here is Landow on writer and reader:

     

    Today when we consider reading and writing, we probably think of them as serial processes or as procedures carried out intermittently by the same person: first one reads, then one writes, and then one reads some more. Hypertext, which creates an active, even intrusive reader, carries this convergence of activities one step closer to completion; but, in so doing, it infringes upon the power of the writer, removing some of it and granting it to the reader. (71)

     

    Notice how comfortably familiar this terminology is–power, writer, reader–even though juxtapositions of dominance-subservience relationships (“power”) and conventionally self-evident labels (“reader” and “writer”) are moderately disconcerting. We are accustomed to assuming that “the reader” cannot be the same individual as “the writer,” that the practices are mutually exclusive. When I write, that is, I am “by definition” not reading. As Landow’s account here indicates, it is difficult not to reproduce this distinction terminologically, even where its inadequacy as regards the hypertext becomes clear. To capture what really goes on in hypertextual pactice we will need to develop a new vocabulary capable of signifying such concepts as “wreading” and “wriding.” (And my “readers” should be warned that I have engaged in some terminological experimentation along these lines below, grotesque though the results may be.)

     

    In any case, it would seem that the hypertext environment brings about a collapsing of the identities of composer and audience, a relinquishment of creative control, a triumph of the consumer. But it is necessary to back somewhat away from these implications and return to the image of a space full of chambers connected by tunnels. Within Landow’s Intermedia technology and my chamber-tunnel image, the “writer” carries out two tasks: preparing the separate lexias in their chambers and installing the first set of tunnels linking them. That design process is creative and authoritative in traditional ways. “Readers” needn’t be privileged to tamper with what the “writer” has installed. And the relationships among the lexias, the links, are–when imagined as existing in space–determined by the writer, and must be “followed” by the reader. Writer and reader are not identical. There is no aleatoric “audience participation,” no wresting of control from the performance artist.

     

    In that case, how can it be said that the technology “infringes upon the power of the writer, removing some of it and granting it to the reader”? First, the person who enters the hypertext space may construct chambers and link them to those already there. Thus the “wreader” gambit. You can compose your objection to these sentences, or your qualification, or even your endorsement, and “file” it in the same size type–ah, where?–Think of the position as “right behind” this screen/plane, visible the way the labelled edge of a Mac window could be visible.

     

    That privilege of reader-being-writer is more easily imagined, but may be less important, than the consequence of the other “transfer of power” effected by the technology. This involves the disintegration of the celebrated essence of literacy, “linearity.” I don’t mean to imply a mandate for chaos; the originator still can design a preferred sequence for the readers’ encounter with the lexias. And sentence-level linearity is not eroded (nor is frame-level pictorial syntax, nor a melody’s phrasing). But the reader-audience-explorer is no longer bound by sequences of paragraphs or chapters. At the granular level we usually call “organizational,” the writer loses what had been almost complete control over the reader.

     

    Before hypertext, that is, author(ities) designed the one-and-only-one sequence of sensation-chunks to be imposed on and shared by all (subservient) readers. The order in which memories were layered, the sequence of admonitory qualifications and concluding caveats was determined by the single creative mind. A rebellious reader who flipped casually from back to front, or read the “last” chapter first, or started with the Index, was a social deviant. Now, however, “Flipping back and forth” is no longer defiant. It’s encouraged. The authority can no longer presume that everyone will have read “the same book,” and it won’t be easy for two readers to discuss their differently based interpretations of the same work. They might be similar, but congruence would be an unlikely accident. The author or wrider still influences, but no longer determines, the way the reader or wreader spends time.

     

    For hypertext generally, then: The wreader can add to a hypertext docuverse, but (usually) cannot alter its existing lexia; the wrider maintains authority over the original lexias and links, but abdicates control over sequence and boundary. With that paradox and transformation outlined for the technology in general, we can turn to a slightly restricted arena, narrative. Hypertext affects storytelling.

     

    If the relationship between wrider and wreader has been transformed, if no single individual is responsible for the whole text, and if that text is no longer a fixed, sacred record–what then are the implications for morality in a record-addicted, legalistic, guilt-needing culture? This might seem like an impertinent question, except that the following sentence is as provocative as any in Landow’s chapter called Reconfiguring Narrative: “Since some narratologists claim that morality ultimately depends upon the unity and coherence of a fixed linear text, one wonders if hypertext can convey morality in any significant form or if it is condemned to an essential triviality” (106). Landow’s answer is affirmative; hypertext storytelling can “convey morality,” and his argument here is consistent with his other positions. Using Michael Joyce’s hypertext Afternoon as his example, Landow maneuvers some responsibility onto the reader’s shoulders. As readers, he says, “our assistance in the storytelling or storymaking is not entirely or even particularly random . . . we do become reader-authors and help tell the tale we read.”

     

    “Nonetheless,” he continues, “as J. Hillis Miller points out, we cannot help ourselves: we must create meaning as we read: ‘A story is readable because it can be organized as a causal chain . . . . A causal sequence is always an implicit narrative’” (115; Miller, Versions of Pygmalion).

     

    One purpose of Landow’s argument here seems to be to rescue hypertext “stories” (and perhaps the medium itself) from “essential triviality.” But I don’t think the rescue operation is called for. The struggle is not between the trivial and the serious, or between absurdity and order, even though Miller (and Aristotle) implies that the absence of centralized, authorial control of time, and the concomitant absence of obvious causes and necessities, would leave hypertext vulnerable to the defamatory epithets “random” and “chaotic.” I see randomness and chaos making a comeback, however, and if morality’s principal basis really is sequence–consequence, post hoc ergo propter hoc, narrative–then I believe that conventional “morality,” thermodynamic morality, is in for a hard time.

     

    My conviction is founded in the implications of fractals and chaos theory, which permit the simultaneous domination of events by absolute determinism and absolute uncertainty. I do not expect “causality” to fade away, any more than Newton or Einstein have, but we are questioning some default assumptions deeply rooted in our culture–see Miller’s casual but inevitable use of “because,” above, for instance. Consider also the questions implicit in a passage Kernan quotes from McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy:

     

    The crucial literary concepts of a central plot and a single structure are extensions of the movement of type in precise lines, which generates "the notion of moving steadily along on single planes of narrative awareness . . . totally alien to the nature of language and consciousness." (Kernan 52)

     

    As Landow himself says, hypertext technology lets us start testing questions and assumptions. In the case of story-telling, hypertext does not demand attention to a single Creative Authority who designs sequences of sensation and requires that audiences accept them in that order. This is why there is really no need, in spite of the consistency and symmetry of Landow’s nostalgic argument (that readers will construe their own causality, and narrative morality will remain essentially the same), to succumb to the argument’s temptations.

     

    Almost half the book is devoted to ways hypertext affects realms outside its own texts. The last two chapters are about pedagogy and politics. Both of them start small and expand. One begins with students and concludes with hypertext’s effect on canonicity. The other starts out with “humanist technophobia” and ideology, and ends with a succinct survey of networks’ and hypertext’s unpacking of the mouldy concept of “intellectual property.” One sentence seems to me to be at the heart of both chapters: “Educational hypertext redefines the role of instructors by transferring some of their power and authority to students” (123). Implicit in this kind of transfer, as I have experienced it, is a modification of the concept “knowledge” away from a “thing” to be sought and found and guarded and delivered by coteries–by mysterious “hoods,” as in brotherhoods or priesthoods or doctoral hoods–away from monolithic thing-ness, that is, and toward a complex system of interpenetrating contributions. “Facts” don’t change much in such an environment, but some dogmatically self-evident conclusions are less likely to be called “facts.”

     

    I have watched this happen in a simple, inexpensive networking environment, and have no trouble accepting Landow’s sweeping statement about the inestimably more challenging environment of hypermedia. To prevail in that environment, students have to become engaged with learning. They will have trouble if they try to get by with habits of remembering and mimicking. Landow says that hypertext provides “the perfect means of informing, assisting, and inspiring the unconventional student” (129), that the environment “frees learners from constraints of scheduling without destroying the structure and coherence of a course” (132), and asks instructors to “rethink examinations and other forms of evaluation” (134). We also have to make some adjustments in our beliefs about “knowledge.” Instead of being a commodity that professors have exposed, “knowledge” is revealed as a dynamic cluster of interacting perceptions being constructed and transformed by real people.

     

    Pleasing as these abstract ramifications may sound, they are also disturbing. How many educators really want “active, independent-minded students who take more responsibility for their education and are not afraid to challenge and disagree” (163)? Landow assesses the prospect as “terrifying” for many, perhaps especially so in an atmosphere of “widespread humanist technophobia” (164).

     

    Beyond the threat to professors’ assumptions about their power, deeply rooted in the proscenium classroom (Barker and Kemp), and registrars’ schedules and “credit hours,” Landow perceives hypertext as more than a teaching tool, a learning machine, an “educational program.” For him it is a medium, and its unprecedented massage (sic) is potentially multicentered and democratizing far beyond the campus. One already hears rumors about the ways some people in medium-sized organizations have adjusted their activity away from obeying and toward collaborating as “horizontal” networks encroach on “chain-of-command” hierarchies. That the change is still in the service of “productivity” seems to me a minor flaw, perhaps temporary, in a near-Odonian transformation of attitude.

