Month: September 2013

Russian Postmodernism: An Oxymoron?

Marjorie Perloff

Stanford University
0004221898@mcimail.com

In the wake, first of perestroika, and now of the wholesale dissolution of the Soviet Union, the temptation has been great to align the “new Russian poetry” with its American postmodernist counterpart. And since the poets who have taken the most active role in translating this hitherto samizdat poetry are those associated with the Language movement, most notably Lyn Hejinian, Michael Palmer, and Jean Day, as well as Hejinian’s collaborators (Michael Davidson, Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten) on the extraordinary travel book Leningrad (San Francisco: Mercury House, 1991), there is naturally a feeling on the part of the Russian poets themselves that there are serious links between the Russian and the American postmodernist avant-garde, whatever these much contested terms really mean. At a reading at New Langton Street last year, for example, when the question was put to Alexei Parshchikov and Ivan Zhdanov, “What American poets have influenced your work?” the immediate reply, I believe from Parshchikov, was “the language poets.” The same point is made by Andrew Wachtel and Parshchikov in their Introduction to Kent Johnson and Stephen M. Ashby’s new anthology The Third Wave. “For both groups,” they write, “the source of poetic production is found in language itself, and it is with this group that, for the first time, the former underground poets have entered into active poetic dialogue . . . in the last few years these contacts have increased as the Soviet poets are actively translating and being translated by their newfound American poetic soulmates.”¹

The new rapprochement between our two poetries has already made a difference, especially on this side of the globe. The influx of energy, enthusiasm, and daring, as well as a new range of source and thematic materials, surely stands behind such recent books as Lyn Hejinian’s Oxota, a long “novel in verse” on the model of Pushkin’s Evgeni Onegin and Clark Coolidge’s forthcoming Russian Nights. At the same time, the question remains, at least for me, whether the homologies between the two poetries are really as prominent as they are claimed to be. And a related question would be: given the enormous political, social, and cultural differences between our two countries over the past century, and given the long midcentury hiatus of the Stalinist years, which largely suppressed the “Modernism” to which recent developments are supposedly “post,” can we expect to find comparable poetic paradigms?

Take Dmitri Prigov’s discussion of Conceptualism in his manifesto “What more is there to say?” and Mikhail Epstein’s elaboration on it, both included in The Third Wave. The Conceptual Art movement in the U.S. dates from the late sixties; as Ursula Meyer explains it in the introduction to her handbook by that title: The function of the critic and the function of the artist have been traditionally divided; the artist’s concern was the production of the work and the critic’s was its evaluation and interpretation. During the past several years a group of young artists evolved the idiom of Conceptual Art, which eliminated this division. Conceptual artists take over the role of the critic in terms of framing their own propositions, ideas, and concepts . . . . An essential aspect of Conceptual Art is its self-reference; often the artists define the intentions of their work as part of their art. Thus, many Conceptual artists advance propositions or investigations. More specifically: the Conceptual art of Joseph Kosuth and Vito Acconci, of Hans Haacke and John Baldessari took up the challenge presented by Duchamp, “preferring the ideational over the visual” and rejecting the notion of a predominantly retinal art, where “meaning” is hidden by a set of visual signs. Art as idea, art as information or knowledge: in practice, this meant that the catalogue could become the exhibition, or indeed, that there would be no exhibition at all, only a series of writings and blueprints.

Now compare this aesthetic to Epstein’s account: What is conceptualism?. . . . Almost any artistic work . . . is conceptual insofar as there lies within it a certain conception, or the sum of conceptions, which the critic or interpreter draws out. In conceptualism this conception is demonstrably separable from the live artistic fabric and even becomes an independent creation, or “concept” in itself. . . . a “break between the idea and the thing, the sign and reality, is created.” And Epstein cites a passage from Dimitri Prigov: The outstanding hero– He goes forward without fear But your ordinary hero– He’s also almost without fear But first he waits to see: Maybe it’ll all blow over And if not– then on he goes And the people get it all. And he comments: Behind these lines by Dmitri Prigov we easily recognize the formula that lies at the basis of numerous pathetic works about the fearless, all-conquering hero and his slightly backward but devoted comrades in arms. The typical problem with such odic writings is how to reliably hide the formula behind the clothing of linguistic beauty so as to make it frighteningly similar to a live person. The poet-conceptualist, on the other contrary, drags the formula out into the open from the sum of its aesthetic imprintings and changes of form, placing it as an independent fact before the reader’s perception. . . . Conceptualism . . . unmask[s] beneath the covering of lyrical soulfulness or epic picturesqueness the skeleton of an idea-engendering construct. (TW 270) For Epstein–and his explanation accords with Prigov’s own as well as with Lev Rubinshtein’s statement of his “conceptualist” poetics in The Third Wave–conceptualism evidently refers to the willingness to reveal the ideological base which a more conventional poetry would try to mask beneath a set of decorative trappings. But ironically, this urge to “expose” the ideologeme and separate it from its material embodiment is almost the antithesis of the conceptualism of our sixties and seventies, which rejected the notion of hidden meaning outright, making the case that psychological depth was itself an anachronism. Whereas American conceptual art was an attack from the Left on the vapidity and “prettiness” of late Abstract Expressionism and color-field painting, the Soviet version is concerned to unmask the “aesthetic imprintings,” designed to make Socialist Realist poetry and painting more palatable. Conceptualism, in this sense, is more properly a form of parody or pastiche, a self-conscious mode of satire that takes nothing on faith and is determined to reveal precisely those inner motivations of poetic and artistic discourse that our own Conceptualists have denied existed.

The other two movements described by Epstein– Metarealism and Presentism–pose somewhat different problems for the Anglo-American reader. “Metarealism” (here Epstein includes such poets as Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Nadezhda Kondakova, Viktor Krivulin, Olga Sedakova, and Ivan Zhdanov) is defined as “the pull toward the construction of supertemporal models of reality,” the emphasis being on metamorphosis, the process whereby “one thing becomes the other.” Metarealism, says Epstein “has little in common with surrealism, since it turns not toward the subconscious but to a supraconsciousness” (TW 177). To which Surrealists would respond that in practice, one can’t quite separate the two. Indeed, such precursors of surrealism as Rimbaud and Lautreamont made use of precisely the kind of imagery Epstein describes; the passionately erotic, discontinuous, and hallucinatory poetry of Dragomoshchenko, for that matter, immediately brings Rimbaud to mind although there are no doubt important Russian models as well.

The third major movement–presentism or the “poetry of presence”–is characterized by its “taste for contemporaneity and the technological plasticity of objects,” but without the “social-aesthetic aggressiveness and evangelical utopianism” of futurism (TW 280). “Presentism,” writes Epstein, “affirms the presence of an object, its visibility and tangibility, as the necessary and sufficient conditions of its meaningfulness.” And his gives the example of Parshchikov’s “Catfish,” as a phenomenological lyric that tries to capture “the sum total of perceptions: [the catfish] in water and on land, waking and sleeping” (TW 281).

I find this account somewhat puzzling because postmodernism is generally characterized as precisely the calling into question of presence, of center, of organic wholeness, and so on. From the late sixties, when Derrida published Ecriture et difference, “presence” has been one of those terms whose role is to be negated in favor of its antithesis, “absence.” How, then, do we deal with a poetry like Parshchikov’s? His own “Conversation between an Editor and a Poet,” reprinted in The Third Wave, doesn’t help us very much. Parshchikov says he “want[s] to be plugged into the search for a new descriptive language,” but then adds that “there is no ‘old’ language, only the discovery of new ways, only the growth of language.” And further: “Biochemistry is leading us into a world where the border between the living and the dead is washed away. . . . and so I wrote about the concrete work on earth” (TW 24).

Let us look more closely at the poetry itself. Here is “BEGSTVO–II,” (the original is represented here by my transliteration), together with Michael Palmer’s translation in The Third Wave, and the word-for-word translation of Parshchikov’s poem by Andrey Patrikeyev: (Peel. Peel i priboy. Myedlenuh, kak smyati pakyet tselofanovi shevelitsuh rasshiryayass zamootnyayetsuh pamyat. Samalyot iz peska snizhayetsuh, takovim nye yavlayayass Vnachalyeh voini mirov kroochye beryot poleen Vpoot’ sobirayass, ya chistil ot nassekomikh radyator, kogda novi ogon’ spalil puluvinu zemyel’, no nass nye nakreel, isskomikh Pepyel byenzozapravki. Peel i priboy. Kroogom nikovo, kromye zaglavshevoso pribora Vsadnik li zdyess myertsal, ili snybeo pyeskom possipali leeneeyu priboya Vrabye blestyat kablooki i zoobi. Tanyets Tyanyetso, slovno bredyen vkogtyakh cherepakhi. Zrya Ya eeshchoo tebya, soboy nye yavlyayass; nass, vozmozhno, rassassivayet zyemla) FLIGHT Michael Palmer Dust. Sea-form and dust. Slowly, the way a crushed cellophane packet stirs and expands, memory blurs. An airplane out of sand descends–not even a plane. At the start of the war of the worlds harsh wormwood takes command. Preparing to set out, I was scraping bugs from the radiator when a new fire torched half the land, seeking but missing us. Gas station’s ashes. Sea foam and dust. Nothing around but this control panel in eternal malfunction Was a rider shimmering there, or was sand scattered from the sky along the shoreline … Flashing teeth and flying heels in the bar. The dance fans out like a seine net in a turtle’s claws. In vain I search for you, not knowing who I am Maybe the earth dissolves us. (TW 26) “Begstvo II”: Word-for-Word Translation Andrey Patrikeyev (Dust. Dust and the surf. Slowly like the moving crumpled plastic bag the memory expands, getting torrid. A plane made of sand is losing height, without being a plane. The smell of wormwood is more acute at the beginning of the war of the worlds. Getting ready to set off, I was cleaning the radiator from insects when a new fire burned half of the lands, without reaching us whom it sought. The ashes of the petrol station. Dust and surf. All around there is nobody but the instrument (measuring?) that is telling lies without reserve. Was it a rider that glimmered here or was it sand that was strewn over the line of the surf … Heels and teeth glitter in the bar. The dance is like a drag net stretching in the claws of a tortoise. In vain I’m seeking you without being myself; maybe we are being dissolved by the earth.)

Palmer’s fine translation, generally quite close to the original (compare it the word-for-word translation by Andrei Patrikeyev), presents us with nature images in collision with those of industrialization gone awry. In this nameless and faceless landscape of “sea-foam and dust” (peel i priboy), memory expands like “a crushed cellophane packet,” and the “gas station’s ashes” cover the sand, which scatters like a mysterious airplane or, in the second stanza, like a “rider shimmering there,” with “Flashing teeth and flying heels in the bar.” Sea-foam, dust, wormwood, bugs, turtle’s claws: these items from the natural world provide a mysterious backdrop, first for the “radiator,” from which a “new fire” seems to erupt, “torch[ing] half the land, seeking but missing us,” and then in line 9, for the unnamed “instrument” or “measuring” agent–Palmer ominously calls it a “control panel in eternal malfunction.” The poem inevitably raises the specter of Chernobyl, although the meaning is not limited to that particular disaster, the imagery conjuring up any number of nightmare visions having to do with fire, earthquake, and apocalypse. Whatever the referent, the poet presents himself as one who can make contact neither with the unnamed “you” nor with himself: the only reality seems to be one of wholesale “dissolution” (rassassivayet zyemla).

Given its hallucinatory imagery, its lack of specification of “I” and “you,” its strange conjunctions of unlike objects–rider with flashing teeth and radiator covered with bugs–it seems quite appropriate to call a poem like “Flight” “meta-realistic” as well as “presentistic.” Yet the motive and mode of Parshchikov’s poem is, in many ways, quite different from, say, the poetry of his translator Michael Palmer. Here, for example, is the opening of Palmer’s “Notes for Echo Lake 1”: He says this red as dust, eyes a literal self among selves and picks the coffee up Memory is kind, a kindness, a kind of unlistening, a grey wall even toward which you move. It was the woman beside him who remarked that he never looked anyone in the eye. (This by water’s edge.) This by water’s edge. And all of the song ‘divided into silences’, or ‘quartered in three silences’. Dear Charles, I began again and again to work, always with no confidence as Melville might explain. Might complain.²

Like “Flight” Palmer’s “Echo Lake” has references to dust, to water’s edge, and to the process of memory, but it is much more dislocated–or more strictly speaking, unlocated than Parshchikov’s “Flight.” In the latter, the scene, however dream-like, is a constant throughout, even as the positioning of the the poet’s “I,” however unspecified and generic, is clearly established. This specification is in keeping with the poem’s formal structure: four stanzas, each rhyming abab with alternate masculine and feminine rhymes. In Palmer’s poem, on the other hand–and this would be equally true for, say, John Ashbery or Lyn Hejinian or Barrett Watten–subjectivity splinters and scenes shift from moment to moment. “The grey wall . . . toward which you move,” for example, gives way to “It was the woman,” and a declarative sentence like “He never looked anyone in the eye,” is followed by the pronomial phrase, “This by water’s edge,” where “This” has no specific referent. Address too shifts, as we see in the “Dear Charles” passage. Formally, the poem is prose–a fragmentary, gnomic prose that alludes to “events” and “objects” we cannot define, even though “Notes for Echo Lake” is, broadly speaking, a lyric “about” the emptying out of the sign, the search for clues that might connect past to present, that might make sense of memory and desire.

To generalize from so few examples is, of course, dangerous, and my aim is by no means to set up some sort of neat presence/ absence dichotomy between our two poetries. But what may be helpful in drawing literary/cultural maps of the postmodern situation is to “thicken the plot,” as John Cage would put it, by finding the lacunae in the current narrative. One such link, whether overt or not, is French Modernist poetry, not so much the poetry of Dada or the full-blown Surrealism of Andre Breton or Robert Desnos, as the poesie brute (“raw poetry”) of Pierre Reverdy, Rene Char and other Modernist poets who came of age after World War I. Indeed, the poetry of Parshchikov, of Dragomoschenko, and other poets of the “Third Wave” seems much more analogous to the intense, elliptical, and mysterious lyric of a Reverdy than to the disillusioned, cool, media-reactive postmodernism of late twentieth-century America. Here, for example, is Reverdy’s “Chemin Tournant,” which I reproduce in Kenneth Rexroth’s translation: It is frightening grey dusty weather A south wind on strong wings Dull echoes of water in the capsizing evening And in the soaking night spouting turning Rough voices complaining A taste of ashes on the tongue The sound of an organ in tbe byways The pitching ship of the heart All the disasters of work When the fires of the desert go out one by one When the eyes drip like blades of grass When the dew falls barefoot on the leaves Morning hardly risen Somebody seeks A lost address on a lost road The stars brighten the flowers tumble down Across the broken branches The dark brook wipes its soft scarce parted lips When the steps of the walker on the counting dial order the movement and crowd the horizon All cries pass and all times meet And me I walk to heaven my eyes in the rays Noise about nothing and names in my head Living faces Everything that has happened in the world And this holiday Where I have lost my time³ John Ashbery, in an essay of the sixties, praised Reverdy’s poetry for its transparency, its presentation of factories and canals as “living phenomena,” its “restoration to things of their true name, without the eternal dead weight of symbolism and allegory.”⁴ The mysterious presence things assume in Reverdy’s poetry (“When the steps of the walker on the counting dial / order the movement and crowd the horizon”) is not unlike the mysterious presence, in the middle of Parshchikov’s “sea-foam and dust,” of a measuring “instrument” or “control panel” that has gone awry.

The issue is not, finally, whether Parshchikov knew Reverdy when he wrote his poem or whether the links between them are only coincidental. Rather, I want to suggest–and I made a similar point in the case of Arkadii Dragomoschenko in a recent issue of Sulfur⁵— that as literary and cultural historians, we should try to flesh in the picture, tracing lineages and cultural formations more accurately than we have done to date. Take the simple fact that Ashbery and Palmer, themselves important to Parshchikov, were great disseminators of the French “poetry of presence.” Such missing pieces in the coming into being of the postmodern puzzle will help us to define the momentum that has brought the Third Wave brilliantly crashing on our shore.

Notes

1. The Third Wave, The New Russian Poetry, ed. Kent Johnson and Stephen M. Ashby (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), 9. Subsequently cited as TW.

2. Michael Palmer, Notes for Echo Lake (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981), 3.

3. Pierre Reverdy, “Turning Road,” Selected Poems, trans. Kenneth Rexroth (New York: New Directions, 1969), 21.

4. John Ashbery, “Reverdy en Amerique,” Mercure de France: Pierre Reverdy Issue, 344 (January/April 1962): 111-12. I reproduce the whole passage and translate the key sentences in The Poetics of indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 35-37.

5. Sulfur 29 (Fall 1991): 216-21.

September 25, 2013

Symposium on Russian Postmodernism

Symposiasts:

Jerome McGann, Department of English, University of Virginia (jjm2f@lizzie.engl.Virginia.EDU)

Vitaly Chernetsky, Department of English, University of Pennsylvania

Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, St. Petersburg, Russia (atd@HM.SPB.SU)

Mikhail Epstein, Department of Slavic Languages, Emory University

Lyn Hejinian, (70550.654@COMPUSERVE.COM)

Bob Perelman, Department of English, University of Pennsylvania (bperelme@SAS.UPENN.EDU)

Marjorie Perloff, Department of English, Stanford University (0004221898@MCIMAIL.COM)

[Editor’s note:

This symposium brought together several people working in the field of Russian Postmodernism. Discussions took place in the month of October 26-November 25, 1992.

The genre of this symposium is unusually mixed. You will find here, among other things, lengthy set pieces, conversational responses, poems previously published and unpublished, draft essays, papers from conferences, and excerpts from published work. Instead of a flow of short entries, we received fewer, longer messages.

We have chosen not to regularize the form of these entries or their mechanics, and not to revise or edit messages, in order to preserve the occassional nature of the discussion. You might refer the work found here to a transcription from an oral symposium, with printed text incorporated, and not to the dialogue of essays and replies often published in journals.]

 
Date: Mon, 26 Oct 1992 11:09:14 -0500
From: "Jerome J. McGann" 
Subject: Re: well...no record

Perhaps it will be useful to begin the discussion with a set of
topics and questions that seem to me to be pertinent -- given
what various people involved have already said or written.
     Marjorie Perloff's draft essay on "Russian Postmodernism",
sent for this symposium, focusses a central problem: how does one
talk about the relations that have been made and pursued between
agroup of contemporary Russian writers and certain western
writers (are they a "group"? how?) who have been seen as their
counterparts?
     Let me say that the (local) history of the emergence of
each"group" -- both have constructed themselves outside given and
traditional institutions -- is a telling fact.  (Though of course
"samizdat" and "small press"/private printing/desktop publishing
ventures have in each culture, by now, been fairly
well-established.)
     The problem may be seen in various forms.  Perloff traces
out some differences in conceptualist programs and ideas.  In
_Leningrad_ the same problem appears, I think, in the recurrent
preoccupation with the question of the poetic "object", as well
as with the (perhaps related) question of the status of
"objects-as-such" in two very different types of societies.  (The
problem --perhaps it is reciprocal -- of the "subject" also
arises repeatedly.)
     For example: I read Perloff's essay and I wonder: why did
she write this? what is the point of pointing out such
differentials?  Or I read Watten's essay on "Post-Soviet
Subjectivity. . ." and wonder: is this essay "about"
Drogomoshenko and Kabakov and "post-soviet" writing, or is it
about -- somehow, for some reason --contemporary American
writing?
     I think it would be useful if everyone in the symposium
addressed these issues at the beginning.  You might want to
respond to Prigov or to Perloff or to Watten specifically, or to
pick up from any of the other related texts in _Leningrad_ or
_The Third Wave_ or _Poetics Journal_ no. 8.
     For myself, I would find it helpful if -- in addressing
these issues -- a person would also explain why they take their
chosen approach (e.g., through social and institutional history;
through questions of aesthetics, or stylistics; through a
consideration ofthe relation of poetry and ideology; or of
writing and language and "the person"; etc.).
     At some point the more general cultural and social question
also needs to be taken up.  How to frame the question is itself a
question?  Well, there are different imaginable ways: why has
this intercourse begun?  what function does it serve the
individuals, their societies, the practise of writing and art?
Most immediately, what are we doing in this very symposium, what
are we after?

Jerome McGann

 
Mon, 26 Oct 92 15:37:42
From: Lyn Hejinian <70550.654@CompuServe.COM>
Subject: first response

Dear Colleagues and Friends, I have just received Jerome McGann's
opening message, and I am as astounded at the format of these
proceedings as I am at the "theme" or "themes" of the symposium.
        My own particular concerns with respect to contemporary
Russian (or any other) poetry and poetics were, I think,
originally epistemological; they are still, to a large degree,
although my involvement (as translator) with the particular
writings of Arkadii Dragomoshchenko has enlarged that original,
abstract quandary with particular, immediate ones. In any case,
the question "how does one know" (the question of consciousness
and the quest for a consciousness of consciousness), becomes,
perhaps especially for an American, enormously vivid in the
otherness of a Russian context.
        I don't intend by this to be taking a relativist
position--that we can understand ourselves better by
understanding something else seems a banal and thoroughly
uninteresting truism. And to discover that certain American
literary groups have a similarity to certain Russian literary
groups is probably only to discover a coincidence--one which
might motivate curiosity but doesn't necessarily generate
meaning.
        The affinities that have evolved in the past five or six
years between certain poets in the U.S. and certain poets in
Russia exist, I think, because those poets wanted them to.
There's been a remarkable degree of seeking out--of which this
symposium is another example.
        My own personal initial experience in the course of this
seeking out was a dispersal of my American knowing in the Russian
context (could one call it a postmoderning of knowing?) where the
grounds for that knowing simply didn't exist. The experience
convinced me that knowledge is always embedded--always
contextualized (so that one only knows THAT something or OF
something, for example)--that is always and only situated and
that it depends on specific logics and linkages.
        Logics and linkages, of course, are precisely the
materials of poetic method.
        And perhaps our enthusiasm for their proliferation is a
specifically postmodern attitude. Finally, I'd like to say
something in answer to Jerome McGann's question, "what are we
doing in this very symposium, what are we after?" that I would
hope we are after some non- or even anti-nationalist engagement
with the man questions that postmodernism and postsovietism
suggest.

         Lyn Hejinian

Date:         Tue, 27 Oct 1992 19:36:58 +0300
From:         arkadii 
Subject:      remarks

S-Petersburg
27 October, 1992, 7:33 PM.
atd@hm.spb.su

Dear colleagues, it seems slightly strange to start any
"discussion" (even on postmodern) from the point of a
question -- "what all of us doing it for?.." Somehow or
other I have nothing to do but to continue offered mode
putting a great deal of questions to myself which entailed
by first two essays and followed remarks. The very problem
of Russian Postmodern to the same extent looks dark as well
as "American" or "African". Despite numerous writing on
this object the course of approach to it switches itself in
dizzying velocity. Couple years ago -- economical premises,
transformation of production modes or subjectivity per se,
social geterogenity, circulation of capital, signifiers,
Ego, etc. + notorious seductiveness, simulacra were really
magic formulas, even keys for operations with postmodern
phenomena (if one couldn't just to say that agglomeration
of them is in fact a certain composition, or invention of
its own horizons). Noticeable, that the last mentioned
terms have appropriated by Russian critics in a great
longing, corresponding, to be sure, to the roots of a main
principle of "Russian policy of representation"-- endless
chain of "icons" getting its origins in an invisible
prototype..) However we hear another voices now, another
songs -- "memory," "time," "space," "aesthetic" and so on.
Why not? It is entirely immaterial in _what_ terms, even
_sentence_ we are going to speak about present state of the
given object. Future is only a projection of our habits.
Right as _this symposium_ seems at a moment like iridescent
bubbles of a monitor in a soapy soup of imagination. As far
as I get it, essays by Marjorie Perloff and Barrett Watten
somehow or other attempted to touch different things
regardless of "concrete" stuff of reading. Sure, between
them -- diffusion of two different poetry practices/
consciousness despite the postmodern affirmation of
locality, the ways of such deterritorialisation (let us
recall a work of Veselovskii, dedicated to wandering
plots...). For all of that -- in MP essay evidently runs
itself the vein of the problem of interrelations of the
language of Father and artificial infant language of
Russian "conceptualism" that unfolds the ceaseless dream of
an ambiguous release trough the closing of meanings as such
in continuous repetitions of the certain rhetoric. (I think
Marjorie Perloff feels that explanations of this "event" by
Michael Epshtein are not only insufficient, still to some
respect -- wrong). And at least, the theme of memory rose
by Barrett Watten in his reading my poem. Sure, the _time-
memory-space_ questioning is most self-erasable "problem"
be tight connecting to such themes as body politics,
imagination strategy, etc., -- connecting postmodern's
ontic spectrum of worries with ontological ones. Perhaps,
if we'll have a time, I'll try offer you couple of pages
dedicated to "memory".

Arkadii Dragomoshchenko.

 
Date:         Fri, 30 Oct 1992 15:09:30 EST
From:         Lyn Hejinian <70550.654@COMPUSERVE.COM>
Subject:      second comment

October 30; I've only received Jerry's initial opening message
and Arkadii's first remarks (and a copy of my own first attempt
to enter this e-conversation), so maybe it is premature to add
something now.  But it does seem appropriate, both generally
(globally) and specifically (with respect to Russia and to the
U.S.) to frame the notion of postmodernism in the context of
"memory" (I am thinking of Arkadii's use of the term), since
among other things doing so blurs the distinction between
"objects" and "events." And it is this blurring that
characterizes the so-called end of history, postmodernism.
     Perhaps the Vietnam War (and the morally-related Watergate
scandal) helped to collapse U.S. history somewhat as perestroika
and the demise of the Soviet Union have collapsed history in
Russia. But maybe, again, the comparison is irrelevant; can we
compare Ezra Pound's and Charles Olson's and HD's (albeit very
different) attempts to recover history with Viktor Shklovsky's
and Vladimir Mayakovsky's and Anna Akhmatova's and Marina
Tsvetaeva's attempts to witness it? Such comparisons themselves
are typical dispersals.
     The notion of "memory" no longer suggests contemplation so
much as sentimentality (or its sister, irony), amorality, and
above all novel patterns of logic: "wandering" rather than
hierarchically organized plots. When the cause-and-effect
structuring which determines that an occurrence is an event
breaks down, the event becomes an object. This object isn't
necessarily isolated--it probably always rests in a matrix of
relationships and associations. But they are spatial and it is
atemporal.
     The beating of Rodney King has achieved instant
object-status. That's in part because it was "captured"
(objectified) on video tape and the tape has been repeated over
and over, and only objects, not events, can't repeat.
     Well, these quick remarks merely invite Arkadii's "couple of
pagesdedicated to 'memory'."
     And what of equivalence? In Arkadii's remarks it seems as if
numerous and various items and terms (the objects of concern)
swirl like motes in warm twilit sunshine, and this view is
familiar to me, too. One might be intelligent about any one, or
even several, of them,but perhaps not about the whole mass.

Lyn Hejinian

Date:         Fri, 30 Oct 1992 07:38:00 GMT
From:         Marjorie Perloff <0004221898@MCIMAIL.COM>
Subject:      Postmodern Symposium

Dear Colleagues, I came home from 10 days at Stanford to find
eleven messages, most about the symposium.  There are very
interesting comments from Lyn Hejinian and Arkadii Dragomoschenko
that I want to mull over for a day or two.  In the meantime, I
want to address Jerome McGann'squestion, "Why did she (I) want to
write about this?  For me, the fascination of the Russian
language and the Russian world is endless. As someone who loves
the early twentieth century Russian avant-garde, but also
Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Chekhov, I want to understand what is
happening in the former Soviet Union today.  But since my Russian
is very minimal, I must rely on what I can read and I suppose I
wasn't quite satisfied with Ephshtein's account of what's going
on and wanted to speculate on the relationship between two
cultures, my point being that since "modernism," whatever that
is, hasn't quite been absorbed in Russia, it's hard to imagine a
"postmodernism" that would be parallel to our own late-century
versions.  On the other hand, a book like Hejinian's Oxota could
not have been written without the impact of the Russian poets,
writers, critics--the whole culture, so there's clearly something
wonderfully exciting going on.  But what exactly?  I hope to
learn more.  This past week, we have had on the Stanford campus
Joseph Brodsky, who was invited by the Stanford Humanities
Center.  I went to only one session--where Brodsky was talking
about Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost.  He began by saying that
Pound and Eliot had deflected British Modernism from its true
path, epitomized by Hardy and then performed an analysis on "The
Convergence of the Twain."  Now, I want to ask my fellow
symposiasts: how do we relate Brodsky to the mode of
Dragomoschenko, Parshchikov, and the other "new wave" poets?

With best wishes, Marjorie Perloff

Date:         Sat, 31 Oct 1992 15:40:58 +0300
From:         arkadii 
Subject:      moving on in one step

31 October, 1992, 3:32 PM

Dear Lyn, dear colleges, I'm not certain that we _must_
speak only about memory (unconsciouses, traces, etc.) as
about of a main perspective of postmodern phenomena.
Nonetheless, this "term" is really provocative. Firstly,
because it involves varies "things" by virtue of which we
could get "something" concerning to our current state --
this is to say, about History, or -- to hove we like to
understand it, or to understand ourselves.

Two or three days ago, when we spend a time with Alexander
Zeldovich^1^ (he was back from Finland, and this time with
beautiful friend - Marianna) drinking bad wine but speaking
about global problems (exactly! yes! - typical Russian
manner of wasting of time, like "matreshka" or
"perestroika" and so forth) and when he paged first
"papers" from beginning of our symposium, he'd said --
"Write them, please, that there is very important thing --
We (Russia) are as a Bermuda triangle for all "-isms",
including postomdernism (which itself seems like the same
notorious "triangle"). It is a point that _every_ art's
mode, every direction transforms itself here in mode of
life!^2^ Moreover, this mode of life become "only one" way of
dealing with social space..." -- this is to say, with
history and memory. Isn't it? To some extent he was right
-- all our "revolutions" are the fruits of perverted
imagination. Meanwhile the time between -- was gifted by
devil. Where is memory? Or -- are we sentenced to be
the nation of an eternal Posmodern?

Arkadii Dragomoshchenko
____________________
^1^ Well-known filmaker from Moscow - the last work was
"Sunset" on Babel. In the last issue of "Iskusstvo Kino"
(Art of Cinema) you can read our idle, "kitchen", talk
about the phenomena of "American Cinema".

^2^ I think this was the first impulse which Authors
of "Leningrad" got in Leningrad in 1989 (?).

Date:         Sat, 31 Oct 1992 17:05:50 +0300
From:         arkadii 
Subject:      memory

(out of the left field or -- )
EROTICISM OF FOR-GETTING, EROTICISM OF BEYOND-BEING(a) (1)

          by Arkadii Dragomoshchenko; translated by
                         Vanessa Bittner with
                              Arkadii Dragomoshchenko
(Thank you, Lyn and Barrett, --
you participated in a hard business
of this translation too, preparing it
for the next issue of Poetics Journal...)

                         I entered - where I don't know
                         Understanding forsook me -
                         I stood -all knowledge departed.

                                   St. Juan de la Cruise

     There exist a multitude of things about which it
doesn't seem possible to talk, without risking a
meaningless pomposity, regardless of the fact that these
things continue to be a desired object of descriptions and
discussions, remaining not only as a horizon of experience,
but of the possibility of uttering something about it as
well.  Simultaneously such things seem illusorily ordinary-
habitual.  They are primordially vacillating and
mysterious, they whose senses are not grasped by reason,
which irritates the imagination, emitted and continue to
emit the unusually bewitching enchantment of the
strangeness of being -- which have already become a certain
semblance of sediment -- dictionaries willingly presenting
any rhetoric with this or that spectra of significance --
or: the history of the use of words or: the casts of former
"existential territorialities" (F. Guattari).

     Among such things can be found "memory".

     The kind proposal I received to deliver this paper
about memory led me to just another dead end of a certain
"beginning", despite the delicate indication of a path by
which thought could follow.

     And indeed, is it not tempting to fit the object of
our interest into historical and geopolitical perspective?
All the more, for me, having spent my life in a country
whose, let's say, more than marvelous relations with
"memory" and "history" were marked by the bewilderment of
Chaadaev, but thanks to which I received a rare opportunity
to contemplate her (memory's) surprising transformations,
both on the level of the individual and of society.  But
with time everything fades, including the sense of
surprise.  However and indeed doesn't the presence of
passion seduce the expressions: "peoples, having
remembered themselves or - having recalled their
destination and, the almost Platonic: "Man, having recalled
that he is a man"?  But I will stop here, not without basis
suggesting that this theme will find/has found worthy
illumination in presentations and discussions, so then how
should I, a person deeply private in his habits and work,
even if hurriedly and chaotically, touch upon an object of
conversation from a different side or, perhaps, sides.
More accurately, to remind about the existence of other
points of view.  Or at least the possibility of others.

     In the Malibu city museum in California there is a
thin gold plate measuring 22X37 mm bearing six engraved
lines, apparently a fragment of an orphick hymn, or
instructions to the soul of one who has died on how to
conduct themselves in the land of shades (2)

     Here are the lines whose literal translation is known
to many:

     But I am parched and perishing of thirst./Give
     me quickly/the cold water flowing from the Lake
     of/Memory/Then they will freely let you drink
     from/the holy spring,/and thereafter you will
     have lordship with/the other heroes.

     The spring mentioned in the above fragment is, of
course, Mnemosyne, Memory.  Whose moisture is opposed to
the waters of Leto.  Also, the opposition of "water of
life" and "water of death" is inferred in the duality of
the nature of someone who speaks, in other words, of the
simultaneous questioning and answering, the nature of which
combines the Earth-Titanic and the Sky-Dionysian.  However,
in defiance of the obvious banality of such a
"distribution" of roles and functions, something
nevertheless does not allow us, in reading these lines, to
see the painted plaster frieze of postmodernism.

      We will follow once again the well-trod path of plot,
taking into consideration as much as possible also the
amalgam of its narrative: the loss of memory is equal to
death; the dead who have entered the territory of Aida,
first of all lose their memory. (4)  The realm of Aida, the
world of night, is itself death or -- oblivion, then how
the day cannot stand unconsciousness -- forgetfulness
transforms itself into the death of the "future" (thus
Orpheus forgets the instructions, transgresses them and
turns around... to his own destruction) -- since memory is
nothing other than potential future, taking its origins in
duration, repitition, prolongation, the logic of which, as
is known, is the logic of history, narrative, day,
continuity, of causality, knowledge, law, the Norm.

     Within the borders of this logic, the structure of the
sign (or the mediation of it) is unequivocally manifested
by a direct connection between the "signifier and the
signified," where the signified is the memory of the
referent (the guarantee of the signifier's reality) of a
certain "object" and, more likely, the essence of this
object, reflected or revealed by the intelligible
signified.  A rupture or only the approximation of such a
connection, according to general opinion, of the loss of
referent, in other words, chaos, the destruction of the
hierarchic unity of the world picture in which, by the way,
the self identification of the "I" (as a reflection of the
true center of the Universe) and, consequently, of society
becomes impossible.  Thus, outside of memory, the becoming
of neither the "I" nor of the personality, self or social
can occur. Outside of "I" and outside of "the social"
narrative becomes impossible, the narrative itself, the
formative state making the world accessible to
understanding, to reproduction and to repetition -- the
content.

     In this horizon memory can be taken as the pre-writing
(see Plato about writing as an instrument of memory) which
must steadily uphold being in consciousness in the form of
traces, but, more than anything, the origins of those
traces.

     Actually, we know that memory is nothing other than a
means of consolidating, ordering, unifying the world map.
And which to some extent allows us to apply the analogy
between memory and the Eros of Plato, also forming the
world into an absolute ascent of cognition of the ascent
itself.  From here -- in spite of the fact that, for some,
memory is something like a depository, an archive or (for
others) a reserve of a mobilly difficult, associative
process of the conscious-unconscious, arises the motif of
her (memory's) teleologicity since it, like "the time of
history" (which memory forms) is directed at the
resurrection of that which, until recently remained as a
trace of a past (thing, person...) as the trace of which
the source was some sort of co-being/o-ccurence.(b)  Memory
is teleological, since it satisfies Absolute Memory or "the
embodiment of All the Ages" -- it satisfies Apokostasis, in
other words, the coincidence of "past-present-future" in
the point of presence, in the punctum of the endlessly
lasting "present" in which it, perfecting itself,
nevertheless, is already perfected since it doesn't know
incompleteness, lack or defect.  Or -- where memory has no
need for the resurrection of any traces, since there aren't
any, since there is no past as such.

     From this point of view any disruption of memory even
in everyday life is not only pathological, but a misdeed
appearing through the limit of definition and infringing
upon a definite conception of world study.  And here we
should not remark how in terms of the unfolding of the
description of its known conception of the "semantic" model
of the real, the thread of another ornament begins to
intertwine.  Suffice it to say that the Russian word
"pamiat'" (memory) covers perception with dust in a few
semantic layers:  1) that of "imeni"(c) (po(i)myanut' --
po-imenovat', po-minovenie -- po-imenovanie)(d) which
translates into English roughly as "to remember -- to
name", "remembrance -- naming", referring to being called,
concrete naming as to estate, in other words, to possession
since being called is an introduction to property,
appropriation; -- 2) of the first person pronoun, of the
accusative/genitive case: "mya" (from "menya") and 3) "men-
y", of the exchange (obmen) (in part of the sign for a
thing) closing the topology of ya-imeni-imeniya (I-name-
estate) to the act of power, submission and governing that
which stands apart, the external, non-articulated.(5)
Because -- as it follows from Western tradition's
experience, only in the title, in the re-tention (con-
tent)(e) of the name, in the retaining of the established
connection between name and thing the retention of the "I"
and the world is possible.  However, are there etymological
premises relevent, despite the seduction-ceremony of their
reading in the protocol of deconstruction, to the true mis-
en-scene of these meanings today?

It is difficult to refrain from making Jean Baudrillard's
statement about the transformation of the very nature of
the sign. To talk about Western culture means, in his
opinion, first of all to talk about the principles and
modes of its co-sociability(f), which must collect the
world into a single entity, more precisely, to return to it
its primordial wholeness (6), belief in this wholeness and,
nevertheless:

     All  the  Western  faith  and  good  faith  was
     engaged in  this wager on representation: that a
     sign  could   exchange  for   meaning  and  that
     something could  guarantee this exchange -- God,
     of course.  But  what  if  God  himself  can  be
     simulated, that  is to say, reduced to the signs
     which  arrest  his  existence?  Then  the  whole
     system  becomes  weightless;  it  is  no  longer
     anything but a gigantic simulacrum. (7)

Of course, if we touch upon positions, which must some way
or another guarantee the "symbolic exchange", it would be
more important to consider the instance "pure, invulnerable
(absolute) memory", along with that and "space" in which
such an exchange is possible, that is, a gigantic
simulation machine (8) - "absolute historical memory"
(Nietzsche). But even having proposed such absolute memory,
we can say that being completely-almighty, memory is
powerless to penetrate, bring out, preserve one thing --
the sources of one's own co-being/o-ccurence(g) the trace
of which is memory itself.  It's strange "beginning", the
striving to remember, to preserve the function of Freud's
Thanatos constantly slips away, having become memory before
carrying the name of forgetfulness (h) which exists between
its infinite impulse to activity, to work, to
repetition/creation.(i)  The writing of poetry bears a
close relation to this.

     The reverse of memory spreads oblivion.  But what
happens there?

     Once again the Russian verb "zapamyatovat'", "to
forget"(j) means to go out beyond memory, beyond its
limits, consequently to cross the border of "mya", that is,
"I" ("ya"), "name" (imeni), "self-property" (imenie). But
what, then, can be found "beyond" (k)?  Only the "absence
of definition"?  Of duration?  Of continuity?  Of that from
which the word habitually develops in propositions and
modalities?  Simply "absence"?  Or maybe we'll phrase the
question another way: what happens in the very act of
"forgetting"?  Doesn't language itself point out in its
etymological luminescence that for-getting/beyond-being is
literally a transgression (9), that is, a crime(l) of being
(m), waste of reserve, or otherwise, of the former
existence as from the noun created from the verb, otherwise
-- a twice-halted present? Such is poetry, immutably and
courageousely going out to the border, where the dark glow
of the indifferent something, unheard of, having never
existed, but the Genesis "of which", penalizing not even
the word "time"(n), meets the concealing smoke of human
vanity.

     Beyond the border of memory, if we believe in the
topography of Preispoden(o) (reverse-side) we find Leto.
On her banks grow poppies. On her shores oblivion reigns,
the transparency of which is transmitted to the world,
drawn into her game, confusing one with another, the times
and intentions, words and silence, -- opening the
transparency of the absence of any scales whatsoever - here
"this" is simultaneously "there", "now" - everywhere
"after" or "already always then".  The waters of Leto never
reflect -- it is that place, locus classicus(p) -- where
the myth of Narcissus, seduced by the yearning for another
in himself, ceases to be a source of light in the mirrored
rooms of the human "I"(10).  Peering into the sources,
memory enters into the most intimate and closest relations
with Oblivion, which represents to her (memory) her own
death.  It is impossible to imagine a certain smile which
is so easy to take for an enigmatic grimace... but where
then do pains come from?

     And here the conclusion of the fragment from the gold
plate becomes clear -- the question is full of perplexity
since the questioner in the question-answer about its
double nature nevertheless confirms its belonging to
Heaven, to Dionysus, Transgression, Oblivion, Poetry --
that is, the body of language, speech, which confirms
itself to being torn to shreds, to dismemberment by the
Titans, by Mimesis, having seized him (the questioner) in
the labyrinth of the mirror, in the labyrinth of logic
which rules reflection (vt/tv-orenie;
repitition/creation)(q), in other words of that which is
always seen as the basis of the art of speech... There is
no point in continuing the list of that which, according to
the critics, "reflects" or "depicts/represents", at the
same time appropriating, the word... It doesn't appropriate
but removes layer by layer from the wax table of memory-
warp that by definition possesses neither meaning or trace,
that... which exists in its own disappearance.

     However, Night attracts even this mute rustling.
Night, like poetic speech is sourceless and so steps over,
erasing any possible interpretation, her language, her
speech, her intentions , her now, her memory.  Squandering
all of this in her own disappearance, poetry possesses
nothing,

only:

**********

Author's Notes:

2) It is noteworthy that this memorandum is inscribed on
material whose nature is ambivalent in its presentation -
gold, sun, and light are inseparable in the mythological
consciousness from ashes (in the Russian language the very
etymology of this word points to their unanimity). Sunlight
is in the same way life-creating, ash-creating and light
itself, more precisely its source, the sun, is inseparable
from "darkness", blindness, like a vision through the wall
of optico-centrism, which controls not only epistemiology
but the metaphysics of culture.

3) The motif which the British poet Robert Graves used in
one of his poems and which I have added to the final piece
of "Ksenia" in part as an answer to Graves.

4) The thirst for memory is equal to the thirst for blood -
a drop of blood gives a moment of memory to the soul of a
dead person.

5) Unfortunately, there is not room here to refer to yet
another nuance of meaning, ehich adds through the meaning
of the word "mnit'" -- to imagine, and for this reason a
signficant problem of memory -- imagination does not fall
in with the intent of today's discussion.  In connection
with this it seems to me that Bashlyarovsky's dream should
not be considered exactly as non-memory, as non-
imagination.

6) See Lyotard's meta-recite.

7) Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings. Stanford U. Press,
1988, p. 170. ("All of Western faith and good faith was
engaged in this wager on representation:  that a sign could
refer to the depth of meaning, that a sign could exchange
for meaning and that something could guarantee this
exchange - God, of course.  But what if God himself can be
simulated, that is to say, reduced to the signs which
attest his existence?  Then the whole system becomes
weightless; it is no longer anything but a giant
simulacrum...")

8) Precisely this point, apparently, compels J.L. Borges to
create the metaphor Funes-Miracle-Memory, a metaphor of the
reciprocal devouring of memory and the remembered: of their
factual, monstrous coincidence.

9) Jacques Derrida makes the following distinction between
transgression and reduction-epoche: "The phenomenological
epoche is a reduction that pushes us back toward meaning.
Sovereign transgression is a reduction of this reduction:
not a reduction to meaning, but a reduction of meaning."
Jacques Derrida.  Writing and Difference.  U. Chicago
Press, 1978. p. 268.

10) Memory-mirror-titans; the torn, dismembered Dionysus,
etc.

11) From the book XENIA (by this author)? Lyn has this
poem.

Translator's notes:

a. The Russian prefix "za-" in the works of this author
reflects the multivalency of one word or invented words due
to the creative morphology of the language.  The existing
word "zabyvanie" means literally "forgetting".  But there
is also a verb "byvat", "to be", which the author here
fuses with the prefix "za-" which can mean "trans-" or, as
a preposition, "behind", "beyond", "at", "after", "because
of".  The noun "zabyvanie" does not exist in Russian (no!
Vanessa is wrong!), therefore the meaning is open to
interpretation and associations.

b. "sobytie" without hyphen means "happening, occurence,
event" which, according to the author, is the result of
"co-being".

c. "imeni" is a declined form of "imya", "name" in the
nominative case.

d. the author inserts an "i" into the root of the verb
"pomyanut'" ("to remember") to emphasize what he sees as
the semantic connection between the words.

e. In Russian these two words have identical roots but
different prefixes - uderzhanie, soderzhanie.

f. "so-obshitel'nost'" hinting at the word "soobshit'" to
inform, announce and "obshitel'nost'" - sociability.

g. see note b.

h. this word also contains the elements "za" and "byt" and
could also allude to the verb "zabyt'" - to forget. See
also note a.

i. a play on sounds/words: "vtorenie-tvorenie".  The first
word does not exist (O, Vanessa, dear, this word exists
too) on its own but the "vtor" root implies repeating,
something done a second time. The second word literally
means creation or creating; the consonant pair is simply
reversed or "turned around".

j. "zapamyatovat'" is a less commonly used form of the verb
"zabyvat'/zabyt'", "to forget", and, as the reader can see,
contains both the particles "za" and "mya".

k. see note a.

l. "prestuplenie" which literally means "crime", is
semantically related to the verb "perestupat'/perestupit'"
meaning "to step over" and figuratively "to overstep,
transgress", thus linking the words "crime" and
"transgression".

m. as taken from the verb "byvat'".

n. "vremya" ("time") which contains the elements "mya" and
"ya" from the preceding discussion.

o. Tartarus of Greek mythology.

p. in Latin in the original.

q. See note i.

Date: Sun, 1 Nov 1992 14:46:37 EST
From:         Lyn Hejinian <70550.654@COMPUSERVE.COM>
Subject:      xeniaX-To:  symposia@ncsuvm.cc.ncsu.edu

November 1, Sunday:

Dear Colleagues: I'm amused that our symposium in its first week
has resembled my only other e-mail experience, namely messages
from Arkadii Dragomoshchenko; I bought a modem solely in order to
communicate with him during the long period when Soviet and then
Russian postal system was only sporadically operative, and when
strange (good) fortune gave Arkadii access to e-mail.
       In any case, both Arkadii and Eyal have asked me to add
something from Arkadii's forthcoming booklength poem XENIA to our
discussion. The American translation (in manuscript) is a little
over 100 pages long, and it's difficult to excerpt from the
whole, since the "argument" accumulates, like an unfolding
discourse (or in multiple discourses).  So I've decided just to
send you the first several pages, with the alternation between
poetry and prose which is characteristic of the work as a whole.
       The essay on Memory that Arkadii sent to us, by the way,
will be published in POETICS JOURNAL (the next issue), but the
version you read is slightly rough (no fault of the author's or
Vanessa Bittner's--Arkadii's prose is very difficult to
translate) and we will try to revise a bit before
publication--with Vanessa's help.

       from XENIA

                    You see the mountains
                    and think them immobile
                    but they float like clouds.
                         Al-Djunayd
We see only what
we see

only what
lets us be ourselves--
seen.

The photograph refuses
to let into itself
what it created by studying us.
The frenzied braiding of salts,
                         ashes of silver.

A cock will crow three times
as dawn arrives. Sight
(in a game of tossed bones? an opening in the body?
shoelaces?
in the autobiography approaching
from behind your head?), finding
no object, seems lost.

History begins
only when powerlessness is acknowledged. I
can't understand: the embraces of father and mother?
The transition of one to the other?
This is the boundary dancing at the threshold
where an echo slowly floats around reason.

To go on.

Death is not an event, but an ex-
foliation:
the past is a knot of ellipses--
                              noon
with the sun spot removed
whose depths are raised to the simple surface
by the mosquito wind of things,

objects' chips, sucked
in vain
into description--sight--
or the rules for rendering
a two-dimensional representation multi-dimensional--
a question of optics (or allegories).

Flight fades into the porous yellow ice
of the pages flowering between the dry fingers.
The smoke is black.

               The azure's shrieking.

Senselessly cloud falls to the south.
And stuck together, like candies of happiness,
demons with their meditations control the eyes
like fire whose net is irridescent and plain
and monotonous too
like the pendulum of love.

It's not death that's "disturbing," but rather--
until one is able to move in metabolic particles--
the absence discovered at every point in the splash
                              of the day
whose halves are shut
behind the shadow's back (yes, definitely, embraces,
before all else) everywhere

where it can occur
coupling non-becoming with intercession--

the unravelled tissue's decay. Speed.
Skid. The division of time: the roar in a child's seashell.
Surroundings.
The site of wandering examines
its own expectations. The mouth
takes on a definite form
so that the word sky takes on the density of pebbles
smashing the shell of reflections.

Now for the story of the branching city. Complexity doesn't mean
endless additions. The proto-perception of dreams. The multitudes
are mutinous (the more money you give me the more I'll have--and
what do you need it for?). This playful twig sticks up in the
air: attentiveness. But also the epistolary style, exhaustive,
following trackes (are you talking about me? the day before
yesterday you said that you needed me in order to experience
yourself through me), evading possible signs, one's own presence,
Khlebnikov--the ruins of never-erected cyclopic constructions. A
stellar swarming in the absolute transparency of subject and
object. The rustle of a stone flying downward. Slowly I bend
toward you. The slope is open to the south wind. What for you is
a moment, for me is a millenium, augmented by anticipation.
Patience? The foreknowledge that is fated not to answer questions
about death--not to sprout in the skull of matter. Unhurried
oxydation, but also the epistolary method, reaching an
inadmissable surplus: an intersec/ruption, not giving the sought
for sense of conclusion in any point of the splash, rousing the
night with ex-. What distinguishes a "judgment" from an
"utterance"? Look in the dictionary, you say. Look in the
dictionary and the word is already turning into the word that
endlessly approximates a fading voice. As for snow in the
branching story of the city. I bend down toward her and in front
of me the thinnest droplet discloses the time frame of China.
Behind the window there's snow. No. Contaminations of the city.
We'll bring this elm into the map's field. A crow, not knowing
loss. Instead, so as to come nearer, opening--it moves away,
until it disappears completely beyond the boundaries of the
phrase.

*********
translated by Lyn Hejinian and Elena Balashova. Sun and Moon
Press will be publishing the book in January of next year. My
apologies for any typos--I don't know how to call up files into
my e-mail program, so anything you get from me is typed "in
realtime"--and generally, as fast as I can type it.

Lyn Hejinian

 
Date:         Tue, 3 Nov 1992 16:28:22 -0500
From:         "Jerome J. Mc Gann"

Subject:      memory again

I was moved to the following reflections after reading Arkadii's
essay.  I would be much interested in any other reactions.

               "Thoughts on `Zapamyatovat'"

     What follows are some reactions to Arkadii D's
essay/meditation "Eroticism of For-Getting, Eroticism of
Beyond-Seeing".  I am moved to write them because AD's essay
exposes some of the most cherished illusions of the west.  And
also because from the west may yet come (do now come, and have
been coming always) other voices and imaginations that stand
counter to those mostcherished in Memory.  Other possible
"memories".
     AD mentions Plato in passing -- Plato, who deplored writing
because it threatened one of his touchstone values: Memory.  But
according to Lyn H "Writing is an Aid to Memory".
     LH's is a distinctly anti-platonic thought.  And what she
means by "Memory" is not at all what Plato means.  Plato's is the
meaning you, AD, sketch in the opening of your essay -- the
meaning of the known and ordered world, the remembered world.
     AD also mentions Baudrillard, a quintessential (or so we
have judged) "postmodern thinker".  His however is, I believe,
the deconstructive dead end of the Platonic/Enlightenment line.
Out ofthe ground of reality Baudrillard spins the precession of
the simulacra.  Or: either Memory or Oblivion.  Being and
Nothingness. Presence and Absence.  And all these ordered along
the platonic grid of "the real" (the Forms) and the "unreal" (the
Shadow plays).
     "But what if God himself can be simulated, reduced to . .
.signs?  Then the whole system becomes. . . a gigantic
simulacrum."(Baudrillard)  In Baudrillard this famous question
comes as a deconstructive threat -- is posed as such, is received
as such (generally).
     That is to say, Baudrillard is not serious.
     But Baudrillard may be taken seriously.  His whole system
canbe reduced to a system of signs, a gigantic simulacrum, as
ideal as god himself.  Himself.
     We may think otherwise than this -- say, according to Blake,
for whom all gods reside in the human breast.  God (to be
capitalized here as the subject of this sentence) and the gods
always were creatures of the human imagination, ie, in postmodern
terms, constructed systems of signs; it was merely a special
system of signs -- one that asserted it wasn't a signifying
system, but was self-identical ("I am that I am"), that (mis)led
us into the transcendental imagination of reality.
     "Absolute historical memory" in this perspective is a
special conception -- a heuristic tool, literally a signifying
system.  We must not take it for either god or the "set of all
(memorial) sets".  It is simply (and profoundly) the idea of such
a set -- an idea we may want to invoke and use for particular
immediate and practical purposes.
     So, "zapamyatovat": "to go beyond memory", to cross
itsborder, is to enter another territory, the geography of
"oblivion".  Here is Leto, the land (in English) of Swinburne:
     Here where the world is quiet,
     Here where all trouble seems
     Dead winds and spent waves' riot
     In doubtful dreams of dreams. . . .etc.
Most emphatically not an "absence" or a nothing: it is
"positivenegation" (terrifying to Coleridge's idealistic mind,
splendid andcomforting to Swinburne's sensational mind).  To
enter this (new)world is (in William Morris's words) to "Forget
six counties overhung with smoke", etc.  It is to get, literally,
"News from Nowhere".
     "Zapamyatovat": we have no such wonderful word in our
language, so I thank you for it, AD.  But it is a word known to
all the poets, and especially to those for whom there is a world
of imagination.  The Swinburnian Land of Oblivion, Byron's
Manfred, Blake's Los[s].

jerome mcgann

 
From: jenglish@sas.upenn.edu (James English)
Subject: Rabate/Chernetsky
Date: Thu, 5 Nov 92 21:47:27 EST

To the symposium participants:

     Having only recently arrived from France to take up his new
post at the University of Pennsylvania, Jean-Michel Rabate is
having difficulties getting set up with functional computer
hardware and software.  The computer that has just been installed
in his office, for example, is equipped with a French keyboard
but can only read the keyboard input as though it were standard
American.  In any event, Jean-Michel regrets that it is
impossible for him to participate in the symposium.  He has,
however, solicited a response to the early symposium postings
from Vitaly Chernetsky, a colleague in the Comparative Literature
and Theory department.  I have slightly edited Vitaly's text,
which follows.

               --Jim English

        WHY THE RUSSIAN POSTMODERN?

       "Russian postmodernism: an oxymoron?"--this is the
question posed by the title of Marjorie Perloff's essay.  What
happens to the cultural phenomenon which according to most
cultural theorists is the product of late capitalism, consumer
society, commodity culture, etc., when it is transposed into the
society where the most basic commodities are in short supply?
And if there exists Russian (or, more correctly, Soviet)
postmodern culture, how does it sustain the claim of being
postmodern, in what postmodernist activities does it engage?  To
my disappointment, I found that what Russian postmodernism is
is precisely the question Perloff's essay is not willing to
address.  Perloff's agenda seems to be only to underscore that
the two groups--the heterogeneous Russian postmodern poets and
the American language poets--differ considerably; her way of
proving it seems to be to claim that cultural production in the
late Soviet Union has little if anything to do with its Western
postmodern contemporaries.  Although she herself admits that "to
generalize from so few examples is, of course, dangerous,"
Perloff is nevertheless willing to do so.  In this I see a
possibility that a forum like ours could degenerate into an
enterprise which I would call "paleontological": to
"reconstruct," as Georges Cuvier claimed to be able to do with a
prehistoric animal, the entire Russian postmodern scene out of
one or two of its "bones."  Need one to say that the postmodern
culture is not a coherent "organism," and that in these
paleontological attempts we end up creating ghosts like the
mysterious Foma Akvinskii (instead of St. Thomas Aquinas) who
appears in the English translation of Aleksei Parshchikov's essay
"New Poetry" in _Poetics Journal_?  Can we thus hope actually to
produce a meaningful discussion and not just a simulacrum of it?
      Another problem that I find potentially present in the
argument advanced by Perloff and some other critics is reducing
postmodernism from a culture's condition simply to a movement or
even a sum total of stylistic devices (unfortunately, that also
happens to be the predominant view of postmodernism expressed by
the Russian critics within the former Soviet Union).  And, in my
opinion, it is the question why the culture both in the US and in
the former USSR has taken the forms it did, what are these
changes symptomatic of, that needs most urgently to be addressed.
      It has been said at various occasions that "cultural
phenomena that reached [Russia] from the West. . . acquired
features utterly unfamiliar to their progenitors and relate to
their Western kin only in name" (Dmitrii Prigov, interview in
_Poetics Journal_ 8, pp. 12-13).  Many would argue that it were
often not even the phenomena themselves but rather the names for
them.  The case often seems to be that the names were
appropriated for various cultural practices which were not
imported from the West, but conditioned in their emergence by
Russian culture's internal development.  But the very fact that
the shapes taken by this cultural production happened to have
striking similarities with their Western counterparts suggests
that the homology goes further than it might seem at first; and
one does not need to be labeled a Slavophile when one asserts
that sometimes Russian practitioners of culture may even be ahead
of their colleagues abroad (remember Marinetti's amazement when
upon his arrival in Russia he was told by the Russian Futurists
that he wasn't going far enough in handling language).  Marjorie
Perloff seizes upon the vague, almost "impressionistic"
formulations ofEpstein's account of contemporary Russian poetry,
easily susceptible to criticism.  I would like to draw attention
to another essay by Epstein, "After the Future: On the New
Consciousness in Literature,"the English translation of which was
published in the Spring 1991 issue of _South Atlantic Quarterly_,
one of the most noteworthy attempts to date of theorizing the
cultural condition of the late Soviet empire, stating that "by
the 1980s, the basic premises ofartistic consciousness in [the
USSR] were quite postmodern, perhaps even more radically and
consistently than in the West."  "Was it not the case," writes
Epstein,
      that our culture began creating simulacra, that is, the
      utmost faithful copies that do not have an original,
      much earlier and in greater quantities that in the West?
      How does one have to deal with the figure of Brezhnev,
      embodying the 'businesslike constructive approach' and
      'the progressive development of the mature socialism?'
      In difference with the sinisterly modernist, Kafkaesque
      figure of Stalin [here Epstein's point of view is akin to
      that of Boris Groys, elaborated in his The Total Art of
      Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and
      Beyond (Princeton, 1992), who interprets Stalin's Soviet
      Union as a kind of Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, a
      total(itarian) work of art; this also leads us to assert
      once more the profound homology of totalitarianisms in
      the fascist and Soviet states which both embarked on
      aesthetisizing the political project (see Walter Benjamin's
      "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
      Reproduction" in his Illuminations)], Brezhnev is a
      typical simulacrum, a postmodernist perfunctory object,
      even a hyperrealistic object of some kind, behind which
      there is no reality to be found.  Long before the
      Western video technology started creating in abundance
      true-to-life images of the nonexistent reality, this task
      was already being solved by our ideology, media,
      statistics that counted up to a hundredth of a percent
      the crop that had never been gathered." (440 [I have
      modified the translation to be closer to the original
      Russian.])
"The triumph of the self-valorizing ideas," he continues, "that
imitate and abolish reality assisted in creating the
postmodernist mentality not less than the domination of video
communications which also create the folded in itself world of
the transfixed time" (443, modified translation again).
      Since I have brought up Boris Groys's book which from the
moment of its original publication in German provoked a heated
debate among the academics engaged in the study of Russian
culture, I would like to point out some of this book's
unquestionable merits.  Groys positions the cultural production
which occasioned the present forum within the context of the
Soviet empire's own development.  I strongly disagree with
Marjorie Perloff when she talks about "the long midcentury hiatus
of Stalinist years."  While from the point of view of aesthetic
value (recently a very much attacked concept) culture of the
Stalin years probably loses the competition with cultural
products of other times and places, its aesthetical system, its
governing logic should by no means be discarded by a cultural
theorist.  Recently there have been trends to explain Stalinist
art both as a modernist and as a postmodern phenomenon.  In fact,
in Groys's book the two seem to be conflated, as manifested, for
example, in his insightful remark that "Stalinist culture looks
upon itself as postapocalyptic--the final verdict on all human
culture has already been passed."  "Socialist realism,"
Groyscontinues, "regards historical time as ended and therefore
occupies no particular place in it" (48, 49).  Of socialist
realism's simulacric concern with verisimilitude he writes:
      Its heroes . . . must thouroughly resemble people if
      people are not to be frightened by their true aspect,
      and this is why the writers and artists of socialist
      realism bustle about inventing biographies, habits,
      clothing, physiognomies, and so on.  They almost seem
      to be in employ of some sort of extraterrestrial bureau
      planning a trip to Earth--they want to make their
      envoys as anthropomorphic as possible, but they cannot
      keep the otherworldly void from gaping through all the
      cracks in the mask. (63)
      We must, then, talk not about a Russian postmodernism, but
probably about three of them: the postmodernism of the peak of
Stalin years, the one of the 1970s and 80s, and some new
post-Soviet culture which is probably emerging now.  The culture
that our forum is trying to address, then, could be named the
postmodernism of the late (using both meanings of the word
"late") Soviet empire.  The fascinatingly rich scene of the new
Russian poetry that emerged during the past fifteen years or so
has been rather unlucky in the critical/theoretical treatment it
received.  Attempts at analysis ended up in imposition of rigid
classificatory grids (a project suspicious tobegin with), and if
Epstein's trichotomy "conceptualism/metarealism/presentism"
offered in his essay "Metamorphosis" (a bowdlerizedversion of
which appears as an afterword to _Third Wave_) is debatable,
Wachtell's and Parshchikov's pseudo-Bakhtinian dichotomy
"monological/pluralistic" found in their "Introduction" to
_ThirdWave_, which happens to place all of conceptualists and
those close to them under the former rubric, is hair-raising.
The merit of"Metamorphosis" is that, despite all its weaknesses,
it is still the only attempt to date in any language to offer a
somewhat coherent and inclusive picture of the new wave of
Russian poetry (why this wave should be counted "third" remains a
mystery to me).  Perloff finds Russian conceptualism not standing
up to its name, seeing in it the urge to "expose." If anything,
this urge to "expose" (inaugurated in Russian culture by
Vissarion Belinsky [1811-1848]) is something quite alien to the
works in question; they do not"expose"--they deconstruct.  In
fact, they precisely "take up the challenge presented by Duchamp"
(Perloff about Western conceptualism).  How else would you
classify V. Komar and A.Melamid's gesture of signing the Lenin
"quotation" "Our goal is communism"?  (This quote was to be found
multiplied through millions of posters all over the Soviet
Union.)  And, to look in the realm of poetry, doesn't, for
example, such a specimen of American language poetry as Bob
Perelman's poem "China," which Fredric Jameson analyses in his
essay "Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logicof Late Capitalism,"
strikingly resemble "catalogs" by the Russiancon ceptualist Lev
Rubinshtein (which returns us to Wachtell's and Parshchikov's
puzzling gesture of calling Russian conceptualist poets
"monological")?
      What, then, I would suggest as a possible course of
discussion--which has already been begun by our forum and which
should by all means be continued--is both to try to investigate
the multiplicity of paradigms of postmodern cultural production
in the former Soviet empire, to try to single out in what and why
it is both similar to and different from cultural phenomena found
in the US and the rest of the Western world, and, most
importantly, to theorize these similarities and differences.  A
Russian proverb says that "the first pancake comes out lumpy"
(pervyi blin--komom).  Even if that might be the case, it should
by no means stop us from frying more of them.

Vitaly Chernetsky
University of PA

From:         Marjorie Perloff <0004221898@MCIMAIL.COM>
Subject:      Vitaly Chernetsky's essay

This is precisely the sort of response I hoped the symposium
would generate.  Vitaly Chernetsky is right, of course, to say
that my remarks were superficial; indeed, I only wanted to raise
an issue that had come upbecause certain parallels were being
drawn between the "language" poetsand "new Russian" poets that I
found dubious and I was having a hardtime finding a connection.
It's still hard: for a foreigner to understand the
modernist/postmodernist strains in the Stalinist era is difficult
and what we now need--and I hope will get from people like
Chernetsky--is afuller account than the one Wachtel and
Parschchikov give us in Third Wave of what the cultural
determinants are and now they relate.  But I would like to ask
Chernetsky how he proposes that those of us with little or no
Russian begin?  Is there a bibliography he can suggest?  An
important cultural study that might help U.S. readers? I would be
very grateful for such information.  From the "lumpy pancake,"

Marjorie Perloff

Date:         Tue, 10 Nov 1992 14:54:45 EST
From:         Bob Perelman 
Subject:      Russian postmodernism

November 10: Dear Colleagues: My first impulse is toward what
Jakobson might term the phatic: hello, contact, tweet, cheep,
bow-wow.

Lyn, if I had _The Guard_ here I would love to quote the lines
where you mime the operation of translating from the Russian, to
the effect that the dog says quack, the goat says gruss or
whatever. That seems emblematic of the space between contemporary
Russian and American poetry. Vitaly, when I read that "China"
"strikingly resembles" Lev Rubinshtein's catalogs, it feels like
"quack" where I expect "bow-wow." I.e.,

 8.
 Foo! Right here in nearby dale
 Heartthrobs at the nightingale!

 9. Mischievous small nightingale
 Singing always in the dale!
 . . . .

 32.
 People surely get th' idea,
 If they're just not idiots!

 33.
 People are not idiots,
 Even if they miss th'idea! [_Third Wave_, 139, 141]

 There is something going on there involving, I would guess,
sarcasm directed against the vatic mode; doggerel as vehicle for
generous social emotion; repetion & permutation. But so much must
be happening at the level of tone, aggressive echoes of cultural
memory, that I'm at a loss to find much similarity to my own
work.

 Arcadii, rereading your "Nasturtium," I thought of Williams's
"Crimson Cyclamen." Not that the following sets of lines are all
that much 'alike':

 Blades pocked with repetition
 (forty seconds spent searching for an analogy
                          to the upward branching
 at the throat of the stem--instead
 of this: "the emotions are
 a component of composition, and the expression,
       itself branching out into exclamation,
 means as much as
 the comma which proceeds its appearance")   [_Description, 99]

 The stem's pink flanges,
 strongly marked,
 stand to the frail edge,
 dividing, thinning
 through the pink and downy
 mesh--as the round stem
 is pink also--cranking
 to penciled lines
 angularly deft
 through all, to link together
 the unnicked argument
 to the last crinkled edge--
 where the under and the over
 meet and disappear
 and the air alone begins
 to go from them--
 the conclusion left still
 blunt, floating
 . . . .
 each petal tortured

 eccentrically
 the while, warped edge
 jostling
 half-turned edge

 side by side
 until compact, tense
 evenly stained
 to the last fine edge

 an ecstacy       [_Collected Poems_, Vol 1, 421, 423]

It's just an analogy of course, but it strikes me that the
distance between poem and flower, made central in "Nasturtium"
and refused if not refuted in "Cyclamen," is like the distance
between critical apprehension and poetry in many cases. In my own
unofficial thought about these matters, and in the emphatically
phatic contact zone of e-mail, such distances sholdn't exist, are
false projections, reified backdrops for auratic arias.
Nevertheless, as Williams puts it in "The Descent":

 Postmodernism beckons
       as modernism beckoned.
               Critical genealogy is a kind

 of art prose,
       a sort of poetics,
               even

 a poem, since the lines it rewrites are new lines
       read by readers
               heretofore unaddressed,

 unmarked--
       since their eyes
               are focused on new media
 (even though formally these were unaccredited).

 No poem is made up entirely of language--since
       the channels it leases are always conduits
               formerly unarticulated. A

 world lost,
       a world unarticulated,
               beckons to new genres
 and no aesthetic value (trashed) is so valuable as the memory
 of value

Among others things, I hope the above will be heard as
counterpoint to Arcadii's "Eroticism of For-getting."

Date:         Thu, 12 Nov 1992 14:31:08 +0300
From:         arkadii 
Subject:      idle talk

Dear colleagues,

For me to answer some of the questions posed by Mr.
Chernetsky or to oppose some of his arguments I would have
to get back to my first remark about endless love of
Russian criticism to Baudrillard's rhetoric which it
believes is the most relevant instrument in studying the
contemporary culture and the rest.

But in this article I was most interested by some of his
digressions which bring back memories of critical discourse
of the time of Socialist Realism. so dear to the author of
the article.  For example - "sometimes Russians practicers
of culture may even be ahead of their colleagues abroad"...

Certainly, nobody  claims inventing postmodernism but
still... sometimes it happens! But what on earth being
ahead means? Ahead of what? The head of a foreign
colleague? Then what is a system of coordinates for the
action? What do we refer ourselves to? A beginning? Then a
beginning of what? Or an end? An end of history?

No matter what all the subsequent reflections of Chernetsky
on post-modernism will necessarily have to be looked at in
the perspective of History reaching its completion. History
which is not short of time, space or any features of
creativity. Background of orthodox vision is obvious even
in the very beginning of the passage quoted by Chernetsky,
from Michael Epshtain - "our culture began creating
simulacra (sic!) <...> much erlyer and in greater
quantities..." . That is for sure. Dating back to the
polemics of the Nicaea Council in 767 on _kenosis_ through
the endless discussions of symbolism and up to the very
recent past...

In fact, all of this reminds of an attempt to play a game
of chess using Go stones. As much as Michael Epshtain's
poetic taxonomy. Just in case, one should keep in mind that
it owes a lot to Goethe's theory of metamorphosis which
according to Kassirer "fundamental altered the biological
ideal of knowledge".

And so on, and so forth. Meanwhile, to touch again our
favorite conceptualism again seems pointless - it's as
infinite as any other projection. But sometimes I can't but
ponder whether the known slogan Jedem das Seine can
become a cliche which being involved into the practice of
ironic rethinking would become a surplus meaning of
today's culture. Lyn Hejinian is right -- irony is a twin
sister of nostalgia.

Arkadii Dragomoshchenko.

 
     From: Mikhail Epstein, Department of Russian Studies, 403
     Candler Library, Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322.

     To: Editors of PMC and all participants of the discussion on
     Russian postmodernism.

     November 15, 1992

     Dear colleagues and friends:

          I am entering the discussion with a delay because of my
     inability to cope with such a "postmodern" technical device
     as e-mail, which argues in favor of those who resist any
     parallels between Russian and Western "postmodern"
     mentalities.  My theoretical standpoint, however, is the
     relevance of these typological parallels: not in the sense
     that Russia belatedly "caught up with" the Western
     postmodernism, but in terms of their "alternate" (and
     complementary) developments, in such a way that Russia was
     the first to embrace the "post-apocalyptic" sensibility of
     postmodernism, whereas the West was the first to identify
     this sensibility in theoretical concepts and to give it the
     name of "postmodernism." Vitaly Chernetsky's proposal "to
     talk not about a Russian postmodernism, but probably about
     three of them: the postmodernism of the peak of Stalin
     years, the one of the 1970s and 80s, and some new post-
     Soviet culture which is probably emerging now" seems to me
     the most promising point of departure and the possible core
     of our subsequent discussion.  Vitaly Chernetsky refers to
     Boris Grois's book which regards Stalin's state as the
     fulfillment of modernist (avant-gardist) project; it should
     be added that the accomplishment of such a project (if it
     really was a success) transported Russian-Soviet culture
     into a new, postmodernist, "post-apocalyptic" dimension.  No
     more tension between the modernist project and reality: this
     is already postmodernism (at least the gates to this kingdom
     of simulacra).
          I suggest to your attention some excerpts from my paper
     on two Russian postmodernisms and their interrelationship
     with the Western one.  The paper was presented at the MLA
     conference in December 1991, at the same panel with Marjorie
     Perloff's and Barrett Watten's papers now proposed for this
     discussion.  Also, I will cite several passages from my
     recent pamphlet (of a very limited circulation) arguing for
     the purely "ideological", "Eastern" version of postmodernism
     as opposed to Fredric Jameson's influential theory which
     connects postmodernism with the economic basis of the "late
     capitalism" and therefore denies its possibility in non-
     Western countries (Mikhail Epstein, _Relativistic Patterns
     in Totalitarian Thinking: An Inquiry into Soviet Ideological
     Language_.  Kennan Institute of Advanced Russian Studies.
     Occasional Papers,  # 243.  Washington: Woodrow Wilson
     International Center for Scholars, 1991).  What I am going
     to say does not reflect latest interesting developments in
     Russian criticism where the question of "post-modernism"
     became as focal as the concept of "socialist realism" was in
     the 1930s (this is not an arbitrary connexion: actually, the
     later stage of post-modernism comes to succeed the earlier
     one).  In particular, I would like to address you to the
     articles of Vyacheslav Kuritsyn "Post-modernism: new ancient
     culture" and Sergei Nosov "Literature and Play", accompanied
     by editorial comments in _Novyi Mir_ (Moscow), 1992, No.2.
     pp.225-239.

     [Editor's note: Mikhail Epstein's work is included in the
     file SYMPOS-2.193 in this issue of PMC.]

 
Date:         Sun, 22 Nov 1992 12:02:21 EST
From:         "(James English)" 
Subject:      Vitaly C. Remarks

To the Symposium participants:

Here is a follow-up correspondence on the Third Wave from Vitaly
Chernetsky.
                                               --Jim English

Dear Bob, dear colleagues:
     It is always a dangerous enterprise to offer a reading
(especially a sketchy one) in the presence of the author(s) of
the text(s) one is talking about.  I still believe that comparing
Bob's "China" to some of Lev Rubinshtein's work (notice: I am not
attempting to establish an equation between larger corpuses of
their works) is not entirely a misreading (a "quack" when on
expects a "bow-wow").  By the way, in Russian the ducks say
"krya-krya" and the dogs say "gav-gav," but still one can say
with a degree of certainty that Russian ducks and dogs (and other
creatures) "strikingly resemble" their American counterparts.
     I would even venture to extend this comparison: I believe
that Rubinshtein is not only about doggerel-like lines as
"vehicle for social emotion" (see, for example, the other catalog
included in Third Wave, "From Thursday to Friday" [Bob quotes "A
Little Nighttime Serenade"]).  I apologize for not being able to
present here, due to time constrains, a convincing proof of my
argument, but let me elaborate the parallel a little more.  I do
find some of Rubinshtein's texts ("Poiavlenie geroia" ["The
Appearance of the Hero"], "Vse dal'she i dal'she" ["Further and
Further On"] and others) to some extent "Perelmanian," while in
some of Bob's poems (here I would mention, in addition to
"China," "Holes in the Argument" and "Doggerel Overtaken by
Order") I see a mode present which is similar to that of some of
the writings of, say, Rubinshtein or Druk.
     A few words about Third Wave.  Producing an anthology of the
new Russian poetry in English is a most praiseworthy idea.  I
believe, however, that the "pancake" offered by this book is much
too "lumpy."  To my knowledge, another such anthology is being
prepared for publication (as far as I can understand, completely
independently from Third Wave).  I hope that it avoids some of
Third Wave's drawbacks (although that could be problematic, too:
the project is "marred" by the involvement of Yevtushenko as a
co-editor).
     First, why Third Wave? The title is misleading, because the
term "third wave" is customarily applied to the culture of the
Russian emigration of the Brezhnev years (Joseph [or Iosif, but,
for heavens sake, not "Josef," as it is in the introduction to
Third Wave] Brodsky, Sasha Sokolov, Vasily Aksenov, Sergei
Dovlatov, Lev Losev, Bakhyt Kenzheev, Yuz Aleshkovsky, etc.).  In
fact, a collection of essays entitled exactly The Third Wave and
devoted to these and other writers of that generation was
recently published in this country.  If anything, the emergence
on the literary scene of the generation represented in the
anthology in question is posterior to "third wave."  (Besides,
virtually all of the poets represented in the anthology did not
emigrate from the Soviet Union in the Brezhnev era.)
     Second, the choice of poems is sometimes surprising
(although perhaps it is not the editors' fault), and omissions of
certain poets (Igor' Irten'ev, Evgenii Bunimovich, Aleksandr
Levin and Mikhail Sukhotin to mention just a few) are hard to
explain (as well as perhaps the inclusion of some of the others).
Most importantly, I think that in this particular case the fact
that the original texts are not printed together with the
translations is especially unpardonable: the Russian publications
of these poems are dispersed between various official and
underground journals, almanacs, collections, etc.; there does not
yet exist a single representative anthology of the writings of
this generation in their original language.  This is even more
true when one considers the fact that some of the translations of
these poems, in which the play with linguistic and cultural codes
is one of the most relevant elements of construction, are not
entirely reliable; in my opinion, Vladimir Druk was particularly
unlucky in this respect, and I could list dozens of other
instances where I disagree with the translations offered.  It
would be unfair, though, not to add at this point that some of
the translations, for example those by Michael Palmer, are
excellent.
     One of the most problematic parts of Third Wave is the
introduction by Parshchikov and Wachtell.  Some of their
assertions simply run counter to historical facts.  (They claim,
for example, that Mayakovsky and Blok were "unpublishable in the
USSR between 1934 and the late 1950s" while these two have been
part even of the secondary school curriculum.)  The most
questionable, though, is the pseudo-Bakhtinian dichotomizing
division to which I referred earlier; the mere reading of the
works by the "monological" and "pluralistic" poets (to call
postmodern poetry "monological" hardly makes sense to begin with)
unsettles it completely. And do we really have, in our postmodern
age, to be fed explanations in terms of binary oppositions?
Thus the anthology is framed by two highly idiosyncratic texts
(the introduction and Epstein's afterword), abounding in various
undercurrents evident to the reader familiar with the poetry in
question, which may serve only as an element of confusion (the
way they confused, I believe, Marjorie Perloff).
     Finally, Third Wave is not, as it claims to be, the first
anthology of new Russian poetry to be published in English. It
was preceded by The Poetry of Perestroika, ed. Peter Mortimer and
S.J. Litherland, published in Britain two years ago.   A note
about the possibility of homologies between the cultural
phenomena in the US and in the former USSR. One should talk, I
believe, not about the homology of movements, but about a number
of similarities, certain shared aspects of the postmodern
cultural condition.   As far movements go, Russian conceptualism
is the only actual movement among the classificatory terms we are
offered in Third Wave (there isn't a "metarealist movement" or
school, etc.). This movement spans across genres: visual arts
(including happenings and performances, and through them,
avant-garde theater); poetry; prose; most recently -- film.
Together with the conceptualists, under the same cover (and
within the same "umbrella" groups, such as the Moscow Club
"Poetry" [Moskovskii klub "Poeziia"], which are highly
heterogeneous), one finds poets whose writing is much more
hermetic and esoteric, whose writing practice is to a great
extent conditioned by the situation of a narrow circle; in some
bizarre way they resurrect the paradigm of poetry's existence in
medieval Europe before printing -- poetry circulating within a
limited circle of friends and patrons.
     Emerging from underground in the second half of the 1980s,
these heterogeneous literary groups developed differently. Some
came into the foreground of the cultural scene, gaining attention
of the critics and the media, etc.; some remained "widely known
in narrow circles."  It is really sad, though, that sometimes
these circles are much too narrow; and in this respect I
especially welcome the happy event of the present symposium which
breaks through the barriers of these narrow circles. Once again,
I believe that the new Russian poetry is fascinatingly rich and
diverse, just like the entire culture of the Soviet postmodern.
We need more events like this one to open it up to intellectual
communities across the globe so that it achieves the recognition
it deserves.

                              Sincerely,

                              Vitaly Chernetsky

Date:         Mon, 23 Nov 1992 07:42:00 GMT
From:         Marjorie Perloff <0004221898@MCIMAIL.COM>
Subject:      Vitaly Chernetsky's commentary

Dear Colleagues, I just read Vitaly Chernetsky's comments on THE
THIRD WAVE and want to say I appreciate them very much.  I myself
had wondered about the title, the lack of bilingual texts, and
some of the translations.  I could not judge the omissions.  I
also had reservations about the monologic/dialogic dichotomy that
Andrei and Andy Wachtel sketched out. Still, I think we should be
grateful for THIRD WAVE as a first stab at the problem.  The
difficulty, when material is so new, is that translations will
vary greatly in quality, that the editing will be less than
meticulous, and that Introductions and Afterwords may be
misleading.  On the other hand, Andrew Wachtel, working with
Alexei Parschikov, was willing to take on the project and to see
it through and, given time constraints, translation problems, and
availability of materials, I think it was useful. Clearly, it
will take some time before we get the kind of anthology we want
and, even then, what anthology, even of our own poetry, is ever
ideal, ever comprehensive?  Increasingly, U.S. publishers are
reluctant to print the original language when they bring out
translations; I know Ron Padgett had to fight to get the French
into his beautiful edition of Blaise Cendrars's poetry--and then
only in the back of the book!

The real problem THE THIRD WAVE has faced--and I don't know how
this  will be resolved--is that unfortunately now that the Soviet
Union is no more Americans have become much less interested in
the "new new poetry," have lost the thrill of coming into contact
with "forbidden" perestroika poetry.  Now Russian poetry is just
one more foreign poetry and increasingly, U.S. readers seem not
to care too much about poetry in other languages.  So what we
need to do is keep up the momentum initiated by THIRD WAVE, even
if the anthology is flawed.  This symposium and the help people
like Chernetsky have given is a step in the right direction.  And
I look forward to that next anthology he talks about.

Best wishes, Marjorie Perloff

September 25, 2013

From Phosphor

Arkadii Dragomoshchenko

St. Petersburg, Russia
atd@HM.SPB.SU

Habits of mind result from a redistribution of the places on which the eyes fall. Yes, I’m probably right about this. What I’m thinking about at this particular moment allows me to assume so. A rusty rat crossing the street. A soft, interminable twilight, and above it the night lights burning. The room in which we lived was almost eighteen meters long. In the mornings, on streets billowing steam, I went around the corner, bare foot but for sandals, to drink a cup of hot milk and eat cheese pastry. Liteiny Prospekt was blinding. I shuffled along in unbuckled sandals. Amid mocking seagulls and love cries. Through a courtyard to the Fontanka, passing the library, toward the circus, the bridge. This is about many things. It’s about emigration. About T.S. Eliot and Turgenev. But what are you thinking about? What did or what does your life consist of? I like your question. In the kitchen in a glass jar she kept demons (warring with cockroaches) which she fed with poppyseeds. Your question comes at absolutely the right moment, although it makes me slightly nauseous, the way roses or moldy dolls might–vertigo. By evening my skin stung from the sun. It happened the first time on an anthill. They rushed frantically toward the river. As if through a magnifying glass. In the future, if he’s to recount a couple of the plots that interest him (let’s suppose), he will have to get rid of her. But of whom, one wants to know! History? Geometry? Mental habits? One of these plots begins with a murder.

A yellow-edged photograph. Beads of laughter on his glasses, on the windshield. Thought is a system, producing systematic eliminations. At the same time, a question arises–as to whether or not it is right to assume, having left one’s message on the answering machine, that the resulting communication will be from a living person. “I’m not home,” for example, “I can’t come to the phone now,” or, “You have reached so-and-so,” etc. This question, however, despite its apparent silliness, is essentially theological, since it inevitably touches on the question of the life force, the soul, its migrations, and the places it inhabits, suggesting “voices of existence,” too, not to mention routine speculation as to presence and absence. And indeed, if my voice reaches your ear across a particular stretch of time (or period of endurance–the experience being in what remains), it presupposes a “distance,” since you are never I. Does my voice, even being inside me, a single being–does my voice reach you, that is, my essential “I” (our breathing is an out-terance, a crazy moment dangling between “out” and utterance), which does exist, but not for you, in your complete acceptance of flickering, glittering matter, shrouded in the most delicate rustle of awakening that flows from your pursuing vision, where the present has already existed? Where do our identifyings take place? A vibration of the surrounding atmosphere–microwinds, a mystical notebook. And “who” or “what”? Moreover, the people involved in a narrative, in other words the characters, don’t in themselves represent much of anything, except in the case of a woman who takes an important role in the action (and there is such a portrait: a familiarly shaped mouth, wide lips, a habit of adjusting the shoulders of her dress, etc.–and another, intimate portrait, more transparent: her brownish pubic hair cut short, an imponderable scar on her waist, wide pale aureoles around her nipples, the trace of a tattoo between them), whose son died a few years ago. There is some thought that he didn’t “simply die” but that he was killed near Kandahar not far from Thebes, but instead of this romantic invention most people prefer the truth, namely that he was hanged on the 14th of May in the assembly hall of his school by his classmates, using a silk cord from the white curtain; and possibly, due to unforeseeable circumstances, one of them has some notion concerning the silk cocoon of the window and a tedious description of a flight across the Atlantic, abounding in similes and necessary to the progress of future events.

One would have to be an idiot to speak of a “sequel” to the new. This is impossible to explain to artists. It’s utterly impossible even to explain it to the man who sits rubbing the crystal eyes of the fish swallowed into the museum’s lottery drum. Ball lightning, rocking, froze over my grandfather’s glass of vodka and after a few moments crept in through the window, where my grandmother, because of her nearsightedness, took it for one of the demons living in the kitchen in her glass jar which had somehow slipped past the cockroach patrols. The terra-cotta colored morocco leather of the book bindings, the faded imprint embossing the leather, the copper coolness of the sextant, the mother-of-pearl sheen of blackened silver inlaying the yellow bone paper knife–that day is no different from yesterday. There are two types of suicide (of course, it’s possible there are more). First, when your will and the world’s desires meet and you are shattered while attempting to enclose them in your own existence–you become too strong, sturdy, bulky, heavy–and I don’t pity you–like a porcelain Christmas bird. Second, when you suddenly find yourself in a realm of deafness, where nothing reflects anything else and where for a while a terrifying image of a false world is erected: what surrounds you surrounds you, fingers flowing into the porous substance of matter, every second thought finding uniquely correct solutions. No questions exist. You are born, you die, you eat, you explain the essence of phenomena, enumerating all of them. Or you don’t enumerate them. In which case, I don’t pity you.

What, one asks, is there to pity? Probably some contradiction between “desire” and “wish.” The more intense the desire, the stronger the non-wishing. A person, realizing this, dedicates himself to Demeter. The morning flowed smoothly, like a comparison slowly unfolding into similarities. And this was all in the course of things. What is this “there are no senses”?….

No? Could it possibly be “no”? But they waved sunflowers after us, which had turned gold like their eyes, withered by grief and yet also by consciousness of the happiness which had befallen them; or rather, of course, first by one and then by the other; but they simply hadn’t managed to figure out that they had been happier in other times when other models of happiness had been offered them. But we already know how the smoothly flowing morning takes a bend toward the nightingale darkness, when night, snow white as a sable, nurtures the phosphorous in a half-sphere of a porcelain cup. And to that extent we know the figure of fate and the theory of catastrophes, painstakingly illustrated by the dazzling pulse of a system which upsets all calculations as to how they’ll behave–in the same way, gusts of wind strike one’s face with the finest sands and with crackling leaves when the street is parched with yellow like a throat sifting the granular air. A mothy murk. I suggest we take the following walk. Beginning on our street, we’ll cross the intersection at the point where the huge shadow of a nut is falling on the sidewalk, its sound momentarily making voices completely unintelligible; then we’ll proceed straight ahead toward the school where after all I happen to have studied and from which I was expelled as from so many others, although I suppose it’s inappropriate to mention this. Then we’ll go through a sparse grove of mulberry trees and barren apple trees and come to the chemical plant’s sedimentation tanks, incredible in their magnitude, always astounding both his and my (that is, to put it another way, your and my) imagination–to the cyclops-like squares and rectangles formed by the embankments, which were formed in prehistoric times by bulldozers and are, as always, filled in some places with milky nacreous slush and in others with a substance startling in the beauty of its unearthly color, an “electric,” azure emerald threaded with some kind of fibrous, brass gold spasm, shot in some places with jasper blazing up at the very moment you look away and streaked like rainbowed spots of oil in the sun, and in yet others with a hellish red plasma, and all this in one sense forms a single field as far as the forsaken shooting range: in its terrifying flatness, a mirror, in whose zenith is placed the formula for the inversion of light. It would be naive, in light of this field, to think about your brother’s bones, brittle, whittled like a wafted message, or about your sister’s hair. The girl here doesn’t comb her braids, the geese don’t honk, our meeting here is set for noon. And further on we’ll come to the shooting range, empty cartridge cases, willows. In a two hour walk among the hunted wormwoods there’s much else to be found. A map of poetry. The broken mirrors of the foliage. The broken mirrors of number. Tendrils of conclusion. The “humane” is washed from a body endowed with feelings–not one single reflection falls on the object. On an uninhabited island an object replaces memory as that which proceeds toward the future. A decision has been made. Torquato Tasso’s first visit to Don Carlos took place at the end of the 80s, the second at the beginning of the 90s. It’s worth noting that comment regarding a collaborative writing of madrigals, and not only such poems as they both wrote about the prince but also about his wife, including stanzas on his first wife’s death. Hounded by madness, Tasso dashes from one courtyard to another. The autumn weather remains dry. Near Kherson the stubble is burning. The first visit. Some correspondence. A second visit.

The musicians–one must give them their due–were quite good. But Monteverdi! Why, he began composing when he was fifteen…. That time whose splinters resemble broken mirrors of foliage has never come.

September 25, 2013
Post-Soviet Subjectivity in Arkadii Dragomoshchenko and Ilya Kabakov
Barrett Watten

University of California, San Diego

While it has often been said that since the purported “fall of communism” the Soviet Union has become in reality a collection of Third World countries with nuclear weapons and a subway system, this is an untruth. It is the “Second World”–and what is that?

(Watten, in Davidson, 23)

Subjectivity is not the basis for being a Russian person. . . . “Protestants,” said Arkadii, “go to church to mail a letter to God, the church, it’s like a post office. The Orthodox church–the building is not symbolic–it is considered to be the real body of God, and Orthodox people too are God because they are together here, not alone, and speaking, by the way, has nothing to do with it.”

(Hejinian, in ibid., 34-35)

The break-up of official culture, even the “official/unofficial” dialectic that was a part of it, in the Soviet Union led to aesthetic developments characterized by an intense, utopian, and metaphysically speculative subjectivity that I am going to call “post-Soviet” even if it had its origins in earlier periods. Beginning in the 1960s with the optimistic horizons prior to the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, extending through the Brezhnev “era of stagnation” of the 1970s with its fully articulated counterculture, through the opening to the West and the influence of emigration in the 1980s, a series of these developments anticipate their reception as “postmodern culture” in the West. Identifying these “post-Soviet” developments with postmodernism would be to misunderstand them, however; as poet Dmitrii Prigov has said of the Moscow conceptual art of the 1970s, “When [Western conceptualism] entered our part of the world, [it] discovered the total absence of any idea of the object and its inherent qualities or of any hint whatsoever of fetishism” (12). The subsequent valorization of Andy Warhol would have has yet-to-be-determined (though not unimaginable) consequences; so the “Women Admirers of Jeff Koons Club” I encountered in Leningrad in 1989 would be the sign of an emerging feminism as much as an acceptance of the Reagan-era consumerism of Koons’s work. Even the culture of Russian modernism, refracted through Western connoisseurship, has been reinter- preted in the new post-Soviet context in a way discontinuous with its historical origins. In order to understand these developments as not simply the colonization of Western postmodernism, it will be necessary to develop models for Second World discourses of subjectivity. A prospective conclusion is that contemporary post-Soviet culture, once it has expanded to integrate both unofficial and international influences, does not simply mean an uncritical embrace of Western postmodernism but reveals a post-Soviet “subjectivity” that is not simply reducible to the various national identities now contesting the ground of the former Soviet state. I see aspects of this subjectivity in Moscow conceptual art, originating in the 1970s and producing internationally recognized figures such as Komar and Melamid, Erik Bulatov, and Ilya Kabakov, and in the 1980s “meta” literature from Moscow and Leningrad, now being translated in the West, exemplified by poets Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Ivan Zhdanov, Alexei Parshchikov, Ilya Kutik, and Nadezhda Kondakova.

A Metapoetics of Memory

Arkadii Dragomoshchenko’s poetry, it was said, “is unlike anything else being written in the Soviet Union today” (Molnar, 7), and direct observation bears this out. At the Leningrad “Summer School” of 1989, Dragomoshchenko was unique in abandoning the (often complex) metrical forms and performative theatricality that, however inflected by skewed and difficult sound patterns and semantics, look back to a precedent “classical tradition . . . as in the Acmeism of Akhmatova or early Mandelstam, [which] stood for heroically distanced emotion and a European cultural intertext” but which often led to poetic norms reduced to “ruthless metricality and relentless rhyming” (Molnar, 10). Dragomoshchenko read his poems as if they were written texts rather than oral presentations of cultural memory embodied in the poet as much as in the poet’s rhymes–unlike Ivan Zhdanov, who declaimed the highly wrought language of his richly textured and difficult lyrics as if ab eterno, directly from memory, to great effect. One listener afterward complained to Dragomoshchenko, “What you are doing isn’t poetry”–because it lacked the generic markers by which poetry had been set apart, in ways directly related to Osip Mandelstam’s memorization and embodiment of his poetry as a standard of truth set against ideological lies. While equally based in an internalized self-consciousness, Dragomoshchenko’s poetry rips a hole in the lyrical fabric of tradition’s modernist authority–not simply for anti-authoritarian motives but to create a new poetics that challenges conventional meaning and its entailments of common knowledge. It would be hard to underestimate the radical effect of this break with the overdeterminations of sound and sense that have provided the standards for Russian verse–and the resulting demand it conveys for a redefinition of collective memory and objective truth.

A poetics of collective memory in opposition to official history (often meeting at a middle ground in official/unofficial poets such as Yevgenii Yevtushenko, Andrei Voznesensky, and Bella Akhmadulina) is one of the implicit goals of Russian modernism–the poet (seen as survivor) becomes a living embodiment of memory. But in Dragomoshchchenko’s poem “Nasturtium as Reality,” memory is fractured and refigured by means of a relentless epistemological critique toward a more complicated horizon. The poem begins by essaying “An attempt / to describe an isolated object / determined by the anticipation of the resulting whole– / by a glance over someone else’s shoulder” (93). Spatial and temporal vectors specify the dynamics of this attempt: the poem predicates a temporal series on a “missing X” that precedes it, presumably the nasturtium but also a grammatical “there exists.” This predicative address likewise introduces the “nasturtium” in the second stanza as parallel and equivalent to the “attempt”–with both to be resolved in the “resulting whole” that will make either possible. Equally determining, however, is the opacity of the “glance over someone else’s shoulder”–that which interferes with vision equally motivates it. The nasturtium is seen as if a window were both transparent and opaque, not to the nasturtium but to itself–the “window” is an opaque analogy to transparent language through which a nasturtium normally would be seen: “A nasturtium composed / of holes in the rain-spotted window–to itself / it’s `in front,’ // to me, `behind.’” This “rain-spotted window” is the language of the poem, through whose constructed elisions occurs the possibility of description; on the surface of language, description is “in front,” though from the point of view of subjectivity in the poem the nasturtium is “behind” language (from an easier perspective, of course, “in front” and “behind” mean the nasturtium’s relation to the window). Where a window, like description, is conventionally transparent, here it is a shattered opacity of perspectives, interfering with and determining the gaze much like “someone else,” that leads to grounds of certainty and belief posed grammatically as a question: “Whose property is the gleaming / tremor / of compressed disclosure / in the opening of double-edged prepositions / in / a folded plane / of transparency which strikes the window pane?” Anything but transparently, we begin to see the nasturtium as if in double-edged language that predicts a “resulting whole” of description preceded by “an isolated object.” In the ensuing working through of the poem, memory is displaced and refigured in the spaces opened up by such knowledge through similar means; the poem is a construction of memory and knowledge between a past and a future it will formally embody. Futurity will have accounted for the nasturtium that preceded the poem, making possible the “compressed disclosure” of an intensely sub- jective continuity of memory and perception taking place in and of its language.

In stages of approach, the poem sharpens the edges of prospective meaning figured in the nasturtium, often defining the space where it would exist by negation, in terms of its absence from other spaces: “A sign, inverted– not mirror, not childhood. // (A version: this night shattered apart / by the rays of the dragonflies’ concise deep blue / drawing noon into a knot of blinding / foam” (94). In this way, the poem typically shifts “thematic” address to noncontiguous objects of a fractured nature such as this dragonfly (later a specific tree, a flight of “swifts”). Occasional eruptions of what V. N. Voloshinov would have called ideological speech (“A sign sweats over the doorway: `Voltaire has been killed. Call me immediate- ly”) likewise shift the poem away from its “object,” but they cannot detract from its expanding subjective truth: “the knowledge, which belongs to me, / absorbs it cautiously, tying it / to innumerable capillary nets: / the nasturtium–it is a section of the neuron / string” (96). This knowledge is presented not as a report to some transcendent observer–a comparison with Marianne Moore’s aesthetics of natural grandeur in “An Octopus” would fail at this point–but through the substance of language produced from a variety of sites. So shifts away from the ostensible subject of the poem are “only a continuation / within the ends’ proximity” (97); the poem expands to include fragments of dialogue, self-reference (“Arkadii / Trofimovitch Drago- moshchenko describes / a nasturtium, inserts it in his head”; 99), along with its observation of spatial and temporal discontinuities. An increasing axis of meta-commentary is created through the language of the poem by means of such semantic shifts: “The nasturtium / and anticipation rainy as the window and wind- / ow behind wind- / ow / (he in it, it in him) / like meanings smashing each other / [I don’t say, metaphor . . .] / drawn / by emptiness / one of the distinct details–“; 100). Through its insistent reduction of similarity to contiguity– description turning to language–poetry becomes virtually a kind of physics (“The mechanism / of the keys, extracting sound, hovering over / its description // in the ear, // protracted with reverberation into the now”) which depends, for its assertion of palpable reality, on a continual undermining of language by itself (“When? Where? / Me? Vertigo conceives / `things’”; 101). In this expanding horizon of meaning, sense is made “only / through another / (multiplication tables, game boards, needles, a logarithmic / bird,” i.e., anything presentable in language, “and the point isn’t which kind” (103). The poem oscillates between intensely subjective states and objective properties of description, attempting both in either’s negation: “I contemplated the truth behind events listening to the vivid- ness / of the erased words / ready to expound on the defects of precision” to become definitive of poet’s self-canceling voice: “And here in the 41st year of life / A pampered fool, whose speech continually / misses the point” (106). “The Nasturtium” is an account of subjectivity seen through such intensities of language: “I follow from burst to burst, from explosion to explosion, / faces, like magnesium petals floating by, which permit those who remain a misprint in memory / to be recognized” (108), but it makes no assump- tions about a continuity of nature behind the poem as the basis for these effects. Rather, the poem moves directly from the negated description of objective reality to expanded systems of meaning encompassing it: “Conjecture is simple– / the nasturtium is not /// necessary. It is composed from the exceptional exactness / of language / commanding the thing–`to be’ / and the rejection of understanding” (110-11). The poem locates the objective world by placing the language of description under erasure, opening language to many languages and in this way deter- mining what its relation to nature is going to be: “The nasturtium–it is the undiminished procession / of forms, the geological chorus of voices crawling, / shouting, disclosing each other” (112).

It is through this clash of languages tending toward future objectivity that a space for refigured subjectivity, seen in purely material strands of memory, can be located. In that futurity is connected here to a poetics of many languages, it is important that Dragomoshchenko is by birth Ukrainian (born in postwar occupied Potsdam, raised in multilingual environs of Vilnitsa, now living in St. Petersburg), although he writes in Russian. He has, in other poems, shifted to Ukrainian as poetic counterpoint specifically to bring up a kind of archaic subtext under the surface of ordinary language, thus allying his epistemological concerns with those of cultural memory. In “The Nasturtium,” such archaic subtexts appear in two autobiographical narratives that emerge out of its nonnarrative continuum. In one such vignette, a typically cinematic moment of self-knowledge, “tossing her skirt on the broken bureau / with wood dust in her hair / a neighbor girl, spreading her legs / puts your hand where it is hottest” (103)–which leads, not quite as typically, to anxious spasms of linguistic cross-cutting. It is as if the eruption of the feminine demands a release of poetic authority, as it does in the next section in a more measured way where an account of the death of a woman close to the poet, again in and of language, locates another range for the outer horizons of the poem: “and all the more unbearable the meaning of `her’ ripened in you / while the quiet work went on revealing / thoughts / (you, her) from the sheath of feminine pain / the silent symmetry crumbling in the immense proximity of the end” (105). In this way “the meaning of `her’” aligns with both memory and objectivity; while there is a difficult cultural truth in this admission of women only at the extremes of authorizing self-knowledge, at least the Russian poetic convention of transcendent nature (think of waving fields of grain as equivalent to verse in a Sovkino documentary of Yevtushenko) is being broken down in its assumptions.

This location of a poetics in a refiguring of memory through the limits of objectivity aligns Dragomoshchenko’s work with related projects in post-1960s Soviet culture. So the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, a prior reference point for the semantically shifting world of Dragomoshchenko’s work, crop up in his recent article on poetic subjectivity. Making a figure for collective knowledge, Dragomoshchenko says that the poet may return, like a blind bee, to a “hive” of understanding, but there is no hive. It disappears at the very moment when understanding comes close to being embodied in itself and its “things,” which to all appearances is really the “hive.” We wander through a civilization of destroyed metaphors: road, home, language, a man on a bicycle, embraces, Tarkovsky’s films, moisture, “I,” memories, history, and so forth. (“I(s),” 130)For Dragomoshchenko, “the problem of subjectivization is tautological,” fractally reproduced in the dispersion and refiguring of a collective center, “the hive,” in culture’s unreified objects. Wandering through this “civilization of destroyed metaphors,” one can only figure the holistic tenor from its dispersed vehicles. Such a demetaphorization occurs similarly in a film such as Tarkovsky’s The Mirror (by means of techniques intended as the opposite of Eisenstein’s constructed film metaphors). Nonnarrative, intuitive sequences displace memory, continuity, futurity onto a fragmented world of objects comprising several registers of image. In one, the burning house in the countryside to which mother and son have been removed during the war stands as mnemonic placeholder for the future return of the father that is always to come (there is a question for the viewer if it “really” takes place). In another, the multiple, sidelong, disjunct views down corridors of the state publishing house where the mother worked in the 1930s as proofreader enacts the moment where the collective “hive” dissolves into “things”; millennial horizons become fragments of presence, as in the hinted propaganda poster barely glimpsed on the way to other rooms. Finally, the insertion of documentary footage of the Spanish Civil War argues the film’s subjectivity against the intrusiveness of represented history, which takes on memorial value as loss. Images in Dragomoshchenko have similar organizing dynamics; so “the nasturtium bearing fire” which closes Dragomoshchenko’s poem stands in place of memory’s anticipated return; the overlapping and mutually contradictory frames of descriptive language dissolve certainty into isolated moments; and the interruptions of narrative displace subjectivity toward expanded horizons. Closure–the father’s return or the nasturtium as realized object–is distributed through these registers as partial resolution.

The relation between empirical reality and a deferred future that exceeds nature but in terms of which it can only be known (figured here in the form of the poem) is also a central theme in recent discussions in Soviet (and post-Soviet) science. The opening invocation of our “Summer School” was to “be scientific,” but what followed led rapidly away from any question of empirical verification toward a prospective, metaphysical hyperspace in which, for example, “futurist art [like that of Khlebnikov’s post-Euclidean mathematics of world correspondence] has its own dominant in consciousness” (Watten, in Davidson, 43). So a recent article by Moscow philologist Mikhail Dziubenko describes a scientific project that would unite the problem of “new meaning” in poetry and art with an idiosyncratic branch of Soviet science known as the “Linguistics of Altered States of Consciousness”–a quest for a new approach to method characteristic of a wide range of Soviet science. For Dziubenko, “At deep levels of consciousness (which acquire primary meaning in the creative process) the ability to penetrate into the logic of other languages is established. Artistic creativity, then, involves a break- through into another language, which uses the character- istics and lacunae of the original” (27). Such a language, in addition, is based in material, sensed reality, but only for its future potential:

We must understand that there is only one linguistic universum, uniting all world languages in the massive entity of their historical development and functional applications. This universum is not a scientific abstraction. It is manifested concretely, on the lowest, phonetic level, in naming, where moreover language differentiations do not play any definitive role, and on the highest, grammatical-syntactic level, in art, which is only possible by virtue of the existence of different languages and which is itself an unconscious borrowing of foreign language structures.(29-30)

Here, “the knowledge of one language is knowledge of all languages,” leading to a research program in which “there is no doubt that a Persian specialist could contribute a great deal to the study of Khlebnikov’s works” (30-31). Creativity expands language into a utopian “linguistic universum” in a romantic philology that recalls Wilhelm von Humboldt’s fantasy of whole nations thinking in each of their various languages. There are several points to this excursus into late-Soviet discussions of scientific method: the first is that creativity is thought to have ontological implications; the second is that as material reality, crea- tive language extends, “through characteristics and lacunae,” into a greater reality that contains it; and a third would be that, structuring language in the variety of its altered states as well as being structured by it, subjectivity is not permitted the transcendent distance of the observer but instead experiences loss due to an expanded suprasubjectivity whenever the grounds for language (altered states, presumably) historically change. So the impact of the creative on scientific method is to open a space of loss of certainty that can then be aligned with a need for a reconstituted memory–as it is for Dragomoshchenko. “Nasturtium as Reality” is not only a reconstitution of lyric subjectivity but a parallel text to post-Soviet considerations of collective memory and empirical truth. Clearly “an authoritarian complex” involving several strands in Soviet culture–lyric voice, embodied memory, and scientific objectivity–is being dismantled as the occasion of poetic address.

The Fall of Soviet Man

The theatricality of Ilya Kabakov’s conceptual albums, paintings, and installations is at a polar remove from Dragomoshchenko’s expansive interiority. Ten Characters, a series of installations with accompanying narratives published as a book of the same name based on the theme of the kommunalka or communal apartment, was presented by Kabakov at the Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York and the Institute for Contemporary Art, London, in 1988-89. These projects had been under development since at least the early 1980s, but one imagines their everyday materials to have been collected, and various components worked on, over the preceding decade. Installation itself, understood as one of the forms by which traditional genres such as painting and sculpture have become destabilized in postmodernism, takes on a culturally hybrid value in Kabakov’s work as most of what was seen in the active Soviet underground of the 1970s was itself “installed” in some nongallery setting such as an apartment or open-air happening; the bulldozer art exhibition of the late Brezhnev era in this sense could be the outer social horizon for the form. The genre continued in Moscow conceptual art in what has been called “Aptart,” which was characterized as uniting a social scale of presentation based in everyday life with a diverse and often aggressively dissonant range of issues, materials, and strategies. This work seems more a cultural breeding ground for new ideas than a finished product, while Kabakov’s installations have all the finish and framing of the most professional work in the genre as it has developed as a component of museum programs over the last fifteen years in the West–witness his inclusion in the recent Dislocations show at the Museum of Modern Art. It would be interesting to chart Kabakov’s movement from Soviet oppositional scale to that of Western postmodernism; this could be read, thematically, in his work as a movement from the simultaneously millennial and dystopian horizons of the Soviet context through to another kind of transcendence implied in Kabakov’s showing, outside the Soviet Union, works that depict its deepest, most interior reality.

Subjectivity in Kabakov, rather than being read along some razor’s edge of language in nonnarrative forms addressed to metaphysical horizons, is narratively defined in the life histories of disjunct, created personae configured around the communal apartment seen from a transcendent perspective (even if it is still linked to the metaphysical as an enabling point of reference for the work). Transcendence is really the only option for a social reality modeled on such living arrangements, which, from the Revolution through the Khrushchev housing boom and into the present, typically crammed the urban working class into multi-family dwellings, often one family per room, where everyone shared the collective amenities and, according to Kabakov, life was open-ended verbal abuse. Given this premise, Kabakov has created a world of discontinuous, extreme personality types to be imagined as somehow, impossibly, sharing the same communal space while inventing wildly adventurous behaviors and systems of belief to accommodate themselves to their world. The short narrative accounts that accompany Kabakov’s meticulously detailed physical installations are anything but anecdotal; rather, these narratives form a template through which the realities of Soviet systems of belief can be represented as they would be experienced in everyday life (or byt, a central term in Kabakov’s work, and one that evinces from many post-Soviets an unutterable horror: “Our everyday life, you cannot imagine how boring it is!” once remarked poet Alexei Parshchikov). There is a system of interlocking, mutually supporting belief systems in Kabakov’s byt, a structuring intersubjectivity that gives an accurate value to the represented world of May Day parades, the Moscow Metro, Soviet theme parks outside. “The kommunalka presents a certain collective image, in which all the ill-assortedness and multileveledness of our reality is concentrated and vividly revealed” for Kabakov (Tupitsyn, 50), a reality figured as an “autonomous linguistic organism,” “an extended childhood,” “a repressive sea of words,” “the madhouse,” and so on (51-54). Alternatives emerge: one can go into oneself (“Some of the inhabitants of the communal apartment lead a mysterious, even secretive existence”; Kabakov, 52) or “leap out of oneself,” as Kabakov himself says he did (“While formally I haven’t ceased to live inside myself, I observe what happens from repeatedly shifting positions”; Tupitsyn, 55). Beyond either possibility, “some powerful, lofty, and faraway sound is clearly audible. A higher voice” (54) for both artist and communal residents. Listening to the voice of the “beyond” will be one of the organizing metaphors of Kabakov’s project–it is simultaneously the voice of collective life and the position of transcendence from which the komunalka‘s voices can be heard.

So in “The Man Who Flew into His Picture,” subjectivity is drawn as if by a magnet to a negating white space, a ground for pure projection: “He sees before him an enormous, endless ocean of light, and at that moment he merges with the little, plain figure that he had drawn.” At this moment of self-undoing, however, “he comes to the conclusion that he needs some third person, some sort of witness [to be] present to watch him `from the side’” (7). Such a witness is given embodiment as merely the case of delusions in the next room, where “The Man Who Collects the Opinions of Others,” “standing behind the door, immediately writes down in his notebook everything which is said, no matter what” (9). This quest for objectivity yields only another structured fantasy:

According to his view, opinions are arranged in circles. Beginning at any point, they then move centrifugally and as they move away from the centre they meet "opinions" moving from other centres. These waves are superimposed, one on top of another; according to him, the entire intellectual world is a gigantic network, a lattice of similar dynamic intersections of these waves. He compared all this to the surface of a lake, where 10-20 stones are randomly and uninterruptedly thrown all at once. (9)

“In talking about this, it was as though my neighbour actually saw these magical, shining circles” (10); Kabakov visualizes them likewise in his installation of tidy mock-ups of the character’s notebook pages arranged around the “objects” that gave rise to the “opinion waves.” While this is clearly high satire of venerable Russian literary pedigree, there is an identification with these delusional modes of organizing reality that makes Kabakov’s project unlike the realist mode of describing the subject positions of, say, the flophouse in Gorky’s The Lower Depth (which Kabakov cites in an interview). The meticulous details of Kabakov’s miniature mock-up and full-scale realization of the scene from “The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment” reveal a complicity with monumental obsessiveness, as do his “characters’” collections of objects and albums of kitsch postcards. It is Kabakov himself who assembled these Soviet versions of Trivial Pursuit, reframing his activities through the various personae. In each of these works, the space of culture and everyday life is seen as the opposite of the transcendental perspective and monumental organization of Soviet society’s official self-presentation (given the dominant red of numerous cheap posters covering the walls). The explosion that rips a hole in the top floor of the communal apartment, sending its resident into orbit, creates a negative space from Soviet monumentalism, while the orbits of Yuri Gagarin and followers ironically mimed here stand for state-sponsored transcendence purveyed to the masses at large. The desire to substitute material reality for ideological abstraction created this negative space: “I asked him why there were metal bands attached to the model and leading upward from his future flight” (13). Such kitsch futurism–the mechanical predictability of “We are Going to Communism”–seems to have created, in this char- acter, a highly developed metaphysics to explain how it will be:

He imagined the entire Universe to be permeated by huge sheets of energy which "lead upwards somewhere." These gigantic upward streams he called "petals." . . . The Earth together with the sun periodically crosses through one of these enormous "petals." If you knew this precise moment, then you could jump from the orbit of the Earth onto this "petal," i.e., you could enter, join this powerful stream and be whirled upwards with it.

Fabricating a contraption made of rubber “extension wires” and explosive charges, the resident realizes his objective and blasts into orbit, thus creating a monumental gap in the explanatory fabric of everyday life which others rationalize in a characteristic way: “Maybe he really did fly away, that sort of thing happens.” In the ideological space vacated by monumental trajectories and transcendent goals one can see a cultural breeding ground for rumors, speculations, and theologies of all sorts.

Such systems of belief, orbiting as it were around a vacant belief, are made equivalent, in yet another irony, to the material culture that was supposed to provide them with normative expectations. So a metaphorized collecting, a simple accumulation of bits and pieces of culture, becomes the activity of the artist; material reality replaces a more conventionally redemptive collective memory. In works like “The Short Man,” “The Collector,” “The Person Who Describes His Life Through Characters,” and “The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away,” Kabakov makes his art an inductive process adding up to indeterminate but compelling horizons that motivate his fractal characters. The “short man’s” project of accumulation and re-presenting cultural detritus in fold-out albums is a parodic version of realism seen as representing the world “in little”: “Everything that goes on in our communal kitchen, why, isn’t that a subject, it’s actually a ready-made novel!” (20); however, the only people who can stoop so low as even to read this little world are, like its author, little (as the poet Louis Zukofsky wrote, “Strabismus may be of interest to strabismics; those who see straight look away!”); others invited in to view the work merely step over it as an obstacle. The substratum of material culture, reinterpreted as past not present reality, initiates a process of individuation and recuperation in “The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away”: “A simple feeling speaks about the value, the importance of everything. This feeling is familiar to everyone who has looked through or rearranged his accumulated papers: this is the memory associated with all the events connected with each of these papers” (44). So this character initiates a project of collecting, preserving, and labeling all the discarded items found in the kommunalka‘s hallway in order to recover this value: “An enormous past rises up behind these crates, vials, and sacks. . . . They cry out about a past life, they preserve it” (45).

“The Person Who Describes His Life Through Characters” continues this process of induction to uncover a principle of individuation through his subjects: “that even these variegated fragments belonged not to his single conscious- ness, his memory alone, but, as it were, to the most diverse and even separate minds, not connected with each other, rather strongly different from each other” (34), while “The Untalented Artist” modulates this effect of individuation through structures of the state that in fact produce it; the paradoxical success of his paintings (in the actual installation an excessively beautiful group of large-scale, ideologically inflected works by Kabakov) is described as based equally in the artist’s partly realized native talent and in the lacunae of official projects (various official notices and posters) he was commissioned to paint: “What re- sults is a dreadful mixture of hackwork, simple lack of skill, and bright flashes here and there of artistic premonitions and `illuminations’” (17)–a kind of suprasubjective intention. In “The Collector” a similar suprasubjective horizon looms as the dissociation of identity through collective culture proceeds; arrangements of numerous color postcards on state tourist and memorial themes become “enormous, complex pictorial works which are worthy of a very great professional talent” (31). Recombining disparate strands of the culture produces an effect of “the power of ORDER”; “This is the triumph of the victory of order over everything.” There is a paradox here, however; while it is the artist who in fact created this order by making his arrangements of cultural materials, the voice of order points beyond individuality: “It seemed to me that in some terrible way, some kind of, how shall I say it, idea of COMMUNALITY, was expressed in [the arrangements], that very same thing which surrounded us all in our common overcrowded apartment” (32). This drawing out of the collective voice is pursued in “The Composer Who Combined Music with Things and Images,” whose staged mass productions in the kommunalka hallway, like a miniature version of a Stalinist sports extravaganza, trades the sovereignty of the artist who arranges reality for a collective voice heard by all: “Gradually those who are reading the [arranged] texts begin to notice that beyond the sound of their voices is a faintly heard, special kind of sound” (27)–a transcendent moment reproducing, I would argue, an idea of communality.

So we have come full circle, from an obsessively material collocation and implicit satire on Soviet collective life to the question of higher, transcendent, metaphysical perspectives. In “The Rope,” a piece that serves as a comment on his “characters,” Kabakov essays the point at which materialism breaks off and spirituality begins: “So these empty ends of rope . . . represent the soul before and after `our’ life, and in the middle is depicted its life, so to speak, in its earthly segment” (48). Working out from these middles toward the open ends of the soul, Kabakov recuperates the multiple identities of his communal apartment in terms of a single, collective destiny–albeit otherworldly. His project here could not be less like George Perec’s description of multiple lives in the same building in La Vie mode d’emploi, where each life means a separate history, a different outcome rendered in the reified space of owned or rented individual dwellings. Kabakov, in his ironic rejection of Soviet culture, still maintains a totalizing attitude toward history–at the risk of a virtual nihilism in regard to the things of this world, an attitude necessary, it would seem, to maintain a totalizing coherence. In a short text on the status of the “beyond” in relation to material reality, Kabakov speaks of “emptiness” as conditions of his work: “First and foremost I would like to speak about a peculiar mold, a psychological condition of those people born and residing in emptiness . . . . Emptiness creates a peculiar atmosphere of stress, excitedness, strengthlessness, apathy, and causeless terror” (Ross, 55). In the negated space once occupied by a a transcendent, materialized state, there is now the inescapable horizon of a totalizing “stateness”:

The stateness in the topography of this place is that which belongs to an unseen impersonality, the element of space, in short all that serves as an embodiment of emptiness. . . . A metaphor comes closest of all to a definition of that stateness: the image of a wind blowing interminably alongside and between houses, blowing through everything by itself, an icy wind sowing cold and destruction. . . . What sort of goals does this wind, this stateness, set for itself, if they exist at all? These goals always bear in mind the mastery of the scope of all territory occupied by emptiness as a SINGLE WHOLE.(58)

From this single whole of Soviet reality it is but one step to a profound nihilism (and one that is more socially significant than simply the attitude of an artist): “Nothing results from anything, nothing is connected to anything, nothing means anything, everything hangs and vanishes in emptiness, is born off by the icy wind of emptiness” (59). These collective emptinesses interpret the nonexistent fullnesses, the pasts and futures at both ends of Kabakov’s individual, material rope.

Values for transcendence in the project would thus seem to refer importantly to two diverse registers: the this-worldly perspective of the artist-as-character who organizes reality in some compensatory way, and the other-worldly vision of the collective/individual subject, who would seem to have no other option than to await the dystopian millennium. Kabakov, in his position outside and beyond Soviet reality in commenting on his installation for the Museum of Modern Art, explicitly resolves these two versions of transcendence:

The installation as a genre is probably a way to give new correlations between old and familiar things. By entering an installation, these various phenomena reveal their dependence, their "separateness," but they may reveal as well their profound connection with each other, which was perhaps lost long ago, which they at some time had, and which they always needed. And particularly important is the restoration of that whole that had fallen into its parts [the separation of art from the "mystical"] I had spoken of.

The “mystical” union of restored parts within a formal whole would be one that Kabakov had induced from the ideological horizons of his characters but which, as artist working as it were “outside” the kommunalka, can realize in his chosen form. There is an explicit self-contradiction here; so when Kabakov says in an interview, “Upon discharge from the madhouse, I cease to exist. I exist only insofar as I am the resident of a kommunalka. I know no other self” (Tupitsky, 54), it is clear that his “outside” position as installation artist in the Museum of Modern Art, Kabakov’s position as quasi-Soviet emigre’ (he maintains studios in France and in Moscow), can only be another version of the transcendence strategized from within the confines of collective life. Re-sited within the museum’s horizon, however, this insistence on wholeness becomes reinterpreted as tragic separation and loss, as the Fall of Communism that so comforts the curatorial perspective of Dislocations:

Kabakov's reconstruction of the Tenants' Club of Moscow Housing Project No. 8 gives one a sense of the dreary mediocrity of Soviet society. . . . This unwelcome gathering place has been set up for an official lecture on the demerits of unofficial art, examples of which are propped against the drab gray walls between oxblood banners. Although the work of artists outside the system, the paintings nonetheless exemplify some of the bleakness and awkwardness of mainstream Soviet life to which they are the oppositional exception.(Storr, 16-17)

Nothing in Kabakov’s work could be construed as endorsing such a view of “opposition”; indeed, it is explicit purpose is to induce a metaphysical wholeness that reinterprets “the unity of opposites we learned about in school.” How then to understand the central conceit of Kabakov’s MOMA installation, that “apparently, someone or something was to appear in the city that evening, and not just anywhere, but right in the middle of the club hall.” The appearance and disappearance of this person occurs: “There is no single description of what happened–the reports of various witnesses maintain the most adamant discrepancies” but leading to a negative vision of sorts: “After all the commotion had subsided, the entire floor in the center of the hall was littered with groups of little white people, constantly exchanging places.” It is almost too easy to view this moment as an allegory for the collapse of central authority leading to a negative social space in which the masses circulate aimlessly, without direction. The too-availability of this reading does seem to indicate an influence of the Museum’s interpretative horizons, trading on Soviet history in a representative installation of Kabakov’s totalizing process. This is the crisis of emigration, of the literal materialization of the transcendent position outside a totality it organizes, and here it leads Kabakov’s partial, metaphysically sited narratives to a grand narrative of somewhat lesser interest. However, it may be said here, as elsewhere, that nothing is lost even in translation, for the likewise evident effect of Kabakov’s piece is to make each of the other installations in this mainstream extravangza–by Adrian Piper, Chris Burden, David Hammons, Louise Bourgeois, Bruce Nauman, and Sophe Calle, indeed the entire permanent collection of MOMA used by Calle as the site for her work–interpretable as the compensatory projects of other residents of an expanded communal apartment. This sovietization of cultural horizons–an opening up from the oppositional politics of the Cold War to the reality of collective horizons–is a hopeful reason to reject Kabakov’s integration into the MOMA show as an imperial trophy collected under the banner of Western postmodernism.

Whose Subject?

Two aspects of post-Soviet subjectivity are evident in the examples of Dragomoshchenko and Kabakov. In the former, authority is impossibly sited from immanent horizons that entail voices of lyric subjectivity, collective memory, and scientific objectivity. The entire activity of the poem– its creation of new meaning in and of itself–is central to its implicit thesis that subjectivity, while everywhere in its own undoing, cannot be known from a transcendental position. The formal dimensions of Dragomoshchenko’s work– nonnarrative, fractal, predicative, and continually metaleptic–are an instance of a “world-making” poetics that works out of a continuity of fabricated worlds. Central to these constructions is their conveyance of futurity; the lyric voice will have been the authority of present address from a point in the distant future; both collective memory and scientific truth will have been revealed in similar ways. In order to understand the implications for post-Soviet culture here, it will be necessary to develop an account of Soviet subjectivity in relation to such utopian, transcendent, and immanent horizons–survivals, as indicated in the epigraph above, of an embodied collectivity (not necessarily national) preceding the state.

In Kabakov’s constructions, a converse implication for the subject may be descried, one that is more amenable to the international horizons of postmodern culture simply because it dismantles transcendence in the process of post-Soviet emigration. These displacements of subjectivity and authority are literally enacted in Kabakov’s shows in the high-rent collective apartments of the West, and in so doing take part in the process by which Soviet authority has been undermined through the foreign contacts that the Stalinist state did so much to prohibit. This new horizon is nothing if not ironic, and the emptying out of the “full presence” of the collective apartment into the nihilism of “stateness” illustrates an eerily dystopian moment. The difference from Western discourses of the postmodern, with their anchoring in rationality and critique, should equally be apparent–with the unforeseen result that the post-Soviet project makes the postmodern one appear even more qualified by an imaginary totality. Here the construction of the postmodern as an effect of Cold War oppositions–hinted at by Fredric Jameson’s citing of it as consequence of the “era of national revolutions” and to that extent inflected by their lost horizons–shows its “cultural specificity” to the West when compared to the emerging post-Soviet horizons.

Works Cited
- Davidson, Michael, Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman, and Barrett Watten. Leningrad: American Writers in the Soviet Union. San Francisco, 1991.
- Dragomoshchenko, Arkadii. Description. Trans. Lyn Hejinian and Elena Balashova. Los Angeles, 1990.
- —. “I(s).” Trans. Lyn Hejinian and Elena Balashova. Poetics Journal 9 (June 1991): 127-37.
- —. “Syn/Opsis/Taxis.” Trans. Lyn Hejinian and Elena Balashova. Poetics Journal 8 (June 1989): 5-8.
- Dziubenko, Mikhail. “`New Poetry’ and Perspectives for Philology.” Trans. Lyn Hejinian and Elena Balashova. Poetics Journal 8 (June 1989): 24-31.
- Jameson, Fredric. Introduction to Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, N.C., 1991.
- Kabakov, Ilya. Artist’s statement and text for installation, Dislocations, Museum of Modern Art, 1991.
- —. “Dissertation on the Cognition of the Three Layers . . . ” In Margarita Tupitsyn, Margins of Soviet Art, 144-47.
- —. “On Emptiness.” In Ross, Between Spring and Summer, 53-60.
- —. Ten Characters. London, 1989.
- Molnar, Michael. Introduction to Dragomoshchenko, Description, 7-16.
- Parshchikov, Alexei. “New Poetry.” Trans. Lyn Hejinian and Elena Balashova. Poetics Journal 8 (June 1989): 17-23.
- Perec, Georges. La Vie mode d’emploi. New York, 19xx.
- Prigov, Dmitrii. “Conceptualism and the West.” Trans. Michael Molnar. Poetics Journal 8 (June 1989): 12-16.
- Ross, David, ed. Between Spring and Summer: Soviet Conceptual Art in the Era of Late Communism. Boston, 1990.
- Storr, Robert. Catalogue essay on Kabakov in Storr, ed., Dislocations. New York, 1991.
- Tarkovsky, Andrei. Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema. Trans. Kitty Hunter-Blair. Austin, Tex., 1986.
- Tupitsyn, Margarita. Margins of Soviet Art: Socialist Realism to the Present. Milan, 1989.
- Tupitsyn, Victor. “From the Communal Kitchen: A Conversation with Ilya Kabakov.” Trans. Jane Bobko. Arts 66, no. 2 (October 1991): 48-55.
September 25, 2013

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Discount Mail-Order Information:

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discount.  Buy one for $7, two for $13, three for $19 or all four
for $25.  We pay US postage!  (Foreign orders add $2.50 per
book).  Please make all checks or money orders payable to:

Fiction Collective Two
Publications Unit
Illinois State University
Normal, IL 61761

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

_Black Sacred Music_
A Journal of Theomusicology

Jan Michael Specer, editor
7:2 (Fall 1993)

Presenting the proceedings of an important conference held in
Blantyre, Malawi in November of 1992, this volume represents a
significant step for the African Christian church toward
incorporating indigenous African arts and culture into its
liturgy.  Recognizing that the African Christian church continues
to define itself in distinctly Western terms, forty-nine
participants from various denominations and all parts of Africa--
Uganda, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Madagascar, Mauritius,
Zimbabwe, Zambia, Sierra Leone, Cameroon--and the United States
met to share ideas and experiences and to establish strategies
for the indigenization of Christianity in African churches.

Other special issues available by single copy:

The William Grant Still Reader
presents the collected writings of this respected American
composer.  Still offered a perspective on American music and
society informed by a diversity of experience and associations
that few others have enjoyed.  His distinguished career spanned
jazz, traditional African-American idioms, and the European
avant-garde, and his compositions ranged from chamber music to
opera.

Sacred Music of the Secular City
delves into the American religious imagination by examining the
religious roots and historical circumstances of popular music.
Includes essays on musicians Robert Johnson, Duke Ellington,
Marvin Gaye, Madonna, and 2 Live Crew.

Subscription prices:  $30 institutions, $15 individuals.  Single
issues:  $15.  Please add $4 for subscription outside the U.S.
Canadian residents, add 7% GST.

Duke University Press/Box 90660/Durham NC  27708

4) --------------------------------------------------------------

_boundary 2_
an international journal of literature and culture

Paul Bove, editor

Forthcoming in 1993:

The Violence of Light in the Land of Desire; or, How William
Jones Discovered India / Jenny Sharpe

Veiled Woman and Veiled Narrative in Tahar Ben Jelloun's _The
Sandchild_ / John D. Erickson

The Ideologies and Semiotics of Fascism:  Analyzing Pound's
_Cantos 12-15_ / Stephen Hartnett

Lionel Trilling, _The Liberal Imagination_, and the Emergence of
the Cultural Discourse of Anti-Stalinism / Russell J. Reising

Divine Politics:  Virginia Woolf's Journey toward Eleusis in _To
the Lighthouse_ / Tina Barr

_Saxa loquuntur_:  Freud's Arcaeology of the Text / Sabine Hake

Deleuze's Nietzsche / Petra Perry

A Tyranny of Justice:  The Ethics of Lyotard's Differend / Allen
Dunn

Thinking\Writing the Postmodern:  Representation, End, Ground,
Sending / Jeffrey T. Nealon

Three issues annually
Subscription prices:  $48 institutions, $24 individuals, $16
single issues.  Please add $6 for postage outside the U.S.

Duke University Press/ Box 90660 /Durham NC  27708

5) --------------------------------------------------------------

_The Centennial Review_

Edited by R.K. Meiners

_The Centennial Review_ is committed to reflection on
intellectual work, particularly as set in the University and its
environment.  We are interested in work that examines models of
theory and communication in the physical, biological, and human
sciences; that re-reads major texts and authoritative documents
in different disciplines or explores interpretive procedures;
that questions the cultural and social implications of research
in a variety of disciplines.

**SPECIAL ISSUE**

POLAND:  FROM REAL SOCIALISM TO DEMOCRACY
Winter 1993

Guest Editor:  Stephen Esquith
Essays on events and ideas in recent Polish history, culture, and
politics.

Adam Michnik:
_An Interview with Leszek Kolakowski_

Marek Ziolkowski:
_The Case of the Polish Intelligentsia_

Marian Kempny:
_On the Relevance of Social Anthropology

to the Study of Post-Communist Culture_

Plus:  Lagowski, Narojek, Szszkowska, Buchowski, and others.

Please begin my _CR_ subscription:

___ $12/year (3 issues)

___ $18/two years (6 issues)

(Add $4.50 per year for mailing outside the US)

Please send me the special issue:

___ Poland: From Real Socialism to Democracy

Please make your check payable to _The Centennial Review_.  Mail
to:

_The Centennial Review_
312 Linton Hall
Michigan State University
East Lansing MI  48824-1044

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

_College Literature_
A Triannual Literary Journal for the Classroom

Edited by Kostas Myrsiades

"_College Literature_ has made itself in a short time one of the
leading journals in the field, important reading for anyone
teaching literature to college students."
     J. Hillis Miller
     University of CA, Irvine

"Congratulations on some extremely important work; you certainly
seem attuned to what is both valuable and relevant."
     Terry Eagleton
     Oxford University

"In one bold stroke you seem to have turned _College Literature_
into one of the things everyone will want to read."
     Cary Nelson

"My sense is that _College Literature_ will have substantial
influence in the field of literacy and cultural studies."
     Henry A. Giroux

"A journal one must consult to keep tabs on cultural theory and
contemporary discourse, particularly in relation to pedagogy."
     Robert Con Davis

Forthcoming issues:

     Cultural Studies:  Theory, Praxis, Pedagogy
     Teaching Postcolonial Literatures
     Europe and America:  The Legacy of Discovery
     Third World Women

     African American Writing

Subscription Rates:      US                  Foreign
         Individual      $24.00/year         $29.00/year
         Institutional:  $48.00/year         $53.00/year

Send prepaid orders to:

_College Literature_
Main 544
West Chester University
West Chester, PA 19383

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

_CONTENTION_
Debates in Society, Culture, and Science

_Contention_ is:

"...simply a triumph from cover to cover."
                                   Fredrick 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:

Journals Division
Indiana University Press
601 N. Morton
Bloomington IN  47104
 ph: (812) 855-9449
fax: (812) 855-7931

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

_Differences_
A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies

QUEER THEORY: LESBIAN AND GAY SEXUALITIES
(Volume 3, Number 2)
Edited by Teresa de Lauretis

Teresa de Lauretis: _Queer Theory:  Lesbian and Gay Sexualities
                     An Introduction_
Sue Ellen Case:     _Tracking the Vampire_
Samuel R. Delany:   _Street Talk/Straight Talk_
Elizabeth A. Grosz: _Lesbian Fetishism?_
Jeniffer Terry:     _Theorizing Deviant Historiography_
Thomas Almaguer:    _Chicano Men:  A Cartography of Homosexual
                     Identity and Behavior_
Ekua Omosupe:       _Black/Lesbian/Bulldagger_
Earl Jackson, Jr.:  _Scandalous Subjects:  Robert Gluck's
                     Embodied Narratives_
Julia Creet:        _Daughter of the Movement:  The
                     Psychodynamics of Lesbian S/M Fantasy_

THE PHALLUS ISSUE
(Volume 4, Number 1)
Edited by Naomi Schor and Elizabeth Weed

Maria Torok:        _The Meaning of "Penis Envy" in Women (1963)_
Jean-Joseph Goux:   _The Phallus:  Masculine Identity and the
                     "Exchange of Women"_
Parveen Adams:      _Waiving the Phallus_
Kaja Silverman:     _The Lacanian Phallus_
Charles Bernheimer: _Penile Reference in Phallic Theory_
Judith Butler:      _The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological
                     Imaginary_
Jonathan Goldberg:  _Recalling Totalities:  The Mirrored Stages
                     of Arnold Schwarzenegger_

Emily Apter:        _Female Trouble in the Colonial Harem_

Single Issues:  $12.95 individuals
                $25.00 institutions
                ($1.75 each postage)

Subscriptions (3 issues):  $28.00 individuals
                           $48.00 institutions
                           ($10.00 foreign surface postage)

Send orders to:

Journals Division
Indiana University Press
601 N Morton
Bloomington IN  47404
 ph: (812) 855-9449
fax: (812) 855-7931

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

_DISCOURSE_

Volume 15, Number 1

SPECIAL ISSUE

FLAUNTING IT:  LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

Kathryn Baker:  _Delinquent Desire:  Race, Sex, and Ritual in
                Reform Schools for Girls_

Terralee Bensinger:  _Lesbian Pornography:  The Re-Making of (a)
                     Community_

Scott Bravmann:  _Investigating Queer Fictions of the Past:
                 Identities, Differences, and Lesbian and Gay
                 Historical Self-Representations_

Sarah Chinn and Kris Franklin:  _"I am What I Am" (Or Am I?):
                                The Making and Unmaking of
                                Lesbian and Gay Identity in _High
                                Tech Boys_ _

Greg Mullins:  _Nudes, Prudes, and Pigmies: The Desirability of
               Disavowal in _Physical Culture Magazine_ _

JoAnn Pavletich:  _Muscling the Mainstream:  Lesbian Murder
                  Mysteries and Fantasies of Justice_

David Pendelton:  _Obscene Allegories:  Narrative Structures in
                  Gay Male Porn_

Thomas Piontek:  _Applied Metaphors:  AIDS and Literature_

June L. Reich:  _The Traffic in Dildoes:  The Phallus as Camp and
                the Revenge of the Genderfuck_

Single Issues:  $12.95 individuals
                $25.00 institutions
                ($1.75 each postage)

Subscriptions (3 issues):  $25.00 individuals
                           $50.00 institutions
                           ($10.00 foreign surface postage)

Send orders to:

Journals Division
Indiana University Press
601 N Morton
Bloomington IN  47404
 ph: (812) 855-9449
fax: (812) 855-7931

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

_The Electronic Journal on Virtual Culture_

We are very pleased by the great interest in the _Electronic
Journal on Virtual Culture_.  There are already more than 1,280
people subscribed.

The _Electronic Journal on Virtual Culture_  (EJVC) is a refereed
scholarly journal that fosters, encourages, advances and
communicates scholarly thought on virtual culture.  Virtual
culture is computer-mediated experience, behavior, action,
interaction and thought, including electronic conferences,
electronic journals, networked information systems, the
construction and visualization of models of reality, and global
connectivity.

Contact Ermel Stepp Editor-in-Chief or Diane Kovacs Co-Editor at
the e-mail addresses listed below. You can retrieve the file EJVC
AUTHORS via anonymous ftp to byrd.mu.wvnet.edu (pub/ejvc) or via
e-mail to listserv@kentvm or listserv@kentvm.kent.edu

Cordially,

Ermel Stepp, Marshall University, Editor-in-Chief
MO34050@Marshall.wvnet.edu
Diane (Di) Kovacs, Kent State University, Co-Editor
DKOVACS@Kentvm.Kent.edu

11) -------------------------------------------------------------

_FutureCulture_

Requests to join the _FutureCulture_ E-list must be sent to:
future-request@nyx.cs.du.edu

The subject must have one of the following:

subscribe realtime  -subscribe in realtime format
subscribe digest    -subscribe in daily-digest (1msg/day)
subscribe faq       -subscribe to faq only (periodical updates)
unsubscribe realtime
unsubscribe digest
unsubscribe faq
help                -send help on subscribing and general info
send info           -receive info on the FutureCulture
mailing list
send faq            -this file

FutureCulture list maintainer and keeper of this FAQ:
andy
ahawks@nyx.cs.du.edu
ahawks@mindvox.phantom.com

Contact on Internet:  ahawks@nyx.cs.du.edu

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

_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.

                    Spring 1993 Special Issue

                 _CHALLENGING ABUSE AND ASSAULT_

       Anne Allison   Dominating Men:  Male Dominance on
                      Company Expense in a Japanese Hostess Club

     Samuel Kimball   _Into the light, Leland, into the light_:
                      Emerson, Oedipus, and the Blindness of Male
                      Desire in David Lynch's _Twin Peaks_

          Vinay Lal   The Incident of the _Crawling Lane_:  Women
                      in the Punjab Disturbances of 1919

       Sandra Runzo   Intimacy, Complicity, and the Imagination:
                      Adrienne Rich's _Twenty-one Love Poems_

   Grace A. Epstein   Bodily Harm:  Female Containment and Abuse
                      in the Romance Narrative

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

    _GENDERS_ is published triannually in Spring, Fall, Winter
        Single Copy rates:  Individual $9, Institution $14
                   Foreign postage, add $2/copy
       Subscription rates:  Individual $24, Institution $40
             Foreign postage, add $5.50/subscription

Send orders to:

University of Texas
Box 7819
Austin TX  78713

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

Eastgate Systems, Inc. announces:

its name was Penelope
by Judy Malloy

(Cambridge, MA) Eastgate Systems has announced the publication of
_its name was Penelope_, an important new interactive novel by
Judy Malloy.

_its name was Penelope_ explores the boundaries of performance
art, hypertext, interactive fiction and poetry.  It is a woman
artist's story--a story about making art, of love, sex, and work,
of being very young and growing older.  The reader is invited to
step into the mind of narrator Anne Mitchell, to see things as
she sees them, to share her memories.  _its name was Penelope_ is
filled with uncomfortable truths, closely observed and stunningly
retold:  the rituals enacted at the opening of art shows of men
dying of AIDS, the conflict between the demands of love and art,
the pain and sacrifice and, occasionally, the rewards of a life
in the arts.  In her introduction, artist and hypertext author
Carolyn Guyer writes:

     If you've never been able to make up your mind whether an
     artist's life is divine or hellish, read _its name was
     Penelope_.  Judy Malloy tells the truth.

Judy Malloy's artists books and electronic narratives, including
_its name was Penelope_, have been exhibited at galleries and
exhibitions throughout the world.  1992-3 venues include:

     The Computer Is Not Sorry               The Houston Center
     (Boston)                                for Photography

     Women and Technology                    The National Library
     (Beverly Hills)                         of Lisbon

     Ringling School of Art                  Intl. Symposium
     and Design                              Electronic Art
                                             (Australia)

An associate editor of _Leonardo_, Malloy has lived all over the
world, from a tent on a small island in the Rhine to a house in
the Colorado Rockies.  She currently resides in Berkeley,
California.

Like all Eastgate hypertext titles, _its name was Penelope_ is
carefully crafted for interactive performance on the computer.
No conventional, paper version of the work exists, or can exist.
The program runs on all Macintosh computers, models Plus or
better.  _its name way Penelope_ sells for $19.95.  No additional
software is required.

Since 1982, Eastgate Systems, Inc. has been a leading publisher
of quality hypertexts and hypertext writing tools, including
Storyspace (tm) and Hypergate (tm) hypertext writing
environments, Michael Joyce's _Afternoon, a story_, Sarah Smith's
_King of Space_, and Stuart Moulthrop's _Victory Garden_.

_its name was Penelope_ is available from:

Eastgate Systems, Inc.
PO Box 1307, Cambridge MA 02238 USA
(617) 924-9044 (800) 562-1638

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

_Minnesota Review_

Tell your friends!  Tell your librarians!
The new _Minnesota Review_'s coming to town!

**now under new management**

Fall 1992 issue (n.s. 39):  "PC WARS"

includes essays by:

* Richard Ohmann              "On PC and related matters"
* Michael Berube              "Exigencies of Value"
* Barry Sarchett              "Russell Jacoby, Anti-
                               Professionalism, and the Politics
                               of Cultural Nostalgia"
* Michael Sprinkler           "The War Against Theory"
* Balance Chow                "Liberal Education Left and Right"

Spring 1993 issue (n.s. 40):  "THE POLITICS OF AIDS"
Poetry, Fiction, Interviews, Essays.

topics include:

* Queer Theory and activism.
* Public image of AIDS.
* Politics of medical research.
* Health care policies.

Subscriptions are $10 a year (two issues), $20
institutions/overseas.  The new _Minnesota Review_ is published
biannually and originates from East Carolina University beginning
with the Fall 1992 special issue.

Send all queries, comments, suggestions, submissions, and
subscriptions to:

Jeffrey Williams, Editor
_Minnesota Review_
Department of English
East Carolina University
Greenville, NC  27858-4353

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

_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 the undefined
regions among critical theory, the visual arts, and writing.
_Nomad_ is published biannually and subscriptions are $9 for one
year (2 issues).  For information contact:

Mike Smith
406 Williams Hall
Florida State University
Tallahassee, FL  32306

E-mail:
Mike Smith
msmith@garnet.acns.fsu.edu

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

_NO MORE NICE GIRLS_
author:  Ellen Willis

In her new collection of journalism and cultural criticism, _No
More Nice Girls_, Ellen Willis "offers serious readers the fruits
of her wide-ranging curiosity, thoughtful analysis, penetrating
insights, and utterly unapologetic commitment to freedom and
pleasure as liberating, radical ideas" (_Booklist_).  _No More
Nice Girls_ will be published by Wesleyan/University Press of New
England on February 26, 1993.

A former columnist and senior editor at the _Village Voice_,
Willis is the author of a previous collection, _Beginning to See
the Light_ (also available from Wesleyan/UPNE), which was hailed
as "stimulating and satisfying" by the _New York Times_ and as
the work of an "outspoken, articulate and thoughtful woman" by
the _Los Angeles Times_.  _No More Nice Girls_ brings her project
of cultural critique into the contemporary era of conservative
backlash.

Available through:

University Press of New England
23 South Main Street
Hanover  NH  03755
tel: (603) 643-7107
fax: (603) 643-1540

17) -------------------------------------------------------------

_NOUS REFUSE_

a new electronic collective
a new place to make news
a new place to write
a new place

contributors to date include:

joe amato
charles berstein
michael blitz
don byrd
luigi-robert drake
nancy dunlop
chris funkhouser
carolyn guyer
pierre joris
michael joyce
andrew levy
stuart moulthrop
derek owens
martha petry
david porush
martin rosenberg
armand schwerner
juliana spahr
kali tal
katie yates

to get involved, contact joe amato:
JAMATO@UX1.CSO.UIUC.EDU

18) -------------------------------------------------------------

_October_
Art | Theory | Criticism | Politics

The MIT Press

Edited by:  Rosalind Kraus
            Annette Michelson
            Yve-Alain Bois
            Benjamin H.D. Buchloh
            Hal Foster
            Denis Hollier
            John Rajchman

                              "OCTOBER, the 15-year old
                              quarterly of social and cultural
                              theory, has always seemed special.
                              Its nonprofit status, its cross-
                              disciplinary forays into film
                              and psychoanalytic thinking, and
                              its unyielding commitment to
                              history set it apart from the
                              glossy art magazines."
                                        --Village Voice

As the leading edge of arts criticism and theory today, _OCTOBER_
focuses on the contemporary arts and their various contexts of
interpretation.  Original, innovative, provocative, each issue
examines interrelationships between the arts and their critical
and social contexts.

Come join _OCTOBER_'s exploration of the most important issues in
contemporary culture.
Subscribe Today!

Published Quarterly ISSN 0162-2870.  Yearly Rates:  Individual
$32.00; Institution $80.00; Student (copy of current ID required)
and Retired:  $22.00.  Outside USA add $14.00 postage and
handling.  Canadians add additional 7% GST.  Prepayment is
required.  Send check payable to _OCTOBER_ drawn against a US
bank, MasterCard or VISA number to:  MIT Press Journal / 55
Hayward Street / Cambridge, MA 02142-1399 / TEL: (617) 233-2889 /
FAX: (617) 258-6779 / E-Mail:  journals-orders@mit.edu

19) -------------------------------------------------------------

_REPRESENTATIONS_

"...conveys an excitement
  rarely seen in academic
  periodicals.  The array of
  subjects is dizzying."
           -- Wendy Steiner
  Times Literary Supplement

SPECIAL ISSUE:  FUTURE LIBRARIES

Number 42 * Spring 1993
Edited by R. Howard Bloch and Carla Hesse

ROGER CHARTIER
"The Library Without Walls:  Fifteenth to Twenty-First
Centuries."

DOMANIQUE JAMET and HELENE WAYSBORD
"History, Philosophy, and Ambitions of the Bibliotheque de
France."

EMMANUEL LE ROY LADURIE
"The Everyday Life of an Administrator of the Bibliotheque
Nationale."

GEOFFREY NUNBERG
"The Place of Books."

ALAIN GIFFARD and GERALD GRUNBERG
"New Reading Technologies."

PROSSER GIFFORD
"Information and Democracy:  The Libraries of Eastern Europe."

ANTHONY VIDLER
"The Site of Reading:  Urban Libraries from Labrouste to
Perrault."

KENNETH DOWLIN and CATHY SIMON
"The New San Francisco Public Library:  Reprisals of the Civic
Mission."

Subscriptions:  Individuals $30.00, Students $22.00, Institutions
$57.00.  Outside U.S. add $6.00 postage.

To order, write:

_Representations_
University of California Press
Journals Division
2120 Berkeley Way
Berkeley CA  94720
fax: (510)643-7172 (VISA/MC only)

20) -------------------------------------------------------------

_RIF/T_
E-Poetry Literary Journal

                              In all arts there is a physical
                              component...We must expect great
                              innovations to transform the entire
                              technique of the arts.
                                                  --Paul Valery

This list was formed to serve as a vehicle for (1) distribution
of an interactive literary journal: _RIF/T_ and related exchange
(2) collection of any information related to contemporary
poetics.

_RIF/T provides a forum for poets that are conversant with the
media to explore the full potential of a true electronic journal.
Dynamic--not static, _RIF/T_ shifts and riffs with the diction of
"trad" poetry investigating a new, flexible, fluid poetry of
exchange.

_RIF/T_ has the listserv name e-poetry: to subscribe to e-poetry,
send the command

SUB e-poetry your name

to:  LISTSERV@UBVM or LISTSERV@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU via mail
message (again, as the first line in the body of the mail, not
the Subject: line).  For example:  SUB e-poetry John Doe

Owner:  Ken Sherwood
v001pxfu@ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu

21) -------------------------------------------------------------

_South Atlantic Quarterly_
Winter 1993 (Volume 92, Number 1)

_The World According to Disney_

Guest Editor:  Susan Willis

Contents:

Critical Vantage Points on Disney's World
Susan Willis

Reality Revisited
Karen Klugman

Of Mice and Ducks:  Benjamin and Adorno on Disney
Miriam Hansen

It's a Small World After All:  Disney and the Pleasures of
Identification
Jane Kuenz

The Cartoonist's Front
Holly Allen and Michael Denning

Disney World:  Public Use/Private State
Susan Willis

The Contemoprary Future of Tommorow
Shelton Waldrep

Technological Utopias
Alexander Wilson

Theme Park
Arata Isozaki

Subscription Prices:  $48 institutions, $24 individuals.  Single
issues $12.  Please add $8 for postage outside the U.S.

Duke
University
Press
Journals
Division
Box 90660
Durham,
N.C. 27708

22) -------------------------------------------------------------

_SSCORE_
Social Science Computer Review

G. David Garson, Editor
Ronald Anderson, Co-Editor

The official journal of the Social Science Computing Association,
_SSCORE_ provides a unique forum for social scientists to acquire
and share information on the research and teaching applications
of microcomputing.  Now, when you subscribe to _Social Science
Computer Review_, you automatically become a member of the Social
Science Computing Association.

Recent articles:

Social Impacts of Computing:  Codes of Professional Ethics
Ronald Anderson

Teledemocracy and Political Science
William H. Dutton

Trends in the Use of Computers in Economics Teaching in the
United Kingdom
Guy Judge and Phil Hobbs

The Essentials of Scientific Visualization:  Basic Techniques and
Common Problems
Steve E. Follin

Psychology:  Keeping up with the State of the Art in Computing
Charles Huff

Computer Assistance in Qualitative Sociology
David R. Heise

Automating Analysis, Visualization, and Other Social Science
Research Tasks
Edwin H. Carpenter

From Mainframes to Micros:  Computer Applications for
Antropologists
Robert V. Kemper, Ronald K. Wetherington, and Michael Adler

Quaterly
Subscription prices:  $48 individuals, $80 institutions
Single Issue:  $20
Please add $8 for postage outside the U.S.
Canadian residents add 7% GST

Duke University Press/ Journals Division / Box 90660 /Durham NC
27708

23) -------------------------------------------------------------

_Studies in Popular Culture_
Dennis Hall, editor.

_Studies in Popular Culture_, the journal of the Popular Culture
Association in the South and the American Culture Association in
the South, publishes articles on popular culture and American
culture however mediated:  through film, literature, radio,
television, music, graphics, print, practices, associations,
events--any of the material or conceptual conditions of life.
The journal enjoys a wide range of contributors from the United
States, Canada, France, Israel, and Australia, which include
distinguished anthropologists, sociologists, cultural
geographers, ethnomusicologists, historians, and scholars in mass
communications, philosophy, literature, and religion.

Please direct editorial queries to the editor:
Dennis Hall
Department of English
University of Louisville
Louisville KY  40292
tel: (502) 588-6896/0509
Fax: (502) 588-5055
Bitnet:  DRHALL01@ULKYVM
Internet:  drhall01@ulkvm.louisville.edu

All manuscripts should be sent to the editor care of the English
Department, University of Louisville, Louisville, KY 40292.
Please enclose two, double-spaced copies and a self-addressed
stamped envelope.  Black and White illustrations may accompany
the text.  Our preference is for essays that total, with notes
and bibliography, no more than twenty pages.  Documentation may
take the form appropriate for the discipline of the writer; the
current MLA stylesheet 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.

_Studies in Popular Culture_, is published semiannually and is
indexed in the _PMLA Annual Bibliography_.  All members of the
Association receive _Studies in Popular Culture_.  Yearly
membership is $15.00 (International:  $20.00).  Write to the
Executive Secretary, Diane Calhoun-French, Academic Dean,
Jefferson Community College-SW, Louisville, KY 40272, for
membership, individual issues, back copies, or sets.  Volumes I-
XV are available for $225.00.

24) -------------------------------------------------------------

_VIRUS 23_

For those brave souls looking to explore the Secret of Eris, you
may wish to check out _VIRUS 23_.

2 and 3 are even and odd,
2 and 3 are 5,
therefore 5 is even and odd.

_Virus 23_ is a codename for all Erisian literature

Don Webb
6304 Laird Dr.
Austin, TX 78757
0004200716@mcimail.com

_VIRUS 23_ is the annual hardcopy publication of A.D.o.S.A, the
Alberta Department of Spiritual Affairs.  This is what a few of
cyberculture's luminaries have had to say about it:

All issues are available at $7.00 ppd from:

_VIRUS 23_
Box 46
Red Deer, Alberta
Canada
T4N 5E7

Various chunks of _VIRUS 23_ can be found at Tim Oerting's
alt.cyberpunk ftp site (u.washington.edu, in
/public/alt.cyberpunk. check it out).

For more information online contact Darren Wershler-Henry:
grad3057@writer.yorku.ca

25) -------------------------------------------------------------

_Zines-L_

announcing a new list available from:  listserv@uriacc

To subscribe to _Zines-L_ send a message to:
listserv@uriacc.uri.edu

on one line type:
SUBSCRIBE ZINES-L first name last name

26) -------------------------------------------------------------

             _Postmodern Culture_ announces PMC-MOO

PMC-MOO is a new service offered (free of charge) by _Postmodern
Culture_.  PMC-MOO is a real-time, text-based, virtual reality
environment in which you can interact with other subscribers of
the journal and participate in live conferences.  PMC-MOO will
also provide access to texts generated by _Postmodern Culture_
and by PMC-TALK, and it will provide the opportunity to
experience (or help to design) programs which simulate
object-lessons in postmodern theory.  PMC-MOO is based on the
LambdaMOO program, freeware by Pavel Curtis.

To connect to PMC-MOO, you *must* be on the internet.  If you
have an internet account, you can make a direct connection by
typing the command

telnet dewey.lib.ncsu.edu 7777

at your command prompt.  Once you've connected to the server, you
should receive onscreen instructions on how to log in to PMC-MOO.

If you do not receive these onscreen instructions, but instead
find yourself with a straight login: and password: prompt, it
means that your telnet program or interface is ignoring the 7777
at the end of the command given above, and you will need to ask
your local user-support people how to telnet to a specific port
number. If you have the Emacs program on your system and would
like information about a customized client program for PMC-MOO
that uses Emacs, contact pmc@unity.ncsu.edu by e-mail.

27) -------------------------------------------------------------

*******************************
Call for papers/participants in
interdisciplinary conference on
Cyborgs.
*******************************

Please contact:

Steven Mentor
Dept. of English
GN-30
University of Washington
Seattle WA  98195
e-mail:  cybunny@U.Washigton.edu

We welcome all disciplines and perspectives including historians,
philosophers, computer scientists, bio(nic?) engineers, medical
technologists, cognitive psychologists, anthropologists,
sociologists, science fiction writers, poets, artists, and of
course, cyborgs them/ourselves.  We are planning to put on the
conference in Winter, 1994, so please write us with issues,
questions, quandaries, directions, permutations.

28) -------------------------------------------------------------

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Call for Papers on Don DeLillo
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Papers are solicited on the topic of the writings of Don DeLillo
(his fiction, drama, and journalism) for possible inclusion in a
cluster section of a future issue of _Postmodern Culture_.
Selected essays may also be included in a book collection planned
for later publication.

Inquiries may be sent to Glen Scott Allen at:

E7E4ALL@TOE.TOWSON.EDU

or by mail to:

Stephen D. Bernstein
English Department
University of Michigan
Flint, MI 48502

29) -------------------------------------------------------------

*********************
Call for Submissions
*********************

_Hypertext Fiction and the Literary Artist_ is a research project
investigating the use of hypertext technology by creative
writers.

The project consists of evaluations of software and hardware,
critiques of traditional and computerized works, and a guide to
sites of publication.

We would like to request writers to submit their works for
review.  Publishers are requested to send descriptions of their
publications with subscription fees and submission formats.  We
are especially interested to hear from institutions which teach
creative writing for the hypertext format.

To avoid swamping our e-mail account, please limit messages to a
page or two in length.  Send works on disk (IBM or Mac) or
hardcopy to:

_Hypertext Fiction and the Literary Artist_
3 Westcott Upper
London, Ontario
N6C 3G6
E-mail:  KEEPC@QUCD.QUEENSU.CA

30) -------------------------------------------------------------

*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+
Call for Papers/Fiction/Poetry
_Minnesota Review_ Fall, 1993
*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+

Fall Issue (n.s. 41, 1993):  "The Institution of English"

Professional context and institutional formation of literature.
We welcome articles and particularly review-essays on recent
trends in criticism, theory, and literature such as "The New
Medievalism" or the _boundary 2_ school, as well as on
institutional structures, such as NEH, MLA, graduate
assistantships, SCT, the rise of cultural studies programs, new
journals, book series, and the politics of publishing.

Essays, interviews, and reviews due by June 1, 1993.

Send all queries, comments, suggestions, submissions, and
subscriptions to:

Jeffrey Williams
Editor
_Minnesota Review_
Department of English
East Carolina University
Greenville NC  27858-4353

31) -------------------------------------------------------------

_PHAGE_

Welcome to the Future
---------------------

_PHAGE_ is a new magazine for people who are living on the new
edge, surfing along the new wave of radical thought.  This
magazine was born from the need for a forum for new ideas in
print media.

_PHAGE_ will be designed and produced on the Macintosh computer,
in an 8 1/2 x 11" format, and each issue will be in the area of
64 pages.  We are planning to sell the magazine at a cover price
of $3.50 (US), but until costs are measured, we cannot say for
sure.

We are looking for submissions and assistance with this project
from all angles:  fiction writers, essayists, ranters, graphic
designers, artists, poets, etc..  Submissions are welcome in any
form, in any style or tone, though that is not a guarantee that
everything we receive will be printed.  We are looking for
submissions as soon as possible, but feel free to send them
whenever you like.  However, due to a lack of available
resources, we are unable, for now, to reward monetarily those who
contribute to _PHAGE_.  While we have little money, our primary
interest is producing the highest-quality magazine possible,
containing an immense spectrum of information.

Possible topics include:

Focusing on the Edges of Culture, examining the Fringes of Reason
and the Reasons of the Fringe, the Here and Now and Soon-to-Be,
via unstructured Tones that Ebb and Flow from In-Form Information
to Formless Rants of Altered States.

If you would like to contribute to _PHAGE_ in any way, please
send all queries, submissions, tips, words of wisdom, etc., to us
on the Internet at:

obscure@mindvox.phantom.com
obscure@zero.cypher.com

or

ahawks@nyx.cs.du.edu

If you do not have Internet access, please send mail to:

_PHAGE_ Magazine
PO Box XXX
Green Bay, WI  54304

32) -------------------------------------------------------------

[PMC editor's note: the SUNY Press Series _Postmodern Culture_ is
not affiliated with the electronic journal _Postmodern Culture_.]

*************************************
Announcement and Call for Submissions
_Postmodern Culture_
*************************************

_Postmodern Culture_
A SUNY Press Series

Series Editor:  Joseph Natoli
Editor:         Carola Sautter

Center for Integrative Studies, Arts and Humanities
Michigan State University

We invite submissions of short book manuscripts that present a
postmodern crosscutting of contemporary headlines--green politics
to Jeffrey Dahmer, Rap Music to Columbus, the Presidential
campaign to Rodney King--and academic discourses from art and
literature to politics and history, sociology and science to
women's studies, from computer studies to cultural studies.

This series is designed to detour us off modernity's yet-to-be-
completed North-South Superhighway to Truth and onto
postmodernism's "forking paths" crisscrossing high and low
culture, texts and life-worlds, selves and sign systems, business
and academy, page and screen, "our" narrative and "theirs,"
formula and contingency, present and past, art and discourse,
analysis and activism, grand narratives and dissident narratives,
truths and parodies of truths.

By developing a postmodern conversation about a world that has
overspilled its modernist framing, this series intends to link
our present ungraspable "balkanization" of all thoughts and
events with the means to narrate and then re-narrate them.
Modernity's "puzzle world" to be "unified" and "solved" becomes
postmodernism's multiple worlds to be represented within the
difficult and diverse wholeness that their own multiplicity and
diversity shapes and then re-shapes.

Accordingly, manuscripts should display a "postmodernist style"
that moves easily and laterally across public as well as academic
spheres, "inscribes" within as well as "scribes" against realist
and modernist modes, and strives to be readable-across-multiple-
narratives and "culturally relative" rather than "foundational."

Inquiries, proposals, and manuscripts should be addressed to:

Joseph Natoli
Series Editor
20676jpn@msu.edu

or

Carola Sautter
Editor
SUNY Press
SUNY Plaza
Albany, NY 12246-0001

33) -------------------------------------------------------------

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Call for Papers
_PSYCHE:  an interdisciplinary
journal of research on consciousness_
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

You are invited to submit papers for publication in the inaugural
issue of _PSYCHE:  an interdisciplinary journal of research on
consciousness_ (ISSN:  1039-723X).

_PSYCHE_ is a refereed electronic journal dedicated to supporting
the interdisciplinary exploration of the nature of consciousness
and its relation to the brain.  _PSYCHE_ publishes material
relevant to that exploration from the perspectives afforded by
the disciplines of Cognitive Science, Philosophy, Psychology,
Neuroscience, Artificial Intelligence, and Anthropology.
Interdisciplinary discussions are particularly encouraged.
_PSYCHE_ publishes a large variety of articles and reports for a
diverse academic audience four times per year.  As an electronic
journal, the usual space limitations of print journals do not
apply; however, the editors request that potential authors do not
attempt to abuse the medium.  _PSYCHE_ also publishes a hardcopy
version simultaneously with the electronic version.  Long
articles published in the electronic format may be abbreviated,
synopsized, or eliminated from the hardcopy version.

Submitted matter should be preceded by:  the author's name;
address; affiliation; telephone number; electronic mail address.
Any submission to be peer reviewed should be preceded by a 100-
200 word abstract as well.  Note that peer review will be blind,
meaning that the prefatory material will not be made available to
the referees.  In the event that an article needs to be shortened
for publication in the print version of _PSYCHE_, the author will
be responsible for making any alterations requested by the
editors.

Any figures required should be designed in screen-readable ASCII.
If that cannot be arranged, figures should be submitted as
separate postscript files so that they can be printed out by
readers locally.

Authors of accepted articles assign to _PSYCHE_ the right to
publish the text both electronically and as printed matter and to
make it available permanently in an electronic archive.  Authors
will, however, retain copyright to their articles and may
republish them in any forum so long as they clearly acknowledge
_PSYCHE_ as the original source of publication.

Subscriptions

Subscriptions to the electronic version of _PSYCHE_ may be
initiated by sending the one-line command, SUBSCRIBE PSYCHE-L
Firstname Lastname, in the body on an electronic mail message to:

LISTSERV@NKI.BITNET

34) -------------------------------------------------------------

*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+
Call for Papers on the
work of Derek Walcott
*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+

_VERSE_ is calling for submissions for a special issue devoted to
the work of Derek Walcott:  12-15 page articles on his poetry or
plays; poems that are indebted to Walcott in some way.  _VERSE_
is a journal published both in the UK and out of the College of
William and Mary in Virginia.  The articles should be written for
an informed, but not necessarily academic, audience.  Deadline:
end of August.

Please direct inquires to:

Susan M. Schultz
Department of English
1733 Donaghho Road
University of Hawaii-Manoa
Honolulu HI  96822
(h) 808-942-3554
(w) 808-956-3061

35) -----------------------------------------------------------

CALL FOR PAPERS

PANEL: Feminist Theory and Technoculture
CONFERENCE: Northeast Modern Language Association (NEMLA)
DATE: April 8 & 9, 1994
PLACE:  Pittsburgh, PA

This panel will address a variety of feminist theories
(poststructuralist, Marxist, Gender and Sexuality Studies,
ecofeminism, etc.) as they respond to the problems and
possibilities of the culture of technology.  Topics include (but
are not limited to) the Internet (incl. bbs, lists, email,
electronic conferences, MUSHES, MUDS, etc); television,
telephone, fax and other electronic media; and technoliterature.

Send inquiries to lxh16@po.cwru.edu

Send abstracts and papers by September 1 to
Prof. Lila Hanft
Dept. of English
11112 Bellflower Rd.
Case Western Reserve Univ.
Cleveland, OH  44106-7117

36) -------------------------------------------------------------

_International Conference on Refereed
Electronic Journals:  Towards a Consortium
for Networked Publications_

October 1-2, 1993
(Friday & Saturday)

Sponsored by:

Medical Research Council
Natural Sciences & Engineering Research Council
Social Science & Humanities Research Council of Canada
The University of Manitoba

The Delta Winnipeg Hotel
288 Portage Avenue
Winnipeg, Manitoba
R3C 0B8

The aims of the conference are: (1) to make academic merit the
sole consideration in the publication of journal-type research,
(2) to advance the idea that the academic community should have a
hand in determining what gets published and how it is
disseminated, (3) to provide an outlet for research publication
that is not subject to the severe economic constraints of
traditional paper-journal publishing, (4) to make collective use
of the scholarly advantages of network publication (savings in
production costs, increased speed in publication and
dissemination process), (5) to provide an effective and low-cost
means for universities and learned societies to play a greater
role as disseminators of research information, and not only as
producers and consumers.

This historic two-day event will be organized as a series of
plenary working sessions that will include presentations from
major resource people from a variety of fields.  An exhibition of
the latest computer technology is also planned.  Registration is
limited to 200 participants.

Registration Information

Fees:

     If paid by September 1, 1993:           $150.00 (Cdn)
     If paid after September 1, 1993:        $200.00 (Cdn)
     Dinner for Guests of participants:      $ 30.00 (Cdn)

Requests for information or the completed Conference Registration
Form together with payment should be sent to:

Ms. Helga Dyck, Co-ordinator
Institute for the Humanities
Room 108 Isbister Bldg.
Winnipeg, Manitoba R3T 2N2 Canada
ph.: (204) 474-9599
fax: (204) 275-5781
e-mail:  umih@ccu.umanitoba.ca

37) -------------------------------------------------------------

               "THE WATCH-TOWERS OF PEACE"

          An Art Installation By Fred Forrest (FR)
               May 28th - 4th June 1993

          Installation telephone Numbers:

               0043 3453 5411
               0043 3453 5412
               0043 3453 5413

SEND YOUR MESSAGES OF PEACE TO FORMER YUGOSLAVIA FROM ACROSS THE
BORDER IN AUSTRIA.

RING THESE NUMBERS FROM EVERY CORNER OF YOUR PLANET TO COVER THE
LAND OF WAR WITH SLOGANS OF PEACE.

DISSEMINATE YOUR ENERGIES IN REAL TIME THROUGH POSITIVE WAVES.

We would like to draw your attention to an installation that will
be realised by the artist Fred Forrest within the framework of
the European Month of Culture in Graez.  The installation will
incorporate the general theme "Entegenzte Grenzen" (Dismissed
Borders) and function as leading project.  It will open in April
and can already be considered as extraordinary and exemplary.

The technological communication media Fred Forrest is going to
install at the Slovenian border will be placed in such a way that
they will look in the direction of the former Yugoslavian
territory and are called

"OBSERVATION TOWERS FOR PEACE".

These technological communication media will consist of five
sound amplifiers connected to computers and the INTERNATIONAL
TELEPHONE NETWORK.  The metal structures designed to carry these
strong amplifiers will be erected in Ehrenhausen, directly at the
Austrian-Slovenian border.  Through these amplifiers, peace
messages are to be emitted in real-time mode.  These peace
messages will be transmitted to the amplifiers via telephone from
the whole world over.

A computer will be used to transform the messages via synthesizer
into one collective sound signal.  The modulation of this
whistling sound will change in accordance with both the number of
incoming phone calls and the distance from which they come.

There is no doubt that the interaction of Fred Forrest's project
and its symbolic dimension in view of the present geopolitical
situation make the installation a first class media event and
emphasize the meaning of our modern society's new forms of
communication.

For more information, please write to:

          Fred Forrest
          Territoire Du MZ,
          60540 Anserville,
          France

          Tel 44 08 43 05
          Fax 44 08 59 67

38) -------------------------------------------------------------

_MONTAGE 93:  INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL OF THE IMAGE_
(1-800-724-4332)  montage93@brock1p.bitnet

The future of visual communication will open up to educators,
professionals and the public during an international festival
slated for July 11 through August 7, 1993 in Rochester, New York.

The festival will explore the present and future of image-making
as well as the fusion of art and technology.  _MONTAGE 93_ will
feature the latest advances in imaging technology through a
series of events which include a Trade Show, International Film
and Video Festivals, Lecture and Panel series, Arts & Technology
Exposition, International Student Festival and world-premiere
exhibitions.

The lecture and panel discussion series will focus on numerous
topics including digital museums, living in the computer age,
privacy and civil liberties in the computer age, Virtual Reality,
the future of film and video, and more.

Sixteen exhibitions, including 11 premiering at the festival,
along with the works of over 300 international artists will
feature photography, computer graphics, holography, video,
electrostatic imaging, electronic transmission and other advanced
techniques.

The Trade Show will include a pavilion of over 50 international
companies dealing with many facets of technology.  Expect to see
manufacturers of next-generation of digital cameras, Interactive
and Virtual Reality, Computer 2D and 3D graphic software,
business imaging and more.

The International Student Festival will draw about 500 students
and educators from across the globe.  A Media Teachers
Educational Conference will also take place during _MONTAGE 93_.

The Arts & Technology Exposition puts you inside simulated studio
environments as artists and tool developers demonstrate still,
moving, dimensional, and interactive image-making systems.

The International Film Festival will feature screenings of new
films, 35 and 16 mm, created by independent producers.

Video, Etc. is a showcase of video, computer animation, and time-
based electronic work by international artists and independent
producers.

Several professional conferences will take place during _MONTAGE
93_ including:  High-Tech Global New York; Oracle; Fast Rewind;
International Visual Sociology Association; and the Media Arts
Teachers Association.

_MONTAGE 93_ now has available ticketing and registration
information.  This includes the names and topics scheduled for
panel discussions and seminars.  Please call 1-800-724-4332 and
request additional information or call (716) 442-6722 (overseas)
or e-mail:  montage93@brock1p.bitnet.

39) -------------------------------------------------------------

_FEMISA_

FEMISA@mach1.wlu.ca

_FEMISA_ is conceived as a list where those who work on or think
about feminism, gender, women and international relations, world
politics, international political economy, or global politics,
can communicate.

Formally, _FEMISA_ was established to help those members of the
Feminist Theory and Gender Studies Section of the _International
Studies Association_ keep in touch.  More generally, I hope that
_FEMISA_ can be a network where we share information in the area
of feminism or gender and international studies about
publications or articles, course outlines, questions about
sources or job opportunities, information about conferences or
upcoming events, or proposed panels and information related to
the _International Studies Association_.

To subscribe:  send one line message in the BODY of mail-message

                       sub femisa your name

to: listserv@mach1.wlu.ca

To unsub send the one line message

                           unsub femisa

to: listserv@mach1.wlu.ca

I look forward to hearing suggestions and comments from you.

Owner:  Deborah Stienstra  stienstr@uwpg02.uwinnipeg.ca
        Department of Political Science
        University of Winnipeg

40) -------------------------------------------------------------

_HOLOCAUS:  Holocaust list_

HOLOCAUS on LISTSERV@UICVM.BITNET
         or LISTSERV@UICVM.UIC.EDU

HOLOCAUS@uicvm has become part of the stable of electronic mail
discussion groups ("lists") at the University of Illinois,
Chicago.  It is sponsored by the University's History Department
and its Jewish Studies Program.

To subscribe to HOLOCAUS, you need an Internet or Bitnet computer
account.  From that account, send this message to
LISTSERV@UICVM.BITNET or LISTSERV@uicvm.uic.edu:

                  SUB HOLOCAUS Firstname Surname

Use your own Firstname and Lastname.  You will be automatically
added.  You can read all the mail, and send your own postings to
everyone on the list (We have about 100 subscribers around the
world right now).

Owner:  JimMott@spss.com

The HOLOCAUS policies are:

1.   The coverage of the list will include the Holocaust itself,
     and closely related topics like anti-Semitism, and Jewish
     history in the 1930's and 1940's, as well as related themes
     in the history of WW2, Germany, and international diplomacy.

2.   We are especially interested in reaching college teachers of
     history who already have, or plan to teach courses on the
     Holocaust.  In 1991-92, there were 265 college faculty in
     the US and Canada teaching courses on the Holocaust (154 in
     History departments, 67 in Religion, and 46 in Literature).
     An even larger number of professors teach units on the
     Holocaust in courses on Jewish history (taught by 273
     faculty) and World War II (taught by 373), not to mention
     many other possible courses.  Most of these professors own
     PC's, but do not use them for e-mail.  We hope our list will
     be one inducement to go on line.  _HOLOCAUS_ will therefore
     actively solicit syllabi, reading lists, termpaper guides,
     ideas on films and slides, and tips and comments that will
     be of use to the teacher who wants to add a single lecture,
     or an entire course.

3.   H-Net is now setting up an international board of editors to
     guide _HOLOCAUS_ policy and to help stimulate contributions.

4.   _HOLOCAUS_ is moderated by Jim Mott (JimMott@spss.com), a
     PhD in History.  The moderator will solicit postings (by e-
     mail, phone and even by US mail), will assist people in
     subscribing and setting up options, will handle routine
     inquiries, and will consolidate some postings.  The
     moderator will also solicit and post newsletter type
     information (calls for conferences, for example, or listings
     of sessions at conventions).  It may prove feasible to
     commission book and article reviews, and to post book
     announcements from publishers.  Anyone with suggestions
     about what _HOLOCAUS_ can and might do is invited to send in
     the ideas.

5.   The tone and target audience will be scholarly, and academic
     standards and styles will prevail.  _HOLOCAUS_ is affiliated
     with the _International History Network_.

6.   _HOLOCAUS_ is a part of H-Net, a project run by computer-
     oriented historians at the U of Illinois.  We see moderated
     e-mail lists as a new mode of scholarly communication; they
     have enormous potential for putting in touch historians from
     across the world.  Our first list on urban history, _H-
     URBAN@UICVM_, recently started up with Wendy Plotkin as
     moderator.  _H-WOMEN_ is in the works, with discussions
     underway about other possibilities like Ethnic, Labor, and
     US South.  We are helping our campus Jewish Studies program
     set up _JSTUDY_ (restricted to the U of Illinois Chicago
     campus, for now), and are considering the creation of _H-
     JEWISH_, also aimed at academics, but covering the full
     range of scholarship on Jewish history.  If you are
     interested in any of these projects, please e-write Richard
     Jensen, for we are now (as of late April) in a critical
     planning stage.

7.   H-Net has an ambitious plan for training historians across
     the country in more effective use of electronic
     communications.  Details of the H-Net plan are available on
     request from Richard Jensen, the director, at:

                         campbelld@apsu
or
                       u08946@uicvm.uic.edu

41) -------------------------------------------------------------

_UTNE READER INTERNET E-MAIL SALONS_

Calling all:
                      _Utne Reader_ readers
              Neighborhood Salon Associates members
                        Interested others

The Utne Reader Neighborhood Salon Association is launching a
global network of Internet mailing lists designed to foster small
group dialogue about hot topics and timeless conundra.  We call
them E-mail Salons and they are patterned after the hundreds of
Neighborhood Salons (face-to-face) that we've helped form across
North America since 1991.

Helping to revitalize democracy through vigorous discussion of
issues and ideas is part of the mission of the Neighborhood Salon
Association (NSA), our not-for-profit community service, funded
in part by the Surdna Foundation.  We believe that both online
and face-to-face salons help revive the endangered art of
conversation.

Anyone who does not live in Canada or the United States can
participate for free.  Likewise, anyone who has an account on
PeaceNet, EcoNet, the Web, GreenNet or other APC (Association for
Progressive Computing) network can participate free of charge.
Otherwise, you must be a member of the Utne Reader Salon
Association to participate.  For a one-time sign-up fee of $12
($20 Canadian) you receive:

* Placement in at least one E-mail Salon of up to 25           
  participants.
* A printed list of 20-30 members near you who have also joined
  the NSA over the past two years.
* Access to contact information on existing Salons (face-to-face)
  in your area.
* A printed copy of the Salon-Keeper's Companion, our 8-page   
  guide to conducting salons, council, and study circles.

WILL MY NAME END UP ON A JUNKMAIL LIST?

We will not be giving or selling any of our salon mailing lists
to anyone.  Likewise, we ask that you not use any list of salon
names for anything other than salon-related communications.
Everyone has entrusted us with their name, street and E-mail
addresses for this one purpose only; please respect this trust.

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

           _Utne Reader E-mail Salon Application Form_

First name:
Last name:
Internet E-mail address:
Street address:
City:
State/province:
Zip/Postal code:
Country:
Phone:

I got this E-mail Salon announcement from:

(Choose one of the following:)

___ I'm currently a member of the Neighborhood Salon Association.
    Get me started in an E-mail Salon as soon as possible.

___ I don't live in the USA or Canada.
    Get me started in an E-mail Salon as soon as possible.

___ I have an account on PeaceNet, EcoNet, the Web, GreenNet or
    other APC (Association for Progressive Computing) network.
    Get me started in an E-mail Salon as soon as possible.

___ None of the above applies to me.
    Send me the registration packet via 1st class mail.

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

Send your completed form to:  utnereader@mr.net

If you have questions, contact us at:

               E-mail Salons
               Utne Reader
               1624 Harmon Place, Suite 330
               Minneapolis, MN 55403
Fax:           612/338-6043
Voice:         612/338-5040  (9:00 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Central)
Voice Mail:    612/725-8684  (after hours)

Griff Wigley, Salon-keeper         Patti Cich, Salon Coordinator

September 25, 2013

Women and Islam

Lahoucine Ouzgane

Dept. of English
University of Alberta
LOUZGANE@vm.ucs.ualberta.ca

Ahmed, Leila. Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1992. Pp. viii + 296. Cloth, $30.00

Leila Ahmed’s Women and Gender in Islam centers on the conditions and lives of women in Middle Eastern Arab history. It is a response both to the growing strength of Islamist movements, which urge a return to the laws and practices set forth in the core Islamic discourse, and to the way in which Arab women are discussed in the West.

The book is divided into three parts. “Part One: The Pre-Islamic Middle East” includes a chapter on Mesopotamia and another on The Mediterranean Middle East. Citing archeological evidence, Ahmed points out that the subordination of Middle Eastern women became more or less institutionalized with the rise of urban centers in the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers between 3500 and 3000 B.C.E. These centers gave rise to military competitiveness, the patriarchal family, the exclusion of women from most of the professional classes, the designation of women’s sexuality as the property of men, and the use of the veil to differentiate between “respectable” and “disreputable” women. Challenging the assumption that Islamic societies are inherently oppressive to women–a task that she undertakes throughout her book–Ahmed stresses the fact that the “Mesopotamian, Persian, Hellenic, Christian, and eventually Islamic cultures each contributed practices that both controlled and diminished women, and each also apparently borrowed the controlling and reductive practices of its neighbors” (18).

Reviewing, for example, some of the salient features of Byzantine society, Ahmed notes that the birth of a boy (but not that of a girl) was greeted with cries of joy, that, “barring some general disaster, women were always supposed to be veiled” (26), and that the system of relying on eunuchs to enforce the separation of the sexes was already in place. To show continuity with the rigid Byzantine customs, Ahmed turns to Classical Greek, and specifically Aristotelian, theories which conceived of women “as innately and biologically inferior in both mental and physical capacities–and thus as intended for their subservient position by ‘nature’” (29). Citing several scholars–Sarah Pomeroy, Dorothy Thompson, Naphtali Lewis, Jean Vercoutter, and Christiane Desroches Noblecourt–Ahmed finds that only the “remarkably nonmisogynist” culture of the New Kingdom in Egypt “accorded women high esteem” (31). But neither Ahmed nor her sources explain this anomalous situation. The rest of the chapter outlines how, in the centuries immediately preceding the rise of Islam, the politically dominant Christianity brought with it “the religious sanction of women’s social subordination and the endorsement of their essential secondariness” (34).

The four chapters of Part Two are grouped under the heading of “Founding Discourses.” Here, the text deals with Arabia at the time of the rise of Islam, carefully delineating the changes brought about by the new religion when it spread to the rest of the Middle East. When Muhammed became the established prophet, women lost their economic independence, their autonomy, and the right to a monogamous marriage. The period also witnessed the institution of the patrilineal and patriarchal marriage (Aisha was ten years old when she was married to Muhammed). After the prophet’s death in 632, the mechanisms for controlling women’s lives were more clearly articulated by the succeeding caliphs. Under Umar’s reign (634-44), for instance, segregated prayers were established (with a male imam for the women); and polygamy and marriage of nine- or ten-year-old girls were sanctioned. Umar himself was very harsh toward women both in private and in public.

At the end of this chapter, Ahmed makes one of the most important points of her argument: what has been consistently overlooked, she declares, is “the broad ethical field of meaning” in which these restrictive practices against women were embedded–“the ethical teachings Islam was above all established to articulate” (62). Her point has far-reaching implications for how we understand Islam’s attitude toward women. “When those teachings are taken into account,” she says,

the religion's understanding of women and gender emerges as far more ambiguous than this account might suggest. Islam's ethical vision, which is stubbornly egalitarian, including with respect to the sexes, is thus in tension with, and might even be said to subvert, the hierarchical structure of marriage pragmatically instituted in the first Islamic society.(62-63)

To prove that Islam recognizes the “identicalness of men and women and the equal worth of their labor” (65), Ahmed quotes the following Quranic verse: “I suffer not the good deeds of any to go to waste, be he a man or a woman: The one of you is of the other.” But even if one were to overlook the problem of translation (another translator, N.J. Dawood, renders the passage in question this way: “I will deny no man or woman among you the reward of their labours. You are the offspring of one another”), it is hard to argue for a “stubbornly egalitarian” vision when the only Quranic Sura entitled “Women” is addressed to men, and where one can read that “Men have authority over women because God has made the one superior to the other, and because they spend their wealth to maintain them. Good women are obedient. . . . As for those from whom you fear disobedience, admonish them and send them to beds apart and beat them. Then if they obey you, take no further action against them” (Sura 4: 34).

From Ahmed’s point of view, Muslim women suffered the worst excesses of the pragmatic teachings of Islam under the Abbasid dynasty ruling at Baghdad (749-1258). The Abbasid elite men kept enormous harems of wives and concubines and sanctioned polygamy and the seclusion of women; an enormous number of Arab soldiers who arrived in Irak took wives and concubines from the local non-Muslim populations; and “one young man,” we are told, “on receiving his inheritance, went out to purchase ‘a house, furniture, concubines and other objects’” (83). To survive in this kind of atmosphere, women had to resort to manipulation, poison, intense rivalries, and falsehoods. (“Zubaida, royal-born wife of Harun al-Rashid, jealous of his attachment to a particular concubine, was advised to stop nagging–and felt the need to make up for her jealous lapse by presenting al-Rashid with ten concubines.”) Once again, Ahmed observes, the ethical injunctions of Islam were rarely translated into enforceable laws. Only texts that orthodox theologians, legists, and philosophers (the likes of Al-Ghazali) created were–and continue to be–regarded as the core prescriptive texts of Islam. But Ahmed also makes it clear that this intense misogyny was neither originally nor exclusively Muslim in character, but rather the consequence of a cultural negotiation between Islam and “an urban Middle East with already well-articulated misogynist attitudes and practices”:

[B]y licensing polygamy, concubinage, and easy divorce for men, originally allowed under different circumstances in a different society, Islam lent itself to being interpreted as endorsing and giving religious sanction to a deeply negative and debased conception of women.(87)

“Part Three: New Discourses” is narrow in focus– dealing mainly with Egypt from early 19th Century to the present–but crucial to a good understanding of Islam and women today. The period witnessed the Western economic encroachment on the Middle East and the emergence of the “modern” states. While the inroads made by European goods in Egypt were decidedly negative for women–who worked mainly in textiles–the process of change set in motion would prove broadly positive for them. Most importantly, Ahmed notes, the period saw “the emergence of women themselves as a central subject for national debate. For the first time since the establishment of Islam, the treatment of women in Islamic custom and law–the license of polygamy, easy male access to divorce, and segregation–were openly discussed . . .” (128). But the debates about “women” and social reform always took place in a European context, so to speak: the Muslim society felt the need to catch up to a relatively “advanced” European culture. This, indeed is one of Ahmed’s central arguments. The problem with proponents of “improvement in the status of women,” she observes, is that they had

from early on couched their advocacy in terms of the need to abandon the (implicitly) 'innately' and 'irreparably' misogynist practices of the native culture in favor of the customs and beliefs of another culture--the European.(129)

Ahmed extends this discussion in Chapter 8: “The Discourse of the Veil”–one of the best treatments of the subject I have seen and, for me, the strongest part of Ahmed’s study. The chapter begins with Ahmed’s examination of Qassim Amin’s The Liberation of Woman, a book that provoked intense and furious debate upon its publication in 1899 (with more than thirty books and articles appearing in response) and that is traditionally regarded as marking the beginning of feminism in the Arab world. Amin argues passionately for the abolition of the veil and for fundamental changes in culture, society, and even in Arab character. Of Egyptian women he writes that they are

not in the habit of combing their hair every day . . . nor do they bathe more than once a week. They do not know how to use a toothbrush and do not attend to what is attractive in clothing, though their attractiveness and cleanliness strongly influence men's inclinations. They do not know how to rouse desire in their husband, nor how to retain his desire or increase it. . . .(Quoted in Ahmed, 157)

At this point, Ahmed remarks that the fusion of the issue of women and culture and the expanded signification of the veil originated in the discourses of European societies:

Those ideas were interjected into the native discourse as Muslim men exposed to European ideas began to reproduce and react to them and, subsequently and more persuasively and insistently, as Europeans--servants of Empire and individuals resident in Egypt--introduced and actively disseminated them.(149)

Throughout this segment of her argument, Ahmed insists that “the peculiar practices of Islam with respect to women had always formed part of the Western narrative of the quintessential otherness and inferiority of Islam” (149). Prior to the seventeenth century, Western ideas about Islam derived mainly from travelers and crusaders. The other source of Western ideas of Islam came from the narrative of colonial domination regarding the inferiority of all other cultures and societies, a narrative that successfully co-opted the language of feminism and whose thesis was that “Islam was innately and immutably oppressive to women, that the veil and segregation epitomized this oppression, and that these customs were fundamental reasons for the general and comprehensive backwardness of Islamic societies” (151-52). If the situation of Egyptian women was to improve, Lord Cromer deemed it essential that Egyptians “be persuaded or forced into imbibing the true spirit of western civilization” because the practices of veiling and seclusion constituted “the fatal obstacle” to the Egyptians’ “attainment of that elevation of thought and character which should accompany the introduction of Western civilization” (quoted in Ahmed, 153).

But when Ahmed examines Cromer’s policies in Egypt, they turn out to be extremely detrimental to Egyptian women: he placed restrictions on government schools, raised school fees, and discouraged the training of women doctors because, as he declared, “throughout the civilized world, attendance by medical men is still the rule.” Ahmed also underscores the fact that “This champion of the unveiling of Egyptian women was, in England, founding member and sometime president of the Men’s League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage” (1953). Others besides the official servants of empire shared and promoted Cromer’s ideas. For the missionaries, the degradation of women in Islam was legitimate ground for their attacks on native culture, so missionary-school teachers actively attacked the practice of veiling by trying to persuade girls to defy their families and not wear one. Ahmed quotes a missionary woman’s conviction that marriage in Islam was “not founded on love but on sensuality” and that a Muslim wife, “buried alive behind the veil,” was regarded as “prisoner and slave rather than . . . companion and help-mate” (154). To show how insiduous and widespread this campaign against the veil was, Ahmed cites the case of the well-meaning European feminist Eugnie Le Brun, who earnestly encouraged young Egyptian women to cast off the veil as their first step toward female liberation (154).

Qassim Amin, “son of Cromer and colonialism,” had apparently internalized the colonialist perception of Egyptian culture, and his Liberation of Woman merely replicated this perception. Cromer’s well-known pronouncements (on the differences between, on the one hand, the European man’s close reasoning, his clarity, his natural logic, and his love of symmetry, and, on the other hand, the Oriental’s slipshod reasoning) are echoed in Amin’s assertion that

For the most part the European man uses his intellect, but when circumstances require it, he deploys force. He does not seek glory from his possessions and colonies, for he has enough of this through his intellectual achievements and scientific inventions.(Quoted in Ahmed, 155)

As colonialists and missionaries have always maintained, to change a culture, il faut chercher la femme. To make Muslim society abandon its backward ways, Amin argued, required changing the women–for whom, as noted earlier, he reserved his most virulent contempt: “The grown man is none other

than his mother shaped him in childhood," and this is the essence of this book. . . . It is impossible to breed successful men if they do not have mothers capable of raising them to be successful. This is the noble duty that advanced civilization has given to women in our age and which she fulfills in advanced societies.(Quoted in Ahmed, 156; emphasis in original)

The irony here, Ahmed argues, is that it is Western discourse that in the first place determined the new meanings of the veil: Muslim men exposed to European ways felt the humiliation of being described as uncivilized because “their” women were veiled. Amin’s ideas can thus be explained only in the context of the authority and global dominance of the Western world, for, as Ahmed says, “the connection between the issues of culture and women, and more precisely between the cultures of Other men and the oppression of women, was created by Western discourse” (165). Ahmed does not deny that Islamic societies oppressed women: “They did and do; that is not in dispute.” Rather, she wants to emphasize “the political uses” of the idea that Islam oppressed women, so as to challenge the “vague and inaccurate understanding of Muslim societies,” an understanding derived from what patriarchal colonialists identified as the sources and main form of women’s oppression in Islamic culture. In short, the attention given to the issue of the veil far outweighs its significance and obscures the real and substantive matters of women’s rights, including their right to identify what they (and not Cromer or Amin) define as significant sites of struggle.

Chapter 9, “The First Feminists,” looks at the two founding feminist discourses that appeared in Egypt in the first three decades of this century. While the dominant voice, closely allied with the westernizing and secularizing tendencies of society, promoted the desirability of progress toward Western-type societies, the alternative voice, wary of and opposed to Western ways, searched for ways of articulating female subjectivity within a native Islamic discourse (174). Here, Ahmed deals briefly with the work of such figures as Huda Sharawi, Malak Nassef, Mai Ziyada, Alila Rifaat, and Nawal El-Saadawi. For the first time, Egyptian women themselves were exploring the implications of a male-gendered debate and its fixation on the veil.

In the last chapter, “The Struggle for the Future,” Ahmed examines the significance of a “new” phenomenon in Egypt known as al-ziyy al-islami or the Islamic dress:

Men complying with the requirement of modesty may wear Arabian-style robes (rather than Egyptian robes), sandals, and sometimes a long scarf on the head, or they may wear baggy trousers and loose shirts. Women wear robes in a variety of styles. . . . but the skirts are ankle-deep and the sleeves long . . . and some of them, depending on how they personally interpret the requirement for modesty, wear face veils."(220- 21)

Ahmed’s point is that the Islamic dress might be seen as a democratic one, erasing class origins; it is also economical, and most importantly for women, it gives them a great deal of social mobility while preserving their native culture. Ultimately, the Islamic dress “is the uniform of arrival, signaling entrance into, and determination to move forward in, modernity” (225).

As no other general survey of women and gender in Islam exists, Women and Gender in Islam is a welcome contribution to the subject and particularly to the current debates about the “inherently misogynist” nature of Islam. The book is a fascinating survey of Islamic debates and ideologies about women and gender in the Middle East, a part of the world that has exercised–and continues to exercise– a compelling influence on the Western imagination.

September 25, 2013
Cyfy Pomo?

Eric Rabkin

Dept. of English
University of Michigan
esrabkin@umich.edu

Ketterer, David. Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy. Indiana University Press, 1992. ix + 206 pp. $27.50 cloth.

McCaffery, Larry, ed. Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Fiction. Duke University Press, 1991. xvii + 387 pp. $17.95 paper.

. . . The review was the color of an electron spinning to the frequency of anti-matter . . .

“Love and Napalm: Export U.S.A.” shouts two simultaneous stories: in boldface, a three-sentence poster series of incestuous desire, erotic violence, and the military-industrial complex; intercut, five pages of media-spawned obsessive need for dripping flesh, mass mind control, mechanical sex, and orgasmic death. This is but one of the “compressed novels” in J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition (1967), a precursor text for both David Ketterer and Larry McCaffery.

In ancient China, the followers of Mozi (c. 479-381 B.C.E.) believed that all judgments should rest on the distinction between usefulness and uselessness, but Zhuangzi (c. 369-286 B.C.E.) offered the parable of “The Useless Shu Tree.” Huizi complained that the huge Shu tree was too twisted to yield planks and too mottled to yield veneer. Zhuangzi replied that from the tree’s viewpoint these were useful traits because all the other trees in the forest had long since been cut down to make planks and veneer. Better, Zhuangzi advised, to find a different use for the tree, to sit beneath it and to rest in its shade.

The books by Ketterer and McCaffery may look like they should be read, cover to cover, page by page. They should not. If it is useful to speak of readable and writable texts, perhaps it is also useful to speak of consultable and compilable texts. Telephone directories are both. Ketterer’s anthology of Canadian fiction is consultable; McCaffery’s “casebook” is compilable.

In our postmodern times the ideology of realism has come increasingly under attack, and Canadian literature, no less than British or American literature, has turned increasingly to various nonrealistic and metafictional forms--which frequently include, or approximate, SF and fantasy. The present visibility of Canadian SF and fantasy, then, is largely attributable to the dissolution of the realistic paradigm.(Ketterer 3)

Promise A: There will be a demonstration that Canadian literature has turned increasingly to F&SF. Discharge: A book-length narrative catalog–arranged in chapters by language (English and French) and historical period (e.g., before and after the 1984 publication of William Gibson’s Neuromancer!) and genre (F and SF), peppered by the occasional connected, often insightful, page or two on a single work (e.g., Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale)–showing that there is more Canadian F&SF, but no comparison is made with total Canadian literary production. Perhaps the country is simply producing more everything as means of production improve and population increases. Harlequin Books, after all, is Canadian.

Promise B: There will be a demonstration that this Canadian generic turning arises from a postmodern assault on realism. Discharge: Canadian F&SF has ever more prominent practitioners (Gibson, Elizabeth Vonarburg) and Canada’s best known authors have turned from time to time to F&SF (Atwood and occasional passages by Robertson Davies and Margaret Laurence), but Gibson is a native of the U.S., Vonarburg of France, and the three native Canadians have returned to realism.

Promise C: There will be a demonstration that Canadian literature has “present visibility.” Discharge: The heart of cyberpunk, the putative SF projection of postmodernism, is Neuromancer, but “there’s nothing here linking Gibson to any Canadian tradition” (143). Hail, Ballard!

“What makes for the very best Canadian SF and fantasy does not have anything to do with Canada at all” (166).

Whazza matter, Bucky? You say we have a non-subject? You say you want to yawn? You say you can’t imagine reading a hundred and sixty-six pages about F&SF in Canada that offer little extended argument and omit the magical Robert Kroetsch (e.g., What the Crow Said, 1978)? Well, listen up, ’cause this book has the most helpful Bibliography around on its targets and a cleverly detailed Table of Contents and a pretty darned good Index and you can use ’em all to track down languages and periods and genres and read just what the doctor ordered OR follow up on any of the twenty biggest Names, and, believe it or not, there are twenty–count ’em–twenty: Margaret Atwood, David Cronenberg, Robertson Davies, Charles de Lint, Gordon Dickson, William Gibson, Herbert L. Gold, Phyllis Gotlieb, Guy Gavriel Kay, W.P. Kinsella, Margaret Laurence, Stephen Leacock, Laurence Manning, Judith Merril, Brian Moore, Spider Robinson, Robert Service, William Shatner, A.E. van Vogt, Elisabeth Vonarburg. And a diverse and estimable bunch they are.

Yeah, yeah, half these folks moved away from Canada and nearly half moved to it and some are only Big Names in g-e-n-r-e (de Lint, Robinson) and others are overpraised (Kay is not really Tolkien’s equal, except in annual sales, at least not yet), but think about it: van Vogt is indisputably one of the formative forces in ghetto SF of the “Golden Age” 1940s; Cronenberg’s Videodrome and The Fly and Dead Ringers make a body of F&SF film second only, if at all, to Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove and 2001 and The Shining; Gold’s editorial work was second only to that of John W. Campbell in determining the directions of SF; Shatner (with the help of Ron Goulart) actually can write a serviceable novel or two; Vonarburg was the first person outside France (and the first woman) to win France’s annual SF award; etc. Think of the poetry (Atwood, Gotlieb, Service)! Think of the humor (Leacock, Robinson)! Think of the movies (Cronenberg, Kinsella’s Field of Dreams)! And maybe think about folks you never thought of before. Consult this book.

[A] the challenge of finding a suitable means to examine the 'postmodern condition' has produced a vigorous and highly energized response from a new breed of SF authors who combine scientific know-how with aesthetic innovation . . . [B] aesthetically radical SF exhibiting many of the features associated with postmodernism are evident as early as the mid-1950s and early 1960s, when literary mavericks like Alfred Bester, William S. Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick, and Thomas Pynchon began publishing books that self-consciously operated on the fringes of SF and the literary avant-garde. [C] During the 1970s and 1980s [writers such as Don DeLillo, Ted Mooney, Joseph McElroy, Denis Johnson, Margaret Atwood, William T. Vollman, Kathy Acker, and Mark Leyner], [w]hile writing outside the commercial SF publishing scene . . . produced works that perfectly fulfill the generic task of SF, described by Vivian Sobchack as 'the cognitive mapping and poetic figuration of social relations as these are constituted by new technological modes of "being in the world"' [D] . . . these mainstream novels (recently dubbed 'slipstream' novels by cyberpunk theoretician Bruce Sterling) typically portrayed individuals awash in a sea of technological change, information overload, and random--but extraordinarily vivid--sensory stimulations."(McCaffery 9-10)

And so on. [A] (the guide letters are my insertions) ain’t quite right. The new breed of SF writers with technical know-how typically doesn’t write cyberpunk or anything remotely like it: David Brin, Robert Forward, James Hogan. And on the other prosthesis, Gibson is famous for having been inspired to write Neuromancer by watching folks in video arcades; he’d never even touched a computer before writing THE BOOK. But there are confirming examples: Rudy Rucker (mentioned by McCaffery) and, by some definitions, Gregory Benford (unmentioned).

[A] and [B] are mutually inconsistent. But, hey, postmodernism frees us from history, right, Bucky?

[B] is the giveaway: no distinctions made between Bester and Burroughs, Dick and Pynchon. But where oh where is Stanislaw Lem? What happened to Kobo Abe? McCaffery’s implicit polemic: there is a theory (mostly francophone but with some anglophones connected via conference calling) to support a world-wide (North Atlantic) movement that transcends genre (like SF or mainstream) and Genre (like fiction and music). Cyberpunk is its bleeding pump (speaking of Kubrick, anyone remember A Clockwork Orange?) and postmodernism is its daytime name.

[C] don’t have no SF writers. Mainstreamers trip in the ghetto, but do the ghettees ever wash in the mainstream? Sure: Abe, Lem, George Lucas (of American Graffiti), Lewis Shiner (of Slam), Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (of late). But McCaffery ignores ’em ’cause they don’t help the cause. The original cyberpunkers–Gibson, Shiner, Sterling, et al.– were for a while called The Movement. McCaffery’s cause? To convince us that The Movement is the movement.

[D]: the slipstream is Pierian. And the rest of the “casebook” (poor Gibson hero that he is, that hard Case: he gets used by every slash body) sets out to do it.

Five sections, very nice: Introduction, Cyberpunk 101: A Schematic Guide to Storming the Reality Studio, Fiction and Poetry, Non-Fiction, Bibliography.

Zhuangzi say, “The Introduction is the most useful part of the book.” (Maybe that’s why Russell Potter assigns this one in his course called “The Transit of the Fantastic: From the Gothic to the Postmodern”). McCaffery writes with the clash and bristle of the slipstream and takes us through a plausible polemic about the conflation of MTV, fragmented fiction, decentered subjects, artificial bodies, and soft machines, and about the need for a new fiction in Third Stage Capitalism (Frederic Jameson is always right). It’s a trip and a half and you come back either truly believing (tant pis) or really juiced to think about all this stuff. (I’ll take what’s behind door number two.)

The “schematic guide” is “a quick list of the cultural artifacts that helped to shape cyberpunk ideology and aesthetics, along with the books by the cyberpunks themselves, in roughly chronological order” (17). Every “artifact” gets its paragraph blast (blurb is too weak a word). The paragraphs do not connect logically. Does anyone still care? They connect imagistically. Frankenstein (for brooding sexuality and love of body parts). Red Harvest (noir is noir). Society of the Spectacle (’cause they do theory right). Dub Music (duh). Never Mind the Bollocks (so that is the Sex Pistols’ best album!). Dawn of the Dead (so cannibalism, so?). MTV (how not?). Big Science (and here is Laurie Anderson when we need her). And so on. For more than a dozen pages. If you think you missed something on the way from George Eliot to George Romero, McCaffery in under half an hour will let you know what you might want to back and fill up on.

Then comes the Fiction and Poetry anthology. Some of the short stories are finds (Pat Cadigan’s “Rock On”), and most of the pieces taken from books (as about two-thirds are) are cleverly enough extracted to be okay for tasting, but overall, what can you do with this collage? I’ve got it! Let’s give it to a lit class. You know, the kind that can’t read whole books? Nah. Better: let’s put it on reserve. Collage might work for postmodern artists but it doesn’t work here as postmodern crit. Nice touch, though: half the folks represented are “slipstreamers” and half SFers. The polemic rocks on.

No SFers in the Non-Fiction anthology, though, except for McCaffery’s interview with Gibson and Sterling’s “Preface” to Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology. (There are others, you know, like Norman Spinrad.) This time we get more complete works, some of them quite useful, like Darko Suvin’s solid “On Gibson and Cyberpunk” and Takayuki Tatsumi’s fascinating “The Japanese Reflection of Mirrorshades” and George Slusser’s wide-ranging “Literary MTV.” But you know that urban legend making the rounds, the one about the guy in a strange city who thinks he’s “getting lucky” but wakes up two days later drug-muzzy and with a tiny band-aid on his back? They stole his kidney! It’s cyberpunk on the streets. Well, the Big Names in this book need to feel their backs. McCaffery has extracts from Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Jameson, Jean-Francois Lyotard, et al.

I’ve got it! Let’s put it on reserve.

Funny, isn’t it, that with all this theorizing in French, all the fiction and poetry is in English? Hey, David, tell this guy about Elisabeth Vonarburg.

And the Bibliography will keep you reading for years, if the imagistic polemic has you swinging that way.

So, this was a compilable book. And I, for one, enjoy it: another day, another dollop.

Ketterer’s book you can read when you need to; McCaffery’s when you want to. They both well repay dipping, each “after his kind” (Genesis 7:14).

“The Heat Death of the Universe” (Pamela Zoline, 1967) is a postmodern, cyberpunk fiction (that no one ever called those names) in fifty-four numbered paragraphs (just like a PMC review) that run a shining riff on housework and entropy. Here is number 2:

Imagine a pale blue morning sky, almost green with clouds only at the rims. The earth rolls and the sun appears to mount, mountains erode, fruits decay, the Foraminifera adds another chamber to its shell, babies' fingernails grow as does the hair of the dead in their graves, and in egg timers the sands fall and the eggs cook on.

I wonder what criticism will look like in ten years?

September 25, 2013
Risk and the New Modernity
Simon Carter

MRC Medical Sociology Unit
Glasgow, United Kingdom
isb002@lancaster.ac.uk

Beck, Ulrich. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage, 1992.

At 0123 hours (Soviet European Time) on Saturday 26 of April 1986, reactor number four of the Chernobyl nuclear power complex exploded, rupturing the reaction vessel and causing major structural damage to the plant buildings. The subsequent release of radioactive material caused acute radiation sickness in 200 individuals, 28 of whom subsequently died (Spivak 1992). The immediate effects of the catastrophe were therefore comparable to a minor air disaster, yet the possible long-term consequences went far beyond those suggested by such a comparison. A plume of radio-nuclides (i.e. strontium-90, iodine-131, and caesium-137) spread westwards over Europe presenting a danger that was invisible and therefore beyond direct human powers of perception. As a result, those living within “fallout” zones became aware that they might be suffering irreversible damage but, at the same time, they were dependent on the knowledge of “experts” to find out–a knowledge that was mediated through institutions, argument and causal interpretations and was therefore “open to a social process of definition” (Beck 88).

The Chernobyl tragedy is just one, albeit particularly dramatic, example taken from a long list of other “invisible risks” in which the danger posed is socially disputable. For example, from within the nuclear economy we could add the names Windscale (now renamed Sellafield), Kyshtym, Three Mile Island and Oak Ridge and, moving outside this domain, we could point to concerns over food additives, pesticides, ozone depletion, air and water pollution, and AIDS. The project that Ulrich Beck has set himself is to ask what a society may look like in which disputes about these “new risks” are increasingly pushed to the fore?

Beck’s thesis is, however, more than just another sociological or anthropological examination of the breaks and shifts in the meaning attached to risk, within or between cultures (for an account of this type see Douglas and Wildavsky). The full title of Beck’s newly translated book is Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (originally published in German as Risikogesellshaft: Auf dem Weg in eine andere Moderne, 1986) and the title resonates with the central theme of his work–that we are in a period of transition not towards postmodernity but towards a second modernity in which the logic of industrial production and distribution (i.e. wealth) is becoming increasingly tied to the logic of “the social production of risk.” As he says:

Just as modernisation dissolved the structure of feudal society in the nineteenth century and produced the industrial society, modernisation today is dissolving industrial society and another modernity is coming into being.(10)

In the first modernity, or industrial society, concerns focused on the distribution of wealth but, according to Beck, as material inadequacy was reduced, or at least isolated, we moved to a more complex modernity, or risk society, where consideration has to be given to the distribution of risks–a move from class position to risk position, from underproduction of goods to overproduction of harm. These are qualitatively different conditions. In the former, one is dealing with “desirable items in scarcity” but in the latter, where it is a question of the risks produced by modernisation, one has an undesirable abundance. “The positive logic of acquisition contrasts with a negative logic of disposition, avoidance, denial, and reinterpretation” (26).

Of course it could be argued that industrial society has always been engaged in a contest with risk and danger. Yet these risks were construed as external to the project of modernity. Thus a distinction was drawn between civilisation (safe) and nature (dangerous). Scientific rationality sought to put into discourse those dangerous spaces and therefore make them predictable–in short to “tame” chance (see Hacking). Beck’s point is that the externalisation of risk is no longer possible because it is increasingly apparent that many hazards are a by-product of the same techno-scientific rationality that initially promised progress, development, and safety. Today’s risks are yesterday’s rational settlements (and here we could cite all forms of pollution, including nuclear fallout).

Within the risk society, though, risk is distributed according to a dual process. On the one hand, the traditional inequalities of strata and class in the West are broken up by the “boomerang effect,” whereby “sooner or later the risks also catch up with those who produce or profit from them” (37). And while this may primarily entail a threat to life and limb it can also “affect secondary media, money, property and legitimation” (38). On the other hand, new international inequalities are established by the industrialised states attempting to export their risks to the third world. Here Beck points to the accident at a chemical production plant in the Indian city of Bhopal and the selling abroad, in developing countries, of pesticides. “There is a systematic attraction between extreme poverty and extreme risk” (41). But even here, ultimately, the boomerang effect strikes back at the source of risk (for instance in the importation of cheap foodstuffs contaminated with Western pesticides). The risks of modernisation, therefore, undermine the bounds of the nation state as established in the industrial society. Risk societies “contain within themselves a grass-roots developmental dynamics that destroys boundaries” (47).

For Beck these developments have implications for our conception of identity. In particular, he suggests many of the traditions and ideas of the enlightenment are breaking down–the old “truths” no longer hold. He sums this up simply in the following section:

To put it bluntly, in class positions being determines consciousness, while in risk positions, conversely, consciousness (knowledge) determines being. Crucial for this is the type of knowledge, specifically the lack of personal experience and the depth of dependency on knowledge, which surrounds all dimensions of defining hazards.(53)

For instance, within the industrial or class society, the threatening potential is knowable (i.e. the loss of one’s job) without any special cognitive means, “measuring procedures,” or consideration of tolerance thresholds. “The affliction is clear and in that sense independent of knowledge” (53). Yet within the risk society the situation is reversed. Those who are victimised–by, say, pesticide contamination–cannot determine their status by their own cognitive means and experiences. Within this new situation “the extent . . . of people’s endangerment [is] fundamentally dependent on external knowledge” (53). But, as we saw above, the externalisation of risk knowledge, into the hands of risk experts, is a social process thwarted by public disputes and disagreements between experts and public and among the experts themselves. The relationship between cause and effect, so central to scientific rationality, is suspended.

But this leads to a situation in which the very divide between expert and non-expert becomes turbid and amorphous. Those people living with “invisible” hazards “bang their heads against the walls of scientific denials of the existence of modernisation risks” (61). This leads to what Beck characterises as a learning process in which victims no longer believe risks to be acts of fate. Elsewhere, Beck has illustrated this process by describing the way in which those who are suffering are required to demonstrate “that they are sick and what has made them sick . . . and in an inversion of the normal legal process, are obliged to provide proof of poisoning themselves” (100). These people become “small, private alternative experts in the risks of modernisation” (61).

This, in some ways, is similar to an argument put forward by Patton in relation to those people living with AIDS. In earlier stages of history those people suffering from illness were largely silenced by the knowledge formations which establish an unreachable boundary around scientific medical “wisdom.” But the advent of the AIDS epidemic has led activists, at least in the United States, to themselves gain considerable medical proficiency. The circulation of newsletters and self help books provides information about clinical trials, including criteria of inclusion and exclusion, to those people living with AIDS. In addition, “underground” drug trials, using experimental products ordered through offshore pharmaceutical companies, have become established in some communities. As Patton says “it is the medical knowledge of the person living with HIV/AIDS . . . which has become today’s ticket to experimental treatments” (52).

This period of acute uncertainty and risk, in which the promises of techno-science are seen to have failed, may lead one to suspect that Beck has a pessimistic and bleak view of our future. But Beck is an optimist and this is expressed in what he sees as the possible potential of the learning process. It may now be that risks are no longer accepted passively by those who have to live with them. In his recent extensive commentary on Beck’s work, Lash has summarised this process of reflexive modernisation. Of course, the first modernity, or industrial society, by definition was reflexive. Yet there are, among others, two possible forms of reflexivity: it can be the self-monitoring of a social system or, on the other hand, a self-monitoring by individuals. The industrial society would “consist of a mixture of self-monitored (and modern) and heteronomously monitored (or traditional) spheres of social life. Beck’s second modernity would then be much more consistently reflexive” (Lash 5). This reflexive modernisation, rather than constituting a rejection of rationality is instead an embracing of a radicalised rationality. As Beck sums the process up:

In contrast to all earlier epochs (including industrial society), the risk society is characterised essentially by a lack: the impossibility of an external attribution of hazards. In other words, risks depend on decisions; they are industrially produced and in this sense politically reflexive. While all earlier cultures and phases of social development confronted threats in various ways, society is confronted by itself through its dealings with risks. . . . This means that the sources of danger are no longer ignorance but knowledge; not a deficient but perfect mastery over nature; not what eludes the human grasp but the system of norms and objective constraints established with the industrial epoch.(183)

Now for some criticisms. A good place to begin may be Beck’s style. His book can only be described as a gradual slide from topic to topic in which one is never sure if one is reading a conclusion or an opening announcement. He makes statements on one page, only to then, apparently, contradict them a few pages later (but one is never totally sure.) While some writers, labelled as postmodernist, intentionally use similar devices in order playfully to resist the illusion of perfect textual coherence and univocity, with Beck one is less confident that one is being deliberately exercised.

For example, one of the difficulties in conceptualising the term “risk” is that the it can mean very different things in different contexts. Thus, in Beck’s argument we have, among others, two models of risk. On the one hand, within the industrial society we have those scientific understandings of risk which seek to “objectively measure” and quantify risk while, on the other hand, within the “risk society” such an objective measurement of risk increasingly becomes exposed as socially disputable–a move from risk as “object” to risk as “social process,” from knowable to unknowable risk. Added to this could be a series of less well defined and colloquial uses of the word risk (ranging from lay epidemiology to fatalistic and mystical interpretations of danger.) Hence, within Beck’s account, one word–“risk”–becomes overloaded with a plethora of often opposed meanings, and this gives his text a certain blurriness at just the point where one would hope it to be clear.

To be fair to Beck, this same problem is found in much of the literature on risk, a good deal of which is even less helpful than he is in defining its central term. Also, at a more general level, it does seem that Beck is, at least partially, aware of the amorphous nature of his book, as he claims that this work represents, more than anything, a personal process and admits that “the noise of wrestling sometimes resounds in this book” (9). In this respect he compares himself to a nineteenth-century observer who is on the “lookout for the contours of the as yet unknown industrial age” (9).

Yet the structure of his book does leave certain sections “out on a limb.” In chapter 4, for example, which concerns gender relations, Beck argues that men have practised a rhetoric of equality, without matching their words with deeds. On both sides, he says, the ice of illusions has grown thin; with the equalisation of the prerequisites (in education and law) the positions of men and women become more unequal, more conscious, and less legitimated (104). While it is good to see a male social theorist giving serious attention to questions of gender, it is not fully clear how this chapter is built into, or relates to, the rest of his thesis. Indeed, in his shorter articles on risk society, Beck scarcely mentions gender at all.

One can also criticise certain parts of Beck’s argument. For Beck, we are at the point of transition between two historical epochs–between the industrial and the risk society. Yet he does not adequately deal with how far along this transition we have passed. In this respect his vision of a new modernity appears somewhat illusory. For instance, his claim that the industrial society has brought about a reduction in material inadequacy cannot sit well with the experiences of many living in the deprived areas of any large city or substantial sections of the third world population. And the boomerang effect of risk re-distribution has a long way to go before there is any real equalisation of risk distributions. To give one example, we are all exposed to a certain level of “engineered radioactivity,” and catastrophes such as Chernobyl and Three Mile Island demonstrate that radioactivity, in these cases, does not very faithfully respect the class or wealth of its victims. Nevertheless, in most cases it is easy to identify systematic unevenness in the distribution of risk exposures. Recent studies of cancer “hot spots” linked with the workers at nuclear plants and their children (see Epstein, also Gardner et al.) have shown that risks may still be localised to particular geographic spaces or specific groups.

And Beck’s optimism about the prospects of a radicalised rationality does not even serve to dispel his own empirical evidence of reasons why we should all be gloomy about prospects for the future. On the next to last page of the book Beck outlines some practical steps towards a reflexive modernisation: Only when medicine opposes medicine, nuclear physics opposes nuclear physics, human genetics opposes human genetics or information technology opposes information technology can the future that is brewed up in the test-tube become intelligible and evaluable for the outside world (234). This might be a reasonable starting point, but there is little evidence that anything like this is about to happen. As Bauman has observed, in commenting on Beck’s work:

And yet we are told repeatedly that it is the same science (in company with technology, its executive arm) who brought us here, who will get us out. Science has made all this mess, science will clear it. But why should we trust it now, when we know where the past assurances have led us?(25)

Yet, having said all this, I would stress that Beck’s work is well worth examining–and not just by those interested in the sociology of risk, but by anyone with an interest in social theory and politics. While his claim that we are entering a new risk society may be premature, I think that, at a restricted local level, we may be seeing a reflexive modernisation as specific risks become politicised by certain social actors (in particular by the new social movements or associations).

In terms of a social understanding of risk, Beck’s book represents a novel and innovative contribution to a field of enquiry that has become somewhat stale in recent years. It is a field largely dominated by cognitive psychologists (see, for example, Slovic et al., or Tversky and Kahneman), and I must agree with Beck’s assessment of cognitive psychological work on risk when he ironically describes the way these researchers view the lay public:

They [the public] are ignorant, of course, but well intentioned; hard-working, but without a clue. In this view, the population is composed of nothing but would-be engineers, who do not yet possess sufficient knowledge. They only need be stuffed full of technical details, and then they will share the experts' viewpoint.(58)

There is no such condescension in Beck’s Risk Society, which, whatever its weaknesses, is an engaging and provocative book. At the very least it provides us with some new formulations and some fresh terms to bring to bear on debates about “development,” “progress,” and the risks that attend them.

Works Cited
- Bauman, Z. “The Solution as problem.” The Times Higher Education Supplement, 13 November 1992.
- Beck, U. “On The Way to the Industrial Risk-Society? Outline of an Argument.” Thesis Eleven (1989): 86-103.
- Douglas, M., & Wildavsky, A. Risk and Culture: an essay on the selection of technical and environmental dangers. Berkeley and London: U of California P, 1983.
- Epstein, P.R. “Soviet nuclear mishaps pre-Chernobyl.” The Lancet (1993): 341, 346.
- Gardner, M.J., Hall, J., & Downes, S. “Follow up study of the children born to mother resident in Seascale, West Cumbria.” British Medical Journal 295 (1987): 822-827.
- Hacking, I. The Taming of Chance. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.
- Lash, S. “Reflexive Modernization: The Aesthetic Dimension.” Theory Culture & Society 10 (1993): 1-23.
- Patton, C. Inventing AIDS. New York: Routledge. 1990.
- Slovic, P., Fischhoff, B., & Lichtenstein, S. “Facts and Fears: Understanding Perceived Risk.” Societal Risk Assessment: How Safe is Safe Enough? Ed. R.C. Schwing & W. A. Albers. New York: Plenum Press, 1980.
- Slovic, P., Fischhoff, B., & Lichtenstein, S. “Perceived risk: psychological factors and social implications.” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London 376 (1981): 17-34.
- Spivak, L.I. “Psychiatric aspects of the accident at Chernobyl nuclear power station.” European Journal of Psychiatry 6 (1992): 207-212.
- Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. “Judgement Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases: Biases in Judgements reveal Some heuristics of Thinking Under Uncertainty.” Science 185 (1974): 1124-1131.
September 25, 2013
Playing With Clothes

Debra Silverman

Dept. of English
University of Southern California
dsilverm@scf.usc.edu

Garber, Marjorie. Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety. New York: Routledge, 1992.

In March, the women’s NCAA basketball championship was played in Atlanta, Georgia, and for the first time in many years the event was sold out. The sell-out warranted a lot of notice in the printed press and on the television news– the men’s tournament always sold out but women’s basketball had been all but neglected in the past few years. The rise of women’s basketball had already been making headlines in the Los Angeles Times, where a story on the women’s team at Stanford noted that the women’s games were frequently selling out this season while the men’s games were marked by numerous empty seats. According to the Times, fans are appreciating the new athleticism of female players, particularly of stars such as Texas Tech’s Sheryl Swoops, who has been said to run the fast break as well as any male player. But many sports writers and radio call-in jocks have been dismayed by the sudden popularity of the women’s sport and by the media attention it has received, proclaiming that too much TV time has been taken away from the male players. On one call-in program a male viewer complained, “It’s not as if we really want to watch a bunch of girls run around a basketball court.” It seems that men, players and sports aficionados alike, felt for the first time this season that their all-male space was being threatened. It was an anxious moment for men’s basketball.

But it has been an anxious cultural moment for women in the sport, as well. Another L.A. Times article, which appeared at the end of last year’s tournament, is symptomatic. Entitled “Lesbian Issue Stirs Discussion” (April 16, 1992), the article engages the all too familiar conflation of discussions of women athletes with discussions of sexual preference. The “Lesbian Issue” was precipitated by comments from Penn State women’s basketball coach Rene Portland–her team rules include the mandate “no lesbians.” Julie Cart, Times staff writer, sets out to investigate the history of this mandate and the problematic relationship between women athletes and their perceived (homo)sexuality. Cart concludes that, “being perceived as a lesbian in the women’s sports world often carries the same stigma as being a lesbian.” The way in which one’s sexuality is perceived is just as potent as how one represents her own sexuality.

In an effort to confuse (or perhaps illuminate) the boundaries between “being” and “seeming,” women athletes have turned to traditional “feminine” tactics. Cart notes that “to counter the perception of lesbianism, some female athletes adopt compensatory behavior” (emphasis added). By femme-ing up, wearing make-up while competing and dressing in “ultra-feminine” clothing when not on the court, players have marked their (“seeming”) heterosexuality with a vengeance. Pat Griffin, a former basketball coach who currently conducts seminars on homophobia for collegiate sports programs, calls this compensation “hetero-sexy.” Indeed, there has been a longstanding tradition of making female athletes seem more like women and less like men. Cart turns to Mariah Burton Nelson, a former Stanford player, as confirmation of this tradition. When hired by the L.A. Dreams, one of the short-lived women’s pro teams, Nelson and her teammates were told to enter charm school. If we can judge by last year’s film A League of Their Own, these basketball players were not the first female athletes sent for etiquette lessons. In Penny Marshall’s film, set in the 1940’s, female baseball players learned to sip tea, to apply their make-up properly, and to play baseball in skirts. Such calculated displays of “femininity” were meant to combat the spectacle of the masculine woman.

One might wonder why a review of Marjorie Garber’s excellent and comprehensive study Vested Interests begins with a discussion of women’s basketball. On the surface, it seems that what we have is a simple example of machismo–the desire that men’s space be men’s space and that women not confuse the issue by playing sports. Nor should women ever confuse or challenge gender expectations–it is not expected or widely accepted that women should desire a career in basketball. Simultaneously, we have a confirmation of the long standing acceptance of homophobia in our culture– spectators look past the performer, here a basketball player, to what might potentially go on in the locker room. I would like to argue a third possibility which intersects with Garber’s book. The women talked about in the Times article were women playing with drag–dressing up as women to make sure that they would not be (mis)taken for someone or something else. Rather than covering up gender, their drag performances displace sexuality. The femme, female athletes use the markers of femininity as expressions of self-representation; markers that culture can easily read. I also want to suggest that their dressing up, cross- dressing for societal consumption, creates many of the same anxieties that Garber examines and negotiates so well in Vested Interests.