     

    A basic image for Landow, and for this review, has been transfer of power. The author’s authority is decreased and the reader’s power is increased by the same “amounts,” it would seem. Democracy gains to the extent that autocracy loses. The image implies scarcity, limitation, restriction. But “power” does not really exist as a fixed quantum, after all, to be shared only among the privileged and withheld from, kept secret from, the underclass. In certain contexts, power resembles information, in that sharing power does not leave the sharer with less of it. To the extent that information and power (and authority) overlap, hypertext’s ecology of abundance can be regarded as spreading all of them around, rather than either reducing or increasing any of them. To that extent, at least, hypertext technology resembles network technology: sharing, abundance, even the dreaded “overload” are its hallmarks, rather than the sort of de-centering that implies reduction or diminishment.

     

    Although it takes some rigorous imagining to do so, I can even extrapolate the hypertext environment in the direction of broadly anti-propertarian attitudes. The propertarian, anti-collaborative concepts of artist and inventor, copyright and patent, publication and secrecy, are closely linked. But the impetus toward collaboration already evident in the Matrix or on the Net looks to be compounded by the experience of hypertext. IF the overlapping cultural schemas of a) deference to isolated genius, b) worship of mystery, and c) reverence for hierarchy continue to be eroded by a technology that virtually mandates collaboration, our great-grandchildren will share a radically refabricated culture in which concepts like intellectual property, trade secrets, and even searching for The Truth may have been significantly altered.

     

    These declarations are mine, not Landow’s. He wisely stops short of such gee-whiz speculation. His boldness in discussing pedagogy alongside critical theory, and in discussing the political implications of an academic technology, are more significant for me than the specific directions we may make guesses about.

     

    For it is this convergence of technology, pedagogy, scientific and literary theorizing, and the feedback processes of cultural evolution, that Landow’s volume heralds. Indeed, I wish he had brought his talent for drawing the most crucial particulars out of a complex framework to bear on the broader academic curriculum (and political agenda). It seems to me that the sooner we can integrate hypertext’s opportunities for exploration into our graduate training in all the artistic and critical disciplines, the greater the likelihood that some system of positive global cooperation will prevail over the temptations to self destruct.

     

    There are other matters that I wish Landow had been able to address. On the technical side, they include the implications of the broader definition of “text” forthcoming when “cinema” and “sound” join “plain words” and “pictures” in the hypermedia “space.” On the theoretical side, they include the intriguing hypothesis that “Time”–as in the dis-integration of before-and-after relationships–is the concept that arches over all his reconfigurations. Pedagogically, they include the implications of the growing demand for computing resources, including trained people, that will issue from the humanistic disciplines as the technology’s value to all forms of textual-interpretive endeavor comes to be recognized. Politically, they include the ramifications of high cost and slow distribution of the technology (which brings us full circle, centrifugally, around the bullseye Landow has anatomized). But in a book so thoroughly admirable, these few lacunae are no more worrisome than the missing “the” on page 131.

     

    There are skeptics about hypertext, particularly scholars concerned about its apparent promotion of bull-session anarchy and rigorless dissipation. Landow quotes doubts about “the erosion of the thinking subject” (Said, Beginnings) and “the disintegration of the centering voice of contemplative thought” (Heim, Electric Language). For Landow himself, however, whatever is lost at the center appears offset by benefits of collaboration. In discussing the relationships he experienced during an Intermedia project, for instance, he lambastes those who, still bathing themselves “in the afterglow of Romanticism, uncritically inflate Romantic notions of creativity and originality to the point of absurdity” (91). Quoting Bolter about the way “book technology itself created new conceptions of authorship and publication” (93), Landow celebrates the fact that “hypermedia linking automatically produces collaboration” (95).

     

    There is also suspicion that anything to do with computers is essentially materialistic and centralized, and an associated suspicion that any “program” must be a “product” whose acceptance will implicate us in the machinations of the producers. One reviewer, objecting to Jay Bolter’s attitude toward computing technology (in Writing Space), links this threat (of a “decentering, associative technology being developed by and for the greater consolidation of post-industrial, multi-national, capitalistic institutions”) with “a neo-conservative position” and “Republican ideology” (Tuman, “Review,” 262-63). The paradox of “consolidated decentering” might be resolvable, but it will be hard for a while yet to fight the presumption that network technology and hypertext technology have the same effects on their users. I can testify that the impacts are very different, however, and I will insist that confusing the concept hypertext with whoever delivers and installs a particular version is like confusing the generic technology of the book with the sellers of paper and printing presses; hypertext is a generic technology, not a product. And Usenet (to shift to The Matrix of networks) is like an anarchists’ convention compared with commercial bulletin boards’ shopping malls.

     

    A related objection, also directed at Bolter and Writing Space, has been to his “radical environmentalism,” which allows the “human mind to be shaped by whatever writing space it happens to be occupying” (Kaufer and Neuwirth, “Review,” 260). But while one must certainly beware of absolute technological determinism, it seems clear enough that the human mind is used differently, say, in paper-based cultures than in memory-dependent societies. If that translates into environmental “shaping,” then hypertext, in its disruption of such self-evident categories as “reader” and “writer,” would seem already to have begun to reshape us.

     

    Hypertext is as radical a social technology as there has been since compound interest, and its subsequences won’t crystallize in a rationally predictable way. Who could have prophesied, for instance, that the internal-combustion engine and the quartz-crystal radio would play out as suburban decentralization and public television broadcasting? I am willing to predict that the nature of record-keeping is going to change now that we can tape events in “real-time” as well as write down summaries from memory. Since we live in a record-grounded culture, that is, changes in recording technology will have effects as profound as they are gradual–over the next century or two. Hypertext, a recording medium, will play some part in those tectonic changes, but it is far too early to predict its exact role or the precise changes. Isaac Asimov once made the point that most people can carry out a plausible straight-line extrapolation of (some) effects of change in a single variable. He grinned as he added that plotting the feedback effects where those extrapolations affect other variables is, shall we say, more difficult. Few “variables” affect the understructure of culture more subtly or seismically than its recording technology, and hypertext is an unprecedented, appealing, available recording technology. Its effects on what we call “writing” may turn out to be as momentous as those of photography on “drawing.”

     

    I doubt that any member of the four hostile audiences I enumerated at the outset will now rush off to buy Landow’s Hypertext. But I hope that others who are more prepared to credit an emerging technology with the potential to radically reshape our institutional lives–right down to such assumed conceptual bedrock as text, author, story, knowledge, and reader–will give this admirable book the chance to convince them.

     

    Works Cited

     

    • Barker, T.B., and F.O. Kemp. “Network Theory: A Postmodern Pedagogy for the Writing Classroom.” In Carolyn Handa, ed., Computers and Community: Teaching Composition in the Twenty-First Century. Portsmouth, New Hampshire: Heinemann/Boynton-Cook, 1990.
    • Bolter, Jay David. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1991.
    • Delany, Paul, and George P. Landow, eds. Hypermedia and Literary Studies. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991.
    • Gibson, William. Neuromancer. New York: Ace, 1984.
    • Heim, Michael. Electric Language: A Philosophical Study of Word Processing. New Haven: Yale UP. 1987.
    • Kaufer, David, and Chris Neuwirth. “Review” of Bolter, Writing Space. College Composition and Communication 43.2 (May 1992): 259-61.
    • Kernan, Alvin. Printing Technology, Letters and Samuel Johnson. Princeton: Princeton UP 1987.
    • Lanham, Richard A. “From Book to Screen: Four Recent Studies.” College English 54.2 (February 1992): 199-206. Review of Bolter, Writing Space; Hardison, Disappearing Through the Skylight: Culture and Technology in the Twentieth Century; Kernan, The Death of Literature; Ulmer, Teletheory: Grammatology in the Age of Video.
    • McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1962.
    • Miller, J. Hillis. Versions of Pygmalion. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1990.
    • Moran, Charles. “Computers and English: What Do We Make of Each Other?” College English 54.2 (February 1992): 193-98. Review of Handa, ed., Computers and Community; Holdstein and Selfe, eds., Computers and Writing: Theory, Research, Practice.
    • Moulthrop, Stuart. “Polymers, Paranoia, and the Rhetoric of Hypertext.” Writing on the Edge 2.2 (Spring 1991): 150-59.
    • Said, Edward W. Beginnings: Intention and Method. New York: Columbia UP, 1985.
    • Schwarz, Helen J. “Computer Perspectives: Mapping New Territories.” College English 54.2 (February 1992): 207-12. Review of Delany and Landow, eds., Hypermedia and Literary Studies; Hawisher and Selfe, eds., Critical Perspectives on Computers and Composition Instruction; Hawisher and Selfe, eds., Evolving Perspectives on Computers and Composition Studies: Questions for the 1990s.
    • Slatin, John. “Reading Hypertext: Order and Coherence in a New Medium.” In Delany and Landow, eds., Hypermedia and Literary Studies.
    • Storyspace, a hypertext writing environment. Cambridge: Eastgate Systems.
    • Tuman, Myron. “Review” of Bolter, Writing Space. College Composition and Communication 43.2 (May 1992): 261-63.