Garber’s book is a combination of literary and cultural criticism. Its episodic and anecdotal moments work beautifully with theoretical interventions into discussions of postmodern gender configurations. Much like Donna Haraway’s ground breaking “A Cyborg Manifesto” which challenged the fixed nature of two terms, male and female, by introducing a third term, the cyborg, Garber’s theory insists on the discussion of three terms: male, female, and transvestite. In her analysis, the transvestite is not a side-effect of culture, an interesting thing to look past while being entertained. Her third term is the defining point of culture. As she writes in the introduction, “The ‘third’ is a mode of articulation, a way of describing a space of possibility. Three puts in question the idea of one: of identity, self-sufficiency, self-knowledge” (11). The third term–transvestite–throws gender categories into a state of “category crisis” which we must see as “not the exception but rather the ground of culture itself” (16). In other words, for Garber, crisis defines culture–and the transvestite figure defines the space of crisis negotiation, and hence of cultural re-definition or transformation.

Maneuvering her critical readings toward an examination of cultural anxiety about transvestites, Garber distinguishes her project from those which have preceded it. “The appeal of cross-dressing,” she observes, “is clearly related to its status as a sign of the constructedness of gender categories.”

But the tendency on the part of many critics has been to look through rather than at the cross-dresser, to turn away from a close encounter with the transvestite, and to want instead to subsume that figure within one of the two traditional genders. To elide and erase--or to appropriate the transvestite for particular political and critical aims.(9)

Garber will insist on the third term as the marker of entry into the Symbolic, training her readers to look at the transvestite and read this figure as the site of cultural confusion and anxiety.

At its heart, Vested Interests is a book about blurred boundaries. Many things happen when we really look at a transvestite figure instead of incorporating its “mode of articulation” into comfortable categories of gender identification. Many boundaries are crossed. It becomes difficult or impossible to explain away the transvestite or fit the cross-dresser into a specific cultural niche. Garber continually reminds us that “transvestism is a space of possibility structuring and confounding culture: the disruptive element that intervenes, not just a category crisis of male, and female, but the crisis of category itself” (17). In this respect, Garber’s position can be placed alongside Judith Butler’s theorization of identity in Gender Trouble (Routledge 1990). Both writers suggest that finding true identity is never fully possible as the truth is always already constructed by gendered expectations. In other words, it is not just about peeling back layers of clothing to find the truth of gender under the clothes. What is always at stake is what Butler calls the “parody” of the original, “[a] parodic proliferation [which] deprives hegemonic culture and its critics of its claim to naturalized or essentialized gender identities” (138).

Garber’s book is divided into two large sections, “Transvestite Logics,” which seeks to show “the way transvestism creates culture,” and “Transvestite Effects,” which explores how “culture creates transvestites” (16). “Transvestite Logics” is the more important half of the book. Here Garber establishes her theoretical parameters and sets her theories into place. But the entire book, which moves on a trajectory from the culturally and legally imposed rules of dress and behavior, to the ways in which these play themselves out in our need for the transvestite, is of considerable interest. Garber finds entertaining examples and compelling evidence for her theories in all corners of western culture–from the Shakespearean stage and medieval sumptuary laws to a cross-dressed Ken doll and Elvis’s clothes, from manuals for women on how to cross-dress as men to Madonna. The book is rich in beautiful photographs, drawings and film stills. Taken together, these many examples and illustrations highlight the problematic status of transvestite figures and confirm Garger’s argument that even in persecuting cross-dressers we express our fundamental dependence on them as the crisis points of cultural negotiation.

A brief tour of some chapters will suggest the main contours of this complex and involved book. “Transvestite Logics” begins with “Dress Codes, or the Theatricality of Difference,” which explores sumptuary laws in medieval and Renaissance England and their function in enforcing social hierarchy. In Elizabethan England gender and status confusion became fashionable, causing an official stigmatization of “excess” in clothing. This excess becomes the space of the transvestite. In the two subsequent sections, Garber investigates modern instances of cross-dressed Shakespeare using the actor Sir Laurence Olivier and actresses such as Sarah Bernhardt to offer the possibility that transvestite theater is the norm, rather than an aberration. Transvestite theater signifies impersonation itself, Garber argues, concluding that “there is no ground of Shakespeare that is not already cross-dressed” (40). All the world really is a stage. This initial staging sets the tone for a lot of what will follow. In part, Garber’s book is about excesses of all sorts–excessive behavior, excessive clothing styles, excessive masquerades and parades of gender confusions. It is about excessive body modifications and about pushing the limits of our everyday performances. Therefore, Garber’s point of entry, by way of a historical narrative/analysis of sumptuary laws, sets the scene(s) for the investigations that will follow. From the very outset, Garber urges us to read cultural staging and plotting in exciting and revealing ways.

“Spare Parts: The Surgical Construction of Gender” is a fascinating study of transsexualism, both female-to-male and male-to-female, using psychoanalytic theories in a discussion of male subjectivity. This chapter is particularly interesting when read with the question of excess in mind. To change one’s gender, to construct or deconstruct the proper parts, is a radical way to stage gender. Here Garber asserts that “the transvestite and the transsexual both define and problematize the entire concept of ‘male subjectivity’” (98). Since this subjectivity can be surgically constructed, Garber’s analysis obviously calls into question the viability of any essentialist orientation towards gender. If one can construct the gender s/he is, then the “natural” demarcations of difference (and desire) cannot in any sense be essential.

Garber’s assertion, in the introduction, that “to ignore the role played by homosexuality would be to risk a radical misunderstanding of the social and cultural implications of cross-dressing” (4) leads her to chapter six, “Breaking the Code: Transvestism and Gay Identity.” This chapter’s organizing caveat is the assertion that no matter how intertwined homosexuality and transvestism are, “neither can simply be transhistorically ‘decoded’ as a sign for the other” (131). The section “Transvestite Panic” uses Eve Sedgwick’s model of homosexual panic to describe the anxiety over the cross-dresser in gay society. Later, Garber examines the colonization of gay styles and sensibilities by straight society, using, as examples, the current vogue of camp and the eternal vogue of gay fashion and fashion designers.

“Transvestite Effects” turns its attention more firmly to popular culture. Chapters nine and eleven stand out in this section. “Religions Habits” (chapter 9) draws a connection between cross-dressing and religion. This is an interesting section on the perceived effeminacy of the Jew in various places and periods, as well as the relationship, often quite complicated, between the construction of the Jew and the construction of the male homosexual. “Black and White TV: Cross-dressing the Color Line” (chapter 11) discusses the question of race and the related subjects of minstrelsy and passing. This is an important and insightful chapter. Garber asserts that “the overdetermined presence of cross-dressing in so many Western configurations of black culture suggests some useful ways to interrogate notions of ‘stereotype’ and “cliche’” (268). With attention to these stereotypes, Garber artfully and intelligently delineates the ways in which “the use of elements of transvestism by black performers and artists as a strategy for economic, political and cultural achievement . . . marks the translation of a mode of oppression and stigmatization into a supple medium for social commentary and aesthetic power” (303).

Despite the many strengths of this book, there were two things about it that I found troublesome. The first is that Garber does not pay enough attention to women in drag. Her only extended discussion of how women fit into the analysis is in the chapter “Fetish Envy,” the briefest chapter of the book. Part of what Garber does here is use Madonna to explore the possibility of simultaneously having and not having a penis. Her conclusion: playing with these positions can be an empowering gesture. And certainly Garber is right to observe that when Madonna squeezes her crotch on stage it is funny and offensive precisely because it plays on the joke of having and not having–it mocks the Freudian desire for what is not there. But since this sort of female fetishism plays only a contributing role in Garber’s book, serving to extend or elaborate her theorizations of male transvestitism, the discussion of Madonna’s cultural role, and of female drag in general, is closed down all too quickly. Garber, it seems to me, is too willing to leave women on the margins of transvestite theory. And the result is that she has missed an opportunity to explore the sort of cultural terrain I began with–the staging of “femininity” by women whose threatening “masculinity” requires that they in effect perform in drag. Of course Garber had to place some kinds of limits on her research. But it is a decided weakness that her book has so little to say about women in drag, and that when it broaches the issue at all it is only to situate women in relation to the fetish, positioning them once again as the troubled objects of fetishism.

The second trouble spot was pointed out to me by a friend and grows out of what we see as a dangerous trajectory initiated by Garber’s sixth chapter. In a recent article, Eve Sedgwick remarks that “gender theory at this moment is talking incessantly about crossdressing in order never to have to talk about homosexuality.” Cross-dressing has been used to allude to gay male culture by an operation similar to the “open secret” of homosexuality: “everyone already knows” that cross-dressing and male homosexuality are intimately connected, so the fact of homosexuality can both be avoided and commented on through a discourse on transvestism. Sedgwick sees cross-dressing as a kind of veil or displacement, and the proliferating academic literature on cross-dressing as a discursive closet. I find Sedgwick’s position very persuasive. I also believe that if we are searching for a theory of cross-dressing as a truly effective transgressive practice, one of the most fruitful sites to examine would be the intersection of cross-dressing and gay political action. Clearly, this in itself would not solve the problem of academic or cultural displacement, but I find it troubling that Garber does not even look to these political spaces.

On March 31, 1993 Anji Xtravaganza died in New York from an AIDS-related liver disease. Anji was one of the queens featured in Jennie Livingston’s documentary Paris is Burning. On April 19, 1993, the New York Times ran an article both on Anji Xtravaganza and the New York drag world. Entitled “Film, Fame, Then Fade-Out: The Drag World in Collapse,” the article reports that numerous deaths have decimated the New York drag community. Simultaneously, the writer notes that drag has arrived in prime time; with the appearance of Dame Edna Everage on TV and Ru Paul on magazine covers, nobody need seek out the New York vogue houses. Middle-class Americans can watch drag performances from the comfort of their own living rooms. This would seem to indicate that Garber’s assertions about transvestite culture are true: there is nothing without the transvestite, the figure who confounds our sense of identity while at the same time constructing who we are. Describing the last days of Anji Xtravaganza, Jesse Green writes that the liver disease was “destroying [Anji’s] hard won femininity.” Green reports that near the end Anji had to stop taking the hormones which were inadvertantly helping the progress of the disease. Green notes, “In later pictures you can see the masculine lines of Angie’s [sic] face re-emerging despite the make-up.” For Green, there must always be something else behind the make-up which disease(s) can devastatingly reveal–there is inevitably a re-emergence of what Green reads as “true” identity. It is the strength of Garber’s book to make us aware of just how spurious this underlying or final truth really is–to show us that there is always something else behind the something else behind the make-up. What is always still underneath, and can never fully be revealed, is Anji’s most complex layer; neither a “true” nor a “made-up” identity, but a third term, that which both defies and defines Anji’s “masculinity” and “feminity.”

In Vested Interests Marjorie Garber has managed to traverse the spaces of this third term–some of the most difficult terrain in contemporary gender studies–with the style and grace of Sheryl Swoops leading a fast break, or Anji Xtravaganza sashaying down a runway. It’s a performance not to be missed.

September 25, 2013
Women and Television
Leslie Regan Shade

Graduate Program in Communications
McGill University
shade@Ice.CC.McGill.CA

Spigel, Lynn. Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1992.

Spigel, Lynn, and Denise Mann, eds. Private Screenings: Television and the Female Consumer. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1992.

In the past few years there has been a flurry of published work on women and television. Some of the books include: Gender Politics and MTV by Lisa A. Lewis; Women Watching Television by Andrea L. Press; the BFI collection Women Viewing Violence; Ann Gray’s Video Playtime; Enterprising Women by Camille Bacon-Smith; Elayne Rapping’s The Movie of the Week; and No End to Her: Soap Opera and the Female Subject by Martha Nochimson.

What most of these books have in common is a preoccupation with analyzing the multifaceted role of women as audiences in various televisual experiences, with many utilizing an ethnographic approach to contemporary situations. This tendency within cultural studies to concentrate on media audiences, and particularly non-elite audiences, has often led to overarching generalizations as to the shaping of subjectivity, audience interpretations, and subcultural resistance to the hegemonic order. Nonetheless, this purview has captured the attention of historians eager to examine working-class life, including the audiences of diverse cultural fare. As Susan Douglas has noted, though, very often we have too much theory without history, and too much history without theory. How then, can we get past this absence in the historical record and “admit that, short of seances, there are simply some questions about the colonization of consciousness that we can never answer. We are, for the most part, restricted to data generated by the producers, not the consumers, of popular culture” (Douglas 135).

What is a good strategy for conducting historical research on the impact and effect of media on audiences? What types of evidence are needed? Where can such artifactual evidence be mined? Carlo Ginzburg suggests that the historian’s knowledge is akin to that of the doctor’s in its reliance on indirect knowledge, “based on signs and scraps of evidence, conjectural” (24). Such a conjectural paradigm, Ginzburg believes, can be used to reconstruct cultural shifts and transformations. There is also the potential for understanding society, not by invoking claims to total systematic knowledge, but by paying attention to the seemingly insignificant, idiosyncratic and often illogical forms of disclosure. “Reality is opaque; but there are certain points–clues, signs–which allow us to decipher it” (29-30).

Lynn Spigel, for one, has made avowed use of Ginzburg’s tactic for following the seemingly inconsequential trace in order to render a significant pattern of past experiences. In her cultural history of the early integration of the television in the American home, Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America, Spigel finds tell-tale evidence of the history of home spectators in discourses that “spoke of the placement of a chair, or the design of a television set in the room” (187). What she dubs a “patchwork history” consists in amassing evidence from popular media accounts that mostly catered to a white middle-class audience, such as representations in magazines, advertisements, newspapers, radio, film, and television. In particular, her insistence on treating women’s home magazines as valuable historical evidence allowed her to supplement traditional broadcast history (with its reliance on questions of industry, regulation, and technological invention), by highlighting the important role women assumed in the domestic, familial sphere as consumers, producers, and technological negotiators.

Spigel employs a diverse range of historical material to examine how television was represented in the context of the wider social and cultural milieu of the postwar period, such as the entrenchment of women within the domestic arena, the proliferation of the nuclear family sensibility amidst cold-war rhetoric, and the burgeoning spread of single-family homes in the new Levittowns. Some of the material she examines was culled from women’s magazines, industry trade journals, popular magazines, social scientific studies, the corporate records of the National Broadcasting Company, advertisements, and television programs.

In the first chapter, Spigel briefly examines past ideals for family entertainment and leisure, from the Victorian era to Post World War II. She argues that preexisting models of gender and generational hierarchy among family members, such as the distinction between the sexes and that of adults and children, and the separate spheres of public versus private, set the tone for television’s arrival into the home. As well, the introduction of entertainment machines into the household, including gramophones and the radio, also influenced television’s initial reception.

“Television in the Family Circle” is perhaps Spigel’s most successful chapter. Here she describes women’s home magazines of the time, including “Better Homes and Gardens,” “American Home,” “House Beautiful,” and “Ladies’ Home Journal,” which were the primary venue for debates on television and the family. They addressed their female audience, not just as passive consumers of television, but also as producers within the household. On the practical side, these magazines advised women on the proper architectural placement for the television set in the domestic space. The television set came to be seen as a valuable household object, becoming an electronic hearth that replaced the fireplace and the piano as the center of family attention.

Television was either greeted as the penultimate in technological advancement and as a “kind of household cement that promised to reassemble the splintered lives of families who had been separated during the war”(39); or as a kind of monster that threatened to dominate and wreak havoc on family togetherness. These diverse sentiments were echoed in the advertisements and discourses of the popular magazines of the day. A typical ad by RCA featured the family circle around the television console, while “Ladies’ Home Journal” dubbed a new disease, “telebugeye,” which afflicted the young couch potato.

“Women’s Work,” recounts how the television industry addressed women as consumers and workers within the domestic economy through advertisements and specialized programming. These discourses, addressed to “Mrs. Daytime Home Consumer,” included trying to hook the housewife on habitual daytime viewing through genres such as soaps and the segmented variety show featuring cooking and cleaning tips. Women’s magazines tried to mediate the dilemma housewives faced between television viewing as a leisure activity and their requisite domestic chores. One absurd solution to this predicament was epitomized by the Western-Holly Company’s 1952 design for a combined TV-stove, turning cooking into what Spigel calls a “spectator sport” (74).

The last two chapters deal with the emergence of television as the home entertainment center. In the new suburban landscape, television came to be seen as the “window onto the world,” and spectatorship became privatized and domesticated. Interior architecture reflected this relationship between the inside and the outside by promoting design elements such as landscape paintings, decorative wallpaper that featured nature or city-scapes, and the picture window or sliding glass door. Family sit-coms mimicked this fixation by depicting domestic spaces in which public exteriors could be glimpsed. As well, through various self-reflexive strategies, such as depicting television characters as real families “who just happened to live their lives on television” (158), and through farcical observations on the nature of the medium itself, viewers could be reassured about their relationship with this new electronic medium.

Spigel concludes by musing about current discourses on the contemporary home theater and the utopian possibilities raised by smart-TV’s, HDTV, the 500-channel universe of cable television, new video technology, digital sound systems, and virtual reality. She comments that the discursive strategies used to debate these new technologies are surprisingly the same as those used to discuss the introduction of television into the post-war economy.

Make Room for TV is interspersed throughout with reproductions from ads, cartoons, and television stills. Spigel’s work is an inspiration for those seeking to integrate diverse and unconventional source material into a coherent and plausible exploration of past audiences and the effects of new communications technologies.

Private Screenings, edited by Lynn Spigel and Denise Mann, is an expanded version of a special issue of camera obscura that appeared in 1988, and it is also part of a camera obscura series brought out by the University of Minnesota Press. Other books in the series include the 1990 Close Encounters: Film, Feminism and Science Fiction and the recently released Male Trouble.

I, for one, was slightly disappointed to realize that except for the addition of three new essays, Private Screenings was a reprint of the camera obscura issue. Although the ability to easily purchase such revised editions is preferable to hunting down obscure copies of the journal in specialty bookstores and libraries, the question can still be raised as to the politics of publishing mostly reissued material. Lorraine Gamman commented on the prevalence of the feminist scholarly reprint, urging that publishers be pressured to reduce the prices of books that consist of mostly reissued material:

It seems likely that the live feminist scholarly reprint developed as a phenomenon not only because feminist thinkers are at last becoming recognized, but because it constitutes low-investment publishing. Obviously authors have their own reasons for authorizing the reissue of their work, and so it would be inappropriate to say that reprints constitute exploitation or simply another publishing scam. Yet in the rush to reprint the past, both publishers and authors should take care to ensure that feminism doesn't look like it has run out of new ideas or fresh ways to express them.(Gamman 124)

However, publishers also want to capture part of the relatively large photocopy audience. Important journal articles or special issues circulate through academe mainly in photocopied form, outside the publishers’ revenue loop, contravening copyright law.

The nine essays in Private Screenings provide several interesting cases of historical methodology, focusing on the relationship between women, television, and consumer culture, and are intended to be part of a larger feminist project of “close analysis and historical contextualization” (xiii) which Spigel and Mann believe is the panacea to prevalent theoretical generalizations about television. By paying close attention to the analysis of television texts and their historical frameworks, the editors hope that cultural differences in how heterogeneous groups in particular historical situations perceive various mass media will be more practically delineated.

Three recurrent themes are interwoven in the essays. The first is television’s appeal to women as consumers, either through its display of various lifestyles and commodities; or through the viewing of television programs. The second theme is memory: how did audiences understand television programs, and what kind of nostalgic function did television programs serve? The negotiation between Hollywood and the television industry is the third theme, whether in early programming where the recycling of Hollywood glitz was common, or through contemporary soap operas which imitate cinematic ploys.

What is most interesting is the diversity of historical material that the authors have gleaned, including archival footage of television shows and films, popular magazines, fanzines, market and demographic research, and viewer response mail. A variety of approaches for analyzing the material are employed by the authors, including historical and audience interpretations. The first four essays by Spigel, Mann, Lipsitz, and Haralovich, concerned with historical interpretations of television’s social and cultural function in the 1950s, are by far the most successful and convincing in the book.

Lynn Spigel’s essay, “Installing the Television Set” is an earlier and shorter version of Make Room for TV. In this condensation, the introduction of television into the social and domestic sphere is examined through investigation of a variety of popular discourses on television and domestic space, including the theatricalization of the home front.

A fitting follow-up is Denise Mann’s “The Spectacularization of Everyday Life” concerned with variety shows that featured Hollywood guest stars. For Mann, these formats epitomized the nostalgic return to both earlier entertainment forms such as burlesque and vaudeville, and to strategies utilized by the Hollywood publicity machine to engage women as ardent fans. Using “The Martha Raye Show” as an example, Mann argues that this transfer of Hollywood stars to the home through television eased the negotiation of Hollywood’s participation in television and its placement into the everyday mundane life of the housewife. Women were encouraged to enter into the fantasy world of television while being constantly reminded that the images were corporate-produced and commercially-sponsored.

George Lipsitz examines early subgenres of ethnic, working-class sitcoms in “The Meaning of Memory,” contending that this genre served important social and cultural functions beyond the economic imperatives of network television. Shows such as The Honeymooners and The Life of Riley portrayed an idyllic version of urban working-class life which tugged at the chords of nostalgia for the neo-suburbanites, as well as legitimating a change in the socioeconomic and cultural sphere occasioned by the shift from the depression-era to the post-war consumer consciousness of material goods.

In “Sit-coms and Suburbs,” Mary Beth Haralovich provides a fascinating analysis of the emergence of suburban housing, the consumer product industry, and market research, which operated as defining institutions for the new social and economic role of post-war women as homemakers. By considering the work of architectural historians Dolores Hayden and Gwendolyn Wright, she details the many ways that post-war housing development and design, spurred on by the priorities of the Federal Housing Administration, created homogeneous and socially stable communities which effectively excluded any group that wasn’t white and middle-class. Haralovich explores the ways that the consumer product industry tried to define the homemaker through intensive market research, such as employing “depth research” which would probe into the psychic motivations of consumers and allow for “new and improved” product design and packaging. Using the examples of the television shows Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver, Haralovich shows how these representations of middle-class nuclear domesticity mediated the burgeoning suburban sensibility by inserting the preeminent homemakers June Cleaver and Margaret Anderson into the domestic architecture itself.

The next three articles in Private Screenings utilize archival material, such as viewer response mail sent to the producers of prime-time television shows, to look at how network television was dealing with the changing social roles fomenting in the 1960s, including feminism and civil rights.

Aniko Bodroghkozy in “Is This What You Mean by Color TV?” analyses public reaction to Julia, the first sitcom since the early 1950s to feature an African-American, Diahann Carroll, in its starring role. By concentrating on its reception, Bodroghkozy argues that “Julia functioned as a symptomatic text–symptomatic of the racial tensions and reconfigurations of its time” (144). Her tactics included analyzing viewer response mail, leading her to conclude that viewers were attempting to come to grips with racial difference; and by reading producer script files, she surmised that the production team constantly struggled to produce relevant images of African-Americans in the context of the civil rights movement.

The “new woman audience” that the networks were courting in the 1980s is the subject of D’Acci and Deming’s articles. D’Acci’s study of the police women genre show Cagney and Lacey led her to examine production files and interview the producers and writers to analyze the elaborate bargaining that ensued between the television producers, the network, the audience, critics, and public interest groups, relating this to the ongoing concerns of the women’s movement. She details how Cagney and Lacey struggled with the terms of femininity as it was played out on prime-time television–for instance, charges of lesbianism against the actors, problems with sexual harassment and the pain of the biological clock. Robert H. Deming is good when he argues that our interpretation of the “new women,” as exemplified by Kate and Allie, is contingent on our memories of sitcom women of the past, from ditzy gals like Lucy to goody- two-shoes like Mary Tyler Moore; but he is irritating when he tries to make a case for the program constructing and defining forms of female subjectivity.

The last two articles are concerned with contemporary television melodrama and the insertion of this “feminine” genre into a broad spectrum of programming. Sandy Flittermann-Lewis adopts a rather obtuse psychoanalytic- semiotic model to analysize how weddings are used in soap operas to contribute to the flow of narrative actions, concluding that they function as a return to the cinematic past. Lynne Joyrich examines the prevalence of the melodrama into diverse forms and textures of contemporary television, such as daytime soap operas, prime-time soaps, made-for-TV movies, crime dramatizations, and the growth of the therapeutic ethos. She maintains that “melodrama is thus an ideal form for postmodern culture and for television” (246), but I am not at all persuaded that such genres can, as she believes, “steel women for resistance” (247). Rather than reading melodramas against the grain and providing my own ironic commentaries, I would instead prefer to turn the set off.

On the practical side, the last chapter in Private Screenings is a “Source Guide to TV Family Comedy, Drama, and Serial Drama, 1946-1970” contained at the UCLA Film and Television Archive, the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, the Museum of Broadcasting, and the Museum of Broadcast Communications at River City. As well, William Lafferty has compiled a guide to alternative sources of television programming for research, including video dealers and the collectors market.

Works Cited
- Douglas, Susan J. “Notes Toward a History of Media Audiences.” Radical History Review 54 (1992): 127-38.
- Gamman, Lorraine. “Feminism and Youth Culture: from Jackie to Just Seventeen and Schoolgirl Fiction” [book review]. Feminist Review 41 (Summer 1992): 121.
- Ginzburg, Carlo. “Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method.” History Workshop 9 (1990): 24.
September 25, 2013
Theorizing the Culture Wars
J. Russell Perkin

Department of English, Saint Mary’s University
Halifax, N.S., Canada
rperkin@science.stmarys.ca

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars. New York: Oxford UP, 1992.

Graff, Gerald. Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education. New York: Norton, 1992.

Spanos, William V. The End of Education: Toward Posthumanism. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993.

As Henry Louis Gates, Jr., suggests at the beginning of Loose Canons, the “political correctness debate” or “culture wars” came as something of a surprise to what Gates calls the cultural left. The right was first off the press with a series of books such as those by Allan Bloom, Roger Kimball, David Lehman, and Dinesh D’Souza. Progressive academics replied as best they could in a variety of media, from television to the popular press to academic articles. Now enough time has passed for responses at greater length, such as the three books I am reviewing here.

Since political terms are slippery at the best of times, but especially so in the context of debates about culture, I should begin by briefly explaining my use of the terms “conservative,” “left,” and “liberal.” This is additionally necessary because as a Canadian I would use these words somewhat differently to describe the political situation in my own country, and some of the subtleties of the American usage remain mysterious to me. I have tried to follow Gates in referring to people like Allan Bloom, William Bennett, and Roger Kimball as “the right,” “conservatives,” or sometimes, more specifically, “neoconservatives”–but I do not follow the usage of some on the cultural left who would also refer to them as “liberals” or “liberal humanists.” By the “cultural left” I mean the coalition of literary theorists, feminists, and scholars in various fields of ethnic studies who have reshaped the study of the humanities during the last fifteen years, and who are sometimes closely connected with movements for social change beyond the walls of the academy. The cultural left thus includes both liberal pluralists like Gerald Graff and those on the radical left like William Spanos. I have used the most elastic of all these terms, “liberal,” in two senses: first, joined with “pluralist” to refer to those intellectuals whose stance is to some degree oppositional, but who combine that stance with an allegiance to certain traditional humanist values, and second, as a political label in the narrow sense, to refer to views characteristic of the part of the Democratic Party generally described as its liberal wing. My main reason for not using the term in such a way that it would overlap with “conservative” is a strategic one: part of my argument is that the most promising way to defeat the conservative cultural initiatives of the last few years is to build a coalition between liberal and radical scholars who can work for change on a variety of fronts without needing to agree on every issue.

It would be easy for a Canadian academic to feel smug while contemplating some aspects of the culture wars that have been fought on campuses, on the air, and in the reviews and popular press in the United States in the last few years. Just as we sometimes feel smug–when looking south– about our national health care programme, we can point to the fact that our country is officially bilingual, and that multiculturalism is the law of the land under the Multiculturalism Act of 1988. We might also feel alternately amused and annoyed that amidst all of their theorizing of postmodern difference and of curricular change, American literary theorists still affirm the goal of shaping the American mind in a manner that strikes us as rather unselfconsciously nationalistic, especially when such theorists, as is often the case, are ignorant of the multicultural nature of Canadian society, writing as though multiculturalism were an American invention. But smugness is often misplaced. Our health care system has problems of its own; similarly, bilingualism and multiculturalism are among the most contentious political issues in Canada. Moreover, American academic politics have a way of spilling across the border, which is why as a Canadian professor of English I have taken a strong interest in the culture wars.

As an example of the way that the terms of the American dispute have been appropriated in Canada, I offer the following instance, which also suggests that controversies over political correctness are still being actively played out at the local level, even if they do not engage the national media quite as much as they did in 1991. At Dalhousie University, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, a Committee on Discriminatory Harassment earlier this year released an interim report on procedures to deal with harassment on campus. This led Jeremy Akerman, a former leader of the provincial (and social democratic) New Democratic Party, to write a diatribe entitled “Campus Crazies Are Too Close for Comfort” in a local weekly newspaper Metro Weekly 12-18 Feb. 1993: 7. Akerman writes a regular column under the heading “Straight Talk”). He based his warning about the possible consequences of the Dalhousie report largely on Dinesh D’Souza’s Illiberal Education, which he describes as a “closely argued, well documented book” and “a work of courage and a beacon of common sense.” He also asserts that “University of Pennsylvania professor Houston Baker publicly argues against ‘reading and writing’ in the colleges because he claims they are a form of ‘control.’ Instead, he says the university should study the work of the racist rap group Niggers With Attitude, whose songs urge the desirability of violence against whites.”

In the context of public discourse at this level of ignorance, it is reassuring to be able to review a selection of intelligent assessments of the culture wars, and to evaluate some considered reflections about the nature of what Stanley Aronowitz and Henry Giroux call “postmodern education.” I will begin with Gerald Graff’s book, since Graff has had a high public profile in debates over the curriculum, and since his book is, of the three I am discussing, the most specifically concerned with the question of what a progressive curriculum might look like. His subtitle, “How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education,” suggests that the book aims at the same popular audience who read Allan Bloom and E.D. Hirsch. However, for the most part Graff avoids the nostalgic myths, the apocalyptic tone, and the patriotic fervour of such books. Instead he has written a modest defence of the strategy he has been tirelessly campaigning for over the last five years or so: the project of “teaching the conflicts,” that is, bringing out into the open, for the benefit of students, the issues that have been debated behind the scenes among the professors.

Graff makes effective use of personal narrative, including a fascinating account of his own resistance to reading at the beginning of his career as a student of literature, and throughout the book he shows great concern for what he calls the “struggling student.” He argues that discussion of pedagogy has stressed the sanctity of the individual classroom too much, without acknowledging that “how well one can teach depends not just on individual virtuosity but on the possibilities and limits imposed by the structure in which one works” (114). Thus he is concerned not so much with what texts students should read–in fact much of one chapter of the book is devoted to showing that Shakespeare still firmly holds pride of place in English studies–as with the way the curriculum is structured, and the concluding chapter looks in detail at several experiments in curricular integration.

By organizing the curriculum around conflicts of interpretation Graff proposes to provide students with “common experience” without at the same time assuming the need for a consensus on values and beliefs (178). Though he alludes throughout the book to his own political and social goals, it seems that for Graff, in the end, the conflicts themselves are what matters. That is, his is a liberal pluralist position, as he implies in the Preface when he thanks the conservatives with whom he takes issue throughout the book (x).

As I implied at the beginning of my discussion, there are some ways in which Graff’s book is not free from the aspirations of a Bloom or a Hirsch. In promising to “Revitalize” higher education he is implicitly buying into the very myth of fall and possible redemption that is typcially found in conservative texts. But Graff’s own critique of nostalgic myths of golden ages of education, here and in his influential Professing Literature (1987) runs counter to the implications of the word “revitalize,” and he also suggests that in fact “standards in higher education have actually risen rather than declined” (88, emphasis in original). In addition, he seems to underestimate the degree to which “the conflicts” are already part of the experience of education. As Gates comments about Graff’s proposal to teach the conflicts, “I think, at the better colleges, we do. We don’t seem to be able not to” (118). In spite of this, Beyond the Culture Wars presupposes that the university is in a state of crisis which Graff’s particular institutional proposals can repair. In fairness, I should note that it is possible that he adopted the strategy of employing some of the rhetoric of crisis simply in order to try to secure an audience for the book, which considering the sales of books from the right would be an understandable strategy.

In his last chapter, where he examines several experiments in curricular integration, Graff says that the proposals he endorses take for granted “the dynamics of modern academic professionalism and American democracy” (195). This is where I have the most serious difficulty with his argument. A more radical critique would surely want to at least question the ideology of academic professionalism, and to consider whether there was any disjunction between the noun “democracy” and the adjective “American.” As a scholar and critic who has been privileged to inhabit elite institutions, Graff seems to me insufficiently sensitive to the differences among institutions, and among the faculty employed by them on contracts of varying degrees of security and benefit. His tone throughout the book is that of someone who is comfortable in the academy, and who wants to make it a more interesting place for the privileged students who study there. The assumption is that there are principled differences among different professional factions, and these can be brought into productive conflict. Thus he does not seriously address the way that a corporate agenda is driving the university, so that the humanities are already situated within a frame of reference that is frequently reified as “economic reality.”

Graff expresses concern for the minority students who appear in his classes, but does not address the more fundamental fact that many young people from minority communities, especially African-Americans, do not have access to university education in the first place. Nor would his proposals make much sense to young and often marginalized faculty struggling to gain tenure, while older colleagues with tenure and seniority disdainfully refuse to engage in the sort of dialogue he assumes everyone seeks. But this is surely the reality for many at institutions less prestigious than Northwestern or Chicago. Finally, for all his concern for the struggling student, Graff seems to me insufficiently attentive to the diverse experience of students. Even though he talks interestingly about his own resistance to learning, he acknowledges that he was a middle-class kid at a good school; for students who are working class, especially in a recession, the “life of the mind stuff” Graff discusses may be even more alien. For such students, resistance is a way of registering that they are not destined for the kind of professional career the “life of the mind stuff” presupposes.

Henry Louis Gates’s book is a collection of essays, not all directly concerned with political correctness and the culture wars, although since their main focus is African-American studies they are very closely connected to those issues. However, as a result of his keen awareness of the way that the Reagan-Bush years affected African-Americans, Gates is less uniformly upbeat than Graff; in fact, his book is genuinely dialogic, incorporating a variety of tones and voices, and including a number of memorable personal narratives and two chapters in the mode of a hardboiled detective story. Due to the occasional nature of the essays, one can also see a development of Gates’s thought as it responds to particular events and contexts.

It is clear that for Henry Louis Gates the question of what books should be read is a much more important one than it is for Graff. Throughout the book he emphasizes the need to “comprehend the diversity of human culture” (xv). There is a celebratory tone to some of the essays, as he considers the achievements and the diversity of African-American studies, but at the same time an awareness of the precarious nature of this achievement, especially in view of the limited number of black doctoral graduates. He suggests that the more radical project remains, namely that of transforming the idea of what it means to be American so that it fully incorporates the African element of American culture.

Loose Canons is full of an infectious enthusiasm for the project of literary and cultural studies, and a profound awareness of Gates’s relation to a particular tradition and culture, even as he insists that education must strive for a culture without a centre, and one that accommodates difference. At the same time he rejects a simplistic identity politics, and he asserts that humanists need to learn to live without cultural nationalism (111). For Gates, “any human being sufficiently curious and motivated can fully possess another culture, no matter how ‘alien’ it may appear to be” (xv). The combination of an awareness of the isolating dangers of cultural nationalism and a desire to celebrate his own cultural tradition are particularly apparent in the discussion of the project of the Norton Anthology of African-American Literature; few can have a keener sense than Gates of the force of the arguments on all sides of the canon debate.

At times Gates, like Graff, seems rather comfortable with his position in the academy, and seems to refrain from questioning some of its more problematic enabling assumptions. However, this is only one element from a variety of voices, and a personal anecdote makes it clear that comfort–for the distinguished black professor–is liable at any moment to turn to discomfort: “Nor can I help but feel some humiliation as I try to put a white person at ease in a dark place on campus at night, coming from nowhere, confronting that certain look of panic in his or her eyes, trying to think grand thoughts like Du Bois but– for the life of me–looking to him or her like Willie Horton” (135-36).

Gates tries to maintain a balance throughout the book between on the one hand asserting the importance of intellectual work, and on the other recognizing that the political and social significance of such work can be overestimated by those who engage in it. He doesn’t deny the importance of critical debate, but insists on the highly mediated relationship of such debate to its supposed referent. As he comments, “it is sometimes necessary to remind ourselves of the distance from the classroom to the streets” (19).

I will postpone discussion of the political position Gates take in his important final chapter until I have considered William Spanos, since I think that Gates provides an important corrective to Spanos’s analysis.

With The End of Education we enter a rather different world. Graff and Gates both write in an elegant straightforward English, largely free of technical theoretical language; much of the material in each book has its origin in material prepared originally for oral delivery or for publication in literary reviews rather than academic journals. It is also clear that the publishers are hoping that the books will appeal to an audience beyond the academy. Spanos, on the other hand, writes in a dense discourse owing much to Heidegger and Foucault, and in a tone of unqualified assertion, without any of the engaging personal voice of Graff or Gates. The words “panoptic” and “hegemony,” together or separately, occur with numbing insistency. To make matters worse, the book is printed with small margins in a small typeface, and with forty-seven pages of long footnotes. One of my colleagues, looking at the review copy lying on my desk, commented that this seems like the kind of book that gives you a headache to read. It is likely to be read only by committed postmodern theorists, which is unfortunate, because The End of Education is an important book, and one which in many ways makes a challenging and necessary critique not only of neoconservative humanism but of the structure and discourses of the university which, Spanos asserts, support and are reinforced by such humanism.

The book originates in a response Spanos wrote to the Harvard Core Curriculum Report of 1978. He developed this response into a manuscript which was rejected for publication by an Ivy League press in spite of favourable readers’ reports, because it seemed to that press politically inappropriate to publish a “destructive” critique of the ideology informing the Harvard Report. Some of the material was published during the 1980s in articles in boundary 2 and Cultural Critique, but the final version has obviously been overdetermined by the intervening culture wars, which in some ways vindicate Spanos’s critique of the Harvard Report, but in other ways, I think, qualify the political conclusions he draws, in ways that he does not want to recognize. I should repeat that I find The End of Education at once a difficult, brilliant, forceful, and maddening book. My view of it changed several times as I read it, and the critique that follows is, more than most reviews, a provisional response.

What is impressive about the book, after the essays of Graff and Gates, is the density of its documentation and the erudition of its theoretical argument. Because of this, and because of his relentlessly oppositional stance (Spanos is no liberal pluralist), the book is a far more radical questioning of the institutional structure of the American university, whose complicity–including that of the humanities–with the more repressive and militaristic aspects of American society he clearly documents. His use of Althusser and Foucault prevents the too easy acceptance of the ideology of academic professionalism that Graff and to some extent Gates can be charged with. Furthermore, the most general project of the book is a Heideggerian critique of Western humanism per se. The result is obviously a much more ambitious book than the other two, though at the present juncture it must be evaluated in the context of the political debate over the future of the humanities, since the culture wars have placed it in a more specific frame of reference than Spanos originally anticipated.

The End of Education operates on several levels. The most basic is the Heideggerian critique of the onto-theological tradition of Western humanism, of which the humanities in the modern university are one particular part, and for which the Harvard Report in turn is a particular, synecdochic example. Secondly, Spanos argues that Foucault’s critique of panopticism as a “Benthamite physics of power” is not restricted to scientific positivism, but can be applied to the humanities as well, and to liberal, pluralist humanists as much as to neoconservatives: Far from countering the interested rapacity of the power structure that would achieve hegemony over the planet and beyond, the Apollonian educational discourse and practice of modern humanism in fact exists to reproduce its means and ends (64). The only hope is a postmodern (or, as Spanos prefers, posthumanist), “destructive”–in the Heideggerian sense– coalition of Heideggerian ontological critique and a social critique deriving from Foucault and Althusser, leading to an oppositional politics in the academy.

The genealogy Spanos constructs is impressive, and later developments have certainly vindicated his view of the Harvard Report, which in the early 1980s might have seemed overly paranoid. Spanos clearly shows a pattern in the recurrence of general education programmes based on restricted canons, beginning with the period during and following the first world war, then during the cold war, and finally in the post-Vietnam period. His insistence on acknowledging the importance of the Vietnam war in discussing the humanities at the present time is an important act of cultural memory. As an uncovering of the motives impelling the right in the culture wars, this book should be required reading for oppositional critics. However, as a political intervention it is flawed in several important ways, and I will conclude this review with an account of these, and a suggestion by way of Henry Louis Gates of a less paranoid and more pragmatic strategy for the cultural left.

On the one hand, Spanos gives his book theoretical depth by beginning at the most basic level of the question of being. On the other hand, in purely rhetorical terms, many readers will probably find the juxtaposition of the heavily Heideggerian first chapter and the details of the Harvard Report to be catachrestical; it is hard for even a sympathetic reader to grant the enormous linkages and assumptions involved in the argument. If Spanos had let his Heideggerian approach inform his genealogy without feeling it necessary to include so many long quotations from Being and Time and other works, the book would have a wider rhetorical appeal and thus a potentially greater political effect.

Another problem is that the book makes huge historical assertions that have the effect of lessening difference, even while it attacks the metaphysical principle “that identity is the condition for the possibility of difference and not the other way around” (4; emphasis in original). This is something Spanos has in common with some followers of Derrida who turn deconstruction into a dogma, rather than realizing that it is a strategy of reading that must take account of the particular logic of the texts being read. Spanos asserts that the classical Greeks were characterized by “originative, differential, and errant thinking” (105), which every subsequent age, beginning with the Alexandrian Greek, through the Romans, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the Victorians, and right up to the present, misunderstood in a reifying and imperialistic appropriation. This not only implies a somewhat simplistic reception-history of ancient Greek culture; it also, significantly, perpetuates a myth–the favourite American myth that Spanos in other contexts attacks in the book–of an original period of innocence, a fall, and the possibility of redemption.

There are further problems with the narrative built into The End of Education. Humanism is always and everywhere, for Spanos, panoptic, repressive, characterized by “the metaphysics of the centered circle,” which is repeatedly attacked by reference to the same overcited passage from Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”–not coincidentally one of the places where Derrida allows himself to make large claims unqualified by their derivation from reading a particular text. In order to make this assertion, Spanos must show that all apparent difference is in fact contained by the same old metaphysical discourse. Thus, within the space of four pages, in the context of making absolute claims about Western education (or thought, or theory), Spanos uses the following constructions:
1. “whatever its historically specific permutations,”
2. “despite the historically specific permutations,”
3. “Apparent historical dissimilarities,”
4. "Despite the historically specific ruptures."(12-15)
Western thought, he repeats, has “always reaffirmed a nostalgic and recuperative circuitous educational journey back to the origin” (15). This over-insistence suggests to me that Spanos is a poor reader of Derrida, for he is not attentive to difference at particular moments or within particular texts. He seems to believe that one can leap bodily out of the metaphysical tradition simply by compiling enough citations from Heidegger, whereas his rather anticlimactic final chapter shows, as Derrida recognizes more explicitly, that one cannot escape logocentrism simply by wishing to.

The destructive readings of particular humanist texts certainly show the complicity of Arnold, Babbitt, and Richards in beliefs and practices that are not now highly regarded (although Spanos has to work a lot harder with Richards to do this than with the other two). It is certainly true that Arnold made some unpleasant statements, and they are all on exhibition here. But Arnold was also an ironist, and the simple opposition between bad bourgeois mystified Matthew Arnold and good radical deconstructive Friedrich Nietzsche is too easy, as some recent work in Victorian studies on Arnold has begun to demonstrate. A deconstructive reading of Arnold would be alert to these possibilities, and would be able to argue, against William Bennett and Dinesh D’Souza, that Matthew Arnold amounts to more than the cliche, “the best that has been thought and said in the world.” Such a deconstructive reading would be of more practical use in the academy at the present time than Spanos’s wholly negative destruction.

Spanos’s extensive reliance on Heidegger raises a political question that he doesn’t adequately face. The humanists are lambasted for every ethnocentricity that they committed; Babbitt, perhaps not without justification, is described as having embodied “a totalitarian ideology” (84). But the book is defensive and evasive on the topic of Heidegger’s political commitments. Spanos seems to think he can testily dismiss those who bring up this matter as enemies of posthumanism, and his treatment of the topic consists mainly in referring readers to an article he has published elsewhere. But the problem remains: Heidegger’s ontological critique, when translated into the political sphere, led him to espouse Nazi ideology. If Heidegger is to be praised as the thinker who effected the definitive radical break with humanism, surely the question of his politics should be faced directly in this book.

My final criticism is that Spanos, by his attempt to put all humanists into the same category and to break totally with the tradition of humanism, isolates himself in a posture of ultraleftist purity that cuts him off from many potential political allies, especially when, as I will note in conclusion, his practical recommendations for the practical role of an adversarial intellectual seem similar to those of the liberal pluralists he attacks. He seems ill-informed about what goes on in the everyday work of the academy, for instance, in the field of composition studies. Spanos laments the “unwarranted neglect” (202) of the work of Paulo Freire, yet in reading composition and pedagogy journals over the last few years, I have noticed few thinkers who have been so consistently cited. Spanos refers several times to the fact that the discourse of the documents comprising The Pentagon Papers was linked to the kind of discourse that first-year composition courses produce (this was Richard Ohmann’s argument); here again, however, Spanos is not up to date. For the last decade the field of composition studies has been the most vigorous site of the kind of oppositional practices The End of Education recommends. The academy, in short, is more diverse, more complex, more genuinely full of difference than Spanos allows, and it is precisely that difference that neoconservatives want to erase.

By seeking to separate out only the pure (posthumanist) believers, Spanos seems to me to ensure his self-marginalization. For example, several times he includes pluralists like Wayne Booth and even Gerald Graff in lists of “humanists” that include William Bennett, Roger Kimball and Dinesh D’Souza. Of course, there is a polemical purpose to this, but it is one that is counterproductive. In fact, I would even question the validity of calling shoddy and often inaccurate journalists like Kimball and D’Souza with the title “humanist intellectuals.” Henry Louis Gates’s final chapter contains some cogent criticism of the kind of position which Spanos has taken. Gates argues that the “hard” left’s opposition to liberalism is as mistaken as its opposition to conservatism, and refers to Cornel West’s remarks about the field of critical legal studies, “If you don’t build on liberalism, you build on air” (187). Building on air seems to me precisely what Spanos is recommending. Gates, on the other hand, criticizes “those massively totalizing theories that marginalize practical political action as a jejune indulgence” (192), and endorses a coalition of liberalism and the left.

The irony is that in the last chapter, when he seeks to provide some suggestions for oppositional practice, Spanos can only recommend strategies which are already common in the academy, especially in women’s studies and composition. He praises the pedagogical theory of Paulo Freire, which as I have noted is hardly an original move; he recommends opposition to the structures of the disciplines, and oppositional practices within the curriculum. But again, many liberal as well as left academics are already teaching “against the grain,” enlarging the canon and experimenting with new methods of teaching. I have been teaching full-time for five years now, and the texts my younger colleagues and I teach, and the way we teach them, constitute something radically different from the course of studies during my own undergraduate and even graduate career. Women’s studies, which is not mentioned much in The End of Education, has provided a great deal of exciting interdisciplinary work. Gates’s book shows in detail how African-American studies has constituted not only an oppositional discourse, but one that has started to reconfigure the dominant discourse of American studies.

Thus Spanos seems to me to present, in the end, an unnecessarily bleak picture. It was surely the very success of some of the practices he advocates which precipitated the “anti-PC” backlash. The problem the cultural left faces is that books from the right have been hugely successful in the marketplace, with Camille Paglia as the latest star. But the vitality, scholarly depth, and careful argument that characterizes the books reviewed here show that the intellectual initiative remains with the left. These qualities also refute the wild allegations that have been made against current work in the humanities. Collectively, Graff, Gates, and Spanos suggest a way of moving beyond the culture wars, and I particularly recommend Gates’s final chapter as a careful and pragmatic analysis of the possible course of the humanities for the rest of this decade.
September 25, 2013
Comrade Gramsci’s Progeny
Tim Watson

Columbia University
tw22@cunixb.cc.columbia.edu

Gramsci, Antonio. Prison Notebooks. Volume 1. Ed. Joseph Buttigieg. Trans. Buttigieg and Antonio Callari. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992.

Harris, David. From Class Struggle to the Politics of Pleasure: The Effects of Gramscianism on Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge, 1992.

Holub, Renate. Antonio Gramsci: Beyond Marxism and Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, 1992.

No self-respecting piece of work on Antonio Gramsci can fail to mention his famous letter of March 19, 1927 to his sister-in-law Tatiana Schucht, in which he announces his desire to “accomplish something fur ewig [for eternity]” Letters 79). If Gramsci had been able to peer into the future and see the kind of work being carried out in his name in the Anglo-American academy over sixty years later, one wonders whether he wouldn’t have had second thoughts about that phrase.

Although Gramsci thought that cultural change tended to take place gradually rather than through “explosions” Prison Notebooks 129), it is hard to imagine what other word to use when surveying the proliferation of material around the figure of Gramsci in the last few years. From so-called “radical democracy” to subaltern studies to cultural studies, Gramsci’s name is evoked, his writings are endlessly analyzed, his legacy is contested (see, for example, Laclau and Mouffe; Golding; Chatterjee; Hall, Hard Road; Grossberg, Nelson and Treichler). The sheer volume of work, and its engagement across a wide range of fields and disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, are no doubt testimony to the enduring relevance of Gramsci’s insights; they also suggest, however, that there is now a Gramsci industry–that within the academic market Gramsci represents significant currency, and writers (and publishers) are cashing in.

Given the institutional politics and economics governing the contemporary academy, these two observations (Gramsci as theoretical model, Gramsci as cultural capital) are inseparable; in this respect Gramsci is no different from other leading (dirigente, to use Gramsci’s own terminology) theorists: Derrida, Foucault, Habermas, and the rest. Attempts to isolate and distill the essence of the “real” Gramsci (that which transcends the brash commercialism of the academic marketplace) can never be innocent or disinterested. Indeed, to dismiss the institutional economy within which one operates serves only to consolidate its regulatory mechanisms, its hegemony (so to speak). What follows is an attempt to address not the question “Who or what is the real Gramsci?” but rather the question “Why and in what ways have Gramsci’s writings enabled and generated so much intellectual work, insightful and mediocre?” Such a question is itself, of course, partly an effect of the Gramsci industry.

The subtitle to Renate Holub’s book, Antonio Gramsci: Beyond Marxism and Postmodernism (in the Routledge “Critics of the Twentieth Century” series), indicates some of the reasons why Gramsci has so much political and cultural purchase in the contemporary academy. It also reveals some of the ideological choices involved in the business of reading Gramsci: the book would undoubtedly not have made it this far if it had been called “Antonio Gramsci: Dead Sardinian Communist Militant,” for instance. If we unpack some of the assumptions behind Holub’s title we will find that Gramsci can be mobilized to the extent that he seems to offer political solutions to the predicament of postmodernism (figured as decentering, arbitrary, “merely” discursive), while at the same time appearing to surpass vulgar Marxist economism and historicism. To put it crudely, he is sufficiently Marxist to challenge postmodernism, and sufficiently postmodernist to combat Marxism. Shuttling between the two, the Gramscian writer enjoys great flexibility and space for critique, innoculated against the “worst excesses” of both systems of thought; the question remains, however, whether, in this “interregnum,” Gramsci can be used in this way without “a great variety of morbid symptoms appear[ing]” (Gramsci, Selections 276).

Gramsci and “Us”

Holub’s book is another “Introduction to Gramsci,” and as such, in an already crowded field, it has to differentiate itself and be seen to be offering something new and creative. Thus, she proposes to study Gramsci in the “context of literary criticism, and in the context of Marxist aesthetics” (7). “Until recently,” she observes, “the Gramscian critical community showed little interest in his literary critiques and his aesthetics” (4). In this way Holub carves out a space for herself in the contest over “a text [the Prison Notebooks] held zealously captive by the knights of the Gramscian Grail” (38). These knights (who are not identified) have thus far insisted on “emphasiz[ing] his place in the history of Western Marxism, [and] examin[ing] his conceptual apparatus in the context of political and social theory” (20); Holub prefers instead to build on the pioneering work of Giuliano Manacorda, who reads Gramsci as “speaking of the literary conditions of political possibility, correcting the image of a political Gramsci in favour of a Gramsci whose literary, aesthetic and linguistic interests give shape and form to his political interests” (38).

I do not mean to imply that such a reading of Gramsci is necessarily illegitimate; literary and culturalist readings of Gramsci are possible because there is evidence for them in his writings. (To cite a passage which Holub does not mention: “Every new civilization, as such … has always expressed itself in literary form before expressing itself in the life of the state. Indeed its literary expression has been the means with which it has created the intellectual and moral conditions for its expression in the legislature and the state” [Gramsci Cultural Writings, 117].) I am not interested in “correcting” the image of Gramsci which Holub propagates–even if one may question why, if “primarily he was a militant, [and] a critical and pragmatic one, to boot” (39)–she seems so irritated by those who choose to engage with Gramsci on that terrain. My concern here, rather, is how Gramsci works to legitimate a political project in Holub’s text, and the way in which, as the book progresses, the figure of Gramsci comes to be evacuated of almost all substance, so that “Gramsci” becomes a kind of cipher, merely a vehicle for addressing a contemporary crisis.

If Holub had stuck to the analysis of Gramsci in relation to Frankfurt School critical theory, Benjamin, Lukacs, and Bloch which makes up the first half of the book, things might have been fine. Comparing Gramsci’s and these various theorists’ responses to modernity–rationalization, technologization, the culture industry–is an important task, and one which has for the most part not been undertaken up to now. Holub does indeed begin to demonstrate “the ways in which Gramsci’s work displays homologies with many pivotal twentieth-century ways of theorizing” (9).¹

But one gets the impression, reading Antonio Gramsci: Beyond Marxism and Postmodernism, that the teleology of the book dictates that these discussions are entered into primarily as a pretext to get us into the present. Gramsci as modernist is interesting precisely to the extent that he can also be characterized as a postmodernist avant la lettre, as it were: “To deal with Gramsci, loosely, in the context of Frankfurt School critical theory, in the context of modernism, is apposite. It helps to examine the contours of Gramsci’s non-modernism as well, the ways in which he goes beyond modernism, and the possible applicability of some of his terms for a postmodern agenda” (14).

Thus there are multiple references to Gramsci’s “anticipatory sensibility to very complex cultural and social transformations” (10), or to the way in which “he begins to problematize, long before Edward Said and contemporary theories of progressive anthropology, the predominant Eurocentricity in disciplines and knowledge” (15). In his emphasis on “the materiality of language” Gramsci “surpasses the modernism of the Frankfurt School and aligns himself with or anticipates theoretical concerns which should become prominent in the second half of the twentieth century” (116); Gramsci’s linguistic theory represents “an advance over Volosinov’s” because it “anticipates a theoretical model” which can deal with “gender, race and geography rather than merely with class” (140).

The problem for Holub, however, is that these claims for Gramsci’s predictive capacity become increasingly removed from Gramsci’s writings themselves–unsurprisingly, perhaps, given their rootedness in 1920s and 30s Italian political culture. Hence the tortuous prose in the following passage, in which the reader is called on precisely to “reconstruct” Gramsci’s work in order to bring him up to date: “There are . . . some elements in his reading of Dante that lend themselves, due to their semiological and structuralist components, to reconstructing a version of Gramsci’s theory of the subject which brings him into the vicinity of other major twentieth century critics [here she mentions Merleau-Ponty, Volosinov, Barthes]” (119). At a certain point, Holub ceases to rely on the substance of Gramsci’s thought almost entirely, turning him into a methodological rather than a political model:

What we, living in a western nation-state at the end of the twentieth century, can adopt from Gramsci, I think, is not so much the results of his analysis, culminating in his particular theory of the intellectual. What we can examine are his ways of viewing and doing analysis, and amend or transform them for the political needs of our time.(171)

“We” Westerners emerge as a collectivity at this moment in the book, in contrast to the people of “Central and South America,” whose “socio-political and economic constellations . . . are at this point to some extent not dissimilar to those of Italy in the first few decades of this century,” and who thus can potentially make use of the substance of Gramsci’s work (171). We do theory, they do politics.² The “non- western world” remains undifferentiated and apparently unknowable for Holub (even the reference to Latin America has no specificity); its role is to provide the grounds for auto-critique, and thus for identity, for “us” (the first person plural is insistently present in the final pages of Holub’s text): “Our resistance to power, our critical thinking, must take into account our relation, as western intellectuals, to the non-western developing world, our position, that is, as producers and disseminators of knowledge, and meaning” (182).

It is undoubtedly the case that Western intellectuals need to be more attentive to their positionality and privilege vis-a-vis the Third World, and it is perhaps appropriate that a reading of Gramsci should stimulate such reflections, given his emphasis on uneven development, both within the European nation-state and through the operations of imperialism. The suspicion remains, however, that even as the locus of resistance shifts to the periphery, the Western intellectual retains for himself or herself the role of understanding, judging and representing that resistance.

Perhaps it is proper for us, as critical intellectuals and arbiters of hope, and stationed in the intellectual power apparatuses of the west, to seek out these impulses for democratic change, to receive the messages that meet us from these [`developing'] worlds, and translate them, by way of our theoretical tools, for ours.(189-90)

Such a position cannot avoid producing the “developing world” as raw material for the consolidation of “our” Western subjectivity; or, as Holub herself puts it, “the necessity of the `inferior other’ in the structuration of identity” (15). Thus Gramsci, stretched almost to the vanishing point by the end of this book, can be mobilized to legitimate the continuation of intellectual and political work in the Western academy, at a time when it is perceived to be under threat. Holub’s intervention, via the figure of Gramsci, can be read as an attempt to shore up the precarious but nonetheless powerful position of Western intellectuals “as mediators between the needs and desires of developing cultures, and the mandarins of our establishments” (189).

Gramsci and Cultural Studies

If such a reading of Holub’s work seems uncharitable, then I must have been infected by the deep cynicism underlying David Harris’s survey of British cultural studies, From Class Struggle to the Politics of Pleasure: The Effects of Gramscianism on Cultural Studies. These effects, according to Harris, have been mostly deleterious; the energy of the “early rebellion” of British Gramscians has been “institutionalised and acedemicised” since then, so that the impetus for most current work in the field comes from the need to “found a research programme or school or centre, to engage in a little academic politics” (15). Thus, while Stuart Hall (or, rather, “the ubiquitous Stuart Hall” [xv]) argues that the work of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) demonstrated “heterodoxy and openness,” Harris contends that “beneath this pluralism lies a deeper conformity to a continuing project–the development and defence of gramscianism” (7), and that

this tendency is linked to the academic context of the production of these works: briefly, it is conventional in academic writing to conduct a debate with rivals before allowing the chosen theorist to emerge as the person most likely to synthesise the offerings, make sense of the debates, or offer some suitably pleasurable resolution and closure. This underlying narrative structure . . . might be called `academic realism.'(8)

Harris promises to share with us readers the “tricks of the trade” in this academic game (2), as he demonstrates to us the unity and continuity underlying “the specific twists and turns of the debates” within British cultural studies (8). If this is a survey work, intended primarily as a teaching tool (“I am especially interested in the student audience” [3]), then it is at least up front about its non-neutrality in the face of its subject matter. There is little doubt in Harris’s mind that in the trajectory charted by his title, the British Gramscians have taken part in a “demoralised flight from serious politics” (190) into the coziness of academic tenure and complacency.

Such cynicism is by no means entirely misplaced– although one might wonder at its motivation; given the hegemony currently enjoyed by “British cultural studies,” there is no doubt notoriety to be gained by attacking it. CCCS’s work in the seventies and early eighties did indeed demonstrate “the astonishing tendency for the figure of Gramsci to keep coming to the fore, as a leading theorist and guide, as a source of specific pieces or concepts which guide analysis, or less specifically as a kind of model of good practice, able always to `teach a lesson’, keep the faith, and see off rivals” (7-8). Later on, what Harris calls “gramscianism” certainly did seem to offer, as I suggested above, “a kind of `middle ground’ between fully floating discursive politics and more orthodox class politics” (45). Or, as the ubiquitous Stuart Hall put it, in the discussion period following his paper “The Toad in the Garden”: “Gramsci is where I stopped in the headlong rush into structuralism and theoreticism. At a certain point I stumbled over Gramsci, and I said, `Here and no further!’” (Hall “Discussion,” 69).³

But while academic and institutional pressures are undoubtedly a major factor in the reproduction and dissemination of any theoretical or political movement, such a movement is never reducible to those pressures. At times, Harris’s book ceases to be a sustained critique of a critical tradition, and drifts into academic point-scoring. Harris focuses on the ways in which Gramsci has served as a bulwark against threatening theoretical tendencies; what he fails to acknowledge is that such defensiveness does not preclude (indeed it may have actually facilitated) the production of important intellectual work. As an example, let me focus briefly on Harris’s reading of Policing the Crisis (96-104).

Harris recognizes the complexity and openness of the now classic 1978 study of the ways in which “moral panics” about crime serve to consolidate hegemonic state power: “there seems to be no stage-managed `discovery’ here [in Policing], at least, no premature reduction of the `complex unity’ to some easy slogan about hegemony” (102). However, this very complexity constitutes a problem for Harris: “the piece can look like a conventionally `balanced’ academic piece, riddled with cautious qualifications and reservations” (102).⁴ Some readers may recognize a trick of the trade in operation here in Harris’s text, viz. “a common academic desire to want it both ways” (102). Harris is suspicious of the authors of Policing when they claim to have “just moved, under the pressure of their own argument, from one level of analysis to the other as their discoveries unfolded,” arguing instead that “the authors had known for some while where they were going” (103); so does this mean that there is a stage-managed discovery after all?

While it is true that Harris could hardly be expected to “do justice” to a densely argued and expansive 400-page book in a short summary, nevertheless I think that Harris is enacting his own kind of closure when he argues that, of the possible audiences for Policing the Crisis, “it seems that `academics’ have received the most attention: all those asides and interventions in debates between different authors (and all those careful qualifications and reservations) are for them” (98). This is too easy a dismissal of a complex text–the mobilization of the idea of “academic realism,” if pushed far enough, can cease to be a revealing insight into the strategies which produce a discursive formation, and can become instead an alibi for failing to engage with the substance of that discourse.

We should be thankful to Harris for sharing his inside knowledge of the constraints and conventions of “academic realism,” not least because it will allow his student audience to decode his own strategies. Although “gramscianism” makes some sense as a concept in the context of British cultural studies through the mid-eighties, as the field has become more dispersed and contested (and as the prominence of Gramsci himself as a theorist has waned–the only field in which that could be said to be happening– “Largely . . . Gramsci now exists as a kind of source for handy and stylish quotes, phrases or metaphors” [191]), it makes less and less sense to talk of “gramscianism.” The question arises, then, to what extent the term functions primarily within the economy of Harris’s own text in order to hold his academic realist narrative together, particularly when it can encompass such writers as “[Robert] Hewison [who] is not a gramscian or a semiotician, in so far as it is possible to tell from his books, but . . . is clearly an informed critic, and, with the aid of a few specific concepts and a parachute for them, . . . could become a full gramscian should he so desire” (158). The wit and acerbity here will doubtless endear Harris to his student audience, but in the end one fears that it will encourage the dismissal of what, after all, is “one of the few critical traditions British academic life possesses” (6).

Gramsci’s Corpus

When it comes to writing about Gramsci, the academic realism which Harris anatomizes is almost always supplemented with a dose of tragic melodrama. Gramsci’s premature death in the Quisisana clinic in Rome in 1937, when he was finally freed from his prison sentence but physically incapable of leaving the prison hospital; his heroic struggle to defy the words of the chief prosecutor at his trial–“we must stop this brain from functioning for twenty years”–by writing his prison notebooks, battling ill health and the inevitable lack of resources while incarcerated: among the ranks of Marxist martyrs only Rosa Luxemburg comes close to Antonio Gramsci.

Gramsci’s biography, however, does not merely add that all-important romantic frisson to an otherwise dry academic discourse. His early death means that the body of his later work–the prison notebooks–remains unfinished, sketchy, provisional, and must therefore be actively reconstructed in the process of reading. The usual give and take of scholarly interpretation becomes, in the context of Gramsci studies, an unusually intense tussle over the Gramsci corpus. Gramsci died intestate, as it were; his legacy–the body of his writings–has been contested, sometimes bitterly, ever since.

The publication, finally, of a definitive English translation of the full text of the prison notebooks will not lay this conflict to rest. In the introduction to the first volume of what will eventually be a five or six volume edition of Gramsci’s prison writings, the editor, Joseph Buttigieg, himself acknowledges this fact:

The Gramscian editor, scholar, or commentator, then, feels compelled . . . to stitch [the pieces of Gramsci's text] together. Sometimes this operation of reconstruction is carried out responsibly, that is, with a critical awareness of its limitations. At other times, however, this operation is carried out with the misguided belief that one can actually reconstruct not just Gramsci's thought but Gramsci himself. . . . It would be futile to think that one can put an end to this game. Even the most conscientiously accurate and complete reproduction of Gramsci's manuscript will not settle the polemics, or still the urge to reconstruct the `true' Gramsci."(62-63)

However, English-speaking readers will now have a much better grasp of the sheer volume of material which must be sifted through in order to produce the nuggets of Gramscian gold with which we are all so familiar: hegemony, state and civil society, war of maneuver and war of position, passive revolution, the organic intellectual.

This new translation is based on the standard Italian edition of the Quaderni del carcere edited by Valentino Gerratana, except that the meticulously detailed textual apparatus appears in the same volume as the relevant text, rather than being reserved for a separate, final volume. A pedant would bemoan a number of typos and other proofreading errors which sit badly with the scholarliness of the enterprise; nevertheless, readers can only be grateful to Buttigieg and Columbia University Press (who are also publishing a complete English edition of Gramsci’s prison letters) for their endeavors.

The Buttigieg edition will not supplant the previous translated selections from Gramsci’s prison writings Selections, Cultural Writings), if only because its price and bulk will preclude its use as a teaching text for the most part. However, Buttigieg is right to say that its appeal will not be limited “only to the most scrupulous readers and assiduous researchers” (xix). Even a cursory reading of the “recondite materials” (xix) of Gramsci’s first two notebooks (translated in this volume) will provide the necessary innoculation against the worst excesses of the Gramsci industry: both the tendency to smooth out Gramsci’s writings in the search for a coherent philosophy, and the tendency to treat Gramsci’s text as so disjunctive as to be open to almost any interpretation.

The publication of this new translation would not have been possible without the support of a large Italian bank (whose generosity makes a pointed contrast with the “modest” assistance Buttigieg received from the NEH [xxi]). But the whole project is also clearly an effect of the Gramsci industry. A positive effect, and one for which we can be grateful–even if it means another decade of dubious “gramscianisms” and another generation of scholars claiming to be Gramsci’s postmodern heirs.

Notes

1. Both Holub and Harris make the point that theorists who write about Gramsci, or use his work, have consistently foreclosed or even dismissed critical theory (see Harris 15-16). Although I do not have the space to do more than gesture at a possible new direction here, I think a fruitful place to start might be a discussion of the issues raised by the striking similarity in imagery of Gramsci’s reference to Italian poet Alfieri having his servants tie him to his chair (so that he would have the self-discipline to work Prison Notebooks 236]), and Adorno and Horkheimer’s reference to Odysseus having himself tied to the mast (so that he might have pleasure from the Sirens’ song) while stopping the ears of his sailors, so that they could continue to labor for him (Adorno and Horkheimer 58-60).

2. Although a discussion of Laclau and Mouffe is beyond the scope of this paper, I would contend that a structurally similar argument fatally disables Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. In the section “Equivalence and Difference,” they locate the logic of equivalence in the Third World, where “imperialist exploitation and the predominance of brutal and centralized forms of domination” produce “the division of the political space into [only] two fields” (131); they call this the realm of the “popular,” which they set against the “democratic,” associated with “advanced industrial societies” characterized by complexity and the logic of difference (130). Thus a surreptitious hierarchical account emerges, in which the Third World is parasitic on the West, the site of “hegemony”: “It is clear that the fundamental concept is that of `democratic struggle,’ and that popular struggles are merely specific conjunctures” (137).

3. On Stuart Hall’s use of Gramsci, in the context of Gramsci’s reception in Britain more generally, see David Forgacs, “Gramsci and Marxism in Britain,” New Left Review 176 (July- August 1989): 83-84.

4. The authors themselves, by contrast, worry in their introduction that “academics will find it Policing] too unbalanced, too committed” Policing ix).

Works Cited
- Adorno, Theodor W. and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. John Cumming. New York: Continuum, 1991.
- Chatterjee, Partha. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse?. London: Zed, 1985.
- Golding, Sue. Gramsci’s Democratic Theory: Contributions to a Post-Liberal Democracy. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1992.
- Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Ed. & trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers, 1971.
- Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from Cultural Writings. Ed. David Forgacs and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, Trans. William Beolhower. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1985.
- Gramsci, Antonio. Letters from Prison. Ed. & trans. Lynne Lawner. New York: Noonday, 1989.
- Grossberg, Lawrence, Cary Nelson, Paula Treichler, eds. Cultural Studies. London and New York: Routledge, 1992.
- Hall, Stuart. The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left. London and New York: Verso, 1988.
- Hall, Stuart. “Discussion: The Toad in the Garden: Thatcherism among the Theorists.” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988.
- Hall, Stuart, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, Brian Roberts. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1978
- Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London and New York: Verso, 1985.
September 25, 2013
Can You Go Home Again? A Budapest Diary 1993

Susan Suleiman

Dept. of Romance Languages and Comparative Literature
Harvard University

Introductory Note:

The excerpts that follow are from a diary I have been keeping since early February [1993], when I began a six- month residency at the Collegium Budapest, a new Institute for Advanced Study modeled on those in Berlin and Princeton. When I was invited last year to come to Budapest during this inaugural year of the Collegium, I accepted immediately. Besides the usual luxuries of such a Fellowship period, the invitation offered me what I thought of as a near- providential opportunity to continue the autobiographical project I had started some years back, and which was assuming increasing urgency.

I left Hungary with my parents in the summer of 1949, and rarely thought of it again until thirty-five years later, when I decided to return as a tourist with my two sons, then aged 14 and 7. That return triggered a desire to reconnect with my childhood and native city, a desire that took the form of writing. I published two short pieces I occasionally allude to in the diary (“My War in Four Episodes,” Agni, 33, 1991; “Reading in Tongues,” Boston Review, May-August 1992). Then, as a preparation for my current trip, I wrote a longer memoir, still unpublished, about the 1984 return and the memories it brought back. The decision to write the diary did not crystallize until after I arrived here–I simply found myself writing on my computer, sometimes for hours, at other times for a few minutes, from the first day on. After a while, I realized that I was writing “for a public” as well as for myself, and the project of a published diary began to take shape. Since these excerpts have had to be radically excised from a much longer text that is still in process, I decided to limit my selections to a few themes, chief among them the current resurgence of nationalism and anti-Semitism in Hungary (as in Eastern Europe in general), and, not unrelated to the first, my personal history. Out of a desire to protect the privacy of people I mention, I have used only first names or initials, which are not necessarily factual. In the case of public figures, I cite their full real name. I have tried to keep the writing very close to that of the first draft, but have not resisted making occasional stylistic changes. The order and tenor of the entries have not been modified. Some of the major cuts are indicated by suspension points in brackets.

A few Hungarian words: utca means street, ut means avenue, ter means square (like “place” in French), korut is a round avenue, korter or korond a round “square,” villamos means tramway. Hungarian names are cited last name first, given name second. Hungarian vowels have a variety of diacritical marks, but they cannot be reproduced in this electronic publication.

I would be interested in readers’ responses to this work. Please send them to Postmodern Culture, which will forward them to me.

Wednesday, February 3

My apartment is the whole top floor of a three-story building, very big and nice.

[…] I didn’t want to sleep in the middle of the afternoon, so after taking a hot bath and changing clothes, I went to the Collegium. I walked part of the way, down toward the Gellert Hotel on Bartok Bela ut, a wide, busy avenue lined with shops. I stopped at one to buy a toothbrush and some paper handkerchiefs. It felt strange to be speaking Hungarian to the young woman in the store. I thought I was speaking badly, like a foreigner. After walking a while longer I took a taxi, which cost 240 Forints–just under three dollars.

The Collegium occupies a historical monument, an 18th- century building, newly renovated, in what is surely one of the most beautiful spots in Budapest–on Castle Hill above the Danube, across the square from the Matyas Church. The Church and square look positively dreamlike when they are lit up in the evening. My first sight of them was that way, for it was dark by the time I got there.

Friday, February 5

Had a chat with the downstairs neighbor this morning, a woman of about 65. She and her husband have been living in this house for over thirty years. It was a state-owned building, but three years ago the tenants were given the option to buy their apartments. The couple who own mine bought two–this one and a smaller one on the ground floor, where they now live. They spent several years abroad, which may account for the fancy electronic equipment in my apartment. Everybody had their place redone inside, but they have no money left to repair the outside, which still bears the marks of World War II. The front was just one street over, she said: Germans on one side, Russians on the other. The pockmarks on our facade are due to flying shrapnel. It looks very bad, but would cost too much to repair. There are six apartments in the building. Theirs was divided, that’s why it’s smaller than mine.

Shall I go back again to Akacfa utca and climb again the three flights of stairs to our old apartment, now divided? Maybe the couple who lived there nine years ago no longer lives there, or maybe they have bought the place and had it redone.

After lunch at the Collegium I took a taxi to the home of B., one of the editors of a recently founded monthly journal, whose name was on my list of people to call. He had told me on the telephone yesterday that he lived in an old-style building with a balcony surrounding the courtyard, and asked whether I was afraid of heights. No I wasn’t, I assured him–and a good thing, too, because really his balcony is very narrow and from the third floor where he lives one has a plunging view. The building reminded me of Akacfa utca, but it was less nice–narrow balcony, no wrought iron, a smallish courtyard full of parked cars.

The man who opened the door was tall, around 50, pleasant face, almost bald and what hair he had, white. The apartment’s clutter matched the exterior mess. He invited me into the tiny kitchen while he made coffee. He has a very charming, informal manner and a boyish air which I suspect he cultivates, as if he didn’t want to flaunt his authority or power–or perhaps as if he didn’t want completely to grow up. After the coffee was made, he invited me into his study, a large pleasant room lined with books which we reached by crossing a small bathroom. His computer was still on, and he showed me the database he has been working on for the past fifteen years, just finished: a complete repertoire, in French, of Hungarian poetry written before 1600. A true work of erudition, which somehow didn’t fit in my mind with his image as an editor of a chic journal. But B. turned out to be a man of many interests and talents (“Je n’ai pas un violon d’Ingres, j’ai un orchestre d’Ingres,” he joked at one point), and we spent a pleasant few hours talking about everything from opera to French structuralism, with which he feels a great affinity. At first we spoke Hungarian, but when things got really interesting we settled into French, which he speaks very well with a heavy Hungarian accent.

I asked him about the journal. “Well, I think you have great areas of empathy in you, but you simply cannot imagine what it was like to be an intellectual here around 1987-88. Suddenly, everything seemed possible. I had purposely chosen to specialize in literature before 1600, just to make sure I would never have to write anything about politics. Under the communist regime, that was the only way I felt I could survive. But then, when things began to change, I felt I could and should take an active role.” So he and some friends founded the journal, in the very room where we were sitting–and he didn’t even have a telephone at the time!

After looking at the “Contents” of Subversive Intent, which I had xeroxed for him (the book is on its way), he asked: “Are you close to feminism?” Yes, I answered. He smiled broadly: “I wrote one of the first feminist articles in Hungary–about a 16th-century poet, the first Hungarian woman poet, who wasn’t mentioned in any of the official literary histories.” But now, he no longer considers himself a feminist because all the ones he knows are too angry. He likes women, but not feminism. Are there any women on the editorial board of the journal? I asked. (I knew full well there aren’t any, I had read the masthead.) No, he answered. There are too many “fistfights” (bagarres) among the editors, and in a woman’s presence they might not turn out the same way. Some men become too wildly competitive if a woman is present, as if to prove themselves to her. What did I think about that? That it’s very hard for men to think of women as equals, I answered.

He gave me his latest book–about three kinds of readers, all of them “played” by himself. As he was telling me about his three readers I couldn’t help thinking of the four sons at the Seder, especially since he had mentioned a short while before that both of his paternal grandparents were Jewish. He said neither he nor his father thought of themselves as Jews, though of course, at the first sign of anti-Semitism, he identifies himself as one. He inscribed his book, in Hungarian, “To Zsuzsa, with much affection–B. the feminist.” I gave him some of my essays. The visit lasted more than four hours.

Saturday, February 6

Spent the afternoon in my office, reading final papers for my “War and Memory” seminar. The first one I read was K.’s interview with her father, about the last year of the war he spent in Budapest. He is three years older than I, so he was eight years old in the harsh winter of 1944-45 when all the fighting was going on. Many parallels between our stories, including the fact that all of his immediate family survived. K. writes that she has always known her father was a Holocaust survivor, and he told her many stories when she was a child. The stories were always doctored, or as she put it “filtered,” in such a way that they were tales of good luck and triumph, not of fear or anxiety. It was only now, in this formal interview, that her father, with her prompting, spoke about his fears.

Reading her essay, I wondered why I never told such stories to my children–why, in all innocence or thoughtlessness, I never considered myself as a survivor all these years. I finally decided it had something to do with the fact that I left Hungary in 1949, not 1956 like K.’s father. He was 20, he has an unmistakable accent when he speaks English–there was no “forgetting” his past. I, on the other hand, looked and spoke like many other smart middle-class American Jewish girls by the time I graduated from high school. So I could easily pass, “forget” where I came from or consider it irrelevant, and want other people to consider it that too.

The funny thing is, these days I am irritated when I discover that someone I know thinks of me as “just another American,” or even an American Jew. The other night, at the dinner for Ruth Wisse in Cambridge, D. expressed surprise when I told her I was born in Budapest. So I immediately sent her my two memoirs, as soon as I left the dinner!

Two days ago I bought Magyar Forum, the weekly newspaper of the ruling Magyar Demokrata Forum–or more exactly, of the party’s far-right wing, led by Csurka Istvan. I finally read it this morning. Csurka’s column is on page 2–a piece extolling the Hungarian people (Magyar nep), the “silent majority” against the political “elite.” Since the column starts out by talking about a former head of the National Bank who seems to have been mixed up in some scandal and who “has an Israeli passport,” I think “elite” may be a code word for Jews, or groups that include a lot of Jews.

A pretty piece of populist rhetoric, on the whole. I imagine it’s the kind of thing that the grocery store lady of this morning whom I overheard complaining about the price of life might find comforting. But maybe I am jumping to conclusions about the poor lady. At any rate, Csurka is not a nice man. His name should be Csunya, for he stirs up ugly feelings (csunya means ugly).

Monday, February 8

Last night all the Fellows were invited by the Rector to a concert at the Kongresszus hall, a kind of Convention hall that also serves as a concert hall. Our host, V., was most affable, and also invited us to dinner at a small restaurant not far from the Collegium. We had a wonderful time, talking about frivolities, but also after a while about Csurka and the reasons for the resurgence of nationalism in Central Europe. V. enumerated the usual political reaons: a reaction to the internationalism of the Communist regimes, economic and social inequalities that cause resentment (but B. had told me that it was under Communism one saw the greatest and most unfair inequalities), and generally the recession. But that still doesn’t explain the deep psychological attraction of nationalism and xenophobia in these parts. We agreed that this was an important subject of discussion for the Collegium.

Things noticed: People can be awfully touchy in stores around here. Last Wednesday, on my first day here, I stopped to buy some shampoo in a small store on Bartok Bela ut, which was quite crowded with customers. A young woman near the cash register was surveying the clients, and at one point she said to a woman: “Don’t handle the merchandise too much.” The woman got terribly upset, and stalked out of the store without buying anything: “You’re too disrespectful (pimasz), so I won’t buy from you,” she said in a huff. Similar scene the next day, at the flower vendor stall on the corner of Bartok Bela and Bocskai. The old lady told a young woman not to handle the flowers, and the young woman went away saying, “Then I won’t buy any.” Finally, a similar scene at the concert at the French Institute on Saturday night. During intermission, many people were swarming around the bar ordering coffee, tea, or other drinks. A young man calls out to the waitress: “One coffee, please.” His friend, another young guy, adds: “Some cream,” and then “A milk.” The waitress thought he was ordering a glass of milk, which was a little bit strange for that time of night for a young adult. She was about to give it to him when he said, very rudely, “Didn’t you understand I was asking for milk in my coffee?” She said: “But you didn’t say that, you didn’t say ‘a coffee with milk.’” He then replied: “Well, you heard me ask for cream, didn’t you? What did you think I wanted to do with it, pour it behind my ear?” At that point she got very angry and threw his change at him on the counter. He grumbled, “You don’t have to throw things at me, madam.”

The whole scene was imbued with a degree of aggression I found quite astonishing, directed largely by the young man at the young woman. In the other scenes, it was two women who were involved each time, so it’s not a gender issue (though in this instance I think there was some gender tension as well). One thing all this shows, I guess, is that Hungarians have easily bruisable egos; another, perhaps, is that under the new democratic regime, they won’t “let themselves be pushed around anymore”; or, finally, that they’re feeling generally anxious, especially about things related to money.

Tuesday, February 9

Very interesting TV program, this evening–the first of two films on what appears to be the political history of Hungary from the 1930s to 1956 (I came in late, so I didn’t see the beginning). Tonight’s installment stopped in 1949. It’s based entirely on interviews with men who were involved in politics, non-Communists of course. The three this evening were Nyeste Zoltan, who was a leader of the Kisgazdasag (Smallholders) Party after the war–for a while, part of a democratic coalition with the Communists; Fabry Pal, a journalist and diplomat who stayed out of Hungary after 1949; and someone whose name I’m not sure of, who was a chemist and then an opera singer. They all talked about the war–by 1944, when the Germans occupied Hungary, it was time to resist. Nyeste, a big bearded fellow, had a good story: he and some other students composed a text protesting the German occupation (March 1944), and their plan was to have it made up in posters and post it all over the city. The plan was never realized because the young man carrying the text to the printer was arrested by the Hungarian secret police. But nobody got hurt or even thrown in prison, because the police chief found out that not a single Communist or a single Jew had been among the plotters. “You understand, the myth was that only Communists and Jews were resisting Hitler–no authentic Hungarian would dream of such a thing. So, they preferred to hush up the whole affair rather than have to admit the truth.” And he gave a big laugh.

After the war, all these men were involved in a democratic alliance, and their story is essentially the story of how Rakosi and the Communists succeeded in taking over the country. There was some very interesting footage of mass demonstrations of the time, huge crowds gathered on Hosok Tere, addressed by Rakosi and other orators. In one, around 1946, just before the elections that brought the Communists into a position of power (though not into a majority yet, if I understood right), people chanted “Long live Stalin!” and carried huge photos of him as banners floating above the crowd. I must have seen some crowds like that. The film (or this first part) ended with a bunch of children, boys and girls, dressed in their Uttoro (Young Pioneer) uniforms, white shirt, navy blue pants or skirt, string tie, singing a song about the smiling future. Reminded me of the time I recited Petofi’s poem about hanging all the kings, on Prize Day in 1949 at the end of fourth grade, my last year here. I really believed in that stuff–and so, judging by their uplifted faces, did the children who were singing that song.

Wednesday, February 10

Took my first villamos ride this morning–I rode from Kosztolanyi Dezso ter all the way to Deak Ferenc ter, traversing a good part of the inner city, or rather its rim formed by Muzeum korut, Karoly korut, etc.. From Deak Ferenc I went to the bank, in a small street off Jozsef Attila utca; opening an account didn’t take long, so I strolled over to Vorosmarty ter, which is truly a wonderful space–no cars allowed, and in the middle is a large statue of the poet, now wrapped in burlap to protect it from the cold. From Vorosmarty ter I walked toward the river with the intention of finding a taxi, but as none came I ended up near the Chain Bridge, on a beautiful big square with elaborate buildings facing it, and yet another statue in the middle. The square is so big and full of traffic that I didn’t cross over to see who the statue was of. Instead, I crossed the bridge. It’s quite magnificent, heavy granite and elaborate ironwork, with a superb view on both sides even today, when it was a bit hazy. Walking on the narrow passageway for pedestrians, I thought I felt some memories stirring of having crossed there as a child. But when, and with whom? Mother used to take me for walks, and so did Madame, after the war. Would we have walked this far from home? Maybe to go up to the Castle, on a Sunday afternoon.

Right in front of the bridge is the Budavar siklo, the cable car to the castle. It goes up at almost a 90 degree angle, quite impressive–drops you off very close to the National Gallery and the theater, about a five minute walk from the Collegium, where I arrived tired but happy at 3:30 p.m.. I felt elated by the beauty of the city. “It really is a great capital, it really can be compared to Paris,” I told myself at various moments during the day. That thought somehow makes me feel very proud, and also in a strange way “integrated”–since Budapest turns out to be a city I can put up there with the city I find most beautiful and seductive of all, and that has been part of my mental and emotional life during all the years when Budapest was totally outside it. Finding the link of beauty is a way to connect Budapest to my whole life, the life I spent not here, which has nothing to do with here.

Sunday, February 14

Saw a new Hungarian movie, Roncsfilm (“Junk Movie”), which turned out to be a cross between Monty Python and the French hit of two years ago, the gross Delicatessen, “film bete et mechant.” This one was funny and postmodernly self- conscious (people speaking directly into the camera, “testifying” about the action we are in the process of seeing), but it got a bit tiresome because almost all the episodes involved some kind of violent confrontation– between men, between men and women, between women. In keeping with postmodern humor, though, no matter how badly people were beaten up or stabbed or burned, they always reappeared in the next scene perfectly fine. The idea was, I think, to show the pent-up frustration and rage in people, always there just below the surface. The film starts with the breaking down of a wall, intercut with actual footage from the taking down of the Berlin wall. But the implication is, nothing has really gotten better–the subtitle of the film is “Vagy mi van ha gyoztunk?” “Or how are things now that we’ve won?” They’re not too good, is the answer. The theater, incidentally, was full, mostly very young people. I was one of the few people above 25 there.

Afterwards, I walked down Terez korut to the Oktogon, where the busiest place was the Burger King, again full of very young people. I actually went in, but when I saw that everybody was around 20, I decided to come home and make an omelette. I walked down Andrassy ut to the Opera House, very elaborate but dark (no performance tonight) and took a taxi from there. The taxi driver was extremely talkative, the first one like that I’ve met since coming to Budapest. He asked if I had seen War and Peace on the TV last night. I said no, which one was it? The American one with Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck. He said Audrey Hepburn was not his type, he finds her ugly. We spoke about her death, and about illness and how doctors can’t necessarily cure you if you’re sick. Then he asked me what I did for a living, I wasn’t a doctor by any chance? No, I said, I’m a tanarno, which can mean either a gymnazium (high-school) teacher or a university professor. He said it’s a nice profession, one that requires heart–only people with real heart can be good teachers. I asked him whether he had gone to university. Yes, he said, he had studied for five years there. Really? And what did he study? Engineering–he’s an engineer. And now? “Now I drive a taxi.” I didn’t want to probe any further, and besides we had arrived home. But if what he said was true, that gives one pause: since when do engineers drive taxis for a living?

Monday, February 15

Long lunch with G. today. She told me it was hard for her and N. to readjust to life in Budapest after their year in the States–as I imagine it will be hard for me to readjust after my six months in Budapest. But in their case it was more than just the “return to routine after a time of freedom elsewhere” syndrome, because life in Budapest is harsher in economic terms. After ten years of teaching and a good scholarly reputation, N. is on the second rung of a four-rung ladder that ends with the title of Professor, and he earns 15,000 Forints a month–less than $200. G. was also offered a regular teaching job at the University this year, at a salary of 13,000 Forints a month, which shows the double absurdity of the whole thing: first, because no one can possibly live on that amount, and second, because the difference between a starting salary and the salary of one who has been teaching for ten years is 2000 forints per month, or $25. In fact, everybody who teaches in the university has at least one more job, often two or three more, to make ends meet. G. turned down her offer and accepted a private administrative job instead, in which she earns three times as much. “At least you can live on that,” she said. But in the meantime, she feels every day that “nothing is happening” to her, because she doesn’t like that kind of work. She’d much rather be in the library, reading, or else translating an American novel into Hungarian. “I feel this job is good for my present, but not for my future,” she said. But for now, she has no choice. She simply cannot afford to take a university job.

Tuesday, February 16

Read Csurka’s column in last week’s Magyar Forum, which I only bought yesterday. His rhetoric is disgusting, but so clever (and at the same time so predictable) that it fascinates me. This time, his theme was: The good Hungarian Christian people are being silenced by “George Konrad-type liberalism” (he actually named him: “Konrad Gyorgyek-fele…liberalizmus”)–that is, the old leftists and Communists who now call themselves liberals, but it’s still the same old clique. Once again, it’s those Jews who are trying to keep us true Magyars, Christian Magyars, down. They control all the media, radio and television, plus all the major papers, and they have all the wealth and power. The current talk about the renewal of anti-Semitism in Hungary is just a smokescreen–what really should be talked about is the “robbing of the country” (“az orszag kirablasarol kellene szot ejteni”). In fact, this clique would like to hound the Christian Magyars not only out of politics and public life, but out of life tout court: “without persecution, there is no liberalism. They need space.”

Note how, first of all, he equates the current liberals and the old Communists–conveniently forgetting that someone “like George Konrad,” or more exactly Konrad himself, was during all his adult life a dissident in relation to the Communist regime. Csurka implies (more than implies, almost states outright) that all the Communists were Jews, hostile to true Magyar thought and spirit. He speaks of “Nagy baloldali liberalis kommunista nyilvanossag,” “great left liberal communist declarations,” as if all the adjectives were interchangeable–and at one point he mentions the name of Revai, who I think was a much feared cultural commissar in the 1950s, the man for whom B.’s father worked. “Revai and his culture band, Aczel and his shameses jumped at the throat of the national culture,” writes Csurka. He never actually uses the word “zsido,” “Jew,” but shames (Yiddish for “sexton”) is about as explicit as you can get. I assume Revai and Aczel were both Jewish, or if not, had lots of Jews working for them. Indeed, a few paragraphs later, Csurka makes a nasty dig at some of today’s liberals who “sing the song of Let’s forget the past, it’s no use looking backwards, we have to look forward.” That’s because, he says, some of them “had a Daddy who tore people’s nails off.”

I wonder who Csurka’s Daddy was. On the same page as his column there is an ad for the Magyar Forum publishing house, which has just reissued a 1938 novel about provincial life at the turn of the century, by one Csurka Peter. Any relation to Csurka Istvan?

Saw the second half of the documentary about the three men which started last week. It turns out that what they all had in common was that they left Hungary in 1956 and went to the United States–so the film was a documentary portrait of these men rather than a film about the political history of Hungary, but of course the two subjects are closely linked, since the reason they left Hungary in the first place was because of politics. Fabry Pal was the most successful, becoming a big businessman in New Orleans– founder of the first World Trade Center in 1962. The chemist/singer, Kovesdy Pal, did all kinds of physical work and eventually ended up as an art dealer in New York, where he now owns an important collection of works by the Hungarian avant-garde of the 1920s, which he is trying to sell to a museum. As for Nyeste Zoltan, it’s not clear what he does–he seems to have been in some kind of publishing venture. He is the least assimilated into American life, the most “true Hungarian” of the lot. But curiously, neither he nor the others have hurried back to Hungary, now that communism is gone. Fabry comes often, but with an American wife and American children, he can’t possibly come back to live here, he says. Kovesdy is thinking about it, waiting to see how things turn out; and Nyeste says he never stopped being Hungarian for a single day or a single minute since he left–perhaps implying that he doesn’t need to come back, for he carries Hungary with him wherever he is.

In tonight’s program, like last week, there was very interesting newsreel footage from the 1950s and later: at Stalin’s death, for example, newsreels showed mournful workers assembled, then marching in silent funeral parades; there were several other mass marches and demonstrations, with enormous portraits of Stalin and Rakosi floating above the crowd. As late as 1985, one party speaker (was it Kadar? I didn’t recognize him), discussing Hungarian politics at what looked like a dinner meeting, stated that experience in Hungary has shown a one-party system is best. There is nothing wrong in principle with a multi-party system, he said, but Hungarian history shows that in this country it hasn’t worked. Doesn’t leave much hope for Hungarian democracy, it would seem.

Wednesday, February 17

It snowed today. I had another very long Hungarian visit, this time with A., who teaches literature at the University and has two other jobs as well, like most Hungarian academics. […] A., a woman about my age, received me in her office on the ground floor, which she shares with another person who was not there. She is a very pleasant and warm person, who immediately asked if we could “tegez” each other (say “te,” like the French tu)–it makes life so much simpler, she said. I was delighted, of course. We chatted for quite a while, then she took me up to look at the library, which has a good collection of French literature–plus, of course, an excellent collection of Hungarian literature. A. introduced me to the librarian and obtained permission for me to borrow books. Great! I immediately borrowed The Oxford History of Hungarian Literature by Lorant Czigany, which she recommended. I’ve been reading it all evening.

After the library we went back to her office and chatted for another hour. […] Earlier, we had spoken about feminist criticism, and she confirmed my sense that people here know very little about it. But she also said that right now, with so many bigger problems that also affect men, she doesn’t particularly want to dwell on women’s problems or pit women against men. This sounded like the Marxist-feminist thesis in France during the 1970s (“First the revolution, then women’s problems”), and I didn’t want to engage in an argument about it at this point. I did, however, remark that not all feminist criticism is directed against men. She still wasn’t fully convinced, however.

We spoke at some length about Csurka. Csurka Peter, as I suspected, was his father and was also a right-winger. It seems that Csurka himself wrote (“Alas!” A. said) some very good plays during the ancien regime (that too was her expression), and no one could tell from them that he was an anti-Semite. In fact, he and Konrad considered themselves on the same side! “You have to understand, that was in the good old days when we were all together in opposing the regime. Our opposition was so strong that none of us realized our differences–it was only afterward that we found ourselves split into two hostile camps.” “But didn’t anyone notice his anti-Semitism?” “No! Oh, there were stories occasionally, about how he got drunk at the writers’ club and started to ‘Jew’ (zsidozni, you see we even have a verb for it in Hungarian–to badmouth the Jews), but otherwise, he kept it all under wraps. Maybe if we went back and reread his plays now, we would find indications ….” He also wrote some good stories, she said. He is around 60, the same age as Konrad. I should read some of his stories and plays–it pays to know your enemies well.

The Czigany literary history is very interesting–I could hardly put it down. It makes many things come to life, including the place names of Budapest, of which an extraordinary large number are those of writers: Vorosmarty ter, so central, is named after Mihaly V., a 19th-century poet, the first of the great poets after the language reform of the early years of the century. Kazinczy utca, which I had always associated with Jewishness–no doubt because of the synagogue there–is named after one of the architects of the language reform, which involved, mainly, standardizing orthography and expanding the vocabulary so that abstract concepts and technical terms would no longer have to be borrowed from Latin or German. The Eotvos of the Eotvos Collegium and the University was both a writer and a political figure. To an American, it’s astonishing how many streets and squares and institutions are named after writers and intellectuals: Jozsef Attila, Moricz Zsigmond, Kosztolanyi Dezs, Arany Janos, Madach Imre, Karinthy Frigyes, Jokai Mor and many many others, including of course the hero Petofi.

[…] I kept thinking about Mother this evening, especially when I spread out the map of Hungary to look for Nyiregyhaza, after reading the History. What a pity that she’s not alive now, for her and for me! I would so much have loved to ask her about her childhood, and some of the small towns she knew besides Nyiregyhaza. A few names in the same region sound very familiar, for example Hajduboszormeny and Hajduszoboszlo. I want to find Mother’s birth certificate, though I couldn’t say exactly why.

Thursday, February 18

Exhausted. I must have walked miles today, all around my old neighborhood. Villamos to Deak Ferenc ter, then up Kiraly utca to the yellow church, then right on Akacfa utca. Kiraly utca has some beautiful turn of the century buildings on it, or even older–from the last third of the 19th century, I was told later by T.. Very interesting and varied decorations on all of them. Some look in bad shape, others look redone, and it’s the same in that whole neighborhood. Kiraly utca itself is a grab-bag: some decrepit shops and some newfangled ones selling computers, electronics, etc.. Akacfa utca is mostly decrepit, at least the part I walked on, from Kiraly to number 59, in the middle of a long block. The first two houses on the odd- numbered side are black with soot and practically crumbling, though once they must have been quite noble, with columns and other elaborate decorations. Then comes a long low building which I didn’t remember at all, and after that no. 59, which could be quite beautiful. I don’t think I noticed, last time–at least, I didn’t remember–that there are three statues decorating the curved top of the facade. The three balconies, including our old one on the top left, look as if they’re ready to fall down–I don’t remember that from 1984.

I went into the courtyard, which is very rectangular indeed, and then into the stairwell. The wrought iron railings are still there, still very fine. An elderly woman dressed in red was crossing the courtyard when I walked in, and looked at me curiously. I felt odd, a bit like an intruder. No question of going up to the third floor and knocking on the old apartment door again, though I may do it one of these days–maybe if someone else is with me. In the meantime, standing at the bottom of the stairwell, I remembered the time after Daddy’s heart attack when he had to be carried up the stairs every day, since there was no elevator and he was forbidden to climb. He had hired two men who would come and join hands to form a seat, on which he sat with his arms around each man’s neck. I think this must have gone on until we left the country–or rather, until we moved out to the summer house in Romai furdo, where he didn’t have to worry about stairs. That was around June 1949.

He had the operation for his ulcer in March or thereabouts, then the heart attack a few days later, followed by the long recovery, first in the hospital and then at home. It must have been around May or early June that he gave the “thanksgiving” dinner for all the Talmudic scholars, of which I have a photograph at home: a large table full of men dressed in black caftans and black hats, with Daddy the only one wearing a regular suit. He wrote a learned speech for the occasion, a textual commentary he practiced for weeks beforehand while I listened. It was in Yiddish, so I didn’t understand a word, but every time he said the word “Rambam” I would go into gales of laughter– for some mysterious reason, I found that inner rhyme hilarious. After a while it became a whole production, I would laugh even though I no longer really thought it was funny, because I thought he expected me to. What did it matter that Rambam was Maimonides, a great scholar of antiquity? All I cared for was that Daddy should find me rapt and charming.

Coming out into the street again, I noticed that the building directly across, no. 60, had been knocked down– they seem to be getting ready to build a new house there. I crossed the street and stared intently at the facade again. A little girl, walking home from school, went by and turned around to look at me. I felt too self-conscious to take out my camera again (I had photographed the statues on the facade before going into the courtyard), as if people would notice and not like it. I noticed, or maybe only imagined, that a man standing in front of the building was staring at me suspiciously–what was I doing there, inspecting the place so closely? I suddenly felt tired and hungry, and besides I had had enough nostalgia for one day. […]

The “Evening with Vajda Miklos,” sponsored by the journal 2000, was very interesting, but I’m too tired to report on it in detail. Suffice it to say that VM was born in 1931 of a Greek Orthodox mother and converted Jewish father, and is the editor of New Hungarian Quarterly, whose mission it is to publish Hungarian authors in English translation. He said he thought of the war, including the “ostrom,” the last terrible year, as an adventure; Torok Andras, who was doing the questioning, remarked that just last month George Soros, who had been the invited guest, had used the same word (“kaland”), and I thought of what I say in “My War” about adventure. It must have something to do, I think, with having been so choye before the event, so loved and surrounded by adoring relatives, that we thought we were invincible. That, at least, is how Vajda explained it (his parents had very powerful friends, including the great actress Bajor Gizi, who had been his father’s girlfriend and was his own godmother), and I tend to agree with him. In my more modest way, I too was a totally spoiled and adored child who took all the adulation as her due.

The other thing worth noting is that the evening lasted almost three hours! Unheard of, back home. Scheduled to start at 7 p.m., it actually started at 7:20, with about 100 people in the audience. The two men sat on the stage with microphones and talked–or rather, Vajda talked about his life with just a few well-placed interventions and questions from Torok. At 8:40, Torok announced we would take a break, just as I thought the thing was going to end! Break lasted around twenty minutes, and then we were back for another hour. The audience sat patiently on the uncomfortable chairs, listening intently. Vajda said, at one point: “To be here in the darkest period of the Rakosi era [ca. 1953], one could only survive by laughing a lot”–which is what he and his friends did. Around five minutes before ten, Torok asked the audience if they had questions. I had been reflecting for close to an hour that this kind of dialogue could never happen in the U.S., where questions from the audience would have taken up at least half the time. Here, sure enough, there were only two questions. As if one could get a discussion going with an audience that had sat through almost three hours of its own silence!

Saturday, February 20

Party at T.’s apartment, a huge place across from the American Embassy. There must have been hundreds of people there–writers, academics, politicians, plus a large contingent of foreign visitors. I saw Michael B., and G., who was coiffed and made up quite provocatively, very rouged cheeks, spikey hair–she was wearing tiny black lace gloves plus a fox collar over her loose-fitting culotte dress. Michael introduced me to an interesting woman, Judy S., a journalist from Toronto whose life story resembles mine, except that she’s a few years younger–she left in 1956, after three years of elementary school. Her Hungarian is pretty good, somewhat like mine in that she doesn’t know many abstract words.

She told me about one of the men there that he had published a moving essay in a Canadian journal last year, about how he had discovered that he was Jewish. Another Hungarian “of Jewish origin”! Zsido szarmazasu: I’ve heard or read that expression half a dozen times since I got here. Few are ready to affirm, simply, “I am a Jew.” But to be “zsido szarmazasu,” of Jewish origin, is quite admissible.

Sunday, February 21

Hovirag, snowdrops. Small white bouquets wrapped in green leaves, beckoning at the flowerstands. Evening on the boulevard, the shops are still open when darkness falls. I stop with Madame and we buy a bunch of hovirag, snowflowers for the end of winter. A few weeks later it will be ibolya, violets nestled against velvety leaves–I bury my face in them, inhale the sweet smell. How I love the coming of spring!

I bought some carnations at a stand on the way to the tram stop this afternoon, to put in the vase on my desk. As the young man was wrapping them, I noticed the bunches of snowdrops, dozens of them with their stalks in a shallow pan. These flowers are smaller than the ones we have in America, so you need quite a few to make a tiny bouquet. It must be a huge amount of work to make dozens of bunches, each one wrapped in a green leaf and tied with string. I wasn’t sure of the flower’s name, so I asked the vendor. Until then, I think he took me for a Hungarian, but my question obviously told him I wasn’t. “Hovirag,” he said, looking at me curiously. Snowflower. I took a bunch out of the pan and gave it to him to wrap up. “Are you from England?” he asked. “No, from America.” After that, he spoke to me only in English.

Neither a foreigner nor a Hungarian, but something in between. Just a little off-center, not quite the real thing, but sometimes close to passing for it. One could make this into a sign of unhappiness, or on the contrary a sign of uniqueness, special status. Except that there are whole armies of people like me–not unique, unless it’s a collective uniqueness. Is that what we call history?

Most of the current issue of Magyar Forum is devoted to the founding meeting of the Magyar Ut movement, the Hungarian Way. So Csurka got to be on page 1 in a large photo showing him on the platform at the meeting, on page 2 with his weekly column, and pages 3-4 which printed the complete text of his speech. There is a close-up of him at the podium, a thick, blunt-faced man with receding hairline and double chin. (“His name really should be Csunya,” I said to myself with some satisfaction while studying the photo). He wears tinted glasses. Looks a bit like Le Pen– why do all these right-wing demagogues look like beefy parodies of “real men,” the kind that would never in a million years eat quiche?

Well, anyway. The page 2 column is about the ministerial shakeup of last week. Mr. Csurka is not happy that the MDF may be contemplating a move toward the Young Democrats (Fidesz), which would definitely require them to squeeze out the “national radicals” whose leader he is. National radicals, the phrase comes up at least four times in his article–sounds ominously like National Socialists to me. The usual theme: the People, the Nep, is being kept down by the “nomenklatura,” who used to be the Communists but who are now the liberals. They will certainly do all in their considerable power to keep the Hungarian Way from developing. But it will win out in the end, because you can’t keep the People down, etc. etc..

The speech? More of the same. True Hungarians have “Hungarianness” (Magyarsag), a matter of blood. They’re descendants of King Arpad. Christians. What all true Hungarians detest is “Naphta-liberalism”–and here Csurka the one-time playwright and short-story writer opens a parenthesis to explain about Naphta. Thomas Mann, he tells us, modeled this character in The Magic Mountain on the philosopher George Lukacs, who “as everyone knows liked to vacation in Swiss resorts” during the years before “he threw his lot in with the terror and with the Hungarian Red soldiers”–that’s an allusion to the short-lived Bela Kun government of 1919. And of course everyone also knows that Lukacs was Jewish, or rather, “of Jewish origin,” as were all the other members of the Kun government. So basically, liberals=Communists=Jews, the tried and true formula. But he says that the Magyar Ut is neither right nor left, just Hungarian.

Wednesday, March 24, 1993

Second visit with B. this morning, almost as long as the first! And very interesting. We spoke in Hungarian this time, and a lot about the current situation here. My head was spinning by the time I left, he mentioned so many names and factual details I wanted to retain.

He looked somewhat younger today, and in fact he mentioned later that he was younger than I, born after the war. His manner was still charming and somewhat scatterbrained, but not quite so “bumbling” as last time– and certainly not after we went into his study, where the really intense conversation began. “So, what do you think about what’s happening–the extreme right and all that? Are you worried?” I asked him. “No, I’m not. I’m optimistic,” he answered. That’s because, in his opinion, things are very different from what they were in the 1930s: most importantly, there is now a counter-offensive to nationalism and anti-Semitism. “We are here too,” he said. Well, of course, there were anti-nazis in the 1930s too, I pointed out. But I don’t recall his responding to that.

About anti-Semitism: “I think it’s time to become aggressive. Paradoxically, I have become much more aware of being a Jew because of it–you know that Hungarian Jews have generally been very much assimilated, and my family certainly was. But this changes things.” His idea is to write an article in which he will defend not the idea of tolerance (“Let’s be good Magyars and tolerate difference, those who are not like us”), but rather the idea of a “loose” [laza] Hungarian-ness: “I am not Magyar the way Petofi was–and if Csurka is a Magyar, then I’m not one at all. We should love difference, not tolerate it,” he said. I liked that.

September 25, 2013
The Microstructure of Logocentrism: Sign Models in Derrida and Smolensky
Kip Canfield

Dept. of Information Systems
University of Maryland
canfield@icarus.ifsm.umbc.edu

I. On (Pure) Rhetoric

Peirce (Buchler 99) says that the task of pure rhetoric is “to ascertain the laws by which, in every scientific intelligence, one sign gives birth to another, and especially one thought brings forth another.” Sign models are metaphors that evolve to support any constellation of ideas, and as de Man points out, “metaphors are much more tenacious than facts” (“Semiology and Rhetoric” 123). Any critique of current ideas dealing with human cognition and symbolic behavior must therefore address the metaphoricity of sign models.

In what follows, we will explore a remarkable parallelism in stories about the sign, between the discourse of the humanities and of cognitive sciences. This exploration will be conducted in the form of close readings of two works, “Linguistics and Grammatology,” Chapter 2 of Of Grammatology by Jacques Derrida, and “On the proper treatment of connectionism” by Paul Smolensky. The purpose of these readings is not to apply results from one field to another or to hypothesize direct influence, but rather to investigate two rhetorical strategies that develop in the face of the same metaphoric impasse. Both of the works in question come out of a rejection of structuralism–in philosophy and cognitive science, respectively–and although their arguments are basically the same, they take different paths away from structuralism.

Derrida stakes out a skeptic’s position, one that shows the aporias and contradictions inherent in the dyadic sign model used by structuralists. He explicitly denies that there is any way around these contradictions. Smolensky, by contrast, has the scientist’s typical aversion to skepticism, and he tries to reconceive the sign model that underlies his theory of connectionism in order to resolve those same contradictions. The parallels between these two works, I will argue, may be attributed to a similarity in the historical moment of each author, even though the works themselves are twenty years apart and their authors are of different nationalities.

Derrida stakes out his territory in opposition to Structuralism, with its linguistic model of rules and grammars for atomic units of meaning. Oversimplification of Structuralism can be dangerous (see Culler 28), but in essence, Structuralism was an empiricist reaction to the interpretive projects of the New Criticism, and it explained referent meaning as the center of a symbolic system or structure. In “Linguistics and Grammatology,” Derrida demonstrates the problems that such an autistic view of human signification entails, and suggests that the dyadic sign model of Saussure is in fact responsible for generating the aporias of Structuralism.

Smolensky’s work is an oppositional response to traditional Cognitive Science, that uneasy mixture of Cognitive Psychology and Artificial Intelligence. Cognitive Psychology, in turn, began as a reaction to the empiricism of Behaviorism and its inability to refer to Mind as a theoretical construct. The relatively humanistic models employed by Cognitive Psychology came under attack after the field became heavily influenced by computer-based Artificial Intelligence in the 1970s, and it became fashionable to value cognitive models only if they had a computational implementation. The state of this modeling led to very simple and brittle models of human cognition and, in effect, dragged Cognitive Psychology back towards Empiricism. For example, a recent work by Alan Newell Unified Theories of Cognition) proposes a theory of cognition that is based primarily on production rules (rules of the if/then type). The complex problem of how the antecedents and consequents of these rules arise cannot be addressed in such a limited architecture: in fact, Smolensky sees this sort of dyadic sign model–the kind of model that is easily implemented on a serial computer–as the basic problem for objectivist Cognitive Science.

Both Smolensky and Derrida, then, object to a tradition that presents a simplistic, deterministic view of human signification, and both elaborate a new vision of semantics and dynamics for their sign models. Each author offers a vision of human cognition that is more complex, more mysterious, and less deterministic than the traditions they oppose.

II. Sign Models

Though the discourse of any given historical moment is governed by certain metaphors, it is often the case that changes to those metaphors are generated by the very discourse they govern. Structuralism and Cognitive Science use a static, dyadic model of the sign, but the syntactic orientation of dyadic sign models makes such explanations of meaning unsatisfying, both logically and contextually. Authors such as Sheriff have tried to rescue meaning by applying the triadic model of Peirce, with its interpretant, but this solution is largely unsuccessful because it simply inscribes pragmatics in the interpretant, leaving the connection between pragmatics and meaning obscure. The critiques of Structuralism and Cognitive Science described below rely on more flexible, dynamic sign models: Smolensky tries to change the architecture of the dyadic sign model fundamentally, while Derrida explores that model’s inability to account for the gap between the signifier and the signified. Both authors employ an organic, dynamic, systems model which unifies the oppositions that arise in static accounts of the sign.

Smolensky’s Model

Cognitive Science was carved out in academia during the mid-1970s to create an interdisciplinary home for various scholars who took an information-processing approach to cognitive modeling. Two major critical responses to this objectivist cognitive science are cognitive semantics (Lakoff, “Cognitive Semantics”) and connectionism (McClelland Parallel Distributed Processing vol. 1). George Lakoff is one of the more polemical writers of this critique. He has identified two definitional aspects of what he calls objectivist (mainstream) cognitive science. They are:

(1) The algorithmic theory of mental processes: All mental processes are algorithmic in the mathematical sense, that is, they are formal manipulations of arbitrary symbols without regard to the internal structure of symbols and their meaning.

(2) The symbolic theory of meaning: Arbitrary symbols can be made meaningful in one and only one way: by being associated with things in the world (where "the world" is taken as having a structure independent of the mental processes of any beings).("Cognitive Semantics" 119)

Lakoff goes on to propose a “cognitive semantics” (he also calls it experientialist cognition). In so doing, he challenges two major characteristics of the objectivist account. First, he counters the arbitrariness of the sign with a new theory of categorization related to the prototype theory of Rosch; second, he lambastes the syntactic orientation of algorithms in the information processing model:

The most essential feature of objectivist cognition is the separation of symbols from what they mean. It is this separation that permits one to view thought as the algorithmic manipulation of arbitrary symbols. The problem for such a view is how the symbols used in thought are to be made meaningful.("Cognitive Semantics" 125)

Lakoff’s language here revolts against the arbitrary nature of the sign and the syntactic character of algorithms. Its criticisms strike at the dualistic definition of the sign and therefore at the foundations of structuralism.

The connectionist approach to cognitive modeling accepts Lakoff’s critique, but connectionism is primarily concerned with model architecture:

Connectionist models are large networks of simple parallel computing elements, each of which carries a numerical activation value which it computes from the values of neighboring elements in the network, using some simple numerical formula. The network elements, or units, influence each other's values through connections that carry a numerical strength, or weight.(Smolensky 1)

The connectionist architecture supports distributed processing, in which each parallel processor is doing only part of a larger process that perhaps cannot be modeled as a series of steps in an algorithm (as with a Turing machine). In the connectionist models, representation is achieved by looking at an entire network of individual unit values. These models are often called parallel distributed processing (PDP) models (Rumelhart and McClelland).

The connectionist model is largely incompatible with the traditional cognitive science framework, which is symbolic and based on language. This rejection of the traditional structure of the sign (signifier/signified) makes allies of Lakoff and Smolensky. Smolensky’s article offers what he calls “the proper treatment of connectionism” (1). The article sets out to define the goals of connectionism, and it explicitly advocates a specific set of foundational principles. Smolensky’s first task is to establish the purview of his analysis, which he calls the level of the subsymbolic paradigm. This level lies somewhere between the symbolic level of traditional structuralism or cognitive science and the neural level of basic biological processes:

In calling the traditional approach to cognitive modeling the "symbolic paradigm," I intend to emphasize that in this approach, cognitive descriptions are built of entities that are symbols both in the semantic sense of referring to external objects and in the syntactic sense of being operated upon by symbol manipulation. . . . The mind has been taken to be a machine for formal symbol manipulation, and the symbols manipulated have assumed essentially the same semantics as words of English. . . . The name "subsymbolic paradigm" is intended to suggest cognitive descriptions built up of entities that correspond to constituents of the symbols used in the symbolic paradigm; these fine-grained constituents could be called subsymbols, and they are the activities of individual processing units in the connectionist networks."(3-4)

Smolensky has dispensed with the signifier/signified dyadic structure of the sign (where symbol=sign). He was forced to do this by the intractable space (gap) between the signifier and the signified. This space caused brittleness in the artificial intelligence systems–inflexibility in the face of a changing environment. By contrast, Smolensky’s architecture for the sign is very malleable. A sign (concept) has no simple internal structure that contains the big problematic gap: instead, a sign is conceived of as a network of very simple elements that allows context to intrude into (be contained in) the sign. Dreyfus and Dreyfus put it thus:

What Smolensky means by a complete, formal, and precise description is not the logical manipulation of context-free primitives--symbols that refer to features of the domain regardless of the context in which those features appear--but rather the mathematical description of an evolving dynamic system.(31-32)

Smolensky says: “the activities of the subconceptual units that comprise the symbol–its subsymbols–change across contexts” (15). He states the principle of context dependence as follows: “In the symbolic paradigm, the context of a symbol is manifest around it and consists of other symbols; in the subsymbolic paradigm, the context of a symbol is manifest inside it and consists of subsymbols” (17). At this point Smolensky has described a network structure that claims to have more powerful explanatory capabilities than the traditional dyadic model of the sign because context can intermingle with content.

Derrida’s Model

Derrida has precisely these same objections to the traditional structure of the sign. Whereas Smolensky responds with the network metaphor, Derrida’s critique is governed by the metaphor of generalized (arche) writing. Writing is the structure and process which makes possible the dynamic character of language, according to Derrida, but it is (commonly) considered to be exterior to language. He discusses this exteriority at length, arguing that

[t]he exteriority of the signifier is the exteriority of writing in general, and I shall try to show later that there is no linguistic sign before writing. Without that exteriority, the very idea falls into decay.(Of Grammatology 14)

The problem is that once you enforce the distinction between the signifier and the signified, reference is confused, and you continually get the “eruption of the outside within the inside” Of Grammatology 34). The nature of the confusion surrounding reference in a static, dyadic account of the sign is clear in the following:

The system of writing in general is not exterior to the system of language in general, unless it is granted that the division between the exterior and the interior passes through the interior of the interior or the exterior of the exterior, to the point where the immanence of language is essentially exposed to the intervention of forces that are apparently alien to its system.(Of Grammatology 43; my emphasis)

This notion of penetration is parallel to Smolensky’s observations about brittleness, since including context inside the sign is an example of the exterior intruding on the interior. Under a dyadic sign-model, such an interpenetration of context and the sign is not allowed, and this prohibition, in turn, is one factor that generates critique.

III. Movement and Meaning

Both Derrida and Smolensky object to dyadic sign models because of their naive simplicity and semantic problems. This naivete is a consequence of Structuralism’s and Cognitive Science’s view of the sign as static. Both Derrida and Smolensky elaborate a dynamics in their critiques. Derrida’s mechanisms for including movement in the sign-model are differance, trace and presence, which are discussed below. Smolensky uses the mathematical theory of dynamic systems to put movement into his network structure. The semantic problems are, at root, the same as the hoary old mind/body problem of philosophy. Smolensky thinks that his sign model, in the framework of connectionism, goes some distance in solving that problem. Derrida despairs of a solution and, in fact, states that a solution is impossible. Let us look first at the semantic aspects of each critique and then at the dynamics. SEMANTICS

Structuralism and most flavors of cognitive science are forms of rationalism or introspectionism (see Chomsky, Knowledge of Language). Both Derrida and Smolensky oppose such rationalism. Smolensky proposes an intuitive processor (which is not accessible to symbolic intuition), and a conscious rule interpreter:

What kinds of programs are responsible for behavior that is not conscious rule application? I will refer to the virtual machine that runs these programs as the intuitive processor. It is presumably responsible for all of animal behavior and a huge proportion of human behavior: Perception, practiced motor behavior, fluent linguistic behavior, intuition in problem solving and game-playing--in short, practically all skilled performance.(5)

The programs running on the intuitive processor, then, are not composed of symbols which have a syntax and semantics similar to language. This idea is not mainstream in cognitive science, which takes an artificial-intelligence or information-processing view of cognition and posits exactly the intuitive/linguistic correspondence Smolensky rejects.

Smolensky translates subconceptual processes into mathematics, which are not accessible to intuition. Derrida describes the traditional rationalism as logocentrism, a fundamental effect of the atomic structure of the signified. In the course of his polemic on speech, Derrida says:

The affirmation of the essential and "natural" bond between the phone and the sense, the privilege accorded to an order of signifier (which then becomes the major signified of all other signifiers) depend expressly, and in contradiction to the other levels of Saussurian discourse, upon a psychology of consciousness and of intuitive consciousness. What Saussure does not question here is the essential possibility of nonintuition. Like Husserl, Saussure determines this nonintuition teleologically as crisis.(Of Grammatology 40)

The appeal to nonintuition by both authors is a necessary break with traditional representation, and it recalls Lacan’s barrier between the signifier and the signified (Noth 303), where there is no “access from one to the other.” One can no longer retain traditional models built with now-discarded tools: the new models require a new metaphysics.

It is intriguing that both authors appeal to levels to justify the apparent difference between usual interpretations of the sign and the novel view taken in these texts. Smolensky’s appeal is to physics:

The relationship between subsymbolic and symbolic models is more like that between quantum and classical mechanics. Subsymbolic models accurately describe the microstructure of cognition, whereas symbolic models provide an approximate description of the macrostructure.(12, my emphasis)

This comparison jumps right out of his three-level architecture. The lowest level, the neural level, is closely modeled with the subsymbolic (=subconceptual) level. The highest level, the traditional symbolic (=conceptual) level, is only an approximation of the lower levels. It is an approximate language that developed to allow us (the subject) a way to talk about cognitive matters. He says:

The relation between the conceptual level and the lower levels is fundamentally different in the subsymbolic and symbolic paradigms. This leads to important differences in the kind of explanations that the paradigms offer of conceptual level behavior, and the kind of reduction used in these explanations. A symbolic model is a system of interacting processes, all with the same conceptual-level semantics as the task behavior being explained. . . . [whereas, u]nlike symbolic explanations, subsymbolic explanations rely crucially on a semantic ("dimensional") shift that accompanies the shift from the conceptual to the subconceptual levels.(11; my emphasis)

Derrida has to resort to a similar tactic in the face of our inability to escape metaphysical talk:

What Saussure saw without seeing, knew without being able to take into account, following in that the entire metaphysical tradition, is that a certain model of writing was necessarily but provisionally imposed . . . as instrument and technique of representation of a system of language. And that this movement, unique in style, was so profound that it permitted the thinking, within language, of concepts like those of the sign, technique, representation, language.(Of Grammatology 43)

The dyadic structure of traditional structuralist sign models has proven unacceptable for both authors. Smolensky responds by conceiving of a new structure (a network) and Derrida by exploring the problems in the old structure (the gap between signifier and signified).

Smolensky’s Intuitive Processor

A recurring theme in these stories about levels is the inaccessibility of the lower levels to symbolic intuition. Traditional theories of the sign assume that intuition can penetrate anything cognitive. By contrast, semantics in Smolensky’s model involves the mysterious “shift” from numeric to symbolic representation, a shift described in his “subsymbolic hypothesis”:

The intuitive processor is a subconceptual connectionist dynamic system that does not admit a complete, formal, and precise conceptual level description. . . . Subsymbols are not operated upon by symbol manipulation: They participate in numerical-- not symbolic--computation.(7, 3; my emphasis)

Furthermore, the unit processors in the model do not correspond to conceptual-level semantics at all. They do not model words, concepts, or even distinctive features as described in linguistics. Smolensky proposes the following subconceptual-unit hypothesis:

The entities in the intuitive processor with semantics of conscious concepts of the task domain are complex patterns of activity over many units. Each unit participates in many such patterns. . . . At present, each individual subsymbolic model adopts particular procedures for relating patterns of activity--activity vectors--to the conceptual-level descriptions of inputs and outputs that define the model's task.(6-7)

A complete description of cognition is numerical and therefore not available in our native symbolic language. Subsymbolic computation in a dynamic system is cognition, and the asymptotic behavior of trajectories in the system is somehow approximately mapped to symbolic language. This explains the nonintuitive character of the intuitive processor and presumably explains why symbolic theories like those in linguistics always seem to almost formalize language, but ultimately fail on the fringes.

Derrida’s Origins

We have noted above that Smolensky links the subsymbolic and symbolic levels with a “semantic shift.” The Derridean concepts of trace and differance parallel these levels. These concepts operate within the metaphor of writing in a way that allows Derrida’s system of signs to move and be dynamic. For our purposes, the problem of the origin and the dynamics of differance are the salient topics in Derrida’s theory.
Because the signified is “always already in the position of the signifier” Of Grammatology 73), origins become problematic. As Derrida puts it,

Representation mingles with what it represents, to the point where one speaks as one writes, one thinks as if the represented were nothing more than the shadow or reflection of the representer. A dangerous promiscuity and a nefarious complicity between the reflection and reflected which lets itself be seduced narcissistically. In this play of representation, the point of origin becomes ungraspable.(Of Grammatology 36)

This attention to the problem of origin indicates an uneasiness with semantics. Derrida uses the image of track or trace to express this uneasiness. What he says (in Smolensky’s terms) is that there is no origin because we attach a semantic purpose to origins and at the point of origins, there is no semantics. The (pure) trace is not semantic:

The trace is not only the disappearance of origin-- within the discourse that we sustain and according to the path that we follow it means that the origin did not even disappear, that it was never constituted except reciprocally by a nonorigin, the trace, which becomes the origin of the origin. . . . The (pure) trace is differance. It does not depend on any sensible plenitude, audible or visible, phonic or graphic. It is, on the contrary, the condition of such a plenitude. Although it does not exist, although it is never a being-present outside of all plenitude, its possibility is by rights anterior to all that one calls the sign. . . . The trace is in fact the absolute origin of sense in general. Which amounts to saying once again that there is no absolute origin of sense in general.(Of Grammatology 61-62, 65)

This recalls Smolensky’s “semantic shift” problem, in which he sets up a system where all computation is purely numerical and has no symbolic-level semantics. He must then finesse a “shift” to our human realm of signs, something Derrida says is impossible:

This arche-writing, although its concept is invoked by the themes of "the arbitrariness of the sign" and of difference, cannot and can never be recognized as the object of a science. It is that very thing which cannot let itself be reduced to the form of presence. . . . There cannot be a science of differance itself in its operation, as it is impossible to have a science of the origin of presence itself, that is to say of a certain nonorigin.(Of Grammatology 57,63)

Derrida, like Smolensky, emphasizes the nonintuitive or unconscious character of cognitive acts like language. Derrida calls this the “fundamental unconsciousness of language” Of Grammatology 68) and says that “Spacing as writing is the becoming-absent and the becoming-unconscious of the subject” Of Grammatology 69). But while Derrida says of the trace that “no concept of metaphysics can describe it” Of Grammatology 65), Smolensky has presented a mathematical metaphysics. Smolensky’s attempt has yet to tackle the precise point that Derrida has tried to show cannot be described: the point at which the non-semantic origins of signification become semantic.

Dynamics

In the terminology of engineering mechanics, statics is the study of forces on structures, and dynamics is the study of forces on structures in motion. All critiques of structuralism reflect a passing from statics to dynamics; the dynamic view of structuralism has always existed in structuralism but was not mainstream (see Piaget). Post- structural discourse emphasizes movement and temporality. Smolensky uses models taken from dynamic systems theory to achieve this, while Derrida defines a cluster of terms (differance, trace and presence) for the same purpose. Both authors use this dynamism to argue for an organic sign model that integrates form and function.
Smolensky explicitly uses the models and mathematics of dynamic systems, as studied in physics. He views the architecture of his model in this way:

The numerical activity values of all the processors in the network form a large state vector. The interactions of the processors, the equations governing how the activity vector changes over time as the processors respond to one another's values, is an activation evolution equation. This evolution equation governing the mutual interactions of the processors involves the connection weights: numerical parameters which determine the direction and magnitude of the influence of one activation value on another. The activation equation is a differential equation. . . . In learning systems, the connection weights change during training according to the learning rule, which is another differential equation: the connection evolution equation.(6)

He elaborates a “connectionist dynamical system hypothesis” in which the connection strengths (weights) of the network embody the data, and differential equations describe the dynamic process within which these data become knowledge. The state of this intuitive processor (the network) is defined by a vector which contains the numerical state of each unit processor in the network. For our discussion, the important aspects of this description are the global control over the process of signification given by the systems idea, and the semantic anomalies presented by the numerical character of the model.

Smolensky’s Global Control

The systems idea is very important in Smolensky’s discourse. It becomes possible to describe the connectionist version of cognition by using a mathematical dynamic system as a model (my discussion is informed by Rosen). A dynamic system in mathematics depends on two kinds of representation: one must represent every possible state of the system (statics), and also the behavior of the system (dynamics). The static description uses the concept of a state space, which contains an instantaneous description of every possible state of the system. These states can be described as measurements on a system. For example, in Newtonian mechanics, all particles can be described in a system with six dimensions: three for position in 3-dimensional space and three for a momentum measurement in each of those three dimensions. It is important that the number of dimensions chosen give a complete description of the state of the system. In such a model, all states that have the same values in all dimensions are identical to each other. Each dimension is a state variable and the n-tuple (or vector) of all the state variables is a representation of the (instantaneous) state of the system. The mathematical set of all possible unique vectors is the state space of the system. Therefore, most systems will be multidimensional and cannot be visualized in Euclidean space.

In order to provide a dynamic description of a system, one must know how the state variables change with time. Mathematically, this means that each state variable (dimension) is a function of time. If each of these functions is known, the dynamic behavior of the system is a trajectory in the state space through time. It is usually impossible to know these functions exactly, but since the rate of change of a single state variable depends only on that state in the state space, we can give conditions that these functions must follow. These conditions constrain the trajectory of a behavior but do not uniquely determine it. The constraint is modeled as the derivative of a function which gives the rate of change at a point (state). The derivative of a function (with respect to time) is analogous to the slope of a tangent line to a curve; the slope reflects how fast the points on the curve are changing in the neighborhood of the state. A dynamic system, then, is described by a set of simultaneous differential equations where differential equations are functions of the state variables and their derivatives. Systems described with differential equations represent infinitely many possibilities that are constrained by the (dynamically changing) structure of the system.

Dynamic systems impose a global effect on the state space. For example, in the plane of this paper, all points (positions) can be described with two numbers–the coordinates in the xy plane (a vector with two elements). The intuitive processor’s state space, however, is multidimensional: its state space is the set of all possible vectors that describe all activation values of all unit processors in the system. The global effect occurs (most simply) because a differential equation sets up conditions on every point in the state space. For example, a differential equation with a function in two dimensions involves derivatives which set up a direction field that constrains the trajectory of any curve that goes through a point in it. The direction field is a condition that attaches itself globally to every possible point, and it is what makes possible a global, system-level description of a multitude of separate interacting agents.

The modern scientific concept of fields–such as electric fields, magnetic fields, or even magic force-fields in science fiction–are examples of this kind of global effect. They are something usually unseen but considered to be real (i.e., they effect material reality) and they operate globally, albeit mysteriously, in an area of space. Smolensky sees reference as the asymptotic behavior of a trajectory in a dynamic system, and his scientistic assertion of the possibility of global control contrasts with Derrida’s exasperated skepticism, seen below.

Derrida’s Differance

The early Derrida is conducting a guerrilla war against structuralism from within the metaphysical terrain of structuralism. He only has whatever is at hand there for the fight. While Smolensky is free to use exotic weapons from his experience (he was trained as a physicist), Derrida must work within the tradition of the dyadic sign. He considers the dyadic sign constitutive of human thought, even as he shows its inadequacy for explaining meaning. Notwithstanding these differences in tradition and precept, there are many points of contact between Smolensky’s dynamic systems and Derrida’s trace and differance.

Derrida conceives of the operation of the trace as a field in the sense described above, but has no language to justify such a global and actively structuring concept. In exasperation, he calls it “theological”:

The trace, where the relationship with the other is marked, articulates its possibility in the entire field of the entity [etant], which metaphysics has defined as the being-present starting from the occulted movement of the trace. The trace must be thought before the entity. But the movement of the trace is necessarily occulted, it produces itself as self-occultation. When the other announces itself as such, it presents itself in the dissimulation of itself. This formulation is not theological, as one might believe somewhat hastily. The "theological" is a determined moment in the total movement of the trace. The field of the entity, before being determined as the field of presence, is structured according to the diverse possibilities-- generic and structural--of the trace.(Of Grammatology 47, my emphasis)

The reader should compare this description with the global structuring impact of dynamic systems on state- space, described above. At all times, Derrida presents the trace as dynamic. It is the “movement of temporalization” Of Grammatology 47), and “[t]he immotivation of the trace ought to be understood as an operation and not as a state, an active movement, a demotivation, and not as a given structure” Of Grammatology 51). The shift from statics to dynamics is, of course, a key feature of contemporary discourse on the sign.

Derrida responds to accusations that differance is negative theology with an essay in “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials.” Frank Kermode summarizes the argument well:

The purpose of Derrida's pronouncement is to claim that differance is not negative in the same measure as the God of negative theology; for it is so in much greater measure--indeed it cannot properly be thought of as negative at all; it is outside negativity as it is outside everything. Only by an intellectual error-- induced by a sort of metaphysical paranoia, a fear for the security of that "realm"--could anybody suppose that differance has a design on us, or a desire to make itself into some sort of presence.(Kermode 75; my emphasis)

Informed by a reading of Smolensky, one might conclude that differance is desire, and that “metaphysical paranoia” is completely justified. Where structuralists and objectivist cognitive scientists assume “meaning” as a concept around which structure is built, Derrida and Smolensky use ideas of process and structure to produce “meaning.” The main rhetorical strategy both authors use to do this is to deny a hard distinction between form and function. This conflation gives reality to a field of signification. This is explicit in Smolensky’s mathematical metaphysics; in Derrida, it is implicit in the movement of the trace.

Derrida’s treatment of presence is interesting in relation to these metaphysical ideas. Culler, in On Deconstruction, invokes Zeno’s paradox to explain Derrida’s insistence on the impossibility of presence. The present moment is never really present, but always marked with the past and the future. The present is then not real, as difference is not real. Trace “does not exist” and differance is “nothing.” Time and absence conspire to destroy any phenomenology.

Arche-writing as spacing cannot occur as such within the phenomenological experience of a presence. It marks the dead time within the presence of the living present, within the general form of all presence. The dead time is at work. That is why, once again, in spite of all the discursive resources that the former may borrow from the latter, the concept of the trace will never be merged with a phenomenology of writing. As the phenomenology of the sign in general, a phenomenology of writing is impossible. No intuition can be realized in the place where "the whites indeed take on an importance."(Of Grammatology 68)

One might be tempted to regain presence by an appeal to the idea of a field of signification, proposed above, but presence fails for both authors at the point where its phenomenology must be intuitively accessible to the subject. Both authors set up a metaphysics which describes a mechanism for presence, but both place that mechanism in the inhuman realm of numbers or (pure) traces.

Derrida’s insistence, then, on presence and difference as “nothing” might be understood as referring only to the realm of human consciousness, the only realm describable in structuralist terms. Derrida’s nullification of presence and differance recall a funny story, an old chestnut, that I have most recently seen reincarnated in a book by Arbib In Search of the Person): it seems that there was this mathematician who wished to prove something for Riemann geometry. He disappeared into a room and filled a blackboard with Dirichlet integrals and other mathematical arcana. After a time, a cry was heard from the room, “Wait! Wait! I’ve proved too much! I’ve proved there are no prime numbers!” The nullification of differance is a funny idea when one considers such that this nullification might be the global control that produces cognition. Smolensky might accuse Derrida of having been inattentive in his calculus classes. On the other hand, Derrida would probably apply a quotation from Barthes (Noth 313) to Smolensky: “I passed through a (euphoric) dream of scientificity.”

IV. Conclusion

I would like to reiterate that this has been an exploration of rhetorical strategies that arose in two similar historical moments. My discussion ignores any justification or evaluation (scientific or otherwise) with regard to the works by Smolensky and Derrida, and it proposes no direct influence of one on the other. Most importantly, this is not a “methodological” paper that proposes something ridiculous like a “dynamic systems approach to everything.”

Both Derrida and Smolensky want to give a fuller, more complex vision of the signifying human. Structuralism and objectivist Cognitive Science present a syntactic picture of human meaning that is unsatisfying. Each author tries to breath life into the dyadic sign model by regaining presence. Smolensky explicitly appeals to presence as a field in dynamic systems theory. Derrida precisely defines such a field with the terms trace and differance while denying their reality because he rejects the concept of global control. The genesis of these critiques is the static character of structuralist or objectivist accounts of signification, theories which relegate all process to the gap between a signified and a signifier, a gap which is “nothing”: Derrida and Smolensky rush in to fill this void. Both authors note a semantic problem for sign models that requires a mysterious “semantic shift” from the unconscious to the conscious. This semantic anomaly does not allow intuitive access to the basis of the sign model. Derrida sees this as an insurmountable mystery, while Smolensky thinks it can be accounted for.

Spivak uses Levi-Strauss’ term bricolage to contrast modern discourse with engineering: “All Knowledge, whether one knows it or not, is a species of bricolage, with its eye on the myth of engineering” Of Grammatology xx). Smolensky and Derrida are doing similar odd jobs, but with different tool boxes. Smolensky, with his “eye on the myth of engineering,” is a bricoleur with a full quiver of metaphor: he can play Ahab (“That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate”). Derrida doesn’t have much faith in his weapons: he can love the whale.

References
- Arbib, M. In Search of the Person: Philosophical Explorations in Cognitive Science. Amherst, MA: U of Massachusetts P, 1985.
- Buchler, J. Philosophical Writings of Peirce. New York: Dover, 1955.
- Chomsky, N. Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin, and Use. New York, NY: Praeger, 1986.
- Culler, J. On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1982.
- de Man, P. “Semiology and Rhetoric.” Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism. Ed. J. Harari. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1979.
- Derrida, J. Of Grammatology. Trans. and introd. G. Spivak. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976.
- —. “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials.” Languages of the Unsayable: Literature and Literary Theory. Ed. S. Budick, & W. Iser. New York, NY: Columbia UP, 1989.
- Dreyfus, H. and Dreyfus, S. “On the proper treatment of Smolensky.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 11 (1988): 31-32.
- Kermode, F. “Endings, Continued.” Languages of the Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory. Ed. S. Budick & W. Iser. New York, NY: Columbia UP, 1989.
- Lakoff, G. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 1987.
- —. “Smolensky, semantics, and sensorimotor system.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 11 (1988): 39-40.
- —. “Cognitive Semantics.” Meaning and mental representations. Ed. U. Eco, M. Santambrogio, & P. Violi. Indiana, IL: Indiana UP, 1988.
- McClelland, J., Rumelhart, D., & Group, P. R. Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition. Vol. 1. Cambridge, MA: MIT-Bradford, 1986.
- Newell, A. Unified Theories of Cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1990.
- Noth, W. Handbook of Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990.
- Piaget, J. Structuralism. London: Routledge & Kegan, 1971.
- Rosch, E. H. “Natural Categories.” Cognitive Psychology 4 (1973): 328-350.
- Rosen, R. Dynamical Systems Theory in Biology Volume I: Stability Theory and Its Applications. New York, NY: Wiley-Interscience, 1970.
- Rumelhart, D., McClelland, J., & Group, P. R. Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition. Vol. 2. Cambridge, MA: MIT-Bradford, 1986.
- Sheriff, J.K. The Fate of Meaning: Charles Peirce, Structuralism, and Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1989.
- Smolensky, P. “On the proper treatment of connectionism.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 11 (1988): 1-74.
September 25, 2013
Reading Beyond Meaning
George Aichele

Dept. of Philosophy and Religion, Adrian College
470-5237@mcimail.com

The Theology of the Text

[T]here will never be . . . any theology of the Text.

(Derrida, Dissemination 258)

If the text is an instance of what Jacques Derrida calls “differance,” the ineffable writing, then there can be no theology of the text. There can be no theology of the text because the text is the trace which escapes onto- theological closure (closure of the “volume,” of the “work”) even as it inscribes it. As the non-identity or non- presence which lies at the heart of any scriptural identity, the text is no more than the entirely material “stuff” (hyle) which the idealism inherent in the traditional understanding of the text does not comprehend and therefore excludes.

This understanding of what a text is differs greatly from the traditional one. The traditional understanding of the text allows us to speak of two readers reading “the same text” (book, story, poem, etc.) even though not only the physical objects of the reading but the editions and even the translations involved are different. It allows us to agree or disagree about the legitimacy of an interpretation, the authority of an edition, or the accuracy of a translation. The invisible, underlying stratum which allows us to posit the identity of texts is their meaning, the spiritual essence which binds many varying physical copies into unity.

The traditional understanding of the text is therefore profoundly theological; it is that very theology of the text which differance refuses. It is also profoundly logocentric. For this understanding, the text is not the concrete, unique ink-and-paper thing which you might hold in your hand, scan with your eyes, file on a shelf, give away, or even throw in the trash.¹ Instead, the text is an ideal, spiritual substance, a Platonic form of which the material thing is merely a “copy.” The physical object is simply the medium, the channel in and through which the spiritual reality has become incarnate. This way of thinking seems quite natural to us; this indicates how deeply ingrained the theology involved here actually is.

Corresponding closely to the theology of the text is a complex economy of the text, which allows texts to be owned in three distinct but interrelated ways. The conspiracy between these three types of ownership forms the traditional understanding of the text. Meaning is at the center of this system of values; what defines each of the three types of ownership, and their relations to one another, is the desire for meaning. These three types of ownership together establish a law of the text, a system which authenticates “my property” and delimits my rights and obligations in relation to the text. The law of the text establishes the legitimacy of meaning, the possibility of a proper reading. It is the law of what Roland Barthes calls the readerly.

The first owner, the reader, normally owns one copy of the text, a physical object, the book. The reader desires but has no guarantee of owning the book’s meaning. The second owner, the author, is the book’s origin and therefore owns its meaning–the true meaning reflected in every copy. The author secures the book’s meaning. There is also a third “owner,” the copyright holder, who may also be the author (or the reader). This owner possesses the legal right to disseminate copies, to control the event of incarnation. Each of these owners may say, “This is my book,” but the term “my book” cannot mean the same thing in each of these three cases.

This economy of triple ownership turns the text into a “work.”² For Barthes, the work is defined by society’s recognition of an author and thus of an authority: “One must realize that today it is the work’s ‘quality’ … and not the actual process of reading that can establish differences between books” (“From Work to Text” 79). The work is meaningful and complete; it is an object of consumption. All three owners require the work to be a union of spirit and matter–a union which can (and must) be undone. For the theology of the text, meaning is “in” the text; it is a property of the text.

The theology of the text requires that a distinction be made between exegesis and eisegesis. Exegesis draws (or leads) the truth out of the text; eisegesis imposes the reader’s beliefs upon or reads them into the text. No confusion is permitted between these two. It is an ethical distinction: exegesis respects the integrity of the text, and eisegesis does not. Metaphysics is also involved: the text contains a truth within it, which the skillful reader can extract more or less undamaged, and without imposing too many of her own preconceptions upon it. The text is in some way connected to reality–a reality which is outside of the text (extratextual)–and it is this reality which grounds the proper meaning of the text, inside of the text.

Of course, the theology of the text recognizes that no reading is entirely free of preconceptions, no matter how objective or unbiased the reader may be. Your readings are inevitably shaped by who you are, your previous experiences, feelings and beliefs, and your current contexts, desires, and expectations. Crossing the gap between receiver and sender of any message requires a tricky and sometimes dangerous journey. The traditional understanding of the text assures us that there are guarantees which lessen the difficulties and overcome the dangers in transmission of meaning. These guarantees are provided by rigorous critical techniques, often historical, but also psychological, sociological, or literary. Within the text itself there hides an accessible meaning, which one technique or another can uncover. These techniques provide ways to bridge the gap between text and reality, to capture meaning and thereby close the circle of understanding. Completely objective analysis is impossible, but with proper use of the techniques something approaching a scientific consensus can be reached.

However, the theologically indispensable distinction between exegesis and eisegesis has been eroded in recent years. First the New Criticism, then structuralism, and most recently the various forms of poststructuralism (including the views of Derrida, Barthes, and Michel Foucault) have with increasing vigor exposed and challenged theological presuppositions on which the traditional understanding of the text rests. The notion that each text contains within it a single true meaning–or any meaning– has been abandoned by many, and the question of reference– the connection between text and reality–is up for grabs. The Eurocentric and phallocentric tendencies of the supposedly scientific criticism are increasingly difficult to deny, although defenders of the Western cultural tradition (the “great books”) remain plentiful, and the debate is probably far from over.

There will never be any theology of the text, says Derrida. However, if we must do without a theology of the text, then perhaps a theology of reading can in some respects take its place. The question of the object of our reading becomes uncertain and even mysterious, but the question of what reading is can be at least partly answered. In our belief that there is a connection between the text and reality, we have overlooked or minimized theologically important dimensions of reading, including the role of the reader in the production of meaning, the influence of ideology upon reading, and the resistance to meaning inherent within texts.³ As the concept of “text” becomes problematic and elusive for postmodern thought, an understanding of reading becomes more desirable. We can no longer rely upon a theology of the text, but we can explore a theology of reading.

The Non-Reader

Reading is an endless and violent playing with the text, and the reader is in a perpetual struggle with the law of the text. She draws her life from this law even as she disturbs it; she is a vector directing the movement of the law and giving it meaning. The law establishes the book as a meaning-filled work, as the product of a worker (an author) within a system of exchange which makes it available as a piece of property. Nevertheless the reader determines the value of the book, as a work, for all of its various owners.

In Italo Calvino’s postmodern novel, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, there is a character named Irnerio. Irnerio is a “non-reader”–a person who has taught himself how not to read. He is not illiterate, not even “functionally illiterate.” Irnerio refuses to read. Yet Irnerio does not refuse to look at written words. Rather, he has learned how to see strange and meaningless ink marks on pages where others see words. Irnerio is beyond reading; for him the books, pages, and words are no longer the transparent vehicles for immaterial ideas, but they are solid, opaque objects.

I've become so accustomed to not reading that I don't even read what appears before my eyes. It's not easy: they teach us to read as children, and for the rest of our lives we remain the slaves of all the written stuff they fling in front of us. . . . The secret is not refusing to look at the written words. On the contrary, you must look at them, intensely, until they disappear.(49)

For the non-reader, the written words eventually “disappear”–they disintegrate into not-quite-letters, shapes, blobs of darkness on the white page. This is because the non-reader looks at them, at the physical marks themselves, and not at what they mean. The words disappear into sheer materiality; they become meaningless deposits of ink on paper. They are not altered physically, but they lose their signifying potential. They cease to be filled with what the philosopher Gottlob Frege called “sense”; they become nonsensical. The printed words return to what Julia Kristeva calls the semiotic chora. To speak of such texts as more-or-less accurate copies of an ideal, transcendent original is impossible.

The words also disappear for readers, but for the opposite reason, and in the opposite direction. As you learned to read, the meaning of the words gradually came to dominate the physical text. You learned to conceptualize past or through the concrete marks that make up words and sentences, to “see” meanings or ideas that are represented, to hear the language with your mind’s ear. As reading became easier for you, the materiality of writing (as an obstruction to sense) became an almost invisible, transparent vehicle; what you really read is what the written words “say,” their meaning. You only read words insofar as writing itself has become invisible. What you read is the idea within the word, and you don’t like it if the materiality of the word obscures the idea.

Thus the written word may disappear in either of two directions, which correspond to the two components that make up language–the physical medium (the signifier) and the intelligible content (the signified). For the reader, the word is caught in a tension between these two components–a tension which cannot be maintained, but only imagined as a midpoint between two extremes. When either of the differences which make signification possible–differences between signifiers, or differences between signifieds–are foregrounded (when they become visible), the word disappears. For those who know how to read–and this includes non-readers such as Irnerio–one component or the other must be foregrounded. Unlike Irnerio, readers choose to foreground the signified: the concepts, feelings, and other representations derived from reading. To foreground the material signifier of writing rather than its signified meaning, as Irnerio does, seems ludicrous and irresponsible to us–it goes against the grain; it is unnatural.

Non-reading stays close to the physical letter, the written word. This would correspond to Barthes’s “text of bliss,” the writerly text. A reader can become a non-reader only through a deliberate choice; such a choice reflects upon, and rejects, the ethics (and economics, and theology) of the text. Irnerio refuses the categories of ownership, at least when it comes to books. If he were not such an agreeable fellow, and actually quite moral in his own strange way, you would have to think of Irnerio as evil. Yet readers are also non-readers, although in a limited way. When you attempt to decipher an unusual script, or study a language with a different alphabet, the foregrounding of the signifier is unavoidable, and often unpleasant. You then become an inadvertent non-reader, although unlike Irnerio you are still trying to read.

However, no one can actually learn not to read. Irnerio represents an unreachable goal; that is why his subversions of literariness do not upset us. Instead, they amuse us. Not to read is an impossible ideal, for the unconscious habits of reading cannot be entirely unlearned. The non-reader rejects the signified, and chooses only the signifier. However, a signifier without a signified is impossible; hence the non-reader is impossible. Probably only the truly illiterate person–the one who can make nothing out of writing–can actually see the written word as a bunch of squiggles, senseless marks which cannot be significantly distinguished from other similar squiggles. Such squiggles are not signifiers, and they have no signifieds.

For Irnerio all that counts is the life lived instant by instant; art for him counts as expenditure of vital energy, not as a work that remains, not as that accumulation of life that [the reader] seeks in books. But he also recognizes, without need of reading, that energy somehow accumulated, and he feels obliged to bring it back into circulation, using [the reader's] books as the material base for works in which he can invest his own energy, at least for an instant.(150)

Irnerio views books merely as things. He is an artist, and literature is his medium, but not as we might expect. Books are worthy in and of themselves, but only as the meaningless stuff (hyle) which he glues together into larger hunks and then carves into abstract sculptures. However, non-reading is not easy, even for a master such as Irnerio. How does he decide which book is the right one for a sculpture? Is his decision based solely on the physical matter of the book (color or shape of cover, size or thickness of pages, binding, typeface, etc.), or is Irnerio also somehow aware of its contents?

I fix the books with mastic, and they stay as they were. Shut, or open, or else I give them forms, I carve them, I make holes in them.. . . . The critics say what I do is important. Now they’re putting all my works in a book. . . . A book with photographs of all my works. When this book is printed, I’ll use it for another work, lots of works.

. . . . There are some books that immediately give me the idea of what I can make from them, but others don't. Sometimes I have an idea, but I can't make it until I find the right book.(149)

Non-reading points to the limit-condition which defines reading: its material situation. It highlights the theology implicit in the traditional understanding of the text. Yet the non-reader is clearly a sort of parasite on the literate world, or indeed, on literature itself. Irnerio cannot exist unless readers exist, unless an entire immense structure of civilization exists–including authors and publishing houses and scholars and bookstores and translators, as well as economic and educational and political systems–a structure which allows and requires readers to be readers. The ramifications of that larger structure provide the world and much of the plot of Calvino’s novel.

Literal Translation

The reader is made possible by the misplacing of the word which is writing. Every reading is a translation, a transfer (or “metaphor”) of something which allegedly lies on or in the page–Frege’s “sense”–to some other place inside the reader’s mind. Yet as Irnerio makes clear, when he refuses to read, that “something” is not the physical stuff of the books themselves, but something else entirely. Readers are trans-lators, those who take things from their proper places and move them somewhere else, and reading is intertextual, an endless juxtaposition and interchange of texts which is a kind of translation. The theology of reading entails also a theory of translation, and vice versa.

For the theology of the text, the goal of the translator is to retrieve the authentic message of the original text and then re-embody that message in a new text. It is only the ideal text, the “work,” which can be translated, not the material text. Translation is exegesis. Compared to its meaning, the physical aspects of the translated text are unimportant, and they can be modified and rearranged and ultimately sloughed off, like a mortal human body temporarily inhabited by an eternal soul. As noted above, the theology of the text has its own doctrine of the incarnation, for which the spiritual “word” enters into the written “flesh.”

The translation theory of Walter Benjamin presents an alternative view of the theological dimension of texts and the operations of language–a view that is close to Irnerio’s. According to Benjamin, the goal of translation is not to transfer a meaning (which can somehow be detached from its linguistic embodiment) from one textual body to another, but rather to form a kind of reciprocity between the translation and the original text, so that the reader sees through both to “pure language.” This pure or “true” language is not an historical, empirical language, but rather it is language itself, language without purpose, meaning, or function–language speaking only itself, endlessly. Benjamin called this goal “literal translation.”

A real translation is transparent; it does not cover the original, does not block its light, but allows the pure language, as though reinforced by its own medium, to shine upon the original all the more fully.(79)

Literal translation seeks “a language completely devoid of any kind of meaning function . . . pure signifier . . . paradoxical in the extreme” (de Man 96-97). The goal of literal translation is the interlinear text, “in which literalness and freedom are united” (Benjamin 82). In the space between the parallel lines of the two texts, the translation and its original are united in a true language “without the mediation of meaning.” The translation reflects back upon and reveals the original as a fragment of pure language, in a way that it is unable to reveal itself. In translation the original is brought back to life, and the pure language imprisoned within the original text is “liberated” (Benjamin 71-72, 80). It is translation, according to Benjamin, that “saves” the text.

For Benjamin, the principal question in translation theory is: how does the translated text illuminate the original text? The value of a translation lies in its confrontation with the original text, not in its infallible transmission of the meaning of that text. The preferred translation will not necessarily be the most accurate one, the clearest transmission of meaning, but rather the one which stands in tension with the original text. Literal translation measures the uniqueness of the material text by the other texts with which it is juxtaposed, and with the possibilities for intertextual meaning which then emerge. Like a tangent to a circle, the translation harmoniously supplements and complements the original. There is no question of the two texts somehow being two copies of the same thing.

The interlinear space of translation is utopian and uninhabitable; it is sacred and untouchable space (Derrida, The Ear of the Other 115). The letters of the alphabet, from which the text is assembled, are meaningless in themselves. The text itself as a physical object, the material space of the semiotic, is deficient in meaning. The physical text is a literal text, and therefore it resists interpretation. It is unreadable, non-readable, non-readerly. According to this view, the purpose of language is not to reveal but to conceal, and translation tests the power of language to hide meaning:

[T]ranslation must in large measure refrain from wanting to communicate something, from rendering the sense, and in this the original is important to it only insofar as it has already relieved the translator and his translation of the effort of assembling and expressing what is to be conveyed.(Benjamin 78)

Literal translation seeks to uncover the language spoken by God in creating the universe–that is, a language of naming. For literal translation, the proper name is a matter of crucial importance. Names cannot be translated, strictly speaking–they stand at the very edge of language, at the boundary of signification. Names have meaning (they refer to objects), and yet they do not mean (they cannot be defined). The name is language beyond meaning, without meaning–a language “lost” by humanity (because “confused” by God) at the Tower of Babel.

Benjamin’s views on translation come explicitly into the realm of theology, and they are close to a kind of Kabbalist mysticism. Like non-reading, literal translation draws language back to a point of ineffability, to the edge of the human world. It empties language of significance, reducing it to a material residuum alone. Literal translation refuses to allow the separation of meaning from its physical embodiment, and thereby it de-values the question of meaning. The ideal of exegetical translation is rejected. However, the absence of an extratextual realm of meaning does not liberate translation but rather constrains it, and perhaps even renders it impossible.

Materialist Reading

The reader invents the work as an authority, something worth owning. This law of ownership is equivalent to the desire for translation, and for exegesis. Barthes identified this kind of reading with the readerly, the “text of pleasure.” In its explorations of narrative codes, strategies of authority, and the production of meaning, Barthes’s writings, and especially S/Z, present an important contribution to the theology of reading. Fernando Belo’s book, A Materialist Reading of the Gospel of Mark, is one of the few sustained attempts apart from S/Z itself to apply this method to any writing, although one might argue that Calvino’s novel playfully hoists Barthes on his own petard.

S/Z is an immensely complex and close reading of Honore de Balzac’s novella, Sarrasine. Barthes divided Balzac’s story into 561 “lexias,” which he then analyzed in terms of five “codes” which he found operating throughout that narrative. A lexia is a phrase (in the sense that Jean-Francois Lyotard has given to that term), an individual semantic unit which may range in length from part of a sentence to several sentences. The codes are the cultural and intellectual filters through which the great abstract repository of langue becomes the limited specificity of parole, and through which the field of potential signification (what Kristeva calls the semiotic) is formed into a narrative world (what Kristeva calls the symbolic). The codes permit and also channel the conjunction of signifier and signified.

The codes form the structures through which Sarrasine creates the readerly illusion of a transparent window (a story within a story) opening on to a coherent and realistic world. In the larger, “framing” story, an unnamed man attempts, and fails, to seduce a beautiful young woman by agreeing to reveal to her the identity of a mysterious old man. This revelation takes the form of a story (the inner, “framed” story) of a foolish and impetuous artist (Sarrasine) who mistakes a beautiful castrato (La Zambinella) for a woman and falls in love with “her,” with fatal consequences. Barthes’s detailed analysis of these codes, one or more of which functions in each of the lexias, reveals that they conceal a deep narrative incoherence (the writerly), an absence or deficiency (a castration) which the narrative both represents and is.

This catastrophic collapse always takes the same form: that of an unrestrained metonymy. By abolishing the paradigmatic barriers, this metonymy abolishes the power of legal substitution on which meaning is based: it is then no longer possible regularly to contrast opposites, sexes, possessions; it is no longer possible to safeguard an order of just equivalence; in a word, it is no longer possible to represent, to make things representative, individuated, separate, assigned. (215-216) At its discreet urging, we want to ask the classic text: What are you thinking about? but the text, wilier than all those who try to escape by answering: about nothing, does not reply, giving meaning its last closure: suspension.(217)

The writerly is the resistance which the text offers to coherent meaning–not an active resistance, as of a living presence (such as the intention of an author), but a passive, inertial resistance, a kind of friction. It is lodged in the materiality of the text as writing (hence Barthes’s term). This materiality disrupts the narrative codes, interrupting their operation or setting them against one another, and therefore the writerly may be identified through the frustration of the reader’s desire for a readerly, followable narrative. The writerly consists in those elements of the text which remain opaque to reading, refusing to be reduced to a consistent and comprehensive understanding–and which are present in even the most readerly and realistic narratives, such as Sarrasine.

Every instance of language is at least somewhat writerly, and there are some texts which resist any coherent reading. The conflict over meaning is somehow essential to the attempt to read these writings, which are in effect all surface, a surface which reflects parabolically upon itself and which never opens up to reveal unambiguously an extratextual truth. The materiality of the text appears whenever reference is suspended or otherwise incomplete. Barthes argued that the readerly work must disappear whenever the writerly text appears, that the text de-authorizes or de-constitutes the work (“From Work to Text” 78-79).

Through his reading of Balzac, Barthes (like Benjamin) recovered in a secular way a strand of the Kabbalah, the mystical rabbinic reading of Torah which attended even to the physical shapes of the Hebrew letters, and which has been long overlooked by the logocentric idealist tradition which has dominated Western philosophical and theological thinking–the theology of the text. Barthes’s reading praxis is a Benjaminian translation; the “pure language” of the Balzacian text is uncovered, and it speaks. Through his reading of Barthes (and of the gospel of Mark), Belo has re-imported this sort of reading into biblical studies. Belo’s “materialist reading” of Mark is not merely so in the sense that as a Marxist analysis, it is materialistic. Rather, it is materialist also (and perhaps more so) in that it attends to the written/printed text as a material body.

Belo follows the same method that Barthes used, adopting some of Barthes’s codes and identifying others appropriate to Mark’s text. He claims that he intends to read Mark in terms of its narrative qualities alone, and with no regard to its referential truth-value (95). In order to do so, he divides the gospel of Mark into 73 “sequences,” each made up of one or more “scenes.” Here he compromises Barthes’s text-analytical method by combining it with traditional historical-critical views; Belo’s “sequences” are established from critical pericopes, irreducible atoms of the tradition behind the synoptic gospels as uncovered by biblical scholarship of the last two centuries. The bulk of Belo’s book consists of detailed and often provocative reading of these sequences in terms of the relevant codes.

However, despite his ingenious adaptation of codes which Barthes developed for study of a nineteenth-century French Romantic novella, so that they are also relevant to a first-century Hellenistic Jewish gospel, Belo rarely uncovers in Mark the sort of remarkable narrative structures that Barthes does in Sarrasine. This is not a consequence of the differences between these texts. The gospel of Mark is more writerly than Balzac’s story, although its long entombment within the security of the Christian canon has protected it from this sort of critical reading. Nonetheless, studies of the gospels in recent years have gone far toward penetrating that security. Belo is apparently unaware of these studies.⁴

In addition, Belo frequently accepts the judgments of traditional bourgeois biblical scholarship–the very judgments which he claims to be rejecting!–not only in relation to matters of dating and provenance of the gospel (96-97), but also and apparently unconsciously in relation to many points of exegesis. Belo admits that his reading is “naive” (1). This naivete contributes to the charm and originality of his book. However, what is most disturbing about Belo’s reading of Mark at these points is its quality of naturalness.

Belo’s reading “de-materializes” the Markan text in an effort to bring to it a kind of closure. This closed text refers to participation in an apostolic succession which continues in contemporary movements of liberation, and it turns the oppressed peoples of the world into a new Israel. To this corresponds Belo’s reading of the Markan Jesus as a Pauline Jesus (206, 297), or a Jesus who abandons Judaism in order to turn to the gentiles, and who is stopped by Jewish authorities before his revolutionary plans can be fully realized.⁵ Liberation of the oppressed is a worthy goal, but if that alone is what Mark is “really” about, then the text may once again have been closed in the name of logocentric univocity.

I share Belo’s political sympathies, and I share his disgust with the theological tepidity of contemporary bourgeois churches, but I suspect (as I think Barthes would) those points in Belo’s reading where the reader’s need for a committed writing overwhelms the materiality of the text. I then become a non-reader. This tests both my reading and Belo’s. The strengths of his reading are in those places (and they are many) where it is itself radically shaken or disrupted by the writerly qualities of the gospel of Mark, where Mark’s refusal of the bourgeois reading emerges through its refusal of any single dominant reading–even Belo’s.

The gospel of Mark is not a politically neutral text. Few texts do the job of confronting and rejecting the reader’s need for power and for control as well as Mark does. My objections to Belo’s book do not center upon his political reading, but upon his apparent desire to have his reading be the only reading. This creates a conflict which may be inherent in any reading, but which is suppressed all too often. Belo’s ability to call Mark’s textual resistance to our attention emphasizes the degree to which many readers have failed to see that resistance. It is this ideological dimension of Mark–its resistance to the reader–which demands a materialist reading. Yet it is precisely this resistance which can never be read, which can only be encountered, by any reader, as the unreadable, the non- readerliness of the text. Belo’s reading reveals the alienness of Mark’s story, and this can only happen through close attention to the materiality of the text.

Belo’s book carries profound implications for those who engage in theological enquiry beyond the confines of traditional religious institutions.⁶ His book concludes with a long “Essay in Materialist Ecclesiology” in which Belo sketches an “ecclesial” understanding of the “collective son of man” as a material presence in the world–as a body composed of hands, feet, and eyes. This body, which is inherently political, is in Mark’s view (as interpreted by Belo) Jesus’s body. It is not a body to be abandoned in an ascension to some spiritual realm, but rather it is the text itself incarnate in its readers, in this physical world, the only place where the kingdom of God might be.

The continuity thus refers us to the figure of the collective Son of man at the level of the erased text; this figure . . . functions in the register of a continuity that is indicated by the ascensional schema in which the starting point is earth. Let us demythologize this figure. . . . What will be left of the figure of the collective Son of man will be the communist program of his practice, [and] his subversiveness.(287)

For Belo, this means a re-opening of the question of resurrection, for he insists that salvation in the gospel of Mark is always salvation of the body. The “body of Christ” is no easy theological metaphor here. Belo argues that the messianic narrative of Mark lies in fundamental opposition to the theological discourse of the institutional church. It is this discourse which keeps the church from being able to read Mark in liberative fashion.

The Gospel narrative is articulated with the indefinite play of the narratives of its readings, a play that must not be closured, even in the name of reason, even in the name of God. The debate thus opened concerns the evaluation of the power at work in the practice of the bodies which we are.(294)

By playing the culturally-determined pressures toward signification (the codes) over against the writerly resistance offered by the materiality of the text, Belo’s materialist reading treads a fine line. At every step it threatens the obliteration of the very thing which makes it possible. On the one hand, the desire to produce a coherent reading is very powerful, and perhaps irresistible. On the other hand, it is the materiality of the text–its otherness–that refuses the hegemony of bourgeois theology and opens a space for Belo’s alternative reading.

Concrete Theology

Literal translation, the non-reader, and materialist reading offer approaches to a theology of reading which stress the physical, concrete aspects of the text in ways customarily ignored by traditional theories of the text, as well as by much of the Jewish and nearly all of the Christian theological tradition. Calvino, Benjamin, and Belo provide examples of what I have elsewhere called “concrete theology.”⁷ The theology of the text understands the text as an incarnate yet ultimately spiritual word. In contrast, concrete theology is a theology of reading which seeks to discover the essential carnality of the word in the materiality of the text, language at those points where it bodies itself into concrete reality, apart from any signification, exceeding its own metaphysical limits.

Concrete theology desires the “new word,” the word which is as yet or once again meaningless–not really a word, but only potentially one. It seeks this word in nonsense, incoherence, and gibberish. (This is not glossolalia, for which the “speaking in tongues” is already Spirit-filled.) In this it is both materialistic and mystical. Concrete theology therefore attends closely to those points where language resists rational or empirical analysis, where the rules of meaning are broken–for example, questions of fictionality, connotation, and metaphor.

Concrete theology rejects the theology of the text, and in so doing it makes problematic the very meaning of “theology.” Nevertheless, the word “theology” points to the ongoing, inevitable, and inescapable slide of language and thought toward metaphysical (logocentric, onto-theological) closure–the inevitable return of the traditional understanding of the text. All language and thought, even the most atheistic, the most secular, and the most scientific, is caught in the gravitational field of this great black hole which we call by words such as “presence” and “reference.” Only poetry in its most radical, linguistically self-destructive forms comes close to escaping the vortex–but in such poetry, language is at its most concrete. This is the maximum degree of the writerly.

As a theology of reading, concrete theology is intensely interested in books, writings, scripture.⁸ However, concrete theology rejects the Bible as authority, just as Belo rejects the appropriation of biblical truth by bourgeois theology, and just as Irnerio rejects the demand of every writing, the demand to be read. Concrete theology reads the Bible against the grain of established theological truth. It also rejects the church’s claim to ownership of the Bible–concrete theology liberates the Bible from the church’s hermeneutic control. It refuses the closed canon as such. The Bible becomes for it just another text, or rather, many texts. For concrete theology, the Bible is many bibles, an expanding and contracting and multiple text, a shimmering of texts which cannot be contained in any one book.

For concrete theology, exegesis is eisegesis. A better term than either of these is one recently proposed by Gary Phillips, “intergesis,” which suggests a reading between the texts, or intertextual reading. The term “exegesis” is an ideological subterfuge used to conceal a preference for one type of eisegesis over others, to make one way of reading into the text appear to be the natural, normal reading- out of what the text had within it. The works of Calvino, Benjamin, and Barthes, among others, have made it clear that there is no such thing as an objective meaning hidden within any text. The notion of a scientific critical exegesis is as dangerous in its own way as the proclamation of the “true meaning of the Bible” (as inspired by God) on the part of fundamentalist religion, to which the theology of the text is functionally equivalent.

There are no limits to eisegesis, or to misreading. As a translation from the materiality of the text, every reading is a misreading, turning the text into what it is not. Still, to say that there are no correct interpretations doesn’t mean that there are no incorrect interpretations. One who reads Sarrasine and understands La Zambinella to be a woman, or a gay man, does not read “the same story” as another who understands the accepted meaning of “castrato.”⁹ An alternative set of codes which permit the understanding of “castrato” as, e.g., “a type of woman” is not inconceivable, but such a reading would render incoherent the narrative structures of Sarrasine. In such a reading the bounds of intertextuality would be strained to the point of “anything goes,” and the thwarted desire for meaning would destroy the prospect of its own satisfaction.

However, reading is a juggling of codes, trying to get it all to “work out right.” One misreading leads to another. I read Belo’s book within the context of an attempt to understand concrete theology. I sought a materialist reading of his materialist reading. I did not read Belo in the context in which Belo reads the gospel of Mark, and yet his reading is not entirely unlike Irnerio’s non-reading, either. In addition, Belo also permits a reading from within another context, the context of “the other.” Every (re)reading changes the context and opens a way for the other. The material text–physical marks on the page–is liberated from one context, and it is transported (translated) into another. The material text remains “the same” (physically), but the meaning must be altered. It is a misunderstanding–but then, all readings are inevitably misreadings.

What is needed is an understanding of the tensions between resistance inherent in the physical aspects of the text, and ideological pressures brought to bear upon it by readers. Like Irnerio, I reshape Belo’s work to fit my own desire–I read into it. As a middle-class male gentile white heterosexual North American, I am perpetually in serious danger of reclaiming Belo’s radically neo-Marxist reading of Mark for the sort of bourgeois theology over against which he sets his own reading. That is a risk which I must take, or else not read (that is, not translate) and remain silent–unlike Irnerio, whose non-reading culminates in the work of art. Nonetheless, my reading is also not entirely foreign to Belo’s, even as it cannot be identical to his. It stands over against his book, touching it (I hope) as a tangent to a circle.

The text is the specific, material product of a concrete act of production. For the logocentric, idealist tradition, the materiality of language is only the temporary and ultimately transparent medium for the spirituality of meaning. For materialist reading, in contrast, marks on the surface of the page are not merely the vehicle or channel of a fundamentally independent meaning, passing it on from an earlier, extratextual realm (such as the mind of an author) so that it may eventually be translated back to a different, but also extratextual, location (the mind of a reader). Instead, these marks are opaque, inert, and resistant to the desire for meaning. The differences through which they signify are themselves without meaning. The material body of the text conceals even as (and more than) it reveals. Different texts are not copies of some ideal original, and they cannot be collapsed into some universal, spiritual entity.

Concrete theology is the name for awareness of the tensions involved between the desire for, and the resistance to, meaning. Concrete theology therefore also offers a way of non-reading. It presents a different reading, an alternative reading, from the mainstreams of the Jewish and Christian traditions. It is a reading of the otherness of the text which may well appear to traditional readers as a mutilation of the text. It looks so intensely at the text that the words disappear, not into ideas as they do for traditional readings, but into meaningless marks. Concrete theology can never be more than a prolegomenon, a not-quite- theology, a via negativa which can only announce what it is not.

Notes

1. Increasingly, texts are not a matter of ink and paper but of magnetic or laser-optic recordings. What will the relative invisibility of such media, unreadable without special machinery, do to our thinking about texts and reading? How will the change in the physical stuff of the text itself change our theology of the text?

2. Some analytic philosophers reserve the word “text” for the physical object (words on a page); what I call here the ideal or spiritual text, they call the “work.” The work is a self-identical artistic entity (for example, a particular story) which may be found in various texts. Barthes made a similar distinction, identifying the work with the readerly, the “text of pleasure.” Foucault notes some logical difficulties in the concept of “the work” (143-44).

3. Varieties of reader-response criticism remain popular and influential in literary studies, but they will not be discussed here. However, some criticisms of reader- response theory may be inferred from the following.

4. With the exception of Louis Marin’s important book and the work of a few other French structuralists, Belo does not cite any of the literary and narratological studies of the gospels of the last several decades. His references to English-speaking biblical scholars are to an earlier generation.

5. Belo’s reading here is not at all foreign to the history of bourgeois biblical scholarship, despite his claims to the contrary, but it suggests an anti-Semitism which is arguably foreign to the gospel of Mark. One finds echoes of this at several points in Belo’s reading, such as his comments on Jesus’s interactions with the Gerasene demoniac (pagans do not endanger Jesus, 130) and with the Syrophoenician woman (as an alteration of Jesus’s strategy, 145).

6. See my essay, “Post-Ecclesiastical Theology,” Explorations (Spring,1992).

7. “In order to exceed the limits, theology must uncover the not-itself which lies unnamed at its center, its hidden eccentricity and non-identity: it must become concrete” (Aichele 138-139).

8. “[T]o describe systems of meaning by postulating a final signified is to side against the very nature of meaning. . . . Scripture is a privileged domain for this problem, because, on the one hand, theologically, it is certain that a final signified is postulated: the metaphysical definition or the semantic definition of theology is to postulate the Last Signified; and because, on the other hand, the very notion of Scripture, the fact that the Bible is called Scripture, Writing, would orient us toward a more ambiguous comprehension of the problems, as if effectively, and theologically too, the base, the princeps, were still a Writing, and always a Writing” (Barthes, The Semiotic Challenge 242).

9. When I teach S/Z, I have the students read Sarrasine first, on their own. Several usually come up with such readings.

Works Cited
- Aichele, George. The Limits of Story. Chico, Calif.: Scholars P, 1985.
- Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974.
- —. “From Work to Text.” Textual Strategies. Ed. and introd. Josue V. Harari. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1979.
- —. The Semiotic Challenge. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1988.
- Belo, Fernando. A Materialist Reading of the Gospel of Mark. Trans. Matthew J. O’Connell. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1981.
- Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1968.
- Calvino, Italo. If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler. Trans. William Weaver. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1981.
- de Man, Paul. The Resistance to Theory. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986.
- Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981.
- —. The Ear of the Other. Trans. Peggy Kamuf and Avital Ronell. New York: Schocken Books, 1985.
- Foucault, Michel. “What Is an Author?” Textual Strategies. Ed. and introd. Josue V. Harari. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1979.
- Frege, Gottlob. Translations From the Writings of Gottlob Frege. Trans. and ed. P.T. Geach and M. Black. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1952.
- Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia UP, 1984.
- Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Differend. Trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988.
- Phillips, Gary A. “‘What is Written? How are You Reading?’ Gospel, Intertextuality and Doing Lukewise: A Writerly Reading of Lk 10:25-37 (and 38-42).” Society of Biblical Literature Seminar Papers. Atlanta: Scholars P, 1992.
September 25, 2013

XL (Letters on Xenakis)

Nathaniel Bobbitt

    Introduction and References

       Xenakis remains a musical figure whose methods
       have literary implications.  To consider the personality of
       Xenakis, a musical and architectural thinker, becomes a
       means to extend literary tasks in favor of physical and
       sensory aspects of experience, behavior, and prerformance.
       Xenakis stands as a reference point on how to work with
       techology and how to wonder about a technological outlook
       within the writing process.  

       In XL, Xenakis appears as the means to consider the literary
       task of treating greater quantities of detail and spatial
       reference within writing.  The next step is clearly textual
       instability and a generative prose form.

       A.  Breton's political/scientific approach, also in Xenakis
            -Collaboration and collectives
            -Science, Center of Mathematical and Automated
              Studies, compare Xenakis interest in musical
              cognition with Weil's thesis on Descartes' Science
              and Perception

       B.  What are the exercises which develop an aleatory sense
            of treating greater quantities of data, all at once,
            via:
            -Symmetry
            -Asymmetry
            -Computational complex patterns

       C.  "Objects in action,"  compared with optical illusions
               complex observations rather than the consideration
               of fallibility, hallucination:
            -Consider the juxtaposition with regular hitting
             hangers; scrapping tangle as frictive noise as
             a rythmic source
            -Waterdrops on a metal plate & microtonality

       D.  Irrational quality to be found in "objects in action"
            -Acceleration in glissandi
            -Multiphonic versus microtonal drone
            -Octave glissandi...at a microtonal degree
             These irrational qualities anticipate a "siren"       
             activity that tempi studies in Carter on the player
             piano.

                                  ***

       I.  B.F. Skinner & Xenakis as models for the commentator's
            (the friends') consideration of behavior as
            quantifiable:
            -Skinner...item...collection
            -Xenaxis...group...manipulation
            -Use of memory as heuristic module within the
             sensorial practice:  F(x, y)...sensorial
                                  F (x',y')...memorial
            -Skinner...behavior (habitual)
            -Xenakis...performance (task realization)
       Consider Skinner and Xenakis on math testing and the
        mathematics of experiment testing.

       M.
            Adieux, when I get a chance to break away from the
       hurry up and wait activity I write you, almost a symbol more
       than anything.  A symbol of what I should be in contact
       with, not that I need reminding but all my mainstays are
       packed away.  The necessity of a new place takes over so.  
       The chance to meet with others is here, as I am a substitute
       teacher.  Each day a new school, another direction, and a
       bus route to learn.  The time schedule is that of the rural
       doctor.  What does the sense of patrimony and
       grandfatherhood evoke for you: Such stodgy sorts perhaps
       are not vivid enough for "your punk German, your computer
       talk, cinema and the blurbs that run together."  Yet you
       were friendlier (than the other Darmstadters) as an ideal
       separates...and allows one to respond.  One day these
       letters, notes, and discussion may serve a sentimental end,
       that of being taken on as a companion in a stoic expression.

       For now, necessity takes over from irony.  Both are
       merciless yet irony's heartlessness and pointed humor is
       another story.  Perish the thought, enter hunger, perish the
       thought.  I think of you as someone that asks for only a
       good-humored naturalness, as the bitter and remedial feeling
       after your desires are taken care of elsewhere.  Instead
       there is the commentary the breeze after so many close calls
       and disinterested conversation between two commentators. 
       The word finally appears commentaire.  The ability to work,
       experiment, exchange over short periods, despite wider
       lapses of conversation.  Good commentator, good night.

       XENAKIS LETTERS

       1.2.0

       M.

            It hardly seems like it, but after two summers the term
       "volumetric" has taken on a life of its own coincidental,
       arbitrary, and unavoidable.  I am content with this news
       which I must explain to you...as it means undoing a tangle.

            By now you know that I am always trying to find ways to
       make more out of my sentimentality.  The act of reading a
       favorite is even more pleasurable if I can extend some
       aspect of an author and respond to that attraction in the
       reading.  Better yet, someone shows me something "how to do"
       and I use it.  The call-backs, the sentimentality I live
       over time through the debris of a better time, the reading
       matter, the source of conversation, the identifiable regard.

       You as commentator must have some idea about this as all
       this work grew out of that name..."Xenakis"...with enough
       associations and arbitrary ties, pointing out the same
       name.  The ones today regard measure and the study in
       "pictures which make you think."  Diagram, meditatio,
       Archimedes appears...in particular, the cases of the
       pendium, the bouyancy of things...offer the elements of a
       study of volumetrics in Xenakis.

       Author's Note:

            These quotes refer back until we consider curvature and
       foci in the forms of volume, but what I am after is the
       place of acceleration and temperature in volumetrics, the
       sonic boom in winter and summer according to crisp heat in
       the skyline.  Archimedes was gained from Weil, as your news
       on Xenakis's use of the etch-a-sketch all pose one question:
       how graphism informs acoustics.

            Ever since someone said, "the concert was no good
       because of the acoustics," the relationship of sound and
       space was there, but what little advantage do we take of
       the notion.  Steering clear of metaphor--the pendulum, the
       remote focal point, gravity, centrifugal force align: 
       acoustics, graphics, math, music, and architecture--without
       metaphor.

            The first example will be mine...regarding clusters in
       the form of the siren, the warning signal, and radiated
       pitch.

       1.3.0

       M.
            Tell me something, when you are out at the club, at
       what moments does imagination take over from the body
       slamming.  How weightless do they get or is it controlled
       busting one's head into a wall.  Is it just black and blue
       or does clotting appear.
            Yesterday I read about India, rioters after an act of
       self-immolation.  Degrees of frenzy, hunger, and new friends
       fear the insipid.

       XENAKIS LETTERS

        The tenets of Logic:
            -To think faster, to learn (heuristic models) within
             correction and error.
            -To handle greater quantities of data
            -Applications for a math primer for everybody:
            -Selection
            -Mathematical Expectation
            -Weighting test criteria
            -Qualities of experimental testing as fundamental to
             quantification rather than 1:1 quantification of
             behavior.

       Conclusion:

       Seek modes and resolve application tenets:
            -rythmic comparison of irregular (odd numbered)
             figures at irregular durations.
            -interval in an interval
            -compare two-sided lineal time scheme

            Stroking facial movements to stimulate memory in
       dementia patients is comparable to a normal person's
       stroking of face when one is engaged or interested.
            Yet the dementia patients ramble and stroke themselves
       but it is their hair which they stroke.  What role can
       stroking have in neurological functions in intelligence and
       cognition:
            -memory
            -learning
            -concentration
            -recollection
            -attention

       1.4.0

       M
            One can concentrate by straining the forehead to
       attempt to focus one's attention or shake one's head.  The
       relation between gesture and intelligent functions is a
       means to consider therapy and neurological stimulation
       without drugs.

       When dementia patients forget, several steps are missing:
       -image of concentration
       -direction of image (contextual relation)
       -inability to hold onto the image
            *) slipping away of name--object association
            *) slipping away of verbal--phonatory mode
            Dementia is a regression into a childlike
       consciousness: sensorial and pre-speech.  Reinforce
       sensorial rather than verbal lapses.
            We are living very modestly and that stops me.  As
       always rules the motto "go broke in a beautiful place."  The
       lake here, the amplitude of space, the triangle with Toronto
       and Canada are reasons for you to come up.  The absence of
       identity makes it even a better place.  One is free of
       influence, one can just bounce off objects in action.  The
       radio reception is fair.  The  whole thing could improve.

       1.5.0

       M.
            Aural blocks of sound, the siren, the warning signal,
       or the sound block in desphase are most active when taken in
       their coupling or drone state.  Stasis in these blocks is
       like gridlock in which the immobility of a section of a
       population flow swells until it stops and only can vibrate
       without forward motion for a while but the particles slide
       through, ungluing the gridlock.  The gridlock is never fully
       immobile, neither is the stasis, in an aural block.  The
       sonora block can be considered as a gridlock.  The gridlock
       can be considered a compact space in a maximal growth
       pattern which virbrates within itself and then passes onto
       more discrete space and motion...becoming mobile interactive
       again amazing fluttering reeds, tongues, and ureal sounds.

       XENAKIS LETTERS

       XL.2.0

       M.
            This series you will find in one piece but it has grown
       over a disperse set of circumstances, which in a way
       fragments, this study upon arhictectural design in Xenakis's
       Phillips Pavilion.  I wish this series were more solid, I
       have found few mathematical conclusions, I have been left to
       observe and pick at the bones for procedural observations.
            It was comforting to hear from you after those months
       in which I had no address to send you.  Now you can call. 
       The fact that German has outweighed programming and
       computation...on with change.
            Your mode of ruling out the waste and your admitted
       oversimplification are all parts of the commentary.  What I
       ask is that we should go into collective research, rather
       than work on solos and then join, to give solos.
            "Find yourself a programmable young thing."  If said
       what kind of hell would break out, in the form of a swollen
       lip.

       Outline

            The success of this series would be the elaboration, of
       automated simulation and manually composed reconstruction
       problems.  First condsider architectural design as it holds
       for acoustic activity.

September 25, 2013

Talking and Thinking: David Antin in Conversation with Hazel Smith and Roger Dean

Hazel Smith and Roger Dean

H.Smith@unsw.edu.au

David Antin is a “talk poet” who gives provocative talks which combine the genres of lecture, stand up comedy, story-telling and poetry. They juxtapose anecdote with poetic metaphor, philosophical and political debate with satirical comment. The talks are improvised, that is they are created during the performance and no two performances are the same. In his talk piece Gambling (Tuning 148), performed in the seventies, Antin refers to the recreativeness which dominates many poetry readings and which he is reacting against; simply reading a poem is like “returning to the scene of the crime/you try to reenact it and the more you try to bring it back to life the deader it becomes.” The medium of the talk restores to poetry its lost oral dimension; the opportunity to bridge the gulf between creative process and product and the opportunity to create in a public forum. Although there is no written record of many of Antin’s talks, some of them have been published in two volumes Talking at the Boundaries and Tuning.

David Antin was born in New York City in 1932 and graduated from New York City College and New York University. He is currently Professor of Art at the University of California at San Diego. He is married to the performance and video artist and film-maker Eleanor Antin. He is also a distinguished critic who has written on the visual arts, postmodernism, television and video art, and the role of art in technology.

The context of the conversation was our forthcoming book Discovering the Discourse: improvisation in the arts after 1945 in which we are investigating the importance of improvisatory techniques and approaches in art, film, literature and theatre. In this book we will rebut the naive conception of improvisation as a purely spontaneous and intuitive process and demonstrate how improvisation has been a complex creative procedure used by many artists since 1945. We were particularly interested in David Antin’s work because it is one of the few examples of improvised poetry. We wanted in the interview to ascertain how David went about his improvisations, what his technique for improvising was and how this related to the effect of the improvisations.

The interview took place in San Diego in February 1992 shortly after David Antin’s talk at Carroll’s Bookshop in San Franscisco on the subject of the other. Although David’s work over the years was the main focus of the interview, we also alluded from time to time to that specific talk.

HS: In what sense do you think your talks are
improvisations?

DA: Probably in the same sense that most people's
improvisations are improvisations. One person I could
imagine myself in a relationship to, though I've never
said it before, is Coltrane. Coltrane was constantly
working over scales and examining other musical
manoeuvres, to keep his hands on a lot of things that
he could do; he was listening to timbres of different
mouthpieces and playing with different ways of making
music, so it is not as if he went in as a blank slate.
Jazz improvisation is work that in some ways I
feel very close to, because the language offers you a
well-formed grammar. I am not interested in
transforming English grammar, but I am interested in
the full range of English and its varieties of speech-
registers and its ways of movement from here to there.
It allows you much more freedom than anybody really
knows. I mean we know very little about the full range
of colloquial English. In fact most grammar that is
being used in the schools of the high levels of
linguistics, which I did doctoral work in, I regard as
highly idealized. There are so many things that it
doesn't explain, although it's a very eloquent family
of explanations for the things it does explain.
But it seems to me that language is a reservoir
of ways of thinking, because what I am really
interested in, at least as much as language, is
thinking: not thought but thinking. And the closest I
can get to thinking is talking. When I started doing
this I wanted to get close to the sound of thought, and
then I realised the only way you can get the sound of
thought is to think, to do a lot of thinking. Not all
thinking is verbal, and you can get close to some of
the things that are not generally thought to be
linguistic by approaching things in a way that seems
less discursive. That is, in some ways narrative and
images seem less discursive so that you can reach
towards images or towards semantics that are more
governed by other ways of arranging things in your mind
than merely what is taught to people as linguistics.
So the goal is to articulate through thinking, to find
my way and open up and explore the range of thinking,
but to think about things in the course of it. So in
this sense I have a lot of practice because I do it all
the time, but Coltrane also played music all the time.
It seems to me that Monk had a variably finite
repertory of ways of moving, part of which may have
been characteristic and part invented from time to time
and carried from performance to performance. In that
sense I am not any more original than Monk or Coltrane
but very much like them.

HS: I understand that. It is very important that
improvisation shouldn't just be confused with
spontaneity. Nevertheless, if you are going to give a
talk, is there any degree of preparation beyond previous
experience?

DA: Sometimes there is but the preparation is not
formalized. In other words when Peter Cole asked me to
think about the idea of the other I started thinking
about a variety of things. I started thinking about
the way the idea is used. Not systematically, but as I
was driving to school or doing something else like
making coffee in the morning. And I took out books
from the library to read, but not on the subject of
the other. It struck me that I wanted to look at
Marco Polo's travels. I did and it turned out to be a
bad translation and I thought that maybe Mandeville's
travels would even be more useful because they were
more fanciful. So I took out several volumes and was
browsing Mandeville before falling asleep at night. I
also browsed through an older history of ethnology that
I wanted to look at again and I re-read some of Levi
Strauss's Tristes Tropiques, none of which I found
specially important. It was just that I was preparing
my mind and it wasn't that I needed, or was necessarily
going to use any of this material: I thought it might
have some edge-like relationship to what I was doing.
I also looked at several old articles where the term
got recycled but again not very seriously. I made a
very light play with the material just to make myself
cycle the information in my head very loosely.
By the time I arrived for the talk I had no fixed
idea of how I would begin and I had no fixed idea of
structure. The structure normally is provided by the
finite length of the tape, sometimes I will stop long
before the tape runs out. So I talk for about an hour
or 45 minutes: if I'm told that I have to go shorter I
will run around half an hour. I can do very short ones
if necessary, but then it is different, you don't have
the luxury of manoeuvering in the same way. There are
dictates which are purely practical, such as how much
you can get on a side and there are the dictates of the
range and type of audience which has a lot to do with
social interplay and making things intelligible.
Because it is not only thinking out loud, it's thinking
out loud where you are sharing the thinking in some way
with other people.

HS: But how can you tell what the audience is like if you
are not very directly interacting with them? How can
you tell what the range of intelligence is? I was
wondering all the time during the performance what kind
of audience you were pitching it at.

DA: You don't know what it is but you feel it out--at the
beginning of a piece I have a tendency to be fairly
exploratory, it doesn't start taking shape right away.
There is a kind of prelude, you run a few scales to see
how they work for you but also whether people find them
intelligible, which may not mean that you will abandon
them. But you get a sense from body language whether
people are with you or not with you and there are ways
of playing it that are so completely intuitive I don't
even know how I do it. That is I spend a fair amount
of time circling the material before plunging in, to
achieve a readiness of mind and also a kind of tuning
relationship--it's like tuning an instrument as a
prologue. In other words in standard orchestral
situations they tune because they have got to reach a
particular pitch, but I have freedom of tuning because
no one tells me whether I need just tempered or equal
tuning.

HS: One possibility improvisation provides is
collaboration with other people, for example to
collaborate much more with the audience. I have read
about the incident at 80 Langton Place where the
audience, made up largely of poets, made you interact
with them.

DA: I was actually interacting with them rather maliciously
I thought.

HS: During your talk I wondered whether it would end with a
discussion and in some ways I was quite relieved that
it didn't.

DA: Most people are. I don't have a set feeling about it.
My sense is that people are there of their own free
will and I offer a kind of human engagement with them.
In other words I don't deal with material that is
impossible for them to deal with. I deal in a space
that I presume this intelligent audience can arrive at
in some manner. The length of the piece has something
to do with the audience's interest, and sometimes the
question is how much I can push the material and keep
the audience still with it. I think that I can also
tell whether people are dialoging with the piece.
When I am talking what I say is never quite what I
intend to say. There is a kind of relationship between
the sense of one's own intentionality and what one
does, because if one had a complete match between what
one intended and what one said, one wouldn't have to go
any further, one would never have to reformulate. So
there is a kind of slippage and sometimes what you say
is better than your intention and sometimes worse or
sometimes merely to the left or right of it. And so I
am always conducting a kind of dialogue with myself, as
well as a dialogue with the audience, and the audience
is always conducting a kind of dialogue with me, but
also spinning off. I feel that's good. One of the
reasons I use a less tight presentation mode is that I
want the audience to have room to pursue its own
interest and loop away and loop back, which I think
they do. I think people associate off into things that
are like my experience but different, and that they
might have said in a different way. So they pursue
their agreements and disagreements with me through
parallels of support, this allows them a full-scale
dialogue. And to the extent to which they are involved
in it, they are interested in the piece and they have
this kind of intense but intermittent attention.

HS: It's still different from a direct dialogue with the
audience. Have there been some instances (apart from
the incident at 80 Langton Place) where people have
spoken from the audience or you have actively
encouraged that?

DA: Sometimes but not a great deal, unless it happens, in
which case sometimes I will respond to it in a way,
loop it in and continue, but my performance is not
aimed at that. Usually the audience doesn't feel
inclined to do this, anymore than they would normally
feel inclined to do it. Imagine an audience of
musicians at a jazz performance. They might feel very
responsive, someone might say, yeah, but they are not
likely to start playing. There is a feeling that the
audience generally has at an artwork that they interact
with it by thinking about it, rather than that they
immediately interact discursively with it. Although
once in a while I'll say something that gets close and
somebody will say something, usually not much, and I
acknowledge it and bring it in a bit and that is fine.

HS: As audience we're very conservative, I think: we're not
used to participating and so I suppose we would have
to be actively encouraged.

DA: You have to be not only encouraged but also feel
sufficiently ready. It is more than that, you have to
feel a readiness with respect to a common range of the
material and I think the lack of feeling ready is
partly a sense that the material is not quite so common
to them. In fact that was one of the complaints that
the Langton Place people had which I was toying with,
it was essentially that they knew very little about the
material. I was dealing with a relationship between
the figures of rhetoric and figures of mind and I was
trying to retrieve the values of certain Greek terms
because I thought they were useful. But when I got to
a story in an area they felt they knew a great deal
about or thought they knew something about, (they felt
inclined to have an opinion about anorexia say, or what
was called anorexia) it was funny because they hadn't
really thought about that either. Which was of course
one of the great difficulties for them, that is, they
were thinking about it now for the first time in any
significant way. And I think even they were tepid in
their interventions because they really hadn't thought
about it that much, and they figured I had thought
about it more which was probably true.

RD: Have you ever tried to set up a situation where you
have a discourse between several people who are
simultaneously thinking?

DA: I've never tried to set it up because it is hard to do.
Though I would certainly find it interesting.

RD: Because that would be the analogy to the jazz
performance.

DA: It certainly would, it's just that you have to organise
it and find people and find a terrain that you all feel
you are willing to do it in relationship to. I did a
thing in France at the Beauborg with several French
poets a couple of years ago but I think they saw
themselves as more supportive of what I was doing than
I would have liked. It was fun talking with them but I
found it hard to draw them out. I tried but it was
harder for me to draw them out in those circumstances.

HS: Could you give me any idea of the process by which you
generate the talks, how you get from one item in them
to another?

DA: Well I look for a promising tangle, some kind of snarl
of threads so to speak. I may not see all of them at
once, I may see the end of a thread, the end of a
couple of threads and I try to pick it apart, and find
out what it consists of.

HS: So you are holding all those threads together
simultaneously in your mind?

DA: I follow one of them and it either leads to another
knot or I go back up to find another one and I might
move into what seems like an end that I can't get out
of and then instead of backtracking I will leap to one
that was next to it. I will make a transition to the
one that was further away but which I had left over
there. So there is a way of dealing with it, as a
problematic: it is a sort of playfulness, it is as if I
took the notion of problem solving and thinking away
from its seriousness into a kind of sheer pleasure, the
idea of solving knots. You look for the great knot and
then you try to solve it like the Gordian knot. To me
the world is filled with some things that are knots and
some things that are snarls and some things that are
pleasant tangles and I try to find a way to open them
up and see what they are made out of and this sometimes
lead to new forms of ravelling. I knot and unknot and
I am looking for an ultimately elegant knot structure
which I will eventually work out of the remaining
material.

HS: That is actually what it feels like.

RD: It feels like several successive modules in some cases
doesn't it, particularly in the other. Did you have
an awareness that it was likely that there would be
five modules and that "Guattari" and "Saddam" and
"molecular structure" would be amongst them, or were
those things that mostly came to mind as it happened?

DA: I think they come from a kind of experience and a set
of attitudes and what sometimes happens is that you
have clear cut modules but the number of them may
differ and also they turn out not to be situated
precisely in the same plane. In other words there are
discrete concentrations usually, something leads to a
concentrated module and somewhere another one may
develop, but it generally turns out not to be module
module module in total contiguity. I try to construct
in a kind of cognitive space in such a way that the
distances between the modules create openings for the
mind and also begin to throw light on a space that
seems like a meaningful quasi container, but a
container filled with holes. In other words my
relationship to a system is--the problem of systems
is--that they don't have enough holes. So that they
become fanciful and unreal: the trap of systematic
thinking is that it is falsified through closure. I
like systems, I find them illuminating, but what I find
illuminating is the notion of systems that articulate
and are elegant and in some way incomplete and clearly
so. And it is a relationship between the one
incomplete system and the other one which creates a
kind of hyperspace, because the spaces between them
become interesting. The principle of complementarity
in physics is an example of concentration, on the non-
fit between two situations, and it takes head on the
difficulty of wave and particle and puts it right up
front in physics. Well I don't want to necessarily
argue that what I do puts it right up front like that
but I have treated it with casual obviousness. That is
I allow this complementarity situation to develop where
one story doesn't fit over the other story in such a
way that one completely clarifies the other (I don't
believe in total clarification) but on the other hand
it throws light onto it.

RD: But it is a logical necessity that thinking could not
have a complete closure really isn't it?

DA: It can't have complete closure.

RD: So what I was going to ask was,why so much emphasis on
making that necessary failure overt? I can see the
attraction but why is it attractive to you?

DA: Well it doesn't turn out to be a failure, because what
I really am doing is partly making a polemical case for
what I believe is real thought, real thinking, as
opposed to what has come to stand for rationalism in
the history of Western thought, which is a straw man:
the notion of the totally closed logical system which
has only one little hole in it that is unfortunate
because there is a paradox lurking in the corner. This
particular form, has dominated rational and
irrationalist thought in Western European discourse to
the point of annoyance finally, but what you actually
find is that structures, because they have holes in
them, don't become useless. On the other hand rational
thought is different from what people think it is, and
rationality is an exaggeration of the kind of clarity
of mind and the possible mental tactics that can be
deployed to think usefully, meaningfully and
creatively, and it seems to me these are very poorly
understood. So part of the purpose of my work is to
illuminate, by example, the nature of real thinking, in
which art-thinking shares a great deal with scientific-
thinking, and we have a lot in common although we will
do things that may be done differently we may not do
some of the things that scientists may do and we may do
a great number that they do. And even if you do what
they do, what they do doesn't look like what they say
it is, because when they write the article they always
do it backwards. The article is not the thinking.

RD: We art thinkers would not have such a tendency to
prioritise as scientists would have would we?

DA: No, and my work is about the unity of thinking and the
absolute absence of the dichotomy between what we call
irrational artistic thought and rational thought. It
basically engages with the idea of raiding across the
two terrains to insist on the unity of the terrain.
Logic is a function of human character, people are
basically in some sense logical when they think at all.
But logic is broader than that. The truth-table fable
is a fantasy but if you could lock down the categories
in such a way and you could position them rigidly
between here and there, you could quantise between the
true and the false in a particular curious way. But
usually the categories are too slippery for anything
significant to be put into this position for very long.
What happens is that the slippage in anything you use
generally causes you to have to approach it in a number
of different ways, "as long as this holds to be true"
and "as long as this is like that then it follows from
that that this is this."

HS: Do you feel there is a sense in which you adopt a
persona in your talks? Reading through the talks I
sometimes felt there was a persona of a kind of naive
person struggling to understand certain things, for
example in the talk where you speak about the third
world and what the third world actually is.

DA: There is in a sense a persona but the persona develops,
because as soon as you begin representing yourself at
all, anything you represent has a fictional property.
As soon as a representation occurs it's partly untrue,
it's partly fiction, but it develops its own inertial
moment, its own commitments and a lot of these things
derive essentially from a kind of philosophical
positioning. In other words you can approach it in a
different way: "what if we didn't start by accepting
belief in all these things that everybody always knows,
what if we didn't know this, how could we examine this
belief." So the naivety is ultimately based on the
belief that we know too much and that it is founded on
too little. We are standing on a swamp or a cloud and
we rely on these well known things, that are well known
to be true, but how true are they? So in a way you
take things everybody knows so it sounds naive to say
them, but if you say "third world" by now everybody
seems to have forgotten what the first and second
worlds were. I mean is there a second world? What do
you mean by a world? Are there more than that? In
other words if the third is invented largely as a
function of a quarrel between one and two and you
develop a kind of economic theory on the basis of this,
the third gets to be built up largely on not belonging
to one or two. And then you call it unified, but the
relations that either the one or two might have can be
extremely bizarre, and furthermore you can imagine a
unity of victimization but the victims might not like
each other if they were unified. For example, it is
not obvious that the Jehovah's Witnesses, the gypsies,
the Jews, and the communists in the concentration camps
of the Nazis really were very friendly with each other,
or they were only as long as you had the barbed wire
around the camp, and they were often treated in
different ways. So it seems to me, without being
naive, you can't ask the right questions.

HS: But can I go back to the issue of the relationship
between the first person and yourself, because that has
been worked out in so many different ways in post-
modern poetry and yours seems to be very interestingly
situated with regard to that. Do you feel you have a
strong sense of talking about your own experience, or
do you sometimes tell lies about your own experience?

DA: Very often. No, it is all mixed! I basically feel
that my talks should be no more reliable than
conversation in general as absolute fact! You see what
one depicts as true is a function of one's feeling and
experience and all of it has its origins in things that
are factual as far as I remember, but some of them are
fantasies. And some of them are fantasies
involuntarily, sometimes you remember things that are
not true simply because your desire has already
produced the representation. So that I have never gone
out and notarised my statements, and my self-position
is that people will take it as credibly as
conversation. Now much of the experience is true or at
least partially true and some of it is very true and
some of it is fiction, but it is fiction that is true,
in other words it is serious fiction, it's not fantasy.
It is serious fiction in that it derives from a kind of
experiential engagement with it.

HS: How do you think the talks relate to your normal talk
or your normal speech?

DA: They are close but the situation creates a greater
intensification of the characteristics. In a
conversation with other people, in a social situation,
you tend to encourage other people and allow other
people to play and you may not have the space to take
on one of these things.

HS: The knotting and the unknotting you talk about wouldn't
be so prevalent in a conversation would it?

DA: No. But it has a relationship with some of the
teaching that I do.

HS: That was another thing that struck me when I saw the
talk; it reminded me of the lecture situation in some
respects.

DA: Yes, well it draws on the lecture and on stand-up
comedy. It is not really stand up comedy in that I
really don't play gag after gag, I don't theatricalize
myself like Spalding Gray. Spalding Gray, of course,
is characterized as a performer who also does
improvisation although his improvisations become
somewhat memorized by the time he does the work. At
least I think he said this and on another occasion he
said he didn't, so I am not sure, he may work more like
me than he indicated first time around. He comes from
acting and so what he generates essentially is very
markedly a persona of Spalding Gray. He theatricalises
himself so he is his main actor and he positions
Spalding Gray as bewildered and as a major victim of
his own inadequacies and it is very charming.
And what happens is that though he is his main
actor, things befall him, whereas I tend to be
sometimes an actor and often merely only an observer or
sometimes an actor who is in there involuntarily but
the action is the other people. I am not my main actor
so my persona doesn't develop beyond necessity. It
seems to me as long as you start saying "I" you have
got a persona, especially if you say it three times in
a row because the "I" begins to develop a configuration
from its continuity. And you see Gray concentrates so
much on the behaviour and the bewilderment of his "I"
because he is his main actor, he produces not exactly a
Chaplinesque figure but a certain kind of bewildered
central figure. It is a more artefactually complete
version of the naivety you say that you pick up in
some of my pieces but my pieces are merely an attitude
that enters into a discussion of something else,
whereas in his case he then intrudes into and stumbles
over it and falls into a trap deliberately and picks
himself up out of the trap.

HS: Well that is a very important distinction isn't it?

DA: And so I don't build up the character and occasionally
I get sucked into a case where I am a considerable
figure but usually I am interested in something outside
of the "I." The subject in my case becomes the vantage
point from which to look.

HS: How do the talks relate to the written transcripts of
them, how do you actually notate them and what makes
you decide where to notate the gaps?

DA: It is very impressionistic. You see the media are
really quite different so what I am doing with the
talks is trying to create an experience for the reader
which is an analogue structure of the performance. The
media are really so different, that is performance has
all these unknown things that are happening between
you. The audience is there and they pick up a great
number of things from the way you look, from what you
are saying, the inclination of your head movement, they
have many more contextual clues than is on the tape
recording. The tape recording is in some ways totally
bewildering for most people, because it contains stuff
that people don't hear and it doesn't contain things
they do pick up. Whatever is said they ignore certain
things and slips at the time which they don't pay
attention to. It is perfectly clear when an audience
listens they hear the right thing. They hear what you
intend to a very great degree, and a tape recorder
records only what is acoustically available to it
within certain filters, so the tape recording is the
most bizarre mode of dealing with this material.
The transcript then is an attempt to construct. I
used to do it myself but now I get somebody just to
type it up altogether with no pauses, or to pause
wherever they think a sentence ends or not to worry
about it. If I decide to listen to the tape, which I
sometimes do, I listen all the way through and then I
take the transcript and put it down over there. And
then I look at the beginning and I read through it once
and then I start typing and then I might look at it
four pages later, six pages later, 12 pages later, I
may look at it very closely in spots. So what happens
is that I am typing, I am writing something with my own
habits of verbal composition and in my head the image
of what I have done, and I am recreating its image, I
am not transcribing line for line. Often without doing
anything of the sort it comes out almost as if it has
been memorized, which is very startling. But sometimes
what will happen is that I will come to a place where I
didn't have room to do something at the time, the piece
had a moment where I wanted to go on and for some
reason I couldn't do it as fully as I would have liked
and I think it should be made more articulate. Some
transcripts are twice as long as the talks originally
were. Some pieces are very close to the literal form:
the phrasing system seems to be very similar in both of
them and you could hardly tell the difference between
them.
I remember a piece called dialogue in my book
tuning. I did this piece in Santa Barbara and they
sent it back to me and I transcribed it and I added a
whole story that I cite in the performance but didn't
have room to tell it. But a reading audience doesn't
suffer from the same psycho-dynamic as a listening one,
you are in a different space, you are holding a book in
your hand and so I simply told the whole story that I
couldn't have told there given the difficulties of
timing. So the version that I sent back to them was
one and a half to two times the length of the other
piece. I met the editor about a week later and she
said she really liked it a lot and what she really
liked was how completely identical my original version
was with the performance! And so I have to say that
there is a phenomonological issue at stake.
It does vary from occasion to occasion depending
on the commitments I have. I have a commitment to the
performance, to the psycho-dynamics of improvisation,
to doing the best I can, which always involves an
engagement with an audience, and a commitment to
material. And sometimes one has to be traded off
against the other, you can't let the audience down. I
have a responsibility to an audience to do it as well
as I can in a way that allows them to be participants
to the end, and so my sense of timing is partly related
to that. I can stretch it, I can negotiate it but I
am not a performer who is interested in violating
audiences. My interest is essentially in engaging an
audience, discoursing with an audience perhaps pushing
it, but in some kind of social relationship that I find
is humanly responsible. Now the problem is I don't
always feel that I was responsible enough to some of
the articulations I should have undertaken in relation
to my loyalty to the material and then the question is
how do I do it in the text in such a way that it
doesn't violate the spirit of the performance? And
there will be times when I will take up in the text a
greater articulation of some of the material that I was
handling in a performance, and then I have to construct
a way of getting back from it into where I was before.
It is as if a cadenza went wild and I take the cadenza
way out and then I've got to come back in some way and
I create an artifice for getting back to where I was
before.

HS: I think, actually, the transcripts are very successful
because one of the things that struck me when I saw you
talk was...

DA: They sound like me.

HS: Yes that it was very much what I had conjured up from
the text.

DA: Well that is the intention.

RD: On the other hand another way of looking at that
process of transcribing is that you are using the
process of thinking but then you are also superimposing
thought.

DA: Well actually no. Just superimposing more thinking.

RD: Except that you are presumably doing that over a much
longer time-span and you are also thinking
retrospectively about what you thought in the process
of thinking when you performed--i.e., by now, thought.
It is kind of a combination of the two, isn't it?

DA: Well it is interesting--it is true in a way although I
don't see it that way. I see it as thinking and
rethinking, because it seems to me I don't write slowly
either. I write almost as fast as I speak. I use a
computer and I used to use a typewriter and I am an
extraordinarily fast typist and the computer has made
me even faster. So I don't use the system that many
people use to write, which is built on endless
revision; not because I don't want to do it, I just
don't feel that way. I write almost the way I talk so
I go pusssssh you know and I catapult myself along
almost at the pace of my speaking.

RD: That raises the other question which comes from the
realization of the two stages. Why do you really need
to do the performance verbally in public? Why can't
you do the thinking at the computer.

DA: I like the engagement. Somewhere in Levi Strauss' work
he talks about the one thing that is so marked in all
primitive art and that is almost lost completely in
Western traditional art as we know it. And he says
what isn't there is a sense of occasion, whereas
occasion so dominates the art that he was talking
about. For me the sense of occasion, of art being
rooted in an occasion, is one of the central issues of
its motivation.

RD: Yes, well as an improviser I sympathise with that.
Stemming from what you said at the beginning of the
conversation and the comparison with Coltrane there is
one major difference, it seems to me, between what you
are doing in your talks and what they are doing. You
are saying that you don't really want to transform
grammar but I think that they did eventually transform
the grammar of music and by the heyday of free jazz it
became a primary objective almost. I don't think it
was ever a prime objective of Coltrane's but it
probably was of Cecil or Ornette. Do you not feel any
temptation in that direction in spite of that?

DA: Well grammar plays a different role historically in
music. And in a certain sense the grammar of music is
much more constraining and in some sense fairly
trivial. As someone reasonably grounded in music my
sense is that grammar in music is more of a
straightjacket than grammar in language. So they
really had to break with a lot, although they didn't
really break with grammar if you take grammar to be a
universal grammar. Supposing we take the notion of the
universal grammar of music, a very loosely
understandable psycho-grammar in a sense of what you
can distinguish, that is based on the
distinguishability of timbres, the limit and thresholds
of what perception can in fact articulate in sound. It
seems to me we don't know the universal grammar of
music. The grammar of language has just begun to be
discovered with the appearance of people like Chomsky
and the Russian formalists, and we hardly know what the
real grammar of language is.

RD: Nevertheless quite a few of our literary peers have
felt inclined to attack it haven't they?

DA: Yes though they usually do so on the basis of very
insufficient understanding.

RD: But as you have said in various ways already that
doesn't necessarily undermine the validity of the
enterprise does it, quite the opposite.

DA: No, not at all, I'm perfectly happy with them doing it.
If they start out from false premises and do terrific
things. I've got nothing against it! It is the theory
that I sometimes find foolish but the outcome of the
work is often terrific. So in a sense if Coltrane or
Ornette do things that are breaking up a grammar it is
only when you take grammar in the narrow sense of the
grammar of music, because if, for example, you suppose
that the deep grammar of music is different from the
grammar that was imposed on it, in my sense they look
for the deep grammar. I would say they are looking for
the deep grammar in music and that was the greatness of
free jazz, the fact that it was so coherent. I taught
one entire 3 hour course with a group of people where
we tried simply to take one whole performance of the
Coltrane group in 65 and we were listening to it and we
tried to find a way to talk about it that made
intelligent sense about the articulations and the moods
that were made. And we needed a kind of theatrical
vocabulary to discuss it and we were trying to re-
formulate, and it seemed to us that the work was
extraordinarily coherent and in some sense humanly
grammatical because it was intelligible.

RD: Do you recognise a group of improvising talk-givers in
whatever country that are your peers, and if so have
you considered trying to set up a condition in which
you could collaborate with any of them specifically?

DA: Well I don't know of any peers in the sense of having
close relations although I know other people who work
in the domain.

RD: Yes I mean in the latter sense, a peer, somebody with
an equivalent level of interest.

DA: Yes they do but they are in a semi-commercial zone
overlapping mine and have different aims. For example
Garrison Keillor is an improvisor in certain ways. I
am not sure whether he memorizes his stuff and maybe it
is in story-telling that we overlap more than in
improvisation, although I have a feeling he may
improvise his stories. And there is a kind of
connection, although not a connection of sensibility
with Spalding Gray, though he is theatrical. And
whereas my talks have a kind of philosophical
linguistic commitment, in his there is a kind of
theatrical but also psychological set of concerns. I
don't know anyone who basically works that way that it
would be easy to imagine working in relationship to.

RD: So the idea of a collaboration with say a person who
might use phonemic improvising, let's say a Bob Cobbing
wouldn't really appeal because there isn't that
cohesion between the two approaches?

DA: No, although I am very inclined to the possibility of
working with a musician because I could imagine working
with some really contemporary musician, doing a piece
for example with George Lewis. I could imagine doing
things with him because the space that he operates in
seems to me not unreasonably playful. It is both
different enough and at the same time capable of being
rhetorically innovative and I could see myself playing
with it.

RD: We have used musical and verbal improvising. It can be
very interesting, you can make the relationship in lots
of ways.

DA: Yes, as long as you can figure out how to work together
in a physical sense and a team-like sense. It seems to
me that we could do it in ways that are not the most
obvious ways.

HS: And have you thought of doing anything, setting
yourself up technologically in any way? Having for
example a tape of yourself talking and then talking
with that or something like that.

DA: Well I did use the intervention of taped conversations
for the Archeology at Home and I was not enormously
thrilled by that. And I did another piece, Scenario for Beginning Meditation, that was published in one of
my books of poems. It has a set of questions with wide
spaces between them and some responses to them. There
were questions such as "is this the right time to
begin" and I left spaces between them on the tape
recording long enough so that I could answer the tape
recording. And I went back the next day and I ran down
the batteries of the tape recording so that I knew that
it would be fairly weak and that it would get weaker
and weaker. The sentences were philosophical
reflections on the problem of beginning. The tape
recording would talk and then I would try to answer the
recording in a dialogue. I tried to respond because it
was asking questions and I tried to answer it. The
students were in the middle and as the tape recorder
got lower and lower because I had deliberately run down
the battery very low, I had to push through the
students to hear the tape recording and be able to
respond to it. So the piece was a sculptural piece
because basically it forced the re-articulation of the
space. The piece took a while to do and at the end I
frantically leant against the tape-recording trying to
hear what it said in order to answer it. So the piece
was sort of funny but it was designed as a piece of
sculpture but later I just published the questions.

HS: Reading through Talking at the Boundaries and
Tuning there didn't seem to be a major change in the
way that you actually approached giving talks. When
did you start the talks?

D: Early 70's, about 71.

HS: Do you feel that the talks you give now are very
different in certain ways?

DA: I think they vary enormously. Obviously there were
changes because I am much more experienced at doing
them. But on the other hand if you look at the two
books, there are 16 talk pieces published in the two
books and yet in the 21 years that I have done this I
may have done 160 talks.
And this is a very small subset of what I have
done and in it is hard to have an idea of the range of
the talks from the 16. I could publish more but in a
way I am an oral poet who has book capability, and to
be an oral poet you have to do 7 or 8 performances a
year or you are not performing. It's important to be
an ongoing performer. I will do about 5 or 6 this
year; if you don't do it you can't keep your hand in
it. There have been changes and I've got a book coming
out with New Directions which will be out in Spring of
93. It is called What It Means to be Avant Garde.

HS: Do you think there are certain topics that you are
really obsessed with, which keep coming up time and
time again in your talks? I am sure if I went through
I could find certain recurring themes.

DA: Probably some that come up more than others and new
things show up once in a while. I like to think that I
am not so completely closed that I always talk about
the same things. On the other hand we have our habits
and concerns and things that are not resolved. What is
resolved I don't bother dealing with. For example in
the other certain things familiarly fit into it. On
the other hand it was not a subject I had thought about
in any significant way before and if you take it at the
micro-level, some of the concerns are the same, but you
are looking at them from different points of view. So
my sense is that there is a mixture. I am sure if I
went through the talks I would find things that were
familiar, but then one isn't infinite in one's
capabilities.

The Interviewers:

Hazel Smith, who lived in England until 1989, was an undergraduate at Cambridge University, has a PhD from the Department of American Studies at the University of Nottingham in contemporary American poetry and is currently a lecturer in the School of English at the University of New South Wales, Australia. She has a particular interest in the contemporary avant-garde and in the creative process, and her current research interests include performance- orientated and technologically manipulated poetry, and improvisatory techniques and real time manipulation in the contemporary arts. She has published articles in many journals and is currently writing a book collaboratively with Roger Dean on improvisation in the arts after 1945 for the publishers Gordon and Breach.

Hazel Smith is also a poet and sound artist working in the area of experimental poetry and performance and has published in numerous international poetry magazines. She has also published three volumes Threely (Spectacular Diseases Imprint 1986), Abstractly Represented: Poems and Performance Texts 1982-90 (Butterfly Books 1991) and TranceFIGUREd Spirit (Soma 1990). Some of her work was included in the 1991 Anthology Floating Capital: new poets from London, Potes and Poets Press, U.S.A..

Hazel Smith has given poetry and text performances in many different countries including Australia, Great Britain, USA, Belgium and New Zealand, and also on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), BBC and US radio. She has collaborated several times with artist Sieglinde Karl and musician Roger Dean and her performance work has been featured on several ABC programmes, and internationally, for example on France Culture. She is currently making a CD of her poetry and performance pieces and one is being released on CD by the US journal in sound, Aerial.

Hazel is also a violinist. She is leader of the contemporary music group austraLYSIS and has performed solo and chamber music in many parts of the world including Australia, Belgium, Denmark, Great Britain, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, New Zealand, Norway and the Philippines. She has featured as soloist on several gramophone records.

Roger Dean is an improviser, instrumentalist (playing double bass, piano and electronics), composer and musicologist. He has worked widely in Europe, Asia, Australasia, and the U.S.. He formed the European group Lysis in 1975, and its Australian counterpart, austraLYSIS, in 1989. He has made more than twenty five lp and cd recordings. Amongst his recent recordings are The Wings of the Whale (with Lysis; Soma 783), Something British (with Graham Collier Music; Mosaic GCM 871), Moving the Landscapes (austraLYSIS, Tall Poppies 007) and Xenakis Epei on the Wergo label.

He has written more than 60 works, both completely notated pieces and also works for improvisers. He has used a range of compositional techniques, from serial, and freely atonal, to neotonal and other post-modern approaches; and composed for digital electronics also. Several scores have been widely distributed in his books (mentioned below); and in publications of Sounds Australian, The Australian Music Centre, Sydney, and Red House Press, Melbourne. Many are on commercial record releases on Soma, Mosaic, and recently Tall Poppies.

Amongst his recent works are TimeDancesPeace, in which dancers and musicians work interpretively and improvisatorily with shared materials and methods of development. He has also collaborated with Hazel Smith in two large text-sound works, Poet Without Language, and Silent Waves, both written for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).

He is active in musicology, with many articles and reviews published. His practical book Creative Improvisation was published by Open University Press (UK/US) in 1989. It was followed by New Structures in Jazz and Improvised Music since 1960 (Open University Press; 1991). He has received bursaries and commissions from the Arts Council of Great Britain, the Australia Council, ABC, and Rikskonserter (Sweden).

He also has a career in scientific research, and is the Director of The Heart Research Institute, Sydney, Australia.

September 25, 2013

“It Meant I Loved”: Louise Gluck’s Ararat
Eric Selinger

Dept. of English
University of California at Los Angeles
eselinger@aol.com

Thanatos undercuts, overrides Eros, his sweet, belated sibling–so says Freud.¹ And in Revolution in Poetic Language, her closely argued brief against paranoid Unity and culture as theology, Julia Kristeva more than agrees. Like the Accusing Angel that she calls “the text,” Kristeva puts the writing subject, in her now famous phrase, en proces–in process and on trial–charged with denying the very spark that drives him: the “jouissance of destruction (or, if you will, of the ‘death drive’)” (150). This drive lies below language, she argues; it underwrites or even is desire (49, 131). Even oral pleasure, that link between infantile suckling and the poet’s honeyed words which at one moment in her account “restrains the aggressivity of rejection,” thus holding the death drive in check, amounts in the end to “a devouring fusion,” “borne” and “determined” by the very rejection one hoped it would restrain (153, 154). Avant-garde social and textual “practice,” along with the critic’s own, must on account of this be strict, undeceived, and unsentimental. There’s no entry for “love” in the index to Revolution. No Eros peeks out from Psyche’s cupola, offering readers shelter from the storm.

At moments Louise Gluck’s Ararat calls to mind such passionate strictness. “The soul’s like all matter,” the poet observes. “Why would it stay intact, stay faithful to its one form,” when it could fly apart into “particles” and “atoms,” disintegrate, “be free?” (“Lullaby” 28-29). The Kristeva I’ve cited so far would take this as a rhetorical question; and indeed, on first reading, so it seems. But these lines, like the rest of the volume, are spoken by a self-professed “Untrustworthy Speaker” (34). Suppose we read deeper, then, and hazard an answer? Recall another myth of rejection, the sentence passed on another subject on trial: Job, who refused to curse God and die (the biblical version of Kristevan “practice”). He survives to see an erotic restitution, his second crop of daughters, Dove, Cinnamon, and Eye-shadow, married with children and grandchildren of their own (Mitchell xxx, 91). A taste of fairy-tale closure, this end equally hints at that love “fierce as death” we read of in the Song of Songs (8:6), the book which follows Job in the Hebrew Bible as its countersong, a promise and a kiss.

The effort to unlock a love like that, a fierce erotic drive to hold life together, propels Gluck’s sequence from scene to stark, lyric scene. And the etiology of the affections we find in Kristeva’s more recent volumes can illuminate both the particulars and quiet formal imperative of the poet’s mourning work and self-analysis. “Beyond the often fierce but artificial and incredible tyranny of the Law and the Superego,” she writes in Tales of Love, postmodern love has been undermined by an “erosion of the loving father”: the one that Freud called the imaginary Father in Individual Prehistory, whose love for us ushers us out of melancholy longing for a lost maternal presence and into speaking subjectivity (378). Two musings from this book might serve as epigraphs to Ararat, highlighting the questions the poet sets herself as she attempts to reconstitute a vision of such paternity. “Love as unacknowledged lament?” Kristeva asks. “Lament as unsuspected love?” Tales 88).

It’s easy to read Ararat as a book about death, a fatalistic “family tragedy” (Cramer 102). The passing of the speaker’s father precipitates portraits of earlier losses, of a distance and coolness in the family’s past, and of the uneasy relations that remain. “Long ago, I was wounded,” the first poem begins (15); the last poem echoes the phrase, suggesting that no cure has been effected in between. “I thought / that pain meant / I was not loved,” the volume all-but ends, and no sunburst of metaphor, rhythm, or rhetoric amplifies the retraction of the line that follows to close out the book: “It meant I loved” (68). And yet, for all Gluck’s restraint–she’s no Mahler, massing brass fanfares to signal the shift–this quick modulation from minor to major ripples back to revise our sense of everything we’ve read before. Thus while “Ararat” is the name of a Jewish cemetery in the text, as a title for the book it also suggests something rather more hopeful, a place to settle, a mountain that peeks into view as the high waters ebb. Somewhere to speak from, perhaps, for in Kristeva’s tale “our gift of speech, of situating ourselves in time for another, could exist nowhere except beyond an abyss” Black Sun 42). We might paraphrase that as “after a flood,” with Matthew Arnold’s “salt, estranging sea” filling the developmental gulf between child and mother that the theorist has in mind. And if we took this as a book about Thanatos, did we brush past its actual epigraph on the way? “Human nature was originally one and we were a whole,” Gluck quotes from Plato’s Symposium, “and the desire and pursuit of the whole is called love” (11).

The androgynes split up by Zeus have long since lost their cartwheeling brio, their mocking, comic tone as a myth for the origin of sexual lack and desire. Gluck herself sets them aside, turning instead to the two visions of union that our modern myths allow: that between mother and infant, and the “coagulation of the mother and her desire” that intervenes in the mother/infant dyad as a third term, and that reveals to the child that “mother is not complete… she wants…who? what? … ‘At any rate, not I’” Tales 41). Through a “primary identification” with this third, whom Kristeva, following Freud, names the “father in individual prehistory,” we may be reconciled to the loss of primal symbiotic bliss (see Tales 21-56; Black Sun 6, 13). He, or he-and-she (since the Third “possesses the sexual attributes of both parents” [“Joyce” 172]) is the seed of the Ego Ideal, our original constitutive metaphor: “I’m like that.” Split off from mother, taking ourselves for, or becoming like, this other object of her affection, we thus inaugurate, all at once, subjectivity, metaphor, identification, idealization, symbolicity, and love. “The speaking being is a wounded being,” Kristeva explains; “his speech wells up out of an aching for love” Tales 372). Primary identification cannot heal the wound, but it sutures, salves, and compensates the pain. When it fails or is too fragile I lapse melancholic, have only the sense “of having been deprived of an unnameable, supreme good” as I run my thoughts over, in numbed, dumb repetition, the “unnameable” loss Black Sun 13, 12).