     

  • Becoming Postmodern?

    Ursula K. Heise

    English Department
    Stanford University
    <uheise@leland.stanford.edu>

     

    Ermarth, Elizabeth Deeds. Sequel to History: Postmodernism and the Crisis of Representational Time. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1992.

     

    Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth’s Sequel to History: Postmodernism and the Crisis of Representational Time addresses a problem that has been all too long neglected in studies of contemporary avant-garde art and thought: the concept of temporality. Although postmodernism’s relationship to and construction of space, time, and historicity has been discussed with some frequency in more general accounts, there has not so far been any book-length study focused in particular on postmodernism and temporality. In its attempt to fill this theoretical gap, Ermarth’s book must be welcome to any reader interested in postmodern theories and practices.

     

    Ermarth analyzes the problem of temporality within the general framework of poststructuralist theory as well as the more specific one of narrative structure. The three theoretical chapters that constitute the bulk of her book explore the ramifications of her central thesis: postmodern theory and postmodern art replace the %historical temporality% which has dominated Western thought since the Renaissance with the concept of %rhythmic time%. Chapter One, “Time Off the Track,” defines historical temporality as a convention that emerged in the Renaissance and came to inform all the most important forms of Western knowledge. As a “realistic” or “representational” device,

     

    historical time [is] a convention that belongs to a major, generally unexamined article of cultural faith . . . : the belief in a temporal medium that is neutral and homogeneous and that, consequently, makes possible those mutually informative measurements between one historical moment and another that support most forms of knowledge current in the West and that we customarily call "science." History has become a commanding metanarrative, perhaps %the% metanarrative in Western discourse. (20)

     

    Postmodernism radically subverts this convention by relying on a “rhythmic time” which is no longer a transcendent and neutral medium “in” or “on” which events take place as in a container or on a road stretching to infinity. Rather, rhythmic time is coextensive with the event and does not allow the subject to distance itself from it, but collapses the two and binds both of them in language. It is a “time of experiment, improvisation, adventure”:

     

    Because rhythmic time is an exploratory repetition, because it is over when it's over and exists for its duration only and then disappears into some other rhythm, any "I" or ego or %cogito% exists only for the same duration and then disappears with that sea change or undergoes transformation into some new state of being. What used to be called the individual consciousness has attained a more multivocal and systemic identity.(53)

     

    This new type of identity, the topic of Ermarth’s second chapter entitled “Multilevel Thinking,” renders humanist and Cartesian notions of individuality obsolete, since the subject now exists in an irreducible multiplicity of perspectives and moments of awareness and becomes indistinguishable from the object. Ultimately, it turns out to be a construct of language, as Ermarth details in her third chapter, “Time and Language”:

     

    If time is no longer a neutral medium, a place of exchange between self-identical objects and subjects and "in" which language functions, then the language sequence--especially in the expanded theoretical sense of discourse--becomes the only site where temporality can be located and where consciousness can be said to exist. (140)

     

    In one of her most interesting theoretical moves, Ermarth describes this innovative linguistic constellation in terms of the medieval notion of %figura%, in opposition to the modern concept of %image%. In contrast to the image, the term %figura% for Ermarth emphasizes an understanding of the linguistic sign as reflexive rather than as representational, as a value within a system rather than as an indicator of some external reality. In the medieval as in the postmodern figura, the sign attains an “absolute” status insofar as it is not separate from the reality it is linked to, but coextensive with it. “[In postmodernism] [t]ime and subject %are% the figure,” Ermarth concludes, “and there is no ‘other side’ to it, except in some other figure” (181).

     

    Each of the three theoretical chapters is followed by a “rhythm section” which illustrates the theory through an interpretation of a postmodern novel: Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy, Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch, and Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada. In all three, Ermarth emphasizes the amount of reader involvement that is required for the construction of the narrative sequence, to the point where readerly construction comes to form part of the text itself. Rather predictably, she focuses on the repetition and variation of key scenes in Jealousy, the varied reading itineraries of Hopscotch and the repetition and superimposition of themes and motifs in “alternative semantic contexts” in Ada, but all three novels are well chosen to give an idea of how rhythmic time in narrative differs from the traditional linear and “historical” plot. One wonders, however, whether the concept could have been shown to work equally well if Ermarth had included examples of those maybe more typically postmodern texts whose narrative is structured by formal principles not so easily accounted for in terms of repetition and semantic multivalence: Walter Abish’s Alphabetical Africa, for example, the texts produced by the Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle (OULIPO), or some of the novels of Ronald Sukenick, Raymond Federman, or Christine Brooke-Rose, in which the layout of the printed page comes to play a crucial role for the understanding of narrative progression. Neither is it clear how the notion of rhythmic time would apply to the novels of, for example, Ishmael Reed or Kathy Acker, whose “storylines” are far more radically disrupted than those of Jealousy or Hopscotch. Ermarth here seems to have chosen her examples from that particular brand of early postmodernism that can be made to serve as support for her theoretical approach, to the exclusion of later, more radical experiments that present a much greater challenge to any notion of rhythm.

     

    Nevertheless, Ermarth’s general claim that postmodernism implies a reconceptualization of time is in itself an innovative and promising one. But it is also obvious from the start that her definition of historical time as a realist convention dependent upon the Cartesian %cogito% leads her straight back to two of the most well-beaten tracks of postmodern theory: the critique of subjectivity and the critique of representation. The strength of this approach is that it makes the entire methodological and terminological arsenal of poststructuralist theory available for the study of time. But precisely as a consequence of this, time turns out to be just another metaphysical convention, another meta-narrative to be dismantled in terms that are by now familiar. I am not objecting to this on the basis of those reproaches that the more “historicist” camp of postmodern theorists has frequently leveled at the more “deconstructionist” camp–for example, that an account such as Ermarth’s, which opposes postmodern temporal notions to earlier forms of historical reasoning, relies on historical reasoning even in the process of announcing its demise; that the radically discontinuous “rhythmic time” she describes seems to preclude any notion of individual morality and any possibility of meaningful political thought or action; and that such a temporality makes it impossible for socially repressed groups to articulate their “histories” against the dominant “History” of the elite. Ermarth is aware of these objections, and answers them–tentatively, as she herself concedes–by arguing that social reform in the postmodern age must proceed through the construction of new forms of discursive mediation, and that the reformation of language is itself a political act (112-14, 156-57). To repeat the arguments against such a view would be merely to rehearse once more one of the most well-worn–though admittedly crucial–controversies over postmodernism. Instead, I would like to discuss briefly three central points of Ermarth’s account that seem to me to weaken its theoretical grasp: the absence of any discussion of already existing literature on temporality, the construction of the relationship between modernism and postmodernism, and the connection of time and language which, according to Ermarth, underlies the notion of “rhythmic time.”

     

    Whereas the strength of Sequel to History lies in its familiarity with and survey-presentation of various theories of postmodernism, especially feminist ones, its maybe most serious shortcoming lies in its failure to engage any strand of previous research on temporality. Ermarth mentions Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative and Fraser’s Voices of Time in passing, but does not once refer to David Carr’s or Hayden White’s explorations of the connection between historical time and narrative.1 There is no reference to any of the recent studies of time as a social dimension by Eviatar Zerubavel, Michael Young, David Landes, Paul Halpern or Stephen Kern, nor to any of the more specific studies of the contemporary experience of time by Jeremy Rifkin or David Harvey. None of the classical studies of literary and narrative temporality by Jean Poulet, Georges Pouillon, Hans Meyerhoff, A.A. Mendilow or Frank Kermode finds its way into her study, not to speak of much more recent ones such as Gerard Genette’s, Peter Brooks’s, or Suzanne Fleischman’s. Ermarth does not quote Roland Barthes’s critique of narrative time as a purely representational convention, or Thomas Docherty’s recent concept of a postmodern “chrono-politics,” both sources that are highly relevant to many of her considerations; neither does she mention Philippe Le Touze’s claim that in the %nouveau roman%, temporality has shifted from story to discourse, a hypothesis that anticipates her own claim that in the postmodern novel, time becomes a function of language. But maybe most surprising, given Ermarth’s attempt to develop a non-transcendental concept of time, is the absence of any engagement with Derrida’s suggestion that time itself is an irrecuperably metaphysical concept, and David Wood’s extensive discussion of this hypothesis in The Deconstruction of Time (1989). In a book which justifies its existence by the absence of theoretical considerations of time and postmodernism, this large number of omissions cannot but weigh heavily.

     

    It does so not only at a purely theoretical level. Practically, Ermarth’s lack of concern for earlier analyses of time leads to the disappearance of high modernism from her historical map. The only current of pre-World War II literature she discusses is surrealism, but the more crucial precursors in questions of temporality–Joyce, Woolf, Wyndham Lewis’s rebellion against the “time school in modern literature,” and Gertrude Stein’s experiments with narrative time and timelessness, to name only a few–are left out of consideration. In fact, since Ermarth defines as “modern” the period from the Renaissance to the beginning of the twentieth century, one is left with the impression that novelists such as Proust or Faulkner would have to be considered postmodernists in her terminology. Is there any difference between them and the postmodernists she discusses –Robbe-Grillet, Cortazar, Nabokov? Nowhere does Ermarth spell out whether she sees any fundamental break between the high modernist and the postmodernist conceptualization of time, or whether she views them as essentially homogeneous in their break away from Cartesian rationalism and realist forms of representation.

     

    This is more than quibbling over labels, since her central theoretical notion, “rhythmic time,” can be applied to a number of modernist novels as well as postmodernist ones. Rhythmic time, according to Ermarth, manifests itself in narrative as a structure that no longer consists of linear plot development, but the repetition of identical motifs, details and descriptions with slight but disturbing variations, or as repeated and incompatible accounts of what the reader must take to be the same events. These variations and distortions make it impossible for the readers to construct a rational, representational picture of the novel’s world and events. Rather, they are invited to perceive the text as a figural pattern of elements which can be arranged and rearranged, “[e]mphasizing what is parallel and synchronically patterned rather than what is linear and progressive” (85). Thus, Ermarth argues, the structuring principle of the postmodern novel is paratactic rather than syntactic, relying on a style which “thrives by multiplying the valences of every word and by making every arrangement a palimpsest rather than a statement, rather as poetry does when it draws together a rhythmic unit by means of repeated sound or rhythm” (85). This is, on the surface, a valid enough account of the functioning of many postmodern stories and novels. But the emphasis on synchronicity, multiple meanings, and a structure closer to poetry than to traditional narrative also characterizes the late novels of, for example, Joyce, Woolf or Stein. In what way, then, is rhythmic time typically postmodern?

     

    Furthermore, Ermarth’s definition of rhythmic time raises the question of why one would even insist on still calling this kind of narrative “temporal” at all in a sense other than the superficial one that it takes time to read. One cannot but remember that Joseph Frank used a very similar argument when he characterized the novels of Proust and Joyce as “spatial” in his influential essay, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature”: overcoming the linearity of the 19th-century plot, Frank argued, the modernist novel invites the reader not so much to follow an evolving story, but a gradually spreading network of images which must be perceived in simultaneity. This simultaneity of perception he calls “spatial form.” Like Ermarth, then, he sees a paratactic patterning to be perceived in parallel or in simultaneity as the structuring principle of the 20th-century novel–only Ermarth does not call this “spatial form,” but “rhythmic time,” a concept she herself explains by means of other, sometimes quite distinctly spatializing terms such as “pattern,” “arrangement,” or “figura.” In this context, she quotes Robbe-Grillet’s programmatic statement from For A New Novel to the effect that “in the modern narrative, time seems to be cut off from its temporality. It no longer passes. It no longer completes anything” (155; Ermarth 74). But she seems unaware of how easily this could be used to support a concept such as “spatial form” rather than any specifically temporal approach.

     

    Ermarth’s reference to poetry adds another twist to this: if the postmodern novel is configured on the basis of rhythm, repetition and patterns, then indeed how %is% it different from poetry? Given this affinity, could one not argue that postmodernism’s rhythmic time constitutes no real “reformation of time” at all, but simply the extension of a concept of time that has been present all along in the poetic tradition? I hasten to add that this is not at all a conclusion that I find satisfactory; I am quite prepared to accept that postmodern narrative does innovate our construction of temporality. But Ermarth’s account does not really explain why and how we do still read postmodern narratives as narratives rather than as extended poems. Hopscotch is %not% like long poems such as Pound’s Cantos or Hejinian’s My Life, but one cannot tell by Ermarth’s theory why that is so.

     

    Even discounting these difficulties of applied narratology, though, Ermarth’s theory of time remains problematic. It follows logically from her critique of historical temporality as a representational convention that she ends up describing both postmodern time and consciousness as anchored in the differential signifying system of language. This final emphasis on the crucial role of language may appear at first like a staple of much poststructuralist theory. But the exclusivity which Ermarth attributes to language as the ground and site of all discursive formations, be they philosophical, esthetic, or ethical (“all thought is discourse and all discourse is language” [156]), turns into a serious problem for her theory of temporality. Let us assume for the sake of argument that our conception of time, and in general our cultural, social, and political practices do indeed “take place” principally in and through language, and that changes in these practices must be based on changes of or in language. But then how does language change? How do we get, for example, from the discursive formation that grounds historical time to the one that opens up the possibility of rhythmic time? How do–or did–we become postmodern? I do not see how Ermarth’s account can solve this dilemma: by situating time “in” language, she makes it virtually impossible to situate language “in” time.

     

    This question cannot be brushed off by saying that it is a “historical” one of the kind Ermarth condemns (and even if it were, this would not eliminate the necessity of an answer, since Ermarth herself admits that her account cannot in all respects avoid historicity). Rather, it is a question regarding the very nature of change, of Becoming– that is, regarding the very “processual” character of time that Ermarth herself considers crucial. Possibly, Ermarth would argue that this question cannot be answered in general terms, since we would in this case be again reduced to a “neutral and homogeneous” temporality of some sort. But this is really conceding that there simply can be no non-metaphysical concept of time–a conclusion which leads Ermarth’s idea of a non-transcendental “rhythmic time” %ad absurdum%. A concept of time that is coextensive with the event cannot explain the process that leads from one event to another, and hence evades one of the most central questions in any theory of temporality.

     

    These, in brief, are some of the difficulties Ermarth’s account of postmodernist time encounters, and which might have become, if not solvable, at least more manageable through an engagement with those texts that have already discussed them. My own prediction would be that a successful reformulation of the concept of time will only become possible once we rethink the postmodern notions of “metaphysics” and “transcendence.” Time will tell.

     

    Note

     

    1. I am indebted to Shirley Brice Heath for pointing the latter omission out to me.

     

  • BOOK REVIEW OF: Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences

    Michael W. Foley

    Department of Politics
    The Catholic University of America
    <foley@cua>

     

    Rosenau, Pauline Marie. Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences: Insights, Inroads, and Intrusions. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1992.

     

    On display in the New York Museum of Modern Art’s current exhibit of postmodernist drawing is a piece by Stephen Prima: 67 framed sheets, of various shapes and sizes, broad brushed, light tan ink wash on rag barrier paper, with the suggestive tag “No Title/(‘The History of Modern Painting, to label it with a phrase, has been the struggle against the catalog….’ Barnett Newman).” Pauline Rosenau’s book is a thoroughgoing repudiation of that (post)modernist preoccupation. To analyze postmodernism, in Rosenau’s mind, is to catalog it. In the process, her “postmodernists” mix and blend, as indistinguishable, but for her frames, as Prima’s paintings. Postmodernism plays on the ambiguity, contradiction, and confusion of the text. Rosenau falls victim to it. She mixes description and prescription, observer and observed, thinker, thought and thought-about in an eclectic and often bewildering catalog of postmodern opinion.

     

    Running through the book is a distinction between two broad categories of postmodernists. The “skeptical post-modernists”

     

    argue that the post-modern age is one of fragmentation, disintegration, malaise, meaninglessness, a vagueness or even absence of moral parameters and societal chaos. . . . In this period no social or political 'project' is worthy of commitment. Ahead lies overpopulation, genocide, atomic destruction, the apocalypse, environmental devastation, the explosion of the sun and the end of the solar system in 4.5 billion years, the death of the universe through entropy. (15)

     

    Given such powerful and alarming claims, it may seem surprising that the skeptics also maintain “that there is no truth” and that “all that is left is play, the play of words and meaning” (15).

     

    The "affirmatives" are a still more nebulous category: More indigenous to Anglo-North American culture than to the Continent, the generally optimistic affirmatives are oriented toward process. They are either open to positive political action (struggle and resistance) or content with the recognition of visionary, celebratory personal nondogmatic projects that range from New Age religion to New Wave life-styles and include a whole spectrum of post-modern social movements. (15-16)

     

    Who are these post-modernists? We never learn, though Rosenau cites Baudrillard, Derrida, and articles by Todd Gitlin and Klaus Scherpe. The theorists of postmodernism and its exemplars exchange places freely in Rosenau’s account, and it is often difficult to tell which is being described. Nor do we get the opportunity to judge postmodern thought for ourselves; Rosenau rarely quotes her theorists and even more rarely explores an individual author’s work or argumentation. Postmodern thinkers, in her account, do not argue: they claim, they assume, they relinquish or adopt ideas, they reject or they share views; but they never appear to present a connected argument, elaborate an interpretation, or explain their case. How could they when, as Rosenau never tires of repeating, postmodernism “rejects reason,” preferring instead “the romantic, emotions, feelings” (94). This attack on reason, on the truth claims of modern science, on “the modern subject,” and on moral certainty make up, in Rosenau’s view, “one of the greatest intellectual challenges to established knowledge of the twentieth century” (5).

     

    Rosenau is far from comfortable with that challenge. She dedicates her book to her parents, identified as “strong modern subjects, who had no confusion about their identity or their values.” She worries about the “cynical, nihilist, and pessimistic tone” of the skeptics, who find in “death, self-inflicted death, suicide,” “affirmations of power that conquer rationality” (143). She finds it alarming that “postmodern social movements” like fundamentalism have become “widespread and hegemonic” in some places, because “post-modernism in the Third World provides a justification for requiring women to adopt forms of dress that were abandoned by their grandmothers” and promotes the re-establishment of traditional marriage roles and the restoration of male prerogatives (154-5). In this book, Derrida lies down with the Ayatollah Khomeini; their issue is, as might be expected, monstrous.