In Ararat this “father of imaginary prehistory” appears in several incarnations: the father as object of the mother’s love; other children, sisters, in the same position; the “family unit,” as we blithely say, in its full domestic happiness. Or, I should say, he fails to appear. For all these unities lie shattered, unrecognized, unimagined, or forgotten as the volume begins. “Long ago, I was wounded,” the first poem opens:

I learned to exist, in reaction, out of touch with the world: I'll tell you what I meant to be-- a device that listened. Not inert: still. A piece of wood. A stone.(15)

The near-toneless abstraction, the muted affect here, is that of a poet cut off from the pleasures of language as tactile, material, rhythmic, “the world.” The register Kristeva calls “the semiotic,” words surging with instinctual energy, seems repressed or abandoned. “Why should I tire myself, debating, arguing?” the speaker demands, as though such efforts of control were the only language games she knew, or thought to play–at least with those near her, “those people [sisters? the rest of her family?] breathing in the other beds.” If she “meant” in the past to be silent, mechanical or symbolic (a “device”), she hardly escapes that condition in the present tense of the lines.

A slumber does her spirit seal, we might say, for surely the last line of this stanza distantly echoes Wordsworth’s “rocks, and stones, and trees.” Her words, arhythmic, breaking off in dashes, suggest the melancholy speech Kristeva describes as “elaborated with the help of much knowledge and will to mastery, but . . . secondary, frozen, somewhat removed from the head and body of the person who is speaking” Black Sun 43). But hers is a sleepless slumber, a restless depression, stirred by a turbulence instantly put down. “Those people” are “uncontrollable / like any dream–” the poet observes, then at the word “dream” breaks off to watch “the moon in the night sky, shrinking and swelling.” Perhaps phallic in its alternate tumescence, or like a mother’s heartbeat, throbbing in the dark, this moon supplies an image for that archaic force the poet calls “the dark nature,” to which birth and death itself “are proofs, not / mysteries.” Ominous, the moon still seems attractive, a source of the dynamism the poet lacks. As we move through the stasis of the next few poems, its changes will be missed.

The opening poem I’ve been discussing stands in a double relation to the rest of the book. Its title, “Parados,” names the choral ode sung at the start of a Greek tragedy, a dramatic form that Nietzsche reads as teaching that “the state of individuation” is “the origin and primal cause of all suffering . . . objectionable in itself” (73).² If we take the poem as a distinct dramatic invocation, thirty-one verses remain–and exactly halfway through the book, in “Brown Circle,” we find the pivot of confrontation and forgiveness on which its progress hinges. Gluck doubles up on organization, however, supplying a second structural logic I will follow from now on. After “Parados” we find five poems that move the sequence along, introduce characters, fill out the plot. Then we have “Confession,” which comments both on the speaker and, obliquely, on what we’ve seen so far. Five more poems, then another address from and about “The Untrustworthy Speaker.” Five poems later, after the halfway pivot, we find “Animals,” which treats the speaker and her sister together, and for the first time hints at the true bonds between them. Five poems, and we find a deus ex machina of sorts, a vertical turn to hear “Celestial Music,” followed by the coda, “First Memory,” which echoes and revises the opening ode: “Long ago, I was wounded. I lived / to revenge myself / against my father” (68). I don’t mean by spelling out these structures to suggest that the book is primarily organized by differences and distinctions, other than of course its division into separate poems. The sections I propose are nowhere marked. But by reading this way, against the grain, we can get below the speaker’s evident emotional stasis, and tune in to deeper, subtler, curative shifts.

“A Fantasy” To “Confession”

At the end of “Parados” we learn that birth and death “are proofs,” not the mysteries the poet must bear witness to. Proofs of the power of Thanatos, or so it seems as this section opens in “A Fantasy.” Here, though no familial relationship has yet been described between her and her subjects, the speaker watches birth and death lamentably converge as “every day, in funeral homes, new widows are born, / new orphans” (16). In the “new life” of each widow and orphan time flashes in jarring, paratactic fragments: “Then they’re in the cemetery”; “And after that, everyone goes back to the house / which is suddenly full of visitors.” The only force that counteracts this fragmentation and dispersal is the mourner’s memory: the imagination of “the widow” our attention has lighted on and entered into as the poem progresses:

In her heart, she wants them to go away. She wants to be back in the cemetery, back in the sickroom, the hospital. She knows it isn't possible. But it's her only hope, the wish to move backward. And just a little, not so far as the marriage, the first kiss.(16-17)

The poet, we note, presses back a bit farther in the continuity than the widow allows herself. She lingers as the last line ends on the vision of a woman–the mother, we will learn–achieving her desire. And yet, as the focus widens again in the next poem to include the whole of “this family,” still unnamed as the speaker’s own, nostalgia withers and a harsher tone sets in. “No one could write a novel about this family,” this voice announces: “too many similar characters. Besides, they’re all women; / there was only one hero. / / Now the hero’s dead” (18).

Why this sudden shift in tone? It takes no particular psychological insight to see something defensive at work, signalling the importance of “the hero” when alive. The women may be “determined to suppress / criticism” of him, but in the speaker’s case, at least, they don’t succeed. His death “wasn’t moving,” the speaker insists; he was a “figurehead” alive, evidently narcissistic (the women are “like echoes”); “he’s weak,” she notes, “his scenes specify / his function but not his nature.” That function has something to do with narrative, with the making of sense and sentences through time. If at the gravesite a nameless someone instructed the mourners on “what to do next,” even that desiccated remnant of paternal function has now evaporated. “From this point on, nothing changes,” we are told. Not only is there “no plot without a hero,” but his absence rules out change as erotic development, new first kisses, escape. “In this house,” the speaker explains, “when you say plot what you mean is love story.” For Kristeva, love rests on a foundation of primary identification with the “imaginary father”: “a warm but dazzling, domesticated paternity” Tales 46). The recovery of such an imaginary father–the reconstruction of “the hero”–will be the poet’s task. As imagined here, he can only hurt and divide: in a brief flash of metaphor that perhaps signals his continued power, each woman’s heart is “pierced through with a sword” (19). But since the imaginary father does not simply equal the biological father, but incorporates whatever “not I” the child discovers its mother to desire, the poet must equally reconstruct the rest of her family. Her sympathetic imagination cannot jump past or exclude “these women, the wife and two daughters” and their children. These paired efforts will shape the first three sections of the book, starting with an admission that, indeed, this family is the speaker’s own.

With the next poem, “Labor Day,” her mourning work begins. “It’s a year exactly since my father died,” she begins; everything snaps into focus with the first- person pronoun: the heat last year, a coldness now; a niece riding her bicycle out front. “There’s just us now,” the poet remarks, “the immediate family.” Immediate, since no longer mediated by a paternal third term, the family also seems trapped in an unhappy immediacy, a static present. Between the father as “a blond boy” and his appearance as “an old man gasping for air” we see nothing, no development, no life but “a breath, a caesura” (20); likewise, in the poem that follows, “Lover of Flowers,” we find references to “every spring” and “every autumn” as though years of seasons were compressed in the year that’s passed. Certainly immediacy does not equal closeness, for the speaker seems determined to mark off borders, to differentiate, particularly between her sister and herself. “In our family, everyone loves flowers,” she begins (21). But “with my sister, it’s different, / it’s an obsession.” When a set of poppies that the sister plants is beaten down by rain, we can glimpse the poet’s unacknowledged self-portrait in her mother’s words:

My mother's tense, upset about my sister: now she'll never know how beautiful they were, pure pink, with no dark spots. That means she's going to feel deprived again.But for my sister, that's the condition of love. She was my father's daughter: the face of love, to her, is the face turning away.(21-22)

The sister, too, was “wounded” it seems, perhaps by the father’s distancing love. Such separation marks “the face of love, to her,” the poet insists, as though this deprivation were not her own case, her condition as well. That acknowledgement would require more identification with the sister, and a stronger ability to idealize, to see the father or the parents’ love without dark spots, than she can summon up so early in the text.

If we’ve had a first sketch of the poet’s response to her sister, the next poem fills out the background, shifts our perspective back two generations. What we find bears little resemblance to the ease of partial differentiation, the reassuring presence of reproduced motherhood that critics of the Freudian scheme discover between women and their daughters.³ Gluck’s sibling mysteries play themselves out in a difficult key. Mother and aunt play cards, “Spite and Malice, the family pastime, the game / my grandmother taught all her daughters” (23). The immediate, all-female world we see at the start and close of this poem, where the mother and aunt “have cards; they have each other” and therefore “don’t need any more companionship”–this world and its games may be “better than solitaire,” but they ring a little hollow nonetheless. “In the end,” in their game, “the one who has nothing wins”; and the next poem, the first address-lyric or echo of “Parados,” picks up and deepens that conclusion. Not Carol Gilligan’s “ethic of care” but bracing competition motivates the women of this world, or at least their representative speaker. “You show respect by fighting,” she observes; that’s how her mother and aunt were raised. And something of that sororial strife has worked its way into the myths of the next generation. “Fulfillment” and “happiness,” the poet confesses, serve only to draw down the anger of the Fates: “sisters, savages–” who “in the end . . . have / no emotion but envy” (“Confession” 25).

Why does the speaker thus overstate the case against these women, evidently downplaying the affections of the scene? Why has she “learned to hide” her dreams, in other words, and what would those dreams contain? In her uncertainty we find a trace of resistance to that “sine-qua- non condition of our individuation” that Kristeva melodramatically calls “matricide” Black Sun 27-8). “Matricide is our vital necessity,” the theorist proclaims, for we must all extricate ourselves from undifferentiated infant bliss.⁴ But for women the violence of this process is harder to focus entirely outward. “Locked up within myself” it turns to “an implosive mood that walls itself in and kills me secretly, very slowly, through permanent bitterness, bouts of sadness” (29). The poet is trapped in this sort of bitterness, unable to blur her own borders, to metaphorize, to reach out in amorous idealizing identification to mother or sister, let alone to the dead hero or imaginary “loving father” she needs Tales 378). This family is indeed hers, but she stands outside it, at once unsympathetic and unable to acknowledge the roots of her pain.

“A Precedent” To “The Untrustworthy Speaker”

The five poems that come before “The Untrustworthy Speaker” hazard, if indirectly, one such identification. We learn of a death before the father’s loss–a sister to the speaker, one who died in infancy–and, more important, we find a new imaginative sympathy with the mother. As the poet details preparations for “the child that died,” a new delicacy of tone and loving accuracy of description breathes life into her voice. “Bureaus of soft clothes. / Little jackets neatly folded. / Each one almost fit in the palm of a hand” (“A Precedent” 26). We saw the mother’s capacity for care unfold in “Widows,” where she slept on the floor to be near her dying husband. But while the focus there was on her inability to get used to his absence after death, here we see her affections in full flower, as yet unthreatened, unhurt. When the hurt does come, when her daughter is lost, we see transformations in both the mother and the poet left behind:

. . . when my sister died, my mother's heart became very cold, very rigid, like a tiny pendant of iron.Then it seemed to me my sister's body was a magnet. I could feel it draw my mother's heart into the earth, so it would grow.("Lost Love" 29)

This poem and “A Precedent” are more tender, more compassionate, more fluent in their sympathetic identification than anything we’ve seen so far. But if the poet can sense her way into her mother’s skin, she equally seems inclined to be the dead sister, to cure the mother’s wound, to offer herself in a risky but attractive sacrifice.

Perhaps we do not press too far to see a crucial early identification with the dead sister as, in effect, a dead “imaginary father”–recalling that the father was defined as such, in part, simply for being what Mama valued other than me. Stillness thus seems a virtue to the poet-child, one learned from the sister who died. As she wanted in “Parados” to be “Not inert: still” (15), in the final poem of this section, “Appearances,” we see her hazard an analysis of that longing, recall her childhood pride in its accomplishment: “It was something I was good at: sitting still, not moving. / I did it to be good, to please my mother, to distract her from the child that died. / I wanted to be child enough” (32). But this is too close for comfort to the stillness of the stillborn, of “the dying” who “spin so rapidly they seem to be still” (“Lullaby” 28) and to the inertia of the women who “can’t get moving” after the father-hero’s death, which itself “wasn’t moving” (18). If those who fall asleep “grow slowly calm,” soothed by a mother’s heartbeat–one thinks of the moon of “Parados,” and of the curative regressions in Whitman’s “The Sleepers”– those who fall apart in death refuse, or fail, to be comforted. The speaker, we sense, would gladly identify with the infant her mother holds, feeds, attempts to keep alive, in order to prove that she’d accept. On her the effort would be efficacious; loved, she’d stay alive.

There is of course more to say about the middle poems in this bundle of five, and I will return to examine the father’s role in them shortly. But I want to focus on “Appearances,” the last of them, especially on its description of the living sisters’ relations to one another and their mother, and its invocation of a new character from outside the family, an artist. For if “forgiveness emerges first as the setting up of a form . . . [and] has the effect of an acting out, a doing, a poiesis,” Black Sun 206), the progress of the book requires this new intercessory term: a figure at once for the poet and for the loving father she lacks.⁵

What, first off, needs to be forgiven? In poems of this section we’ve seen the mother’s love in action: folding baby clothes, holding a child that doesn’t want to be fed, lulling husband and infant to sleep, and into death. (“I can’t say / what she did for my father,” the poet reassures us, and herself; still, “whatever it was, I’m sure it was right” [28].) And yet, when the speaker considers the portraits her parents commissioned, looking with the eyes of an adult, one who’s “been analyzed,” who can “understand our [her and her sister’s] expressions” (31), she sees something more painful and troubling:

My mother tried to love us equally, dressed us in the same dresses; she wanted us perceived as sisters. That's what she wanted from the portraits: you need to see them hanging together, facing one another-- separated, they don't make the same statement. ........................................... She likes to sit there, on the blue couch, looking up at her daughters, at the two that lived. She can't remember how it really was, how anytime she ministered to one child, loved that child, she damaged the other. You could say she's like an artist with a dream, a vision. Without that, she'd have been torn apart.(31-32)

The mother’s ministration to the living, unlike her care for the dying, calls pain to the poet’s mind in a new, post- analytic specificity. As usual, though, we see more than the words acknowledge. The mother’s desire to have her daughters “hanging together,” eyes fixed on one another, counters the potential dispersal by death of two generations. It works at once between the sisters (they won’t be torn away from each other) and in the mother’s heart (I won’t be torn apart by another loss), calling to mind and helping justify the grandmother’s attempt to make mother and aunt a sufficient pair: the attempt we read about in “Widows.”

And yet the poet withdraws from the potential identification I am, like my mother, an artist. She doesn’t reject it, I hasten to add, since we find none of the dismissive force she mustered in “A Novel.” She merely steps back to the solid ground of her painful individuation. She still wants, first off, to be set off from her sister: to be either the loved child or the damaged one. “You had to shut out / one child to see the other,” she recalls, clearly hungering for that specific attention (33). She gets it from the most successful imaginary father so far, the portrait painter, “Monsieur Davanzo.” He, like the poet herself, insists on distinctions and accuracies. He notices the difference between flesh tones, for example, against the identical green cotton dresses the two sisters wear: the sister, who’s been linked with reds and pinks, is “ruddy”; the poet’s “faintly bluish,” recalling the daughter who died. We have seen no play so far in the poem, whether in the language or by children or with parents; but here, “to amuse us, Madame Davanzo hung cherries over our ears,” reminding us that the imaginary loving father, the critical third term the poet lacks, is in fact a “father-mother conglomerate” Tales 40), pictured here, if briefly, as an actual couple. But the poem ends with “the painter” himself marking in his portrait what is at least the child’s interpretation of her mother’s wish that her children always be bound up together. Does she want me to stay with her, with women, forever? Never turn to a sexual Other, fall in love with a man? “Every morning, we went to the convent,” we read of her summer schedule. “Every afternoon, we sat still, having the portraits painted”; and the artist Monsieur (“my lord”) Davanzo understands her expression. “A face already so controlled, so withdrawn, / and too obedient, the clear eyes saying / If you want me to be a nun, I’ll be a nun” (33).

Does the mother really want this? Again, as after “Widows,” we sense an unfair accusation, and again we find a confession: the third of the “Parados” poems, “The Untrustworthy Speaker.”

Don't listen to me; my heart's been broken. I don't see anything objectively. I know myself; I've learned to hear like a psychiatrist. When I speak passionately, that's when I'm least to be trusted.
It's very sad, really: all my life, I've been praised for my intelligence, my powers of language, of insight. In the end, they're wasted--(34)

This poem marks the speaker’s first acknowledgement that she has cut herself off from something, someone; that the analysis she’s brought to bear so far has failed. We note the self-criticism as a flicker of Eros, a latent desire to “see myself, / standing on the front steps, holding my sister’s hand,” even if that means having to call herself to account for love’s sadisms and failures, “the bruises on her arm, where the sleeve ends” (34). This would entail, in part, an observation of her own masochism, of the degree to which the “wound” or loss she mourns is self-inflicted, a condition of her speech. An exculpation of the mother indeed soon follows, set in motion by the “criticism of the hero” (18) suppressed earlier. This combination will bring the book to its pivotal moment of confrontation and crisis.

“A Fable” To “Animals”

This central section of the book begins with its first extended metaphor for the poet’s situation: “A Fable.” “Suppose / you saw your mother / torn between two daughters,” she demands, the daughters identified with those competing self-proclaimed mothers who fought over a single baby before Solomon (36).

What could you do to save her but be willing to destroy yourself--she would know who was the rightful child, the one who couldn't bear to divide the mother.

Setting aside the admission of masochism here–itself a step beyond the mere victimhood of “Appearances”–we find a curious blur of familial roles. The mother plays at once the parts of a “wise king” who judges and a child under threat; the poet too is at once mother (the one who can’t bear to divide) and child. Not her own but the mother’s pain attracts the poet’s attention: an unsettling shift, apparently, as the short lines and shivering enjambments suggest. If indeed “the transfer of meaning” in metaphor “sums up the transference of the subject to the place of the other” Tales91), we can understand the fragility of the poem’s presentation, as it ferries the poet oh-so-nervously across the flood waters, the gulf or “abyss” of individuation.

Who, though, is the other daughter in this scene? The living sister, or the dead? Both sisters have divided their mother’s affections; and if we keep our eyes on the function of each sister, to borrow a term from the sequence itself (see “A Novel” and “The Untrustworthy Speaker”), we note that each acts for the other, in this emotional division, like the “imaginary father” Kristeva describes. As though to reinforce this connection the following poem, “New World,” turns from the sisters’ relations to those of the husband and wife. What role, the poet asks, did that Ur-Other play, and how did I imagine it at the time?

As I saw it, all my mother's life, my father held her down, like lead strapped to her ankles.She was buoyant by nature; she wanted to travel, go to theater, go to museums. What he wanted was to lie on the couch with the Times over his face, so that death, when it came wouldn't seem a significant change.

This life study, our first glimpse of the father in life, not death, treats him with imagistic specificity, as though to flesh out his “nature” in the way obscured at the start of the book. If he still seems the “someone remote” he was named in “Mount Ararat,” doing nothing but preparing to die, his association here with time and a certain style of language, the restrained clarity of “the Times,” is now insisted on through a new flair of metaphor. (So that’swhere the poet learned her style, we note in the margin.)

This subtle change of style marks a quiet change of heart. “I thought my father’s death / would free my mother,” the poet observes; and while “in a sense, it has”– she can travel, go to her museums at last–something valuable’s been lost as well. The mother “isn’t held” anymore; “she’s free . . . / Without relation to earth” (39) –a phrase that echoes the speaker’s own original condition: “out of touch / with the world” (15). It’s not that being earth-bound was so good, but the inverse seems equally unfortunate. For the first time the father seems a figure of curative attraction–like the dead sister’s body in “Lost Love,” he draws, or drew, the mother down to earth. But the speaker seems loathe to articulate this attractive quality, her focus on the mother occluding the father as an object of desire, whether her mother’s or her own. Thus in “Birthday,” the next poem, we find a stand-in for him: an “old admirer” who, even after death, continues to send roses on the mother’s birthday, “his way of saying that the legend of my mother’s beauty / had simply gone underground” (40). A figure for the loving, living father–an alternative to that morbid silence below the Times–he’s both Persephone to the mother’s Demeter and, in his “ministering,” a mother too.⁶ “I thought / the dead could minister to the living,” the poet remembers. “I didn’t realize / this was the anomaly; that for the most part / the dead were like my father.” Hard words, if she means “like my father when alive.” And even if she means like the father after death, a certain harshness comes through the allegation, for if “my mother doesn’t mind, . . . doesn’t need / displays from my father,” surely his daughter suffers as the mother spends her birthday “sitting by a grave,” “showing him she understands, / that she accepts his silence / . . . she doesn’t want him making / signs of affection when he can’t feel” (40-41). “Hates deception”; “can’t feel”–the present indicative tense sweeps together the obvious lack of response from the dead with a vision of the father as there, watching without response or turning his face away. Did he not feel before his death, not live up even then to the “standard of courtesy, of generosity” the old admirer set? One might read the lines that way, written by a daughter who prefers to rest, like her father, undeceived.

We have reached the hinge of the book, “Brown Circle.” Whatever objections we might have had to the speaker’s unforgiving stance toward her mother and sister, to the tone she’s taken toward her father until now, are suddenly voiced as this poem starts with a question from one who’s been silent so far. “My mother wants to know,” it begins, “why, if I hate / family so much, / I went ahead and / had one” (42). Why indeed? Freudian theory no less than the Bible finds the sins of the fathers visited on sons, and daughters here seem no exception. The cutting lineation of her response suggests the speaker’s uneasiness, the way she halts and stammers her way through to an unspoken answer.

I don't answer my mother. What I hated was being a child, having no choice about what people I loved.I don't love my son the way I meant to love him.(42)

How close she comes to simply saying “I don’t love my son”! Or, as we might expect from the end of the first stanza, “I don’t love him / because I must, but because I choose to.” In fact, of course, we find something quite different: a recognition that choice and love are uneasy bedfellows; that while we may choose to have our children we can’t choose who they are or even, often enough, what they do. Their ways are beyond us, have their way with us. How culpable, then, can we find each other and ourselves? If the poet loves like a scientist, unwilling to set down her magnifying glass and leave off her scrutiny “though / the sun burns a brown / circle of grass around / the flower”– and we think of her unyielding observation of the older generation so far–was she herself not similarly burned? Such scrutiny is “more or less the way / my mother loved me,” she admits, and the stanza ends on that line, backing up the recognition: my mother loved me, not just, as in “Appearances,” “one child . . . that child” or “the other.” “I must learn / to forgive my mother,” the poet admonishes herself, as the play of mother-daughter identifications we saw in “A Fable” becomes literal. It’s the only way to forgive herself, “now that I’m helpless / to spare my son” (43).

Ararat revolves around “Brown Circle” in two ways. First, and most obviously, the book now focuses on the poet’s sister and her daughter, the poet and her son, and on the father himself, with the mother largely absent. But behind this lies the more crucial shift from a poetry of hazarded, uneasy identifications, verse searching for its sponsoring imaginary Other, to a poetry of calm, practiced distance, observation, and compassion. “It is by making his words suitable to his commiseration and, in that sense, accurate,” Kristeva explains, “that the subject’s adherence to the forgiving ideal is accomplished and effective forgiveness for others as well as for oneself becomes possible” Black Sun 217). None of this is entirely new to the volume: we saw such accuracies at work in “A Precedent” and at moments elsewhere. But by bringing a new generation into focus the poet lets go of certain earlier obsessions, and clears a path for forgiveness in substance as well as in style. No longer, for example, does she insist on distinctions between herself and her sister. Both have children itching for independence: the sister’s daughter in the first panel of the triptych “Children Coming Home From School,” the poet’s son sulking in her driveway in the second, “accus[ing] me / of his unhappiness.” In the third panel the poet and her niece, both of whom can be said to be “growing up with my sister,” equally learn “to wait, to listen,” to grapple for verbal advantage. And in the poem that stands where we’ve come to expect a version of “Parados,” some confession of the speaker’s untrustworthiness, we find the unsentimental sororial accord of “Animals” instead:

My sister and I reached the same conclusion: the best way to love us was to not spend time with us. ...................
My sister and I never became allies, never turned on our parents. We had other obsessions: for example, we both felt there were too many of us to survive.
We were like animals trying to share a dry pasture. Between us, one tree, barely strong enough to sustain a single life.(47-48)

The poet’s growing ease with metaphor allows her, for the first time in the sequence, to unite the parents in either a phrase (“the” or “our parents”) or a figure (the “one tree”). Where once the sisters tugged at and split up their mother’s love, here they stand off warily from parents who cannot “bring themselves / to inflict pain” on either. (“You should only hurt / something you can give / your whole heart to,” the speaker mordantly observes.) The chosen metaphor of “Animals” would seem to suggest an inevitable competition or natural selection between the two; and we’ve been led to expect something rather like this through the first half of the book. An unspoken pact emerges in its place, however, marking our transition to the fourth group of poems, focused for the first time on connections. Neither girl, each staring the other one down, will move to “touch / one thing that could / feed her sister” (49). What comes between them now, if only it were a little bit stronger, could keep them both alive.

“Saints” to “Snow”

Two paragraphs ago I quoted Kristeva as saying that the forgiver’s commitment to accuracy demonstrates an “adherence to the forgiving ideal.” The nature of that ideal should by now be clear–the Third, the imaginary father–and, in fact, Black Sun names it as such elsewhere. “Whoever is in the realm of forgiveness–who forgives and who accepts forgiveness–is capable of identifying with a loving father, an imaginary father,” Kristeva propounds, “with whom, consequently, he is ready to be reconciled, with a new symbolic law in mind” (207). That new law–a covenant after the flood–will remain unspoken until the penultimate poem of Ararat, but already we can see the reconciliation proceed. At first the imaginary father appears as female, and as a familial ideal. “In our family, there were two saints,” she startles us by writing: “my aunt and my grandmother” (50). Generations flicker, linked by metaphor: of these the grandmother seems to stand in for the speaker’s own mother, “cautious, conservative,” the aunt for the speaker, suffering repeated losses and haunted by jealous Fates familiar from “Confession.” (The mother suffers and loses too, you say? Ah, but these are ideals, desires, imaginings…). The aunt’s marked as a saint by her refusal to “experience / the sea” that steals away her loved ones “as evil. To her, it is what it is: / where it touches land, it must turn to violence” (50). This stoic acceptance, a model for the poet’s own work, prompts her into accepting complementary opposites that must also remain “what they are” in the pair of poems that follow: herself and her sister, her niece and son, as treated in “Yellow Dahlia” and “Cousins.”

In the interest of space I will set these poems aside– suffice it to say that, despite Kristeva’s allegation that art forgives by giving shape “without exegesis, without explanation, without understanding” Black Sun 207), Gluck here demonstrates ample talent at all three. Let me rather turn to the central stanzas of “Paradise” and the final poems of the section, “Child Crying Out” and “Snow,” for here we see the slow introduction of the father as a loving Other in his own right. Once “remote,” a hero in disgrace, he approaches; and the poet admits an identification:

In some ways, my father's close too; we call a stone by his name. ..................... They always said I was like my father, the way he showed contempt for emotion. They're the emotional ones, my sister and my mother.(54-55)

We have, perhaps, suspected this deep congruence all along. The poet’s distance, her sense of deprivation, made her seem her father’s daughter as much as or more than the sister named as such back in “Lover of Flowers.”

But is “contempt” quite the right word here? “Child Crying Out” suggests that something else is at stake, a basic resistance to the claims of emotion to overwhelm the distance between individuals, to offer immediate access to the soul. This poem, an answer to Adrienne Rich’s “Night Pieces: For a Child,” refuses to assume a mother’s fundamental maternal connection with and insight into her child. Rich mourns her son’s slipping away into patriarchical terrors; here, the son has never been close enough to keep:

The night's cold; you've pushed the covers away. As for your thoughts, your dreams--I'll never understand the claim of a mother on a child's soul.

Does she mean the “claim” on his imagination, the way one’s mother slips into dreams as abject “death’s head, sphinx, medusa” (Rich 67)? Or, conversely, the claim to understand (a mother knows)? Though the former sticks in the back of our minds, the latter seems Gluck’s explicit quarrel:

So many times I made that mistake in love, taking some wild sound to be the soul exposing itself-- But not with you, even when I held you constantly. You were born, you were far away.
Whatever those cries meant, they came and went whether I held you or not, whether I was there or not.(56-57)

The son’s sleep, like the father’s face turned away, stands for a certain “condition of love” (22), of accepted alterity, “a basic separation that nonetheless unites” (Kristeva, Tales 90).⁷ It hints that the absence of “signs of affection” on either side of the grave won’t necessarily mean that the loved one, unlike the old admirer, “can’t feel” (41). Did the father, though we’ve never seen it, therefore love? And how would we, or the poet know?

“If [the soul] speaks at all,” “Child Crying Out” ends, “it speaks in dreams.” Fair enough: and in “Snow,” the last poem of this fourth group, we get our first dream-vision (though it’s phrased as a memory) since the moon in “Parados.” Poet and father are on their way to New York, waiting for a train.⁸ “My father liked / to stand like this,” the poet recalls, “to hold me / so he couldn’t see me,” but so that she can stare into the world he sees, “learning / to absorb its emptiness” (58). A father, then, of both connection and withdrawal, he stands implicated in the narcissistic emptiness of the subject split off from maternal plentitude, the disjunction from the earth we’ve watched the poet suffer. (The snow’s not falling but whirling, we notice, borne up against gravity.) Their love, for we edge into calling it that, rests on the same disengaged commonality we saw between mother and son, the sort Frank Bidart calls “the love of / two people staring / / not at each other, but in the same direction” (“To the Dead”). A love, it happens, closer to that shared gaze on the Good that Socrates offers than to Aristophanes’s erotic myth–though here the good stays elusive, out of sight, lost in the empty white-out of the flurries.

“Terminal Resemblance” to “Celestial Music”

The final sequence of Ararat, these five poems hover and turn from portrait to portrait without anxiety, with the sense of at last accomplishing that “promise, project, artifice” Kristeva sees as integral to writing as love, mercy, transformation, forgiveness Black Sun 216-17). We get a last clear look at father and mother, father and daughter, daughters and mother, sisters and children, along with two poems that stand out from the rest: a nod to aesthetic religion in “Lament,” and the turn to religious aesthetics of “Celestial Music.” Rather than treat each poem individually, as I’ve done so far, I will first explore the way these as a group echo and revise the themes and images of the book. “Celestial Music” deserves to be looked at alone, since it stands out from the rest as a deus ex machina, a tribute to love, to the Third, as quite literally “a godsend” Tales 40).

Since the start of the book the father has been linked to time, the Times–or, to be more accurate, the father’s absence has marked time’s failure to pass. In “Terminal Resemblance,” a poem about the poet’s last meeting with her father, we learn “he wasn’t . . . pointing to his watch” as he waited for her, signalling not only that “he wanted to talk,” but also certain relief from the earlier deathly, encompassing stasis. Gluck hints at this return to mutability at the close of the poem as well. “For a change, my father didn’t just stand there,” she writes; “this time, he waved” (60, my emphasis). Even the idea of immediacy is transformed in these last poems, appearing now in the mode of aesthetic appreciation, and not of numb, paratactic sequence:

Your friends the living embrace one another, gossip a little on the sidewalk as the sun sinks, and the evening breeze ruffles the women's shawls--this, this, is the meaning of "a fortunate life": it means to exist in the present.("Lament" 61-6)

Words and phrases culled from earlier poems make these last five seem a final tally, a summing up. In the first section we read about gardens and flowers; here we see a “gardener’s truck” (59). The grandmother-saint escaped suffering; so does the dying father (60). “It frightens” the mother, we read, “when a hand isn’t being used” (60); the poet’s sister wouldn’t let her daughter walk with both hands “totally free” in “Children Coming Home From School,” a poem whose title is given to a second poem, the fourth of this group, where the “children” are again the poet and her sister. The poet’s sadness over losing the mother’s complete, swaddling attention has been visible between the lines from the first. At last it is named outright: “I continued, in pathetic ways, / to covet the stroller. Meaning / all my life” (64). “Amazons” plucks the word “end” from the all-woman scenes of “Widows” and “Confession” and runs it through revelatory changes:

End of summer: the spruces put out a few green shoots. Everything else is gold--that's how you know the end of the growing season. .................................. My sister and I, we're the end of something. ................................... I can see the end: it's the name that's going. When we're done with it, it's finished, it's a dead language. That's how language dies, because it doesn't need to be spoken.My sister and I, we're like amazons, a tribe without a future. I watch the children draw: my son, her daughter.(65)

The father’s name will be lost; the maternal tradition of sufficient, respectfully fighting pairs of daughters, too, will soon die out, written as it was in “soft chalk, the disappearing medium.”

In such recapitulations Ararat comes to terms with its own ending, with the way that writing finishes, so unlike life. Do we see here that “unease over the final, masterful accomplishment” Kristeva sees as returning the writer to the need for forgiveness once again Black Sun 217)? That would perhaps explain the sudden entry of a “friend who still believes in heaven,” one who “literally talks to god” in “Celestial Music.” This poem, which in its sustained long lines and metaphorical resonance stands dramatically apart from the rest of the volume, snaps us back to the grander dimensions of the book’s long quest to imagine a loving father, a Third. For if the love of “primary identification” founds and figures both “Greek Eros–violent, destructive, but also platonically ascending towards the Ideal,” and “the Christian Agape which, emanating from the Other, descends upon me” (“Joyce” 168), why not identify with a father in heaven, that God who is, or so we’re told, Love?⁹

Such a turn seems at first promised by the poet’s praise of her friend, and the effects of her faith. “On earth, she’s unusually competent,” we learn. “Brave, too, able to face unpleasantness” (66). She’s like a mother, an “adult”; in the poet’s dreams she’s a lecturer on love. (“When you love the world,” she admonishes, “you hear celestial music.”) But a turn to on-high would belie, not enrich, the poet we’ve come to know; and, indeed, identification is extended only horizontally, on the human axis of friendship. If she starts by asserting her differences from the friend, as with her sister, similarities follow:

It's this moment we're both trying to explain, the fact that we're at ease with death, with solitude. My friend draws a circle in the dirt.... She's always trying to make something whole, something beautiful, an image capable of life apart from her. We're very quiet. It's peaceful sitting here, not speaking, the composition fixed, the road turning suddenly dark, the air going cool, here and there the rocks shining and glittering-- it's this stillness we both love.(67)

The success of the volume, not simply as a group of poems, but as a progress from loss, depression, the narcissistic wound, through “the narrow pass of identification with flawless ideality, loving fatherhood” Black Sun 216), into the formal aesthetic accomplishment of an ending, can be measured in the believability of these lines. Though different from the rest of the volume they must not seem out of place or make us frown in vexation at the poet’s claim to be “at ease” at last. For them to work we must have been prepared to see a metaphor for the poet’s own structures and symmetries in the friend’s dirt circle, that “composition” that surrounds a torn and dying (read: “wounded”) caterpillar. “The composition / fixed,” she writes; and the heavy stress of an enjambment forces us to pause, to read “fixed” as healed, made “whole” and “beautiful.” Fixed means “still” as well, and in “the stillness we both love” the twinborn but separated longings for stillness and new life of earlier poems are rejoined. Where it once implied a stunned fixity in the present, or a desperate identification with the dead in order to restore a mother’s love, stillness here suggests the reassurance of completion, the satisfactions of order and limit, an artist’s “it is finished” (if not Christ’s). A stillness bound up in the accomplishment of love, she suggests, telling over the word three times in the last two lines. “It’s this stillness that we both love. / The love of form is a love of endings” (67).

Though it brings Ararat to conclusion, “Celestial Music” is not the last poem we read. That place belongs to “First Memory”: a reprise of “Parados,” a piece whose title suggests both that this memory delves as far back as the poet can and that she can now truly remember for the first time. On a first read through the book we come upon “First Memory,” not with a shock (as with “Celestial Music”) but with a shiver at its spare, discursive, chilly, familiar style. The poem is short enough to quote in its entirety:

Long ago, I was wounded. I lived to revenge myself against my father, not for what he was-- for what I was: from the beginning of time, in childhood, I thought that pain meant I was not loved. It meant I loved.(68)

We can at last gloss those critical, open-ended phrases on which the poem ends and folds back on itself. “For what he was”: quiet, affectionate only at a distance, too hard to idealize, to imagine as the object of mother’s desire. “For what I was”: quiet, distant, longing to picture myself once again the sole focus of care, more like my father than I could bear to admit. But why does the poem not end with a perfect reversal, with “It meant I was loved,” which is equally true? Why does the pain mean she was a lover, too?

In part, and on the book’s own terms, this ending includes and implies my suggested alternative. If pain meant I loved, then I loved my family; which means I wasn’t incapable of love, as I thought my father was; which means, since I’m like him, that he wasn’t incapable of love either; which means that he loved mother and me, and so was in pain, was wounded too; which means that under all the relations in the book, painful or strained, we might find love, denied or distorted, as well. And, indeed, if we look beyond Ararat, place it in a broader context, we find a further sanction for this reading. In the final chapter of Tales of Love, Kristeva records her sense of the narcissistic crisis in which we find ourselves. We are, as a chapter title claims, “Extraterrestrials Suffering for Want of Love”: as cut off from the earth as the poet of “Parados,” lacking “the secular variant of the loving father” to ensure our identifications, our ability to “elaborate primary narcissism,” to love and be loved in return (374). (“The unsure narcissist,” we might paraphrase Robert Creeley, “is not good for himself.”¹⁰) “Because today we lack being particular,” she writes, “covered as we are with so much abjection, because the guideposts that insured our ascent toward the good have been proven questionable, we have crises of love. Let’s admit it: lacks of love” (7).

In answer to this crisis Kristeva offers an aesthetic antidote: “the imagination” (381), which can “turn the crisis into a work in progress” (380), with no pretension to finality or ultimate satisfaction. “Let it [the self] remain floating, empty at times, inauthentic, obviously lying,” she proclaims near the end of Tales of Love. “Let it pretend, let the seeming take itself seriously, let sex be as unessential because as important as a mask or a written sign–dazzling outside, nothing inside” (380). But this is James Merrill’s solution, not that of Gluck, who may stun but rarely dazzles. The love elaborated in Ararat weathers the postmodern condition, with its lack of faith in the old codes of romance, less by insisting on the open- endedness of Kristeva’s “work in progress” than by reaching out to affiliate itself with a stern, more potentially moralistic tradition of love-theory: one in which love is defined (against desire) as that which “embraces the other’s limited and imperfect reality, and invites and accepts the binding and defining embrace offered by the other” (McWhirter 6). Such love, which “accepts, in other words, its own finitude” and resigns the Platonic quest for wholeness and reunion in favor of the bittersweetness of “the attainable” (7, 197), accords with Gluck’s undeceived stance, and it sponsors the collection’s final lines. The speaker, after all, has been “wounded” not only by the loss of the mother in her individuation, but by a series of more quotidian disappointments. She wasn’t “child enough,” and no one else was quite mother or father or sister enough either. That such disappointment is the inevitable “break- up” of any idealizing relationship, Freud and Kristeva and popular culture will all testify, since at heart we are all men and women who love too much.

Gluck’s poetic success lies in the way she turns the plot of a Donahue confession or an Oprah Winfrey show into memorable and particular verse, pressing her language to an antipoetic limit that marks, in some sense, her postmodernism as well. “Compared to the media,” as Kristeva explains,

whose function it is to collectivize all systems of signs, even those which are unconscious, writing-as -experience-of-limits individuates. This individuation extends deep within the constituent mechanisms of human experience as an experience of meaning; it extends as far as the very obscure and primary narcissism wherein the subject constitutes itself in order to oppose itself to another.("Postmodernism?" 137-8)

If we want to write love poems, Gluck’s book suggests, we have to start by pressing back into the depths behind our affections–not just to the power dynamics of a particular relationship, the culture it plays itself out in, or of the family romances that provide its local habitation and its names, but to what is at once our most and least private aspect: the way these construct the writing subject itself. Ararat takes us down to rock-bottom; it is a foundational text more than a therapeutic one. “Long ago I was wounded,” the poet’s choral ode begins, and she dares us as readers not to join in. This is not, I suppose, such a bleak rock song. “There is no imagination,” writes Kristeva, “that is not, overtly or secretly, melancholy” Black Sun 6). Yet “if it lives,” as she adds elsewhere, “your psyche is in love” Tales 15).

Notes

1. See Freud, 139; see also chapter four of The Ego and the Id, passim, and the final passages and footnote to Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

2. My thanks to my UCLA colleague Brenda Kwon for pointing out this connection.

3. I think here less of the work of Nancy Chodorow herself than the use of it made in Homans, for example, 1-39 passim.

4. For a dissenting view, at least so far as daughters are concerned, see Homans 11-15. For a persuasive argument that we are always already differentiated, and that mother-child union is a nostalgic fantasy not borne out by studies of child development since the 1980s, see Benjamin 16-21.

5. “The artist takes himself,” Kristeva writes, “not for the maternal phallus but for that ghostly third party to which the mother aspires, for the loving version of the Third, for the preoedipal father.” (“Joyce” 174).

6. I make this maternal connection because the mother in “Appearances” “ministered” to her children, though with unforseen and divisive consequences.

7. Kristeva likewise speaks of “the abyss between the mother and the child” in the lefthand column of the split essay, “Stabat Mater.” “What connection is there between myself, or even more unassumingly between my body and this internal graft and fold, which, once the umbilical cord has been severed, is an inaccessible other? My body and…him. No connection. Nothing to do with it. And this, as early as the first gestures, cries, steps, long before its personality has become my opponent. The child, whether he or she, is irremediably an other” Tales 254-55).

8. Or so I now normalize the scene. On first reading, I saw them walking along the tracks, watching “scraps of white paper / blow over the railroad ties” in a way that calls to mind the opening of Elizabeth Bishop’s “Chemin de Fer.” “Alone on the railroad track / I walked with pounding heart. / The ties were too close together / or maybe too far apart” (Bishop 8).

9. Such a heavenly identification may be implicit in forgiveness, which, Kristeva writes in Black Sun, “assumes a potential identification with that effective and efficient merciful divinity of which the theologian speaks” (216).

10. I misquote Creeley’s “The Immoral Proposition” (Creeley 125).

Works Cited
- Benjamin, Jessica. The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination. New York: Pantheon, 1988.
- Bidart, Frank. In the Western Night: Collected Poems: 1965-1990. New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1990.
- Bishop, Elizabeth. The Complete Poems 1927-1979. New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1983.
- Cramer, Steven. Review of Ararat. Poetry (Nov. 1990): 101-106.
- Creeley, Robert. The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley: 1945-75. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1982.
- Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Essays and Lectures. New York: Library of America, 1983.
- Freud, Sigmund. “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes.” Papers on Metapsychology: the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, Vol. XIV. Ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1953.
- Gluck, Louise. Ararat. New York: Ecco, 1990.
- Homans, Margaret. Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth Century Women’s Writing. U of Chicago P, 1986.
- Kristeva, Julia. Black Sun. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1989.
- —. “Joyce ‘The Gracehoper’ or the Return of Orpheus.” James Joyce: The Augmented Ninth. Ed. Bernard Benstock. New York: Syracuse UP, 1988.
- —. “Postmodernism?” Bucknell Review: Romanticism, Modernism, Postmodernism. Ed. Harry Garvin. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP: 136-141.
- —. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia UP, 1984.
- —. Tales of Love. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1987.
- McWhirter, David. Desire and Love in Henry James: A Study of the Late Novels. Cambridge UP, 1989.
- Mitchell, Stephen. The Book of Job. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1987.
- Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner. Trans. Walter Kaufman. New York: Vintage, 1967.
- Rich, Adrienne. The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New, 1950-84. New York: Norton, 1984.
September 25, 2013
Marxist Pleasure: Jameson and Eagleton
Steven Helmling

Department of English
University of Delaware

As reading matter, contemporary Marxist criticism is pretty heavy going. First and most obviously because it inherits a long, rich and adventurous tradition not only of political and sociological but also of philosophical argument–the breadth of Marx’s own interests insured that: he aimed, and so have all Marxisms after him, to synthesize all sciences, to make Marxism the key to all mythologies, or (in Fredric Jameson’s now-famous phrase) the “untranscendable horizon” of all cultural, political, and social inquiry. (Marxism obliges itself to reckon with, say, deconstruction; whereas deconstruction regards dealing with Marxism as discretionary.) But Marxism takes on other difficulties, other burdens besides the intellectual ones; it carries the torch of a moral tradition as well, of concern, even anguish about the plight of the oppressed. And its burdens are “moral” in another sense, too, the sense that connects less with “morality” than with “morale”; for it is the very rare Marxist text that is without some sort of hortatory subtext–though usually, it is true, expressed polemically (often most fiercely against other Marxists). And here, too, Marx himself is the great original: he asks to be read as a scientist, not a moralist, but we do not readily credit any Marxism that is deaf to the moralist (and ironist) in Marx’s potent rhetoric.

So “doing Marxism” is not easy. To join in the Marxist conversation, even just as a reader, requires an askesis that cannot be casual, an experience of initiation that involves extraordinary “difficulty” of every possible kind: difficult texts, difficult issues, difficult problems, a (very) difficult history, difficult political conditions. Yet the initiation into Marxism is not without its pleasures, too: pleasures, indeed, not punctually marked off from, but rather continuous with, the satisfactions of the adept–and even more conflictedly, pleasures somehow deriving from, even constituted precisely by, the very “difficulties,” both moral and intellectual, that Marxism obliges its initiates to shoulder.

I want in this essay to consider Fredric Jameson and Terry Eagleton, the two leading Marxists writing in English, with an eye to the contrasting ways each negotiates the contradictions of this mix of intellectual pleasure with intellectual-moral difficulty. (A salient topos will be “Left puritanism,” with some sidelights from Roland Barthes.) The eminence of Jameson and Eagleton makes them the obvious choices for such an essay in contrasts. Their substantive differences are as well known as the warmth with which they avow common cause, but in what follows I want to shift the emphasis from their “positions” to the ground where the contrasts between them are the sharpest, namely to their prose styles. That a subculture so devout as the academic about splitting fine ideological hairs nevertheless seems agreed on accepting as indispensable two writers so different–Jameson with his aloof hauteur warmed occasionally by erudite despair, Eagleton with his impetuous, energetic hope–attests that their manifest differences as stylists, and in their stances as writers, make them virtually polar terms, “representative,” between them, of the limits, the possibilities and the predicaments, of the rhetorical or libidinal resources available to Marxist criticism in our historical moment. It should go without saying that my focus on “textual” effects intends no renunciation of more substantively “thetic” interests: rather, I hope to stage the contrasts between these two very different prose styles to see how each writer handles “pleasure” as an issue, a problem, desire, or object of critique–to see how (or whether) what each says about “pleasure” squares with the pleasures (or whatever else we are to name the satisfactions) of their writing.

A convenient place to begin, as it happens, is with Eagleton’s essay, “Fredric Jameson: The Politics of Style” (1982), in which Eagleton avows the “profound pleasure” he experiences reading Jameson. Tactically, consider what a very strange move Eagleton makes in speaking this way. Though I no longer find Jameson as vexing to read as I once did, “pleasure” seems a calculatedly provocative word for whatever it is that keeps me reading him–and lest we miss the point, Eagleton even takes care to remind us that “‘pleasure’ is not the kind of word we are accustomed to encountering in Jameson’s texts” Against the Grain 66). Indeed, not. Quite apart from its notorious difficulty, Jameson’s writing is fastidiously pained, “stoic,” even “tragic,” in its evocation of the ordeals Utopian desire must suffer through what he calls “the nightmare of history as blood guilt.”¹ Most readers sense from the tone and sound of Jameson’s work, long before they get a grip on the complexities of its content, that the best motto it supplies for itself is the famous “History is what hurts” passage, the often quoted peroration to the opening chapter of The Political Unconscious. The passage begins in reflection on the genre of “dialectical” analysis to which Jameson obviously aspires to contribute:

the most powerful realizations of Marxist historiography . . . remain visions of historical Necessity . . . [and of] the inexorable logic involved in the determinate failure of all the revolutions that have taken place in human history . . . [they adopt] the perspective in which the failure or the blockage, the contradictory reversal or functional inversion, of this or that local revolutionary process is grasped as "inevitable," and as the operation of objective limits.(The Political Unconscious 101-102)

As visions go (and “visions” is Jameson’s own word here), this one–the failure of all revolutionary action as “inevitable” after the fact–is about as bleak as any vision (Marxist or otherwise) could possibly be. (In other Marxist writers, Jameson warns, such a vision risks “post-Marxism,” and this is obviously an anxiety close to the quick for Jameson himself.²) This bleak vision bears a patent family resemblance to many other critically powerful pessimisms–Michel Foucault’s “total system,” Paul de Man’s “aporia,” and Harold Bloom’s “Gnosticism,” to name three whose “defeatism” Eagleton has particularly vilified.

Contempt for “defeatism” is a constant in Eagleton’s work, a gesture (symptomatically) much against the grain not only of Marxist “critique” but of culture criticism generally. So in testifying to the “profound pleasure” of reading Jameson, Eagleton is playing a deep game, seeming to praise Jameson but also, with typically British (not to say Marxist British) puritanism, subtly indicting Jameson in terms that echo Eagleton’s repudiation of the “frivolous” counter-culture (and French!) hedonism of Barthes and the Tel Quel group. Eagleton means it as a sign in Jameson’s favor when he specifies that he derives “pleasure” from Jameson’s work, but not “jouissance.”³ Evidently, “pleasure” may be tolerable in contexts of righteous revolutionary effort, but “jouissance” would be going too far. (Insofar as Eagleton’s own pugilistic wit invites us to pleasures that feel distinctly masculine, his aversion to Barthesian “jouissance” might seem almost a residual, unwitting homophobia: the revolutionary band of brothers, apparently, is to enjoy collective pleasures, but not collective ecstasies.)

Perhaps Eagleton’s double-edged praises of the “pleasure” of reading Jameson express the embarrassments of meeting so potent a version of the “defeatist” vision under the Marxist banner. But my point is that Jameson’s peculiar eloquence has been of that ascetic, despairing, facing-the- worst type familiar, and according to some (Leo Bersani and Richard Rorty, as well as Eagleton, and Barthes), over- familiar, in nineteenth- and twentieth-century culture- criticism. It is a rhetoric that cuts across the ideological spectrum: beside Foucault, de Man, and Bloom, whom I have already named, one might place Adorno, one of Jameson’s particular culture-heroes, and T.S. Eliot, one of his particular betes noirs. But what Jameson especially admires in a writer like Adorno, he has said repeatedly, is a “dialectical” quality in the writing: a power to render unflinchingly the awfulness of our present condition, but also to sustain some impulse toward utopian hope.

But this utopian impulse must not offer any solace; to do so would make it liable to a post-Althusserian, Levi-Straussian definition of “ideology”: “an imaginary solution to a real contradiction,” i.e., a kind of “false consciousness”–and the more so in that it here appears as a textual effect, an achievement of style. Yet just this, but (ironically?) as “praise” rather than indictment, is the implication of Eagleton’s judgment that “Style in Jameson . . . both compensates for and adumbrates pleasures historically postponed” Against the Grain 69). Such “compensation,” such “adumbration” of how things will be after the revolution, is for Jameson sheer “ideological” indulgence in “the Imaginary,” and as such a particular pitfall or temptation that Marxist writing must avoid.

On the contrary, what Jameson calls “the dialectic of ideology [the capitalist present] and utopia [the socialist future]” should aggravate, rather than soothe, our discontent with the way we live now.⁴ Jameson is trying for a rhetoric, a tone, that will not be a profanation of its subject matter, an eloquence appropriate to the plight of capitalism’s victims, and to Marxism’s hour on the cross. In a time (ours) of near-total “commodification” or “reification,” this task gets harder and harder, as you can hear in Jameson’s grim joke that Adorno’s question about whether you can write poetry after Auschwitz “has been replaced with that of whether you could bear to read Adorno . . . next to the pool” Late Marxism 248). The point of such a joke is not “pleasure,” but laceration; you might even call it a moral-intellectual masochism.⁵

And this seems a model for Jameson’s effect generally. As a writer, as a stylist, Jameson is committed to a bleak “vision” of near-total desperation, and to praise the effects of his prose, as Eagleton does, in terms of “profound pleasure” seems a shrewdly pointed missing of the point. True, Jameson himself earlier commended the “purely formal pleasures” of Adorno’s prose, but Jameson’s language sounds sober–even “purely formal”?–whereas Eagleton’s praise of the “intense libidinal charge” of Jameson’s prose sounds like transport, not to say (the word Eagleton specifically rules out) jouissance.⁶ And Eagleton’s “defense” (or mock-defense?) of Jameson’s style is couched not only in terms of pleasure, but of Jameson’s own pleasure: “weighed down” as he is with the “grave burdens” and “historical responsibilities” he has assumed, writes Eagleton,

[Jameson] must be allowed a little for himself, and that precisely, is style. Style in Jameson is the excess or self-delight which escapes even his own most strenuously analytical habits. . . . (Against the Grain 66)

I lack the space here to rehearse Jameson’s aversion to all discussion of literary, cultural, social, political, or even psychological issues in terms of “self”; any reader of Jameson will have noticed that after his 1961 book on Sartre, hostility to the category of “the subject” is the most consistent of his presuppositions. So Eagleton’s reinscription of “pleasure” here in terms of a stylistic self-consciousness, and a “self-delight” that is Jameson’s due as a sort of allowance or indulgence (like Lenin’s penchant for Beethoven, or Freud’s cigars) compounds Eagleton’s sly “mis-taking” of Jameson’s point.⁷ Eagleton is raising issues as ancient as Aristotle on tragedy: how do we derive pleasure (if it is pleasure) from works that visit unpleasure upon us? Eagleton seems “materialist” in the British tradition of Hobbes and Bentham rather than Marx when he unmasks the “pleasure” of reading Jameson in this way.

Eagleton’s remarks originally appeared in a 1982 issue of Diacritics devoted to Jameson. It was in the following year (1983) that Jameson published an essay that not only mentioned the word “pleasure,” but took it as its title, “Pleasure: A Political Issue.” I do not argue that Eagleton’s remarks prompted Jameson’s essay, but reading it “as if” it did makes its centerpiece, Jameson’s elaboration of Barthes’s plaisir–jouissance distinction, seem a kind of defense against, correction of, or better, a dialectical out-leaping of, Eagleton’s implied strictures, as well as a tacit program or apologia for Jameson’s own writing as far as its literary “effects” are concerned.

“Pleasure: A Political Issue” argues against what Jameson calls “Left puritanism” of just the sort that I have identified with Eagleton IT2 66-7); and its vehicle is a reconsideration of Barthes, a much more positive one than Jameson had offered, for example, in “The Ideology of the Text” (1976). The treatment of Barthes is, as usual in Jameson, quite unstable; he passes over, for example, Barthes’s wobble over the relation of “jouissance” to “significance” (“bliss” as liberation from the tyranny of “meaning,” versus “bliss” as restoration of a “meaning” utopia); and one of the most simply pleasurable parts of the essay, the opening jeremiad against the commodification of “pleasure” in our mass culture, ascribes this theme to The Pleasure of the Text, where it nowhere appears. (Jameson is conflating plaisir/jouissance with S/Z‘s lisible/scriptible.)⁸ Eagleton took care to absolve Jameson of any taint of Barthes’s “perversity”; but Jameson mounts a defense of the Barthesian “perverse” that resonates with his homage to Lacan.⁹ And where Eagleton reviles Barthesian jouissance as a flight from politics into a cerebral-sensual wet dream, Jameson avers that

the immense merit of Barthes's essay The Pleasure of the Text] is to restore a certain politically symbolic value to the experience of jouissance, making it impossible to read the latter except as a response to a political and historical dilemma. . . . (IT2 69)

“Impossible”? As usual when Jameson offers a judgment for or against a writer’s politics, this seems an eye-of- the-beholder situation, Jameson’s construction of a “political” Barthes attesting Jameson’s ingenuity more than Barthes’s politics; but I want to pass to the next, most interesting phase of Jameson’s argument, in which Jameson reads Barthes’s binary of “pleasure” and “jouissance” as a contemporary avatar of Edmund Burke’s “beautiful” and “sublime.” It seems a master stroke, until you reread Barthes. Jameson invokes Barthes’s epigraph from Hobbes about “fear,” and quotes Barthes quoting Hobbes in the section of The Pleasure of the Text called “Fear.” My own reading of Barthes is that by “fear” he means something like “shame”:

Proximity (identity?) of bliss and fear. What is repugnant in such nearness is obviously not the notion that fear is a disagreeable feeling--a banal notion-- but that it is not a very worthy feeling. . . .(Barthes's emphasis; Pleasure of the Text 48)

This unworthiness is a particular in which “fear” resembles “pleasure”; only two pages earlier Barthes protests the “political alienation” enforced by

the foreclosure of pleasure (and even more of bliss) in a society ridden by two moralities: the prevailing one, of platitude; the minority one, of rigor (political and/or scientific). As if the notion of pleasure no longer pleases anyone. Our society appears to be both staid and violent: in any event: frigid.¹⁰

But Jameson tilts Barthes’s invocation of “fear” away from the disquiets of prudery and the miseries of a closeted Eros in a very different direction: towards a Burkean sublime of terror, an effect that “threatens, diminishes, rebukes individual human life” IT2 72). Jameson initially treats this as an effect merely aesthetic, and therefore “ideological,” a mystification (Burke, he notes, makes the end-term of the sublime God Himself), and he jeers the hunger for such an effect–“choose what crushes you!” IT2 72)–but the valence changes when he goes on to posit an end-term of his own, namely that “unfigurable and unimaginable thing, the multinational apparatus” of late capitalism itself. Jameson alludes to the work of “the capital-logicians,” who invert Hegel’s providential world-historical metanarrative so that “what Hegel called ‘Absolute Spirit’ was simply to be read as the transpersonal, unifying, supreme force of emergent Capitalism itself”; it is “beyond any question,” he continues, that some such apprehension attaches to “the Barthesian sublime” IT2 72-73). Granted Barthes’s good-leftish politics, an ecriture(“sublime” or not) that “threatens, diminishes, rebukes individual human life” is not only very un-Barthes-like, but actually valorizes Barthes in terms of that very “Left puritanism” Jameson affects to defend Barthes against.

Jameson has remade Barthes’s jouissance, in short, in the image of his own “sublime,” a passion of “fear” prompted by “History,” by “what hurts”: it is not Barthes who has chosen what crushes him; Barthes is willing to confess (or boast) that at least parts of him are not crushed; it is Jameson who insists on being crushed, by a “sublime” villain, late capitalism. The measure of that “crush” is of course the effect of the prose in which Jameson projects his “vision of Necessity” and its inverted Hegelian-Marxist metanarrative in which “the subject of History” proves to be not the proletariat but capitalism. “Pleasure: A Political Issue” invites a redescription of what Eagleton named the “pleasure” of Jameson’s prose as, on the contrary, a type of “the sublime.”

“The sublime” is a theme that has much preoccupied Jameson in the ’80s, a decade in which, it seems to me, his prose has undergone a change. It is as allusive and inward as ever, but its emotional charge is much larger and more accessible than before. Eagleton in 1982 chided Jameson’s “regular, curiously unimpassioned style” Against the Grain 74), and here his judgment is avowedly adverse: he is calling in fact for a more “impassioned” Jameson. But the formula of 1982 no longer fits the Jameson of 1992, as even a cursory reading of, for example, the short meditations on diverse topics gathered as the “Conclusion” to Postmodernism will show. Moreover, “the sublime” is a frequent theme in this writing, and Jameson unfailingly characterizes it (as in the passage quoted above) in terms of unrepresentability, unfigurability, unsymbolizability. To evoke the nightmare of history as beyond the intellect’s grasp is to present a vision of “fear.” But another frequent theme in Jameson is the ambition to write a “dialectical prose,” like Adorno’s, that resists or escapes what Jameson calls “thematization.” Jameson nowhere speaks of this condition “beyond thematization” as a “jouissance,” but insofar as it, too, involves a transit beyond a linguistic-semantic entrapment, this ambition of Jameson’s rewrites the fear of the sublime as a kind of desire, and thus projects the terror of the sublime as a kind of utopia.

I want to mention one more portent in the later Jameson’s evocation of “the sublime”: if “the sublime” is the unfigurable, it must necessarily defeat any project of interpretation. From long before his 1971 essay “Metacommentary,” through The Political Unconscious (1981), with its programmatic opening chapter, “On Interpretation,” Jameson presented his effort as a hermeneutic project, opposed to that of “anti-hermeneuts” from Susan Sontag to Foucault, Barthes and Derrida. In his work since then, “postmodernism” itself figures as the unfigurable, insofar as it is (to use a paleoMarxist shorthand whose terms Jameson disapproves) the “superstructural” concomitant of changes in the “base” wrought by a “late” or (in Ernest Mandel’s terms) “third-stage” capitalism whose modes of production have undergone a decisive world-historical alteration since, roughly, the ’60s. Hence Jameson’s more recent rhetoric in which, ominously, the center does not hold: as if, to use the terms of the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, our impotence to “change” the world must be expressed as an impotence also to “understand” it, in accordance with (“Left puritanism” indeed) the “vision of Necessity” in which the “failure” of revolution appears as “inevitable after the fact”–and must further entail the “vision” of the “inevitable failure” of “dialectical historiography” itself, along with any hermeneutic labor tributary to it. Hence the agitation of Jameson’s recent prose, particularly the later pieces in Postmodernism, in which “the sublime” is not only a prominent theme, but also a frequent effect.¹¹

I have suggested that “Pleasure: A Political Issue” be read “as if” it responds directly to Eagleton’s ambiguous praise of the “pleasure” of reading Jameson, “as if” it aims to propose another ethos, a literary “effect” (“the sublime”) more creditable than “pleasure” for culture-criticism generally, and for Jameson’s own work in particular. I want now to turn to Eagleton’s writing, which, beyond ideological affinities, seems diametrically opposed to Jameson’s rhetorically, in its effects as writing. Where Jameson enlarges every problem, problematizes every solution, insists on “inevitable failure,” and proposes both for his prose and for his readers an askesis of facing the worst (what Geoffrey Galt Harpham has called “the ascetic imperative”), Eagleton writes a prose full of jokes and irreverences, Bronx cheers and razzberries, polemical piss and ideological vinegar, every clause lighting a ladyfinger of wit, almost as if under the compulsion of a kind of high-theory Tourette’s syndrome. It is a style with affinities to “counter-culture” journalism, as if James Wolcott had gone to graduate school instead of to The Village Voice. With obvious and naughty relish, Eagleton transgresses the decorums of academic prose, setting (for example) a clever bit of baby-talk on Derrida’s name (labelled “Oedipal Fragment”) as epigraph to a chapter on “Marxism and Deconstruction,” or concluding a book of essays with a doggerel busker-ballad in the broadside style (“Chaucer was a class traitor,/ Shakespeare hated the mob,” etc., to be sung to the tune of “Land of Hope and Glory”), or launching his essay on Jameson’s style with a parody of Jameson, or indulging a parody of Empson in his essay on Empson, “The Critic as Clown,” or sending up everything academic-critical in a parody of the academic handbook manner in “The Revolt of the Reader.” (Equally un- or anti-academic, but in the other direction, is the poem at the end of Eagleton’s book on Benjamin; compare the poem dedicating Criticism and Ideology [1976] to his father.¹²)

As for the pained, mournful, obligatory pessimism of “the ascetic imperative,” Eagleton consistently jeers it as a kind of false consciousness. Here, for example, he is setting the stage for a recuperation of Walter Benjamin (whose “melancholy” he readily concedes) under the sign of “carnival”; and with characteristic brass, he makes the very implausibility of such a move his opening gambit:

the suffering, Saturnine aspects of Benjamin, the wreckage of ironic debacles and disasters that was his life, have been seized upon with suspicious alacrity by those commentators anxious to detach him from the vulgar cheerfulness of social hope. Since political pessimism is a sign of spiritual maturity . . . Benjamin offers a consolingly familiar image to disinherited intellectuals everywhere, downcast as they are by the cultural dreariness of a bourgeoisie whose property rights they would doubtless defend to the death.(Walter Benjamin 143)

Two pages later, enter Bakhtin, and the theme of “carnival,” which the prose not only describes but enacts:

In a riot of semiosis, carnival unhinges all transcendental signifiers and submits them to ridicule and relativism . . . power structures are estranged through grotesque parody, 'necessity' thrown into satirical question and objects displaced or negated into their opposites. A ceaseless practice of travesty and inversion (nose/phallus, face/buttocks, sacred/profane) rampages throughout social life, deconstructing images, misreading texts and collapsing binary oppositions into a mounting groundswell of ambiguity into which all discourse finally stutters and slides. Birth and death, high and low, destruction and renewal are sent packing with their tails in each other's mouths . . . A vulgar, shameless, materialism of the body--belly, buttocks, anus, genitals--rides rampant over ruling-class civilities; and the return of discourse to this sensuous root is nowhere more evident than in laughter itself, an enunciation that springs straight from the body's libidinal depths.(Walter Benjamin 145, 150)

These passages are from the chapter of Walter Benjamin called “Carnival and Comedy: Bakhtin and Brecht,” and I want to consider this essay at length here: it provides the program projected in the book’s subtitle (“Towards a Revolutionary Criticism”), and the place of “pleasure” in this program is large and important–both as an aim proposed by the argument and, more immediately, as an effect of the writing. The energy of these passages is not the only kind of energy to be found in Eagleton–space forbids sampling the rabble-rousing wisecracks, the downright, matey metaphors, the sheer gusto for combat and polemical hurly-burly, the insouciantly highbrow laying about amid Heidegger, Althusser, Hegel, or whomever. But the fluency of Eagleton’s rant makes a sharp contrast with Jameson: while Jameson’s notoriously “difficult” prose enacts the difficult (indeed impossible) position of Marxism today, the sheer brio of Eagleton’s prose in all its guises, its “riot of semiosis,” seems to address a political situation whose solution ought to be as simple as getting everyone to admit what they already know, if only by springing jokes so cunningly as to enable us to catch them laughing despite themselves. “A vulgar, shameless materialism of the body– belly, buttocks, anus, genitals–rides rampant over ruling-class civilities”: is there a straight face to be seen? The transgressions seem a test to see who will laugh and who will scowl–good fun, and pointed, of course, at the latter.

Surely this is Eagleton’s dominant effect: it is why graduate students idolize him, and part of why he is recommended for anyone wanting an introduction to “theory.” He can, quite simply, be fun to read, and in that regard, more than any other contemporary highbrow Marxist, he can remind you of some passages in Marx himself. You can, indeed, almost imagine a coal miner or a factory worker reading him, as, in labor movement myth, some of them used to read Marx. I highlight this effect of Eagleton’s prose because it is an effect of pleasure. Even Eagleton’s darker notes, the moments of righteous anger, generally assume or imply (indeed, they aspire to create) a political situation in which righteous anger can readily find its proper effectivity–a situation, to put it another way, in which righteous political anger is felt as a pleasure in its own right. Eagleton’s prose means to yield such pleasure as an effect, as well as proposing it as a theme or program.

Over the course of Eagleton’s career, indeed, the effect of pleasure is far more consistent than the theme; about the theme, Eagleton has often, especially when younger, expressed doubts–as in the caveat above about Jameson, for example: “pleasure,” yes; “jouissance,” no. Jouissance is a Barthesian word, and although Eagleton does on occasion resort to it as a positive term, his reservations about Barthes remain everywhere in force. Pace Jameson, Eagleton regards Barthes’s plaisir and jouissance as privatistic, apolitical, and corrupted with the (to Eagleton) irredeemably contemptible bourgeois pathology of guilt-as-added-thrill; Barthesian pleasure is “guilty pleasure,” enacted behind closed doors in controlled environments, whereas Eagleton’s rabble-rousing implies gleeful sacrilege in public places, and not with guilt, but with whoops of righteous laughter.

“Carnival and Comedy” proposes such effects, such styles of revolutionary laughter and humor, not only in its practice (in the style of its prose), but also as a program for a “Marxist theory of comedy” Walter Benjamin, 159), which Eagleton sketches out, with Brecht’s help, as properly answering to something like the movement of history itself. For Brecht, the Marxist “dialectic of history” is “comic in principle”: “a source”–quoting Brecht now–“of enjoyment” heightening “both our capacity for life and our pleasure in it.”¹³ Hence, explains Eagleton, the redemptive move from pessimism to “the vulgar cheerfulness of social hope”: “What for Walter Benjamin is potentially tragic . . . is for Brecht the stuff of comedy.” But what of history’s horrors? Eagleton seemingly bids defiance to all obligatory handwringing on that score: “Hitler as housepainter yesterday and Chancellor today is thus a sign of the comic, because that resistible rise foreshadows the unstable process whereby he may be dead in a bunker tomorrow” Walter Benjamin 161). (Note the verb tenses, and especially the “may” in that last clause: even in this “comic” moment, Eagleton is conjuring with the prospect of future Hitlers, warning that we must not be complacent because the last one was vanquished.)

But against Auschwitz, a paragraph later, Eagleton knows that his comic bravura will not stand, and he acknowledges that there is “always something that escapes comic emplotment . . . that is non-dialectizable” Walter Benjamin 162). This last nonce-word seems a little too impromptu; it would be a mistake to hold Eagleton to all its implications against “dialectic” itself. It is better taken as a symptom of how Eagleton’s improvisational afflatus can tread Marxist toes as readily as bourgeois ones. But Eagleton means the word to acknowledge that the “comic” critique he projects here has its limit, comes up against things in history that can not be “emplotted” in a “comic” mode. If “comedy” can mean Dante, or the Easter Passion, it may seem that Eagleton has confused the “comic” with the “funny”; immemorially august Western conceptions of “the comic” have claimed to encompass brutality, suffering, injustice. Perhaps Eagleton regards these as in bad taste, or perhaps he wants to avoid the assimilation once again of Marxism to religion.

However that may be, what happens next in “Carnival and Comedy” provides a far more surprising tack away from revolutionary laughter toward something like the “melancholy” the essay began by protesting. And it does so, more remarkably still, by way of a reading of a passage from The Eighteenth Brumaire, perhaps the first among Marx’s texts one might have cited as exhibiting just the sort of “carnivalesque” angers and “comic” pleasures (ridicule and mockery) Eagleton had seemed to project. But Jeffrey Mehlman reads the passage this way, and it is as a refutation of Mehlman’s reading that Eagleton stages his own Revolution and Repetition). What apparently prompts Eagleton’s ire is Mehlman’s reference to the “anarchism” of Marx’s prose, which Eagleton finds complicit with “those ruling ideologies that have an interest in abolishing dialectics and rewriting Marxism as textual productivity” Walter Benjamin 162). Mehlman argues that Marx’s rhetorical excesses overflow his supposed thesis; Eagleton scorns such a notion, but goes on to make an argument not much different.

Eagleton’s fulcrum is the first-time-as-tragedy- second-time-as-farce motif, for Marx specifies “Caussidiere for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre . . . the Nephew for the Uncle,” quite as if the Revolution’s giants were first-timers, and did not themselves dress up in Roman togas (conveniently requiring little restyling when the signified changed from “Republic” to “Empire”). Yet precisely this revolutionary repetition–both heroic and farcical– quickly becomes Marx’s main theme. Eagleton interrogates the resulting “semiotic disturbance” (inconsistent metaphors, etc.) over several pages of “close reading,” much too lengthily to quote here; but its surprising premise is that “Marx’s text is symptomatically incoherent” Walter Benjamin 163). But where Mehlman found this carnivalesque, and thus a strength and an interest, Eagleton, avowedly promoting “carnival and comedy,” is pained at Marx’s “unwitting” loss of control over his language, and finds himself talking back to Marx, correcting him, unmixing his metaphors for him. He recovers himself at last by the threadbare critical move of transferring the “symptomatic incoherence” from Marx to his object (bourgeois revolution), thus at the final bell transforming what had been Marx’s unwitting “symptom” into his masterful critical “negation.” But the passage ends weakly, and the essay moves to a coda lamenting Western Marxism’s loss of Marx’s comic strength (as if forgetting Brecht, Eagleton’s initial sponsor). There is irony here, insofar as Eagleton has just (by imposing a monologic of his own on Marx’s figurally dialogic text) sapped the very strength he now professes to mourn; and there is pathos in this wistful statement of irrecoverable loss, since recovering a comic possibility for Marxist critique had been, just a few pages earlier, Eagleton’s boldly stated ambition. The essay ends this way:

Benjamin, like Gramsci, admired the slogan "Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will," and in what Brecht called "the new ice age" of fascism one can see its point. But Marxism holds out other strategic slogans too. Having taken the point of the first, it might then be possible to say, without voluntarist or Kautskyist triumphalism: "Given the strength of the masses, how can we be defeated?"(Walter Benjamin 172)

Tentative (“it might then be possible to say”), and with the taunts of the shibboleth-meisters (“Voluntarist!” “Kautskyist!”) rising in his inner ear, Eagleton’s final flourish cannot, for once, deliver the pleasurable Eagletonian “triumphalism” that is his usual stock in trade. The final “slogan,” indeed, ending on a question mark, sounds more like a real question than a rhetorical one. Here the “optimism of the will” is too willful to convince, the “pessimism of the intellect” too much more than merely intellectual not to. For once, “pessimism of the intellect” really seems to win the agon in the arena of Eagleton’s prose.

So a guerilla foray into a “Marxist theory of comedy,” driven by “carnival” energies, loses momentum at the name of the eponymous master. This failure tempts the sort of lit-crit “psychoanalysis” indicated when, say, the word “balls” sends Stephen Dedalus’s chastely passionate villanelle off the rails: a gallant defense of Marx turns into a subtle assault on Marx–“anxiety of influence”?–and suddenly all Eagleton’s fight (and fun) have gone out of him. But of course we had better push in the direction of that transindividual “libidinal apparatus” that assigns the “objective limits” (Jameson’s phrase) determining such failures–and in fact to “allegorize” the trajectory of Eagleton’s essay as enacting the fate of pleasure in our present “conjuncture” is to assimilate Eagleton to Jameson. Jameson, as we have seen, makes a “vision” of “necessary failure” an imperative for Marxist criticism, and Eagleton, despite his bravely avowed aim of rebutting all such “pessimism” here ends by bowing to it. Jameson, inscribing a failure imperative, compels from it his tortured, ambivalent, “difficult” success; Eagleton, in brash defiance of all pessimisms and confident of Marxism’s inevitable, eventual success, here “enacts” the Jamesonian “vision” of “necessary failure” the more movingly for all his “optimism of the will” against it. This may sound like scoring points against both of them, especially against Eagleton–but if pressed to admit that Eagleton’s failure, at least, does seem a “symptom” rather than a “negation,” I would want to add that both writers, by putting their expository “mastery” at risk, challenge the whole ethos of “critique” that gives the “symptom”/”negation” binary its significance. The ensuing gain is that we can see how two writers so different, enacting differing consequences of the same “contradiction,” must probe and come up against different reaches of the same “objective limits.”

As for the question how to name the complex satisfaction of reading such writers as Eagleton and Jameson, the very difficulty of calling it “pleasure” raises problems whose force is worth looking into in its own right. What Jameson’s discomfort with “pleasure,” his need to sublimate it into “the sublime,” tells us about the fate of pleasure in our historical moment converges with Eagleton’s seemingly opposed embrace of pleasure (with, nevertheless, his reservations about “bliss” on the one hand and the more obscurely motivated “failure” enacted at the close of “Carnival and Comedy” on the other).

Which returns us to the question of “Left puritanism.” Both Eagleton and Jameson seem shadowed by the “minority (political) rigor” whose affinities with the more majoritarian moralisms we saw Barthes uncovering. Each seems to find some sorts of enjoyment (however they differ on which ones) tainted by (Barthes again) “unworthy [bourgeois] feelings.” Neither, of course, wants to be tarred as a “Left puritan”; Jameson’s embrace of Barthes (and Lacan) bespeaks his desire to escape that label, and Bakhtin serves as a similar alibi for Eagleton. As I have argued above, though, Jameson’s construction of Barthes seems motivated by a very un-Barthes-like, and very “Left puritan,” distrust of “plaisir,” and his reinscription of “jouissance” into “the sublime” sublimates it into something very far from enjoyment (in anything other than, say, the Zizekian sense).¹⁴ As for Eagleton’s appropriation of Bakhtin, it is to be read in opposition to, not as a version of, Barthesian “jouissance.” It constructs “carnival” as social, and thus an affair less of Eros than of its collective sublimate, Agape. Sex, in Eagleton’s “carnival,” is comically deflationary–“A ceaseless practice of travesty and inversion (nose/phallus, face/buttocks)” Walter Benjamin 145)–rather than a unique, privileged, grand (or grandiose) access to the transport and exaltation of “the sublime.”

Barthes, I suspect, would see in both of these writers more than a few symptoms of that “frigidity” he protests, “As if the notion of pleasure no longer pleases anyone” Pleasure of the Text 46-7). Barthes writes as one for whom the “promesse de bonheur” that Marxists so frequently denounce as “ideological” has already been in some measure cashed; his superego has apparently fought free of that “categorical imperative” that would have him deny his own pleasure in the name of the possibly counter-revolutionary effects of corrupt ideas of “pleasure” on others. But insofar as the resistance to “pleasure” involves the worry of “false consciousness,” the fear of being falsely consoled by “an imaginary solution to a real contradiction,” it will doubtless remain a potent source of moral trouble for Marxists and others who would direct the energies of “critique” to the tasks of making a more just society. The example, though, of Eagleton’s “optimism of the will” (and, most of the time, of his optimism of the intellect, too) prompts me at least to the pleasurable speculation whether “false consciousness” might not equally involve the temptation of responding to real contradictions with imaginary aggravations.

Notes

1. “Stoic” and “tragic” are terms of praise in Jameson’s essay “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan” (1978), in The Ideologies of Theory, Volume 1 (hereinafter IT1), 98, 112; and it is manifest that part of Lacan’s fascination for Jameson is Lacan’s achievement of an ethos at once (“dialectically”) Hegelian and pessimistic, and to that extent a model for Jameson’s own. For “the nightmare of history as blood guilt,” see “Architecture and the Critique of Ideology” (1985), in The Ideologies of Theory, Volume 2 (hereinafter IT2), 43, and “Pleasure: A Political Issue” (1983), ibid, 68.

2. See, for example, Jameson’s account of the Italian architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri in “Architecture and the Critique of Ideology” (1985), in IT2, 35-60; the caution about “post-Marxism” is on 38. See also remarks on Tafuri in Postmodernism, 61. Jameson scorns any suggestion of his own putative “post-Marxism” in the opening pages of the “Conclusion” to Postmodernism.

3. Against the Grain, 68. Eagleton similarly praises Jameson in “The Idealism of American Criticism,” ibid, 49-64.

4. “The Dialectic of Ideology and Utopia” is the title of the last chapter of The Political Unconscious (281-99), but the motif recurs throughout Jameson’s work, from the chapters on Marcuse (83-115) and Ernst Bloch (116-59) in Marxism and Form to the section of the “Conclusion” of Postmodernism called “The Anxiety of Utopia” (331-40).

5. Cf. Jameson’s most unequivocal praise for Paul de Man: that no one has been more “self-punishing” in pursuit of a moral-intellectual askesis Postmodernism 239).

6. Eagleton quotes Jameson on Adorno (from Marxism and Form xiii) in “The Politics of Style” Against the Grain 66); on the same page he quotes himself, on Jameson’s “intense libidinal charge,” from “The Idealism of American Criticism” Against the Grain 57).

7. Compare this move of Eagleton’s with Jameson’s judgment that de Man’s project, despite its avowed ambition to deconstruct “the subject,” is “fatally menaced at every point by a resurgence of some notion of self-consciousness” Postmodernism 245, cf. 258-9).

8. “Commodification” is a frequent topos in both Eagleton and Jameson, as well as in many other Marxist (and not-so-Marxist) writers. (Eagleton even images Jameson’s encyclopedic range of reference as a shopping cart wheeling through “some great California supermarket of the mind” collecting Hegel, Deleuze, Croce, et al., like so many designer-products Against the Grain 70].) Indeed, anxiety about the commodification of highbrow “theory” like his own–Barthes, Lukacs, Macherey, and whoever else as status-acquisitions in some flash-card degradation of intellectual life–frequently appear in Jameson himself, and in just such consumerist terms–as, for example, when he deplores hearing figures like Althusser, Gramsci, et al. turned into “brand-names for autonomous philosophical systems” (“Interview” 78).

9. For Eagleton’s exempting Jameson from Barthesian “perversity,” see Against the Grain, 66; for Jameson on Barthes and Lacan, compare “Pleasure: A Political Issue” IT2 69) with the closing paragraph of “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan” IT1 115).

10. Pleasure of the Text, 46-7. One of Jameson’s more dazzling asides is the linkage of Barthes with Lionel Trilling’s Sincerity and Authenticity on the grounds that both associate what they despise with the left–student radicals for Trilling, “Left puritanism,” as in the quoted passage, for Barthes IT2 65).

11. This hermeneutic despair, surprisingly, lightens in work Jameson has published since Postmodernism. See the (previously unpublished, and presumably recent) essay, “The Existence of Italy,” in Signatures of the Visible, 155-248, where hermeneutic satisfactions again compensate for the reifications accounted for; and The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System, in which third world cinema’s reinvention of narrative and realism and its sense of “totality as conspiracy” offer a prospect of the world system once again rendered intelligible to the terms of a politically committed (mass) art form. See my review of these two books in Kritikon Litterarum (forthcoming).

12. “Oedipal Fragment,” Walter Benjamin, Or, Towards a Revolutionary Criticism, 131; “The Ballad of English Literature,” Against the Grain, 185; the parody of Jameson, ibid, 65; of Empson, ibid, 151; “The Revolt of the Reader, ibid, 181-4. For the homage to Benjamin, see Walter Benjamin, 185. This is also the place to mention Eagleton’s play, Brecht and Company (1979) and his novel, Saints and Scholars (1987).

13. Brecht on Theatre, 277; qtd. in Walter Benjamin, 160.

14. I am thinking, of course, of Slavoj Zizek’s Enjoy Your Symptom: Jacques Lacan In Hollywood and Out, but readers of Zizek know that they will find this and Zizek’s other central themes rehearsed in virtually any of his books.

Works Cited
- Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. 1973. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975.
- Eagleton, Terry. Against the Grain: Selected Essays. New York and London: Verso, 1986.
- Eagleton, Terry. Walter Benjamin, Or, Towards a Revolutionary Criticism. New York and London: Verso, 1981.
- Jameson, Fredric. The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System. Indiana UP/British Film Institute: Verso, 1992.
- —. The Ideologies of Theory, Volume 1: Situations of Theory. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988.
- —. The Ideologies of Theory, Volume 2: The Syntax of History. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988.
- —. “Interview.” Diacritics 12.3 (Fall 1982): 72-91.
- —. Late Marxism, Or, Adorno: The Persistence of the Dialectic. New York and London: Verso, 1990.
- —. Marxism and Form. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1971.
- —. The Political Unconscious. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1981.
- —. Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991.
- —. Signatures of the Visible. Routledge: New York and London, 1992.
- Mehlman, Jeffrey. Revolution and Repetition. Berkeley: U of California P, 1977.
- Zizek, Slavoj. Enjoy Your Symptom: Jacques Lacan In Hollywood and Out. New York and London: Routledge, 1992.
September 25, 2013
The Excremental Sublime: The Postmodern Literature of Blockage and Release
Roberto Maria Dainotto

Dept. of Comparative Literature
New York University
DAINOTTR@acfcluster.nyu.edu

Once a famous Hellenic philosopher, [Aesop’s] master in the dark days of his enslaved youth, had asked him why it was, when we shat, we so often turned around to examine our own turds, and he’d told that great sage the story of the king’s loose-living son who one day, purging his belly, passed his own wits, inducing a like fear in all men since. “But you don’t have to worry, sire,” he added, “you’ve no wit to shit.” Well, cost him a beating, but it was worth it, even if it was all a lie. For the real reason we look back of course is to gaze for a moment in awe and wonder at what we’ve made–it’s the closest we ever come to being at one with the gods.

Now what he reads in this analecta of turds is rampant disharmony and anxiety: it’s almost suffocating. Boundaries are breaking down: eagles are shitting with serpents, monkeys with dolphins, kites with horses, fleas with crayfish, it’s as though there were some mad violent effort here to link the unlinkable, cross impossible abysses. And there’s some dejecta he’s not sure he even recognizes. That foul mound could be the movement of a hippogriff, for example, this slime that of a basilisk or a harpy. His own bowels, convulsed by all this ripe disorder, feel suddenly with a plunging weight, as though heart, hump, and all might have just descended there: he squats hastily, breeches down (well, Zeus sent Modesty in through the asshole, so may she exit there as well), to leave his own urgent message on the forest floor.

–Robert Coover, “Aesop’s Forest”

For this relief much thanks…

—Hamlet, I: i, 8

Dedicatory Epistle to the Reader

The paper hereby presented is, properly speaking, a treatise on evacuation. As such, its ideal location would be between Dominique Laporte’s Histoire de la merde and Pietro Manzoni’s Merde d’artista–works, in other words, secretly dedicated to friendly souls, or, as in this case, to the logorrheic interpreter of postmodernity. The author, but a humble hack, aims at the scholastic fame of having been able, if not to tap, at least to indicate a peculiar gap in postmodern criticism: for it appeared astounding to him that, among so many postmodernisms–“John Barth’s postmodernism, the literature of replenishment; Charles Newman’s postmodernism, the literature of inflationary economy; Jean-Francois Lyotard’s postmodernism, a general condition of knowledge in the contemporary informational regime; Ihab Hassan’s postmodernism, a stage on the road to the spiritual unification of humankind…” (McHale 4)–the one concerned with the sublimity of evacuation had been so absolutely neglected.

To single out a certain sense of the sublime in contemporary literature, it is mandatory to impose severe limitations on and some critical selecting of the otherwise too heterogeneous material at hand. First, this research will be limited to North American fiction. Second, the investigation will focus on one particular theme that seems to have grieved American literature since the fifties–a theme that goes under the name of “the crisis of consciousness.”¹ What is intended here by “critical selecting” is that pre-Kantian form of judgement that constitutes the essence and very nature of the author’s critical method: “I like it, or I don’t.” On this basis, I have not the least intention to encompass within this reading the “fast-food fictions” (Pfeil 2) and minimalist melancholies of Jay McInerney or Susan Minot. They do not “fit,” and, moreover, they get on my nerves.

Of this critical scheme, the author is ready to admit that it is what nowadays seems to be the object of ridicule and scorn: it is, no doubt, a dogmatic scheme. It begins with an assumption about what contemporary American literature might be, and therefore it handles exclusively those works which “fit” into the scheme. In defense of this method, the author can only mention the innocence with which he is trying not to impose his assumption on any work.

If the reader finds this preamble to be redundant, or the following to be repugnant, let us make clear that these notes, “neither a defense nor yet another denigration of the cultural enterprise we seem determined to call postmodernism” (Hutcheon, Poetics ix), should be intended as an attempt to single out some strategies of aesthetic, and maybe also moral and political, survival within the limits of what Jameson has so grimly called “logic of late capitalism”–or, in Baudrillard’s more pertinent formulation, the logic of fast-food, anorexia, bulimia, and obesity. Henceforth, dear reader, consider the following as yet one more exercise in survival and digestion–an exercise morally and socially relevant of which the author professes himself to be a persevering practitioner.

Fables of Digestion

The term digestion itself is one of the interfaces between ideas of bodily and mental process. Latin digero meant properly to force apart, to separate…

–R.M. Durling, “Deceit and Digestion in the Belly of Hell”

Inclusion and exclusion, symbolic and material exchange, body boundaries, gender, and other identity factors are systematically and most deeply inscribed in the members of a given group through eating practices.

–George Yudice, “Feeding the Transcendent Body”

In this paper, the term “sublime” refers not only to a set of aesthetic practices and transcendental ideals that have manifested themselves in contemporary American literature, but also to certain features of our own life and culture, features that, to paraphrase Geoffrey Harpham, “have survived the loss of the ideological structures within which they emerged” (xi). Loss and survival are two of the most remarkable traits of the sublime: since Longinus, they mark the stages of the individual’s confrontation with a superior force that momentarily marks the disruption of the subject, which is first “scattered,” and then joyfully reconstituted, “uplifted with a sense of proud possession…filled with joyful pride, as if we had ourselves produced the very thing we felt” (Longinus On the Sublime VII, translation mine).

There seems to be general agreement today about the fact that the first epochal horizon within which one can speak of postmodernity coincides with the alleged death of the subject–or, at least, with an “attenuation of the self,” as Lionel Trilling puts it in Sincerity and Authenticity. From the “loss of the self” of Wylie Sypher, through the “divided self” of Ronald Laing, to the “deconstructed self” of Leo Bersani, the identity of the “I” is dramatically scattered.

One can locate the first symptoms of the vanishing Emersonian self in the schlemiel of the literature of the fifties.² Undoubtedly, there are specific historical reasons that generate this sense of pessimism and loss. The crisis of consciousness in the literature of the fifties may well witness, in Edmund Wilson’s words, the “homicidal and menacing schemes” of McCarthyan policy (Wilson 128). At the turn of the new decade, Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest warns against the clinical suppression of the subject in the political style of Kubrick: “[they] try to make you weak so they can get you to toe the line, to follow their rules, to live like they want to” (Kesey 57). As Hendin puts it, society, as symbolized in Kesey’s asylum, “controls and infantilizes [the subject] in the name of the best interests of the inmates” (Hendin 132).

And yet, the fiction of the sixties muses, with Kesey’s McMurphy, an outside space (“We want to live out of this society,” the king of the Merry Pranksters avows), the revival of the American dream, the fantasy of an ultimate frontier that, once crossed, will open onto the uncontaminated plains of ultimate innocence and freedom. Although the themes of power and suppression undergo some variations, say, from Kesey’s dystopic vision to Kerouac’s beatnik quest, the literature of the sixties traces a neat line between a power reduced to mere symbol of evil and an Adamic individual consciousness outside power and innocently extraneous to it. Curiously enough, the writer of the sixties uses the themes of power and consciousness in a way that resembles Thoreau’s, Whitman’s, and Hawthorne’s more than it resembles any postmodern writer’s: the Walden of literature is still a sacred wood in which I sing myself far from the evil of civilization and far from its scarlet symbols of doom. But is there any such a space of innocence in the coming society of the spectacle?

Postmodern statements on politics and society, from Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow to Coover’s The Public Burning, persistently echo the gloomy tones of Kesey’s Foucauldian clinic–but where is the ultimate frontier of innocence and freedom?

America was the edge of the World. A message from Europe, continent-seized, inescapable. Europe had found the site for its kingdom of Death, the special Death the West has invented. . . . Now we are in the last phase. American Death has come to occupy Europe. It has learned empire from its old metropolis. . . . Is the cycle over now and a new one ready to begin? Will our new Edge, our new Deathkingdom, be the Moon? . . . Gravity rules all the way out to the cold sphere, there is always the danger of falling.(Pynchon 722-23)

Or, as Richard Nixon admits in The Public Burning, some pages before being sodomized by Uncle Sam, “we cannot escape” (Coover 8).

Yet, the theory and practice of postmodernity may recast the question of “the crisis of consciousness,” raised in the fifties and brought to its final “paranoid” conclusions in the sixties, in “a more positive mode of confrontation between subject and power” (Olderman 124); the postmodern answer to this question attempts at producing new and different structures of survival–“new mutants,” to say it with Leslie Fiedler. The argument I want to support with this paper can be summarized as follows: the claim of a death of the subject in postmodern discourse must be understood, pace all those critics who take the “death-theme” in absolute earnestness, as a “radical irony” (Ihab Hassan) which aims at reconstituting what one can call–faute de mieux–the “radical subject”: a subject which stands to represent “the community of disappointed . . . literary intellectuals–and how many of us really stand outside this class?–whose basic need is to believe in the autonomy of self-fashioning.”³ Escape is impossible, since Kesey’s clinic is virtually everywhere, in “the crime labs . . . the records . . . the radios and the alarm system and the TV over the teller’s cages . . . the cells and the jails and the schools and institutions . . . the traffic signals and the alternate-side-of-the-street parking regulation . . . the magnified maps of the city . . . the beats and patrols,” as Elkin’s Bad Man witnesses (70); and yet, the repressive project of society reveals itself inefficient to discipline the postmodern self-fashioning individual.

“I say all this to assure you that it is incorrect to assume that, because I am invisible and live in a hole, I am dead. I am neither dead nor in a state of suspended animation. Call me Jack-the-Bear, for I am in a state of hibernation.” But what can Ellison’s Bear do in the society of spectacle? How can Trilling’s “liberal imagination” survive the mystifications of mass-culture? And how can individual consciousness confront and survive a power disseminated in the most appealing forms of advertising, a power so forcefully obliterating reality with fictive simulacra? If “my life is a kind of simulation,” as the protagonist of DeLillo’s Mao II believes (97), how can the subject reposition itself within a society that transforms everything into simulation, in which even the individual, as Teresa de Lauretis warns, is “continually engaged, represented, and inscribed” (“Alice Doesn’t” 37)? In the last analysis, power is not framed within an inside that allows an outside innocence: power resides in the pre- fabricated notions of “reality” that the subject lives, “a series of overlapping fictions [that] cohere into a convincing semblance of historical continuity and logical truth” (Coover, Burning 122). Power is the ability of mass-media to create “static tableau–The New York Times’s finest creation–within which a reasonable and orderly picture of life can unfold” (Coover, Burning 192).

Once reality and life have lost any ontological arche, and have become the result of a fictive construction, the radical subject, as Coover puts it, must become “cynical about it…learn the rules and strategies . . . [and become] a manipulator” (“Interview” 72); or, as Jerome Klinkowitz suggests, the radical subject must recuperate some sort of “transformative imagination” Disruptions 16) to be able to change plots and life, drive force beyond exhaustion, and transform indifference and its simulacra.

Indeed, the publication of Berger and Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality (1967) had to convince a group of American authors, now labelled as “post-modernists,” that the first step towards the Bildung–or rather, a re-membering–of the radical subject was “to destroy the hold which these artificial constructions have on men, typically by forcing the very patterns and mythic structures to undermine themselves” (McCaffery, “Checklists” 112). Robert Coover declares:

Men live by fiction. They have to. Life's too complicated, we just can't handle all the input . . . All of them [fictions], though, are merely artifices-- that is, they are always in some ways false, or at best incomplete. There are always other plots, other settings, other interpretations. So if some stories start throwing their weight around, I like to undermine their authority a bit, work variations, call attention to their fictional nature.⁴

Thus, the dead “I” opens a breach in the institutionalized mythic structures, a breach in which s/he will find space enough for inventing new plots and new fables of identity: the radical subject survives the attempt of annihilation by virtue of his/her ability to transform social plots, “work variations, call attention to their fictional nature.”

Why, then, does postmodernism insistently repeat the litany of the dead at the same moment in which death is to turn into survival? One reason may be that postmodernism tries to re-enact a drama that takes place in daily life– the risk that the subject could be actually annihilated by his/her inability to confront overpowering social myths. Most important, this dramaturgy allows postmodernism to celebrate an ironically initiatory rite, or “mythotherapy,” as Campbell Tatham suggests (“Mythotherapy” 155), that enacts the drama of a temporary collapse in order to subsequently reconstitute a new subject in a stage of sublime ecstasy: as a ritual, the death of the subject initiates the reader to confront overpowering structures and destroy their hold. “The process is part of our daily life,” Richard Poirier tells us, “and no other novelist predicts and records it with Pynchon’s imaginative and stylistic grasp” V. 5). Indeed, Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow might be the best example to illustrate this kind of ritualistic sublimation of the self. If “They” have transformed the self into a “poor cripple, [a] deformed and doomed thing” GR 720), living in the “master plan” of a continuous alienation; if the self has been ensnared in a plot that is trying to subject both humanity and the Earth to the principle of economic exploitation–then it is “our mission to promote death,” and to become, like Katje and Gottfried, “children who are learning to die” GR 175). As the narrator says, “We must also look to the untold,” to a story different from the “master plan” that has constructed our very idea of identity GR 720). Like Slothrop’s, the human self must first be “broken down” and “scattered” in order to overcome alienation and return as the Benjaminian “bright angel of death” GR 738 ff.). In Pynchon’s novel, Slothrop’s “death” serves the purpose of recognizing fictions and social “master-plans” for what they are, thus liberating the subject from his/her dependency on artificial constructs. As Ihab Hassan argues, “revulsion against the self serves [postmodernism] as a link between the destructive and visionary impulses of modern apocalypse; it prepares for rebirth” Postmodern Turn 5). It administers last rites to all of human life.

Coover’s fictions are no less rich of ritualistic sublimations. Coover, with his proclaimed interest in Roger Caillois’ Eucharistic rites (“Interview” 74), repeatedly stages sacrificial public burnings, regicides, and other executions. In “Aesop’s Forest” the artist/Aesop, who has sinned against Apollo, is, like Orpheus, dismembered by the angry Delphians–“one eye is gone, the other clouded, an ear is clogged with bees, his hide’s in tatters.”⁵ Aesop’s sacrilege consists in having denounced Apollo’s Truth as a fable.

As Aesop remarks, with a sense of tragic irony, “I told them the truth, they called it sacrilege.” Like the postmodern demiurge, Aesop has de-mystified an absolute Truth, but, in so doing, he has hypostatized his own construction as a new truth, allegedly free from any Dionysian construction. Men live by fictions, they have to. But some fictions, like Aesop’s “deconstruction” of Apollonian Truth, start throwing their weight around. When this happens, fictions can turn against their creator, and Aesop’s moralized animals join the Delphians in the lynching of the author:

they are on him: wolves, boars, apes, moles, toads, dancing camels, plucked daws, serpents, spiders, snails, incestuous cocks and shamming cats, hares, asses, bats, bears, swarms of tongueless gnats, fleas, flies and murderous wasps, bears, beavers, doves, martins, lice and dungbeetles, mice and weasels, owls, crabs, and goats, hedgehogs and ticks, kites, frogs, peacocks and locusts, all the fabled denizens of the forest, all intent in electing him into the great democracy of the dead.("Aesop's Forest" 82)

At once, Coover’s story gives the idea of Aesop-the-fabler’s “radical” (anti-Apollonian) activity, and of Aesop-the-man’s entrapment in his own “eloquent text of the forest.” It is not less amazing to notice how Aesop is dismembered by his own “fabled denizens” than to notice how the Rosenbergs are sacrificed to the fable of American democracy in The Public Burning. To give credit to fictions is to put lives at stake. It is not surprising, in this context, that Coover’s narrative technique continuously aims at constructing “exemplary fictions”–fictions that, in Robert Alter’s formulation, “flaunt their own condition of artifice” Partial Magic x) and that, by so doing, escape any hypostasis onto the plane of myth and absolute Truth:

Ejemplares you [Cervantes] called your tales, because "si bien lo miras, no hay ninguna de quien no se pueda sacar un ejemplo provechoso," and I hope in ascribing to my fictions the same property, I haven't strayed from your purposes, which I take to be manyfold. For they are ejemplares, too, because your intention was "poner en la plaza de nuestra republica una mesa de trucos, donde cada uno pueda llegar a entratenerse sin dao del alma ni del cuerpo, porque los ejercicios honestos y agradables antes aprovechan que daan"-- splendid, don Miguel! for as our mutual friend don Roberto S. [Robert Scholes, in The Fabulators] has told us, fiction "must provide us with an imaginative experience which is necessary to our imaginative well being . . . We need all the imagination we have, and we need it exercised and in good condition"--and thus your novelas stand as exemplars of responsibility to that most solemn and pious charge placed upon this vocation. . .(Coover Pricksongs, 77)

Coover’s self-denouncing fictions, differently from Aesop’s moralities, do not permit “to have their miserable excrement read so explicitly”⁶–they do not establish any interpretive order. Because, if Aesop was the victim of an Apollonian social order, he has become, quite paradoxically, the grantee for a classical order–think of La Fontaine– which sees in Aesop’s fables the explicit moralities of “avarice, panic, vanity, distrust, lust for glory and for flesh, hatred, hope, all the fabled terrors and appetites of the mortal condition, drawn together here now for one last demented frolic.” Eventually, whether they were guilty or not of a radical and anti-Apollonian statement, Aesop’s fables serviced another artificial but stable moral order. Establishing the tradition of the Aesopian genre tells enough about the institutionalization of fable and the fetishization of narrative constructs, as Chenetier argues: “Aesop[‘s] . . . transformations, a founding gesture for his particular world-view, [have become] a-dynamic and irreversible” (“Ideas” 101). Hence, Coover’s exemplary tale, in order to exercise “all the imagination we have . . . in good conditions,” must dismantle the whole of Aesop’s mythologized apparatus. For reasons antithetical to those of the Delphians, Coover himself must sacrifice Aesop–or his now overpowering plot–on the altar of the postmodern transformative imagination, in the “Temple of the Muses” (“Aesop’s Forest” 81).

Whatever happens to Aesop, and whoever kills him, we know that his is a tragic end. But what happened to the postmodern subject, or, to a lesser extent, whatever happened to Coover in Aesop’s forest? Does the death of Aesop stands to signify the death of the author tout court? Does this coincide with Lyotard’s claimed death of grand narratives? Coover’s allegory is very careful about this: the felicitous announcement of the death of the author can well serve the political agenda of the fox, “that treacherous foul-mouth.” Should we give absolute credit to the wide-spread announcement of the death of narrative (another myth, indeed), the fox may engineer a subtle takeover and make us believe that its realpolitik is the ultimate demystification–we may find ourselves entrapped into Peter Sloterdijk’s “cynical reason,” the belief that, since ideologies are all equally false, one’s behavior should then be absolutely determined by “particular interests.” The problem with Sloterdijk, as with our fox, is that they do not see in their “cynicism” a new fiction, a novel artificial construction: the “particular interest” is not more “real” than what has so far been deconstructed. Interests, to paraphrase Baudrillard, are never “free” from ideological determinations: “there is no basis on which to define what is ‘artificial’ and what is not. . . . No one experiences this [particular interest] as alienation” (“Consumer Society” 40). The grand narratives that have a hold on our life may be easily condemned and unmasked on the assumption that, much like the Socratic “enlightened” rationalism according to Nietzsche, they aspire to Apollonian truth, forgetting that they are bound to the deceptive nature of the Dionysian. However, what is striking is precisely the degree of forgetfulness that accompanies many annunciations of death and unmaskings of grand narratives: the authoritative announcement of the disappearance of authority, and the articulation of a total and comprehensive narrative of a postmodern condition in which it would be impossible to articulate any narration, surreptitiously establish, as Coover suggests, a “foxy” and fraudulent totalizing order. If there is any difference between Aesop’s and Coover’s postmodernism, it is this: the “suspicion” Aesop casts on Apollonian order is recast by Coover on the suspicion itself, with the result that the denunciation of myths does not acquire the status of an Aufklarung, but rather, in Bentham’s formulation, of a “necessary fiction.”⁷ In other words, the de- mythification itself is the result of another fictive construction that can acquire “exemplarity” only if it recognizes itself as “fictive,” thus avoiding any hypostasis onto the plane of absolute truth and enlightenment. Whoever would execute the myth-maker and fight an order of reality must be fully aware that the logics on which s/he would perform the “de-mythification” are not devoid of a necessary fictional nature–or, in Coover’s own words, “It’s all shit anyway” (“Aesop’s Forest” 83).

More precisely, the death of the author/Aesop prepares for a rebirth: once Aesop’s moralized forest “extinguishes itself around him,” a new, exemplary forest can be created, and a new “self-conscious” author can take Aesop’s place. The execution of the author participates of a tribal ritual of initiation in which “killing the author,” as Frazer would say, “assumes, or at least is readily combined with, the idea that the soul of the slain author is transmitted to his successor.” As in Freud’s “totemic meal,” oral incorporation and its correlates–instalment and digestion of authority within the self–consume a patricidal act that sublimates the subject’s desire for strength, authority, and life. The Gerontion-like loss of sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch that characterizes the narrator of “Aesop’s Forest” must be counterbalanced by a will to eat: “even in such decline, the familiar hungers stir in him still… his appetite for power outlasting his power to move” (“Aesop’s Forest,” 68).

It is the same hunger that saves the characters of Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior in their endless combat against the ghosts of patriarchal culture: “my mother won in ghost battle because she can eat anything…. All heroes are bold toward food…. Big eaters win.”⁸ In Kingston’s and Coover’s vocabulary, one must introject the myth for reasons of survival; only by following the drive of this appetite can the postmodern subject “learn the rules,” and find alternative plots, “more pathways, more gardens, and more doors” (Coover Pricksongs, 19). In other words, if eating practices and “disorders,” as Julia Kristeva suggests, may be the product of a hysterical resistance to (patriarchal) authority (“Stabat Mater”), it must be noticed that the postmodern resistance is not on the part of the anorexic, but, rather, of the bulimic. As the title (if not the argument) of Sohnya Sayres’s article on “Food and the Agon of Excess” suggests, postmodernism is a tale of bulimic excess, or, as George Yudice puts it, the promise of “transcendence in an age of fake fat and microwavable synthetic meals” (“Transcendent Body” par. 3). As Susie Orbach’s The Anorectic’s Struggle as a Metaphor implies, even the anorectic’s “hunger strike,” a loss at the level of the physical, “replenishes” the body with the metaphors of an excess in respect to social codes.

But is “appetite” enough for the individual’s survival? Cannot eating rather be, as Baudrillard’s discussion on “The Obese” insinuates, a “fatal strategy,”⁹ or simply produce a blockage? “As a child,” Kingston tells us, “I pictured a naked child sitting on a modern toilet desperately trying to perform until it died of congestion” (86). Cannot the introjection of social structures, literary traditions, and Aesop’s moralities, actually paralyze the childlike postmodern imagination in some sort of congestion? Or into a compulsion to repeat? Indeed, the rather heavy meal can create a digestive disorder, a rampant dyspepsia, and a metabolic chaos. The “urgent message” of the postmodern author is hindered. The author “squats hastily, breeches down. Ah!, what a plunging weight.” Can postmodernism overcome this moment of blockage, this compulsion to cite and repeat–this compulsion to death? One has reason for worrying: the signs shed in Coover’s forest seem to be Aesop’s and La Fontaine’s, rather than Coover’s own– “there’s some dejecta he’s not sure he even recognizes”! For the voracious postmodern individual, blockage is the real threat, and survival coincides with some sort of “digestive capability”–the power to actively transform authorities and traditions into fecal signs, into wastes from which the subject has to separate in order to constitute itself as a subject. It is the ability of forcing apart, separating one’s individuality from that of the slain king. In the next section, I will try to associate the possibility of survival for the postmodern individual with a sublime ability to evacuate. This–it goes without saying–is a topic that the author, who is not free from certain academic scruples, has not the power to censor nor the happiness to approve. It is a topic that has been forced upon me by Robert Coover, for whom evacuation is “the closest we ever come to the gods.”

And so, with a timid “Can I?,” I’d like to move to the second section.

From Citation to Sublimation: Metaphors Of Evacuation

As if it were a game played by the sphincter muscle . . .

–Richard Brautigan, Trout Fishing in America

Although several critics have commented on the subject, the key document in defining postmodern American literature remains John Barth’s “The Literature of Exhaustion” (1967). Barth’s radical announcement was that writers were facing “the used-upness of certain forms of exhaustion of certain possibilities” (29). From then on, the author could only cite and repeat old stories and earlier forms. It is evident that postmodern literature seemingly endorses Barth’s aesthetics of exhaustion: Coover’s repetition of Aesop’s fables, Barthelme’s rewriting of Snow White, Kathy Acker’s Borgesian Don Quixote, equivocally suggest a compulsion to cite, quote, and repeat a whole literary tradition that disturbingly crops up in the postmodern literary body. “Nobody had enough imagination,” Barth’s Ambrose muses at the end of Lost in the Funhouse (97). The postmodern author is condemned to cite and repeat old stories, given forms and structures. Or so it seems. Because some questions can still be asked: Is it possible to turn Barth’s aesthetic ultimacy, his entropic compulsion to cite, into a sublime strategy for the survival of the subject? Can the citing subject be “uplifted with a sense of proud possession” above the cited material? And, if so: According to which paradigm can we define this “uplifting” as “sublimation,” and in what terms?

Suzanne Guerlac, in her study on “Longinus and the Subject of the Sublime,” locates the force of the sublime in the humble practice of citation, in which the author takes “proud possession” of the given message (275). Frances Ferguson replies to Guerlac by suggesting that citation rather promotes, to be fair to Longinus, a “suppression of the author” (295; emphasis mine). Despite the different conclusions they reach, both Guerlac’s and Ferguson’s arguments, as Geoffrey Harpham argues (198-199), are essentially correct, since the Longinian sublime, in the last analysis, does not aim to promote auctorial individuality, but instead the unification of the author with a transcendent totality, or with a past re-presented by and in the citation. The author is thus “promoted” (Guerlac) by dispersing him/her self within a “totality” (Ferguson). When the Longinian author recognizes the citation “as something he had himself produced,” s/he is caught in the sublime experience because s/he feels as part of a transcendental creative energy.

From its very outset, postmodernism seems to tell a rather different story: postmodern citation can be more correctly imagined as a moment of blockage, in which the author is compelled to cite, to repeat,¹⁰ because a given totality–a literary tradition, a social given to which the author feels belated, or, as Kathy Acker puts it, some “great expectations”–already comprehends him/her. The problem for the postmodern author is that s/he, unlike Longinus, tries to escape that totality, whose overpowering force blocks and paralyzes. Donald Barthelme’s Snow White, trying to narrate her own story, finds herself captured in a plot–Grimm’s Snow White–from which she cannot escape: “Oh I wish there were some words in the world that were not the words I always hear!” (6). Whereas the Longinian sublime contents the subject with a syntactical “sympathy” (the term is Burke’s) between subjective expression and absolute logos, postmodern technique tries to free the subject from the hierarchy of syntax, and hinges, as Hayden White comments, on “a paratactical consciousness: a language of linear disjunction rather than narrative sequence” (“Culture” 69). To put it in rhetorical terms, the organizing principle of postmodern narrative would be metonymy–the succession of unconnected elements –rather than metaphor–the link between the parts. Accordingly, Donald Barthelme breaks syntactic hierarchy to introduce an element of error, a metonymic uncodifiable fragment, in the ordered space of social information:

I have a number of error messages I'd like to introduce here and I'd like you to study them carefully . . . they're numbered. I'll go over them with you: undefined variable . . . improper use of hierarchy . . . missing operator . . . mixed mode, that one's particular grave . . . invalid character transmitted in sub-program statement, that's a bitch . . . no END statement.("Explanation" 79)

The Guerlac-Ferguson debate suggests that Longinus’s holistic sublime may lose its usefulness to describe a postmodern strategy. The ironic tone of postmodern citation implies a different movement, namely, in Paul Bove’s terms, “a radical break or rupture in the genetic pattern,” in which the subject inter-relates dialectically with his/her genetic/historical predecessor, thus instituting “discontinuities” rather than syntheses.¹¹

If Longinus’s sublime and Burke’s “sympathy” do not “fit” postmodernism, Neil Hertz’s “The Notion of Blockage in the Literature of the Sublime” tries to define the postmodern practice of citation in terms of Kantian sublime. The enormous “accumulation of secondary discussion,” the “proliferation of secondary comments,” Hertz argues, brings the postmodern author to face “a point of blockage: he [writes] of the threat of being overwhelmed by too much writing, and it may not be possible to go beyond that” (62 ff.) This “accumulation,” an enormous difficulty to ex-press (etymologically: ex premere, to push out) new signs under “the pressure of the super ego,” produces on the author/subject what Hertz calls a “blockage,” something emotionally similar to Kant’s fear and amazement in facing an overwhelming, “limitless” force. The subject/author feels impotent, constipated, quite dead. Yet, Hertz suggests, after the postmodern author posits this impossibility, after s/he installs such a monstrous accumulation impeding writing–after blockage is posited, writing flows out: a logorrhea, indeed, about the “impossibility” of writing. This process constitutes, according to Hertz, the liberating experience of contemporary sublime–an experience organized on the double “mind’s movement [of] blockage, and release.”