     

    Rosenau does scant better justice to her primary concern, the challenge of postmodernism to the social sciences. Though she cites work which has attempted to incorporate postmodern themes into a wide variety of social science disciplines, from international relations to urban planning, her treatment of these efforts is as superficial and unsatisfying as her references to Derrida, Foucault, or Baudrillard. More generally, though, she is inclined to pit postmodernism against social science. In the end, she suggests, efforts to create a “post-modern social science” run aground on what she sees as postmodernism’s fundamental denial of any standards for evaluating knowledge claims. “Can post-modernism survive for long,” she asks, “in a methodological vacuum where all means for adjudication between opposing points of view are relinquished?” The answer seems to be no. “Without any standard or criteria of evaluation post-modern inquiry becomes a hopeless, perhaps even a worthless enterprise” (136).

     

    It is not clear in this presentation of an essentialized “post-modernism” that Rosenau grasps what her radical postmodernists are about. Baudrillard, she tells us, “claims the nuclear holocaust and the Third World War have already taken place; in so doing he violates all modern concepts of time” (68). Without linear time, she asks, what becomes of contemporary social science’s pursuit of causal explanation? Certainly Baudrillard challenges conventional notions of space and time. Does he do so to “overturn” them, as Rosenau asserts? Or to open up our thinking by shattering the self-validating presuppositions of “normal science”? Unless he and other postmodernists are offering an alternative metaphysic with exclusive truth claims of its own, it is hard to see how their “challenge” could be quite as cataclysmic as Rosenau imagines. Rosenau, however, prefers to stress the destructive confrontation of postmodern critique and social scientific presuppositions. In doing so, she evidently intends to take seriously both the most radical claims of the postmodernists and the most positivist pretensions of mainstream social science. But the maneuver is fatal, for it blocks an opportunity to investigate what is new about the postmodernist movement and how and to what degree it clashes with what is new and interesting in contemporary social science.

     

    It is testimony to the cachet of postmodernism that this book found a publisher. That it found one in one of the better university presses perhaps testifies, as well, to that abandonment of standards of judgment which the author finds at the core of postmodernism. This may nevertheless be a book postmodernism deserves. The trouble with postmodernist theory lies, even more than in the overheated language of postwar French intellectuality, in its exaggerated claims. Skepticism, after all, is as old as Zeno, or Abraham, or the Buddha–pick your Father–and no doubt older: the Mothers had plenty of reason to be skeptical of the gods of the Fathers and the Father-Gods of even the skeptics. It was Hume who taught that “causality” was a figment of the imagination and the logical positivists who insisted that “truth” lay only in propositions, not in reality. So what is new in postmodernism? What does the movement have to say to the social sciences?

     

    As a radical reaffirmation of traditional skepticism, probably not much. Reminders of the precariousness of our knowledge claims have regularly given way to fresh constructions: nominalism to Baconian inductivism, French skepticism to the Cartesian reduction, Humean skepticism to British empiricism, Kantian analysis to the idealist syntheses. Ultimately, the postmodern reconstruction of inquiry will hold more interest and have more impact than the initial, skeptical extravagances, however sound and however needed. Here too, however, it is not always clear how much the theorists of postmodernism run counter to even mainstream social scientific theory.

     

    In an exchange between Lucien Goldman and Michel Foucault in 1969, Goldman attacked what he saw as a denial that “men make history” and quoted a bit of graffiti left on a blackboard in the Sorbonne by a student during the May 1968 uprising: “Structures do not take to the streets.” Foucault denied that he had ever called himself a structuralist, but another speaker, Jacques Lacan, attacked the aphorism because “if there is one thing demonstrated by the events of May, it is precisely that structures did take to the streets. The fact that those words were written at the very place where people took to the streets proves nothing other than, simply, that very often, even most often, what is internal to what is called action is that it does not know itself.”1

     

    Rosenau thinks this sort of argument captures postmodern thought. “Post-modern social science,” she tells us, would describe a society “without subjects or individuals,” in which structures “overpower the individual,” “beyond the reach of human intervention” (46). How curiously old-fashioned this sounds to a social scientist! Has the “sociological mind” ever been disposed to think otherwise? Lacan’s comment could have come from a scion of any of several lineages of social scientists, from Marx to Durkheim to Weber. Wasn’t it Freud who exploded the bourgeois self as Marx had exploded the bourgeois social order and Durkheim its moral order? American social scientists have no further to go than Robert K. Merton, whose definition of social science as the investigation of the “unintended consequences” of human action justly characterizes the mainstream of social scientific research since the nineteenth century.

     

    Foucault himself seems only to echo Marx and Engels when he declared that every society controls the production of discourse in an attempt to “evade its ponderous, awesome materiality.”2 By the time Foucault was well launched on his project to recover the hidden origins of our discourses about “man,” “madness,” and the criminal, moreover, Berger and Luckmann had published The Social Construction of Reality and Gregory Bateson had generated a good deal of heat, and some little light, with his notion of schizophrenia as a language disorder. It would not be altogether unfair to argue that French postmodernism paralleled developments that were already brewing in the social sciences, when it was not simply playing catch-up.

     

    One area in contemporary social science in which divergence seems to overwhelm convergence, on the other hand, is precisely the question of human agency. What is really new in the social sciences, in political science perhaps above all, is an attempt to think through the implications of a “non-necessitarian” social science, in which the choices (and occasionally the personal skills) of individuals play a crucial role. The attempt to give the voiceless a voice, marked in contemporary feminism but also evident in important recent work in anthropology, history, sociology, and political science, likewise seems to run counter to any postmodern “denial of the subject.” Rosenau quotes a postmodernist feminist, Jane Flax, who finds “post- modernist narratives about subjectivity . . . inadequate” from the point of view of feminist theory (52). But she might equally well have cited work in the “new social history” or the Annales school.3

     

    There are certainly tensions between postmodernist efforts to “decenter” the subject and the return to notions of human agency in contemporary social science. Rosenau plays on these conflicts, however, without really illuminating them, or even giving an adequate account of them. Despite the frequency with which the issue is joined, moreover, I suspect that postmodernists and their critics alike have been beguiled by the rhetoric and that there is a profound consistency in the efforts of Foucault, in particular, to banish the subject from the history of discourse while attempting to discover, in the everyday experience of the intolerable, new grounds for moral action on the part of an individual both constituted by prevailing discourse and free in the uncovering of its oppressive silences. Such possibilities go unglimpsed in Pauline Rosenau’s account, as they do in the moral and scientific positivisms which still dominate much social scientific practice. But they are well represented in recent social science, and they deserve better treatment than that afforded here.

     

    Contemporary social science, moreover, both converges with postmodernism and borrows heavily from the attempts of Foucault, Bourdieu, and others to embed the new skepticism in new approaches to understanding. What characterizes these efforts is 1) a focus on discourse as the material (and thus powerful) vehicle for social understandings and action, and 2) the insistence that such understandings are best uncovered in examination of everyday practices. Behind these affirmations lie a discomfort with the rigidities of the various structuralisms and a rejection of “meta- narratives” like Marxism which attempt to capture the grand motions of history. Before them rages a still important debate on the justification for abandoning all such paradigms–or the possibility of doing so. But some of the best recent social science–like that of James C. Scott on “the arts of resistance,” Donald McCloskey on the rhetoric of economics, or Stephen Gudeman and Alberto Rivera on peasant economic discourse–uncovers the dynamics of concrete practices and bodies of discourse and demonstrates, in doing so, the fruitfulness of postmodern preoccupations. Rosenau’s book seems largely unconscious of this work. More’s the pity, because, as the postmodernists might insist, we will learn far more about postmodernism in the academy from the everyday practices and preoccupations of contemporary social scientists than by surveys of the self-consciously “postmodern.”

     

    Notes

     

    1. Quoted in Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991), 210-11.

     

    2. “The Discourse on Language,” in Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 216.

     

    3. Curiously, Rosenau tells us that postmodernist skeptics “reject history as longue duree . . . because it claims to discover a set of timeless relations existing independent of everything else” (64). Unfortunately, she does not cite the postmodernists she has in mind, nor adequately explain their aversion to a key concept in the work of Fernand Braudel, an ardent supporter of Foucault.

     

  • The Vietnam War, Reascendant Conservatism, White Victims

    Terry Collins

    General College
    University of Minnesota
    <tcollins@gcmail.gen.umn.edu>

     

    Rowe, John Carlos, and Rick Berg, eds. The Vietnam War and American Culture. New York: Columbia UP, 1991.

     

    Jason, Philip K., ed. Fourteen Landing Zones: Approaches to Vietnam War Literature. Iowa City: Iowa UP, 1991.

     

    The Bloom-D’Souza-NEA-NEH silencing of feminist and multiculturalist positions, trivialized in the popular press as tritely inflated rhetorical agonics over who gets control of the English Department budget and reading list, masks the larger struggle for control of ideology in America, for the terms of our history and future. The contested discourse of intellectual authority and privilege extends directly from reinscription of the Vietnam War, and both are central to the conservative reascendance of the Reagan-Bush period.