Let us consider, as an example of this mechanism of sublimation, Linda Hutcheon’s The Politics of Postmodernism. The first chapter of this text is entitled “Representing the Postmodern,” and it begins with a subchapter devoted to the discussion of “What is Postmodernism?” That is to say: Can post-modernism have any identity? Hutcheon astutely plays on the oxymoron opened between the notions of “representation of postmodernism” and that of “postmodern impossibility of representation.” How can we possibly represent, in fact, a phenomenon whose first given is that of unpresentability? Impossibility rules the program of Hutcheon’s text, which is to represent the unpresentable. The Politics of Postmodernism may be seen as some kind of allegory–quite literally an anagogic attempt–of postmodernism itself. The entire postmodernist project is re-enacted here as the desire to “project,” and create, that which cannot be pinned down or mastered by representation. The transcendent object of desire is that which, according to Lyotard, moves postmodernism toward the sublime:

The postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself, that which denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable; that which searches for new presentations.(Postmodern Condition 81)

The entire postmodern “representation” (or “postmodernism represented”) is in it–the “post-modernist project,” or, in other words, that ephemeral, brilliant moment of writing the impossibility of writing that by itself represents an entire era, and transcends the logical and stylistic possibilities of representation in the moment the unpresentable is finally presented:

it seems reasonable to say that the postmodern's initial concern is to de-naturalize some of the dominant features of our way of life; to point out that those entities that we unthinkingly experience as 'natural' . . . are in fact 'cultural'; made by us, not given to us. Even nature, postmodernism might point out, doesn't grow on trees.(Hutcheon, Poetics 2)

The “indeterminate,” the “unpresentable,” is thus transcended, as Kant puts it, in the “representation of the limitlessness.” The question “What is postmodernism?” poses to the reader an apparently unrecoverable “momentary check” (Kant) to the possibilities of representing “an indeterminate reference”¹²; the feeling of impotence is then “followed at once by a discharge all the more powerful” (Kant) in the moment the unpresentable is finally “connected with the mere presentation or faculty of representation, and is thus taken to express the accord, in a given intuition, of the faculty of presentation, or the imagination, with the faculty of concepts” (Kant). The identity of postmodernism is given, albeit in a negative way, as discrepant from representation itself; or, rather, as ironic (negative) representation, as a representation that takes traditional (positive) representation ironically.

However, we have come a long way from Kant’s sublime. Kant’s was the attempt, once again, to reconstitute the excess of feeling within the notions of “unity,” “integrity,” and “coherence” sanctioned by the “ethical man.” As Hayden White has noticed, Kant’s sublime is some sort of disguised ideology which disciplines the suprasensible by reconciling it with the re-cognition of a social meaning in it. The individual, rather than freeing him/herself from overwhelming totalities, is eventually subjected to the overpowering force–a force of representation, or “faculty of concepts”–of the ethical man.¹³ By advocating the need for rupture, disjunction, and differance, the postmodern “improper use of hierarchy” might well fall out from any Kantian categorization. In his insightful “Sublime Politics,” Donald Pease implicitly maintains the necessity, for postmodernist poetics, of dropping out any argument about, and tendency toward, the sublime:

Despite all the revolutionary rhetoric invested in the term, the sublime has, in what we could call the politics of historical formation, always served conservative purposes . . . the sublime, instead of disclosing a revolutionary way of being that is other than the ethical, in Kant's rendition, is reduced to strictly ethical duties. Or, put differently, the sublime makes the formation of an ethical character sound as if it is a rebellious task.(275-276; Pease's emphasis.)

Published in boundary 2 in 1984, Pease’s might be seen as a declaration of postmodernist intents. However, Pease’s refusal of the sublime may be contradictorily sublime in itself. What Pease claims, in his elaborate discussion and description of so many theories of the sublime, is the necessity of dropping out, releasing a certain political embarrassment which seems to be the given of the sublime. By first citing an impressive mass of material on the sublime, and then proclaiming a repudiation of all these structures, Pease’s article offers a clear example of what I intend as the postmodern sublime, organized, indeed, on Hertz’s paradigm of blockage and release. Not only does Pease confront something as overwhelming as the sublime, but he also exceeds it, thus “uplifting” postmodernism beyond the possibilities of what is usually known as “the sublime.” In Pease’s epistemological displacement, the “sublime” reaches what Kant’s conservatism represses: namely, the discontinuity between the given structures and the individual effort to transcend that given; Pease’s sublime results in the differance between self and world, present and past, referent (the “sublime politics”) and sign (a discourse exceeding that referent).

Dick Hebdige, in “The Impossible Object: Towards a Sociology of the Sublime,” is more explicit than Pease in affirming the existence of a postmodern sublime based on the ironic rejection of previous theories of the sublime and on the disruption of totalities. Hebdige singles out what he calls “the pull towards the asocial sublime” in contemporary discourse: for Hebdige, the mode of the “asocial sublime” is a celebration of the “camp vision,” the vision of waste, trash, and excrement–an indirect citation of Barthelme’s “digging on the leading edge of the trash phenomenon.” The ironic inversion of the sublime from Kant and Lyotard’s totalizing aestheticizations (a re-engagement of the excess as aesthetic work), to the new “camp vision,” explicitly aims at both resisting unity and locating the force of postmodern sublime within the realm of an anti-aesthetic differance. For Hebdige, one of the most remarkable strategies of the postmodern sublime consists in the simultaneous citation and combination (“double coding,” in Umberto Eco’s or Linda Hutcheon’s terminologies) of texts belonging to high and camp culture. The result of this peculiar citational practice is complexly disruptive and constructive at once: at the same moment in which hierarchy (high vs. low culture) is disrupted, the post-modern subject is “uplifted” with a sense of complete mastery of both fields:

Rather than surrender mastery of the fields, the critics who promulgate the line that we are living at the end of everything (and are all these critics men [sic]?) make one last leap and resolve to take it all-- judgement, history, politics, aesthetics, value--out of the window. . . . The implication seems to be that if they cannot sit at the top of Plato's pyramid, then there shall not be any pyramid at all.(Hebdige 70)

As Fred Pfeil maintains, manipulation and digestion of culture in its entirety, from high to low, coincides with some sort of jouissance, of a pleasure that is, in the last analysis, the constitutive nature of postmodern subjectivity:

[the postmodern subject] finds him/herself an extraordinarily well-rounded, complete cultural consumer and connoisseur, eminently capable of taking pleasure in a spectrum of choices . . . ranging from just a step ahead of mass culture . . . to just a foot short of high.(108)

At this point, we can start defining the specific features of a postmodern strategy of the sublime, which is —on le sait!–an anti-theory, a virtual subversion of all totalizing theories. Hebdige’s sense of metaphoric inversion from art to anti-art, from aesthetics to anti-aesthetics, from the “beautiful” to the sublime “camp vision,” and from “exhaustion” to “mastery,” no longer stresses the drama of “ultimacies,” or the disintegration of identity; instead, it shifts into the strategy for the Bildung of a new subject. This new subject confronts given structures to master them with some kind of Keatsean negative capability.¹⁴ In his book on The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary American Fiction, Tom Le Clair argues:

Recognizing their dependence on their culture's system of dissemination . . . novelists have two strategies to counter the homogeneity of mass-produced and institutionally controlled information. One strategy is to collect to excess and thus use against the dominant culture its own information. The other...(16)

. . . But let us stay with the first of Le Clair’s strategies of mastery: the postmodern sublime, to start with, is a strategy of “collection” and ex-cess (etymologically: ex cedere, to give out), in which the givens of an “accumulation of writing” (Hertz), of a political embarrassment (Pease), or of “mass-produced and institutionally controlled information” (Le Clair), lead not so much to a rejection, but rather to an introjection (admission of the problem, commentary, citation, allusion), which poses a blockage suddenly overcome by a release, an ironic “excess” which turns the manipulator against cultural givens. This sublime strategy of ingestion, ironic blockage, and final release, has been defined by Arthur Kroker and David Cook as the privileged strategy of an “excremental culture”: such a culture nourishes itself of the “pestilential spirit” of social and cultural entropic systems, to finally digest and drop out a fairly new message of disruption whose “psychological signs are those of . . . disaccumulation”: “[postmodern art] exists at the edge of ecstasy and decay where the consumer culture of the passive nihilists does a reversal and in a catastrophic implosion flips into its opposite number” (10 ff.). Not altogether differently, John Barth’s metaphor of disaccumulation in Lost in the Funhouse suggests that “The final possibility is to turn ultimacy, exhaustion, paralyzing self- consciousness and the adjective weight of accumulated history … Go on. Go on. To turn ultimacy against itself to make something new and valid” (109).

Ihab Hassan, as far as I know, is the first critic who has defined the postmodern sublime as ironic discharge of the “infinite powers” that impede expression. Hassan’s metaphor is that of defecation overcoming the nausea brought about by constipation:

Nathaniel West, writing at the edge of our contemporaneity, first comes to mind . . . The Dream Life of Balso Snell, mock artist, proves to be a wet dream. More precisely, Snell imagines that he ascends into the bowels of the Trojan horse. This accords with his view of art as "sublime excrement." West seems to endorse this bilious irony: his own repugnance of life touches even his craft. His nausea, which no social dependency of the thirties can entirely explain, conceals itself in black comedy. A world of ugly doorknobs, dead dreams, and distressed loves, burns into the ash of parodic apocalypse. Thus West, turning violence into dubious merriment, is the new satirist laughing at the wound within his laugh. Thirty years after, William Burroughs carries the excremental vision even farther. A devilish mimic, he transposes a world ruled by entropy, waste, and disease into a film of metallic laughter.(Dismemberment 249)

The vision of excremental sublime, as “parodic apocalypse” of a subject opposing “a world ruled by entropy,” certainly emerges in many postmodern works. We might think of Pynchon’s “defecation rites,” or of the narrator of Gass’s The Heart of the Heart of the Country who asserts that “I want to rise so high that when I shit I won’t miss anybody.” Federman’s The Voice in the Closet provides the (autobiographical) example of a thirteen-year- old boy hidden in a closet to escape the Nazis: “I was scared. And on top of that, in the middle of the afternoon I had to take a crap. And why not? So I unfolded one of the newspapers and took a shit on it” (47). After defecation, fear is overcome; the boy finds courage to leave the closet, and embarks to America. Federman charges the scene with almost obvious allegorical implications: the closet becomes the tomb and the womb for the coming-into- life of a new subject; defecation is the ironic release of the fear of death and annihilation. The same allegorical structure is at work in Coover’s Spanking the Maid. The “teacher” of Coover’s story has to realize that his Victorian ideal of Bildung–“feeding with spanking . . . that broad part preferred by him and Mother Nature for the invention of the souls”–is absolutely incorrect. For “that broad part” of the human body “seems more like a place for letting things out than putting things in.” After a moment of apparent death, which is, in truth, only a digestive pause, the “invention of souls,” the epiphany of the subject, happens in a water-closet, in a last heraldic effort to produce “spiritual” signs: “twitching amicably yet authoritatively like a damp towel, down a bottomless hole, relieving himself noisily” (102). Even more explicitly, Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five offers fecal signs as allegorical signs of authorial consciousness and as the epiphany of the radical writer opposing war and its horrors:

Billy looked inside the latrine. The wailing was coming from there. The place was crammed with Americans who had taken their pants down. The welcome feast had made them as sick as volcanoes. The buckets were full or had been kicked over. An American near Billy wailed that he had excreted everything but his brains. Moments later he said, "There they go, there they go." He meant his brains. That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book.(125)

This is the price that the subject has to pay for its survival. Giving up any metaphysical consistency, this sort of subject becomes, quite literally, an excrement, a surplus that cannot be codified and inscribed in the fabricated notions of “reality.” Its “resistance” to codification institutes at the same time its absolute superfluity in relation to the symbolic order. Its manipulation of codes and structures, in other words, cannot have any effectual consistency if not in establishing a topos in which subjectivity may exist, as a digestive process, in a sublime manipulation of pre-existing categories.

Examples of excremental sublime in postmodern American fiction could multiply almost endlessly. However, I should discourage my reader from thinking that the excremental sublime is limited to the (many) cases in which fecal signs explicitly appear in the literary space; rather, excremental sublimity consists of a narrative practice which I have defined as a movement from blockage to release, and from Longinian citation or Kantian re-presentation to sublime digestive transformation. As such, it encompasses a more general postmodern trend: it includes any strategy of incorporating social myths and given plots–we might say: history and/as literary tradition–to finally release new stories and new modes of being. This new mode of being is the postmodern radical subject, who has survived the menaces of death and has “uplifted” him/herself with “joyful pride” in an act of ultimate poiein. In this sense, we might well conceive of the postmodern subject as a sphincter muscle performing its daily activity of retention, manipulation, and ex-pression; Altieri seems to endorse this idea when he argues, rather aphoristically, that “as organ, the [postmodern] ego has its own rhythms of expansion and contraction . . . it is not a place to store experience, but a way of experiencing” (627; Altieri’s emphasis).

However, some mysteries are still unsolved: how can postmodern irony overcome the moment of blockage? And how can a subject be reconstituted–in his/her “way of being”– in spite of a power aggressively trying to “objectify” him/her? The postmodern answer to both questions is that the blockage–the “impossibility”–is not “real”; power is only a fiction. Put like this, the answer may seem too blunt, and it certainly exacts sharpening in order to prevent excessive optimism. It is my assumption that the achievements of Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization (1962) and Norman O’Brown’s Life against Death (1964) must be taken as defining features of the American postmodern sublime. For it is in these works that, through an alliance of Marx and Freud, the inevitable confrontation of subject and power takes place in a radically new fashion. Exemplified (maybe at the excess) by Theodore Roszack’s “The Dialectics of Liberation,” the problem of “making a counter culture” during the sixties could be put like this:

While both Marx and Freud held that man is the victim of a false consciousness from which he must be freed to achieve fulfillment, their diagnoses were built on very different principles. For Marx, that which is hidden from reason is the exploitive reality of the social system. Culture--"ideology" [. . .]--intervenes between reason and reality to mask the operation of invidious class interest. . . . For Freud, that which is hidden from reason is the content of the unconscious mind. Culture plays its part in the deception not as a mask concealing social reality, but rather as a screen on which the psyche projects itself in a grand repertory of "sublimations." [. . .] There we have the issue. Is the psyche, as Marx would have it, a reflection of "the mode of production of material life"? Or is the social structure, as Freud argued, a reflection of our psychic contents?(84-85)

What is power, then? Social super structure, or father figure projected by the unconscious? Philosophically, the issue raises the question of the locus of reality; politically, it poses the question of how liberation is to be achieved: by social or psychic revolution? Marcuse’s answer to these questions is that power is both a reality and a fiction: accordingly, he tries to develop a radical social critique out of the psychoanalytic assumption that power may be, after all, a projection, a myth. Significantly enough, this Freudian turn moves American radicalism away from Marxist de-subjectification and, in a very Emersonian way, puts the accent upon those “tendencies that have been attenuated in the post-Marxian development of his critique of society [Marx’s, in his first writings], namely, the elements of communistic individualism.”¹⁵

Marcuse’s social critique hinges on the notion of “alienation.” For Marcuse, “alienation” does not have any of Marx’s (or Hegel’s) connotations. Alienation is no longer a locus between labor and exploitation, but rather a disease that is rooted inside human beings. What the psychiatrist knows is that alienation results from acts of repression: the patient “forgets” his/her own construction of symbolic structures that the analytic anamnesis should re-present. Marcuse emphasizes the primacy of consciousness in social changes: the subject must be conscious of his/her own projections; s/he must recognize, in other words, that “power” is nothing else than the re-presentation of an Oedipal complex Eros viii ff.). The impossibility, or blockage, is only a psychic construction, a story.

I will discuss the Oedipal strategy of postmodern sublime, based on Freud’s notion of “anal character,” in the next section. To bring the current section to a conclusion, let me notice how Marcuse’s social critique bears powerfully on postmodern narrative. Larry McCaffery’s The Metafictional Muse provides a neat summary of how postmodern narrative can produce an anamnesis of the artificial construction of overpowering structures of “reality”:

In examining the concept of man-as-fiction-maker, [postmodern works] deal with characters busily constructing systems to play with or to help them deal with their chaotic lives. Some of these systems are clearly fictional in nature: we observe writers trying to create stories, men struggling to break the hold of mythic patterns, desperate people inventing religious explanations for a terrible catastrophe. . . . Yet, [postmodern narrative] is filled with hints that other, less obviously artificial systems--such as mathematics, science, religion, myth, and the perspectives of history and politics--are also fictional at their core. . . . [T]here exists a tension between the process of man creating his fictions and his desire to assert that his systems have an independent existence of their own. . . . [T]his tension typically results in man losing sight of the fictional basis of his systems and eventually becoming trapped within them.(25-26)

The postmodern subject is thus the locus (maybe all-too literally a rhetorical topos) of consciousness; consciousness of the fictional nature of overpowering structures will finally allow the subject to imagine new plots, new stories, new lives to be told. Let us think, in this context, of Coover’s maneuver in “Aesop’s Forest”: the imaginative power of the narrator is here absolutely impaired by the presence of his grand precursor–Aesop. Facing such an overpowering presence, the narrator can only cite the stories already told by the genius–Aesop. But, as the scholar well knows, “Aesop” is only “a fictional construct . . . [a] biography . . . reconstructed to satisfy the Greek requirement, according to which all genres should have an inventor” (Chenetier 97). The overpowering presence that impairs the subject turns out to be a mere fiction! As Borges would put it, “[t]he fact is that every writer creates his own precursor.”¹⁶ The blockage–the death–may be overcome by consciousness, thus uplifting the subject as the true crafter of his/her own narration. In this moment of sublime release, the dejecta membra are re-composed into subjective expression: “Orpheus, dismembered, continues to sing” (Hassan, Dismemberment 45).

…You see, dear reader, how, step by step, singing along, citing, arguing, implying, yawning, digesting what has been already said, apologizing, we go on together from section to section! We are already at the end of the second section, and one hour ago the first one did not even exist yet. You see, this is the mystery and joy of the excremental sublime. There was a great silence, nothing that we could say to each other, no new story we could entertain each other with. In truth, you did not even exist, and neither did I. There was nothing, not even the excremental sublime. Maybe only the embarrassing feeling of something that we wanted to say. And then, in this silence, a voice is heard, a voice that I want to compare to the growling of the bowels after a meal long retained, and the voice becomes stronger, and the story bigger, and nothingness a logorrhea…. Maybe it was in this way that the world we live in was created–from the unintentional digestion of an apple….

… Well, I was happy to find ourselves at the end of the second section, but now I am losing myself in superfluous details. And so, let us jump into our third section….

The Postmodern Subject: An Epiphany Of Sorts

I think of myself as a lyrical socialist,which makes about as much sense, given the world we live in, as being an anal-retentive anarchist with a bomb in his hand.

–Robert Coover, Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears?

“All aesthetics has its root in repressed anal erotism,” the psychoanalyst says (Ferenczi 325). All writing, on le sait!, engages in some sort of coprophiliac activity. Yet the paradigm of blockage and release that we have followed so far seems to suggest that the process —the movement from retention to release–is far more important, for the postmodern Muse, than the final excremental result. It is this process, after all, that structures the intensity of postmodern narrative–a process of digestion of old and mythical structures that will indefinitely defer the production of an ultimate (fecal) meaning. In this sense, even the postmodern subject will be, as Altieri has already told us, a “process,” rather than a simple excremental left-over of our times.¹⁷ It is a subject, as Kathy Acker’s Don Quixote has it, that resists “capitulation to social control. . . . [t]o letting our political leaders locate our identities in the social” (18), and that continually refuses to end its manipulations and digestion into visible social signs. It is a subject, in other words, that finds in the process defined above as excremental sublime its locus and only raison d’etre.

Another way to define this process, and thus identify our subject, is of course through Freud’s notions of “anal retentiveness” and “anal character”:

they [anal characters] seem to have been among those who refuse to empty the bowel when placed on the chamber, because they derive an incidental pleasure from the act of defecation.("Character" 28; emphasis mine)

Anal retention aims at finding “an incidental pleasure” in the moment of eventual defecation. Pleasure is “incidental” to actual defecation, since it belongs more properly to the process of retention and release. Such process is also, as the quoted passage suggests, an Oedipal strategy, that is, a refusal of the Law imposed by authority. If defecation is a pleasure, this pleasure cannot accept any external imposition or constraint: the subject must decide when, where, and how, this pleasurable activity shall take place. Freud supplements the passage quoted above with a footnote which better highlights the Oedipal refusal of a super-imposed Law (i.e., the wish of the nurse) which tries to regulate defecation according to social (i.e., non-pleasurable) norms; the footnote runs like this:

It is one of the best signs of later eccentricity or nervousness if an infant obstinately refuses to empty his bowel when placed on the chamber, that is, when the nurse wishes, but withholds this function at his own pleasure. Naturally it does not matter to the child if he soils his bed; his only concern is not to lose the pleasure incidental to the act of defecation.("Character" 29; emphasis mine)

The fact that Freud confers on the anal character the quality of an “obstinacy [which] may amount to defiance, [and] with which irascibility and vindictiveness may easily be associated” (“Character” 28) should not pass unnoticed. The most distinctive traits of the anal character seem therefore to be those of a rebellious, almost anarchic energy; its main qualities, much more than “parsimony” and “order,” seem to be, as Freud’s essay on “Character and Anal Erotism” has it, “obstinacy,” “vindictiveness,” and “eccentricity.” Dispositions, in other words, which defiantly refuse social order. It is worth noting that Freud, in Civilization and its Discontents, singles out in anal retention a “most remarkable” strategy for the “sublimation” of a particular kind of subjectivity, that is, an “original personality, which is still untamed by civilization and may thus become the basis . . . of hostility to civilization” (43). Thus, an “anal character” is the sublimation of an anti-social impulse, and the anal-retentive character might well be identified with Coover’s “anal-retentive anarchist with a bomb in his hand”: s/he who survives a repressive society by disrupting its order, and by transforming its Law into pleasurable fecal signs.

In this ironic negativity, in this reduction to a metabolic process, Lentricchia’s “radical subject” and “disappointed intellectual” seems to have been re-membered and brought back to life after a digestive nap; social reality has been redeemed from Debord’s consumer conformism, Jameson’s schizophrenia, and Habermas’s indifference.

“But,” the fairy-tale reads, “there’s always a ‘but’”. . . . Like Barthelme’s “angel,” my reader might be overtaken, at this point, by some fundamental questions (the question of angels in postmodern discourse has a considerable history, from Barthelme to Wim Wenders): Is redemption a mere narrative practice? Is the sublimation of the subject a mere narrative freedom resulting from the disruption of notions such as “essence,” arche, and “representation”? Furthermore: what kind of hopes can we draw from a narrative that resolves any signification to excrementality? Will digestion resist the inevitable commodification of our lives? Will we prevent society from reducing our selves to excremental left-overs? Henry Kariel, in The Desperate Politics of Postmodernism, woefully remarks that “we resist . . . by telling a story, by producing narratives that elaborately depict the drift of events as the sublime unfolding of the inevitable” (117). But what besides these stories and ephemeral resistance? What changes in “real life,” or in the real life of our postmodern subjectivities–those wonderful entelechies of creation? However puzzling the term “real” may sound in the context of a postmodern condition, the doubt cannot be repressed; the angel, unaccustomed to doubt, falls into despair: “Redemption is a fucking fiction anyway,” Gravity’s Rainbow admonishes us; “It’s all shit anyway,” Coover’s forest resounds. Maybe Cornelius Castoriadis is right in his jeremiad on “Post-Modernism as Generalized Conformism”: even this allegory of the postmodern subject as excremental practice may be the, albeit sublime, manifestation of “the pathetic inability of the epoch to conceive of itself as something positive” (14). Moreover, as Yudice admonishes, it is difficult to discern any political relevance–if not Coover’s anal-retentive “anarchism”–in these narratives of subjective redemption:

The aesthetics accompanying current analyses of eating disorders tend to celebrate the individual body, thus not posing any challenge to the Right or Liberalism. We need an aesthetics that instills the values of the social body.("Transcendent Body" par. 36)

Undoubtedly, angels should start looking forward for a more “concrete” strategy of survival, a radical praxis that does not act only in the sacred wood of literary theory and in the groves of subjectivity, but also in the doomed world of production. Until then, postmodern theory and narrative will play the role of praxis while praxis has no more role to play.

Today that postmodernism, as Hassan pontificates (in Selves At Risk) is at its dusk–or is it an ironic dusk preparing for another rebirth? Today that postmodernism seems on the verge of its ultimate exhaustion, it is likely that we should surrender to the ultimate impossibility of reconstituting radical politics according to excremental practices. Probably, the postmodern sublime is today an untenable strategy even for real subjects’s survival. Linda Hutcheon, among many, advocates the necessity of going beyond postmodernism, of “using” it to “exceed” it: “Postmodernism manipulates, but does not . . . (re)construct the structures of subjectivity . . . [we] may use postmodern strategies of parodic inscription and subversion in order to initiate the deconstructive first step, but [we] do not stop there” Politics 168; emphasis mine). Postmodernism is dead! Long live postmodernism! (But isn’t there a sense of deja vu in Hutcheon’s forest? What is this initiation about?). Today, failure faced, one feels that new doors must be open, new strategies found, new steps taken, new paths trodden. Let us finally digest postmodernism!

. . . With a sense of deep elegy, a feeling of nausea and an unbearable burden in my constipated stomach, I conclude this paper with Robert Coover, postmodern Virgil, with whom my own quest begun:

THIS ACT IS CONCLUDED THE MANAGEMENT REGRETS THERE WILL BE NO REFUND.(Pricksongs 256)

Notes

1. See Max F. Schulz, Radical Sophistication, esp. 198 ff.

2. See Franco La Polla, Un posto nella mente: il nuovo romanzo americano.

3. Frank Lentricchia, Ariel and the Police: Michel Foucault, William James, Wallace Stevens (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1988), 96-97; on the notion of postmodernism as “aesthetic of self-formation” see also George Yudice, “Marginality and the Ethics of Survival.”

4. Robert Coover, “Interview with Larry McCaffery,” 68. In a slip of the tongue Coover seems to echo Sigmund Freud: Life, as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings to us too many pains, disappointments, and impossible tasks. In order to bear it we cannot dispense with palliative measures. “We cannot do with auxiliary constructions,” Theodor Fontane tells us. . . . But one can do more than that; one can try to re-create the world, to build up in its stead another world in which its most unbearable features are eliminated and replaced by others…. (Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents 22 and 28)

5. Robert Coover, “Aesop’s Forest” 82; see also Hassan’s metaphorization of postmodernism in the terms of the Orpheus’s myth, in The Dismemberment of Orpheus.

6. Coover’s active participation in Aesop’s lynching cannot pass unnoticed in the shift from “They’ll be here soon,” (75), referring to the Delphians, to the final “We set him [Aesop] on his bendy legs and stepped back, blocking any possible escape” (81).

7. On the centrality of Bentham’s notion of “necessary fiction” in American narrative, see Guido Carboni, La finzione necessaria; see also Fred Pfeil, Another Tale to Tell.

8. Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior: Memories of a Girlhood among Ghosts (New York: Vintage, 1989), 88 and 90. For the symbology of the ghosts as essence of patriarchy, see Sidonie Smith, “Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior: Filiality and Woman’s Autobiographical Storytelling.” Notably within feminism, “big eating” seems to counteract what Kim Chernin has called “the tyranny of slenderness” imposed on women by patriarchy; on this issue, see Kim Chernin, The Obsession. Reflections on the Tyranny of Slenderness, and Susan Bordo, “Reading the Slender Body.”

9. Jean Baudrillard, “The Obese,” Fatal Strategies; on the way food industry may re-code gastronomic excess into consumerism, see Warren Belasaco, Appetite for Change: How the Counterculture Took On the Food Industry. 1966-1988.

10. In postmodern narrative, “[c]haracters become the passive receptors of phenomena from outside; they become all ears, listening to the sounds of voices, noises from the street, literary parodies and emulations, music . . . compulsion to repeat” (Poirier 9); anticipating for a moment, I would like to paraphrase Lacan, in order to individuate in the “repetition compulsion” an ironic (“reversal”) mode of affirmation of the subject in history but as difference from history: [the repetition compulsion] has in view nothing less than the historizing temporality of the experience of transference, so does the death instinct essentially express the limit of the historical function of the subject. This limit is death–not as an eventual coming-to-term of the life of the individual, nor as the empirical certainty of the subject, but, as Heidegger’s formula puts it, as that “possibility which is one’s ownmost, unconditional, unsupersedable, certain and as such indeterminable (unberholbare)” . . . This limit represents the past in its real form, that is to say, not the physical past whose existence is abolished, nor the epic past as it has become perfected in the work of memory, nor the historic past in which man finds the guarantor of his future, but the past which reveals itself reversed in repetition. (“The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis” in Ecrits 103; emphasis mine).

11. Bove, Destructive Poetics 37. Examples of this break with genealogy: the abortion at the beginning of Kathy Acker’s Don Quixote; the illegitimate child at the beginning of Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior.

12. References are to Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement 90-94.

13. See Hayden White, “The Politics of Historical Interpretation: Discipline and Desublimation.”

14. Charles Altieri, in “From Symbolist Thought to Immanence,” stresses the importance of Keats’s notion of “negative capability” in the context of American postmodern poetics; he traces a genealogy from Keats to Olson.

15. Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution, 294-295; another exemplary case of the psychoanalytic turn of Marxism into “Marxist Humanism” is certainly Erich Fromm, Marx’s concept of Man.

16. Jorge Luis Borges, “Kafka and his Precursors,” 201; Borges’s own emphasis. Also Tony Tanner: “[postmodern writers suggest that] the plots men see may be their own inventions” City of Words 156).

17. Charles Altieri, “From Symbolist Thought to Immanence”; but is this idea of self-as-process a novelty of postmodernism? Identity as a process of self-creation is, after all, a Jungian idea. James Olney confirms: “Like the elements, individual man never is but is always becoming: his self, as C.J. Jung will say some twenty-five hundred years after Heraclitus–nor did man change much in the interim–is a process rather than a settled state of being” (James Olney, Metaphors of Self 27). And so, postmodernism is once again repeating the old, isn’t it? And yet, John Paul Russo comments on Olney’s passage, “[i]t is hard to reconcile the two sides of this sentence: on one hand man is ‘always becoming.’ On the other, man has not changed ‘much’ in two and a half millennia” (John Paul Russo, “The Disappearance of the Self” 22).

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- Poirier, Richard. The Performing Self. New York: Oxford UP, 1971.
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- Polla, Franco La. Un posto nella mente: il nuovo romanzo americano (1962-1982). Ravenna: Longo, 1983.
- Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity’s Rainbow. Harmandsworth: Penguin, 1987.
- Roszack, Theodor. “The Dialectics of Liberation: Herbert Marcuse and Norman Brown.” The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and its Youthful Opposition. New York: Doubleday, 1969.
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- Schulz, Max F. Radical Sophistication: Status in Contemporary Jewish-American Novelists. Athens: Ohio UP, 1969.
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September 25, 2013

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                  ESSAYS ON POSTMODERN CULTURE

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Plus: Lagowski, Narojek, Szszkowska, Buchowski, and others.

Please begin my _CR_ subscription:

___ $12/year (3 issues)

___ $18/two years (6 issues)

(Add $4.50 per year for mailing outside the US)

Please send me the special issue:

___ _Poland: From Real Socialism to Democracy_

Name____________________________________________

Address_________________________________________

City____________________________________________

State/County____________________________________

Zip_____________________________________________

Please make your check payable to _The Centennial Review_.  Mail
to:

_The Centennial Review_
312 Linton Hall
Michigan State University
East Lansing MI  48824-1044

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

_College Literature_
A Triannual Literary Journal for the Classroom

Edited by Kostas Myrsiades

A triannual journal of scholarly criticism dedicated to serving
the needs of College/University teachers by providing them with
access to innovative ways of studying and teaching new bodies of
literature and experiencing old literature in new ways.

"_College Literature_ has made itself in a short time one of the
leading journals in the field, important reading for anyone
teaching literature to college students."
     J. Hillis Miller
     University of CA, Irvine

"Congratulations on some extremely important work; you certainly
seem attuned to what is both valuable and relevant."
     Terry Eagleton
     Oxford University

"In one bold stroke you seem to have turned _College Literature_
into one of the things everyone will want to read."
     Cary Nelson

"My sense is that _College Literature_ will have substantial
influence in the field of literacy and cultural studies."
     Henry A. Giroux

"A journal one must consult to keep tabs on cultural theory and
contemporary discourse, particularly in relation to pedagogy."
     Robert Con Davis

Forthcoming issues:

     Third World Women's Literature
     African American Writing
     Cross-Cultural Poetics

Subscription Rates:      US                  Foreign
         Individual      $24.00/year         $29.00/year
         Institutional:  $48.00/year         $53.00/year

Send prepaid orders to:

_College Literature_
Main 544
West Chester University
West Chester, PA 19383
(215)436-2901 / (fax) (215)436-3150

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

_CONTENTION_
Debates in Society, Culture, and Science

_Contention_ is:

"...simply a triumph from cover to cover."
                                   Fredrick 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:

Journals Division
Indiana University Press
601 N. Morton
Bloomington IN  47104
 ph: (812) 855-9449
fax: (812) 855-7931

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

_Differences_
A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies

QUEER THEORY: LESBIAN AND GAY SEXUALITIES
(Volume 3, Number 2)
Edited by Teresa de Lauretis

Teresa de Lauretis: _Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities
                     An Introduction_
Sue Ellen Case:     _Tracking the Vampire_
Samuel R. Delany:   _Street Talk/Straight Talk_
Elizabeth A. Grosz: _Lesbian Fetishism?_
Jeniffer Terry:     _Theorizing Deviant Historiography_
Thomas Almaguer:    _Chicano Men: A Cartography of Homosexual
                     Identity and Behavior_
Ekua Omosupe:  _Black/Lesbian/Bulldagger_
Earl Jackson, Jr.: _Scandalous Subjects: Robert Gluck's
                     Embodied Narratives_
Julia Creet:        _Daughter of the Movement: The
                     Psychodynamics of Lesbian S/M Fantasy_

THE PHALLUS ISSUE
(Volume 4, Number 1)
Edited by Naomi Schor and Elizabeth Weed

Maria Torok:        _The Meaning of "Penis Envy" in Women (1963)_
Jean-Joseph Goux:   _The Phallus: Masculine Identity and the
                     "Exchange of Women"_
Parveen Adams:      _Waiving the Phallus_
Kaja Silverman:     _The Lacanian Phallus_
Charles Bernheimer: _Penile Reference in Phallic Theory_
Judith Butler:      _The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological
                     Imaginary_
Jonathan Goldberg: _Recalling Totalities: The Mirrored Stages
                     of Arnold Schwarzenegger_

Emily Apter:        _Female Trouble in the Colonial Harem_

Single Issues: $12.95 individuals
                $25.00 institutions
                ($1.75 each postage)

Subscriptions (3 issues): $28.00 individuals
                           $48.00 institutions
                           ($10.00 foreign surface postage)

Send orders to:

Journals Division
Indiana University Press
601 N Morton
Bloomington IN  47404
 ph: (812) 855-9449
fax: (812) 855-7931

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

_DISCOURSE_

Volume 15, Number 1

SPECIAL ISSUE

FLAUNTING IT: LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

Kathryn Baker:  Delinquent Desire: Race, Sex, and Ritual in
                Reform Schools for Girls

Terralee Bensinger: Lesbian Pornography: The Re-Making of (a)
                    Community

Scott Bravmann: Investigating Queer Fictions of the Past:        
       Identities, Differences, and Lesbian and Gay 
       Historical Self-Representations

Sarah Chinn and Kris Franklin: "I am What I Am" (Or Am I?):
      Making and Unmaking of Lesbian and Gay Identity in _High
      Tech Boys

Greg Mullins:  Nudes, Prudes, and Pigmies: The Desirability of
               Disavowal in _Physical Culture Magazine_

JoAnn Pavletich:  Muscling the Mainstream: Lesbian Murder
                  Mysteries and Fantasies of Justice

David Pendelton:  Obscene Allegories: Narrative Structures in
                  Gay Male Porn

Thomas Piontek:  Applied Metaphors: AIDS and Literature

June L. Reich:  The Traffic in Dildoes: The Phallus as Camp and
                the Revenge of the Genderfuck

Single Issues: $12.95 individuals
               $25.00 institutions
               ($1.75 each postage)

Subscriptions (3 issues): $25.00 individuals
                          $50.00 institutions
                          ($10.00 foreign surface postage)

Send orders to:

Journals Division
Indiana University Press
601 N Morton
Bloomington IN  47404
 ph: (812) 855-9449
fax: (812) 855-7931

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

_The Electronic Journal on Virtual Culture_

We are very pleased by the great interest in the _Electronic
Journal on Virtual Culture_.  There are already more than 1,280
people subscribed.

Our first issue was distributed in March 1993.  The future looks
very interesting.  Editors are working on Special Issues on
education, law, qualitative research, and dynamics in virtual
culture.

The _Electronic Journal on Virtual Culture_  (EJVC) is a refereed
scholarly journal that fosters, encourages, advances and
communicates scholarly thought on virtual culture.  Virtual
culture is computer-mediated experience, behavior, action,
interaction and thought, including electronic conferences,
electronic journals, networked information systems, the
construction and visualization of models of reality, and global
connectivity.

EJVC is published monthly.  Some parts may be distributed at
different times during the month or published only occasionally
(e.g. CyberSpace Monitor).  If you would be interested in writing
a column on some general topic area in the Virtual Culture (e.g.
an advice column for questions about etiquette, technology, etc.
?) or have an article to submit or would be interested in editing
a special issue contact Ermel Stepp Editor-in-Chief of Diane
Kovacs Co-Editor at the e-mail addresses listed below. You can
retrieve the file EJVC AUTHORS via anonymous ftp to
byrd.mu.wvnet.edu (pub/ejvc) or via e-mail to listserv@kentvm or
listserv@kentvm.kent.edu

Cordially,

Ermel Stepp, Marshall University, Editor-in-Chief
MO34050@Marshall.wvnet.edu
Diane (Di) Kovacs, Kent State University, Co-Editor
DKOVACS@Kentvm.Kent.edu

11) -------------------------------------------------------------

_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.

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

   _GENDERS_ is published triannually in Spring, Fall, Winter
        Single Copy rates: Individual $9, Institution $14
                  Foreign postage, add $2/copy
       Subscription rates: Individual $24, Institution $40
             Foreign postage, add $5.50/subscription

Send orders to:

University of Texas
Box 7819
Austin TX  78713

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

M/E/A/N/I/N/G

A Journal of Contemporary Art Issues

M/E/A/N/I/N/G, an artist-run journal of contemporary art, is a
fresh, lively, contentious, and provocative forum for new ideas
in the arts.

M/E/A/N/I/N/G is published twice a year in the fall and spring.
It is edited by Susan Bee and Mira Schor.

M/E/A/N/I/N/G #13 is a vivid mix of writings by artists and art
historians.  Curtis Mitchell's "Working the Park" considers the
sublime and the abject through the travails of an installation
artist's efforts at public sculpture; Jordan Crandall's
"Transactional Space" speaks of new systems of art communication
and production at the limits of information technology; Jo Anna
Isaak sheds new light on colonialist discourse in Matisse's "The
Comfy Chair"; painting illiteracy is considered in Mira Schor's
"Course Proposal;" Daryl Chin's "Those Little White Lies"
critiques art history as an instrument of capitalism; an artist's
spiritual sources are explored in David Reed's "Media Baptisms."

Also in this issue: Definitions of "Art" by Stewart Buettner;
Book and video reviews by Barry Schwabsky, Susan Bee, Johanna
Drucker, Stephen O'Leary Harvey, and Robert C. Morgan.

>From issue #13, Spring 1993

"The sublime consists of a major dose of entropy, with the
picturesque as only a condiment."
                                             -- Curtis Mitchell

"In all likelihood, what Matisse actually saw of a harem was what
any tourist would see -- the high outer walls of the compound."
                                             -- Jo Anna Isaak

"If 'good' painting is suspect and unseen, then it might help to
look at some bad painting just as closely."
                                             -- Mira Schor

"The artwork becomes a Marxist Christmas tree on which are hung
gaudy baubles of 'late capitalism.'"
                                             -- Daryl Chin

"Rationality or belief don't work well now for painting.
Suspension--doubt, works best."
                                             -- David Reed

Subscriptions for

2 ISSUES (1 YEAR):
$12 for individuals:
$20 for institutions

4 ISSUES (2 YEARS):
$24 for individuals;
$40 for institutions

* Foreign subscribers please add $10 per year for shipping abroad
and to Canada: $5

* Foreign subscribers please pay by international money order in
U.S. dollars.

All checks should be made payable to Mira Schor

Send all subscriptions to:

Mira Schor
60 Lispenard Street
New York, NY 10013

Limited supply of back issues available at $6 each, contact Mira
Schor for information.

Distributed with the Segue Foundation and the Solo Foundation

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

_Minnesota Review_

Tell your friends!  Tell your librarians!
The new _Minnesota Review_'s coming to town!

**now under new management**

Fall 1992 issue (n.s. 39): "PC WARS"

includes essays by:

* Richard Ohmann              "On PC and related matters"
* Michael Berube              "Exigencies of Value"
* Barry Sarchett              "Russell Jacoby, Anti-
                               Professionalism, and the Politics
                               of Cultural Nostalgia"
* Michael Sprinkler           "The War Against Theory"
* Balance Chow                "Liberal Education Left and Right"

Spring 1993 issue (n.s. 40): "THE POLITICS OF AIDS"
Poetry, Fiction, Interviews, Essays.

topics include: 

* Queer Theory and activism.
* Public image of AIDS.
* Politics of medical research.
* Health care policies.

Subscriptions are $10 a year (two issues), $20
institutions/overseas.  The new _Minnesota Review_ is published
biannually and originates from East Carolina University beginning
with the Fall 1992 special issue.

Send all queries, comments, suggestions, submissions, and
subscriptions to: 

Jeffrey Williams, Editor 
_Minnesota Review_ 
Department of English
East Carolina University 
Greenville, NC  27858-4353

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

NOMAD
      An Interdisciplinary Journal of
                       The Humanities,
                                 Arts,
                         And Sciences

**************************************************************
Manuscript submissions wanted in all interdisciplinary fields!

Nomad is a forum for those texts that explore or examine the
undefined regions among critical theory, visual arts, and
writing.  It is a bi-annual, not-for-profit, independent
publication for provocative cross-disciplinary work of all
cultural types, such as intermedia artwork, metatheory, and
experimental writing, as well as literary, theoretical,
political, and popular writing.  While our editorial staff
is comprized of artists and academics in a variety of
disciplines, NOMAD strives to operate in a space outside of
mainstream academic discourse and without institutional
funding or controls.

Manuscripts should not exceed fifteen pages (exclusive of
references); any form is acceptable.  If possible, please
submit manuscripts on 3.5" Macintosh disks, in either
MicroSoft Word or MacWrite II format, or by E-mail.  Each
manuscript submitted on disk must be accompanied by a paper
copy. Otherwise, please send two copies of each manuscript.
Artwork submitted must be no larger than 8 1/2" x 11", and
in black and white.  PICT, TIFF, GIF, and JPEG files on
3.5" Macintosh disks are acceptable, if accompanied by a
paper copy (or via E-mail, bin-hexed or uuencoded).  All
artwork must be camera-ready.  Submissions by regular mail
should include a SASE with sufficient postage attached if
return is desired.  Diskettes should be shipped in standard
diskette mailing packages.

  Subscriptions: $9 per year (2 issues)
  Send Manuscripts and Inquiries to:
  NOMAD, c/o
  Mike Smith
  406 Williams Hall
  Florida State University
  Tallahassee, Florida, 32306
  (msmith@garnet.acns.fsu.edu)

*****************************************************************
 "In NOMAD, the rarest combinations of interests are treated with
  respect and exposed to the eyes of those who can most
  appreciate them."
*****************************************************************

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

_October_
Art | Theory | Criticism | Politics

The MIT Press

Edited by: Rosalind Kraus
            Annette Michelson
            Yve-Alain Bois
            Benjamin H.D. Buchloh
            Hal Foster
            Denis Hollier
            John Rajchman

                              "OCTOBER, the 15-year old
                              quarterly of social and cultural
                              theory, has always seemed special.
                              Its nonprofit status, its cross-
                              disciplinary forays into film 
                              and psychoanalytic thinking, and
                              its unyielding commitment to 
                              history set it apart from the
                              glossy art magazines."
                                        --Village Voice

As the leading edge of arts criticism and theory today, _OCTOBER_
focuses on the contemporary arts and their various contexts of
interpretation.  Original, innovative, provocative, each issue
examines interrelationships between the arts and their critical
and social contexts.

Come join _OCTOBER_'s exploration of the most important issues in
contemporary culture.
Subscribe Today!

Published Quarterly ISSN 0162-2870.  Yearly Rates: Individual
$32.00; Institution $80.00; Student (copy of current ID required)
and Retired: $22.00.  Outside USA add $14.00 postage and
handling.  Canadians add additional 7% GST.  Prepayment is
required.  Send check payable to _OCTOBER_ drawn against a US
bank, MasterCard or VISA number to: MIT Press Journal / 55
Hayward Street / Cambridge, MA 02142-1399 / TEL: (617) 233-2889 /
FAX: (617) 258-6779 / E-Mail: journals-orders@mit.edu

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

_RIF/T_
E-Poetry Literary Journal

                              In all arts there is a physical
                              component . . .  We must expect
                              great innovations to transform the
                              entire technique of the arts.
                                                  --Paul Valery

This list was formed to serve as a vehicle for (1) distribution
of an interactive literary journal: _RIF/T_ and related exchange,
and (2) collection of any information related to contemporary
poetics.

_RIF/T provides a forum for poets that are conversant with the
media to explore the full potential of a true electronic journal.

Dynamic--not static, _RIF/T_ shifts and riffs with the diction of
"trad" poetry investigating a new, flexible, fluid poetry of
exchange.

Archives of e-poetry and related files are stored in the e-poetry
FILELIST.

To receive a list of files send the command 

INDEX e-poetry 

to: LISTSERV@UBVM or LISTSERV@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU as the first
line in the body of your mail message (not your Subject: line).

To subscribe to e-poetry, send the command

SUB e-poetry your name

to: LISTSERV@UBVM or LISTSERV@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU via mail
message (again, as the first line in the body of the mail, not
the Subject: line).  For example: SUB e-poetry John Doe

Owner: Ken Sherwood
v001pxfu@ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu

17) -------------------------------------------------------------

_SSCORE_
Social Science Computer Review

G. David Garson, Editor
Ronald Anderson, Co-editor

The official journal of the Social Science Computing Association,
_SSCORE_ provides a unique forum for social scientists to acquire
and share information on the research and teaching applications
of microcomputing.  Now, when you subscribe to _Social Science
Computer Review_, you automatically become a member of the Social
Science Computing Association.

Recent articles:

Social Impacts of Computing: Codes of Professional Ethics
Ronald Anderson

Teledemocracy and Political Science
William H. Dutton

Trends in the Use of Computers in Economics Teaching in the
United Kingdom
Guy Judge and Phil Hobbs

The Essentials of Scientific Visualization: Basic Techniques and
Common Problems
Steve E. Follin

Psychology: Keeping up with the State of the Art in Computing
Charles Huff

Computer Assistance in Qualitative Sociology
David R. Heise

Automating Analysis, Visualization, and Other Social Science
Research Tasks
Edwin H. Carpenter

From Mainframes to Micros: Computer Applications for
Anthropologists
Robert V. Kemper, Ronald K. Wetherington, and Michael Adler

Quarterly
Subscription prices: $48 individual, $80 institutions
Single Issue: $20
Please add $8 for postage outside the U.S.
Canadian residents add 7% GST

Duke University Press/ Journals Division / Box 90660 /Durham NC
27708

18) -------------------------------------------------------------

_Studies in Popular Culture_
Dennis Hall, editor.

_Studies in Popular Culture_, the journal of the Popular Culture
Association in the South and the American Culture Association in
the South, publishes articles on popular culture and American
culture however mediated: through film, literature, radio,
television, music, graphics, print, practices, associations,
events--any of the material or conceptual conditions of life. 
The journal enjoys a wide range of contributors from the United
States, Canada, France, Israel, and Australia, which include
distinguished anthropologists, sociologists, cultural
geographers, ethnomusicologists, historians, and scholars in mass
communications, philosophy, literature, and religion.

Please direct editorial queries to the editor: 
Dennis Hall 
Department of English 
University of Louisville
Louisville KY  40292
tel: (502) 588-6896/0509
Fax: (502) 588-5055
Bitnet: DRHALL01@ULKYVM
Internet: drhall01@ulkvm.louisville.edu

All manuscripts should be sent to the editor care of the English
Department, University of Louisville, Louisville, KY 40292. 
Please enclose two, double-spaced copies and a self-addressed
stamped envelope.  Black and White illustrations may accompany
the text.  Our preference is for essays that total, with notes
and bibliography, no more than twenty pages.  Documentation may
take the form appropriate for the discipline of the writer; the
current MLA stylesheet 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.

_Studies in Popular Culture_, is published semiannually and is
indexed in the _PMLA Annual Bibliography_.  All members of the
Association receive _Studies in Popular Culture_.  Yearly
membership is $15.00 (International: $20.00).  Write to the
Executive Secretary, Diane Calhoun-French, Academic Dean,
Jefferson Community College-SW, Louisville, KY 40272, for
membership, individual issues, back copies, or sets.  Volumes I-
XV are available for $225.00. 

19) ------------------------------------------------------------

_VIRUS 23_

For those brave souls looking to explore the Secret of Eris, you
may wish to check out _VIRUS 23_.

2 and 3 are even and odd,
2 and 3 are 5,
therefore 5 is even and odd.

_VIRUS 23_ is a codename for all Erisian literature

Don Webb
6304 Laird Dr.
Austin TX 78757
0004200716@mcimail.com

_VIRUS 23_ is the annual harcopy publication of A.D.o.S.A, the
Alberta Department of Spiritual Affairs.  

All issues are available at $7.00 ppd from:

_VIRUS 23_
Box 46
Red Deer, Alberta
Canada
T4N 5E7

Various chunks of _VIRUS 23_ can be found at Tim Oerting's
alt.cyberpunk ftp site (u.washington.edu, in
/public/alt.cyberpunk.  Check it out).

For more information online contact Darren Wershler-Henry:
grad3057@writer.yorku.ca

20)------------------------------------------------------------

ViViD Magazine

The first issue of ViViD Magazine is now available. ViViD is a 
hypertext magazine about experimental writing and creativity
in cyberspace. We are actively seeking contributions for
the next issue.

The magazine is presented in the colorful, graphics environment
of a Windows 3.1 Help File. You will need Windows 3.1 to read the
magazine.

The magazine will also be available via anonymous FTP at 
"ftp.gmu.edu", to obtain it:

                         ftp ftp.gmu.edu
username: anonymous
     password: (your email address)
     cd pub/library
     binary
     get VIVID1.ZIP

-----------------------------------------------------------------
For more information on ViViD, contact the editor, Justin McHale.
Internet address: jmchale@gmuvax.gmu.edu
-----------------------------------------------------------------

Issue 1 Features:

Articles:
       What is Cyberspace?
       What is Hypertext?
       Multiple Fiction and Multiple Worlds.

News items:
       "Matrix News," a section featuring news items, notices
        and reviews concerning cyberspace. 

       "Treasure of the Internet," a section which details       

        interesting sites and services on the Internet.

Experimental writing:
                    Poemtexts
                    Explodedview Texts

21) -------------------------------------------------------------

_Zines-L_

announcing a new list available from: listserv@uriacc

To subscribe to _Zines-L_ send a message to:
listserv@uriacc.uri.edu

on one line type:
SUBSCRIBE ZINES-L first name last name

22) -------------------------------------------------------------

             _Postmodern Culture_ announces PMC-MOO

PMC-MOO is a new service offered (free of charge) by _Postmodern
Culture_.  PMC-MOO is a real-time, text-based, virtual reality
environment in which you can interact with other subscribers of
the journal and participate in live conferences.  PMC-MOO will
also provide access to texts generated by _Postmodern Culture_
and by PMC-TALK, and it will provide the opportunity to
experience (or help to design) programs which simulate object-
lessons in postmodern theory.  PMC-MOO is based on the LambdaMOO
program, freeware by Pavel Curtis.

To connect to PMC-MOO, you *must* be on the internet.  If you
have an internet account, you can make a direct connection by
typing the command

telnet dewey.lib.ncsu.edu 7777

at your command prompt.  Once you've connected to the server, you
should receive onscreen instructions on how to log in to PMC-MOO.

If you do not receive these onscreen instructions, but instead
find yourself with a straight login: and password: prompt, it
means that your telnet program or interface is ignoring the 7777
at the end of the command given above, and you will need to ask
your local user-support people how to telnet to a specific port
number.  If you have the Emacs program on your system and would
like information about a customized program for PMC-MOO that uses
Emacs, contact pmc@unity.ncsu.edu by e-mail.

23) -------------------------------------------------------------

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

"RAIDS ON THE CONSCIOUS:
New Essays on Don DeLillo"

A special cluster for _Postmodern Culture_, Jan. 1994
******************************************************

   Since the early Seventies, Don DeLillo's work (fiction, 
drama, and journalism) has played an important role in the 
literature of what has gradually become known as the 
"postmodern condition."  DeLillo's novels and plays 
investigate the problem of subjectivity in an environment 
increasingly governed by, perhaps even constructed purely of 
information and its various modes of transmission.  Identity 
in DeLillo is dominated by a sense of anxiety concerning the 
formation of "self" from this patchwork of postmodern 
discourses, and is often further problematized by the 
lurking suspicion that there is no longer any stable 
referential framework behind the blizzard of signifiers; a 
suspicion that ideals, goals, and even individuality are 
categories as "empty" as poststructuralist theory tells us 
are the images, words, and digits with which we are 
surrounded; that identity is as arbitrary, illusory, and 
transient as the "sign."

   The breakdown of various Western master narratives 
which is often at the heart of DeLillo's novels--a 
breakdown discussed by, among others, Lyotard--contributes 
to this "vacuuming out" of substance.  The result is a 
"postnarrative" world where the acontextual, the enigmatic, 
the arbitrary and fundamentally anti-rational continually 
threaten to become the sole reality--as in Jorge Luis 
Borges' "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius."

   Furthermore, in DeLillo's works this cultural 
identity crisis often "bleeds" into the characters' private 
anxieties; in fact, the boundary between public and private 
is the barrier which DeLillo seems to believe the postmodern 
condition threatens to breach.  Some line has been crossed, 
and in DeLillo's work identity is now formed from the 
outside in, the product of a ceaseless anti-Cartesian 
barrage of decontextualized messages and undifferentiated 
signals from without.  The governance of this situation has 
devolved from powerful but recognizable individuals onto 
shadowy larger "bodies": corporations, intelligence 
agencies, the academy and, perhaps most importantly, 
terrorist organizations.  Beyond such barely tangible agents 
DeLillo posits a postmodern sublime, the force described in 
Libra as the "world inside the world."

   Papers are solicited which respond to these issues in 
DeLillo's work (fiction, drama, and journalism) for possible 
inclusion in a special issue (January, 1994) of the 
electronic journal Postmodern Culture, and in a hard cover 
edition to be published later in 1994 or in early 1995.  
Papers should address the problems of how literature and 
other forms of public language support and/or resist the 
construction of the postmodern relationship of author, text, 
and reader; how these identities and their relationships are 
maintained, thwarted, or altered through a concatenation of 
public spectacle, random violence, and decontextualized 
language; and how the control of a massively disoriented 
narrative (or former narrative) of and about these 
identities increasingly depends upon a variety of ill-
defined and vaguely sinister "postindividual" agencies.  
Comparative essays utilizing other authors, films, music and 
other forms of popular culture are welcomed.
   Abstracts (250-500 words) should arrive no later than 
Oct. 15th, and the *first* drafts of papers (15-30 pages) 
will be due no later than December 15th.  Inquiries, 
abstracts and rough drafts may be sent electronically to: 

Glen Scott Allen at e7e4all@toe.towson.edu, or
Stephen J. Bernstein at bernstein_s@crob.flint.umich.edu

or by regular mail to

Prof. Glen Scott Allen   or   Prof. Stephen J. Bernstein
English Dept.                 Dept. of English
Towson State University       University of Michigan-Flint
Towson, MD  21204             Flint, MI  48502

24) ------------------------------------------------------------

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
CALL FOR ARTICLES

EJVC: Electronic Journal of Virtual Culture

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Special Issue: Gender Issues in Computer Networking

Issue Editor: Leslie Reagan Shade
               McGill University
               Graduate Program in Communications
               czsl@musica.mcgill.ca; shade@well.sf.ca.us

EJVC is a new peer-reviewed electronic journal dedicated to
scholarly research and discussion of all aspects of computer-
mediated human experience, behavior, action, and interaction.

This special issue of the EJVC will be devoted to gender issues
in networking.  Despite the abundance of various private networks
and the meteoric growth of the Internet, this rapidly expanding
user base does not include an equal proportion of men and women. 
How can women become equally represented in the new "electronic
frontier" of cyberspace?  Issues to be discussed can include, but
are not limited to, the following: 

* Access issues--to hardware, software, and training.  What
     barriers do women face?  What are some success stories.

* How can women be given the technical expertise to become
     comfortable and versatile with computer networking?

* Interface design: can there be a feminist design?

* How can networking realize its potential as a feminist tool?

* How can women scholars exploit networking's technology?

* What information technology policies could be developed to
     ensure computer networking equity for women, as well as
     minorities?

* How does one define computer pornography and "offensive"
     material on the net?  Should it be allowed?

* How should sexual harassment on the net be treated?

* Are women-only groups necessary?

* How do women interact on MUDS and MOOs?

* What net resources exist for women?

Deadlines:     December 1, 1993 (submission of abstracts)
               April 1, 1994 (submission of contributions)

Abstracts will be reviewed by the issue editor for
appropriateness of content and overall balance of the issue as a
whole.  In turn, authors will then be invited to submit full-
length contributions, which will be peer-reviewed by the
journal's normal editorial process before final acceptance for
publication.  The issue editor encourages correspondence about
proposed contributions even before submission of an abstract.

Potential contributors may obtain a more detailed statement about
the focus and range of this special issue by sending email to the
issue editor with the subject line: EJVC Issue or by anonymous
ftp to byrd.mu.wvnet.edu, directory/pub/ejvc, get
ejvc.shade.call.

Further information about EJVC may be obtained by sending e-mail
to LISTSERV@KENTVM.BITNET or LISTSERV@KENTVM.KENT.EDU with one or
more of the following lines in the text:
SUBSCRIBE EJVC-L YourFirstname YourLastName
GET EJVC WELCOME
INDEX EJVC-L
Also, the file is available by anonymous ftp to byrd.mu.wvnet.edu
in the pub/ejvc directory.

25) ------------------------------------------------------------

*********************
Call for Submissions
*********************

_Hypertext Fiction and the Literary Artist_ is a research project
investigating the use of hypertext technology by creative
writers.

The project consists of evaluations of software and hardware,
critiques of traditional and computerized works, and a guide to
sites of publication.

We would like to request writers to submit their works for
review.  Publishers are requested to send descriptions of their
publications with subscription fees and submission formats.  We
are especially interested to hear from institutions which teach
creative writing for the hypertext format.

To avoid swamping our e-mail account, please limit messages to a
page or two in length.  Send works on disk (IBM or Mac) or
hardcopy to:

_Hypertext Fiction and the Literary Artist_
3 Westcott Upper
London, Ontario
N6C 3G6
E-mail: KEEPC@QUCD>QUEENSU.CA

26)------------------------------------------------------------

          THE JOURNAL OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE AND POPULAR CULTURE

                         CALL FOR PAPERS

Scholars are invited to submit manuscripts/reviews that
meet the following criteria:

ISSUES:  The Journal invites critical reviews of films,
          documentaries, plays, lyrics, and other related visual
          and performing arts.  The Journal also invites original
          manuscripts from all social scientific fields on the
          topic of popular culture and criminal justice.

SUBMISSION PROCEDURES: To submit material for the Journal,
          please subscribe to CJMOVIES through the listserv and a
          detailed guidelines statement will automatically
          follow.

To subscribe, send a message with the following command to

                       LISTSERV@ALBNYVM1:
          SUBSCRIBE CJMOVIES YourFirstName YourLastName

Manuscripts and inquiries should be addressed to: 
The Editors, 
Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture
SUNYCRJ@ALBNYVM1.BITNET
or SUNYCRJ@UACSC2.ALBANY.EDU

MANAGING EDITORS:
Sean Anderson and Greg Ungar 
Editors 
Journal of CriminalJustice and Popular Culture, 
School of Criminal Justice, SUNYA 135
Western Avenue Albany, NY 12222 

INTERNET:
SA1171@ALBNYVM1.BITNET or GU8810@uacsc1.albany.edu

LIST ADMINISTRATOR
Seth Rosner 
School of Criminal Justice, SUNYA
SR2602@uacsc1.albany.edu or SR2602@thor.albany.edu

27) -------------------------------------------------------------

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Call for Papers
_PSYCHE: an interdisciplinary
journal of research on consciousness_
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

You are invited to submit papers for publication in the inaugural
issue of _PSYCHE: an interdisciplinary journal of research on
consciousness_ (ISSN: 1039-723X).

_PSYCHE_ is a refereed electronic journal dedicated to supporting
the interdisciplinary exploration of the nature of consciousness
and its relation to the brain.  _PSYCHE_ publishes material
relevant to that exploration form the perspectives afforded by
the disciplines of Cognitive Science, Philosophy, Psychology,
Neuroscience, Artificial Intelligence, and Anthropology. 
Interdisciplinary discussions are particularly encouraged. 
_PSYCHE_ publishes a large variety of articles and reports for a
diverse academic audience four times per year.  As an electronic
journal, the usual space limitations of print journals do not
apply; however, the editors request that potential authors do not
attempt to abuse the medium.  _PSYCHE_ also publishes a hardcopy
version simultaneously with the electronic version.  Long
articles published in the electronic format may be abbreviated,
synopsized, or eliminated form the hardcopy version.

Types of Articles:

The journal publishes from time to time all of the following
varieties of articles.  Many of these (as indicated below) are
peer reviewed; all articles are reviewed by editorial staff.

Research Articles reporting original research by author(s).
Articles may be either purely theoretical or experimental or some
combination of the two.  Articles of special interest
occasionally will be followed by a selection of peer
commentaries.  Peer Reviewed.

Survey Articles reporting on the state of the art research in
particular areas.  These may be done in the form of a literature
review or annotated bibliography.  More ambitious surveys will be
peer reviewed.  

Discussion Notes critiques of previous research.  Peer Reviewed.

Tutorials introducing a subject area relevant to the study of
consciousness to non-specialists.

Letters providing and informal forum for expressing opinions on
editorial policy or upon material previously published in
_PSYCHE_.  Screened by editorial staff.

Abstracts summarizing the contents of recently published journal
articles, books, and conference proceedings.

Book Reviews which indicate the contents of recent books and
evaluate their merits as contributions to research and/or as
textbooks.

Announcements of forthcoming conferences, paper submission
deadlines, etc.

Advertisements of immediate interest to our audience will be
published: available grants; positions; journal contents;
proposals for joint research; etc.

Notes for Authors

Unsolicited submissions of original works within any of the above
categories are welcome.  Prospective authors should send articles
directly to the executive editor.  Submissions should be in a
single copy if submitted electronically of four (4) copies if
submitted by mail.

Submitted matter should be preceded by: the author's name;
address; affiliation; telephone number; electronic mail address. 
Any submission to be peer reviewed should be preceded by a 100-
200 word abstract as well.  Note that peer review will be blind,
meaning that the prefatory material will not be made available to
the referees.  In the event that an article needs to be shortened
for publication in the print version of _PSYCHE_, the author will
be responsible for making any alterations requested by the
editors.

Any figures required should be designed in screen-readable ASCII.

If that cannot be arranged, figures should be submitted as
separate postscript files so that they can be printed out by
readers locally.

Authors of accepted articles assign to _PSYCHE_ the right to
publish the text both electronically and as printed matter and to
make it available permanently in an electronic archive.  Authors
will, however, retain copyright to their articles and may
republish them in any forum so long as they clearly acknowledge
_PSYCHE_ as the original source of publication.

Subscriptions

Subscriptions to the electronic version of _PSYCHE_ may be
initiated by sending the one-line command, SUBSCRIBE PSYCHE-L
Firstname Lastname, in the body on an electronic mail message to:

LISTSERV@NKI.BITNET

28) -------------------------------------------------------------

*************************************
Announcement and Call for Submissions
_Postmodern Culture_
*************************************

_Postmodern Culture_
A SUNY Press Series

Series Editor: Joseph Natoli
Editor:         Carola Sautter

Center for Integrative Studies, Arts and Humanities
Michigan State University

We invite submissions of short book manuscripts that present a
postmodern crosscutting of contemporary headlines--green politics
to Jeffrey Dahmer, Rap Music to Columbus, the Presidential
campaign to Rodney King--and academic discourses from art and
literature to politics and history, sociology and science to
women's studies, form computer studies to cultural studies.

This series is designed to detour us off modernity's yet-to-be-
completed North-South Superhighway to Truth and onto
postmodernism's "forking paths" crisscrossing high and low
culture, texts and life-worlds, selves and sign systems, business
and academy, page and screen, "our" narrative and "theirs,"
formula and contingency, present and past, art and discourse,
analysis and activism, grand narratives and dissident narratives,
truths and parodies of truths.

By developing a postmodern conversation about a world that has
overspilled its modernist framing, this series intends to link
our present ungraspable "balkanization" of all thoughts and
events with the means to narrate and then re-narrate them. 
Modernity's "puzzle world" to be "unified" and "solved" becomes
postmodernism's multiple worlds to be represented within the
difficult and diverse wholeness that their own multiplicity and
diversity shapes and then re-shapes.

Accordingly, manuscripts should display a "postmodernist style"
that moves easily and laterally across public as well as academic
spheres, "inscribes" within as well as "scribes" against realist
and modernist modes, and strives to be readable-across-multiple-
narratives and "culturally relative" rather than "foundational."

Inquiries, proposals, and manuscripts should be addressed to:

Joseph Natoli
Series Editor
20676jpn@msu.edu

or 

Carola Sautter
Editor
SUNY Press
SUNY Plaza
Albany, NY 12246-0001

29) -------------------------------------------------------------

                             NSC'93

              The Network Services Conference 1993
               Warsaw, Poland, 12-14 October 1993

Invitation

Networking in the academic and research environment has evolved
into an important tool for researchers in all disciplines.  High
quality network services and tools are essential parts of the
research infrastructure.

Building on the success of the first Network Services Conference
in Pisa, Italy, NSC'93 will focus on the issue of providing
services  to customers, with special attention paid to the 
actual usage of the various tools available.  We will address the
impact of today's global tools on service development and
support, the changing function of traditional tools and services
(such as archives), new services (such as multi-media 
communications), the future role of the library and the
effects of commercialization of networks and network services.
Customer support at the institutional and campus level, and the 
role of support in accessing global services, will also be
covered.

Talks, tutorials, demonstrations and other conference activities
will address the needs of the research, academic, educational,
governmental, industrial, and commercial network communities.

Tutorial sessions on specific network services have been
integrated into the regular conference program.  Practical issues
in the use of these services and tools will be covered in detail
by experts.  Throughout the conference, participants will be able

to get hands-on experience in the well-equipped demonstration
area.

NSC'93 is being organized by EARN in conjunction with EUnet,
NORDUnet, RARE, and RIPE.

To get a preliminary program and registration form, send e-mail
to:

   LISTSERV@FRORS12.BITNET     (or LISTSERV@FRORS12.CIRCE.FR)

In the body of the message, write:  GET NSC93 ANN2

David Sitman
EARN

30) ----------------------------------------------------------   

_FEMISA_

FEMISA@mach1.wlu.ca

_FEMISA_ is conceived as a list where those who work on or think
about feminism, gender, women and international relations, world
politics, international political economy, or global politics,
can communicate.  

Formally, _FEMISA_ was established to help those members of the
Feminist Theory and Gender Studies Section of the _International
Studies Association_ keep in touch.  More generally, I hope that
_FEMISA_ can be a network where we share information in the area
of feminism or gender and international studies about
publications or articles, course outlines, questions about
sources or job opportunities, information about conferences or
upcoming events, or proposed panels and information related to
the _International Studies Association_.

To subscribe: send one line message in the BODY of mail-message

                      sub femisa your name

to: listserv@mach1.wlu.ca

To unsub send the one line message

                          unsub femisa

to: listserv@mach1.wlu.ca

I look forward to hearing suggestions and comments from you.

Owner: Deborah Stienstra  stienstr@uwpg02.uwinnipeg.ca
        Department of Political Science
        University of Winnipeg

31)-------------------------------------------------------------

_HOLOCAUS: Holocaust list_

HOLOCAUS on LISTSERV@UICVM.BITNET
         or LISTSERV@UICVM.UIC.EDU

HOLOCAUS@uicvm has become part of the stable of electronic mail
discussion groups ("lists") at the University of Illinois,
Chicago.  It is sponsored by the University's History Department
and its Jewish Studies Program.

To subscribe to HOLOCAUS, you need and Internet or Bitnet
computer account.  From that account, send this message to
LISTSERV@UICVM.BITNET or LISTSERV@uicvm.uic.edu:

                 SUB HOLOCAUS Firstname Surname

Use your own Firstname and Lastname.  You will be automatically
added.  You can read all the mail, and send your own postings to
everyone on the list (We have about 100 subscribers around the
world right now).

Owner: JimMott@spss.com

The HOLOCAUS policies are:

1.   The coverage of the list will include the Holocaust itself,
     and closely related topics like anti-Semitism, and Jewish
     history in the 1930's and 1940's, as well as related themes
     in the history of WW2, Germany, and international diplomacy.

2.   We are especially interested in reaching college teachers of
     history who already have, or plan to teach courses on the
     Holocaust.  In 1991-92, there were 265 college faculty in
     the US and Canada teaching courses on the Holocaust (154 in
     History departments, 67 in Religion, and 46 in Literature). 
     An even larger number of professors teach units on the
     Holocaust in courses on Jewish history (taught by 273
     faculty) and World War II (taught by 373), not to mention
     many other possible courses.  Most of these professors own
     PC's, but do not use them for e-mail.  We hope our list will
     be one inducement to go on line.  _HOLOCAUS_ will therefore
     actively solicit syllabi, reading lists, termpaper guides,
     ideas on films and slides, and tips and comments that will
     be of use to the teacher who wants to add a single lecture,
     or an entire course.  

3.   H-Net is now setting up an international board of editors to
     guide _HOLOCAUS_ policy and to help stimulate contributions.

4.   _HOLOCAUS_ is moderated by Jim Mott (JimMott@spss.com), a
     PhD in History.  The moderator will solicit postings (by e-
     mail, phone and even by US mail), will assist people in
     subscribing and setting up options, will handle routine
     inquiries, and will consolidate some postings.  The
     moderator will also solicit and post newsletter type
     information (calls for conferences, for example, or listings
     of sessions at conventions).  It may prove feasible to
     commission book and article reviews, and to post book
     announcements from publishers.  Anyone with suggestions
     about what _HOLOCAUS_ can and might do is invited to send in
     the ideas.

5.   The tone and target audience will be scholarly, and academic
     standards and styles will prevail.  _HOLOCAUS_ is affiliated
     with the _International History Network_.

6.   _HOLOCAUS_ is a part of H-Net, a project run by computer-
     oriented historians at the U of Illinois.  We see moderated
     e-mail lists as a new mode of scholarly communication; they
     have enormous potential for putting in touch historians from
     across the world.  Our first list on urban history, _H-
     URBAN@UICVM_, recently started up with Wendy Plotkin as
     moderator.  _H-WOMEN_ is in the works, with discussions
     underway about other possibilities like Ethnic, Labor, and
     US South.  We are helping our campus Jewish Studies program
     set up _JSTUDY_ (restricted to the U of Illinois Chicago
     campus, for now), and are considering the creation of _H-
     JEWISH_, also aimed at academics, but covering the full     
     range of scholarship on Jewish history.  If you are
     interested in any of these projects, please e-write Richard
     Jensen, for we are now (as of late April) in a critical
     planning stage.

7.   H-Net has an ambitious plan for training historians across
     the country in more effective use of electronic
     communications.  Details of the H-Net plan are available on
     request from Richard Jensen, the director, at:

                         campbelld@apsu  

or

                      u08946@uicvm.uic.edu

32) -------------------------------------------------------------

NewJour-L@e-math.ams.org

NewJour-L aims to accomplish two objectives; it is both a list
and a project.

   FIRST:

   NewJour-L is the place to *announce* your own (or to forward
information about others') newly planned, newly issued, or
revised *ELECTRONIC NETWORKED* journal or newsletter.  It is
specially dedicated for those who wish to share information in
the planning, gleam-in-the-eye stage or at a more mature stage of
publication development and availability.

   It is also the place to announce availability of paper
journals and newsletters as they become available on electronic
networks.  Scholarly discussion lists *which regularly and
continuously maintain supporting files of substantive articles or
preprints* may also be reported, for those journal-like sections.

   We hope that those who see announcements on Bitnet, Internet,
Usenet or other media will forward them to NewJour-L, but this
does run a significant risk of boring subscribers with a number
of duplicate messages.  Therefore, NewJour-L IS filtered through
a moderator to eliminate this type of duplication.

   It does not attempt to cover areas that are already covered by
other lists.  For example, sources like NEW-LIST describe new
discussion lists;  ARACHNET deals with social and cultural issues
of e-publishing;  VPIEJ-L handles many matters related to
electronic publishing of journals.  SERIALST discusses the
technical aspects of all kinds of serials.  You should continue
to subscribe to these as you have done before, and contribute to
them.

   SECOND:

   NewJour-L represents an identification and road-mapping
project for electronic journals and newsletters, begun by Michael
Strangelove, University of Ottawa.  NewJour-L will expand and
continue that work.

   As new publications are reported, a NewJour-L support group
will develop the following services -- planning is underway & we
ask that anyone who would like to participate as below, let us
know:

   -A worksheet will be sent to the editors of the new
     e-publication for completion.  This will provide detailed
     descriptions about bibliographic, content, and access
     characteristics.

   -An original cataloguing record will be created.

   -The fully catalogued title will be reported to national
     utilities and other appropriate sites so that there is a
     bibliographic record available for subsequent subscribers or
     searchers.

   -The records will feed a directory and database of these
     titles.

  Not all the of the implementation is developed, and the work
will expand over the next year.  We thank you for your
contributions, assistance, and advice, which will be invaluable.

   SUBSCRIBING:

     To subscribe, send a message to: LISTSERV@e-math.ams.org

     Leave the subject line blank.

     In the body, type: SUBSCRIBE NewJour-L  FirstName LastName

     You will have to subscribe in order to post messages to this
     list.

     To drop out or postpone, use the standard LISTSERV
     (Internet) directions.

   ACKNOWLEDGMENT:

   For their work in defining the elements of this project and
     for their support to date, we thank:

      Michael Strangelove, University of Ottawa, Advisor
      David Rodgers, American Mathematical Society, Systems &
          Network Support
      Edward Gaynor, University of Virginia Library, Original
          Cataloguing Development
      John Price-Wilkin, University of Virginia Library, Systems
          & Network Support
      Birdie MacLennan, University of Vermont Library,
          Cataloguing and Indexing Development
      Diane Kovacs, Kent State University Library, Advisor

We anticipate this will become a wider effort as time passes, and
we welcome your interest in it.  This project is co-ordinated
through:

The Association of Research Libraries
Office of Scientific & Academic Publishing
21 Dupont Circle, Suite 800
Washington, DC  20036
e-mail: osap@cni.org  (Ann Okerson)

33) ------------------------------------------------------------

popcult@camosun.bc.ca       Popular Culture

   The POPCULT list is now in place.  It is open to analytical
   discussion of all aspects of popular culture.  The list will  

   not be moderated.  Material relevant to building bridges      

  between popular culture and traditional culture will be very   

  strongly encouraged.

   To subscribe, unsubscribe, get help, etc, send a message to:

                     mailserv@camosun.bc.ca

   There should not be anything in the 'Subject:' line and the   

   body of the message should have the specific keyword on a line

   by itself.

   Some keywords are:
      SUBSCRIBE POPCULT
      HELP
      LISTS
      SEND/LIST POPCULT
      UNSUBSCRIBE POPCULT

   It is possible to send multiple commands, each on a separate  

   line. Do not include your name after SUBSCRIBE POPCULT.  In   

   some ways this server is a simplified version of the major    

   servers, but it is also more streamlined.  I recommend, to    

   start, that you put SUBSCRIBE on one line, and HELP on the    

   next line.  That will give you a full listing of available    

   commands.

   To send messages to the list for distribution to list members 

   for exchange of ideas, etc, send messages to:

                      popcult@camosun.bc.ca

   Owner: Peter Montgomery  Montgomery@camosun.bc.ca
           Professor
           Dept of English                 ph (604) 370-3342 (o)
           Camosun College              (fax) (604) 370-3346
           3100 Foul Bay Road
           Victoria, BC                       Off. Paul Bldg 326
           CANADA   V8P 5J2

34) -------------------------------------------------------------

************************************************************
                    John W. Hartman Center
          for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing History
                 Special Collections Library
                       Duke University

          TRAVEL-TO-COLLECTIONS GRANTS 1993-94

          Three or more grants of up to $1000 are available to
          (1) graduate students in any academic field who wish to
          use the resources of the Center for research toward
          M.A., Ph.D., or other postgraduate degrees; (2) faculty
          members working on research projects; or (3)
          independent scholars working on nonprofit projects. 
          Funds may be used to help defray costs of travel to
          Durham and local accommodations.

          The major collection available at the Hartman Center at
          the current time is the extensive Archives of the J.
          Walter Thompson Company (JWT), the oldest advertising
          agency in the U.S. and a major international agency
          since the 1920's.  It is anticipated that the
          advertisements (1932+) and a moderate amount of agency
          documentation from D'Arcy, Masius, Benton & Bowles
          (DMB&B) will be available for research by autumn 1993. 
          The Center holds several other smaller collections
          relating to 19th and 20th century advertising and
          marketing.

          REQUIREMENTS: Awards may be used between November 15,
          1993 and December 31, 1994.  Graduate student
          applicants (1) must be currently enrolled in a
          postgraduate program in any academic department and (2)
          must enclose a letter of recommendation from the
          student's advisor or project director.  Please address
          questions and requests for application forms to:

               Ms. Ellen Gartrell, Director
               John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising, and
               Marketing History
               Special Collections Library
               Duke University
               Box 90185
               Durham NC  27708-0185

               Phone: 919-660-5836
               Fax: 919-684-2855
               email: egg@mail.lib.duke.edu

          DEADLINES: Applications for 1993-94 awards must be
          received or postmarked by September 30, 1993.  Awards
          will be announced by the end of October.

September 25, 2013

Selected Letters From Readers
Paul Miers
Department of English
Towson State University
e7e4mie@toe.towson.edu

RE: Kip Canfield’s essay, “ The Microstructure of Logocentricism: Sign Models in Derrida and Smolensky,” in PMC v.3 n.3. A reply by Paul Miers, Department of English, Towson State University.

Connectionism and Its Consequences

Kip Canfield’s article in the last issue of Postmodern Culture is one of the first pieces of critical theory to discuss the implications of the revolutionary paradigm shift now taking place in the cognitive sciences. The movement inspiring that shift, generally called connectionism, offers a powerful and still controversial alternative to the standard model of mental representation which has more or less dominated western philosophy at least since the Enlightenment (Bechtel). As Canfield notes in his comparison of Paul Smolensky, one of the leading connectionists, with Jacques Derrida, the connectionist critique parallels in many ways the deconstruction of traditional semiotics and structuralism. But, as Canfield also notes, connectionist theory does more than deconstruct the old paradigm: it also purports to offer an alternative account of representation, a genuine Copernican revolution which changes our view of mental life from a symbol centered token/type model to a network based vector/matrix account (Churchland).

Since Canfield focuses almost exclusively on Smolensky and Derrida, however, readers of his essay not already familiar with the paradigm wars in cognitive science may not see just how profound the connectionist revolution could be. For that reason, I want to offer here a brief note on the consequences of connectionism which follows up on a point I have made elsewhere regarding the implications of connectionism for critical theory (Miers).

The attraction of connectionism for cognitive science is its potential for providing a “natural” theory of information processing in the brain. All the evidence indicates that the brain itself is organized as a massively distributed parallel processor (Edelman); what the great debate is about is how to reconcile the neural evidence with the standard, classical theory of mental representation. Classical theory claims that mental representations are the product of arbitrary atomic symbols (i.e., signs rather than symbols in the Coleridgean sense) operated on by formal syntactic rules. Connectionist theory, on the other hand, focuses on the fact that neural networks have no one- to-one mappings, and that they respond to input vectors not by invoking rules, but by dynamic transformations of the network (Churchland). The real issue then is not a simplistic opposition between atomic and distributed elements or between arbitrary and motivated symbols; it is, rather, the problem of explaining how the brain produces the apparent formalism of symbolic representation from the non- classical structure of neural networks.

In broad terms, there are two explanations for this puzzle, the first of which I call weak connectionism or neo- symbolism and the other I term strong or pan-connectionism (Miers; see also Bechtel). In the weak version, the logic of neural networks serves simply to implement some version of the traditional token/type symbol processing which the classical cognitivists like Fodor see as essential for mental representation (Fodor, “Connectionism and Cognitive Architecture”). In the weak case, the classical cognitivists can, with some modifications, “save the appearance” of the symbolic paradigm. Even though connectionist processes may infiltrate and shape whole aspects of mental life, there remains a unique domain of rational or propositional thought governed by the formalisms of symbolic structures. As Fodor has consistently argued for years, not all of the messy flux of what passes through our heads needs be structured like a formal language, and Fodor is quite willing to concede much of mental life to Freudian and even Skinnerian accounts (The Language of Thought 200).

Strong connectionism, on the other hand, is much more radical and leads to a rather uncanny picture of the apparent symbol processing capabilities of the mind. Strong connectionism claims that symbolic representation is, in fact, a rather shallow illusion which is being approximated or mimed by a wholly connectionist strategy that evolved in the brains of mammals long before the appearance of humans. In this account, our sense that there are atomic tokens is being created by a series of vector/matrix interactions, and our notion that tokens belong to some double system of message and code or object language/meta-language is a belated allegory. There are only vectors operating within matrices, and the language of thought is in reality the algebra for convolving vectors and matrices (Churchland). Our received notions of deep structure, symbolic orders, even the Unconscious, are therefore historical constructs, reinforced by external contingencies and controls. The language of thought is not structured like a language; indeed language cannot be structured like a language since language itself is fabricated by a non-classical strategy for representation.

I have argued in favor of strong connectionism (Miers), but which, if any, of these two versions turns out to be the case is still an open question. The symbolists argue that connectionist models fail to meet the formal requirement for symbolic representation (requirements, it should be noted, which must be taken seriously) (Fodor “Connectionism”), while the connectionists point to increasingly sophisticated programs which have begun to meet (or more accurately approximate) these requirements (Bechtel). The point I want to make here, however, is that both the strong and the weak version of connectionism have significant consequences for a certain kind of ironic postmodernism most often identified with Lyotard and Baudrillard. It might appear at first glance that this postmodernism would be vindicated by the triumph of strong connectionism since strong connectionism undercuts classical representation. My claim is that ironic postmodernism loses either way, because it is wedded to a particular account of representation still tied to the symbol-centered token/type account–albeit a deconstructed, paradoxical version–of the classical system. In short, ironic postmodern can only think itself within the paradigm of the sign and is highly dependent on that paradigm remaining in place as a failed system.

If weak connectionism proves to be the proper model for representation, then what we will see is a return to classical theory and a demonstration that at least in some realm it is possible to defend the classical account of reason, indeed that the classical account of reason is rooted in natural evolution. In this case, the postmodern ironists will have bet on the wrong reading of the symbolic order, and their arcane jargon will rapidly look as out of date as the discourse of Ptolemaic astronomy. But if strong connectionism proves true, that is, if representation is driven by the logic of vector/matrix interactions, then ironic postmodernism also fails because of its dependency on the deconstructed sign. The triumph of strong connectionism would support the claim that ironic postmodernism is simply a very late, very belated and desperate version of modernism (Cascardi). The true end of modernism then would come not with the deconstruction of the classical system, a deconstruction which leaves in place and cultivates the ruins of the system. Modernism would end, rather, when the recipe for making the illusion of signs is finally revealed.

What is most radical about strong connectionism is its claim that such a recipe exists and that it can be formulated. This recipe for thought is going to include both sensory and propositional modes in a single model of figural forms. Ironic postmodernism tells us that we live in an economy of undecipherable hieroglyphs, condemned to know but unable to change their fictive, arbitrary status. Strong connectionism suggest that we might be able to refigure this notion and see ourselves as living in the first post-symbolic culture, a culture where we know how to make and unmake signs, a culture where it is possible to limit and resist the sublime allure of unlimited semiosis, a culture which knows itself to be a natural and necessary illusion.

Works Cited
- Bechtel, William and Abrahamsen, Adele. Connectionism and the Mind: An Introduction to Parallel Processing in Networks. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.
- Canfield, Kip. “The Microstructure of Logocentricism: Sign Models in Derrida and Smolensky.” Postmodern Culture May (1993).
- Cascardi, Anthony J. The Subject of Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992.
- Churchland, Patricia S. and Sejnowski, Terrence. The Computational Brain. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992.
- Edelman, Gerald. Neural Darwinism: The Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. New York: Basic Books, 1987.
- Fodor, Jerry. The Language of Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1975.
- —, and Pylyshlyn, Zenon. “Connectionism and Cognitive Architecture.” Cognition 28 (1988): 3-71.
- Miers, Paul. “The Other Side of Representation: Critical Theory and the New Cognitivism.” MLN 107 (1992): 950-975.
September 25, 2013
The Sound of the Avant-Garde

Timothy D. Taylor

Music Department
Denison University
taylort@cc.denison.edu

Kahn, Douglas, and Gregory Whitehead, eds. The Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992.

Co-editors Kahn and White describe their purpose in The Wireless Imagination as an attempt to compile a collection of “first utterances” rather than a Last Word on the subject of abstract sound. But these utterances are so disparate, so dispersed, that the reader may be more frustrated than enlightened, perhaps wishing instead for something a little less pomo and a little more old-fashioned: coherence. Kahn and Whitehead write, “Rather than simply starting to pull theories of aurality out of a hat, we have chosen to ground Wireless Imagination in the more modest intent of documenting and charting sonographic resonances among the above existing histories, strangely dissonant and cacophonous as they may strike the naked ear” (x).

Fair enough. Some of the essays are indeed historical and useful (Mel Gordon’s “Songs from the Museum of the Future: Russian Sound Creation (1910-1930)”; Mark E. Cory’s “Soundplay: The Polyphonous Tradition of German Radio Art”; Christopher Schiff’s “Banging on the Windowpane: Sound in Early Surrealism”). But what’s wrong with theorizing? Perhaps the fault of the volume is that it suffers from sprawling theory: there’s theory all over the place, and some of it makes little sense. A few essays indulge in the kind of critspeak that would turn off all but the most ardent theory fetishist (Charles Grivel’s “The Phonograph’s Horned Mouth”; Gregory Whitehead’s “Out of the Dark: Notes on the Nobodies of Radio Art”; Allen S. Weiss’s “Radio, Death, and the Devil: Artaud’s Pour en Finir avec le Jugement de Dieu“). I do not mean to make a blanket attack against theoretical work. The problem with these essays is not that they deploy theory, but that they do so in a way that makes them appear both elitist and every bit as non-significant as the abstract sounds they’re ostensibly about.

Probably the most interesting portions of The Wireless Imagination are those that detail someone’s response to sound. Alexander Graham Bell worked with his father to try to find a written language for non-language sounds; the young Bell and his brother tried to get their dog to speak by moving its jaws, eventually getting it to “say,” “How are you, grandmamma?”; Thomas Edison believed that each person has small, noise-producing beings within them, and devised a machine to record these “life units” exiting dead bodies as they lay in their coffins.

Nearly as interesting are the fictions, or prose inventions. Velimir Khlebnikov, in “The Radio of the Future,” presages Muzak: “During periods of intense hard work like summer harvests orduring the construction of great buildings, these sounds [“la” and “ti,” or the pitches A and B] can be broadcast by Radio over the entire country, increasing its collective strength enormously” (21). Khlebnikov resurfaces in a detailed essay by Mel Gordon on Russian sound creation from 1910-1930 as a proponent of zaum, Alexei Kruchenykh’s “language” that incorporated all kinds of random sounds, from baby talk to the speech of schizophrenics. Khlebnikov’s zaum was meant to transcend all cultural barriers. Additionally, Khlebnikov invented a “universal alphabet,” in which each phoneme (just 25 in all) causes a certain emotional response, and is linked synesthetically with a color. So the phoneme “P,” for example, causes “explosion, release of pressure,” and is related to the color black outlined in red. Raymond Roussel’s Locus Solus (1914) tells of a deboned head stored in a liquid called aqua micans. This head can be reanimated through the efforts of a hairless cat, who, upon taking a red pill which turns it temporarily into an electric battery, swims to a metal cone and completes a connection with the head through the cone.

It seemed as though life once more inhabited this recently immobile remnant of faces. Certain muscles appeared to make the absent eyes turn in all directions, while others periodically went into action as if to raise,lower, screw up or relax the area of the eyebrows and forehead; but those of the lips in particular moved with wild agility.(80)

Still, the many attempts, fictional and actual, to record sound make fascinating reading, even if the contributors’ discussions of these attempts aren’t always satisfying. Alexander Graham Bell seemed to be fixated on the subject of sound recording, devoting years of his life to working with his father on an attempt to notate in written symbols all kinds of sounds. Co-editor Douglas Kahn offers an unbelievable story from a 1922 article by Bell, describing his near-vaudevillian demonstrations of this “language”:

The members of the audience were invited to make any sorts of sound they desired, to be symbolized by my father. It was just as easy for him to spell the sound of a cough, or a sneeze, or a click to a horse as a sound that formed an element of human speech. Volunteers were called to the platform, where they uttered the most weird and uncanny noises, while my father studied their mouths and attempted to express in symbols the actions of the vocal organs he had observed. I was then called in, and the symbols were presented to me to interpret; and I could read in each symbol a direction to do something with my mouth. I remember on one occasion the attempt to follow directions resulted in a curious rasping noise that was utterly unintelligible to me. The audience, however, at once responded with loud applause. They recognized it as an imitation of the noise of sawing wood, which had been given by an amateur ventriloquist as a test.(86)

Bell writes that he was close to inventing the phonograph but that Edison beat him to it. If Bell hadn’t invented the telephone, this claim might sound far-fetched given the foregoing excerpt.

There are some lacunae. The aestheticization of abstract sounds seems to have led the creators of these sounds, and their chroniclers in this volume, to overlook politics, or real people “on the ground.” For example, co-editor Kahn quotes in his introduction a passage from Apollinaire’s 1916 “The Moon King” which is redolent of the kinds of surveillance that sound recording and broadcasting devices have facilitated (as Jacques Attali potently observes in his 1985 Noise):

The flawless microphones of the king's device were set so as to bring in to this underground the most distant sounds of terrestrial life. Each key activated a microphone set for such-and-such a distance. Now we were hearing a Japanese countryside. The wind soughed in the trees--a village was probably there, because I heard servants' laughter, a carpenter's plane, and the spray of an icy waterfall. Then another key pressed down, we were taken straight into morning, the king greeting the socialist labor of New Zealand, and I heard geysers spewing hot water. Then this wonderful morning continued in sweet Tahiti. Here we are at the market in Papeete, with the lascivious wahinees of New Cytheria wandering through it--you could hear their lovely guttural language, very much like ancient Greek. You could also hear the Chinese selling tea, coffee, butter, and cakes. The sound of accordions and Jew's harps.(23)

The authors offer this excerpt as an example of Apollinaire’s “wirelessness,” his interest in abstracted sound, but don’t examine the issues of power and surveillance pervading the passage, or, for that matter, the proto-pomo implications of juxtapositions of disparate sounds from all over the world.

But the most disturbing omissions concern gender. Some of the material presented is so outrageous that it would seem to demand some kind of interrogation involving considerations of gender. For example, the first essay, Charles Grivel’s “The Phonograph’s Horned Mouth,” avoids inclusive language, and at one point adds “the other” gender as an afterthought, as though Grivel at the last minute imagines a feminist reader looking over his shoulder. Like so much French theory, Grivel’s essay is quote proof: “Symbol ‘become life,’ that is, substance, of a being articulated like a sex (or rather like two!) and violently applied upon the listener” (33). Grivel describes Villiers del l’Isle-Adam’s L’Eve Future (1886), which features a “fictitious” Edison who constructs a woman with two phonographs instead of lungs, beneath her breasts. (An excerpt from del l’Isle-Adam’s story follows Grivel’s essay.) Grivel’s consideration of Marcel Schwob’s “La Machine parler” of 1892 likewise skirts gender considerations. Schwob’s story tells of a frightening device that makes horrific sounds, which, it seems, are played by a woman, who is, in Grivel’s words, “servant to the ingenious inventor and slave to the monstrous ‘mechanical mouth’.” Another example is Allen S. Weiss’s discussion of Antonin Artaud in his essay, “Radio, Death, and the Devil.” Weiss, like most of the contributors to this volume, notes the invention of a sound-producing vehicle–evidence of the “wireless imagination”–but does little more. His discussion of Artaud’sIl n’y a plus de firmament (c. 1932) describes “an archetypically Artaudian figure . . . the human body transformed into a musical instrument”:

Then the noise of a bizarre drum envelops everything, a nearly human noise which begins sharply and ends dully, always the same noise; and then we see enter a woman with an enormous belly, upon which two men alternately strike with drumbeats.(297)

So, what is the relationship between sound and gender in such passages? Sound, it seems, can stand in for heterosexual sex, something that women “possess” and can “give” to men, or something that men violently take from, or beat out of, women.

All of the book’s discussions of gender serve as yet another example of the ways in which Western culture has mapped binary oppositions on top of each other; in this case “abstract” sound/non-abstract sound is made to coexist with male/female, so that the violence often voiced in abstract sounds comes to reflect deferred, actual violence perpetrated against women. Or ethnic minorities, or whatever oppressed group the dominant culture chooses to attack. This flexible binarism of violence has worked all too well throughout Western history, whether the target of the drumsticks was a woman’s belly or Rodney King’s head. But it goes without comment in all of these essays.

More satisfying considerations of the gendered nature of sound as it appears in these pages might have been possible if any of the authors had examined the ways that sound, including musical sound, signifies: here’s where the subject of the book is most notably undertheorized. Hardly any musicologist deals with this issue (and most contemporary discussions of music aesthetics by philosophers are hopeless–unmusical, unmusicological, and unconcerned with social and performance issues), so it would seem that the range of professions practiced by the authors of these ten essays would include someone who would tackle the problem. All of the writers and thinkers whose work is chronicled in the pages of The Wireless Imagination attempt to deal with sound as a means of expression. But what does it “express,” if anything? Some of the primary texts under consideration address the issue. Surrealist Giorgio de Chirico’s No Music (1913), for example, begins, “Music cannot express the essence of sensation. One never knows what music is about . . .” (162). De Chirico and the other Surrealists turned against music because of their disaffection with first Erik Satie (1866-1925) and then Georges Auric (1899-1983, a Parisian composer of “Les Six”), and Christopher Schiff writes that the Surrealist movement eventually attempted to do without music altogether. But de Chirico’s writings on musical signification go without close examination. Arseni Avraamov’s The Symphony of Sirens (1923) begins at the opposite end of the spectrum: “Of all the arts, music possesses the greatest power for social organization” (245). Perhaps. The authors of these essays fail to examine this central problematic, and thus miss opportunities to track the related issues, mainly the relationship of the abstraction of music and sound to larger cultural and political concerns and to the other arts. Frances Dyson’s insightful essay–perhaps the most valuable chapter in the book–on John Cage comes closest to such a discussion, and makes a crucial assertion (which he unfortunately discounts): that Cage, in his emancipation of sounds and noises, perpetuates the object-status of music in Western bourgeois culture, despite Cage’s systematic critique of the aesthetic premises of that culture.

The translations of historic texts that aren’t often available are welcome; many of these form an important companion to Umbro Apollonio’s Futurist Manifestos (1973). Included are de l’Isle-Adam’s “The Lamentations of Edison,” from L’Eve Future (1886); Alberto Savinio’s “Give me the Anathema, Lascivious Thing” (1915); Avraamov’s The Symphony of Sirens (1923); F.T. Marinetti and Pino Masnata’s La Radia (1933); and Artaud’s To have done with the Judgment of God (1947). These are important to have in recent translations, for they are texts that we readers can examine further in explicating the myriad ways Western culture has attempted to deal with sound as sound.

In sum, it’s about time somebody looked at the role of abstract sound and radio in the “avant-garde.” But as a starting point or “first word” on the subject, we might have done better with a volume more firmly grounded in the everyday world, a world where wireless sound has served not merely as a conceptual and aesthetic challenge but as a concrete reality on the social field and, at times, as an effective weapon of political domination.

September 25, 2013
Idioculture: De-Massifying the Popular Music Audience
Marc Perlman

Department of Music
Tufts University
perlman@pearl.tufts.edu

Crafts, Susan D., Daniel Cavicchi, Charles Keil and the Music in Daily Life Project. My Music. Foreword by George Lipsitz. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England for Wesleyan University Press, 1993.

Cultural Studies frequently constructs popular music as a particularly disruptive sort of object, a form of resistance (Frith: 179). Part of the resistance displayed by consumers of popular culture has been seen in their reinterpretation and creative appropriation of mass-marketed products. Though the best-known examples of this process have been literary (e.g. Radway on the romance, or Penley on K/S zines), Frith sees popular music consumption “becoming the model for ‘active’ popular cultural consumption in general” (Frith: 180).

The book under review features ‘active’ consumption as resistance, though in a way not limited to popular music. In this book the disruptive moment of consumption is generalized beyond pop: here it is the moment of listening across genre borders. In a world where the music market and musical institutions impose strict boundaries between styles, people resist by having eclectic tastes. The “most important message” of this book is that there is “far more complexity and far more self-directed searching, testing, and experimenting than either music schools or commercial market categories can account for.” People find their way to “an astonishing range of musical choices, despite the inhibiting constrictions of the music industry” (Lipsitz: xiii). Their tastes are broader than the “confines imposed upon them by marketing specialists” (xiv).

That is the book’s message; but My Music is much more than an illustration of a thesis. Whatever the plausibility of this view of eclectic listening–and I shall add my reflections on this subject below–the book presents a lively cross-section of lay commentary on music. My Music is an edited selection of 41 interviews out of 150 conducted in Buffalo, NY. The interviewees range in age from 4 to 83. Most are white Americans, though five African-Americans, one Hispanic, and one Asian-American are included, as well as one Bolivian and one Ethiopian.

The Music in Daily Life Project started in 1984, when Carol Hadley, a student at SUNY Buffalo pursuing an independent study project, asked a few people about the role of music in their lives. She found people with unsuspected combinations of tastes (for example, one woman’s listening revolved around a Bette Midler/Allman Brothers/Joni Mitchell configuration) or striking trajectories (a woman who moved from classical music to Neil Diamond). That was the stimulus. Two undergraduate classes carried out further interviews, and three graduate seminars edited and organized the results. The result is this kaleidoscope of individual voices, too diverse and specific to be easily grouped into subcultures.

My Music is a portrait of particularity. As Keil puts it in his Introduction, “Like your fingerprints, your signature, and your voice, your choices of music and the ways you relate to music are plural and interconnected in a pattern that is all yours, an ‘idioculture’ or idiosyncratic culture in sound” (2).

The interviews illustrate Keil’s notion of musical idioculture. A few seem to fit common stereotypes, but just as many defy such caricatures. May, for example, is an overachieving high school violinist who attends Julliard on weekends. Her favorite listening music is Italian opera, but she grew up on the Rolling Stones and the Who, has tapes of Talking Heads, and can play Grateful Dead tunes on request.

The editorial choice to present whole (edited) interviews was made to spotlight the interviewees, many of whom prove to be trenchant observers and witty conversationalists. Molly (age 11) comments on how music videos interfere with individual visualizations, “because you just think of what you saw on TV and not what your mind sees” when you listen (31). The insufferably cute Lisa (age 12) listens to the radio while studying for a test: “when it comes to the test, I remember the song, I remember the question, and I remember the answer” (40). Ralph, the polymath truckdriver (113-16), notices the “Ride of the Valkyries” in an Elmer Fudd cartoon, holds forth on the connection between the Jewish diaspora and polka music, likes the Beach Boys (“all a rip-off of black music … but white fun”) as well as the Mahavishnu Orchestra, but draws the line at opera (“Well, ‘Madam Butterfly’ is okay, but that’s the only one I really appreciate”). Stella, who emigrated from Greece thirty years ago, doesn’t consider Greek music to be her music: “It’s not mine, it’s a couple million other people’s” (159). She thinks country and western is the only adult music–not the “male bonding party songs,” but the ones where “the cliches are given reasons as to why they became cliches” (161).

In short, the interviews are very rich, and not only for their musical content. There are miniature psychodramas, and some clouded glimpses into private lives. Betty, for example, converted from classical music to Neil Diamond. The reader involuntarily wonders about the significance of this conversion when Betty tells us it accompanied her divorce from a classical-music-loving husband. There are also bits of intergenerational sitcom. Nineteen-year-old Abby, interviewed by her father, mentions Grace Jones. Her father, in a follow-up question, mistakenly refers to the singer as Grace Slick, which elicits this putdown: “Grace Jones, honey. Grace Slick? For-give me. Never in a million years” (87).

Nevertheless, while I applaud Crafts et al.’s decision to focus on people’s own words, I wonder if it was perhaps too zealously implemented. My Music is half of the book the authors originally envisioned; it lacks the planned set of essays reflecting on the interviews. In the end they chose to include more voices rather than reserve space for their own pronouncements. As one of the student members of the Project put it, “Isn’t the main point to hear from more people rather than from the critic and expert types again?” (xxii).

It is indeed good to hear from so many people, but there is much we would like to know about them that they do not tell us. We know their age, sex, and (sometimes) ethnic identification. We are given their occupation in a few words: “pastor”; “student”; “music teacher”; “heavy truck salesman”; “works in her husband’s office”; “works at Allstate.” Some seem to be housewives. We know little else about their lives except what they choose to tell the interviewers. Crafts et al. refrain from fleshing out the picture, even when extra information would significantly alter our reading of the interview.

For example, Beth does not tell us that she plays music. We only learn this from Keil, who mentions it in order to make a point about the possible negative effects of the dominance of mediated music in our lives (2). We are told that Charles is a music teacher and composer; he is obviously also a performer, probably a pianist. But it would help us to interpret his diatribes against commercialism, his admiration for Beethoven and Jimi Hendrix, and his quotations from Plotinus, if we knew a bit more about him. Is he a classically-trained pianist performing in a general business band? An aspiring Frank Zappa–or Glenn Branca?

Crafts et al. minimize contextualization and all but abstain from comment. Keil invites us to make our own correlations and interpretations (3), but we can hardly do so without knowing more about these people. Their voices remain only voices, and we remain eavesdroppers on invisible conversations. (Other sorts of contextualization would be helpful, too. For example, some readers will be unable to understand some of the references to specific performers–Rick James, David Sylvian, etc.)

It is instructive to compare this collection of ordinary people’s voices with the results of a somewhat similar project, another book organized around quotations from listeners: Music and Its Lovers, by Vernon Lee (pseudonym of Violet Paget). Whether or not it is a unique precursor of My Music, it is surely the first such study to appear in America: published in 1933, it is based on research conducted before World War I. The two books draw on samples of similar size, but apart from that the differences are striking. Lee used a questionnaire, and usually collected written responses. She worked in French and German as well as English, and reached many of her respondents through a periodical. Her sample seems to have included a disproportionate number of musicians, poets, essayists, critics, and PhDs. She seems to have asked only about ‘high art’ music. In her presentation, too, she kept a firm authorial grip on the material: her respondents’ voices are dispersed throughout her text, surfacing as a sentence here, a paragraph there. Though she was interested in individual responses to music, her questions were narrowly focused: she wanted to know if people listened to music for “a meaning which seems beyond itself, a message,” or if they heard it as “ just music” (Lee: 25).

In other words, Lee was preoccupied with the aesthetic problems of her time: the question whether music was an “absolute” art, inhabiting a realm of its own, independent of programmatic content. As a result, her book has a fairly strict psychological focus. We learn about the inner worlds of her respondents, but hardly anything about their external, practical concerns. (Except in the case of an unnamed suffragette, who disliked Brahms because of the masculine self-satisfaction she heard in his music [211, 531].)

The interview format of My Music insures that it escapes Lee’s overriding tendentiousness. However, it too is clearly a child of its time, and its framing essays show its relationship to some recent themes in the study of popular music.

I have already mentioned the idea that eclectic, exploratory listening represents resistance to the market-imposed pigeonholing of musical styles, the “inhibiting constrictions of the music industry” (xiii). This notion is the main source of celebratory energy in the book. (Though Keil dampens the parade with a light drizzle of cultural criticism: “Aren’t all these headphoned people alienated, enjoying mediated ‘my music’ at the expense of a live and more spontaneous ‘our music’?” [3].)

My Music seems to show that musical tastes cannot be predicted by the usual demographic categories: as Keil puts it, the “Billboard Charts view” of people’s musical worlds is a tremendous oversimplification (2). But is Keil’s notion of “idioculture” the only alternative to the Billboard Charts view? [18] The entire question of cross-genre listening as musical resistance surely needs to be discussed in a larger socio-economic and historical context. The marketplace does not inherently solidify genre or style categories. Under certain circumstances it can collocate diverse styles as well as differentiate them. Indeed, Max Weber argued that the market declassifies culture: presenters seeking large audiences try to provide something for everybody. This does seem to explain the behavior of for-profit, privately owned firms in some circumstances (DiMaggio: 36). Under other conditions (demand uncertainty, high competition, etc.) firms prefer to target narrowly-defined taste bands. This is evident (for example) in the fragmentation of radio formats.

We should recall that the decline of eclectic music programming on commercial radio is a relatively recent phenomenon, hastened by the migration of the radio audience to television in the early 1950s, the proliferation of stations in major markets, etc. (Peterson and Davis: 169-71). With increased competition, stations had more incentive to narrow their appeal to specific demographic groups–those attractive to advertisers.

The fractionalization of radio was noted at the time, and even greeted as evidence that the prophets of massification were wrong: the mass media could be “a vigorous force working for cultural diversity” (Honan: 76). In retrospect, it is clear that radio’s commitment to cultural diversity was contingent on changes in industry structure and market conditions that made it more profitable to differentiate tastes than to agglomerate them.

Finally, it is true that the interviews in My Music show the subtlety, variety, and depth of meaning music has in the lives of 41 individuals. This book represents a welcome complement to the macro-results of survey-based research; as such, it justifiably emphasizes the moment of autonomy in musical reception. Unfortunately, it could easily be read as a romanticized portrait of musical individualism. Aside from a brief mention of the “constraints” and “broader systemic practices” (xiv-xvi) within which listeners operate, My Music does little to avert such a reading. Its micro-vision needs to be articulated with a macro-vision. Recent developments in the sociology of cultural choice should make this articulation especially fruitful.

The past few decades have been marked by two paradigm shifts in the study of popular culture: first, by a drift away from the Adornoesque view of musical massification to an acknowledgement of plural “taste cultures” defined by demographic parameters (class, race, age, geography, etc.); and second, to a view of “culture classes” less tightly bound to social class, defined instead by consumption patterns (Lewis 1975; Peterson and DiMaggio 1975; Peterson 1983; DiMaggio 1987). Turning away from Bourdieu’s Durkheimian correlations of musical taste with position in social space (1984), recent writers reject earlier assumptions of isomorphism between taste and class.

The insistence of Crafts et al. on individuals’ unique configurations of musical taste, it seems to me, is consistent with these sociological results, and could even enrich them. But My Music‘s resolutely idiographic stance seems to forclose the possibility of a sociological account of eclecticism.

In fact, we already have at least one such account. DiMaggio (1987) suggests that broad tastes correlate with high socio-economic status, assuming that those in high positions have wider social networks and hence need to be familiar with a wide range of artistic styles. Might the patterns of musical choice revealed in My Music be explicable in these terms?

We badly need a study of musical taste that combines My Music‘s attention to detail with panoramic views of the social, economic, and historical context. Until one appears, however, we do well to appreciate this book for what it is. It is unique in its use of open-ended, more-or-less nondirective interviews, and its focus on the voices of ordinary people. I don’t know if this book is part of an “emancipatory cultural project” (xvii), but it is valuable in its own right. And I suspect it will prove especially useful in the classroom.

Works Cited
- Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Sociological Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984.
- DiMaggio, Paul. “Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Boston: The Creation of an Organizational Base for High Culture in America.” Media, Culture and Society 4 (1982): 33-50.
- “Classification in Art.” American Sociological Review 52 (1987): 440-55.
- Frith, Simon. “The Cultural Study of Popular Music.” Cultural Studies. Ed. L. Grossberg, C. Nelson and P. Treichler. New York: Routledge, 1992.
- Honan, William H. “The New Sound of Radio.” New York Times Magazine 3 Dec. 1967.
- Lee, Vernon. Music and Its Lovers: An Empirical Study of Emotional and Imaginative Responses to Music. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1933.
- Lewis, George H. “Cultural Socialization and the Development of Taste Cultures and Culture Classes in American Popular Music: Existing Evidence and Proposed Research Directions.” Popular Music and Society 4 (1975): 226-41.
- Peterson, Richard A. “Patterns of Cultural Choice.” American Behavior Scientist 26 (1983): 422-38.
- Peterson, Richard A., and Russell B. Davis, Jr. “The Contemporary American Radio Audience.” Popular Music and Society 6 (1978): 169-83.
- Peterson, Richard A., and Paul DiMaggio. “From Region to Class, The Changing Locus of Country Music: A Test of the Massification Hypothesis.” Social Forces 53 (1975): 497-506.
September 25, 2013
Fear Of Music
Andrew Herman

Department of Sociology
Drake University
ah7301r@acad.drake.edu

Goodwin, Andrew. Dancing in the Distraction Factory: Music Televison and Popular Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992.