     

    The willful national amnesia about the U.S. war in/on Vietnam is, in fact, prerequisite to the current domestic war against the intellectual left. Revisionist history of the Vietnam war is transubstantiative to the conservative reascendance from war criminal status to uncontested author of a “New World Order.” The right has asserted and then reaped the fruit of the myth of rectitude planted and nurtured by Reagan’s reinvention of the Vietnam War as a “noble cause.” This re-creation of the war has gone virtually unchallenged. Norman Podhoretz was able to write, in Why We Were in Vietnam (Simon and Schuster, 1982), that the war was an act of “imprudent idealism whose moral soundness has been overwhelmingly vindicated”– with barely a stir of outrage in the popular press voicing opposition to this macabre rewriting. Equally little notice was taken when, phoenix- like, Richard Nixon issued No More Vietnams (Arbor House, 1985), his self-serving apology for genocide. Celebrating the exorcism of the “ghost of Vietnam” under Reagan, Nixon gloats that “Since President Reagan took office in 1981, America’s first international losing streak has been halted.” He writes (and gets away with it), “Of all the myths about the Vietnam War, the most vicious one is the idea that the United States was morally responsible for the atrocities committed after the fall (sic) of Cambodia in 1975,” dismissing the laws of cause and effect as neatly as he does the idea of truth.

     

    The reclamation of the hearts and minds of the American suburban diaspora, relieving the national consciousness of the burden of the “Vietnam syndrome” (a cynical rearticulation of what might have passed, in a reasonable moral climate, for something like depression growing out of deserved collective guilt), was a prerequisite for the conservative reascendance that so enervates the intellectual discourse of our era. Once vindicated and remythologized, the right launched its Education/NEA/NEH-mediated search- and-destroy mission at home, Bloom, Bennett, Hirsch and D’Souza walking point, on radio to Helms and the Onanites, tipping Coors at recon.

     

    It is logical to look to oppositional discourses in the fiction and film of the Vietnam War for relief. But, in fact, the relative absence of a collective public rejection of and response to the revisionist readings of our war in/on Vietnam is problematized by the personal, fictive, and cinematic narratives of grunt-vets, journalist-vets, and medical-vets who write, from oppositional postures, their experiences in the war. Michael Herr, Tim O’Brien, Larry Heinemann, William Eastlake, Oliver Stone, and the other writers featured in the criticism collected in the books reviewed here have (no doubt authentically, no doubt painfully) written large the psychic and ethical dislocation of young men inserted into the survivalist landscape of the free-fire zone. The problem is this: the prose and cinematic fictions fragment and monadize the war, make it a matter of individual(ist) survival–ethically, bodily. It is easy to imagine the origins of such texts. The stunningly horrid collective lies, pandered by government agents in the pressrooms of Vietnam, had to be countered, producing Dispatches. The clean, faceless, stinkless body counts had to be countered by Paco’s Story.

     

    But Hemingway’s dictum–that fiction tells truer truths about war than history–distorts. The memoirs, fictions, and films which recreate the Vietnam War as primarily a matter of the individual ethical and bodily survival of articulate white men, rather than as genocide, simply reconstitute this as a war of blue-eyed victims. And in the struggle for the history of this war, these fictions, most powerfully those intended as narratives of resistance to LBJ-Kissinger-Nixon, stand complicit, by making Vietnam the individual’s story, a war on Vietnamese peasants reconstructed as a war valorizing the white American grunt’s individual ethical and physical pain, however real. In the most powerful of the Vietnam War books and films, it is still a white American war, a white American morality play enacted on a stage built of dead Asians, albeit an individualist drama sometimes brilliantly re-read for the violently sexist and misogynist spectacle that the Vietnam War was/is.

     

    But in fact this was/is a war on the brown-eyed, and no fictional, cinematic, or critical gloss will make it otherwise. In the field of vision in these narratives, the individual white man’s pain obscures our view of American minorities dying and bleeding, all out of proportion to their numbers. Above all, the individual(ist) pain of the white GI, struggling with his soul, blocks whatever light the authors might want to have shined on Vietnamese and Cambodian and Laotian men, women, children burning, being raped, zipped, zapped, poisoned, free-fired, dis-eared, and forgotten against the glow and smell of white phosphorous, the jell of napalm. The best-written of the novels, the best-made of the films, are most disturbing in this failure. Oppositional by intention, they finally effect a conspiracy of eloquence. As textual representations of the war as the cauldron of the individual white American male soul’s struggle, they Tonto-ize the minority experience and overtly replace MyLai-scapes as the national memory, reaffirming the American master narratives of white male individualism and rebirth.

     

    Furthermore, the best Vietnam narratives represent a reading of Vietnam as anomaly. Far from anomaly, the Vietnam War was/is an exceptionally logical outgrowth of U.S. history and policy. Vietnam may have been Manifest Destiny’s most compellingly horrid spectacle, but it was not an aberrant moment. The more painfully eloquent the struggle of individual grunts represented in these narratives, and the more compelling their individual struggles to adjust ethical calibrations to the horror show of the killing field, the more fully obscured is the historical consistency of Vietnam. And the more obscured our vision of the historical consistency of this genocidal strain of American hegemony becomes, the less likely are we to see the same truth embodied in our contemporary American cityscapes, our drug wars, our increasingly brown-eyed urban villes which putrefy under intentional, national neglect. To atomize the Vietnam War’s reality in its textual representation, to portray it as the individual struggle for physical/ethical survival (rather than as a logically constructed episode leading out of expansionist centuries, leading out of Indian genocide, leading out of slavery, and leading into the New World Order) is to deny the centrality of Vietnam and its consistency with American history. To the extent that the Vietnam War is represented as primarily the individual white male’s struggle with his conscience in an aberrant territory, the war becomes peripheral to our understanding of the national epistemology of slash-and-burn, rape-and-control, genocide. Tim O’Brien’s Paul Berlin Going After Cacciato) Larry Heinemann’s Paco Paco’s Story), and their fictive brothers-in-arms may have been conceived in rage, remorse, or celebration of survival, but as atomized agents, they are surely close cousins to John Rambo.

     

    The collections of essays reviewed here move in and out of coherent visions of the central position occupied by the Vietnam War and by its reinvention as part of the rightist national myth. Interestingly, they follow on the heels of John Hellmann’s American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam (Columbia UP, 1986). Hellmann’s book ends in a call to America to integrate this “nightmare” somehow (via Lucasfilms, he suggests!) into the traditional white American myth of the new world Adam/new world Order. Therefore, the Rowe/Berg and Jason collections are tacitly positioned against Hellmann’s invitation to wishful denial.

     

    The Vietnam War and American Culture grew out of a special issue of Cultural Critique (1986), edited by Rowe and Berg. Of the two collections under review, it is the more consistently aggressive in demanding historical and cultural integrity of the novels, memoirs, and films which attempt to represent the Vietnam War. It is introduced by a long, lucid essay by Noam Chomsky which argues a reading of the Vietnam War as exercise in national slavery to privilege, predicting the reascendant right’s inscription of a canonized discourse of the Vietnam War as erasure of historical consciousness in the service of elites. Divided into sections on “The Vietnam War and History,” “The Vietnam War and Mass Media,” and “The Vietnam War and Popular Media,” the Rowe/Berg collection contains nine strong essays and (as a fitting close to a volume that theorizes the human experience of the war) a sampling of fine concrete poems by W. D. Ehrhart.

     

    Of the essays in Rowe/Berg, three–besides the Chomsky piece–are stunning. The dilemma of the atomized-male- coming-of-age narratives is addressed directly (though in terms quite different from those I use above) by Susan Jeffords. Her essay, “Tattoos, Scars, Diaries, and Writing Masculinity,” re-reads the Vietnam War and the rich lode of male fiction about the War (including oppositional fiction from the left) as misogynist acts and icons. The essay anticipates the extended argument she develops in The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War (Indiana UP, 1989). Rick Berg, in “Losing Vietnam: Covering the War in an Age of Technology,” posits TV and film readings of the war as foundational of the revisionist gestures that would follow: “What is lost and forgotten with each imagined win are those who fought and suffered. It is all well and good to turn Vietnam vets into heroes, but not at the expense of their children and their history. As Brecht’s Mother Courage reminds us, war profiteering has a long, honorable, and expensive history. I wonder if Stallone and his fellow revisionists are willing to pay the price.” And John Carlos Rowe struggles with the conflation of documentary and docudramatic accounts of the war in film as devices which foster a false sympathy with its (white male) victims in “substituting myth for knowledge.”

     

    The essays in Rowe/Berg are consistently clear, expansive, well-documented, and respectful of the historical and human pain their subject embodies.

     

    The essays collected in Philip K. Jason’s Fourteen Landing Zones: Approaches to Vietnam War Literature are self-consciously tentative. Jason positions them as “paths,” not fully realized or conclusive readings. It’s a reasonable humility that takes such a stance before the enormity of this war and its varied literature, it seems. And at their best, the essays test the popular readings of the war, the prevailing ideologies captured in myth, against history or close analysis. At their worst, though, the essays whine, as only the terminally academic can, “Let’s talk about me!” Some of these essays lose sight of the blood and bone.

     

    Lorrie Smith’s “Poetry by Vietnam War Veterans” is less essay than it is prosodic connective among eloquent poetic chunks. Wisely, I think, she mutes her analytic discourse in favor of a type of reading that we used to call “appreciation”–she lets the poetic fragments weave themselves into the eventual essay. Jacqueline E. Lawson’s “She’s a Pretty Woman . . . for a Gook,” like the Jeffords essay in Rowe/Berg, examines the war in view of contemporary theories of misogyny, rape, and media-proliferated degradations of women. Kali Tal’s “Speaking the Language of Pain: Vietnam War Literature in the Context of a Literature of Pain” reads the war and its writing in the company of theorists of the literature of extremity, most usefully Terrence Des Pres’s study of Holocaust literature in The Survivor. Tal gives a smart, but too tentative critique of Hellmann and the other mythic-apologist readings of this literature. These three essays are the strongest in the book, to my mind.

     

    At its worst, the tentative nature of essays in the Jason collection fosters a lapse into a kind of new critical reduction of the literature of the Vietnam War. Stuart Ching’s “‘A Hard Story to Tell’: The Vietnam War in Joan Didion’s Democracy,” for example, seems satisfied to examine the literature as “Literature,” pretending to neither a breathing reader nor a positioned writer.

     

    Understanding the Vietnam War and its literature probably isn’t possible. Conflicted writings-toward such an understanding serve two mutually exclusive functions, are built on internal contradictions. In the one instance, our studies–even the most thoughtful and humanely analytical–must stylize Vietnam, reinscribe it out of the thousands and hundreds of thousands of Vietnams that rattle around in the heads of vets and their families, that scream in the heads of Vietnamese people, that moan from the graves. And thereby, our studies must trivialize the war, its causes, and its consequences. That war existed so many ways, was so many wars, that its fictions will reinvent only fragments, and thereby re-fragment the whole, will situate its atrocities in physical and psychic landscapes, moral landscapes, textual landscapes, that are individual. All such atomized textualizations of atrocities of this scale must themselves be atrocities. In the other instance, we submit to the Nixonian re-inventions, the Reaganesque “noble cause” narrative. The first is the path of choice, quite clearly. Rowe/Berg and Jason move us toward that ambiguous end.

     

    Tonight, as I write, L.A. burns, troops are in our streets, the war is on TV again. Black men are the gooks this time.

     

  • Lesbian Bodies in the Age Of (Post)Mechanical Reproduction

    Cathy Griggers

    Literary and Cultural Theory
    Carnegie Mellon University

     

    What signs mark the presence of a lesbian body?

     

    Writing the lesbian body has become more common of late, making reading it all the more difficult. Less hidden, and so more cryptic than ever, the lesbian body increasingly appears as an actual variability set within the decors of everyday discourses. Signs of her presence appear on the cover of ELLE, for example, or in popular film and paperback detective mysteries as both the sleuth and femme fatale, in texts that range from Mary Wing’s overt lesbian thriller She Came Too Late (1987) to the conflicted, symptomatic lesbian sub-plot in Bob Rafelson’s Black Widow (1986). She appeared disguised as a vampire in Tony Scott’s The Hunger (1983), and masquerading as the latest American outlaw hero in Thelma and Louise (1991). On television, she’s making her appearance on the evening soap L.A. Law, and she virtually made MTV via Madonna’s Justify Your Love music video. When MTV censored the video, she appeared on ABC’s Nightline instead, under the guise of “news.” Elsewhere, in the latest lesbian mail-order video from Femme Fatale–a discursive site where the lesbian imaginary meets the sex industry–you can find her on all fours and dressed in leather or feathers, or leather and feathers, typically wearing a phallic silicone simulacrum. Recently, she’s appeared in the trappings of San Francisco’s lesbian bar culture passing as a collection of art photographs in Della Grace’s Love Bites (1991). Meanwhile, PBS will be broadcasting in the spring of ’92 a BBC production depicting the torrid affair between Violet Treyfusis and Vita Sackville-West into the living rooms of millions of devoted PBS viewers. And Susie Bright, author of Susie Sexpert’s Lesbian Sex World (1990), is making virtual sexual reality with her Virtual Sex World Reader to be published in Spring of 1992 by Cleis Press. Lesbian computer nerds are waiting for Bright to assist in the world’s first lesbian virtual sex program, that is, the first virtual reality program designed by a lesbian. Same-sex sex between women is already a menu option on the popular on-line Virtual Valerie, along with a menu for a variety of sex toy applications. Let’s face it; lesbian bodies in postmodernity are going broadcast, they’re going techno-culture, and they’re going mainstream.

     

    In the process of mainstreaming, in which minoritarian and majority significations intermingle, the lesbian body of signs is exposed as an essentially dis-organ-ized body.1 The lesbian is as fantasmatic a construct as the woman. There are women, and there are lesbian bodies–each body crossed by multiplicitous signifying regimes and by different histories, different technologies of representation and reproduction, and different social experiences of being lesbian determined by ethnicity, class, gender identity and sexual practices. In other words, as lesbian bodies become more visible in mainstream culture, the differences amongst these bodies also become more apparent. There is a freedom and a loss inscribed in this current cultural state of being lesbian. On the one hand, lesbians are given greater exemption from a categorical call that would delimit them from the cultural spaces of the anytime, anywhere. On the other hand, the call of identity politics becomes increasingly problematized.

     

    The problem of identity is always a problem of signification in regard to historically-specific social relations. Various attempts have been made to locate a lesbian identity, most inculcated in the grand nominalizing imperative bequeathed us by the Victorian taxonomies of “sexual” science. Should we define the lesbian by a specific sexual practice, or by the lack thereof? By a history of actual, or virtual, relations? Can she be identified once and for all by the presence of a public, broadcast kiss, by an act of self-proclamation, or by an act of community outing? Should we know her by the absence of the penis, or by the presence of a silicone simulacrum? Surely this material delimitation may go too far–for shouldn’t we wonder whether or not a lesbian text, for all that, can be written across the body of a “man”? I can point to the case of male-to-female transsexuals who cathect toward women, but why should we limit the problematic to its most obvious, symptomatic manifestation?

     

    The question of a lesbian body of signs always takes us back to the notion of identity in the body, of body as identity, a notion complicated in postmodernity by alterations in technologies of reproduction. Benjamin observed in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” that mechanical reproduction destroyed the aura of the original work of art and, more importantly, provided a circuit to mass mentalities and thus an access code for fascism in the twentieth century.2 We should not forget Hitler’s admission that the electronic reproduction of his voice over the radio allowed him to conquer Germany. For the sake of thinking the future of lesbian bodies in postmodernity, I want to recall Benjamin’s critique of the state’s techno-fetishization of technologies of reproduction in the context of lesbian bodies now–within the cultural regime of simulation. Baudrillard defines post-mechanical reproduction as the precession of simulacra, a post-World War II state of hyperreality in post-industrial, techno-culture reached when cultural reproduction refers first and foremost to the fact that there is no original (Simulations). The cultural reproduction of lesbian bodies in the age of (post)mechanical reproduction, that is, in the culture of simulacra, has more than ever destroyed any aura of an “original” lesbian identity, while exposing the cultural sites through which lesbianism is appropriated by the political economy of postmodernity.

     

    We are at a moment of culture, for example, when phallic body prostheses are being mass produced by the merger of the sex industry with plastics technologies. On Our Backs is not the only photojournal to market artificial penises. Even Playgirl, marketed primarily to straight women, carries pages of advertisements for a huge assortment of phallic simulacra. We’re left to wonder what these women might eventually think to do with a double-ended dildo. But there’s no mistaking that the lesbian assimilation of the sex-toy industry is reterritorializing the culturally constructed aura of the phallic signifier. By appropriating the phallus/penis for themselves, lesbians have turned techno-culture’s semiotic regime of simulation and the political economy of consumer culture back against the naturalization of male hegemony. It’s of course ironic that in mass reproducing the penis itself, the illusion of a natural linkage between the cultural power organized under the sign of the phallus and the penis as biological organ is exposed as artificial. The reproduction of the penis as dildo exposes the male organ as signifier of the phallus, and not vice versa, that is, the dildo exposes the cultural organ of the phallus as a simulacrum. The dildo is an artificial penis, an appropriated phallus, and a material signifier of the imaginary ground for an historically manifest phallic regime of power. The effect on lesbian identities of this merger between the sex industry and plastics technologies is typical of the double-binds characteristic of lesbianism in postmodernity. Ironically, the validity of grounding phallic power and gendered identity in the biological sign of difference in the male body is set up for cultural reinvestigation and reinvestment once the penis itself is reproduced as signifier, that is, in the very process of mass-producing artificial penises as a marketable sign for the consumption of desiring subjects, including subjects desiring counter-hegemonic identities. At the same time, the commodification of the signifier–in this case the penis as signifier of the phallus–obscures the politico-economic reproduction of straight class relations by displacing lesbian desire from the unstable and uncertain register of the Real to the overly stable, imaginary register of the fetish-sign (i.e., the repetitive channeling of desire into the fixed circuit that runs from the penis as phallus to the phallus as penis in an endless loop). In other words, if working-class and middle-class urban lesbians and suburban dykes can’t afford health care and don’t yet have real national political representation, they can nonetheless buy a 10-inch “dinger” and a matching leather harness, and they can, with no guarantees, busy themselves at the task of appropriating for a lesbian identity the signs of masculine power. This situation provides both a possibility for self-reinvention and self-empowerment and an appropriation of lesbian identities–and their labor, their leisure, and their purchasing power–into the commodity logic of techno-culture.