I. Fear of Music: Postmodernism and Music Television

The first time I heard the terms “postmodernism” and “the postmodern” was at the “Marxism and Interpretation of Culture Conference” at the University of Illinois during the torpid summer of 1983. Like the inhuman heat and humidity of the Midwestern July, the terms hung heavily in the conference atmosphere, a prominent feature of almost every presentation, debate, and discussion. The omnipresence of the terms was particularly frustrating as almost nobody had anything close to resembling a straight explanation of them. Clearly, I thought, these terms must have some shared intersubjective meaning, otherwise all these people wouldn’t be enunciating them with such zest and enthusiasm. Finally, in desperation, I nearly assaulted a fellow conference participant during an incredibly hot and hazy dance party, determined to extract at least a basic definition of this hot and hazy chimera, “the postmodern.”

This individual did her best to satisfy my inquisitorial hunger by telling me of “the crisis in representation,” the “death of the author,” the “collapse of master narratives,” “pastiche and parody,” the “waning of affect,” and so on. Unfortunately, none of these characterizations of “postmodernism” or “the postmodern” made much sense to me. And so I just stood there nodding and grinning, hoping to convey vague understanding. Sensing a lack of comprehension on my part, and desperate to extricate herself from what was rapidly becoming a dead-end conversation, my reluctant interlocutor directed my attention to the spectral glow of a television monitor that hung in the corner of the room. “Look,” she said triumphantly, “the postmodern is in this very room. If you want to understand the postmodern, watch music television.” She then slipped away, leaving me to ponder the connection between music video, MTV, and postmodernism.

My companion that evening was probably not the first, and most certainly not the last, to note that there was an intimate connection between the postmodern, music video in general, and MTV: Music Television in particular. Indeed, the argument that music video as cultural form and MTV as televisual apparatus were quintessential exemplars of postmodern culture has become the dominant interpretation of music television within cultural studies. For example, John Fiske (1986, 1989) argues that music video as textual form is postmodern because of its fragmentary and disjointed nature. In its privileging of signifier over signified, contends Fiske, music video produces the distinctively postmodern experience of decentered subjectivity. Similarly, E. Ann Kaplan (1987) and David Tetzlaff (1986) maintain that MTV, as a regime of televisual experience, is postmodern because of the atemporal, ahistorical and dreamlike quality of its programming flow. Although they draw widely different political conclusions from their analyses, Kaplan, Kim Chen (1986), and Will Straw (1988) locate the postmodern nature of music video in its palimpsistic intertextuality and representational practices of pastiche and parody. Finally, Larry Grossberg (1988, 1989, 1992) argues that MTV evinces a cultural logic of “authentic inauthenticity,” a peculiarly postmodern form of identity politics that self-consciously celebrates the temporary affective commitments of style and pose. As an expression of the logic of postmodern culture, Grossberg maintains that music television locates identity and difference in the surface appearances of mood and attitude rather than in the meaningful modernist depths of ideology. What makes this superficial, “inauthentic” politics of style “authentic” (and therefore postmodern), according to Grossberg, is that performers, programmers, and audiences all know that there is nothing beyond the pose. In the cynical postmodern sensibility of MTV (and, for Grossberg, popular culture as a whole), there is no pretension to making a difference in the structure or fabric of everyday life beyond the differences of image and appearance.

It would be an understatement to say that Andrew Goodwin finds the predominance of such accounts within cultural studies a bit troublesome. Indeed, much of Dancing in the Distraction Factory is a sustained, if uneven and somewhat contradictory, polemic against the understanding of music television as distinctively postmodern. For Goodwin, the aforementioned authors and their analyses (with the partial exception of Grossberg) represent a theoretical arrogance and political naivete of egregious proportions. They are part of a “current fashion for conflating the specificities of different media and genre into a ragbag category of ‘postmodernism’ that does injustice in equal measure to both the conceptual field [i.e., postmodernism] and the object of study [i.e., music television]” (17). Although Goodwin grudgingly admits that there are certain features of contemporary society and popular culture that might be accurately and fruitfully understood as “postmodern,” music television is not one of them.

According to Goodwin, the fundamental problem of the postmodernist take on music television is that it fails to take into account that music television is, quite simply, music television. Although there has been some work done in media studies on the aural dimension of television (e.g. Williams, 1974; Altman, 1987), according to Goodwin, “very few analyses of music television have thought to consider that it might be music” (5). Goodwin devotes much of the first part of the book to detailing the deleterious results of the bias in studies of music television towards the visual.

For example, Goodwin takes issue with two widely held positions that represent polar extremes of the postmodern assessment of the politics of music television. The first is the pessimistic argument that music video has had a detrimental impact on the interpretative imagination of the audience because its visual images tyrannically fix the lyrical and musical meaning of a song. The second is the more optimistic, “avant-garde” argument that music videos represent a radical, subversive break with “classic realist” modes of representation and subjectivity because of their temporally fractured narrative and distinctive mode of address. Due to their narrow emphasis on the visual text of music video, both arguments ignore two con-textual dimensions of music television that are central to Goodwin’s own analysis.

The first dimension is the interdiscursive polysemy of music television. Goodwin argues that there are a multiplicity of extratextual discourses beyond the visual image which help constitute any particular song’s meaning. These include discourses of performance, promotion, and stardom that are crucial to understanding the institutional context of music television. Secondly, the hermeneutical valences of music video can be understood only by taking into account the phenomenology of synaesthesia, or the complex relationship between sound and image that was central to the production of the pleasure and meaning of songs long before music television.

When both dimensions are foregrounded in the analysis of music television, Goodwin maintains, the aforementioned arguments make little sense. In the case of the “meaning-fixing” dominance of video-text images, because of the array of discourses that are both inscribed in a music video as well as brought to the video by an audience, there is a multiplicity of visual associations that are conjured by the audience, many of which have little to do with a particular video’s images. Rereading the avant-garde argument about the anti-realist nature of music video, Goodwin points out that if one understands the institutional history of pop music discourses and the aesthetics of performance, the supposedly radical mode of address of music video (where the performer often directly addresses the audience) is, in fact, revealed to be “entirely conventional and thoroughly ordinary” (76). Further, if one considers the ways sound and image are linked through the process of synaesthesia, the fractured narratives and other “instabilities” in the music-video text (which are supposedly indicative of its postmodern character) can be understood as visual analogs of the musical structure of a song in terms of voice, rhythm, tempo, timbre, harmonic development and, of course, lyrics. Thus, according to Goodwin, much of what makes “no sense” to postmodernists (c.f. Chen, 1986; Fiske, 1989) makes a great deal of sense in terms of what he calls a “musicology of the image.” Indeed, from this perspective, music television represents “the making musical of television” through the subordination of vision to sound as much as it does the triumph of the visual over the musical (70). Consequently, as Goodwin concludes with a nice rhetorical flourish,

music television does not, generally speaking, indulge in a rapture with the Symbolic; nor does it defy our understanding or attempt to elude logic and rationality through its refusal to make sense. Far from constituting a radical break with the social processes of meaning production, music television constantly reworks themes (work, school, authority, romance, poverty, and so on) that are deeply implicated in the question of how meaning serves power.(180)

II. Meaning, Power and the “Scandal” of “New Populism”

It is this issue of “how meaning serves power”, and how it’s currently being addressed within contemporary cultural studies, that is Goodwin’s ultimate concern in the book. As should be clear by now, he believes that the postmodern perspective is ill-equipped to explore the “social process of meaning production” in music television because of its fascination with the surfaces of visual imagery. However, Goodwin is equally critical of what he terms the “new populism” of cultural studies. Although he never specifies precisely to what work the epithet refers, one gathers that this new populism is characterized by an ethnographic focus on the processes of reception and a concomitant privileging of the audience’s power in terms of interpretation and pleasure (e.g. Ang, 1985; Lewis, 1990). For Goodwin, this so-called new populism accords “too much autonomy” to audiences because it implies that they “could construct meaning from media texts at will,” thus denying the salience of hegemonic or preferred meanings that emanate from cultural institutions and are inscribed in cultural artifacts and texts (14). This valorization of the audience in cultural studies, Goodwin insists, has entailed an abandonment of the project of ideology critique and its concern with the relationship between meaning and power. To my knowledge, even the most optimistic of those who might fall under the Goodwin’s rubric of new populism, such as John Fiske (1989, 1992), do not in any way maintain that power or preferred meanings are inoperative in the process of reception. Nonetheless, Goodwin dramatically asserts that the new populism’s supposed abandonment of concern with ideology as power constitutes “the ‘scandal’” of cultural studies (158).

How, then, is this “scandal” to be stopped? In order to have an adequate grasp of the social processes of meaning and ideology involved in music television in particular and popular culture as a whole, Goodwin maintains that cultural studies must adopt a mode of analysis that is “more adequate to the real.” The “real” for Goodwin is constituted by “actual, historical relations of power” and production (158, 167). In other words, the scandalous state of cultural studies can be rectified by its reorientation within a framework of Marxist political economy. Of course, Goodwin is quick to point out that he is not advocating a return to the good old days of crude base/superstructure certitude where the masses were manipulated into false consciousness by the products of the culture industry, products whose ideological content could be explained solely in terms of the imperatives of capital accumulation. Rather, Goodwin’s political economic approach is meant to be a “non-reductionist” examination of the institution/text and text/audience nexi of popular culture that situates textual aesthetics and ideology, as well as audience reception, squarely within the conditions of cultural production in a capitalist society.

Accordingly, from his perspective, a materialist analysis of music television that is “more adequate to real” adheres to the following logic. First, one must examine the historical development and contemporary dynamics of the institutional politics of production in the music and television industries. This institutional analysis establishes a contextual framework for understanding the aesthetics and ideology of music videos as texts. Although Goodwin claims he is not suggesting that textual content is determined by conditions of cultural production, he does want to emphasize that such conditions have a constraining effect upon texts. Finally, having examined the nexus of institution and text, one can proceed to the final step of analysis wherein one examines the nexus of text and audience, or the relationship between the politics of production and the politics of consumption.

Again, while not claiming that the meaning and pleasures of music video are predetermined and fixed by the institutional imperatives of production, Goodwin clearly argues that there are limits to the polysemy of music television which are set by its political economy. Accordingly, he insists that the first and second levels of analysis can produce an understanding of the third by illuminating what he suggestively terms (but, unfortunately, never explicitly defines) “reading formations.” Such reading formations are multidiscursive regimes of representation and pleasure that privilege certain subject positions in terms of ideology and affect. One example of a “reading formation” is what Goodwin terms a “star-text.” The star-text is composed of the repertoire of images and discourses which constitute a musician’s or band’s persona and is central to the meaning of music videos. Such star-texts operate as a “metanarrative” that structure a musician’s or band’s identity. Thus, even before audiences have seen a particular video clip of, say, the band U2, they are probably familiar with the band’s metanarrative or star-text as the spiritual and political “conscience of rock and roll.” Further, argues Goodwin, such star-texts are inextricably linked to the imperatives of the music industry as they are an essential component of the effort to package and sell musicians as commodities. After all, it was the promotions department at Island Records that came up with the “conscience of rock and roll” moniker for U2 in order to sell The Joshua Tree album. Thus, even though at the book’s beginning Goodwin hedges his bets by disavowing any “claim to provide a definitive account of textual reception” (xxiii), by its end he feels entitled to state unequivocally that “while different parts of the audience will be positioned differently, music television viewers are nonetheless still positioned” (180). It is this claim about the audience which, I would argue, represents the major flaw in the logic of cultural analysis followed by Goodwin and ultimately undermines his claim to provide a coherent alternative to both postmodernism and the “new populism.” [13] When it comes to the first moment of Goodwin’s preferred mode of analysis, exploring the trends in the music and television industries that fostered the development of music video and music television, Dancing in the Distraction Factory is superb. Building upon Wolfgang Haug’s work on advertising and commodity aesthetics (1986), Goodwin offers a compelling argument that it is impossible to comprehend the pleasure and meaning of music video texts without considering their status as unique promotional commodities. Goodwin is certainly not the first to examine the emergence of music television in terms of pressures of market demographics, programming needs, and promotional imperatives of the music and television industries (c.f., in particular, Denisoff, 1988). However, his argument concerning the confluence of industrial marketing and programming imperatives with the emergence of new aesthetics and ideologies of performance and musicianship which privileged the artifice of the visual image (e.g. as articulated by the “New Romantics” such as the Pet Shop Boys), is startlingly original and convincing.

Similarly, Goodwin’s analysis of how the institutional discourses and practices of promotion, performance, and stardom become encoded into the sounds, images, and iconography of music video texts is nuanced and sophisticated. Indeed, the chapter on what Goodwin terms the “musicology of the image” should be required reading for all students of music television and music in general. Yet in spite of the complex relationship between sound, visual image, and narrative structure that engenders the ideology and aesthetics of music video, Goodwin maintains one cannot escape the political economic fact that all video clips are, first and foremost, promotional devices meant to entice consumers to purchase other commodities. Further, both music videos and the programming flow of networks such as MTV operate as a “super-text” which constantly directs the attention and desire of the audience towards commodities that promise solutions to individual and social problems. Accordingly, Goodwin argues, the polysemy of music video is limited by a hegemonic reading formation of commercialism which “attempts to restructure the subject-as-citizen . . . along the lines of subject as consumer” (169). Therefore, the central way in which in which Goodwin’s political economic approach is able to show how meaning serves power in music television is to demonstrate how text, programming, and audience are, to use an old Althusserian chestnut, structured in dominance by the ideology of the marketplace.

Naturally, when one makes such strong claims regarding the hegemonic structuring of the reading formations of music television one runs the risk of creeping (if not galloping) reductionism. That is, there is a danger of assuming that the politics of consumption in terms of use, meaning, and pleasure can be read off the politics of production like elephant tracks. Goodwin is well aware of this danger and, to pre-empt such criticisms, says:

The objection to such arguments is that they tell us too little about what particular television programs mean, what use-values are obtained in the consumption of popular culture and so on. . . . However, to argue that diverse audience readings and real use-values must also be taken into account is not to argue that a politics of individual consumption, based around the promotion of market relations, does not also operate. Indeed, to suggest that the former actually cancels out the latter is every bit as reductionist and simplistic as the most brazen economism.(174)

[16] And, indeed it is. Yet what vitiates Goodwin’s otherwise reasonable argument here is the contradictory way in which he deploys the audience in his analysis elsewhere. On the one hand, he frequently appeals to an audience of “music fans” to validate his hermeneutic analysis of the multi-discursivity of music video texts. For example, when discussing the visual iconography of performance, Goodwin forthrightly claims that he is simply “describing the process by which video clips make sense to the audience” (90). On the other hand, while this may indeed be true, Goodwin has absolutely no evidence to support his conclusions (and admits as much, 95). Further, although he concedes that his analysis “needs to be related to audience interpretation and reader competence” (130), he does not attempt to do so and dismisses almost out of hand other attempts along these lines (e.g. Lewis, 1990). The “audience” seems to exist for Goodwin only as a convenient rhetorical device that enables him to claim a face validity for his textual analysis and thus obviates the need for engaging in or with ethnographies of the music television audience. Doggedly sticking to his Marxist guns against the new populists, whom he condescendingly terms the “bright young things of cultural studies” (xxiii), Goodwin refuses to believe that the audience might tell him something about the politics of consumption that he doesn’t already know.

In the end, Goodwin’s cavalier attitude towards the audience and ethnographic study of the politics of consumption both blinds and deafens him to the salience of the concept of postmodernism for understanding the cultural politics of music television. At this point in the debate around postmodernism within cultural studies, it should be clear that the concept entails much more than simply textual aesthetics. The postmodern is not simply a style, attitude, or pose, but a fundamental mutation in the fabric of everyday life from the political economy of production to the rituals of consumption. In order to understand the politics of music television, to assess how meaning serves power, it would seem to me that it is imperative to examine how the postmodern is evinced in the everyday life of the audience. Goodwin seems to suspect that this might be the case when he notes in passing that “work on postmodernism as a condition of reception might be extremely fruitful” (153). Yes it would, but only if one is less dismissive of ethnographic dialogue with the audience. And, in spite of the many virtues of Dancing in the Distraction Factory, it is this refusal to take the postmodern seriously that is truly a scandal.

Works Cited
- Altman, R. “Television/Sound.” Television: The Critical View. Ed. H. Newcomb. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
- Ang, I. Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination. New York: Methuen, 1985
- Chen, K. “MTV: The (Dis)Appearance of Postmodern Semiosis, or the Cultural Politics of Resistance.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 10.1 (1986).
- Denisoff, R. S. Inside MTV. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1988.
- Fiske, J. “MTV: Post structural Post modern.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 10.1 (1986).
- Fiske, J. Reading Popular Culture. Winchester, MA: Unwin Hyman, 1989.
- Fiske, J. “Cultural Studies and the Culture of Everyday Life.” Cultural Studies. Ed. L. Grossberg, C. Nelson, and P. Treichler. New York: Routledge, 1992.
- Grossberg, L. “‘You Still Have to Fight For Your Right to Party’: Music Television as Billboards of Post-Modern Difference.” Popular Music 7.3 (1988).
- Grossberg, L. “MTV: Swinging On A (Postmodern) Star,” Cultural Politics in Contemporary America. Ed. I. Angus and S. Jhally. New York: Routledge, 1989.
- Grossberg, L. We Gotta Get Outta This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture. New York: Routledge, 1992.
- Haug, W. Critique of Commodity Aesthetics: Appearance, Sexuality and Advertising in Capitalist Society. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
- Kaplan, E.A. Rocking Around the Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism and Consumer Culture. New York: Methuen, 1987.
- Lewis, L. Gender Politics and MTV: Voicing the Difference. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990.
- Straw, W. “Music Video in Its Contexts: Popular Music and Post-Modernism in the 1980’s.” Popular Music 7.3 (1988).
- Williams, R. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. London: Fontana, 1974.
September 25, 2013
Postmodernist Purity

John McGowan

Department of English
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
jpm@unc.bitnet

Owens, Craig. Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture. Ed. Scott Bryson, Barbara Kruger, Lynne Tillman, and Jane Weinstock. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

Craig Owens was a critic/theorist of contemporary art, best known for his essays in October and Art in America, who died of complications stemming from AIDS in 1990. Just about everything he ever published–plus the syllabi and bibliographies for courses he taught on postmodern art, on critical theory, and on visualizing AIDS–has been collected in the volume under review. It makes for sad reading, not just because Owens should still be among us, but also because the shifting yet intractable aporias of a certain postmodernist discourse haunt this work. Owens’s intellectual trajectory–from Derrida to Foucault to Lacan as the major influence on his work–follows that of much of his (and my) generation in this country. From an aestheticist, textual rejection of modernist pieties inspired by Derrida, Owens moved to a political analysis of modernism that focused on relations of power and from there to a cultural critique of the construction of gender identities and of desire (sexual and social) itself. In the process, Derrida and Foucault do not completely disappear, but the prevalence of psychoanalysis in much feminist thought had shaped Owens’s discourse in a particularly distinctive way by the mid-eighties.

The thread that runs through these various sub-periods in Owens’s work is the problematic of representation. An early (1979) essay on Derrida’s critique of classical aesthetics ends with the enigmatic statement from which the editors of this volume take its title:

If in 'The Parergon' Derrida offers us no alternative theory of art, it is because the theoretical investigation of works of art according to philosophical principles is what is deconstructed. Still, 'The Parergon" signals a necessity: not of a renovated aesthetics, but of transforming the object, the work of art, beyond recognition."(38)

What is the nature of the “necessity” here? Necessary for what and to whom? And how would we know (if) something (was) beyond recognition? A few years later (1982), Foucault has led Owens to be more willing to name names, to suggest why an escape from representation, from recognition, might be desirable. He calls our attention to “the ways in which domination and subjugation are inscribed within the representational systems of the West. Representation, then, is not–nor can it be–neutral; it is an act–indeed, the founding act–of power in our culture” (91). The wholesale condemnation of the West’s representational systems is retained in this shift from Derrida to Foucault, but now Owens can at least specify particular harmful effects of powerful representations and the groups most likely to suffer those harms.

Three years later (1985) Owens criticizes Foucault for only telling “half the story”; what “Foucault would excise” is the half “that concerned desire and representation” (204). Here we need Lacan, who teaches us to “regard all human sexuality as masquerade” (214), as a representation of presence/plenitude/identity over the absence/lack that is castration. Appropriately enough, the Lacanian essay on “Posing” brings Owens full circle. He ends with a quote from Derrida. “If the alterity of the other is posed, that is simply posed, doesn’t it amount to the same . . . . From this point of view I would even go so far as to say that the alterity of the other inscribes something on the relation which can in no way be posed” (215).

The critique of representation, then, keeps coming back to the desire for that which exceeds representation, which cannot be represented. I use the word “desire” deliberately here because, while fascinated by the inscription, formation, and constraints of conventional desire, Owens follows his models in never thinking through his own desire to question and disrupt the conventional. This postmodern discourse adopts without question a certain oppositional posture traditionally associated with the avant-garde. This blind spot is particularly irritating because Owens recognizes that the avant-garde was never the revolutionary force it set itself up as and that contemporary re-runs of avant-garde movements are the farcical versions that follow tragedy in Marx’s version of historical repetition. “Honor, Power, and the Love of Women” offers a wonderful send-up of neoexpressionism, while “The Problem with Puerilism” argues convincingly that “what has been constructed in the East Village is a simulacrum of the social formation from which the modernist avant-garde first emerged” (263). But, lest we allow this talk of simulacrum to entice us into nostalgia for the original modernist avant-garde, Owens is quick to sketch for us the role that avant-garde played in making “difference . . . become an object of consumption”:

The fact that avant-garde artists had only partially withdrawn from the middle-class elite--which also constitutes the primary, if not the only, audience for avant-garde production--placed them in a contradictory position; but this position also equipped them for the economic function they would eventually be called upon to perform--that of broker between the culture industry and subcultures.(264)

[5] Armed with this awareness of the modernist avant-garde’s failure, Owens offers nothing beyond calls for a purity more stringent than the modernists could achieve. Writing during the boom art market years of the 80s (which, again, he wonderfully satirizes when discussing enemies like Robert Hughes in “The Yen for Art”), Owens is reduced to denial when asked to contemplate the relation of the artists he champions to that market. Andars Stephanson asks: “But isn’t it true that oppositional artists themselves became marketable, say, after 1980?”–to which Owens replies: “This is seriously overplayed. Hans Haacke does not sell much work, and he has not had a show in an American museum until now. Kruger’s work is also interesting because it costs far more to produce in terms of photomechanical work, labs and so forth, than it costs to produce a painting, yet it sells for one-tenth of the latter’s price” (307). What’s significant here is not the fact of the matter, but the form that the defense of oppositional artists takes. Owens has not gotten past the association of purity and integrity with poverty, with producing the art work which does not become a commodity. He is setting himself up to reach the same dead end that avant-garde art has been reaching for seventy-five years: the dead end of silence as the only pure act and the dead end of isolation from every audience because to appeal to anyone outside the self (or, in some cases, outside a small coterie) is to become implicated in social forms of exchange that are repudiated.

In this context, the poststructuralist critique of representation comes across as a new variant on this long-standing modernist obsession with purity. To even engage in debate with the culture, it seems, would be to succumb to its terms.

It is not the ideological content of representation of these Others that is at issue. Nor do contemporary artists oppose their own representations to existing ones; they do not subscribe to the phallacy of the positive image. (To do so would be to oppose some 'true' representivity to a 'false' one.) Rather, these artists challenge the activity of representation itself which, by denying them speech, consciousness, the ability to represent themselves, stands indicted as the primary agent of their domination."(262)

What would it mean to “indict” the “activity of representation itself” in the name of “the ability to represent themselves”? By rejecting a conflict within the social over different representations with the assertion that every positive image is a phallacy, Owens places the artist on the path of pure negation that has been a modernist treadmill since at least Flaubert’s desire to write a novel about nothing.

The critic is left in even a worse position than the artist.

"What you are saying, then, is that to represent is to subjugate?" "Precisely. There is a remarkable statement by Gilles Deleuze . . . that encapsulates the political ramifications of the contemporary critique of representation: 'you [Deleuze says to Foucault] were the first . . . to teach us something absolutely fundamental: the indignity of speaking for others.'"(261-2)

Owens as critic does nothing else but speak for others. He wrote only one essay–“Outlaws: Gay Men in Feminism”–that is even remotely self-referential, and he is still speaking for gay men, not of this particular gay man. Everything he writes performs the traditional critical task of mediating between audience and work (of art, of theory). A sometime academic who wrote academic prose to introduce academic theory to a nonacademic audience (the New York art world), Owens was primarily a translator, re-representing representations to facilitate their entry into different contexts. His success is attested to by the fact that his work was widely read and highly influential. Through his efforts and those of some collaborators, Art in America became a conduit point between the academy and the art world. Owens was a mediator whose work keeps circling around his distrust of the means of mediation. By adopting a simple-minded and wholesale condemnation of representation, Owens boxed himself into a corner where he had to suspect anything he would write of bad faith. He wrote only three essays the last four years of his life; he did not write about AIDS. I know nothing about Owens personally; his health as well as other commitments could easily explain this relative silence. But his own theoretical views had, by that time, left him very little space to work in.

No doubt Owens would have struck out in new directions. What is fascinating and rewarding about these collected essays is the combination of Owens’s sharp eye (this is someone whose representations of others’ art I came to trust) with his continued fascination with and ability to learn from theoretical arguments. If I focus on the theoretical impasse at which his work ends, it is because I find it sad that one version of postmodernism is currently stuck right there, unable (apparently) to apply its own strictures against universals to this universal condemnation of representation, unable to think its own retrograde (modernist) desire for purity within its critique of discourses that aim for homogeneity. Not surprisingly, the specifics of Owen’s wonderful essays on William Wegman, Barbara Kruger, and Lothar Baumgarten already suggest some ways to move beyond a vague and unsatisfiable desire for absolute alterity. The conclusion to the essay on Wegman talks of “necessity” again, but this time it is the necessity of recognition, not of getting beyond it:

When we laugh at Man Ray's foiling of Wegman's designs, we are also acknowledging the possibility, indeed the necessity, of another, nonnarcissistic mode of relating to the Other--one based not on the denial of difference, but upon its recognition. Thus, inscribed within the social space in which both Bakhtin and Freud situate laughter, Wegman's refusal of mastery is ultimately political in its implications.(163-4)

Postmodern thought needs to turn to the question of the social space which would enable this recognition of difference; it is the absence of the social and its myriad forms of interaction between self and other that constitutes both the purity and the peculiar emptiness of so much postmodernist cultural critique. For what could be more narcissistic than a total repudiation of all the forms of representation by which the other might try to make contact?

September 25, 2013
Practice, Politique, Postmodernism
J.L. Lemke

Sociology Department
City University of New York
jllbc@cunyvm.cuny.edu

Bourdieu, Pierre and Lois J.D. Wacquant. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

I. The Text

Invitation to Reflexive Sociology is a book that is not quite a text. Tiles in a genre mosaic abut one another: Fantasy Interview with the Great Man (Part Deux, a construction not a transcript), Fatherly Advice on Becoming a Sociologist (Part 3, from a seminar for Bourdieu’s students), several essays at a “How to Read Bourdieu” (Part 1, Appendices, Notes, from Wacquant). The unbounded border mosaic of intertexts, present and absent, draws down readers’ accumulated cultural capital toward indebtedness.

If you have read Bourdieu’s The Logic of Practice (1990), whose first half sets forth his most original theoretical ideas (elaborating and superseding the older Outline of a Theory of Practice, 1977), and at least one of his major sociological studies Distinction, 1984; Homo Academicus, 1988; La Noblesse d’Etat, 1989), then Invitation may help you decide whether to read more from Bourdieu, and what. If you have only a vague sense that Bourdieu is a leading social theorist who engages the telling intellectual issues of the day, Invitation may convince you that, along with his near neighbors in social space (as he himself defines them in Homo Academicus, 276), Foucault and Derrida, Bourdieu sets the stage for our postmodernist play.

And if you have ever wondered what Bourdieu thinks of his actual and potential rivals: sociological, intellectual, and philosophical (except Derrida and Foucault), or simply enjoy stockpiling ammunition for use in future intellectual battles of your own, Invitation is a fully-stocked armamentarium.

But Invitation is also a voice, one that resonates with our own, speaking as we would like to speak (if not necessarily saying what we would like to say), about the construction of reality and society, experience and meaning, language and power, the social and the personal, time and the body, gender and domination, science and politics, academics and intellectuals. Perhaps it is only an illusion, but in this text as nowhere else, we seem to hear Bourdieu speaking, rather than writing. Bourdieu writes himself out of his writing in too many ways. However written his speaking may be here, however defensive, didactic, or undialogical, to a small degree at least it allows us to write him back in.

And if you are a student, or any sort of newcomer, to academic and intellectual discourse in what was once humanistic and social studies, I advise you to read and challenge this book.

II. Postmodernism, Si or No?

So, is he or isn’t he? The short answer, I think, is that Bourdieu writes as a chastened defender of the great modernist projects, a modernist for postmodern times. But while his desire is with the best of modernism, his method is shaped by the same rebellion against modernism and structuralism that characterizes his close contemporaries Foucault and Derrida.

Here, taken from Invitation, is my reading of Bourdieu’s project and consequent overt stance against postmodernism, to be followed by a counter-construction of Bourdieu as postmodern in spite of himself.

The project of Bourdieu’s desire is a grand sociology which realizes in part the modernist dream of a scientific objectivity hard won through its own reflexivity: “Sociology can escape to a degree [from its necessarily socially determined point of view on the social world] by drawing on its knowledge of the social universe in which social science is produced to control the effects of the determinisms that operate in this universe and, at the same time, bear on sociologists themselves” (67).

This is the motivation for Bourdieu’s many studies of the academic and educational systems of his native France, and generally for his studies of how the social system shapes our perceptions and desires. He constructs his notion of what scientific objectivity about such matters means following Marx’s criterion that social facts exist “independently of individual consciousness and will.” But what exist objectively for Bourdieu in the social world are pre-eminently relations, not positive entities, and with this he has already taken the first, structuralist step into postmodernism.

Still, he wants to draw a line against critiques of social science that see its/his writings as merely “poetics and politics,” opening the door to “nihilistic relativism” of the same sort found in the “strong program of the sociology of science” (Feyerabend? Bruno Latour?). He opposes “the false radicalism of the questioning of science” and “those who would reduce scientific discourse to rhetorical strategies about a world reduced to the state of a text” (246-7). How can I hope to rehabilitate the author of such reactionary sentiments?

By better understanding the terms of the debate as Bourdieu constructs it. When, just following this last point, he characterizes the goal of his own project as “to wrench scientific reason from the embrace of practical reason, to prevent the latter from contaminating the former,” we need to understand his critical distinction of the practical from the scientific, and his own critique of positivistic objectivity:

Against positivistic materialism, the theory of practice posits that objects of knowledge are constructed, and not passively recorded; against intellectual idealism, it reminds us that the principle of this construction is found in the socially constituted system of structured and struc- turing dispositions acquired in practice . . . and that all knowledge . . . presupposes a work of construction . . . that consists of an activity of practical construction, even of practical reflection, that ordinary notions of thought, consciousness, knowledge prevent us from thinking . . . . [This view aims] to escape from under the philosophy of the subject without doing away with the agent, as well as from the philosophy of the [social, semiotic] structure, but without forgetting to take into account the effects it wields upon and through the agent.(121)

III. Practice, Temporality, Embodiedness

For a systematic account of this Logic of Practice, we have to turn to that text. Its tour-de-force Introduction is mainly a critique of every form of objectivism, and more profoundly of the conditions of possibility of theoretical and scientific perspectives:

Social science must not only, as objectivism [vs. phenomenological subjectivisms] would have it, break with native experience and the native representation of that experience, but also, by a second break, call into question the presuppositions inherent in the position of the "objective" observer who, seeking to interpret practices, tends to bring into the object the principles of his relation to the object.... Knowledge does not only depend, as an elementary relativism would have it, on the particular viewpoint that at "situated and dated" observer takes us via-a-vis the object. A much more fundamental alteration ... is performed on practice by the sheer fact of taking up a "viewpoint" on it and so constituting it as an object ... this sovereign viewpoint is most easily adopted from elevated positions in the social space, where the social world presents itself as a spectacle seen from afar and from above, as a representation.(Logic of Practice, 27)

In The Logic of Practice Bourdieu inquires into those aspects of experience and social reality which look different precisely because we are in the midst of action and not theoretically and scientifically distancing ourselves from it: the contingency and anticipatability of events when they have yet to happen, the absence of synoptic order and structure from the logic of action, the construction of dynamic vs synoptic time, the role of the body in action without reflection (and in reflection itself), the importance of tempo, rhythm, pacing, duration, delay, and haste in the meaning of events-in-flow. This is the perspective from which Bourdieu originally criticized Levi-Straussian structuralism for its theoreticist blindness to whatever is elided from synoptic representations made from the sovereign viewpoint of a science outside of event-time and the pressures of the moment.

It also provides a counterpoint against which to examine both the conditions of possibility and the otherwise unthinkable biases of all theoretical and scientific discourses and perspectives, as such. Dialectically, it allows us to interrogate the practices of science as practice, and to see in them the role of the practical, embodied logics, the famous dispositions toward practice that Bourdieu calls “habitus”, and which derive from the trajectories of practice of individual social agents as they take up the lives available to them.

I have found this dynamic perspective on social practice, and its dialectical relations with the synoptic perspectives of theoretical representation, extremely useful in my own work on social semiotics, discourse analysis, and text semantics (Lemke 1984, 1990, 1991) and so have many others (e.g. Martin 1985, Thibault 1991) in these fields whose underlying disciplines and methods are quite distant from Bourdieu’s. The re-centering of the body in alternatives to mentalist accounts of subjectivity, cognition, and action; in deconstructing the idealist cheats of a natural science self-disembodied from its own practice; and in theorizing gender issues, domination relations, and the repressed role of bodily violence in constituting the social order are but some of the postmodernist projects that will eventually build on Bourdieu’s theory of practice.

IV. Gender, Habitus, and Us

For all that Bourdieu lays the foundations of a productive critical dialectic between the logics of theory and practice, of semiotic structures and bodies in action, social structures and personal trajectories, and for all the centrality of reflexivity in his notion of social science, there seems to be more preparing-the-way than radical self-critique in his work. There is no profound self-examination, for example, of masculinism, Eurocentrism, or even the essentially bourgeois perspectives in his own theoretical metaphors and paradigms.

Homo Academicus comes closest to being a self- analysis “by proxy,” as he says in the Preface. But it is a micro-analysis, situating Bourdieu in his generation, and in the academy, but not in his gender, social class (bourgeois, as such), or culture (European, as such). By proxy and indirection it suggests that various elements of his scientific and career trajectory are shaped, as his theory requires, by his own initial social position and the effects of the dispostions it engendered in him on his encounters with later opportunities. In Invitation he argues that he keeps the personal Bourdieu on the margins so as not to make facile argumenta ad hominem too easy for his rivals. In doing so, however, he may have kept himself from deploying the full power of sociological reflexivity toward his own theorizing. Enabling such self-critique is, after all, the point of his scientific project and the absence of such self-analysis the very point on which, in the Postscript to Distinction, he criticizes Derrida.

Who, Bourdieu included, can read his texts and not see that he models the whole social universe as a struggle and competition among agents for status, domination, profit, and accumulation in one guise or another? In every field of social action, whatever their habitus, agents deploy and convert their capital (economic, cultural, and social) in an effort to win the game as defined in that field. If the game, and especially the competitive game of sport, is Bourdieu’s favorite simile, his master trope is the agon, the struggle for dominance.

The field of fields, the master field, for Bourdieu is the field of power, in relation to which all others are defined, and power for Bourdieu is the power to win the game, to maximize one’s capital position, to overcome adversaries. Any such summary is caricature, of course, but with the truth of caricature, as well. When Bourdieu speaks, rarely, of what happens “in the family and in other relations of philia,” what he sees is “violence suspended in a kind of pact of symbolic non-aggression,” the pervasive potentiality of every utterance to function as an act of power “bracketed” (145).

The social relations of philia are defined as exceptions to the underlying principle of the agon. The institutions of philia are marginalized, those of the agon made central. Economic competition, cultural competition, personal competition, metaphoric competition among abstracted social positions and roles. This is a view of social reality constructed with the dispositions of masculinism. It survives as doxa for Bourdieu precisely for the reasons his theory offers: because the world as he sees it and lives it fits perfectly with the masculinist dispositions it has produced in him.

Power for Bourdieu is the power to dominate, to control, to win. It is not also the power to nurture, to befriend, to console, to inspire, to share, to yield, to cooperate. It is not the power, in general, to engage in, and so to engage with others in, every social practice that comprises the social reality of every agent–a social reality, therefore, remade from every perspective of practice, and not only from that of the specialized practice of the straight, male, bourgeois academic theorist.

Bourdieu began his career as an anthropologist, and all his theoretical work, and most of his insights, arise from and are illustrated by examples from his fieldwork among the berber Kabyle of Algeria. The view he offers is not meant to be restricted to European culture or to the social reality of the bourgeoisie. He offers brilliant analyses (in the Logic) of the differences between barter and monetary economies and the cultures that support them, but still he models all of social reality as an economics, he takes economic capital and the relations of the economic field to be primus inter pares among all forms of capital and all dimensions of the field of power. This is a view of social reality constructed with the dispositions of the bourgeoisie.

And what does Bourdieu add to economism, even as he transforms simplistic models of base and superstructure into something more dialectical and flexible? Cultural capital and social capital, the capital par excellence of the intellectual, the academic, and the cosmopolite. Know-what and Know-who compete with Have-bucks for power in every field of social practice for Bourdieu. This, too, is a view of social reality constructed with the dispositions of a successful academic and intellectual.

All of these dispositions and their theoretical effects are in need of correction according to Bourdieu’s desire for scientific objectivity. Or they are all in need of diversification and multiplication by the perspectives of feminist and gay alternatives to masculinism, working class and other non-bourgeois viewpoints about social reality, and cultural models of the social world that do not privilege agon over philia, or imagine the social world out of an experience of economism, according to we Others’ desire to make meanings troubling to us and ours.

V. Present and Absent Others

I have probably said too much already about some of the absent Others at Bourdieu’s banquet. I should say a little more about some of the theoretical absences here. Bourdieu is a marvelous describer of how things are. He announces, but does not labor at, a “genetic sociology,” an understanding of the historical trajectories by which not just individuals, but institutions and theoretical objects, came to be made as they are. This he seems to have left largely to the most present absence in his work, Michel Foucault. He does not deal well with matters of social and cultural change.

Invitation points to the final chapter of Homo Academicus for the kernel of a theory of change and revolution, but what we find there is much less, mainly a scheme for describing moments of crisis, turning points, the visible tips of the icebergs of long-term social dynamics. Bourdieu seems to have too profound an awe of the stability of social systems to be willing to see on what chaotic foundations of contingent self-organization they rest (cf. Lemke, in press). His emphasis on embodied habitus should point Bourdieu, and all of us, toward the potential of bodies in (inter-) action to find themselves acting as they should not, acted upon in ways their habitus cannot make canonical sense of, because the material relations into which bodies can enter cannot be exhausted by the semiotic relations of any culture, even an embodied one.

Among the present Others, there are many who help orient our reading of Bourdieu. There are the German philosophers, the first intellectual love of the younger Bourdieu, abandoned by him for social science in order to challenge the stranglehold of philosophy on the academic field of Bourdieu’s youth. There are the sociological and philosophical rivals of the phenomenological-hermeneutic school (especially Geertz and the ethnomethodologists) against whom he argues passsionately (and at least in the case of ethnomethodology, for me, rather persuasively). There are the methodological rivals, especially discourse analysis, which he quite properly resituates back in the sociological context (as do Bakhtin and the social functionalists). There are Sartre and Levi-Strauss, whose debate shaped Bourdieu’s choice between philosophy and social science, and the Algerian war, which defined the more difficult choice between politics and the meta-politics.

And always there is this presence-by-absence, Michel Foucault (and to a lesser degree Jacques Derrida), not simply as individual, but as proximate proxy in the academic social space Bourdieu himself defines Homo Academicus, 276). These three followed closely similar academic and social trajectories, and in Bourdieu’s rather convincing view, we should expect them to be critical keys to reading one another. But Bourdieu scrupulously avoids reading Foucault for us, almost as if he would be reading his mirror-self. The parallels of their projects are evident, and Bourdieu notes this himself, but only notes it, and no more. Perhaps self-reflexivity, like agon, meets its limit in philia.

Note

I have said next to nothing about Bourdieu’s discussions of education, particularly higher education, language and symbolic power, or the nature of science. I plan to address at least some of these areas, in which I have considerable personal interest, first in a separate review (of Bourdieu’s Language and Symbolic Power for the journal Linguistics and Education) and then in a book in preparation Textual Politics: Discourse and Social Theory).

Works Cited
- Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cam- bridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1977.
- Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984.
- Bourdieu, Pierre. La Noblesse d’Etat: Grands Corps et Grandes Ecoles. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1989.
- Bourdieu, Pierre. Homo Academicus. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990.
- Bourdieu, Pierre. The Logic of Practice. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990.
- Bourdieu, Pierre. Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991.
- Lemke, J.L. Semiotics and Education. Monograph in Toronto Semiotic Circle Monographs Series, Victoria University, Toronto, 1984.
- Lemke, J.L. Talking Science: Language, Learning, and Values. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing, 1990.
- Lemke, J.L. “Text Production and Dynamic Text Semantics.” Functional and Systemic Linguistics: Approaches and Uses. Ed. E. Ventola. Berlin: Mouton/deGruyter (Trends in Linguistics: Studies and Monographs 55), 1991.
- Lemke, J.L. “Discourse, Dynamics, and Social Change.” Language as Cultural Dynamic [Focus issue of Cultural Dynamics (Leiden: Brill), in press].
- Martin, James R. “Process and Text: Two Aspects of Human Semiosis.” Systemic Perspectives on Discourse. Ed. J.D. Benson and W.S. Greaves. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing, 1985.
- Thibault, Paul. Social Semiotics as Praxis. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991.
September 25, 2013
Postmodern Communities: The Politics of Oscillation

Heesok Chang

Department of English
Vassar College
hechang@vaxsar.vassar.edu

Vattimo, Gianni. The Transparent Society. Trans. David Webb. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.

Agamben, Giorgio. The Coming Community. Trans. Michael Hardt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

I. Philosophical Homelessness

Readers of the young Georg Lukacs may recall this memorable citation from The Theory of the Novel: “‘Philosophy is really homesickness,’ says Novalis: ‘it is the urge to be at home everywhere.’”

According to Lukacs that is why “integrated civilizations”–where the soul feels at home everywhere, both in the self and in the world–have no philosophy. Or “why (it comes to the same thing) all men in such ages are philosophers, sharing the utopian aim of every philosophy. For what is the task of true philosophy if not to draw that archetypal map?”¹

Needless to say (especially in the [virtual] pages of the present journal) this endorsement of philosophy’s “utopian aim” would not find many adherents today. If anything, the “task” of contemporary philosophy would be to debunk the notion of its universalizing, “archetypal” vocation. The subsumptive mapping of the world by reason is no longer an unquestioned telos of occidental thought.

Today, especially in France, philosophy has addressed itself to a nonappropriative understanding of exteriority, a “thought from the outside.”² Modern thought has deterritorialized its claims to dialectical resolution; it has become homeless, so to speak, once and for all. Against the grain of philosophy’s utopian memory–its nostalgic stance in being, its nostalgia for Being–the philosophers of our moment urge a “nomadic” thinking.

This sort of generalization about “postmodern” philosophy (such as it is) is well known. Like journalism, it is useful up to a certain point–let’s say until the end of the day. But like all more or less accurate journalistic descriptions it tries to say too much in one breath. Decisive opinions about “postmodern” or “poststructuralist” thought “today” leave the philosophical terrain largely undifferentiated. For example, we might be overly hasty to isolate “poststructuralism” from a certain “homesickness.” This philosophical “malady” (maladie du pays) need not be grounded in a Judaeo-Christian or Romantic nostalgia for lost origins; it might point to a more urgent need to rethink the social constitution of our being. I am thinking here not only of Richard Rorty’s recent attempts to imagine a “contingent” community (a sense of human solidarity not founded on an essentialist understanding of the human, but on an expanding recognition of human sufferance).³

I am thinking particularly of those thinkers (again, largely French) who write explicitly “within” a Heideggerean idiom–or rather, those writers who continue to stage a critical confrontation, an Auseinandersetzung, with Heidegger’s thought. I am thinking, for example, of Jacques Derrida’s recent meditations on spirit, friendship, and today’s Europe; or Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe’s exemplary work on the aesthetic assumptions informing modern national identity formation (National Socialism). And I am thinking of Jean-Luc Nancy’s extended research on the finitude of our daily, nightly existence–our “being-in-common”–which has given new rigor and new impetus to thinking about what community actually means.

Nancy’s appeal to rethink community could not really be characterized as nostalgic (quite the contrary). Nevertheless, something of the philosopher’s “transcendental homelessness,” the registration of a shared pain or loss, and therefore of a desire, is distinctly audible in these words: “The gravest and most painful testimony of the modern world, the one that possibly involves all other testimonies to which this epoch must answer . . . is the testimony of the dissolution, the dislocation, or the conflagration of community.”⁴

This sentence could stand as a more or less appropriate epigraph for both the texts under review (more so for The Coming Community, less so for The Transparent Society). Like Nancy, both Gianni Vattimo and Giorgio Agamben address questions of our contemporaneity on a very broad scale. They too write in response to this epochal demand: not to “be at home everywhere,” but to free the very idea of “home,” of a certain belonging, from the planetary administration of techno-economic forces. And like Nancy, both authors draw considerably on Heidegger to articulate not only their diagnoses of our (post)modernity, but also their prescriptions for rethinking our being-in-the-world.

Despite marked differences in tone, style, content, and indeed, quality, The Transparent Society and The Coming Community contribute to our political imagination, to our ideas about “freedom” and “singularity,” “heterotopia” and “community.” With varying success, they outline new ways of being at home in a world that is increasingly no longer, quite simply, “ours.”

II. Hermeneutic Oscillations

English readers of Gianni Vattimo’s previously translated work–particularly the later essays collected in The End of Modernity–will not discover much that is radically new in The Transparent Society (but given Vattimo’s thesis about the impossibility of a definitive overcoming, an Uberwindung, this should certainly come as no surprise). Those who are unfamiliar with his writing, or who have only heard his name in association with the miserable label “weak thought” (pensiero diebole), will find this book a lucid and economical (120 pages of largish type) summary of his latest views on “the postmodern question.”⁵

The brevity of his text does not inhibit Vattimo from fielding a wide range of academic topoi: the evolution of the human sciences, the modern resurgence of myth, the privilege of “shock” in aesthetic experience, the disappearance of utopian models, the centrality of interpretation in a radically plural society. These discussions do not dwell on example and illustration (with the exception of a brief and unexceptional look at Blade Runner). Rather, Vattimo engages his interlocuters–Nietzsche, Heidegger, Benjamin, Adorno, Apel, Habermas, Gadamer–at a pace of brisk generality we might as well call journalistic.

Despite the liberal scope of the contents, however, the book’s eight chapters elaborate a consistent politico-philosophical vision. At the risk of oversimplifying, I believe Vattimo’s essential argument is encapsulated in this sentence from the opening chapter: “To live in this pluralistic world means to experience freedom as a continual oscillation between belonging and disorientation” (10). I will direct my review of the book towards a critical gloss on this sentence.

The Transparent Society takes up where the last book left off–namely, at “the end of modernity.” Vattimo elegantly defines modernity as “the epoch in which simply being modern became a decisive value in itself” (1). This cultural capitalization of the new, which emerges in art with the cult of genius, is eventually incorporated into a greater narrative of human progress and emancipation. Within a unilinear, Enlightenment conception of history the intrinsic value of anything modern consists in its being simply the latest, the most advanced, the nearest to the ends of man.

In a hypothesis which clearly resonates with Jean-Francois Lyotard’s, Vattimo states: “modernity ends when–for a number of reasons–it no longer seems possible to regard history as unilinear” (2). In The End of Modernity the “reasons” he gives are confined principally to philosophical ones–in particular, the forceful anti-foundationalist thinking of Nietzsche and Heidegger. In the present work, however, the advent of postmodernity is no longer an emphatically “theoretical” event. Vattimo foregrounds two major sociological causes for the dissolution of unilinear history.

First, decolonization. The global rebellion against European colonialism and imperialism renders the very notion of a single, centralized story of human progress “de facto problematic”; “The European ideal of humanity has been revealed as one ideal amongst others, not necessarily worse, but unable, without violence, to obtain as the true essence of man, of all men” (4).

Second, planetary mass media. Vattimo seems to regard this factor to be more decisive in ending modernity than the emergence of post-colonial voices because (although he does not say this explicitly) the former is the technological condition of possibility for the latter. A “society of generalized communication” must be in place for multiculturalism to get on the map. The relentless expansion of informational media enables “Cultures and subcultures of all sorts [to step] into the limelight of public opinion” (5).

According to Vattimo, this “giddy proliferation of communication” seems to equip the world for actualizing a fully “transparent society.” We should note, however, that the book is misleadingly, or at least provocatively, titled. For “the transparent society” does not name Vattimo’s vision of a utopian postmodernity. Rather, it describes the belated, modernist ideal of our socius championed by every postmodernist’s favourite straw men: Karl Otto Apel and Jurgen Habermas.

Vattimo argues that Apel’s community of “unrestricted communication” and Habermas’ universe of “communicative action” are informed by the old dream of a self-transparent society. More specifically, their normative ideals of communicative rationality are modelled on the communal drive for self-knowledge exemplified by the human sciences. “But,” Vattimo objects, “can one legitimately model the emancipated human subject, and ultimately society, on the ideal of the scientist in her laboratory, whose objectivity and disinterest are demanded by what is at bottom a technological interest and who conceives of nature as an object only to the extent that it is marked out as a place for potential domination . . . ?” (24).

Here Vattimo sides with the Frankfurt School (and Heideggerean) critique of instrumental reason. The Enlightenment ideal of a perfectly self-transparent society–in which the subject (the Subject) seamlessly enframes the world as an object of reflexive knowledge–does not augur human liberation. Instead, it installs a logic of domination. Man is not emancipated from his social labour, but dehumanized by technology. The transparent society is the totally administered and regulated society.

Now does the ungovernable or “giddy” expansion of information technology today mean we are on the verge of realizing such a transparent society?

According to Vattimo, no.

Adorno’s pessimistic vision of an increasingly instrumentalized modernity is well taken. But “–and this is what Adorno missed–within the communication system itself, mechanisms develop (the ‘rise of new centres of history’) that make the realization of self-transparency in principle impossible” (23). Vattimo does not specify what these “mechanisms” might be. Instead, he testifies repeatedly that the generalization of communication guarantees the dissolution of a monolithic history of human knowledge; “the freedom given by the mass media to so many cultures and Weltanschauungen has belied the very ideal of a transparent society” (6). In postmodernity, it seems everyone gets to step up to the mike.

We should object here that the “liberation of differences” Vattimo has in mind–a sort of “giddy” multicultural polylogue–does not necessarily entail a radical challenge to the existing order.⁶ The fact that everybody now can have their “say” does not automatically disrupt the present constitution of our public sphere. Perhaps real political differences, differences that won’t make a difference by their mere “say” are everywhere today, to borrow Claude Lefort’s phrase, “dissolved into the ceremony of communication.”⁷

Vattimo acknowledges this objection, but hastens to emphasize the “irreducible pluralization” (6) accompanying the veritable explosion of mass media in our daily lives. Moreover–and here we return to his central argument–emancipation today should not, he urges, be thought on the model of self-authentication (this would return us to the dream of self-transparency). What is liberating about postmodernism is not the parading of different identities per se.

Rather, “The emancipatory significance of the liberation of differences and dialects consists . . . in the general disorientation accompanying their initial identification. If, in a world of dialects, I speak my own dialect, I shall be conscious that it is not the only ‘language,’ but that it is precisely one amongst many” (9). In this irreducibly multicultural and heterotopian world I carry around a “weakened” sense of my “reality.” Freedom here does not come from asserting the particularity of my (linguistic) being. Rather, I experience freedom in a totally new way: by “oscillating” continually between feeling at home in my language and sensing how thoroughly finite, transient, and contingent it actually is.

Without commenting on the viability of this weird notion of “freedom” (how could such a thing be judged in all rigour?), I would like to close out this discussion by dwelling a bit on the key word “oscillation.”

The figurative movement of vibrating or fluctuating is certainly not new to Vattimo’s thinking. Indeed, oscillation in the present work may well be read as a spatial translation of the temporal or (post)historical notion of Verwindung which is described in the last essay of The End of Modernity. Readers of that work may recall this Heideggerean word signifies a going-beyond of metaphysics which is not a complete overcoming of metaphysics (the modernist myth), but rather a sort of deepening, healing resignation to its tracelike survival. Amongst Verwindung’s other lexical meanings Vattimo points out “twisting” and “distortion.” We experience Being in postmodernity not as an emancipated presence, but as an ironic twist or distortion. Being is only approachable in its estrangement from our nostalgic grasp–as a constant oscillation between revelation and concealment.

In The Transparent Society Vattimo fleshes out this meaning of oscillation as ongoing estrangement by referring us to the realm of the aesthetic. The fluid play of differences we find in postmodernity is likened to the disorienting encounter with the artwork–the blow (Stoss) or “shock”–described by Heidegger and Benjamin. Vattimo explicitly gives ontology and aesthetic theory a defining role in conceptualizing the oscillation and disorientation peculiar to postmodern being.

But I would suggest the metaphor of oscillation in Vattimo’s argument does not only derive from his interpretations of philosophy and postmodernity. Oscillation is a crucial feature of his interpretive methodology itself.

An implicit aim of The Transparent Society (but made explicit in the final chapter) is to defend a ramified understanding of Gadamerian hermeneutics. To move very quickly here, Vattimo wants to rescue hermeneutics from unacceptable axioms like this one: “To recognize oneself (or one’s own) in the other and find a home abroad–this is the basic movement of spirit whose being consists in this return to itself from otherness.”⁸ Hermeneutics’ universalizing appropriation of other worlds can only be corrected by breaking its circular understanding. Thus, the hermeneutic circle gives way to a trembling arc of interpretation. The figure of swaying between the poles of belonging and disorientation, home and away, assure Vattimo’s hermeneutic procedure “cannot appear . . .[under the] logics of subsumption.”⁹

But this metaphor of oscillation is hardly a postmodern twist on interpretation. The methodological notion of oscillation appears at the pre-Gadamerian beginnings of hermeneutics. As Werner Hamacher has noted: “Schleiermacher’s concept for the delicate relationship between the general and the individual, within which all verbal and language-generative acts manifest themselves, is called the ‘schema of oscillation between the general and the particular.’”¹⁰

Vattimo’s hermeneutic oscillation guarantees his understanding of postmodern alterity will remain disoriented. But this does not allow other “dialects” to appear outside the sway of hermeneutic understanding (no matter how “weakened”) itself. In this oscillation differences can only appear as trembling versions of themselves–as different or “contaminated” identities¹¹ –and not as differences indifferent to identity. To borrow a term from Agamben, nothing singular may appear.

It does not occur to Vattimo that the postmodern experience of freedom may be post-hermeneutic as well.

III. Whatever Being

“Marginality and homelessness are not, in my opinion, to be gloried in; they are to be brought to an end, so that more, not fewer, people can enjoy the benefits of what has for centuries been denied the victims of race, class, or gender.”¹²

Edward Said’s words testify, in their own way, to what Nancy calls “the dissolution, the dislocation, or the conflagration of community.” Said here is criticizing the politics of identity–the “unreconstructed nationalism”–that grips not only the academy, but the postcolonial world at large. Reclamations of cultural identity were useful and necessary for asserting independence from colonial rule. But, today, nationalist affirmations of identity for their own sake act only in the interests of a clamorous separatism. Nancy concurs with this diagnosis when he remarks that “the emergence . . . of decolonized communities has not . . . triggered any genuine renewal of the question of community.”¹³

Unlike Said, however, Nancy does not presuppose the question of community to be a question about reclaiming our humanity. He does not think community on the traditional humanist model of a lost or broken immanence (“what has for centuries been denied”) which must be restored. Like Vattimo, he does not imagine our future in the direction of a “transparent society.”

But what other than a local or universal affiliation–a sense of belonging to this tribe, this nation, this race, or to the human race as a whole–could form the basis for any meaningful community? This is where Agamben’s latest book makes, I think, a fundamental contribution to our political thought. The Coming Community delineates the topos of belonging without mobilizing identity politics and without falling back on the idees fixes of humanist discourse.

It is impossible, in the space that remains, to give the reader an adequate sense of the immense scope of Agamben’s philosophical and philological learning. The expected readings of Kant and Heidegger, Benjamin and Kafka, are supplemented at every turn with astonishing examples drawn from medieval logic and analytic philosophy, Talmudic tales and Provencal poetry.

Dense though it is, Agamben’s writing is never turgid or pedantic. Rather, his terse, fluid style is reminiscent (the likeness has been drawn before and will be drawn again) of Walter Benjamin’s.

And like Benjamin (at least in this latest book), Agamben probes contemporary social phenomena–technology and media, the society of the spectacle and the modern fate of social classes, a stocking commercial and Tiananmen Square–in the light of his theoretical expositions.

A lengthier discussion would need to sample some of these exemplary readings (and this entire text proceeds through the by-play, the Bei-spiel, of examples). It might be more useful here, however, to summarize for the reader, against the grain of the text’s singular movement, the gist of the argument. To enhance the critical significance of such a reductive reading, I will place Agamben’s conception of “the coming being” in relation to Nancy’s groundbreaking ideas about community.

In order to rescue community from its nostalgic (and finally Christian) assumptions we must, Nancy thinks, return to ontology (first philosophy). A serious reflection on community requires we answer the call to rethink–at the most mundane level–what it means to be-in-common.

For Nancy this call does not arise from a utopian or humanist appeal for a reorganization of social relations in which community is posited as the end result, the work, of a subject labouring on itself. The obscure exigency of community comes from the existential position of our being-there, thrown into the world. This being-there is not a punctual self-presence, a being-oneself. Community or being-in-common is not a predicate of an essentially solitary entity. Rather, being-there (Dasein) is none other than a being-with (Mitsein). The very possibility of my being alone depends on my ontological potential to share my existence.

Emphasizing Heidegger’s differential and relational definition of Dasein in order to underline our constitutive being-in-common may be easy enough to follow. What is much more difficult to grasp is that for Nancy, our strange built-in sociality does not provide any groundwork for building a community in any identifiable sense. On the contrary, the fact that we are (ontologically) only in relation to one another thwarts–or resists (a key word for Nancy)–in advance any self- or communitarian identification with this or that identity trait (being red, being Italian, being communist–to cite Agamben’s examples). Our being-in-common is a limit-experience, a feeling for our finitude. What we share at the end of ourselves, ecstatically (so to speak), is not our shared individuality, but our uncommon singularity.

The experience of this sharing should not be understood as a selfless fusion into a group (both Nancy and Agamben write continuously against the unsurpassed danger of our political modernity: fascism, Nazism). Rather, our shared singularity takes the form of an exposure. We are exposed to the absence of any substantial identity to which we could belong. Exposure to singularity: that means to be scattered together, like strangers on a train, not quite face-to-face, oscillating between the poles of communion and disaggregation.¹⁴ It is this banal relation without relation that exposes our pre-identical singularity, our being-in-common.

Coming now to Agamben, I believe his work helps us to approach this renewed question of community from another angle. Specifically, he gives positive content to what Nancy is inclined, I think, to describe negatively: namely, the concept of singularity.

The Coming Community opens like this: “The coming being is whatever being. In the Scholastic enumeration of transcendentals (quodlibet ens est unum, verum, bonum seu perfectum–whatever entity is one, true, good, or perfect), the term that, remaining unthought in each, conditions the meaning of all the others is the adjective quodlibet. The common translation of this term as ‘whatever’ in the sense of ‘it does not matter which, indifferently’ is certainly correct, but in its form the Latin says exactly the opposite: Quodlibet ens is not ‘being, it does not matter which,’ but rather ‘being such that it always matters.’ The Latin always already contains, that is, a reference to the will (libet). Whatever being has an original relation to desire” (1).

The basis of the coming community, the singular being, is whatever being–not in the sense of “I don’t care what you are,” but rather, “I care for you such as you are.” As such you are freed from belonging either to the emptiness of the universal or the ineffability of the individual.

In Agamben’s elaboration of singularity, human identity is not mediated by its belonging to some set or class (being old, being American, being gay). Nor does it consist in the simple negation of all belonging (here Agamben parts company with Bataille’s notion of the “negative community,” the community of those who have no community). Rather, whatever names a sort of radical generosity with respect to belonging. The singular being is not the being who belongs only here or there, but nor is it the being who belongs everywhere and nowhere (flipsides of the same empty generality). This other being always matters to me not because I am drawn to this or that trait, nor because I identify him or her with a favoured race, class, or gender. And certainly not because he or she belongs to a putatively universal set like humanity or the human race.

The other always matters to me only when I am taken with all of his/her traits, such as they are. This defining generosity of the singular means that quodlibet ens is not determined by this or that belonging, but by the condition of belonging itself. It belongs to belonging. The singularity of being resides in its exposure to an unconditional belonging. [51] Such a singularly exposed being wants to belong–which is to say, it belongs to want, or, for lack of a less semantically burdened and empty word, to love: “The singularity exposed as such is whatever you want, that is, lovable” (2).

We must be careful here not to conflate Agamben’s exposition of whatever being with a more familiar discourse on love: “Love is never directed toward this or that property of the loved one (being blond, being small, being tender, being lame), but neither does it neglect the properties in favor of an insipid generality (universal love): The lover wants the loved one with all of its predicates, its being such as it is. The lover desires the as only insofar as it is such–this is the lover’s particular fetishism” (2).

But what could a thing with all of its predicates look like? Agamben gives us the example of the human face. Every face is singular. This does not mean a face individuates a pre-existing form or universalizes individual features. The face as such is utterly indifferent to what makes it different and yet similar. It is impossible to determine from which sphere–the common or the proper–the face derives its singular expressivity.

In this the face is not unlike handwriting in which it is impossible to draw the line between what makes this signature at the same time common and proper, legible and unique. We cannot say for certain whether this hand and this face actualize a universal form, or whether the universal form is engendered by these million different scripts and faces.

Whatever being emerges, like handwriting, like the face, on “a line of sparkling alternation” (20) between language and word, form and expression, potentiality and act. “This is how we must read the theory of those medieval philosophers,” Agamben writes, “who held that the passage from potentiality to act, from common form to singularity, is not an event accomplished once and for all, but an infinite series of modal oscillations” (19).¹⁵ The coming community is founded on the imperceptible oscillations of whatever being.

But what, finally, might the politics of whatever belonging be?

Agamben envisions the coming politics not as a hegemonic struggle between classes for control of the State, but as an inexorable agon between whatever singularity and state organization. What the State cannot digest is not the political affirmations of identity (on the contrary), but the formation of a community not grounded in any belonging except for the human co-belonging to whatever being.

“What was most striking about the demonstrations of the Chinese May,” Agamben points out, “was the relative absence of determinate contents in their demands” (85).

Here Agamben surely also has in mind the singular example of May 68. I would even say The Coming Community is (not unlike Vattimo’s book) a belated response to the radical promise–let’s say (using the wrong idiom perhaps), the promise of human happiness–exposed in that event.

In these works by two important Italian thinkers, philosophy becomes once again, perhaps, a kind of homesickness, a longing to belong. To a permanent disorientation. To oscillation. To whatever.

Notes

1. The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge: MIT UP, 1971), 29.

2. This phrase, “La pensee du dehors,” is the title of Michel Foucault’s important essay on Maurice Blanchot (first published in Critique 229, 1966). Gilles Deleuze elaborates on the theme of exteriority in his excellent book on Foucault Foucault, trans. Sean Hand [Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988]). See especially the chapter entitled “Strategies or the Non-stratified: the Thought of the Outside (Power)” where he links up this early essay with Foucault’s later and better known piece on Nietzschean genealogy.

3. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989.

4. This is the opening sentence of “The Inoperative Community” (trans. Peter Connor, in The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Connor [Minneapolis and Oxford: U of Minnesota P, 1991], 1).

5. I take this phrase from a blurb on the back jacket of the book: “‘This book is of major importance to the debate on the postmodern question.’–Jean-Francois Lyotard.”

6. For a recent–and typical (that is, typically anti-academic)–articulation of this objection see David Rieff’s piece “Multiculturalism’s Silent Partner: It’s the newly globalized economy, stupid,” Harper’s 287 August 1993: 17-19.

7. The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986), 226.

8. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, ed. Garrett Barden and John Cumming (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), 15.

9. This quote, not to mention my understanding of the role of oscillation in hermeneutics, comes from Werner Hamacher’s essay “Hermeneutic Ellipses: Writing the Hermeneutical Circle in Schleiermacher,” trans. Timothy Bahti, in Transforming the Hermeneutic Context: From Nietzsche to Nancy, ed. Gayle L. Ormiston and Alan D. Schrift (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990), 190.

10. Ibid. 190.

11. In an essay entitled “Hermeneutics and Anthropology” Vattimo is careful to underscore the ideological nature of ethnographic otherness. Anticipating the theme of generalized communication he writes: “The hermeneutic–but also anthropological–illusion of encountering the other, with all its theoretical grandiosity, finds itself faced with a mixed reality in which alterity is entirely exhausted. The disappearance of alterity does not occur as a part of the dreamed-for total organization of the world, but rather as a condition of widespread contamination” The End of Modernity 159). This sobering reminder about the Westernization of third world cultures seems to drop out of Vattimo’s discussion in The Transparent Society where the emphasis falls on heterogeneity not homologation.

12. Edward Said, “The Politics of Knowledge,” Raritan 11 (Summer 1991): 31.

13. Nancy 22.

14. “Passengers in the same train compartment are simply seated next to each other in an accidental, arbitrary, and completely exterior manner. They are not linked. But they are also quite together inasmuch as they are travelers on this train, in this same space and for this same period of time. They are between the disintegration of the ‘crowd’ and the aggregation of the group, both extremes remaining possible, virtual, and near at every moment. This suspension is what makes ‘being-with’: a relation without relation, or rather, being exposed simultaneously to relationship and absence of relationship” (Nancy, “Of Being-in-Common,” trans. James Creech, Community at Loose Ends, ed. Miami Theory Collective [Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1991] 7).

15. “Oscillation” is an entirely appropriate word to use in this context for, as Hamacher points out, “oscillum is in fact a derivation of os, mouth, face, and thus means little mouth, little face and mask. Oscillation, understood in its etymological context, would indicate that ‘originary’ movement of language in which it is allotted to something or someone, which has neither language nor face, is neither intuition or concept” (190).

16. This sentence concludes, in parentheses: “(democracy and freedom are notions too generic and broadly defined to constitute the real object of a conflict, and the only concrete demand, the rehabilitation of Hu Yao–Bang, was immediately granted)” (85).

September 25, 2013
‘Imagining The Unimaginable’: J.M. Coetzee, History, and Autobiography
Rita Barnard

English Department
University of Pennsylvania
rbarnard@mail.sas.upenn.edu

Attwell, David. J.M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing. Perspectives on South Africa 48. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993.

Coetzee, J.M. Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews. Ed. David Attwell. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.

David Attwell’s important new critical account of J.M. Coetzee’s work takes as its epigraph a statement from one of his interviews with Coetzee, recently collected in Doubling the Point:

I am not a herald of community or anything else, as you correctly recognize. I am someone who has intimations of freedom (as every chained prisoner has) and constructs representations--which are shadows themselves--of people slipping their chains and turning their faces to the light.(341)

The remark is in many ways characteristic of Coetzee: it does not refer in a direct and unproblematic way to any one of his novels; and yet it captures their rigorous sense of their own limitations, as well as their muted utopian dimension. The allusiveness of the statement is also characteristic, in that it rewrites, rather than merely echoes, Plato’s allegory of the cave. Deeply conscious, as always, of our inevitably mediated and tenuous sense of reality (perhaps, in this context, we might call it “History”), Coetzee shares something of Plato’s skepticism about what the poet might do in the world: a body still chained in darkness can scarcely be an “unacknowledged legislator,” nor a herald, nor even a truthful witness. (South African literature, Coetzee once remarked, is “exactly the kind of literature you would expect people to write in a prison” [Doubling, 98]). Yet the shadow-play he evokes here–and, he feels, in his fiction–is not quite the trivial passage of objects before the firelight which Plato has us conceive. It is a shadowy premonition of the impossible, of a different way of seeing: one that can only begin at that moment when, first, the body is unshackled, and then the eyes turn to a new order.

This statement, though far more personal, is reminiscent of a moment in Coetzee’s 1986 essay, “Into the Dark Chamber.” The piece recalls how Rosa Burger, the protagonist of Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter, is thrown into utter confusion as she watches a “black, poor, brutalized” man cruelly whip his donkey in a drunken fury. The act brings to Rosa’s mind, in the rush of an instant, a vision of the entirety of human suffering and torture, especially politically motivated cruelty: “solitary confinement … the Siberias of snow or sun, the lives of Mandela, Sisulu, Mbeki, Kathrada, Kgosana, gull-picked on the Island” (Doubling 367). But it does so in such a way as to render moral judgement impossible: here is “torture without the torturer,” victim hurting victim. How does one proceed beyond this vision? Coetzee asks. He ends his essay with an expression of his longing, with Rosa, for a restoration of ethics, for a “time when all human acts … will be returned to the ambit of moral judgment,” for a society in which it will “once again be meaningful for the gaze of the author, the gaze of authority and authoritative judgement”–the gaze of one who has faced the light outside the prison-cave–“to be turned upon scenes of torture” (Doubling, 368).

The imperative to proceed “beyond” is, of course not one that is often indulged in Coetzee’s novels, nor is it clear, from a strictly logical or materialist point of view, that such a move is really possible. What is at stake, when Coetzee, and his critic/interlocutor, ponder this question, is the relationship between the imagination and the real, or, if you will, between textuality and history. This relationship is the main concern of David Attwell’s book. The project of J.M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing could be understood as an attempt to negotiate the distance between two contradictory attitudes towards history on the novelist’s part. The first position, discussed in Attwell’s opening chapter, finds its most forceful expression in Coetzee’s controversial address (“The Novel Today”) to the Weekly Mail Book Week in 1987. Coetzee here insists on the discursive nature of history, and its difference from–and even its enmity to–the discourse of the novel. He describes the position of the South African novelist as follows:

In times of intense ideological pressure like the present, when the space in which the novel and history normally coexist like two cows on the same pasture, each minding its own business, is squeezed to almost nothing, the novel, it seems to me, has only two options: supplementarity or rivalry.... (15)

In the face of what we might call the dominant counter- hegemonic discourse of the mass democratic movement, in which literature must become a weapon in “the struggle,” Coetzee resolutely refuses the “correct” position of supplementarity, and claims the separate discourse of the novel, of the story, as his own–beleaguered–terrain.

The second position, discussed in Attwell’s final chapter, emerges from Coetzee’s 1990 interview with the Washington Post, in which “real history” seems to be reaffirmed. A propos of Francis Fukiyama’s (premature) post-Cold War declarations about the global achievement of liberal democracy, the novelist observes:

There is a certain controversy, isn't there, going on right at the moment in the United States about "the end of history"?... The position, expressed in a very crude way, is that the Western democracies have reached a stage in their historical development in which development ceases because there is no stage beyond it.... That very way of seeing the history of mankind is a symptom of the First World ... moving to a plateau of inconsequentiality or irrelevance. It's actually the Third World where history, real history is happening. And the First World has played itself out of the game.(Attwell, 124)

This observation, with which Attwell brings his study to its close, is read as a return to the site of history, “real history,” as a place of privilege.

For Attwell, whose approach to literature is theoretically eclectic but fundamentally historicist, and whose declared purpose is not only to explicate, but to offer a “tribute” to Coetzee’s oeuvre (7), Coetzee’s insistence on novelistic autonomy in “The Novel Today” essay presents something of a political and a methodological problem. As a South African academic, he is only too aware of the critical protest which this kind of position could– and did–elicit; namely, that Coetzee is guilty of a decadent, elitist aestheticism.¹ He seems somewhat embarrassed by the “chilly political choice” and the “exclusively and unhappily Manichean” terms in which it is offered (16-17; Trump 107). It is tempting, therefore, to speculate that this might be the reason why “The Novel Today”–surely one of Coetzee’s most provocative and least circulated pieces–is not included in Doubling the Point.

In fact, however, the main impulse in J.M. Coetzee: Politics and Writing in South Africa is not to evade, but to challenge and complicate such a polarization of history and fictionality, by exploring the ways in which Coetzee’s novels are themselves contextualized. Attwell offers the term “situational metafiction” as a way of suggesting that the tension between the two contradictory positions is both irresolvable and productive. The term, as he argues, is by no means paradoxical: “Coetzee’s figuring of the tension between text and history is itself a historical act, one that must be read back into the discourses of South Africa where on can discern its illuminating power” (3).² Whether or not Coetzee chooses to represent South African history is then far less important, in this study, than the fact that his work consistently registers, even when it tries to escape, the political pressures that shape the act of writing. The historical contextualization we see in Attwell’s text is not the kind Coetzee excoriates in “The Novel Today”: the kind that treats the novels’ conclusions as checkable by history “as a child’s schoolwork is checked by a school mistress” [3].³ Attwell suggests that for Coetzee, as for Jameson, “History” per se is unrepresentable, but, as a political unconscious, leaves its mark on all forms of expression. The position is formulated as follows in Doubling the Point: “it is rare that history should emerge … as Necessity, as an absolute limit to consciousness. History, in [Coetzee’s] work, seems less a process that can be represented than a force acting on representation …” (66).

Compared to the other three full-length studies of Coetzee’s work (by Penner, Dovey, and Gallagher) Attwell’s is by far the most knowledgeable and sophisticated in its treatment of the South African context–historical, political, and literary. Indeed, it is fair to say that only Susan Van Zanten Gallagher’s A Story of South Africa: J.M. Coetzee’s Fiction in Context, makes much of an attempt to offer a historicist reading.⁴ Attwell’s book situates the novels not only in terms of political events–the Soweto uprisings, the death in detention of Steve Biko, etc.–the kind of thing that Gallagher, at her greater remove from South Africa, also provides–but in terms of both the academic and political discourses prevalent in South Africa at a given moment.

Attwell is able, for instance, to relate the political stance of Dusklands (1974) to the emergence of a post- liberal discourse in South Africa during the seventies: a phenomenon shaped, in various ways, by the Black Consciousness movement, by Beyers Naude’s Study Project on Christianity in Apartheid Society (SPRO-CAS), by the first contributions of a South African Marxist historiography, and by the first challenges to the comfortable Leavisite humanism that had dominated South African English departments up to that point. Or, in the case of Waiting for the Barbarians (1981), he is able to demonstrate that the novel, despite its fictional location and indeterminate time–and despite its stated theme of resistance to “the time of History” as the imposition of a vicious Empire– responds rather specifically to the discourse and practice of the state at a particularly paranoid moment. In the wake of the Soweto uprising, and the fall of colonial regimes to the north, the Apartheid regime developed a “total strategy” to counter the “total onslaught” of terrorists, communists, and agitators at the border (not to mention those in the backyard, under the bed, and behind every bush). The novel’s challenge to “Empire’s” cruel certainties in its quest for self-preservation and its elimination of the “Other,” clearly responds to this time of detentions, bannings, torture, and rumors of torture in South Africa. Moreover, as Attwell argues, the very phantasmagoric remoteness of the novel’s mise-en-scene, has the paradoxically representational dimension of mimicking the phantasmagoric character of the state’s paranoid projections. As one who was subjected at school to classes in “Youth Resistance,” who joked that the Communists invented sex to seduce the Afrikaner teenager, and who listened in astonishment to the callous excuses given for the deaths in detention in the years just before the novel’s publication, I can only confirm the aptness of this contextualization: it is impossible for someone who lived through the late seventies in South Africa to read the novel only as “being about” a fictive never-never land.

But to say this is to minimize the caution with which both Attwell, and Coetzee in Doubling the Point, approach the question of relevant “facts” and “contexts.” (At the beginning of the latter book, for instance, we find Coetzee pondering the problem of writing the history of his intellectual career: “But which facts? All the facts? No. All the facts are too many facts. You choose the facts insofar as they fall with your evolving purpose. What is the purpose in the present case?” [Doubling 18].) Attwell’s introduction, significantly, offers a kind of apology for his own historicizing efforts: he recognizes that these might go against Coetzee’s “evolving purpose” (which Attwell admits seems to be shifting, in the later novels, in the direction of a kind of self-exploding textuality that opposes the fixed structures of historical consciousness).

The reason for this deference lies in Attwell’s realization that Coetzee’s resistance to history is based on what the novelist sees as an ethical and liberatory imperative. In the interview I referred to at the beginning of this essay, Coetzee reminds Attwell–and all of us–that not just history and necessity, but also freedom, stands beyond representation (freedom is, as Kant argued “the unimaginable”); and insists that (paradoxically) because of the way the overwhelmingly brutal facts of South African history tend to short-circuit the imagination, “the task becomes imagining [the] unimaginable, imagining a form of address that permits the play of the imagination to start taking place” (66-8). Coetzee, in short, does not deny his own status as a prisoner of history–but insists on the importance of those shadowy projections: the need to also think of “people slipping off their chains.” Attwell’s historicist study therefore remains constantly, and self- critically aware of Coetzee’s urgent insistence on the qualified freedom of fiction. The result is the first reading of Coetzee’s work that contextualizes and politicizes Coetzee’s novels, even as it articulates the theoretical problem of “history” and recognizes the possible limitations of historically demystifying criticism.⁵

The value and character of Doubling the Point is rather more difficult to pinpoint. It is, as the subtitle announces, a collection of critical essays and interviews. But it is perhaps primarily an autobiography of sorts; and while, as I suggested above, the collection frequently reveals Coetzee’s connections to the modernist tradition, it has to be seen as a rather postmodern autobiography. It offers only a few moments of conventional first person recollection (notably in the essay “Remembering Texas”), as is consistent with Coetzee’s suspicions about any claim to self-presence–a suspicion that makes him favor the mode of the interview, “as a way of getting around the impasse of my own monologue” (19). What we end up with is, therefore, fragmentary and dialogic; and, while the collection does conclude with a very revealing retrospective statement in the final interview, this too is rather self-deconstructive. Written in the third person, it identifies, as the pivotal moment of the intellectual life we have just reviewed, the essay on “Confession and Double Thoughts”: a skeptical exploration of the infinite nature of confession, of the impossibility to ever tell the truth in autobiography.

All this is not to say that many interesting “facts” about Coetzee’s life and thinking do not emerge from Doubling the Point; but that, as I have already suggested, the idea of a personal “history” is from the start problematic. As the final essay states, there is little distinction to be made between the writing of fiction, of criticism, and of autobiography: all of these are modes of storytelling–and in Coetzee’s hand stories are always fictions that will claim no final closure, that are skeptical even of skepticism. Doubling the Point is thus an intriguingly contradictory text: authoritative (the rigor and range of Coetzee’s intellect inevitably give it that austere quality) and anti-authoritarian.

It is perhaps fair to say that none of the critical essays here–to turn to another aspect of Doubling the Point–are as good as, for instance, the introduction and the first chapter of White Writing; nor (inevitably) does the collection, selected for the sake of a more or less chronological intellectual biography, have the thematic coherence of that earlier book. The essays do reveal an impressive range of intellectual work: in addition to the pieces on Beckett, Kafka, Gordimer, and Achterberg, already mentioned, Doubling the Point includes discussions of Tolstoy, Dosteyevsky, Gibbon, Newton, Rousseau, Nabokov, Musil, Barthes, Godard, Girard, Derrida, Lacan, Fugard, La Guma, and also of advertising, censorship, and even rugby. I can live without some of the essays included here, especially those in the “Popular Culture” and the “Syntax” subsections of the book (though Attwell’s attempts to relate them to the fiction are consistently interesting). But at least two of essays in the collection, the Jerusalem Prize acceptance speech and the essay on torture (“Into the Dark Chamber: The Writer and the South African State”), have always seemed to me essential to an understanding of Coetzee’s political vision. I am also delighted that the sardonic Barthesian essay “The Burden of Consciousness in Africa” (on the Fugard/Devenish film The Guest [1977]) will now be available to a wider audience. On the whole, it seems to me that Coetzee is revealed in these essays as something quite rare, if not paradoxical: a very academic, very sophisticated autodidact. I don’t think this assessment would strike him as out of line: Coetzee observes at one point that he has no “field” as a literary scholar, and therefore frequently finds himself in the position of “reinventing philosophical wheels” (243). The results are sometimes extremely rewarding for the reader, and sometimes less so. 14] But the essays per se, do not make Doubling the Point: the book’s extraordinary interest lies in the interviews, which are by far the most engaged, the most revealing, and the most suggestive for readings of Coetzee’s fiction yet to appear. One interview even offers a disarmingly candid assessment (or would the essay on confession rule out my use of the word “candid”?) of the reason why so many of Coetzee’s previous interviews seem so terse and unrevealing. Coetzee quite frankly acknowledges his reputation for being “evasive, arrogant, generally unpleasant” to journalistic interviewers (65), but suggests that his difficulty with the ordinary interview ultimately comes from a profound philosophical disagreement with their basic assumptions. On some level, he argues, they believe in the confession, whether as something that comes out of a legal interrogation, or (in a more Rousseauvian mode) from the “transports of unrehearsed speech”; while for Coetzee truth is in silence, and in the dialogic possibilities of writing–in the war between the counter-voices which the act of writing evokes within the writer. (The questions and answers here collected were written, not taped.)

Comments like these illustrate perfectly what we may find in the best moments of Doubling the Point: observations that are both personally revealing, and that suggest, rather than dictate, ways in which we might read Coetzee’s novels. The remarks on the interview, for instance, present us with an extremely important caveat against reading Coetzee too monologically, or against any simplistic identification of Coetzee’s position with a single character. Let us apply this suggestion to a controversial example: in the case of Life and Times of Michael K. we are not necessarily called upon to read the humble gardener as a figure for Coetzee’s putative political, or more exactly, a-political, position. The novel does not straightforwardly tell us (as such commentators as Gordimer and Steven Clingman seem to have thought) to “cultivate our own garden” as Michael K. does. (That position would seem to reach its limit after all when the garden is mined.) Rather, the novel sets in motion a struggle (a “war” in the novel’s terminology) between certain principles, possibilities, readings, and stories.

Another revealing moment in Doubling the Point can be discovered in Coetzee’s moving comments on suffering and the body in the interview preceding the section on “Autobiography and Confession.” I cite his confession at some length:

If I look back over my own fiction, I see a simple (simple-minded?) standard erected. That standard is the body. Whatever else, the body is not "that which is not," and the proof that it is is the pain it feels. The body with its pain becomes the counter to the endless trials of doubt. (One can get away with such crudeness in fiction; one can't in philosophy, I'm sure.) ... Let me put it baldly, in South Africa it is not possible to deny the authority of suffering and therefore of the body. It is not possible, not for logical reasons, not for ethical reasons (I would not assert the ethical superiority of pain over pleasure), but for political reasons, for reasons of power. And let me again be unambiguous: it is not that one grants the authority of the suffering body: the suffering body takes this authority: that is its power. To use other words: its power is undeniable. (Let me add, entirely parenthetically, that I as a person, as a personality, am overwhelmed, that my thinking is thrown into confusion and helplessness, by the fact of suffering in the world, and not only human suffering. These fictional constructions of mine are paltry, ludicrous defenses against that being- overwhelmed, and, to me, transparently so.)(248)

These comments are offered to account for the curious authority of Friday, the mute, mutilated, unassimilable figure from Foe, whom we are finally called upon to think of as standing outside language. (His home, we are told at the novel’s end, is “a place where bodies are their own signs” [157].) But they remind us, more generally, of the importance of the body in all of Coetzee’s novels: the bitten ear of the Hottentot child and the (unforgettable!) anal carbuncle of the explorer in Dusklands, the broken feet and bloodied backs of the prisoners in Waiting for the Barbarians, the harelip and bony frame of the starved Michael K., and the cancer that is slowly destroying Elizabeth Curren in Age of Iron. These remarks explain, moreover, why Coetzee identifies so strongly with the moment in Burger’s Daughter I discussed above: that short- circuiting of moral understanding in the face of human brutality is something that he shares, and tries to repair in his fiction.

At the conclusion of Doubling the Point, Coetzee returns us again, surprisingly, to Plato, with a simple insistence that we are somehow born with an idea of justice and truth. This is, as Coetzee is all too aware, a vulnerable and perhaps a naive position, but it is the only way he finds himself able to explain his own marginal position–the paradox of the “colonial postcoloniality” of his texts; the fact that like the Magistrate in Waiting for the Barbarians he seems compelled to “choose the side of justice when it is not in one’s material interests to do so” (394-5). The reconstruction of an ethical vision, against the odds of an unbearably violent history, is the imperative with which both these texts finally leave us: Coetzee’s writings, as Attwell concludes, do project beyond their situation, “alerting us to the as yet unrealized promise of freedom” (125).

Notes

1. See for instance Michael Chapman’s comments on Foe as a “kind of masturbatory release, in this country, of the Europeanizing dreams of an intellectual coterie” (335). Cited in Attwell 127-8 fn.

2. In his essay “The Problem of History in the Fiction of J.M. Coetzee,” Attwell elaborates on the theoretical position underpinning his book (Trump, 128).

3. For a discussion of such readings, see Teresa Dovey, “Coetzee and his Critics: The Case of Dusklands,” English in Africa 14 (1987): 15-30.

4. The title of Dick Penner’s book, Countries of the Mind, declares candidly that his interest lies elsewhere; and Teresa Dovey, while deploying an extremely limited notion of South African discursive codes which Coetzee subverts, has even less interest in any kind of historical specificity. (Schreiner seems to be the only other South African writer she has actually read.) As Attwell so neatly puts it, Dovey challenges those naive critics who would turn Coetzee’s work into a supplement to history, but then turns it into a supplement to Lacan (2).

5. There is an interesting discussion in Doubling the Point of Coetzee’s increasing resistance to symptomatic readings in his own criticism: “Why am I now suspicious of such suspiciousness?” Coetzee asks himself (106). The answer he ventures is that demystificatory criticism tends to privilege mystification. Attwell’s criticism seems to me to be influenced by this discussion. (See, for instance, 118-19.)

Works Cited
- Attwell, David. “J.M. Coetzee and the Problem of History.” Trump 94-133. Rpt. Poetics Today 11 (Fall 1990): 579-615.
- Chapman, Michael. “The Writing of Politics and the Writing of Writing: On Reading Dovey on Reading Lacan on Reading Coetzee on Reading … (?)” Rev. of Dovey. Journal of Literary Studies 4 (1988): 327-41.
- Clingman, Stephen. “Revolution and Reality: South African Fiction in the 1980s.” Trump 41-60.
- Coetzee, J.M. “Author on History’s Cutting Edge. South Africa’s J.M. Coetzee: Visions of Doomed Heroics.” Interview. Washington Post 27 Nov, 1990: C1, C4.
- —. Foe. New York: Penguin, 1987.
- —. “The Novel Today.” Upstream 6 (1988): 2-5.
- Dovey, Teresa. The Novels of J.M. Coetzee: Lacanian Allegories. Johannesburg: Ad. Donker, 1988.
- Fukiyama, Francis. “The End of History?” National Interest 16 (Summer 1989): 3-18.
- Gallagher, Susan Van Zanten. A Story of South Africa: J.M. Coetzee’s Fiction in Context. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991.
- Gordimer, Nadine. “The Idea of Gardening.” Rev. of Life and Times of Michael K. New York Review of Books 2 Feb. 1984: 3,6.
- Penner, Dick. Countries of the Mind: The Fiction of J.M. Coetzee. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1989.
- Trump, Martin. Rendering Things Visible: Essays on South African Literary Culture. Athens: Ohio UP, 1990): 94-133.
September 25, 2013
Authorizing Memory, Remembering Authority
Mark Fenster

Department of Telecommunications
Indiana University
fenster@silver.ucs.indiana.edu

Schudson, Michael. Watergate in American Memory: How We Remember, Forget, and Reconstruct the Past. New York: Basic Books, 1992.

Zelizer, Barbie. Covering the Body: The Kennedy Assassination, the Media, and the Shaping of Collective Memory. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1992.

“Best Evidence is the story of my journey in search of the truth about the autopsy [of John F. Kennedy]. When my literary agent first read this manuscript, he said, ‘You have written a book about authority.’ No, I said, I’ve written a book about the assassination. I didn’t understand, but he did. This is a book about authority because it delves into the process by which we–as individuals and as a society–decide what is true and what is false; what is to be believed and what is not” (Lifton 1992, xviii).

Michael Schudson’s Watergate in American Memory and Barbie Zelizer’s Covering the Body are quite removed from the often heady world of Kennedy assassination researchers, a world in which David Lifton is a lofty, though somewhat controversial figure. Schudson is a sociologist, Zelizer is in a rhetoric and communication department, and neither is interested in the minutiae of medical evidence and the geopolitical speculation that are at the heart of Warren Commission critics. However, they would both agree with Lifton that the debates around such “critical incidents” as the Kennedy assassination(s) and Watergate are indeed as much about authority as they are about “truth” and the never ending and seemingly impossible search for it. While Schudson and Zelizer have written very different books on these events and their implications in their own time and in the present, their projects are quite similar and are worthy of comparison for the study of social memory and contemporary culture.

Specifically, they share the purpose of attempting to use the very problematic events that they discuss in order to make arguments about contemporary American culture. Schudson is interested in “collective memory,” and how societies institutionalize memories, and particularly historical memories, in cultural forms and social practices. Zelizer traces the establishment of journalistic authority in and over the Kennedy assassination–the title phrase, “covering the body,” refers to the actual media “coverage” of Kennedy and his death (ironically, the term was used before the assassination to refer to those whose beat was following the President to Dallas or wherever he went). Both authors, then, are using these events as case studies for projects that seek to move beyond mere historical chronicles, and this movement beyond history and into memory and authority are among the main strengths and weaknesses of these books. These were and remain, as both authors document, important events in recent American history and memory, and their reverberations throughout politics and culture are still felt; in the past year, for example, the twentieth anniversary of the Watergate break-in was commemorated by a CBS documentary, while a “Director’s Cut” of Oliver Stone’s controversial JFK has just been released on video, with a number of scenes “restored” from the shorter version that met the time constraints imposed by Time-Warner. As powerful historical events that took place at crucial conjunctures in recent American history, Watergate and the Kennedy assassination can tell us much about such diverse topics as the function of memory and the practice of journalism; however, as such, these events can and often do exceed such attempts to “use” them. In other words, because there is far more to Watergate and JFK’s assassination than the rather specific theoretical and political interests with which these authors come to these events, their attempts to somewhat sharply focus, or to cut off a discursive slice of an “event” in order to examine “American Culture,” at times yields frustrating results.

* * * * *

Zelizer is most interested in the “interpretive community” of journalists, and how the “cultural authority” of (certain) journalists is asserted and maintained. “Journalism,” in this sense, refers to more than merely the printed page or the broadcast; it comprises the discursive practices authorized and legitimated in professional meetings of journalists, journalism textbooks, codes of professionalism, journalists’ folklore, memoirs, historical accounts, etc. Zelizer argues that the overarching narrative of journalism and the journalist is a structuring principle of journalistic discourse; the journalistic community constitutes itself, she argues, via the stories it tells about itself in order to legitimate itself and what it does.

Within this interpretive community and American culture in general, the Kennedy assassination serves as a “critical incident” (a moment ‘by means of which people air, challenge, and negotiate their own standards of action'[4]) in its historical position within the emergence of television news as a primary form of journalism, the chaotic circumstances of the assassination and the ability of the media to narrate and explain seemingly inexplicable information, and the close ties between the Kennedy administration and many members of the press. This was a story that was clearly “told” first and foremost by journalists–the trickling out of facts, the live coverage of the Oswald murder and the Kennedy funeral, and the early legitimation of the Warren Commission report were all dependent upon the reporting of the news media. And a number of prominent journalists, among them current CBS news anchor Dan Rather and Washington Post pundit David Broder, established themselves as important news figures while covering this event, and continue to keep the event alive within their own work and autobiographies (none more so than Rather, who seems to obsessively cover the story whenever it seems necessary for CBS to give it further prime time coverage). Zelizer is at her best when documenting and describing this obsessive use of the coverage by news organizations and journalists, and persuasively documents how journalists established themselves as “preferred spokespersons of the assassination story” (137).

In addition, her discussion of the struggles over journalism’s association with this story provides a good framework for understanding both the conflicts between journalistic and historical discourse, and those between “legitimate” explanations of the assassination and the explanations offered by Warren Commission critics, as exemplified by Stone and JFK. By asserting themselves as main spokespersons of the assassination story, journalists and news organizations were, and remain, poachers on the territory of historians; this was, after all, a presidential assassination, and can only be understood, so historians argue, within its proper historical context and with the “disinterested” and distanced care of the historian. Yet the assassination remains in the realm of the popular; the “explanations” of the event provided by Dan Rather or James Reston are more widely circulated and have greater purchase on social memories of the event than those of prominent historians (the recent “forum” in the American Historical Review on JFK [1992] was itself a rather problematic attempt to enable historians to engage in the popular debate about the popular film).

If historians represent one challenge to journalistic authority (or, more precisely, if journalists represent one challenge to the authority of historians), then Warren Commission critics represent a similar, though quite different struggle over the meaning of the event. Indeed, no group is more willing to provide an extended critique of the mass media and news organizations as instruments of propaganda than these “independent researchers,” who often come across as a poor person’s Noam Chomsky (this is intended as a compliment to the researchers). At the same time, the mainstream media view the work of these researchers with disdain, if indeed they view it at all. The incredible backlash against Stone and his film, which began before the film was even released, was, as Zelizer argues, as much an attempt to re-assert journalistic authority as it was an attempt to review a film; after all, if Stone was in any way correct, then journalistic accounts are willing or unwilling accomplices to a great cover-up. Thus the debate over the ethics of cinematic representation (i.e., which sequences and images were “real” and which were “fiction”?) was often a displacement of journalistic and mainstream political anxiety over who was telling the tale of the assassination and how it was being told. In this sense, this debate over the Kennedy assassination as a public event, no matter whether Stone is right, is very much about authority.

Yet a central problem of the book lies precisely in questions that arise in Zelizer’s definition of “authority,” as she seems reluctant to explain fully how she would define journalistic (and media) authority. On the one hand, she wants to emphasize what she sees as a “collective” set of knowledge and practices, and she seems to reject or at least to modify the classic left association of the media with the protection of and assistance to power and influence in the transmission of ideologically limited and distorted information (6-7). And yet she closes her book with a discussion of the importance of an “acquiescent,” “relatively uncritical and inattentive” American public in the crafting of journalistic authority. How “collective” is a media complex so removed from an invisible and seemingly powerless public and dependent upon electronic media and stars, and how does journalistic authority survive if not via the transmission of certain types of narratives and not others?

Despite these lingering political and theoretical questions, the book admirably meets its central objective of chronicling and critiquing journalistic discourses of authority. Yet it leaves me dissatisfied because of its inadequate recognition of what I would call the “excesses” of popular political/cultural events like the Kennedy assassination and Watergate. I’m referring here to both disciplinary and phenomenological excess: the assassination was “experienced” and continues to be remembered and “experienced” on a seemingly infinite number of personal, cultural and political levels, and can and has been argued over and “explained” by as many disciplinary authorities as have looked into it. This is why, in some ways, Don Delillo’s Libra can represent the event more powerfully than sociology of journalism can (or should be expected to); it is also why the vast and polymorphous corpus of pro- and anti-Warren Commission authors provides a fascinating, Joycean vision of virtually all aspects of the event.

This is not to say that Zelizer’s project is inherently flawed or that it tells us nothing; rather, it represents a good starting point for understanding the workings of discursive practices of authority in popular historical events such as this. It does, however, mean that in so tightly focusing her study on an event that needs a very wide screen, her argument at times becomes diffused within the broader implications of the murder of a president. Her very controlled academic prose and her staid sociological approach can explain the workings of journalists quite well; yet they can only describe one aspect of the event and the discourse that surrounded and still surrounds it. And at times, this excess seems to overwhelm the book’s premise–after all, if, as polls indicate, the American public disbelieves the findings of the Warren Commission and distrusts the media, then what exactly does “journalistic authority” over the event amount to? What is an authority that has a virtual monopoly on the circulation of information and the construction of historical narratives, and yet is so ineffectual that after thirty years of reiterating its official story of the Kennedy assassination almost nobody appears to believe what it tells them? Sociology of journalism such as Zelizer’s can help us to understand the attempt to control the excess of events like the Kennedy assassination. It remains for further work to explain the institutional and popular practices that attempt, sometimes successfully, to exceed this control.

* * * * *

Schudson’s book is more directly concerned with issues that are central to theorizing the practices of postmodernity: the construction, circulation and institutionalization of memory. Like Zelizer, Schudson is interested in authority, although his emphasis is less on the interests of any one specific group than on the use of and struggle over the events and meanings of Watergate. The book is written in engaging and, compared with Covering the Body, relatively informal and enjoyable prose; it is also neat and tightly constructed, beginning with a concise discussion of theories of social memory, a review of the central political elements of Watergate, and a series of case studies of the use of memory in post-Watergate reform politics, journalistic practice, and historical accounts, as well as in popular culture, language, autobiographies of Watergate participants, and in the self-serving Richard Nixon Library. Among other uses Schudson describes, memories of Watergate have been “mobilized” for the sake of political careers, “contested” in political practice, “ignited” in the discourse surrounding the revelations of and responses to the Iran-Contra scandal, and “besieged” in Nixon’s campaign to restore his personal reputation. In addition, Schudson argues that the revelations of Watergate were easily articulated with growing suspicions and distrust of government (which, as he cogently asserts, had begun prior to Nixon’s fall) as well as with the release of information about the sins of the American security apparatus at home and abroad. At the same time, he demonstrates how the discourse concerning Watergate generally ignores a central source for the conflict between Nixon, the Congress, and popular protest–the Vietnam War and the secret bombing of Cambodia.

Watergate in American Memory is particularly effective in its mapping out of the various reactions to Watergate by different political groups. Schudson divides and sub-divides such responses: first, in terms of whether the event was understood as a constitutional crisis (generally by liberal and conservative centrists) or a scandal (i.e., as a superficial “show” that covered up greater manipulation by elite groups, generally believed by what he terms “ultraconservatives” and the “radical left”), and then by virtue of whether the problem that Watergate represented was caused by systemic shortcomings within the American political system (liberals and leftists) or was peculiar to the Nixon presidency (centrists and conservatives of all stripes). Clearly, these differing reactions concern the construction of larger historical narratives and the placement of Watergate within these narratives; as Schudson argues, understanding and remembering Watergate is an ongoing process and struggle over identifying actors, motives and context.

In this sense, Watergate represents the process of contemporary historical knowledge and memory; it was, at once, a Historical Event, an object of intense media scrutiny, and a site of popular knowledge and debate. Against the tirades of academics and intellectuals on the right and left which posit an American culture that lacks any memory of itself and others, Schudson conceives of a United States that immerses itself in certain texts and practices of popular history, such as the memory of the historical in relation to the personal remembrance, “amateur” historical research, and the popular political discourse of the mass media and everyday life. Like the Kennedy Assassination, Watergate is both popularly “forgotten” (in the “properly” historical sense of the knowledge of specific facts and human agents) and obsessed over in the struggle to understand and define the implications of these events and their relationship to the present. To remember Watergate is to remember Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the Ervin committee hearings, and Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman–thus illustrating the continuing importance of popular narratives and memories in understanding contemporary political events and crises. For the study of contemporary culture, this emergent notion of memory as popular and (mass) mediated rather than as authoritative and mediated through “proper” historical channels is of considerable value.

My frustration with Schudson’s book is his tendency to set up a continuum of political and theoretical positions and to attempt to occupy what he constructs as a reasonable, yet transcendent, middle ground. This appears first in his validation and appropriation of virtually every political response to Watergate; he agrees, yet limits his own agreement, with those who see it as scandal and constitutional crisis, as peculiar to Nixon and as part of systemic problems with the Presidency. Unwilling to assume any one of these positions, he seems ready to occupy all at once. Yet taken to their logical conclusions, these positions are mutually exclusive: if Watergate was the successful resolution of a crisis through the removal of the constitutional threat and the reform of legislation and policy, then it could not have been a scandal constructed by the power or media elite to retain legitimacy for a corrupted system or to depose a conservative president. Similarly, while one might agree that Nixon’s was a singular presidency, the reign of Reagan was competitive in the breadth and fury of its domestic and foreign covert operations–and thus, clearly, Nixon’s singularity is far less significant than the systemic structures that allow for two such imperial presidencies in successive decades. While Schudson notes this, his apparent desire to remain above such “partisan” politics demonstrates an unwillingness to confront the issues of power that (what he might term) the “radical left” position would require of him. Because he chose Watergate as a case study of social memory, Schudson is obliged, it seems to me, to express a good deal more righteous indignation at the politics of the era and the treachery of the Nixon regime; this is neither a question of “objectivity” nor correct politics, but part of the terrain that comes with choosing such a controversial event for a case study of social memory.

This becomes more apparent in his lack of a satisfactory theory of memory. He provides worthy critiques of some of the problems with “interest” theories (i.e., critical theories of the ideological uses of memory), “cultural” theories (the symbolic logic of remembrance within specific cultures) and social constructionist theories (the construction of the past in the memory of present observers), yet seems to argue neither for a singular different theory nor for one that appropriates the best aspects of all of them. While he posits memory as a “scarce resource” that is “handed down through particular cultural forms and transmitted in particular cultural vehicles” (207, 5), he seems unwilling to note the degree to which, in his case studies, it is the power and media elite who construct the dominant, though not unchallenged, narratives of Watergate. While one would certainly want to qualify simplistic notions of ideology that would claim such discourse as all-powerful, the sheer dominance of certain ways of understanding and using Watergate for political ends demonstrates the viability of radical critiques of dominant discourse. Clearly, “American memory” is a site of struggle, but one in which certain groups and interests enjoy greater ability than others to manage what is remembered and how it is remembered.

If, as I would argue, an important dimension of postmodernity is the increasingly sophisticated array of strategies and technologies by means of which certain groups attempt to “manage” the construction and reconstruction of historical knowledge, then Watergate, as a text that was at its very core covert and opaque, seems a seminal example of the relationship between power, the realm of the political, and memory in contemporary American culture. As with the Kennedy assassination, memories of Watergate are aspects of the cultural struggle to construct and authorize certain narratives and explanations of the past. Zelizer and Schudson successfully document aspects of this process; the challenge for theories of postmodernity is to further map social memory within matrices of knowledge, power, and domination.

Works Cited
- “AHR Forum: JFK.” American Historical Review Apr. 1992: 486-511.
- Lifton, David. Best Evidence. New York: Signet, 1992.
- Stone, Oliver and Zachary Sklar. JFK: The Book of the Film. New York: Applause Books, 1992.
September 25, 2013
If I Only Had a Brain

Steven Shaviro

Department of English
University of Washington
shaviro@u.washington.edu

Burroughs writes: “in this life we have to take things as we find them as the torso murderer said when he discovered his victim was a quadruple amputee.” Good advice for the anatomically deranged, like Cliff Steele. He’s a character in the DC/Vertigo comic book DOOM PATROL; I refer in particular to the issues written by Grant Morrison and illustrated by Richard Case, between 1989 and 1992 (#s 19-63). Cliff has a problem with his body, you see. It happened like this. He used to be a daredevil racing car driver; he had a horrible wreck. Nearly all of him was burned to ashes, but they snatched his brain from the flames. And then they implanted that brain in a new prosthetic body, all shiny metal, ultra high tech, a veritable fighting machine. Now Cliff is the muscle of the DOOM PATROL, a brain turned into brawn. They expect him to be a macho bruiser, when actually he’s quite sensitive underneath. And to add insult to injury, they call him Robotman–a name he violently hates. What would that do for your sense of self-esteem? The life of a superhero these days! Cliff thinks of himself as just a regular guy; Robocop fantasies are the last thing on his mind. But with a metallic casing like this, he can’t exactly blend into the crowd. It’s what Baudrillard calls hyper-visibility, the postmodern condition par excellence. No chance of chilling out with a secret identity, like old Clark Kent used to do. All this metal is a clunky encumbrance, no matter how great its tensile strength. You know you’re in bad shape when you bang your head against a wall, and you still don’t feel a thing. At this point, Cliff doesn’t even really know what his body can do. How good is all this cyber-tech stuff anyway? How accurate and detailed is sensory input? How fast is motor response? What unaccustomed relays and connections now trigger the pain and pleasure centers in Cliff’s brain? Will he ever be able to taste and smell? Can he ever have sex again? What about getting drunk or stoned? “The only good thing about having a human brain in a robot body,” Cliff remarks sardonically at one point, “is that it’s easier to control brain chemistry.” Just the touch of a button, and anxiety is dissipated, alertness is heightened, or memory is enhanced. But alas, this techno-manipulation seems to work only for utilitarian ends, and not for hedonistic ones. “Our machines are disturbingly lively,” Donna Haraway writes, “and we ourselves frighteningly inert.” It might not be so bad, if only you could get used to the situation. After all, Descartes argued long ago that the body is a machine. It shouldn’t matter all that much whether metal or flesh is the medium. In either case, it’s simply a matter of mastering the electrochemical interface: regularizing chains of association, facilitating neural feedback patterns, reinforcing the appropriate re-entrant connections. In short, a question of recognition and memory, of cultivating habits over the course of time. The problem is that Cliff’s mechanical body never stays the same. He’s continually being sent back to the shop for upgrades and repairs. Transistors burn out; programming errors and faulty couplings throw him off stride. He gets into fights, and enemies regularly mangle his metal to bits. As if that weren’t bad enough, Doc Magnus (who built and programmed his body in the first place) and Niles Caulder (the Chief of the DOOM PATROL) tend to use Cliff as a pawn in their ongoing professional rivalry. Neither of them is content to let well enough alone; they are both all too eager to retool him in order to try out their latest cybernetic design ideas. And let’s not even think about those insectoid aliens who at one point fit Cliff out in a new metal carapace with six legs. Life in a robot body, even if you’re strong, is just one humiliation after another. The persistence of memory in the brain only makes things worse. Amputees typically feel phantom sensations in their lost limbs; poor Cliff has this problem multiplied many times over. He must endlessly relive numerous episodes of mutilation and dismemberment. Neither Clint Eastwood nor Woody Allen–our two best-known icons of hetero-male angst–ever had to go through anything remotely like this.

The worst part, though, is the waiting. All these body modifications take time, just as it takes time to alter a dress or a pair of pants. Cliff’s brain is disconnected meanwhile, and left in a vat of nutrient fluids. The experience isn’t exactly like returning to the womb. You don’t get some soothing “oceanic feeling”; rather, you freak out from sensory deprivation. The first stage is “boredom: hearing nothing, seeing nothing, experiencing nothing. Boredom and irritation and then panic.” Panic, because the brain (like nature) abhors a vacuum. So that’s when the hallucinations begin: “nightmares of sound and vision, grotesque sensory distortions.” Cliff is overwhelmed by paranoid delusions of a world controlled by malevolent insects and soulless infernal machines. “The body becomes remote, robotic, disconnected,” a symptom of the schizophrenic’s “sense of being abstracted from the day-to-day physical world.” But if this is the case with me, then what about other people? “Maybe I’m not the robot, and everyone else is.” It doesn’t help to realize that this is just a virtual world, and that your own brain is generating all these visions. If anything, such an awareness only makes things worse: your ontological insecurity is heightened, while the horrors you confront don’t for all that become any less vivid and intense. If only I could attribute these appearances to a malevolent programmer, to somebody like Descartes’ evil demon! Then at least I’d have the comfort of knowing that somebody else is out there, that I’m not absolutely alone. True hell for Cliff is the solipsistic universe of Bishop Berkeley, in which nothing exists except one’s own inner perceptions: a closed circle from which there is no escape.

But fortunately this idealist delirium doesn’t last forever; eventually the hallucinations subside. Virtual reality is a great leveller: “nothing can pass through without being broken down, disintegrated.” And so Cliff finally reaches a sort of nirvana, “something I can’t describe: the center of the cyclone, the room without doors.” Now becoming grinds to a halt; time no longer passes, you have all the time in the world. Plenty of time to meditate upon the Smiths lyric that opens and closes one episode of DOOM PATROL: “Does the body rule the mind or does the mind rule the body?” The question resonates in the emptiness like a Zen koan: ironic, unanswerable, absurd. Meditate long enough, and the inner self, the first person of the Cartesian cogito, drops out of the picture. You’re left with the great postmodern discovery, anticipated alike by Hume and by the Buddhists: that personal identity is a fiction. The Cartesian subject disappears, together with all that it created. When I introspect deeply, I may come across all sorts of experiential contents and structures: feelings, desires, perceptions, memories, multiple personalities, and so on. But the one thing I am absolutely unable to find is myself.

The conundrum of the brain in a vat is an old philosophical slapstick routine, our updated postmodern version of Descartes’ original Meditations. The question is always the same: how can I know for sure that these inner representations correspond to something out there, that what I experience is real? How can I be absolutely certain that I’m not just a disembodied mind dreaming the external world, or that it isn’t all a computer simulation fed into my brain through direct innervation of the neuronal fibers? The comedy lies in this: that it’s only my hysterical demand for certainty that first introduces the element of doubt. It’s only by subjecting myself to the horrors of sensory deprivation that I approach the delirious limit at which the senses become questionable. Descartes does just that in his Third Meditation: “I will now shut my eyes, stop my ears, and withdraw all my senses . . . .” Descartes “proves God,” as Samuel Beckett puts it, “by exhaustion.” As metaphysics goes, it’s the oldest trick in the book: first you take something away, then you complain that it isn’t there, and then you invent a theory grounded in–and compensating for–its very absence. Deleuze and Guattari call it the Theology of Lack. A seductive ruse, to be sure: once you accept the premises, you’ve already been suckered into the conclusions.

“If I only had a brain . . . .” For as one character in DOOM PATROL remarks, “Descartes was nothing but a miserable git who never had a good time in his entire life!” Postmodern philosophers rightly reject the very logic that gets us into the dualist impasse. Descartes’ methodical doubt is ultimately a distinction without a difference, since it has no pragmatic consequences whatsoever. For consider the alternatives. Either there’s some telltale sign, which allows us empirically to determine whether or not we’re just brains kept in vats: in which case the whole sorry mess is merely a question of fact, without any deeper epistemological import. Or else, there’s no way of telling: but in this case, we have nothing to worry about, since experience remains the same one way or the other. “The mystery, as Cormac McCarthy’s Judge Holden says, “is that there is no mystery.” Perhaps the evil demon posited by Descartes gets some private, masturbatory delectation out of fooling us like this; but that needn’t be any concern of ours. For the evil demon can’t do anything to us, can’t harm us or change us or otherwise affect us, without thereby tipping his hand and revealing his existence. Descartes’ dilemma is resolved without dualism, then, and without positing a transcendent self, simply by noting that appearances and simulacra are themselves perfectly real. The cogito is reduced to a third-person tautology: things are exactly as they are, “everything is what it seems.” In this postmodern life, “we have to take things as we find them.”