     

    At the same time, new reproductive technologies, including artificial insemination by donor (AID), in-vitro fertilization (IVF), surrogate motherhood, Lavage embryo transfer, and tissue farming as in cross-uterine egg transplants, are both reterritorializing and reifying biological relations to gendered social roles (Corea 1986, Overall 1989). The “body” is breaking up. I’m not talking just about the working body, the confessing body, the sexual body. These are old tropes, as Foucault showed us. In postmodernity, even the organs are separating from the body. That these organs are literal makes them no less organs of power. The womb is disjunct from the breast, for example, the vagina from the mouth that speaks, the ovaries and their production from the womb, etc., etc.. The lesbian body’s relation to these reified technologies is entirely paradigmatic of the contradictions of lesbian subject positions in postmodernity. While new reproductive technologies generally reinforce a repressive straight economy of maternal production, body management and class-privileged division of labor, the technology of cross-uterine egg transplants finally allows one lesbian to bear another’s child, a fact which to date has gone entirely unmentioned by either the medical community or the media.3

     

    The point is that the bodies that are the supposed ground of identity in essentialist arguments–arguments that assert we are who we are because of our bodies–are both internally fragmented in response to the intrusions of bio-technologies and advanced surgical techniques, including transsexual procedures, and externally plied by a variety of technologically determined semiotic registers, such as the sex-toy industry and broadcast representation. As a result, lesbian identities are generating a familiar unfamiliarity of terms which San Francisco’s lesbian sexpert, Susie Bright, has been busily mainstreaming on the Phil Donahue Show–terms as provocative as female penetration, female masculinity, S/M lipstick dykes, and lesbian phallic mothers.

     

    While all social bodies are plied by multiple regimes of signs, as Deleuze and Guattari as well as Foucault have repeatedly shown, lesbian bodies in the age of (post)mechanical reproduction are particularly paradigmatic of a radical semiotic multiplicity. This situation is hardly surprising. That lesbians are not women because women are defined by their straight class relations–a statement Monique Wittig has popularized–doesn’t mean we know exactly what a lesbian is. The “lesbian,” especially the lesbian who resists or slips the always potential sedimentarity in that term, marks a default of identity both twice-removed and exponentially factored. Lesbians in postmodernity are subjects-in-the-making whose body of signs and bodies as sign are up for reappropriation and revision, answering as they do the party line of technology and identity.

     

    This double call of technology and identity complicates our understanding of lesbian bodies as minority bodies–a definition that locates lesbians within the discourse of identity by their differences from the majority bodies of the hetero woman and man. We might want to envision lesbians as runaway slaves with no other side of the Mississippi in sight, perpetual and permanent fugitives, as Wittig argues. But it’s undeniable that lesbians are also, at the same time and sometimes in the same bodies, lesbians bearing arms, lesbians bearing children, lesbians becoming fashion, becoming commodity subjects, becoming Hollywood, becoming the sex industry, or becoming cyborg human-machinic assemblages. And from the alternative point of view, we are also bearing witness to the military becoming lesbian, the mother becoming lesbian, straight women becoming lesbian, fashion and Hollywood and the sex industry becoming lesbian, middle-class women, corporate America, and techno-culture becoming lesbian, etc.. That is, the lesbian body of signs, like all minority bodies, is always becoming majority, in a multiplicity of ways. But at the same time, in a multitude of domains across the general cultural field, majority bodies are busy becoming lesbian.

     

    In the lesbian cultural landscape of postmodernity, essentialist arguments about feminine identity are more defunct than ever, while Wittig’s lesbian materialist analysis of straight culture is more urgent than ever and more problematic. Setting lesbian identity first within the context of postmodern culture suggests two clarifications to Wittig. First, any materialist analysis of a lesbian revolutionary position in relation to straight women as a class has to begin with one irreducible conundrum of postmodernity in regard to lesbian identities. The cultural space for popular lesbian identities to exist–economic freedom from dependence on a man–is a historical outcome of late industrial capitalism’s commodity logic in its total war phase in the first half of the twentieth century. Women, particularly single women, comprised a large proportion of the substitute bodies required by the state to maintain performativity criteria established before each world war or to meet the accelerated industrial needs of total war and reconstruction. This is the undeniable history of women’s entry into the workforce and the professions, including the academy, and of their assimilation into the commodity marketplace beyond the domestic sphere–all of which set up the possibility of the ’70s women’s movement.4 This is also the history of the cultural production of lesbian bodies as we know them today.

     

    In other words, and this is my second clarification to Wittig, lesbians are becoming nomad runaways and becoming state at the same time. And it’s at the various sites where these interminglings of bodies take place that the cultural contradictions will be most apparent and therefore the political stakes greatest. These sites include any becoming majority of the minoritarian as well as the becoming minor of majority regimes of signs, and in each of these sites the political stakes will not be equivalent. This political complication results from the epistemological challenge to materialist analysis presented by the failure of poststructural linguistics to adequately map cultural dialects except as unstable and constant sites of transformation. These kinds of subcultural variance and continuous historical transformation have to be factored in any lesbian materialist modelling system if we are to continue the work Wittig has launched not only toward a lesbian materialist critique of straight class relations, but toward a materialist critique of lesbianism itself.

     

    Lesbian bodies are not essentially counterhegemonic sites of culture as we might like to theorize. The lesbian may not be a woman, as Wittig argues, yet she is not entirely exterior to straight culture. Each lesbian has a faciality touching on some aspect of a majority signifying regime of postmodernity, whether that be masculinity or femininity, motherhood, the sex industry, the commodification of selves, reproductive technologies, or the military under global capitalism. Lesbians are inside and outside, minority and majority, at the same time.

     

    Indeed, the potential power of lesbian identity politics in the current historical moment comes from its situatedness between feminist, gay male, and civil rights activism. Lesbian bodies are a current site of contention in the women’s movement, particularly over the issue of S/M practices and porn, because of their greater affinities with gay males than with straight women. In many ways, the activist politics of ACT-UP in the face of AIDS discrimination represents for lesbians a better strategy of identity politics than the consciousness-raising discourses traditionally authorized by NOW. But in the face of direct losses on the ground gained in the ’70s and ’80s on women’s issues–right to abortions and birth-control information, right to protection from sexual harassment in the workplace, right to have recourse to a just law in the case of rape–the Queer Nation/feminism alliance will be crucial to the future of lesbian cultural politics. In addition, most of the struggle of making feminist-lesbians into feminist-lesbians-of-color lies ahead of us.

     

    Lesbian identities have always presented a challenge to essentialist notions of feminine identity, and never more so than when lesbian bodies are set in the historical context of postmodernity. The cultural period in late-industrial and post-industrial society during World War II and in the fifty years since is their historical heyday. Lesbian bodies came of age under the specter of a Holocaust that could reach finality only by the injection into the global symbolic of a nuclear sublime so horrific as to arrest all prior signification. Their agencies must be agencies that work within the reduced political rights of a worldwide civilian population subjected to a new military regime of global security. They are proffered a variety of prostheses and self-imaging technologies, in fact, a variety of bodies, as long as they meet the performativity criterion of commodity logic. And if they are runaways, they’re running from the very political economy that produced their possibility. This is their double bind. For all these reasons, the immediate challenge facing lesbian bodies in postmodernity is how to make a dis-organ-ized body of signs and identities work for a progressive, or even a radical, politics.

     

    Notes

     

    1. In this case, the majority regimes of masculinity or normative femininity, fashion, porn, mainstream cinema, tv soaps, on-line sex, etc..

     

    2. According to Ong, mechanical production began with the reification of the oral world/word into print.

     

    3. The legal implications of this scenario should be tested immediately in regard to the law recognizing both women as legal parents, particularly in the case of artificial insemination by anonymous donor from a sperm bank.

     

    4. The ’70s women’s movement was also an offshoot of the ’60s African-American civil rights movement, which itself shared some of the same problematic ties to the war machine, particularly through the G.I. Bill.

     

    Works Cited

     

    • Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. Trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, Philip Beitchman. NY: Autonomedia, 1983.
    • Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. NY: Schocken Books, 1978.
    • Corea, Gena. The Mother Machine: Reproductive Technology from Artificial Insemination to Artificial Wombs. NY: Harper and Row, 1986.
    • Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minneapolis P, 1987.
    • Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. NY: Routledge, 1991.
    • Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. NY: Methuen, 1982.
    • Overall, Christine, ed. The Future of Human Reproduction. Ontario: The Women’s Press, 1989.
    • Virilio, Paul. Popular Defense and Ecological Struggles. NY: Autonomedia, 1990.
    • Wittig, Monique. The Straight Mind. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992.