But such logic and such consolations are of little help to Cliff Steele, trapped as he is in all that heavy metal–except for the even worse times when his naked brain is actually left to stew and hallucinate in a vat. If modern Western rationality begins with Descartes’ self-mutilating gesture, perhaps it culminates in Cliff’s absurd disembodiment. For Cliff is the final, helpless, involuntary victim of a whole history of amputations. He iss compelled literally to live out the disabling paradoxes of Cartesian dualism. He suffers every day from schizophrenic disjunctions between the real and the imaginary, between self and other, between vitalism and mechanism, between mind and body. The problem may be a false one philosophically, but it’s still inscribed in our technology. Descartes’ idle speculations are now as it were incised in Cliff’s very flesh. Doc Magnus and the Chief mess with Cliff’s head more insidiously than the evil demon ever could. Their operations give dualism a delirious new twist: for now it’s Cliff’s mind that is materially incarnated, while his corporeality is entirely notional, virtual, simulacral. Such is our postmodern refinement of those old metaphysical endeavors to find the ultimate reality, to separate essence from accident. Descartes’ cogito and Husserl’s epoche were merely thought experiments; but now we can realize their equivalents in actual surgical procedures. Strip everything away that is not indubitably “Cliff Steele,” that is not necessarily contained in the very notion of his essence; and what’s left is precisely these three pounds of neuronal tissue, a fleshy lump “so full of water that it tends to slump like a blancmange if placed without support on a firm surface” (Anthony Smith, The Body). Since Cliff’s only ‘identity’ is that of this actual, physical brain, you might say that his sole grounding certitude is that he is an extended thing–as against Descartes’ claim to be a thinking thing. Just as you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, so you can’t get amputated unless you have a body.

The Chief claims that the operation was a success, that it’s all turned out for Cliff’s own greater good. The old Cliff Steele, he says, was “selfish, arrogant, overconfident, ill-educated . . . a loudmouthed, misogynistic boor”; it’s only through the traumas of amputation and cyborgization that the new Cliff has “learned kindness and compassion and a selfless heroism.” DOOM PATROL is quite different from the revisionist superhero comics that made a big splash in the mid to late 80s: Alan Moore’s Watchmen (with Dave Gibbons), Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (with Klaus Janson and Lynn Varley), and Grant Morrison’s own Batman: Arkham Asylum (with Dave McKean). All these works “deconstruct” our familiar images of comic book superheroes. They go behind the scenes to reveal what we should’ve suspected all along: that Batman and all those other patriotic, costumed crime-fighters are really violent sociopaths with fascist-cum-messianic leanings and a kinky underwear fetish. Everything gets played out for these sordid characters in the registers of secrecy, disguise, and paranoia: literally in the form of their jealous anxieties about maintaining a “secret identity,” and more figuratively in terms of those notorious paradoxes of destroying the world in order to save it, or stepping outside of the law in order to enforce the law. As old Mayor Daley of Chicago once said, “the police are not there to create disorder; the police are there to preserve disorder.” Miller’s Batman and Moore’s tormented anti-heroes owe much to the creepy affectlessness and suppressed fury of Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry. Indeed, their hoods and masks go Clint one better, when it comes to maintaining an unreadable, deadpan exterior. The crimefighter’s costume is a literal “character armor,” rigidly neutralizing whatever may rage beneath–and thereby perpetuating the modernist fantasy that there is a “beneath,” something like manhood or interiority or selfhood. Most of these psychotic superheroes are still organically human; but it’s only one more step to outright cyborgs like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator and Peter Weller’s Robocop (in fact, Frank Miller wrote the scripts for Robocop II and III). And hasn’t there always been something cyborg-like about Clint? In these cyborg fantasy films, in any case, the superhero’s costume–I include Arnold’s muscles in this category–no longer works as a disguise. Now it’s a prosthetic organ of strength, a kind of supplemental, rebuilt manhood. Todd McFarlane’s comic book Spawn (a series to which Alan Moore and Grant Morrison have both contributed) presents an even more fascinating case. Here, the protagonist’s costume is not just an article of clothing, nor even a mechanical interface, but a living inhuman being in its own right: a sexually voracious, “constantly-evolving neural parasite” from Hell that brings Al Simmons back from the dead, heightens his metabolism, encases him in an unbreachable protective carapace, and takes command of his central nervous system. The image is definitely arthropodal: hard armor on the outside, guarding some soft squishy stuff within. Al’s body is nearly invulnerable; but this security only intensifies his hidden anguish. He wallows in the misery of living in back alleys with the homeless, and mourns the loss of his wife and child. And so Al gets to display his macho prowess, while at the same time laying claim to a deep inner sensitivity, a self-righteous feeling of vulnerability and victimization. Can Robert Bly and his “men’s movement” be far behind? Again and again it’s the same old story: a near-catatonic rigidity that can be breached only in outbursts of extreme cathartic violence, whether by banging drums in the woods, or by blowing away the slavering hordes of sickos and scumbags with your .357 Magnum. At least Clint has a keen sense of irony about it all–which is more than you can say for Bly or for Woody Allen. Some guys’ll do anything to redeem their lonely, frustrated lives. And so they endow their experience with a certain self-aggrandizing pathos, by entertaining reactive, resentful fantasies of masculinity under siege. It feels so good to be a victim, ’cause then you’ve got the perfect excuse to demand recompense, to make others pay like you’ve had to pay, to lash out at the bitch who started it all.

A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. You imagine your ‘manhood’ as something both strong and fragile, hard and tough and yet continually in peril. Like a penis that might go limp, or a mind weighted down with a body. But why even bother, why hold back? Why not just let yourself go? Why cling to this rigid exterior armor, why nurture this aggrieved inner self? Can Cartesian dignity mean that much to you? OK, OK, you’ll say–together with Descartes and with Arnold–this body is only a machine, but there’s still something inside that’s really me. I had to destroy my cock in order to save it: I tore it apart and had it recast in hard, cutting metal–a strategy implicit in many of these films, and savagely literalized in Shinya Tsukamoto’s Iron Man. McLuhan describes such techno-hysteria as an inevitable defensive reaction to change, “a desperate and suicidal autoamputation, as if the central nervous system could no longer depend on the physical organs to be protective buffers against the slings and arrows of outrageous mechanism.” But McLuhan also insists that there’s no backing away from the dilemma: “there is, for example, no way of refusing to comply with the new sense ratios or sense ‘closure’ evoked by the TV image.” It isn’t a question of adapting ourselves to the new technological environment, but of realizing that this technology already is our adaptation. We must cultivate the new sensations offered to us by our new organs. And if masculinity can’t keep up with the changes, then so much the worse for masculinity.

Grant Morrison understands these dynamics better than anybody. His Batman: Arkham Asylum pushes the revisionist superhero comic to a parodic point of no return. Batman’s old enemies, now inmates of this asylum for the criminally insane, tauntingly invite him to join them. For isn’t the ‘virtual’ freedom of madness more appealing than the tedium of life in the ‘real’ world, “confined to the Euclidean prison that is sanity”? Batman is all too receptive to this seduction. He knows he’s as crazy as any of them, what with his bizarre fixations and his hysterical rage for order. He senses that walking through the doors of Arkham Asylum will be “just like coming home.” And indeed, once he arrives, the blood of self-mutilation flows unchecked. Virility crumbles in an onslaught of psychedelic dislocation. The Cartesian fiction of the mind as a faithful “mirror of nature” (Rorty) is shattered and scattered into the multiple grotesque reflections of the Asylum’s funhouse mirrors. The Joker captures Batman, but declines to unmask him and reveal his secret identity; for he knows that the Caped Crusader’s mask already “is his real face.” I’ve loved the Joker ever since I was a child, so I was thrilled by Morrison’s reinvention of his character. The Joker may well be a gleefully sadistic mass murderer, but he’s also an exemplary postmodern subject. For he “has no real personality; he creates himself each day. He sees himself as the Lord of Misrule, and the world as a theatre of the absurd.” The Joker responds to the “chaotic barrage” of his overloaded senses–the postmodern information glut–in a radically new manner. Not by choosing and discriminating among his perceptions; and not by striving to maintain a fixed ego structure. But simply by “going with the flow”; he immerses himself in the postmodern flux and just lets it all happen. Unlike Batman, the Joker no longer needs the “protective buffers” that McLuhan feared were numbing us to change. He knows that the only way out is first of all a way in and through. His great adaptive innovation is to hold nothing back; he lives and enjoys the postmodern condition, this mutation of our sensibility into non-linear, non-Euclidean forms. Far from being mad, the Joker may in fact represent “some kind of super-sanity . . . . a brilliant new modification of human perception, more suited to urban life at the end of the twentieth century.”

The Joker’s difference from Batman parallels McLuhan’s distinction between hot and cool media. “A hot medium,” McLuhan says, “is one that extends one single sense in ‘high definition.’” Its chief characteristics are “homogeneity, uniformity, and linear continuity.” Hot media are imperious, unidirectional, even terroristic. They demand rapt contemplation or close, obsessive attentiveness. Your life at every second depends upon their dictates, and yet they leave you feeling strangely uninvolved. They keep you at a proper, ‘alienated’ distance, drawing you into a paranoid frenzy of endless interpretation. This is the culture of the Book: of fundamentalist Christians scrutinizing their Bibles, and of academic Marxists “reading” the insidious ideologies embedded in the seemingly innocuous practices of everyday life. Batman is a quintessentially hot figure, ever on the lookout for miniscule clues that will confirm his Manichean sense of the world’s depravity. Cool media, to the contrary, are ‘low-definition,’ and for that very reason “high in participation or completion by the audience.” Their sparse spaces welcome and envelop us. They are characterized by “pluralism, uniqueness, and discontinuity,” and they solicit high levels of feedback and involvement. A cool medium, McLuhan says in a famous pun, offers you a massage rather than a message: a multi-textured, tactile and sensual experience, rather than the rational finality of a meaning to be decoded. There is nothing to interpret. Instead, cool media invite the kind of open reception that Michael Taussig, elaborating on Walter Benjamin, calls distraction: “a very different apperceptive mode, a type of flitting and barely conscious peripheral visual perception.” This is the Joker’s random drift, a delirious passivity brilliantly adapted to our state of continual technological shock. With innovation running at so fast a pace, alienation is out of date. It’s no longer a case of me against the world. Contrary to the overwrought claims of Neil Postman, Jerry Mander, and other such high-minded media pundits, nobody’s ever been brainwashed by watching TV. In fact, most people talk back to their sets. As Clark Humphrey puts it, “people who consume lots of media are very cynical about what they’re consuming . . . . A typical nonviewer may believe almost anything, [but] a typical TV viewer treats everything with (excess?) skepticism.” Our cheerful postmodern skepticism–reacting as if everything were just “on TV,” or always already in quotation marks–is poles apart from modernist angst or from Cartesian methodical doubt. You can’t ever defeat the evil demon in open battle, but you can put him in his place once you realize that he has more in common with Chuck Barris and Maury Povich than he does with Satan or with God.

You might say that when Cliff Steele lost everything except for his brain, he was thrust willy-nilly into this cool new postmodern world. With all his “protective buffers” gone, he was preadapted to change. He had no choice but to be plugged directly into the “extension of the central nervous system” that electronic media have made of our planet. The Chief is right: something inside Cliff has been altered forever, so there’s no point in even trying to recover what was lost. “We have to take things as we find them,” amputations and all. This is “what it’s like” to be a postmodern cyborg. Prosthetic surgery is painful, but it can powerfully renew our sense of involvement in the world. It’s all a question of where you locate the information interface: how much you can stand to lop off, or just how far back you’re willing to go. Daniel Dennett notes that the question of the interface is the fatal weak point of every mind/body dualism: how can something be wholly immaterial, and yet still have material effects? Descartes placed the transfer point in the pineal gland; phenomenologists extend it to the surface of the skin; spiritualists push it even further out, to the ectoplasmic aura that surrounds us like a crustacean carapace or a superhero’s sheath. But for Cliff it no longer makes sense even to draw the line. Neurons and wires are much the same stuff. The electro-chemical feedback loops that constitute Cliff’s brain are of the same nature as those that are wired into his prosthetic body, or that course across the entirety of the postmodern “global village.” Cliff’s feelings, like the ashes of his former body, are scattered more or less everywhere. But there’s no one single point at which the experiences become “his own.”

So in this strange way, Cliff is the postmodern Everyman. He hasn’t quite become feminized, but at least he’s no “misogynistic boor.” It’s true that he suffers from a certain baffled frustration, from a perpetual sense of unfulfilled duty, from frequent bouts of self-pity, and from a chronic inability to relax. It’s true also that his lovely thirst for the concrete can’t be quenched by any number of virtual or psychedelic wonders. Nothing seems vital to Cliff any more; as his psychiatrist asks him at one point, “how must it feel to have saved a world you don’t really believe is worth saving?” But unlike the old superheroes, Cliff doesn’t feel any differently about the world than he does about himself. The distinction of inner and outer simply isn’t relevant any more. That’s why Cliff’s pathos has nothing vengeful about it; it can’t be seen as the reaction of a resentful masculine ego. This pathos is rather the very affect or quality of that ego’s having been dispersed. It’s the expression, not of Cliff’s subjectivity, but precisely of his no longer being a “subject” in the old Cartesian/Freudian sense. It’s the feeling of not having a center–but also of not even lacking one. A cool, prosthetic pathos, perfect for an age of television and computers. What is the ontological status of this “soul of a new machine” (as one episode of DOOM PATROL calls it), this deeply intimate, yet strangely unlocalizable, affect? Call it a secondary, sympathetic resonance; or an uneliminable redundancy; or an effect of multiple interference patterns; or an emergent property of information flows accelerated beyond a certain threshold. As Deleuze suggests, we need to replace the old phenomenological slogan (“all consciousness is consciousness of something”) with a new, radically decentered one: “all consciousness is something.” For this is what happens when your brain is plugged directly into the ‘real’ world’s “mixing board”; but also when it’s isolated in a vat, or when its contents are downloaded into the virtual-reality matrix of a supercomputer. Round and round and round it goes; where it stops, nobody knows. “Does the body rule the mind or does the mind rule the body? I don’t know.” No cogito, then; no ergo, and no sum. “I don’t know if the world is better or worse than it has been”–as Kathy Acker writes in a different context–“I know the only anguish comes from running away.”

September 25, 2013
Dynamic and Thermodynamic Tropes of the Subject in Freud and in Deleuze and Guattari
Martin Rosenberg

Visiting Assistant Professor
Department of English
Texas A&M University
mer1911@tamvm1.tamu.edu

[O]rators and others who are in variance are mutually experiencing something that is bound to befall those who engage in senseless rivalry: believing that they are expressing opposite views, they fail to perceive that the theory of the opposite party is inherent in their own theory.

–Thrasymachus of Chalcedon

Introduction

In their recent work Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (1991), Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari make explicit the role that the concept of chaos plays in their representations of subjectivity, with respect to philosophy, science and the arts.¹ I wish to exfoliate the chaotic in Deleuze and Guattari’s works, for their analysis of the ways in which chaos may be used referentially in philosophy, science and the arts in this later work may interfere with readers’ attempts to grapple with manifestations of chaos as a referent in their earlier collaboration, the two volumes subtitled Captialism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. One way to make visible Deleuze and Guattari’s recourse to the chaotic in these two works is to examine the role that particular physics tropes play in their representation of subjectivity, especially since the tropes that model the subject in these two works engage agonistically with those that model subjectivity in the works of Sigmund Freud.²

The descriptions of human consciousness in Freud and in Deleuze and Guattari are problematic precisely in their inverse, mirrored opposition, and we may discover the “ground” for that opposition by examining the role played by tropes from the discipline of physics in these theorists’ representations of subjectivity. We will need to notice particularly the historical differences in the ideological use of these tropes–at the end of the nineteenth century, and since the mid-twentieth century. As we will see, these two periods are interesting because they represent moments when the term entropy, a concept describing the amount of disorder in a physical system, has very different meanings– in physics, and in the cultural matrix as well. In the mid- to-late nineteenth century, entropy (in the context of equilibrium thermodynamics) refers largely to terminal processes of disorder for a physical system; since the nineteen-sixties, however, entropy (in the context of non- equilibrium thermodynamics) came to be understood as an initial condition enabling greater order and complexity in a physical system. Since Freud draws on the first version of entropy as referent, and Deleuze and Guattari draw on the second version of entropy as referent, two questions emerge: Can we say that Freud and Deleuze and Guattari are making the same claims for tropes of chaos (or entropy, or disorder) as grounds for their contending representations of subjectivity? If so, what can we then say about the stability of such claims for a correspondence between laws of physics and the forces and processes of human consciousness? In order to confront these questions, we should first examine trope theories that might illuminate the problematic construction of correspondences.

Physics and Tropes

The problematic of the subject becomes the problem of representation when the particular forms of representation of the subject, such as tropes, come into question. This problem of representation then requires a rhetoric of the tropes of subjectivity that will discover the relationships among particular tropes representing specific functions of consciousness, such as the dreamwork, or the Oedipal scenario.

By the term trope, we may refer to what Hayden White calls the irreducible nature of metaphor in imaginative and realistic discourses. A trope is a turn of phrase that links an abstract concept to the physical world, and as such, establishes a correspondence between the physical world and human ideation. According to White, tropes are “inexpungeable from discourse in the human sciences” (White 1-2). In other words, for White, every trope is a fiction, the authorship of which all writers must deny, in order to preserve their claim for the truth-content of their discourse. But even contemporary theories of tropes have had recourse to the discipline of physics in order to model how tropes work. Thus, for the sake of this inquiry, we must first question the motives for such recourse, not only in psychology, but in theories of the trope as well.

Jacques Derrida argues that tropes (or one particular form, metaphors) function explicitly as the onto-theological manifestation of a “White Mythology” that tolerates a “provisional loss of meaning” to arrive at “what is proper” (Derrida 45). Tropes demonstrate their truth-content by grounding discourse in the phenomenal world, with the given that there must be some essential connection posited between word and thing:

Like mimesis, metaphor comes back to physis, to its own truth and its presence. Nature always finds in it its own analogy, its own resemblance to itself, and finds increase there only of itself.(Derrida 45)

Yet Derrida argues that metaphors serve both to “menace” and to function as “accomplices.” They menace by the way that the connection between name and thing is subject to “wear and tear” (13): by the tendency of tropes to wear themselves out like coins through the “repetition” of use; and by tearing that precise link between name and thing through deviation, or tropical “divergence” (71).

Derrida associates this precise link with “Physis,” or the claim for natural law, a law that apparently must decay, “wear and tear” through time–as implied by the nineteenth-century conventional understanding of the thermodynamic term entropy as a kind of end-game. Both Jacques Derrida and Harold Bloom have noticed that interest in tropes and in entropy coincided in the middle of the nineteenth century (Derrida 60-74; Bloom 83-105). Yet, according to Derrida, tropes are also accomplices, allowing for “an inevitable detour,” in order to maintain “a horizon of circular reappropriation of the proper sense” (Derrida 73). That sense, of course, remains dependent upon the fiction that there lies an essential connection between word and thing: these tropes imply a correspondence between a pull or force among planets in a solar system, and with the sun; or, among electrons swarming around a nucleus and the energized link among the tropes in a system of signification, with the significance that it surrounds. As opposed to the borrowing of thermodynamic tropes to describe the irreversible decay of an individual sign, here systems of signification are described with reference to the reversible laws of dynamics–Newtonian mechanics and quantum mechanics. Here one finds the conceit that the irreversible “decay” of individual signs can be arrested by situating signs in a system governed by stasis, or inertia. After all, it was Friedrich Nietzsche who said: “What is Truth? Inertia; that hypothesis which gives rise to contentment; smallest expenditure of physical force, etc.” Will to Power 291).

Derrida’s deconstructive agenda involves demonstrating both the instability of individual signs, and the contradictory traces always present within the inertia of a system of signification. William R. Paulson has argued that Derrida draws on information theory, on the relationship between entropy as formulated in physics, and “noise” in the channel between sender and receiver as a problematic (1988, 26-28, 92-99). In this view, Derrida seeks therefore to subvert philosophical discourse by foregrounding the noise present in every possible message. More recently, Alex Argyrous explores Derridean discourse by formulating a theory of order which emerges out of the noise generated by his tactics, thus presenting a positive gloss on what Derrida’s critics have argued constitutes a nihilistic agenda (1991, 57-85). Yet Hans Kellner identifies the agenda of all tropical relations metaphorically (!) with catastrophe theory, particularly with the relations established in the shift from one master trope to another, as suggested by Vico’s notion of “ricorso” (1981, 24-28).

Within the field of trope theory, we can demonstrate the instability of a tropical system, based as it is on “circular reappropriation,” by observing trans-disciplinary borrowings. In recent theories of rhetoric, there has been a return to the four master tropes discussed by Aristotle– metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony–in order to ground trans-disciplinary borrowings.³

Both Hayden White and Frank D’Angelo have asserted the primacy of the four master tropes from Aristotle’s Rhetoric to demonstrate the stability of certain cognitive structures beneath specific disciplinary formations, history and psychology. They argue that Freud’s mechanisms of the dreamwork–which would be useful to review here: condensation, displacement, representation and secondary revision–are their psychological equivalents. Condensation, the process of fusing several elements or images into one, is equivalent to metaphorical identification; displacement, by which one idea, image or element “surrenders to another, signaling a shift in meaning and emotional intensity,” is equivalent to metonymic displacement; representation, the “process of transposing ideas, feelings into symbols,” is equivalent to synecdoche; secondary revision, which with the help of an analyst converts dream elements into comprehensive form through the intrusion of self-conscious distance, is equivalent to irony.⁴

We may accept or reject D’Angelo’s more pointed defense of the continued study of classical rhetoric by positing (in cognitive psychology) an ontological ground for the four master tropes. Still, and this is crucial, that rhetoric may supply tropes for clinical psychology, and that developmental psychology may provide tropes for rhetoric, indicates the potential circularity inherent in any attempt to ground tropes by recourse to other disciplines. For example, White becomes quite dependent upon a cultural application of Freud’s psycho-analytic approach when he claims that within a cultural field, schemes of tropes function “unconsciously” (White 13-20), thus circulating the grounds of his discourse between psychoanalysis and linguistics, with reference to the work of Jacques Lacan. White’s key word for describing tropical function here is defense, and I am most directly interested in exploring the defensive posture implicit in the recourse to tropes from other disciplines.

As Hayden White points out, Harold Bloom has taken the further, Freudian step in pronouncing tropes “the linguistic equivalent of a psychological mechanism of defense” that, while directed “against literal meaning in discourse,” must always assume that literal meaning is something possible (Bloom 88). For Bloom, however, literal meaning is “death,” what would occur if electrons spun into the nucleus, or planets spiraled into the sun. Bloom refers here, of course, to Freud’s Life and Death drives. Thus, out of “survival,” tropes form a reversible system of false signification that he compares to Newtonian mechanics (93), or even to a chess game (96), both of which are premised on reversible laws. This suggests that even what Bloom calls the romantic undoing [kenosis] of an existing tropical system marks merely the commitment to a “personalized countersublime” that itself then systematizes suddenly freed tropical patterns in order to avoid the “threat” of the literal meaning that is death (Bloom 89). We have here a physics of romantic revolution, of private epistemic shifts, a physis of deterritorializations and reterritorializations of the tropical approximations that constitute the limits of representation.

Yet we must force Bloom’s influence theory into a further step that he would resist, by insisting that tropes “defend” an ideological as well as a psychological state, and thus that the disintegration of an accepted tropical field constitutes a public as well as a private event. Scientists resort to tropes of cultural phenomena to make their explanations of physical forces and processes accessible; social philosophers, artists and psychologists resort to tropes from physical forces and processes in order to similarly explain cultural, aesthetic and psychological phenomena. This borrowing from other disciplines reveals, first, a consensual dependence upon a given set of assumptions about the laws governing physical or human phenomena to which these tropes refer; and second, a mutual complicity in suppressing the fictive nature of the tropes that are used. Thus, physicists, philosophers, artists and psychologists betray their dependence on the fictive correspondence between the laws governing nature and the laws governing culture because it makes their thoughts intelligible. Furthermore, this dependence points ultimately to an essentialist perspective underlying even the thoughts of those whose project is to demystify, to deterritorialize old systems of tropical approximations. We address, therefore, how the institution of the avant-garde functions in complicity with the dominant systems it seeks to destabilize. But, before discussing historical examples of this complicity in two avant-garde moments in the history of theories of the subject, Freud’s, and Deleuze and Guattari’s, we should address motive more directly.

The problem of cross-disciplinary borrowing becomes complicated further by the relative status of each discipline in the cultural field. By this I mean that the borrowing of physical tropes by the arts, philosophy and psychology marks their marginalized position more than their cosmological reach. In contrast, the borrowing of cultural tropes (Richard Feynman’s use of the chessboard to describe the laws governing the interactions of sub-atomic particles, for example) to illustrate physical laws extends mastery, which in turn reflects the domination of the sciences across the spectrum of social discourses. As Michel Serres writes of the poverty of literature:

Science is on the side of power, on the side of effectiveness; it has and will have more and more credit, more intellectual and social legitimacy, and the best positions in government; it will attract strong minds--strong in reason and ambition; it will take up space.(1990, 4)

Here, Serres emphasizes the legitimating power as well as the fictiveness of tropes from physics, and we must recognize, when examining the internally contradictory use of these tropes, that the motive for constructing such correspondences lies with the will to power. The source of internal contradiction generated by the tropes themselves comes from an ideological difference, a struggle from within the discipline of physics itself. This struggle arises out of the difference between the precision possible with the time-reversible geometrical perspective usually associated with dynamics, and the statistically-approached contingencies of the time-irreversible perspective normally associated with equilibrium and non-equilibrium thermodynamics.

Here I am drawing on the works of Ilya Prigogine, particularly on his work to make visible an ideological war within the physical sciences, a war of what he calls “Clashing Doctrines,” between time-reversible and time-bound models of physical processes. In this “war,” time-bound theories are marginalized by time-reversible theories. Prigogine’s work in the physics of turbulent systems far- from-equilibrium brought him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1977), not Physics. A further illustration of the marginal status of Prigogine’s own work comes from chaos theory, which was introduced to the public through James Gleick’s popular work, Chaos. This work emphasizes the geometry of fractals without once mentioning Ilya Prigogine’s works on self-organizing systems (Gleick, 1990; 1984, 1-26 and 79-102). Yet Prigogine’s work may provide the most help in confronting problems created by the ideological appropriation of tropes from physics by other disciplines.⁵

We can situate the historical determinants of the construction of theories of subjectivity by identifying tropes from the very different conceptions of physical laws, identified here simplistically by the familiar terms dynamics and thermodynamics, as they are found in the works of Freud and in the works of Deleuze and Guattari.

After discussing dynamics and thermodynamics, particularly with reference to the internal combustion engine, we will then limit discussion to the allusions to machinery in Freud’s description of dreamwork and of the unconscious; and to Deleuze and Guattari’s description of human consciousness as an aleatory subject embedded in the schizo-fluxes of cultural machinery as a means of resistance to these machines of cultural signification. Finally, we will address Deleuze and Guattari’s transgressive yet fundamentally complicitous relationship with the Freudian hegemony of the subject’s representation.

Dynamics and Thermodynamics

The mechanistic world-view of dynamics involves the study of matter and its interactions; that is, the dynamic view reduces natural events to simple laws that can explain the motion of planets, cannon ball trajectories, the movement of molecules and atoms, the interactions of sub- atomic particles, even the time-lines of Einstein’s Twins. Crucial to the success of this view is the search for absolute precision in the description of these forces, in accounting for the history of, and in predicting the future of the systems upon which these forces work. This precision becomes actualized by the capacity of calculus to determine mathematically the time-line of any dynamic system by freezing time itself into an infinite series of still frames, thus tracing that system into the past or into the future at will.

This assumption of absolute certainty as the criterion for the success of physical investigations was challenged for the first time in the mid-ninetenth century by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, equilibrium thermodynamics, or entropy: given any isolated system, that system moves in the direction of greater entropy or disorder. Articulated further by Boltzmann’s Order Principle (given a closed system, that system will always choose the direction of greatest probability), this Second Law forces observers to recognize the roles that randomness and the irreversibility of time play in physical processes: a Mazda Miata is more likely to turn into a pile of rust then a pile of rust will turn into a Mazda Miata. Most important, however, the state of any system is perpetually contingent until it arrives at its rest state or equilibrium. The precise predictions possible in charting a planetary system, or in plotting the recursive trajectories of comets, are impossible in the investigation of processes governed by thermodynamic laws.

In dynamics, therefore, we have precision and certainty in the prediction of the behavior of any system; in thermodynamics, we have only statistical probabilities that remain contingent until equilibrium or, in the case of non-equilibrium thermodynamics, a steady-state is achieved.

In the design of the internal combustion engine, we have a relationship between dynamics and thermodynamics that illustrates through metaphor, first, the hegemonic domination of dynamics within physics, and second, Freud’s agonistic model of the subject as a dynamic equilibrium of (dynamic) drives forcefully modulating unconscious (thermodynamic) processes.

Prigogine argues that as engineering became the context for the question of thermodynamic processes (mechanical, thermal or chemical), two constraints on the observation of those processes emerged. First, the classical method for accounting for every element in a system became replaced by statistical approximations called “macroscopic parameters.” Second, “boundary conditions” needed definition to account for the relationship between the system and its surroundings (1984, xxx). In engines, these referred, first, to the need for statistical analysis in order to predict the behavior of the energy utilized by the engine; and second, to the need to account for the active movement of that energy from one part of an engine to another, as well as the loss of energy from the engine altogether.

Internal combustion engines require two systems, each with a different energy level, to accomplish work. If both systems can be the source of heat flow from hot to cold, then any engine is reversible in the dynamic sense. Yet the Second Law also describes a universal tendency to erase thermal difference through diffusion, resulting in a limit to the utility of controlling heat to produce work. If engines depend upon the Second Law to do work, and yet have to fight the Second Law to do work, then two constraints occur: engines function inefficiently, and there is a limit to the amount of energy available. This does not mention the threat to the integrity of the mechanical system that friction produces, as well as threats created by imperfections in the dynamic system itself: there are limits to precision even in the manufacturing of the parts for the engine.

Thus, the industrial revolution brought about a war of domination by applying the principles of dynamics to mechanical dissipative structures against the inefficiencies that plague those systems. These inefficiencies are due, in turn, to processes governed by the same law of thermodynamics that enable work to be generated by dynamic machines in the first place. In the nineteenth century, the contradictions inherent in the application of dynamic systems and thermodyanmic processes culminates in a world- view, best described by Lord Kelvin, that the universe itself tends toward the degradation of mechanical energy. As Prigogine notes:

This world is described as an engine in which heat is converted into motion only at the price of some irreversible waste and useless dissipation. Effect-producing differences in nature progressively diminish. The world uses up its differences as it goes from one conversion to another and tends toward a final state of thermal equilibrium, "heat death." (1984, 115-116)

The philosophical implications for this irreversible process were not lost on the nineteenth-century mind. Aside from the shift from a fascination with system and classification in the eighteenth century to the seeming domination of time over the imaginations of all the disciplines in the nineteenth century, the association of time with disorder, decay and death shaped the imaginations of social philosophers such as Henry Adams and Oswald Spengler well into the twentieth century. Here we may situate Freud’s recourse to the discipline of physics in modeling the unconscious and the dreamwork, while anticipating the cultural as well as clinical implications of Deleuze and Guattari’s polemical statement that “Everything is a machine” Anti-Oedipus 2, 8).

Physics, Hegemony and the Freudian Subject

If we examine the stages of the dreamwork– condensation, displacement, representation and secondary revision–these stages seem similar to the stages of the function of a steam engine as it does work. Condensation, or the mixing and fusing of disparate elements into one, corresponds to the initial activity of the chamber, the function of which is to mix coal or other fuel and oxygen before ignition produces heat. Displacement, or the surrender of meaning and emotion as it is transferred from one image to another, corresponds to the generating of heat in the chamber after ignition, that is then channelled to the steam engine used to drive the machinery being worked.

Representation, or the translation of those elementary ideas and feelings into symbols, corresponds to the commodity that can be manufactured by harnessing the process of conversion taking place in the secondary chamber of the machine. Secondary revision, or the conversion of the elements of the dream into coherent form with the aid of a therapist, corresponds to the attachment of public value to the commodity created by this dream machine. The dreamwork, then, modulates the flow of desire through a process that transforms that desire into a system of valuation cultured, even manufactured (in process), with the aid of the therapist.

Psycho-analysis, in this sense, becomes one of many cultural machines that control desire. Furthermore, Freud describes thought itself as the fundamental transformation: the sublimation of effulgent desire becomes by itself a threat to the health of the system that generates the desire in the first place. The purpose of thought itself, of which the dreamwork is only one manifestation, is to channel the libido, defined thus in thermodynamic terms, into acceptable behavior. As Freud writes in The Ego and the Id:

If this displaceable energy is desexualized libido, it may also be described as sublimated energy . . . . If thought processes in the wider sense are to be included among these displacements, then the activity of thinking is also supplied from the sublimation of erotic motive drives.(45)

In other words, the entire subject-system, expressed in terms of the Id, Ego and Superego, can be made to correpond to a mechanical dissipative structure, in which desire, as heat or entropy, motivates the system, and is modulated through drives for the purposes of psychological survival.

LaPlanche and Pontalis have identified two different subject-systems in Freud’s works: the narcissistic ego/ideal-ego system; and the superego/ego-ideal system (1973, 144-5, 201-2). Both systems modulate flows of sublimated energy-desire to different ends. One may inquire (as LaPlanche does, for example) into how these differing structures function in terms of the life and death drives respectively (1976, 8-24), especially if we remember Bloom’s conceit that the literalization of tropes brings “death” to the system-subject. What most concerns us, though, is that the function of the subject appears to be the control of energy-as-desire, to limit the representations of motivated thought by modulating motivated thought through systems that drive thought into acceptable forms. If forms are unacceptable, as in the case of disturbing dreams, the function of psychoanalysis, with reference to dreamwork, is to remodulate desire through a symbolic system navigated, and therefore mapped, in the dynamic, geometrical sense, by the therapist. To undertand how this system might work at the level of culture-dynamics, we should digress briefly to the work of Peter Stallybrass and Allon White.

In The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, Stallybrass and White demonstrate, first, the disappearance of carnival forms in Northern European (British) society, and second, the reconfiguration of the carnivalesque into the lowest and basest of social interactions, that become a threat to emerging middle-class values (1986, 1-26). In two chapters on Freud, these authors demonstrate the function of the unconscious as the seat of the carnivalesque in the discourse of the bourgeoisie, the seat of dissolved hierarchies and vital turbulence that threatens the carefully modulated orderings of the European middle-class. They also demonstrate the institutions of control, associated with the Family Romance, that enforce the control of desire, seated in the Id, through the triangulation of the Oedipal scenario (149-91). As we have seen, the dynamic forces modulating the thermodynamics of desire for the individual, as a synecdoche, are now applied to the dynamic control of entropic forces throughout culture as a whole.

It will now be useful to negotiate a transition from Freud’s Oedipus to the anti-oedipal strategies of Deleuze and Guattari by situating the public mechanisms at work at the level of individual neurosis and psychosis.

In Deleuze and Guattari’s collaborative volumes, Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, lies a Nietzschean synthesis of the Marxist theory of production (dominated, as it is, by the dynamics and thermodynamics of the Industrial Revolution), and by Freud’s theory of the libido. They do so through the conflated term “desiring-production.” They state that the Oedipal scenario structures desire in capitalist countries, and that psychoanalysis helps to enforce the restrictions imposed by that structure. Also, they agree with the Marxist formulation that capitalism reduces all human interactions to “commodity-relations of universal equivalency.” As Ronald Bogue points out, capitalism therefore “deterritorializes” desire by exploding not only the limits created by the Oedipal scenario, but the limits created by other traditional structures as well (1989, 88-92). Yet capitalism also “reterritorializes” desire by forcing it to manifest itself through the network of commodity relations. While Oedipus helps to focus human desire through the family, leaving its residue to wander the leveled field of “universal equivalency,” capitalism also generates “schzophrenic fluxes,” a mixing up of material and human refuse in the diffused heat of undifferentiated desire which, if all goes well, is redirected through the Oedipal machinery. As trope, the “residue” of desire– “schizophrenic fluxes” of human and material refuse–makes sense when we recognize its thermodynamic origin, while tropes for capitalism and psychoanalysis take on the dynamic properties of machines modulating “fluxes.”

Deleuze and Guattari then define clinical schizophrenia as the psychological equivalent of a thermodynamic state of equilibrium, the human refuse (institutionalized or not) in which the machinery of Oedipus, and even the more primal subject-structures, have been overthrown. Their project is to build a psychoanalysis, aesthetics and politics that valorizes the schizo-flux. They provide a schizo-analysis of the multiple cultural machines of desiring-production, and a program for resistance to those machines.

Deleuze and Guattari’s program for resistance lies in two related tropes for thought and action: the nomad and the rhizome. Representing subjective and cultural contingency on the one hand, and spontaneous aggregation of contingent subjective and cultural formations on the other, these terms constitute a theory of self-organization: the nomad and the rhizome have explanatory power across the human sciences: the writings of Kafka, the contingencies and collectivity of jazz performance, Pynchon’s Tristero postal subculture, the multiple human formations of the dance troop Pilobolus (itself a name for a rhizome), the “cells” of the Kuwaiti resistance.

Physis, Nomos and the “Grounds” for Subjectivity in Deleuze and Guattari

First of all, it should be clear that Deleuze and Guattari merely valorize the heat-energy fluxes (limited by Freud to the chamber of the subject-machine as dissipative structure) over the machine itself: they argue for the sustained play of entropic thought and action, as that play may exist independent of the machinery that depends upon entropy to produce work and controls the chaos that seems necessarily to pose a threat to the system itself. Up until this point we have been discussing entropy as an end-game phenomenon, but it is precisely Prigogine’s work, over the last thirty years, on processes of self-organization possible in chaos or turbulence, that may provide a model for how Deleuze and Guattari’s answer to Freud is not merely destructive, but nihilistic in the affirmative sense. We will then need to confront how their response to Freud also remains complicitous in the rhetorical sense.⁶

Yet Deleuze and Guattari are sly, and they do not wish to seem invested in an essentialist correspondence between the laws of physics and the laws that may govern consciousness and culture. In the chapter from A Thousand Plateaus, entitled “1227: Treatise on Nomadology–The War Machine,” Deleuze and Guattari analize war by opposing chess and Go as opposing game theories: “from the standpoint of the game pieces, the relations between the pieces and the space involved” (1987, 34-52-3). Yet this concept of war involves processes within the subject as well as the most violent manifestations of social dynamics. While Deleuze and Guattari state that “Chess is a game of State, or of the court; the emperor of China played it” (352), we must also remember that chess tropes signifying systems that determine the socially-constituted subject, with rigid rules governing identity. Go pieces, on the other hand, “have only an anonymous, collective or third-person function,” with “only a milieu of exteriority, or extrinsic relations” (353). The properties of Go involve not semiotic precision but strategic flows that obey not cause and effect, as with chess, but dissemination that is contingent upon situation. They write, “it is a question of arraying oneself in an open space, of holding space, of maintaining the possibility of springing up at any point: the movement is not from one point to another, but becomes perpetual, without aim or destination, without departure or arrival” (353).

The oppositions in the tropes generated by their analysis of these two games are useful for our purposes: a closed system against an open system; precise identity against the anonymity of numbers; determined trajectory of the pieces against contingent dissemination; fixed function against virtual potential. Clearly, these tropes from chess and Go draw respectively on the opposing models of pysical forces and processes, the dynamic and the thermodynmic.

We should note that by opposing the “‘smooth’ space of Go against the ‘striated’ space of chess,” Deleuze and Guattari make the distinction between the “Nomos of Go against the State of chess, nomos against polis” (353). By opposing polis to nomos, they imply that chess is premised upon physis, or natural law, while Go is premised upon nomos, or law agreed upon by convention. In their discourse, Go is valorized over chess in order to valorize nomos over the State’s claims for physis. Deleuze and Guattari assault the assumptions of natural law, proposing their avant-garde social philosophy in order to demystify the State. They do so by denying the correspondence between the laws of nature and the laws describing forces governing culture (physis). In their discourse, the laws of nature refer specifically to classical mechanics, and especially to the chess tropes used by Richard Feynman to describe the dynamics of quantum electrodynamics and by Saussure to describe the laws governing signification.⁷

But in using the game of Go as a source of tropes, Deleuze and Guattari must make recourse to physis themselves by valorizing contingency and aggregation as an essential condition of nomadic and rhizomatic thought and action. These concepts refer respectively to the initial conditions necessary for thermodynamic processes (contingency as a condition of freedom), and to one possible behavior for physical systems governed by those processes (prairie grassroots as a collectivity of blades of grass; slime mold as an aggregation of unicellular nomads).

We can trace fairly precisely a genealogy of concepts related to equilibrium and non-equilibrium thermodynamics in Gilles Deleuze’s earlier works, indicating his debt to nineteenth and twentieth-century theories of chaos or disorder that provide the tropical grounds for his theory of subjective and collective resistance to cultural machinery. In Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962, 83), Deleuze describes Nietzsche’s Eternal Return as the return to difference, not sameness, an analysis of the contingent dimension of cultural systems and human consciousness affirming for any physical system, and, by implication, any human subjective or cultural system, the always-already contingency of past and future as it is reformulated in every present moment. This seems, in turn, to indicate a reformulation of Boltzmann’s Order Principle, first defined in Deleuze’s earlier Bergsonism (1966, 1988). In this work, Deleuze defines Bergson’s theory of creative evolution as a dialectic between contingent duration as “pure becoming” and the memory of a system engaged by elan vital or a physical/metaphysical principle of desire, a dialectic explored with remarkable subtlety in his recently translated Difference and Repetition (1968; 1993, forthcoming), particularly when repetition becomes a referent for pathology applicable both to the individual isolate and to the cultural field. The specific applications of these concepts–of the Eternal Return and of contingent duration as Becoming to human subjectivity and to the forces and processes of culture–lead to the nomad, and to nomad thought (“Nomad Thought” 1973, 1985). This is true as well of the passages on becoming as an initial condition for schizophrenia in The Logic of Sense (1969; 1990). This genealogy, in turn, helps to locate in Deleuze’s corpus, as well as in his collaboration, a continuous commitment to the concept of an intense, irreversible and irresistible impetus underlying the relational grids superimposed upon the subject by various visible and invisible cultural machines, machinery that produces aesthetic objects such as cinema (see Cinema I [1983, 1986] and Cinema II [1985, 1989]), or fiction Proust and Signs [1964, 72]; Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature [1975, 1986]). And it is in The Logic of Sense that Deleuze first comes to terms with the cultural as well as clinical implication of schizophrenia as a theory of subjective and cultural chaos (1-3, 82-93). With the help of Felix Guattari, Deleuze offers in A Thousand Plateaus an extended meditation on the role of Becoming as a form of resistance (232-309), a role recognized in Brian Massumi’s recent reading of the two-volume Capitalism and Schizophrenia.⁸

But what interests us further in this passage on game theories of war are the attempts to disguise the nature and function of the system of tropical oppositions that I have demonstrated are crucial to Deleuze and Guattari’s representations of subjectivity. We can find other examples of oppositions disguising a recourse to physis.

Deleuze and Guattari’s recourse to the thermodynamics of open systems far-from-equilibrium, systems grounded in contingency and multiplicity, permeable membranes instead of rigid lines, enables them to articulate their program against the laws of dynamics as applied to human affairs, while hiding their own affiliations with the claim for physis:

A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance. The tree imposes the verb "to be," but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction "and...and...and...." (A Thousand Plateaus 25)

Here we may find, hidden in this parable of two opposing “organic” tropes (the arboreal against the rhizomatic), the implicit reference to the structures of dynamics against the processes of thermodynamics–the definitive static, vertical structure of the tree versus the open conjunction of the spontaneous aggregation of wandering cells into a weaving of roots constructed by simple addition. Chess and Go, tree and grass–sedentary structure and flows of openness: at the center of Deleuze and Guattari’s writing machine lies a programmatic commitment to one side of the ideological opposition between dynamics and thermodynamics, as well as a complicitous commitment to ground their discourses in natural laws of a different sort than those justifying the dominance of our machine age.

Notes

1. I’d like to thank Ronald Bogue for pointing out the crucial role of chaos theory in this work and its relevance to this essay. An extension of the lines of inquiry pursued in this essay will serve as the springboard for a panel on chaos theory and subjectivity in the works of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari at the 1993 Modern Language Association, with the following essays: my “Chess and Go: The Physis/Nomos Debate in Deleuze and Guattari’s Game Theory of War”; William R. Paulson, “Self-Organization and Figures of Resistance”; and Ronald Bogue, “The Micropolitics of the Fractal Fold.”

2. This requires an extension of the concept of chaos, as it is currently employed, to include an earlier theory of disorder associated with nineteenth-century entropy theory. We can suggest such a connection through the works of the contemporary physicist Ilya Prigogine, whose particular approach to chaos theory draws on a genealogy that begins with those nineteenth-century physicists working in thermodynamics, and whose work is central to my argument.

3. One exception has been George Lakoff, who, by drawing on generational grammar as well as on cognitive psychology, argues not only that all conceptual systems are metaphorical, but that the systems of human knowledge that depend upon these metaphors are grounded in the biology of cognition. Expanding beyond the four tropes, he argues that even the most abstract systems from any discipline are dependent upon spatio-temporal metaphors. Lakoff claims that these spatio-temporal metaphors are not arbitrary constructions, but function systematically and have universal status, precisely because they are rooted essentially in the biological fact of a complex organic orientation determined by gravity, by the perception of up and down, of inside and outside, of near and far (Lakoff 3- 24, 56-68). But Lakoff’s tactical representation of those grounded categories of metaphors in terms of maps remains problematic because using maps implies a structuralist methodology. In other words, despite Lakoff’s claims that there may be a “natural” order to metaphors, his use of maps involves the embrace of a conflicting assumption, which of course can be traced to Saussure’s argument that signs are, for the most part, constructed arbitrarily.

4. D’Angelo’s brilliant demonstration of the seemingly arbitrary correspondence between dreamwork and the master tropes of classical rhetoric requires a further negotiation. Specifically, D’Angelo shifts his fascination with the function of tropes in Freud’s account of the process of dreaming toward the discipline of developmental psychology by demonstrating that these tropes also correspond to the four stages of cognitive development as described by Piaget (1987, 37, 36). In fact he argues elsewhere, as Lakoff does, that the master tropes of Aristotle are similarly grounded in human cognition; that is, rhetoric itself, as the science of inquiring into the available means of persuasion, has ontological status in the deep structures of human cognition, structures that can be understood developmentally (1982, 105-117) and in fact may be described with reference to theories of evolution such as that of Pierre de Chardin. Another source for this kind of grounding comes from Gerald Edelman, whose Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind grounds the work not only of George Lakoff, but of Mark Turner and Mark Johnson as well. Another example of the dangers inherent in cross-disciplinary borrowings comes from Mark Turner’s Reading Minds: The Study of English in the Age of Cognitive Science. Turner suggests that contemporary theory has led to a dead end in English studies; he considers their discourses suspect because of their complexity and inaccessibility. Calling contemporary theory “ungrounded bootstrapping” and “fragmented,” Turner argues that “contemporary theory fails to connect with the full human world to the extent that it treats objects in literature that can be seen only by means of the theory: in that case, if the theory vanishes, its objects vanish” (4). Turner argues for humanistic studies grounded in schemes and tropes that are working metaphors in the physical world. He grounds his systematic exploration of the matrix of schemes and tropes by resurrecting classical stasis theory: “image schemas to structure our understanding of forces,” in other words, through ordered forms or geometric structures. What makes Turner’s polemic so astonishing is its deliberate ignoring of a new paradigm in cognitive science that bears some relationship to the chaos theory discussed in this essay: emergence. Instead of connecting cognitive science and English studies through reference to geometric schemes and tropes organized by an implied and unified subjectivity, one could pursue such an interdisciplinary connection by postulating a human cognizing subject that has no unity but the unity that it perceives in itself is a fiction constructed to encompass all the heterogeneity of cognitions occurring. “Emergence” is a theory of self-organization that shares certain characteristics with Prigogine’s formulation of self-organizing systems theory. What Turner misses so egregiously in his attack on contemporary critical theory is that Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the crucial developer of this connectionist/emergence paradigm (dormant though it was for some twenty years after he first conceived of the possibility of human perception without autonomous consciousness), is responsible for certain grounding concepts that led to Barthes’, Foucault’s and others’ assaults on naive concepts of authorships. Turner therefore attempts to ground his assault on contemporary critical theory in one paradigm of cognitive science, ignoring (or ignorant of) how another, competing paradigm within cognitive science grounds the very theories he attempts to refute.

5. One must say at this point that not all physicists have been drafted into this war, only those that are interested in the ideological dimension of the formations of their discipline. Prigogine’s reputation within the human sciences also lacks unanimous support. For example, take N. Katherine Hayle’s account of Prigogine’s position within the field of chaos studies, Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science (91-114). Yet if we apply Prigogine’s ideological categories to her own account, Hayles demonstrates a clear bias toward a time-reversible, geometrical perspective on chaos, something she shares with James Gleick. This becomes visible in her chapter on physics concepts in the fiction of Thomas Pynchon from her earlier The Cosmic Web: Scientific Field Theories and Literary Strategies in the Twentieth Century (168-198). In addressing the concept of the “field” in physics, she ignores physics tropes that have to do with time irreversiblity and with self-organization. These tropes play a crucial role in the representation of subjectivity and cultural processes in that novel. See my “Invisibility, the War Machine and Prigogine: Dissipative Structures and Aggregation Processes in the Zone of Gravity’s Rainbow,” forthcoming in Pynchon Notes 21. See also David Porush’s response to Gleick’s account of chaos, “Making Chaos: Two Views of a New Science,” in New England Review and Breadloaf Quarterly (“On Science” Volume XII, 4, Summer, 1990, 427-442), which may also serve as a useful critique of Hayles’ own methodology.

6. By the term “complicity,” I refer to the implied “contract” embraced by contending opponents to perpetuate the struggle indefinitely. I consider the opening quotation from Thrasymachus a useful arche for this implication. Baudrillard calls this seduction. See “On Seduction,” in Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, edited with an Introduction by Mark Poster, 149-165.

7. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 22; 88; 110; Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law. For the most sustained treatment by an avant-gardist of the cultural implications of the game of chess, see Marcel Duchamp and H. Halberstadt, Opposition et les cases congugee sont reconciliees (Brussels: l’Echiquier/Edmund Lancel, 1932). The opposition of the Kings at endgame is described in terms of the dynamics of the reversible movement of the pieces, and of the thermodymamics of equilibrium, preserving the opposition and breach of equilibrium which precipitate the end of the endgame. At this stage, the kings remain complicitous in attempting to preserve the endgame for as long as possible by seeking only to avoid making a mistake.

8. See Brian Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari; citations with secondary references too numerous to count here. For a different reading of the significance of the concept becoming, as it indicates continuity between Deleuze’s work on Bergson and his work on Nietzsche, see Michael Hardt, Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy, especially 19-25, 47-55.

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- Paulson, William R. The Noise of Culture: Literary Texts in a World of Information. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988.
- Porush, David. “Making Chaos: Two Views of a New Science.” New England Review and Breadloaf Quarterly, “On Science,” Volume XII, 4, Summer, 1990, 427-442.
- Prigogine, Ilya. From Being to Becoming: Time and Complexity in the Physical Sciences. New York: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1980.
- Prigogine, Ilya, and Isabelle Stengers. Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue With Nature. New York: Bantam, 1984.
- Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics. Ed. Charles Bally, Albert Sechehay. Trans. Wade Baskin. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976.
- Serres, Michel. “Literature and the Exact Sciences.” SubStance: A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism 59, xviii, #2, 1989, 4.
- Stallybrass, Peter, and Allon White. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. New York: Cornell University Press, 1986.
- Turner, Mark. Reading Minds: The Study of English in the Age of Cognitive Science. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.
- White, Hayden. Metahistory. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973.
- —. Tropics of Discourse. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.
September 25, 2013
That Was Then: This Is Now: Ex-Changing the Phallus

Lynda Hart

Department of English
The University of Pennsylvania

In A Taste for Pain, Maria Marcus recounts an anecdote about a women’s studies conference in 1972. Germaine Greer, the keynote speaker, was interrupted by a young woman from the audience who suddenly cried out: “But how can we start a women’s movement when I bet three-quarters of us sitting in this room are masochists?” Greer replied: “Yes, we know women are masochists–that’s what it’s all about!”¹

Twenty years later, I am more likely to hear the complaint that all women are masochists in the context of lesbians lamenting the scarcity of tops in the community. Whether they are “real” butches, or the newly popular femme- tops, a good top is hard to find; most lesbians prefer being bottoms.

While feminists continue to debate the pros and cons of lesbian sexual practices, “masochism,” the term that has become synonomous for some feminists with internalized oppression, has undergone a theoretical renaissance in which the erotics of submission have been reclaimed by a diverse group of scholars as an emancipatory sexuality for men. Indeed if we are to follow Leo Bersani’s argument, which strikingly concludes that “sexuality–at least in the mode in which it is constituted–could be thought of as a tautology for masochism,” anti-s/m feminist arguments would be tantamount to barring women from sex altogether.²

For feminists who are struggling to articulate a sexual subjectivity that does not submit to the psychoanalytic imperative of an exclusively masculine libido, which ineluctably consigns femininity to a masculinized fetish, Bersani’s theory might be welcomed since it takes us out of the discourse of the symptom into a “nonreferential version of sexual thought.” Parental identifications, which inevitably reify Oedipus, are no longer constitutive; and the “lost object,” which is relentlessly relegated to a feminized fetish, is diffused so that any object and any part of the body can become an erotogenic zone.³ This theory does not of course undo the historical/social attribution of masochism to women, but it does suggest a psychic model in which the sexual positions one takes up are not necessarily gendered. Nevertheless, Bersani implicitly assumes the now privileged masochistic position as a male preogative, and hence claims sexuality itself for men. This presumption is clearer in his essay, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” when he describes the dominant culture’s revulsion at the sight of a man seductively and intolerably imaged with “legs high in the air, unable to refuse the suicidal ecstasy of being a woman.”⁴

This is a graphic enactment of Freud’s third form of masochism, “feminine masochism,” which he also presumes to be occupied by a male subject in a feminine situation. The male subject in this space signifies “being castrated, or copulated with, or giving birth to a baby.”⁵ Since women presumably already experience one or more of the above, the notion of a feminine “feminine masochism” is redundant at best, if not impossible. In short, linguistically masculine feminine masochism is performative; feminine feminine masochism is constative. The latter merely reports an adequation; it corresponds with the “facts.” The feminist campaign to free women from their masochism was never then about giving up something that they had, but extricating women from something that they were.

Although Kaja Silverman acknowledges that psychoanalytic sexual difference relegates female masochism to a virtually ontological condition when she defends her focus on male subjectivity by explaining that the female subject’s masochism is difficult to conceptualize as perverse because it represents “such a logical extension of those desires which are assumed to be ‘natural’ for the female subject,” she nonetheless accepts and repeats the terms of a psychoanalytic symbolic in which there is only one libido and it is masculine.⁶ Women are denied sexual agency because they are incapable of mimesis. Their options are to take up the position of passive “normal femininity,” or to reverse the position and appropriate masculine subjectivity and its desires, in which case they can “perform” sexuality, but only through their “masculinity complex.” Bersani’s desire is aimed at the pleasures gay men might experience from an alignment with femininity, as is Silverman’s, though her project is to produce a revolutionary subject in a “feminine” yet heterosexual man. Both of these analyses add weight to feminist arguments against sadomasochism, for following their logic the lesbian masochist is either enacting the dominant culture’s degradation of women or she is playing out the desire to be a man. Even if she psychically occupies the position of a man with another man, she is still only a “fag hag” within the terms of sexual difference. These theories that posit male masochism as emancipatory thus continue to depend on the impossibility of desire between women. In this context, truth claims about lesbian sexuality such as this one made by Jan Brown,

We practice the kind of sex in which cruelty has value, where mercy does not. What keeps those of us who refused to abandon our "unacceptable" fantasies sane is the knowledge that there are others like us who would not leave because we scream "Kill me," at the moment we orgasm. . . . We lied to you about controlling the fantasy. It is the lack of control that makes us come, that has the only power to move us . . . . ⁷

would easily fall prey to the argument that lesbian sadomasochists are merely reproducing heterosexist models, or at best, male homosocial ones. The referent for Brown’s “lies” can be located in earlier rhetoric by s/m practitioners who justified the acting out of their fantasies by claiming they were means of exorcising their real hold on the individual. Tacitly accepting the feminist contention that s/m lesbians had internalized cultural misogyny, these defenses asked for a tolerant reprieve, a period of playing through the fantasies in order to transcend them. S/M then, ironically, became therapeutic, like a homeopathic cure.

Theatrical metaphors were central to this defense. Susan Farr, for example, described s/m as “pure theatre,” “a drama [in which] two principals . . . act at being master and slave, play at being fearsome and fearful.” She cites the clues to the drama in the interchangeability of the roles and the repetitive, scripted dialogue. Even though, she acknowledges, much of the scene may be “pure improvisation,” it is still “theater.”⁸ This dialectic between the scriptural and the spontaneous is prevalent in early pro s/m accounts. On the one hand, there is the insistence that the scene is rigidly controlled, with a decided emphasis on the bottom’s mastery of the limits. On the other hand, the eroticism depends on the anticipation that the limits will be pushed to the breaking point, that the “scene” will cross over into the “real.”

To a certain extent, the controversy about whether s/m is “real” or performed is naive, since we are always already in representation even when we are enacting our seemingly most private fantasies. The extent to which we recognize the presence of the edge of the stage may determine what kind of performance we are enacting, but willing ourselves to forget the stage altogether is not to return to the real, as s/m opponents would have it; rather, this will to forget is classical mimesis, which, as Derrida points out, is “the most naive form of representation.”⁹ Nevertheless, it is precisely this most naive form of representation that would seem to be the most desirable of sexual performances. Bersani’s objections to the frequent theorization of such things as “the gay-macho style, the butch-fem lesbian couple, and gay and lesbian sado-masochism” as . . . “subversive parodies of the very formations and behaviours they appear to ape,” rather than, “unqualified and uncontrollable complicities with, correlatively, “a brutal and misogynous ideal of masculinity” [gay macho], . . . “the heterosexual couple permanently locked into a power structure of male sexual and social mastery over female sexual and social passivity” [butch-fem], or “fascism” [s/m], are clearly based on his contention that these sexual practices are not performative. Parody, Bersani states emphatically, “is an erotic turn-off, and all gay men know this.”¹⁰ Although Bersani audaciously speaks for all gay men, I would have to agree with him and add that many lesbians know this too. Self-conscious mimicry of heterosexuality is a side show; when the main act comes to town, we all want the “real thing,” or, more precisely, we all want the Real thing. That is, sexuality is always, I think, about our desire for the impossible-real, not the real of the illusion that passes for reality, but the Real that eludes symbolization.

Lesbian s/m erotica has become increasingly assertive about claiming dildoes as the “real thing.” Although strap- ons are advertised as “toys,” inside the narratives and testimonials of lesbian s/m practitioners references to an outside or a “model” are most often discarded in favor of descriptions that simply occupy the status of the real. So, for example, it has become common to speak of “watching her play with her dick,” or “sucking her off,” or “your dick find[ing] its way inside of me.”¹¹ As one contributor to Quim puts it: “When I put on a strap on I feel male. I feel my dick as real otherwise I can’t use it well.”¹² Rarely if ever does one find lesbian erotica that refers to the dildo as a joke, an imitation, or a substitute, whether these narratives are explicitly in an s/m context or in the more prevalent accounts of butch/femme vanilla erotica. On the contrary, the erotic charge of these narratives depends on both tops and bottoms, butches and femmes exhibiting nothing less than respect for the “phallic” instrument.

Bersani’s argument about gay macho depends on this notion of respect for masculinity as a model. But the slide from gay macho to lesbian butch-fem and s/m is too facilely made. Whereas gay macho’s “mad identifications” are between gay and straight men, which he argues is a “direct line (not so heavily mediated) from excitement to sexuality,”¹³ the identifications made by b/f and s/m lesbians follow a more circuitous route in which the condensations and displacements are more complex. Most obviously, gay macho’s relationship to straight masculinity remains a homo-sexual affair; whereas lesbian b/f and s/m, as long as we are caught within the logic of this binary, would be hetero- sexual. In both cases, however, the erotic charge can only be articulated within the terms of a symbolic order that depends for its coherency on maintaining the distinction between homosexuality and heterosexuality. Nonetheless, even within the terms of this symbolic order, which I presume is what Bersani refers to when he speaks of sex “as we know it,” there is already dissidence, rather than resemblence, in the image of a woman penetrating another woman with a dildo. Although both might be interpreted as a yearning toward “masculinity,” in the gay man’s case it is a masculinity that the dominant culture at least marginally assigns to him and that he thus might willingly surrender. In the lesbian top’s case, it is a “masculinity” that she aggressively appropriates without any prior cultural ownership only then to give it up. If we look at it from the bottom’s perspective, there is quite a difference between the gay man who cannot “refuse the suicidal ecstasy of being a woman,” and the lesbian who is presumed by the dominant sexual order already to be a woman.

Over a decade ago, Monique Wittig implicitly enjoined us to write The Symbolic Order with a slash through the article, just as Lacan writes The Woman, when she made her then startling announcment that “Lesbians are not women.”¹⁴ The straight mind, she pointed out, “speaks of the difference between the sexes, the symbolic order, the Unconsious . . . giving an absolute meaning to these concepts when they are only categories founded upon heterosexuality . . . .”¹⁵ Returning to this article, it is interesting to remember that the example Wittig chooses to demonstrate the material oppression effected through discourses is pornography. Pornography, she argues, signifies simply that “women are dominated.”¹⁶ Thus Wittig might be aligned with Mackinnon when she argues that pornography “institutionalizes the sexuality of male supremacy, fusing the eroticization of dominance and submission with the social construction of male and female.”¹⁷ It is this position that Bersani perversely asks us to reconsider when he temporarilly allies himself with Mackinnon and Dworkin only in order to argue for the necessity of proliferating pornography rather than banning it. However, if the ultimate logic of the radical feminist argument for the realism of porn is “the criminalization of sex itself until it has been reinvented,”¹⁸ whether one takes up a position for or against pornography on this basis, are we not then already acceding to the “straight mind” that can only think homosexuality as “nothing but heterosexuality”?¹⁹

What has fallen out of these discussions is heterosexuality as a social contract, one that as Wittig argues can not only be but already is broken by practicing lesbians. For when we hear of “sex as we know it” or the ultimate logic of anti-porn feminists as the “criminalization of sex,” this “sex” is always already heterosexuality, and implicitly, a relationship of identity between the phallus and the penis. Lacan seems to free us from this difficulty when he argues that the Phallus is a signifier (without a signified), not a body part, nor a partial object, nor an imaginary construct.²⁰ However, in her recent reading of Lacan’s “The Meaning of the Phallus,” back through “The Mirror Stage,” Judith Butler shows that Lacan’s denial of the Phallus as an imaginary effect is “constitutive of the Phallus as a privileged signifier.”²¹ At the risk of reductively summarizing her nuanced argument, what Butler’s essay seems to conclude is that the Symbolic is always only a masculine imaginary that produces the Phallus as its privileged signifier by denying the mechanisms of its own production.

Lacan’s move to locate the Phallus within the Symbolic presumably breaks its relation of identity with the penis since symbolization “depletes that which is symbolized of its ontological connection with the symbol itself.”²² Just as Magritte’s painting of a pipe is not a/the pipe, so the penis and phallus are not equivalent.²³ But, as Butler points out, they do retain a priveleged relationship to one another through “determinate negation.”²⁴ If symbolization is what effects ontological disconnection, we might ask what happens to those “pipes” that are excessive to representation. Would not those things that cannot take place within any given symbolic end up accorded a radically negative ontological status? Would they not, in other words, become that which is real, and therefore impossible?²⁵

When Wittig argues that rejecting heterosexuality and its institutions is, from the straight mind’s perspective, “simply an impossibility” since to do so would mean rejecting the “symbolic order” and therefore the constitution of meaning “without which no one can maintain an internal coherence,”²⁶ she seems to suggest that the straight mind simply denies the possibility of lesbianism. But phallocentrism/heterosexism does not merely secure its dominance through a simple negation. Rather, it needs lesbianism as a negative ontology. It needs its status as both radically real and impossible.

That this is the case can be seen in Silverman’s reconceptualization of the borders of male subjectivity in which her analysis at once ignores lesbian sexuality and persistently depends on it as yet another instance of a constitutive outside. Determined to undo the tenacious assumption that there are only two possible sexual subject positions, Silverman ends by positing three possible “same- sex” combinations: 1. two morphological men 2. a gay man and a lesbian [both occupying psychically masculine positions] 3. a lesbian and a gay man [both occupying psychically feminine positions].²⁷ Given Silverman’s sophisticated psychoanalytic rendering of the body’s imaginary production, it might sound naive to suggest that the latter two positions are morphologically heterosexual, i.e., one of each. Yet she retains the category of two morphological men, so there is obviously still some recourse to a materiality of the body outside its imaginary formations.

Silverman concludes her book by asserting that her third paradigm for male homosexuality has the “most resonance for feminism,” which she claims to represent politically.²⁸ But what is striking is that this is the only place in her analysis where lesbianism is represented. For it is in this most politically productive model of male homosexuality that the “authorial subjectivity” can be accessed “only through lesbianism.”²⁹ What could this “lesbianism” be if not two morphologically female bodies, which oddly do not appear in her liberating models for “same-sex” desire? The feminism that Silverman speaks for politically is once again a heterosexual feminism; for her ability to make cases for imaginary gay sexualities is only intelligible through the assumption of a lesbian sexuality that remains stable and constitutively outside her recombinations of the relationships between psychic identifications and imaginary morphologies. Thus she depends on the orthodoxy of the impossibility of lesbian desire in order to challenge and break with the other orthodoxies that limit sexual choices for (heterosexual) women.

The model that proposes the impossiblity of lesbian desire, constructed as two morphological females with psychic feminine identities, is impossible within psychoanalytic terms precisely because there is no desire without a phallic signifier. In order for lesbianism to escape from its stabilizing function as the place-holder of a lack, Butler’s fictive lesbian phallus would seem to be indispensable. Yet there is still in this formulation a submission to psychoanalytic orthodoxy; and lesbian sado- masochists have thought of much more interesting ways to practice dominance and submission.

Suppose we agree with Bersani’s argument that phallocentrism is “above all the denial of the value of powerlessness in both men and women,”³⁰ and consider what value women might find in powerlessness. I would agree with Tania Modleski that from a heterosexual woman’s perspective there might not be much to value in powerlessness.³¹ But from a lesbian perspective things look different. Powerlessness, in Bersani’s argument, seems to mean little more than submitting to penetration. When he takes anatomical considerations into account, he refers to the “real” of bodies which are constructed in such a way that “it’s almost impossible not to associate mastery and subordination with intense pleasures.”³² If the value of powerlessness is equivalent to being penetrated, note that the “woman” in Bersani’s imaginary must be either a heterosexual female or a gay man. Not only does Bersani then retain an equivalency between the phallus and the penis, but he also reinforces a morphological conflation of the vagina and the anus. At the same time, he insists upon a fantasmatic gender distinction that depends on these anatomical parts as referents. Bersani’s argument, then, surely exceeds his intentions. For while he means to value the powerlessness of both men and women, it is paradoxically between these two penetrable orifices, which are at once the same and different, that on their front/to/back axis the illusion of an impermeable male body is sustained. As D.A. Miller puts it: “only between the woman and the homosexual together may the normal male subject imagine himself covered front and back.”³³

If, as Butler argues, Lacan retains a relationship of identity between the phallus and the penis through “determinate negation,” it is also possible to understand the valorization of a masochism that is explicitly male as further consolidation of this relation of equivalence. For male masochism, which presumably relinquishes the phallus by occupying the being of woman, would necessarily assume that she is the one who does not “have it.” In other words, it is only by giving it up that one gets it. Hence the continuing postulation that female masochism is impossible depends on the assurance that she has nothing to give up. The female masochist would have to give up something that she does not have; and if she were represented as giving it up, then it would have to be admittted that the phallus is nothing more than an imaginary construct. According to Freud’s narrative, women are presumed to have once “had” the penis. The phallus/penis as “lost object” always refers us to the past of a woman’s body and the dreaded future of a man’s body. Hence the cultural horror associated with “becoming a woman.”

Lesbians who regard their strap-ons as the “real thing” instigate a representational crisis by producing an imaginary in which the fetishistic/hallucinatory “return” of the penis onto a woman’s body goes beyond the “transferable or plastic property”³⁴ of the phallus to other body parts by depicting a phallus that has no reference to the “real” of the penis. The lesbian-dick is the phallus as floating signifier that has no ground on which to rest. It neither returns to the male body, originates from it, nor refers to it. Lesbian-dicks are the ultimate simulacra. They occupy the ontological status of the model, appropriate the privilege, and refuse to acknowledge an origin outside their own self-reflexivity. They make claims to the real without submitting to “truth.” If the phallus was banned from feminist orthodoxy because it was presumed to signify the persistence of a masculine or heterosexual identification, and butch lesbians or s/m tops who wore strap-ons were thus represented, as Butler points out, as “vain and/or pathetic effort[s] to mime the real thing,”³⁵ this “real thing” was at least two real things, which were only each other’s opposites. There was not much difference between the straight “real thing,” and the lesbian “real thing,” since the latter was only the absence of the former. Both these prohibitions converged on the assumption of an identity between the phallus and the penis. Without that identification, the top who wears the strap-on is not the one who “has” the phallus; rather it is always already the bottom who “has it” by giving up what no one can have. In the lesbian imaginary, the phallus is not where it appears. That’s why so many butches, as most lesbians know, are bottoms.

Notes

1. Maria Marcus, A Taste for Pain: on Masochism and Female Sexuality, trans. Joan Tate (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981), 181.

2. Leo Bersani, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 39.

3. Ibid, 45.

4. Leo Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” in AIDS: Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism, ed. Douglas Crimp (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 212.

5. Sigmund Freud, “The Economic Problem in Masochism,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1966) vol. 19, 162.

6. Kaja Silverman, “Masochism and Male Subjectivity” Camera Obscura, 17 (1988), 52.

7. Jan Brown, “Sex, lies, and penetration: A Butch finally ‘fesses up,” The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader, ed. Joan Nestle (Boston: Alyson Publications, 1992), 412.

8. Susan Farr, “The Art of Discipline: Creating Erotic Dramas of Play and Power,” Coming to Power: Writings and Graphics on Lesbian S/M (Boston: Alyson, 1981) 185.

9. Jacques Derrida, “The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation,” Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978), 234.

10. Bersani, “Rectum,” 208.

11. Quim, Issue 3 (Winter 1991), 10 and 13. Similar language can be found in almost any issue of On Our Backs or Bad Attitude. And, in fact, in periodicals such as the now defunct Outrageous Women (which was published during the 80’s) one also finds such references to “lesbian dicks,” sometimes without the qualifier. What is apparent is that s/m dykes have always considered their dildoes to be the “real thing.”

12. Anonymous, Quim Issue 3 (Winter 1991), 36.

13. Bersani, “Rectum,” 208.

14. Monique Wittig, “The Straight Mind,” The Straight Mind and Other Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992) 32.

15. Wittig, 27-28.

16. Ibid, 25.

17. Catherine A. MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 3 and 172.

18. Bersani, “Rectum,” 214.

19. Wittig, “The Straight Mind,” 28.

20. Jacques Lacan, “The Meaning of the Phallus,” Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the ecole freudienne, trans. Jacqueline Rose (New York: W.W. Norton, 1985), 74-85.

21. Judith Butler, “The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary,” differences, “The Phallus Issue,” 4, no.1 (Spring 1992), 156.

22. Ibid, 157.

23. Michel Foucault, This is Not a Pipe, trans. and ed. James Harkness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).

24. Butler, 157.

25. If the “realesbian” of lesbian-feminism was a socially impossible identity, so in the psychoanalytic symbolic are lesbians only possible in/as the “Real,” since they are foreclosed from the Symbolic order–they drop out of symbolization. If they can be signified at all it is only as an algebraic x. Given that the “Real” is, in part, the brute, inscrutable core of existence, the “Real” lesbian is in this sense coincident with the “realesbian.” Hence as both real/Real, these figures make her “identical with [her] existence–self-identical–raw, sudden, and unfettered,” but impossible to “see, speak or to hear, since in any case [she] is always already there.” See Catherine Clement’s illuminating discussion of the Lacanian “real-impossible” in The Lives and Legends of Jacques Lacan, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 168-169.

26. Wittig, “The Straight Mind,” 26.

27. Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York: Routledge, 1992), 381.

28. Ibid, p.387.

29. Ibid, p.383.

30. Bersani, “Rectum,” 217.

31. Tania Modleski, Feminism Without Women: Culture and Criticism in a ‘Postfeminist’ Age (New York: Routledge, 1991), 145-158. I agree with Modleski that Bersani loses the sympathy of a feminist reader when he “declines to factor in the ‘history of male power’” (148). However, though she acknowledges that lesbian sadomasochists’ arguments must be taken seriously and points to the unresolvable contradiction between the acting out of power and the presumption of consensuality, I take exception to her assertion that the “defining feature of s/m [is] the infliction of pain and humiliation by one individual on another” (154). As her own discussion indicates, the s/m relationship resists that definition. I have taken up these questions at length elsewhere. What is important to point out here is that Modleski subtly posits the same distinction between “the feminist” reader and the “lesbian” that Silverman holds. The former is a heterosexually-gendered subject, the latter is something like an “exception” to the feminist “rule.” Thus, once again, the “lesbian” becomes that (constitutive) “outside” that facilitates “the feminist” argument.

32. Bersani, “Rectum,” p. 216.

33. D.A. Miller, “Anal Rope,” Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), 135.

34. Butler, p. 138.

35. Ibid, p. 159.

September 25, 2013
“Another Autumn Refrain” and “Two Thirds of a Second at the Center of the Universe”

George Bradley

Another Autumn Refrain

He kept trying to get it right, trying to catch
That wisp of melody, that snatch of sound, listening
And trying, like a man playing music, practicing scales;

He kept trying to remember, though it would not come,
About the leaves and the ghosts hung in the trees,
Trying to recall the closing cadences of a song

That started in his head again, again, again,
About the light that came to him on autumn afternoons,
About the weak sun that peeked around the branches;

He kept trying to remember or trying to forget,
Though that insistent tune returned when he would
That it would not, revolved, rephrased, a sibilance

Like the heavy wash of seashores in the distance,
Like blood that rushes in the inner ear all night;
He kept trying to get it right, though there was no right,

About the wind that whistled through the dry dead grass,
The sap that sank below a brittle crust of frost,
About the earth that spun and came again undone.

Two Thirds of a Second at the Center of the Universe

Still waiting, with less than no time to decide,

You think almost nothing, you thought become a sense,

Become an activity, a woman dancing, a sun rising,

Become persistent voices washing over you once more

As sea air might and with it the sound of waves;

Still waiting, waiting, the tiny object unseen,

The elusive blur that covers your whole ambition,

As it has each day since you first conceived your task,

First elected this improbable pursuit, with its boredom,

Its mundane rehearsals and childish superstitions;

Still waiting, one man at the center of the universe,

Preparing a moment that can never be yours alone,

The issue shared instead with ones who gather watching,

Their faces drawn in distance to form a sort of landscape,

Flames, say, licking the ridgeline of encircling hills;

Still waiting, and they wait also, await the spectacle

Of your deepest satisfaction, your most intimate defeat,

Watching and waiting as you put them from your mind,

As you hold or try to only the image of your attempt,

Of what will be your substitute for every human act,

A motion tinged with memory and its fond mutation;

Waiting, and surely it will soon be taking place again,

The instant out of time which you feel most yourself,

In which hands clutch and hearts gorge with blood

And sweat bursts out like condensation on ripe fruit,

A fraction of a second happening once and forever,

A stream descending, a horse running, a man striding,

Now.

You imagined the triumphant cries far away in your head

Before you gasped, as in pain, betrayed, betrayed.

Strike three, the umpire said.

September 25, 2013
Mapplethorpe’s Art: Playing with the Byronic Postmodern
Elizabeth Fay

Department of English
University of Massachusetts at Boston
EFAY@UMBSKY.CC.UMB.EDU

The term “the Byronic postmodern” is coined here specifically for the purpose of uncovering and exploring a congruency in the works of those artists invested in some aspect of the Byronic hero. The Byronic, which was both encoded by Byron and beyond his control, exudes a transgressive, dark, and seductive appeal that speaks to any artist interested in crossing boundaries. The Byronic postmodern, then, implicates a romanticism within postmodernism and a postmodernism within romanticism that is at odds with more general assessments of the postmodern as a self-romanticizing and self-conflicted phase in the modern era (see Kaplan and Elam), or as a counter-enlightenment and irrationalist philosophical and aesthetic movement whose “post” positionality precludes or throws over prior systems of knowledge.¹

The Byronic postmodern as defined here is not the ironizing superficial and self-aware contemplation that is usually considered to be the link between romantic irony and the postmodern aesthetic; nor do I rest easy in a Lyotardian alternation of modernist and postmodernist impulses. Rather, the Byronic postmodern redefines the historical and social formations called romanticism and postmodernism, and offers them instead as aesthetic impulses that appeal congruously to those artists whose sexual aesthetics overwhelm their perception of the art form. That is, in seeing the world bisexually or homosexually, the Byronic artist understands the nature of mask and the exchangeable subjectivity more clearly than does the artist confirmed in his/her normative sexuality. The relation between Byron and Mapplethorpe as Byronic artists cannot be confined to them alone, but they provide powerful parameters for artists of similar amplitude such as Baudelaire, Emily Bronte, Oscar Wilde, Andy Warhol.

What Mapplethorpe’s photography has to do with Byron’s poetry, or Byron’s art with Mapplethorpe’s, is an argument these two artists initiate themselves: Byron through his postmodernist self-display and questioning of frames, and Mapplethorpe through his critical reassessment of romantic self-presentation. Mapplethorpe’s romantic rereading is most overt in pieces such as “James Ford, 1979,” where the subject is depicted lying in a deep, tiled bathtub in a pose that cannot but recall David’s “Death of Marat” (1793); less obvious are his photographs of classical marble statuary. The clearest example of his romantic revisionism, however, is Mapplethorpe’s “Manfred, 1974,” a four-frame sequence that comprehends Byron’s 1816 poem Manfred more succinctly than literary criticism has been able to do. The significance of Mapplethorpe’s title is pointed; of all the Faustian texts available, including the extreme romanticism offered by Goethe’s version, the twentieth-century photographer fixes on the Byronic Manfred. In the agency of his revisionism, Mapplethorpe has captured the postmodern impetus that drives Byron’s powerful drama, and at the same time reveals the deep romanticism of his own art.

The role of sexual repositioning in Byronic postmodernism is crucial to the Byronist’s ability to reduce experience to a “staged” effect. This sense of staging is the outcome of a knowing difference, and a self-presentation that is at once the aestheticized self and serious art. Mapplethorpe’s choice of artistic medium makes his awareness of staging an open acknowledgement, as does his frequent use of dramatically posed portraiture and tableaux. But Byron’s self-staging required a sequence of transgressive events before he knew himself to be onstage.

At age eight Byron became heir to his great uncle’s title, inheriting it at age ten. He is seduced by his nurse, Mary Gray, at age nine, and probably by Lord Grey de Ruthyn (who was renting the Byron home) during a holiday from Harrow at age fifteen. In between these two events he fell passionately in love with his cousin, Mary Chaworth, when he was fifteen, and Lord Delawarr at sixteen. However, the first to return his love and thus capture his imagination was the younger John Edlestone. The precocity of Byron’s peership coincides with the precocity of his sexual initiations, and his response to the demands of adult experience was accompanied by confusion and guilt. He characterizes this period of his life with the secrecy and ambivalence that becomes typical of his later responses to his double sexual identity. To his step-sister Augusta he writes of Grey, “My reasons for ceasing that Friendship are such as I cannot explain, not even to you my Dear Sister . . . but they will even remain hidden in my own breast” (March 26, 1804); the next year he hints at his affection for Edlestone by writing, “My melancholy proceeds from a very different cause to that which you assign,” one which “you could not alleviate, and might possibly be painful (January 7, 1805; both quoted in Crompton, pp. 100-101). Melancholy, the term literary reviewers associated both with Byron and his poetic heroes, becomes a code word much earlier in his own mind for his `dark’ passions. For Augusta, this melancholy so changed Byron from his boyish disposition that she thought him transformed, almost unrecognizable. His beloved, Edlestone, thought the same when Byron lost more than fifty pounds of bodyweight by vigorous dieting and exercise. Both transformations–from joy to melancholy, from chubby to sleek–are bodily changes that correspond with a new bodily awareness. And this new awareness signifies an understanding that the body now has two kinds of admirers that desire it, and two kinds of passions itself. Yet these must be secreted, coded, costumed, and playacted in order to be legitimated at all: the one must be made to signify the other, or to cover it up, or to displace it momentarily.

In comparison to Byron, the most Byronic of modern artists found an equally Grecian, equally bodily way to express the differences in his taste. Mapplethorpe’s sexual tastes may not have been bipolar, but his artistry was. His black gay friends and lovers are translated into hellenized athletes and gods, with a special emphasis on the textures made possible by photographing black skin in black and white, or countering it with white skin as a way to emphasize not sex but bipolarity as form and mode. Yet when he also photographed his women friends with exquisite sensitivity and sexual daring, his work resonates less to the bipolarized schemata of his male photographs than to Byron’s daring exploits with married and thus inaccessible women: safe and yet satisfyingly seductive adventures. Byron’s seduction of the strong-minded Lady Frances Webster, for instance, resonates to Mapplethorpe’s photography of Lisa Lyon, a woman bodybuilder whose very name suggests gender play.

Serious play becomes the byword for both Byron and Mapplethorpe as artists. The myth of the postmodern is that a series of tableaux produces a pastiche that is seamless truth. The tableaux by which Byron presents himself in his poetry and in society are also stitched together into a fated and apparently seamless narrative, marking him as postmodern and puzzling his romantic interpreters. Mappelthorpe’s work makes the tableau a dramatically postmodern image, imposing on the setpiece a dark, fated quality that signals his transgressive play in much the same way that Byron’s narrative poems do. Like Byron, Mapplethorpe’s apparent seeming comes from a literal seaming, a putting together to produce a new costume and new self. Dancing across the stage or camera’s eye focuses attention on the costume and bodily surface as a semiotic display of sign systems at war. Byron puts on Albanian dress, Mapplethorpe dons that of the Nazi secret police; both bespeak a sign system associated with homosocial fantasy life and self. The Byronic hero of either historical period is concerned in particular with harnessing sexuality, the display of identity, and the sheer play of a textual erotics. For textual erotics must be seen as sheer play, or it loses all signification; however, this is a specifically Byronic gesture which cannot be read into all postmodern texts. Within Byronic aesthetics, play is both a dance on the edge of the allowable/foreseeable/conditional, and a violence done to the sutures that hold–however tenuously–meaning, syntax, consent together.

Certainly desire is part of this behavior, but it is not the only mechanism at work. Dalliance with comprehension and violation are both attributes of depressive melancholy. The bi-polarity of manic depression becomes in the postmodern period hyperactivity, mania as frenzy. Romantic mania, however, is a slow, deliberately tasted dying into, a depressive move into a psychology without faith. Byron laughs at this debilitating gesture even as he exploits its charm. And the charm itself is seductively duplicitous, doubling back with an ironic laugh: “Postmodernism’s distinctive character lies in [a] kind of wholesale `nudging’ commitment to doubleness, or duplicity,” Linda Hutcheon notes (1). The duplicity amounts not to a loss of faith, but to a cynicism thrust at the very heart of belief: both Byron and Mapplethorpe exhibit this awareness of disrupted yet retained foundations via seductive posturing.

The allure that draws in the viewer is born of the wholesale nudge that allots both the one and the other a place onstage. The spectator who feels the safety of familiar principles is seduced and caught before feeling the shifting ground. The seduction for both Byron and Mapplethorpe begins by viewing the viewer as an initially antagonistic eye which must be converted, or mocked, or both. Two of Mapplethorpe’s works especially distill this gendered antagonism and recall earlier heroes of melancholy, metaphor, and misogyny.

“Manfred” (1974) provocatively speaks to Byron’s closet drama, as well as his closeted drama of self, presenting the Faustian man as a multiply-framed modernist who assumes his capacity to redesign the architecture that contains him. The first of the sequenced four frames in “Manfred” is stark white, its blankness signifying not only original purity but also the absence of myth, and therefore of identity. In the second frame, the youth’s pose allows him to fill the arch which is the central of three framings or sculptings of the space around him. He is classically nude and relaxed, a lover not an athlete, yet his frontal revelation mocks classical aesthetics, the contrapposto which makes the figure “a true acting unit,” according to Gardner (132).

In the third frame, the youth has assumed clothing, jewelry, and thus identity; he is poised to step out of the arch or closet, at the same time putting on a dark and melancholic expression that reestablishes the closet as protective and chosen, the space from which he will emerge. He is the `angry young man,’ the rebel and dreamer: Manfred himself. The final frame again finds the youth nude, but this time in full erection yet equal relaxation. He asserts his self upon the frame by placing his arms on its edge, again stepping precisely on its boundary, half-in, half-out.

Outage, whether accomplished in emotional projection or physical projection, places dangerous demands on the dancer, as Byron’s Faustian hero discovered. The power of abstraction, of multiple identities beyond the socially condoned, leads both to love and to the leap of death, two modes of action that Bataille contends are reflexively identificatory. Mapplethorpe’s Manfred declines to indicate who has conjured whom, but the urge to death remains.

In his Hamlet-like “Self-Portrait, 1988,” Mapplethorpe examines himself in light of death, as a death mask, and as a dying Hamlet. In his journal for Feb. 19, 1814 Byron notes that “Kemble’s Hamlet is perfect; but Hamlet is not Nature. Richard is a man; and Kean is Richard.” Mapplethorpe also understands Hamlet as more than nature, more than man. The photograph’s subject transmits his pain and mortal angst as he stares directly at the viewer; his stare is all the eerier for being disembodied and slightly out of focus, as if already fading from this particular world. At the same time, his severed hand floats clearly in the foreground, grasping a death-head cane with intense strength. Hamlet’s existential worry over whether to be, as well as his graveside meditation, is troped here both melancholically and whimsically. And it is but intertextual play that the epigram Byron chooses for his “Manfred” is from Hamlet I.v: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,/ Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Mapplethorpe’s Hamlet intimates this about death too.

Hamlet knew that death defined love, and that the love of a woman is defiling if it is unaccompanied by the proper view and frame. Improper women for Byron are “strumpets,” of whom he requests one friend to “never . . . even allude to the existence of the sex.” Unlike Greek verbs of amorous frenzy, Byron announces “I won’t even read a word of the feminine gender” (16 Feb, 1812). Mapplethorpe would read such words, but would code and frame them to redefine gender itself into the fascination created by the tease of the camera’s eye. This is the posture of Byron’s romanticism and of Mapplethorpe’s postmodernism, and of the improper artist who is poised to leap both because he is willing and because the leap defines and sexes him.

The Byronist’s internalizing of the specular takes place both between men, as well as within the dresser who must then seek other ways to display it. As such, it is an aspect of modernism Mapplethorpe will more fully exploit through the closely controlled space of photographic interiors, and through a cross-dressing which requires no clothes because it is written on the body. This is best incurred through a gender play that is both a natural outcome of specularization and an unnatural doubleness that is doubly enticing. Byron’s self-representations as the Byronic hero and Mapplethorpe’s self-portraits show the face as effeminate because it is seductive, the costuming as gender-play because it is teasing, and both offering relations between men. However, one important qualification must be made here: male costuming is not fashion in the sense of fashion photography because it does not pretend to be for a specifically women’s venue; its focus is the overt disruption of gender binaries rather than the covert exploitation of them. Thus, if women are seduced into buying Byron’s poems or making love to him, he can claim to have no agency in their desire since his overt offer seeks another comer: Women “ought to mind home . . . [and] to read neither poetry nor politics–nothing but books of piety and cookery. Music–drawing–dancing–also a little gardening and ploughing now and then” (Jan. 6, 1821, 1821 Journal). This difference in the visual contract specific to the Byronic postmodern allows for the incorporation of women’s bodies into men’s, and even women’s into men’s, as a statement of excess. Put another way: fashion photography, which can be seen as the extreme version of visual art, implies an absence (of the artist) predicated on the metaphorical use of the model’s body, as well as a covert expenditure of sexual energy between men. Male costuming in the Byronic postmodern posits presence rather than absence because the clothing literally (rather than metaphorically) implicates the artist, and it does so overtly. The clothing is so explicit in its homosexual seduction that it spells out what the fashion model suggestively hides: the clothes become the man. The model’s wardrobe fabricates sexuality, makes it up, while the transvestite poseur or dandy wears seduction as one aspect of his sexual identity.

Thus the artistry that finds itself to be Byronic marginalizes itself from normative aesthetic practices or exaggerates them. It expresses its uncentered status by seeking revenge on its audience through expressive violence contained within a visual stillness. The artist uses this containment beyond the cultural center to artifice alternative worlds of seductive exile; but because the staging is transient rather than verifiable, it threatens the viewer with the possibility of transgressed boundaries and frames. And because the revenge is as much self-annihilating as it is viewer-threatening in its excess, its seductive posture invokes a pathos and an invitation difficult to ignore.

The invitation is necessarily sexual, devastating in its promise to break through the frames of its staging; the Byronic postmodern is always a sexual or sexed violence, an exile caused by sexual transgression, a transvestism. Through this disruptive sexuality, the Byronic artist redistributes the contractual code between producer and consumer, forcing the viewer to make love to him by initiating and teasing out an active reciprocity and transgression.² This contractual aberration is not present in all postmodernisms; nor is it a generally accepted view of the most Byronic of artists, Byron himself. If we accept this precept, however, we accept that postmodernism is not a single current of artistic and intellectual conflux. We also accept that the Byronic artist is not a single manifestation of a single current, but a self-creator who is most himself when playing out the flux and its staging possibilities.

Closet drama may dispense with the need for visible costuming, but the multiple masks it allows the authorizing persona provide an arena for symbolic codes that costume disparate versions of the poetical self. The sexualities, genders, and temperaments that clothe closet characters virtually play out the alternative identities that transvestism frees up to the experiencing subject: closet dramas, at least for Byron, are in drag. Critics interested in Byron’s self-romanticism usually cite this aspect of Byron’s selfhood, finding the poet speaking not only as Sardanapalus but as each of the other main characters, not only as Don Juan but also as the poem’s narrator.³ They do so, however, to prove the biographical nature of Byron’s dramas, locating multiple Byrons (rather than multiple distributions of self) in order to sort out the more important family relations portrayed in the other characters; they do so most often in order to prove the Freudian nature of Byron’s self-obsessive narratives (see also Wolfson). But some critics go further; for instance, Jerome J. McGann argues that Byron exploited the self-identificatory possibilities of costuming from the very first. “Byron was operating en masque from his first appearances in print . . . Childe Harold, evolving from [his] earlier fictional selves, mutates quickly and repeatedly: the Giaour, the Corsair, Lara, Manfred, are all masks of Byron.” Similarly, Sardanapalus is “an autobiographical work . . . carried out in masquerade” (295-96). McGann reads Byron’s texts/masks as double-directed, but not in the contractual sense of artist-viewer; rather, McGann finds a doubled seeing which is, on the one hand, directed “`referentially’ toward certain socio-historical frameworks, and `reflexively’ toward the poetical environments within which they are aesthetically active” (296-97). In other words, the masks provide a way to deliteralize transvestite seeing without seeming to do so through a reflexive vision; at the same time, they reinstitute the metaphorical or referential nature of the homosocial visual contract. Doing so, McGann argues, allows the movement from theatrical to closet drama and thus into temptation: “Byron’s masquerades are requests (or perhaps temptations) for someone to play a correspondent part in the imagined scene,” but they are also “wicked and seductive invitations” (302). These invitations in the end “become the principal subject of his own fictions” because the move into private space allows the mask a literalizing power as well as a metaphorizing one, and thus a wicked dalliance with sincerity.

The wickedness, the temptation, is that of the homosexual openly beckoning within the privacy of the closet: this referential, and paradoxically socio-historical move (Childe Harold amid the battlegrounds of Europe) authorizes that wicked privacy toward the open and public market of the visual contract. The double-edge term which allows this conflation of the opposed ways of seeing (homosexual and homosocial) is “mask.” Mask is not the trickier “masquerade,” in which costumes allow one to put one’s face, person, and morals aside in order to allow the libido and the uncanny full rein; instead, masks are veritable faces, costumes that cannot so readily be put aside. The mask effectively makes the other a self–without making it the self, thus reserving the possibility of a `true’ or recuperable self. The mask also allows for a certain amount of controlled outage within the purview of the closet(ed) drama.

Masking locates this other-self in the face, the doubled site of vision and visage. But the face is itself the site of cupola and thus of excess; the multiplicitous connections it makes possible are different for each viewer, and not precisely controllable by the performer himself. The imprecise nature of the mask/face makes the performer a discourse facilitator through the visage/vision cupola by which he is seen by seeing. When the face is mask, as it forcefully is in the literal faces Mapplethorpe puts forth in his self-portraits, and as it figuratively is in Byron’s narrative voices, it acts as the focal point of the costume, of the other self, and thereby of sexualized difference. As the site of excessive sex, of the doubly male, it thus alters the visual contract in order to force the diffident artist on the viewer: he confronts us face-to-face.

One of the best texts in which to explore Byron’s use of masks, according to McGann, is Manfred:

Byron, like Manfred, ceases to justify himself or his romantic imaginations only when he makes those imaginations the self-conscious subject of his work. There is a power working upon Byron forcing him to display those aspects of the imagination that are seldom exposed to view.(303)

The power working on Byron or his mask, Manfred, is the power of the mask-face in a place of contained excess, the closet. Closet space internalizes the play, making the literal quality of dress, like Mapplethorpe’s Bondage and Discipline leather, unnecessary. Costume refutes metaphor and the need for a covert visual contract and installs a literalized invitation on the body surface; mask reinstates metaphor without refuting costume, and the conflation of the two at once–like the conflation of transvestism with homosexuality–provides a double being, a reference and a reflex, a writing on the body.

That is to say, Byron’s textual masks mark out the space of the Byronic postmodern as a closet space in which the relation between artist and viewer is specifically contracted through bodily inscription. The Byronic hero’s scowl and the feminine makeup and pseudo-Hamlet of Mapplethorpe’s self-portraits all point to the same conceit: that once the wicked invitation is inscribed on the body of the artist, he must then step in front of the artistic/photographic eye to become the feminized body over which contracts get made and invitations exchanged. For this reason Mapplethorpe’s subject-selves stare straight into the camera’s eye: they do not need the fashion model’s flirtatious glance because they know their eye (as artist and poseur) reciprocates the viewer’s gaze–they know because it is written on their face.

Byron’s eye, if not in his portraits then certainly in his poetry, also stares straight into the viewer’s eye, looking for internalized relations and closeted desires. Contemporaneous reviewers were made uncomfortable by the game Byron played, that was playing on himself, and their discomfort may have come in part from the Byronic artist’s self-conscious play with identity and agency. The reviewers as a body, in fact, see Byron as performing the opposite operation from an exchange of masks and identity switches; they read him as inhabiting each Byronic character as himself, without permutation. How the reader is led to see in a particular way becomes a critical question: How has Byron seduced us into this understanding of his person? And the danger of this wicked invitation is that both the viewer and the artist himself are seduced: “the text becomes a kind of precipice that draws one in–like Manfred, like Byron–either to the self or to the destruction of the self” (McGann, 311). Yet the precipice is not as sincere as the critics believe nor as sensual as Byron would have it: within the erotics of a self-constituting dance there is also the artist’s awareness of how that self is not making, is merely a dressing without the deep center so alluringly promised. As David Joselit writes of Mapplethorpe, his popularity “is often explained (or explained away) as a form of sophisticated naughtiness. . . . It is Mapplethorpe’s broader relevance that is typically denied to him–typically obscured by labeling him a subcultural fetishist–by ignoring the hauntingly unstable vision of masculinity and femininity his art proposes” (19).

What Byron and Mapplethorpe share is not merely in their transgressive sexual curiosity; it is also in their transgression into the exotic. Both artists construct travelogues into a fantasy land where costumes signify otherly selves against which the self must struggle or be seduced. And if Byron stepped further out, acting out the travelogue as well as imagining its space in fantastic verses, Mapplethorpe maintained an interior space that contained and transmuted his experience to an equally devastating and self-seducing degree.

Don Juan’s travels necessarily lead eastward, for the Spain of his birth is a Moorish land, and the Moors’ power originates in their hoarding of classical knowledge.⁴ Thus, underneath the oriental tales of Romantic imagination is a love of the Grecian. It was widely known that Araby had absorbed Hellenic culture and preserved it through the middle ages. But what Byron understands, perhaps most from donning his Albanian dress and Turkish masks, is how much this is like boys looking like girls. Pederasty, or Greek love, is the love of nubile boys who looked like girls, boys who are girls underneath just as Arabs are Grecian underneath. When Byron was seen leading young women in his madly promiscuous London period, he was assumed to have been closeted with young women dressed as boys. Don Juan reverses and replays this moment several times as Juan himself dresses in female costume, replaying the London escapades in which Byron was simply closeted with nubile boys who could seem either gender or both.⁵

The fascination Byron exhibits, no less than Mapplethorpe, is with that play between polarized positions, a play Araby exhibits even more than does Greece. Thus in his eastern tales Byron professes his desire for the Grecian costumed as its polarized contrary, the Turkish-Moorish-Arabian, and in doing so recasts his desire for cross-dressed or interstitial gendering. It cannot be surprising, then, to read art critic David Joselit assessing Mapplethorpe’s photographs as producing a “hauntingly unstable vision of masculinity and femininity . . . Mapplethorpe’s sexual aggression and submission–in men and women, heterosexual and homosexual–is clearly evident in the relationship he establishes between his own self-portraits and the photographs of his models.” Indeed, he “has envisioned a world in which masculinity is not stable but a constantly shifting terrain between hyperaggressiveness and submission” (Kardon, 19). Another way of saying this is that the Byronist understands sexuality as an unstable producer of identity. When Byron moves from self to self, and reproduces those shifts in variable dramatic masks, he understands sexuality as self in the moment of sex–not in the moment of self. And these shifts are always restricted by the calculable and incalculable audience response which is itself a thing of contingency and flux. If Mapplethorpe conceives the stillpoint of an erratic world through the classical moment of fixity–fixing the subject with a single frame of its dance across the stage, Byron embraces the fluidity of the shifting self as well as the return upon itself of each mask–and yet in doing so, he fixes his poetical character even more surely than does Mapplethorpe. The fix–the addiction to a dramatic moment of selfhood that one puts on in order to put over–is a mechanism of absolute charisma. And charisma, both in verse and on paper, demands a specular fixation.

Walter Benjamin (in many ways a postmodern romantic himself⁶) reconstructs the nature of that which is “hauntingly unstable” that we locate in both Mapplethorpe’s and Byron’s postmodern romanticism, as a problem of two other Byronists: Baudelaire and Proust. In his essay, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” Benjamin recasts Proust–a spiritual Orientalist–by saying that, “[t]o perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return” (188). This point is specific to photography: whereas painting feeds imaginative appetites (“that of which our eyes will never have their fill”), photography operates within a different paradigm of perception (the mechanical reproduction of images). Painting portrays the living quality of being; photography records it but cannot imbue its images with life, or what Benjamin calls “aura.” Susan Sontag confirms this perception when she writes of Mapplethorpe that his works do not reveal truth, but rather “the strongest version of it”; this is a claim about the mystical ability of art to reveal truth, but it is a postmodern version in that it ironizes art’s attempt to provide a truth where there can be none.

What Sontag knows is that Mapplethorpe’s art gives life back to the viewer through the imbued object–through its aura. This gift, this truth, crosses transcendent boundaries so that the viewer is pulled into, or contracted into, the experience. In contrast, the romantic poet experiences and expresses epiphany while the reader vicariously witnesses its effect but does not participate. The Byronist achieves what we might describe as a sideways transcendence, a boundary crossing of epic proportions which nevertheless laughs at its own indecency.⁷ Benjamin’s “aura,” on the other hand, is meant to refer to a romanticized notion of the visionary’s artistry, the poet’s ability to capture `beauty in truth and truth in beauty,’ to paraphrase Keats. Yet that he comes to the notion of aura through Baudelaire with overtones of Proust means that the vision is available from both the sincere and the sardonic poet, that both assist the provision of what Kardon, after Sontag, calls the “aura of veracity” (12).

It is this aura, according to Benjamin, in which objects hoard the life we lend them through our active looking, and by it they mystically return our gaze from a distance determined by their inscrutability that is somehow yet recognizable. The subject who looks in the camera eye sees nothing, and thus loses his own gaze; at the same time, when he looks at the photograph of himself the lost gaze cannot be met or recaptured because there is no room for aura. The photographer, on the other hand, sees a different picture, or to put it another way, becomes the camera eye and–to rephrase–exchanges glances with the subject, which he can then recall and cast into his own aural perception of each photograph as the authentic aspect of the subject no longer present. These arguments permit us to reconstruct the magnetism of Mapplethorpe’s photographs as visual renditions of that intensely magnetic glance Byron had mastered both in his life and his art–a glance that so captured the passions of both women and men. When Joselit explains that “Mapplethorpe’s presence, in front of the camera as well as behind it, brackets every representation” (19), he is attributing to the photographer’s doubled glance a doubled presence and a double aura. Like the doubled sex of the girlish boy dressed as a boy and so taken for a girl in boy’s costume, as in Byron’s premarital flings, or like the doubly enticing bisexual Byron himself, the double aura works like a double penis, a twice present and twice authenticated contractual power. Bracketing a representation does not fix it within a historical moment, but releases it into the flux of the auteur’s own cross-historical and defiantly untranscendent staging.

Mapplethorpe has been called a classicist because of his painterly approach to photography, but he also deserves the term for his deliberate fostering of aura in both his human and inanimate subjects. It is this relation to the living that both Mapplethorpe and Byron share, for where Mapplethorpe produces works that return one’s gaze, Byron’s works are so aurally replete with his own identifiable persona that they vibrate with his seductive or scorning glance. Annabella Milbanke recalls Byron’s haughty, disdainful posturing at salons she attended before his first marriage proposal; his careful poses and distancing survey of the room both converted his shyness into a powerful tool, and increased his charismatic appeal.

Mapplethorpe’s calm yet distancing stare into the camera in his self-portraits exude a similar aural fascination; significantly, the portraits that convey the same defiance and yet appealing plasticity are those of the two women friends he photographed numerous times: Patti Smith and Lisa Lyon. In two years Mapplethorpe produced more than a hundred photographs of Lyon, works which Kardon notes, reveal “his talents as an impresario, his ability to create images . . . . He discovered some of her latent personas and probably invented others” (11). The “probably” that qualifies Kardon’s insight is also the cupola on which Mapplethorpe provokes Lyon and Smith to become alternative masks for his own continual self-exploration.⁸ For it is through photography that Mapplethorpe “could touch `forbidden’ acts and states of consciousness, using the camera as an instrument of provocation,” according to Kay Larson. Using sexual positioning instead of mystical auras, Larson identifies the Byronic attitude as postmodern: “There is a kind of sexuality–the kind we think of as modern–that pursues self-interest to its limits, and sublimation be damned” (15). The transgression Mapplethorpe pursues in his art–across the bounds between classicism and eroticism, homo and hetero, male and female, pleasure and pain–are precisely the terms of Byron’s journey east, across the transcendental alps to the transnationalism of the Byronically Grecian aesthetic.

In his last years Mapplethorpe begins to photograph Greek statuary, but by evading the cracks and missing limbs in order to imply a perfect whole, he nonetheless conveys the fragmentary nature of existence. The statement produced is that of death in life and life in death, a doubled concept that recalls the Grecian underdressing of Araby, the girl under the boy and boy under the girl, the transvestism of erotic spectacle. For both Byron and Mapplethorpe, classical culture provides a Rosetta Stone for a homoerotic aesthetic. “The Greeks, of course, were the first in Western civilization to erect a culture–a literature, an art, a philosophy–around the homoerotic . . . . Homoeroticism, Mapplethorpe suggests, has been around since the beginning of the world” (Larson, 17). And if Byron learned to write of his wrong-sexed, illicit adventures in the code of Greek phrases and oblique references to fellow sodomists, Mapplethorpe also learned the lexical value of classicism. The Byronist both voices and obscures the homoerotic aesthetic when he turns the classicism of a marble statue or a perfect flower inside out to produce the eroticism already inherent in it. The societies that contextualize both artists also knew and did not know this: Byron’s publisher and closest friends burned his memoirs and altered his letters to hide the first term of the Byronic aesthetic, while the intent of the prosecution of Dennis Barrie, the Cincinnati museum director who exhibited Mapplethorpe’s photographs, was to figuratively burn those photographs that leave no room for sentimental misreadings. Charged with pandering and obscenity charges, Barrie had to defend his “exhibition” of the very sexuality Mapplethorpe intentionally provokes us by: Barrie is indeed a panderer, but of the spirit and not the flesh, for it is the aura Mapplethorpe imparts to his work that so threatens and unsexes us.

Certainly it is part of any Byronist’s threat to the viewer that the artist’s own aura is retained in his endless self-portraiture through sequences of masks and counter-masks. Photography “is a process of two-way looking: looking at, and being looked at,” as Larson notes. Each artist continues to entice the viewer into a witting and unwitting appreciation for a titillating aesthetics. Mapplethorpe is both a “voyeur” and a “provocateur,” writes Larson, and as such “he is not averse to running guns into forbidden territory” (16). The reference is to Mapplethorpe’s excursions into the nightworld of Bondage and Discipline, but it is a wonderful comment on Byron’s own particular form of gun running. He is still remembered in Greece today for his liberatory endeavors there before dying of disease. Like Byron, Mapplethorpe also died young by disease, and his Hamlet-like self-portrait of full-blown AIDS concurs that both artists associate themselves with self-annihilating heroes. As such, both might say with Manfred when the summoning Spirit pronounces, “But thy crimes/ Have made thee–“: “I have not been thy dupe, nor am thy prey–/ But was my own destroyer.” There is a sanctity in this statement that is leveled in the aura, the gaze returned–precisely the seductive threat of both Byronists’ postmodern works.

Notes

1. Christopher Norris takes to task those critics who essentialize postmodern thought in this manner, including Habermas, Rorty and Gasche. Although Norris supports Habermas’ critique in such works as The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1987), he asserts that Habermas misunderstands Derrida’s self-positioning within philosophical traditions as “a species of latter-day Nietzschean irrationalism . . . that rejects the whole legacy of post-Kantian enlightened thought.” See Norris, What’s Wrong with Postmodernism: Critical Theory and the Ends of Philosophy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1990), esp. pp. 49-76.

2. The contract itself has recently been revitalized as a romantic term, however with tonalities other than the visual, by scholars such as Jerome Christensen and Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi influenced by Carole Pateman’s The Problem of Political Obligation (1979; Berkeley, 1985) and The Sexual Contract (Stanford, 1988). The conceptual contract as I understand it here, however, is itself artwork, and as such is specifically set in visual terms. I borrow these terms from de Lauretis, esp. p. 105, and Fuss.

3. Byron’s journals, written with at least an intimate audience in mind, if not simply to the audience of himself, exemplifies the rapidity of his mood and voice shifts. Commenting on a journal passage regarding Napoleon’s abdication, Peter Manning writes: “Byron confessed that he was `utterly bewildered and confounded,’ and the threat to his own identity produced a dispersal of voices notable even in his habitually echoing prose” Reading Romantics, 146).

4. Dorothee Metlitzki provides an important overview of the relation between Orientalism and romanticism in The Matter of Araby in Medieval England (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1977); the final chapter, “The Matter of Araby and the Making of Romance,” is especially helpful (pp. 240-250).

5. Louis Crompton notes that “[t]hough his involvements were overwhelmingly heterosexual, various stories circulated, all at second hand, about how he disguised his inamoratas as boys to deceive his mother or others . . . Since Byron was often attracted by boys with girlish looks, Marchand suggests that some of the boys in his company were in fact mistaken for girls in disguise” (110).

6. Benjamin’s elusive prose, and the `open-sided’ character of his individual phrases, evinces his particular kind of Byronic dancing. That he partakes of the romantic is evident in his mystical claims about art as being behind history; that he is romantically postmodern is productive of his interest in fragmentation and the occasional essay form.

7. When Karl Kroeber describes the improvisational methodology of Don Juan as “open-sided,” he provides an apt term for the whole of Byronic aesthetics, an idea which Peter Manning underscores in introducing his Reading Romantics (4).

8. Bataille states in “The Solar Anus” that, “It is clear that the world is purely parodic, in other words, that each thing seen is the parody of another, or is the same thing in a deceptive form . . . because with the aid of a copula each sentence ties one thing to another . . . . But the copula of terms is no less irritating than the copulation of bodies” Visions, 5).

Works Cited
- Bataille, G. “The Solar Anus.” In Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939. Ed. and trans. Allan Stoekl. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1985.
- Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. New York: Schocken, 1969.
- Christensen, J. “Setting Byron Straight: Class, Sexuality, and the Poet,” in Literature and the Body: Essays on Populations and Persons. Ed. Elaine Scarry. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1988.
- de Lauretis, Theresa. Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction . Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987.
- Elam, D. Romancing the Postmodern. London and New York: Routledge, 1992.
- Fuss, Diana. “Fashion and the Homospectatorial Look.” Critical Inquiry 18 (Summer 1992): 713-37.
- Gardner, Helen. Art Through the Ages. Sixth Ed. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975.
- Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism. London and New York: Routledge, 1989.
- Joselit, D. “Robert Mapplethorpe’s Poses.” In Janet Kardon, 19-21.
- Kardon, J. Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment. Ed. Janet Kardon. Philladelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art/ Univ. of Pennsylvania, 1988.
- Kaplan, E.A. “Introduction.” Postmodernism and its Discontents: Theories, Practices. Ed. E. Ann Kaplan. London and New York: Verso, 1988.
- McGann, J. “Hero with a Thousand Faces: The Rhetoric of Byronism.” SiR 31 (Fall 1992): 295-313.
- Manning, P. Byron and His Fictions. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1978.
- Marchand, L., ed. Byron’s Letters and Journals, 6 vols. London: John Murray, 1973.
- Sontag, Susan. Preface to Robert Mapplethorpe’s Certain People: A Book of Portraits. Pasadena, CA: Twelvetrees Press, 1985.
- Thorslev, Jr., P. The Byronic Hero: Types and Prototypes. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1962.
- Wolfson, S. “`A Problem Few Dare Imitate’: Sardanapalus and `Effeminate Character.’” ELH 58 (1991): 867-902.
September 25, 2013
A Schizoanalytic Reading of Baudelaire: The Modernist as Postmodernist

Eugene W. Holland

Department of French Language and Literature
The Ohio State University
eugeneh@humanities1.cohums.ohio-state.edu

Whether Deleuze and Guattari were actually “doing philosophy” in the Anti-Oedipus or not, their last collaborative work Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?) may shed some light on the status of the concepts operating in that early work.¹ Unlike scientific concepts, which aim to stabilize and identify specific domains within the real, philosophical concepts operate according to Deleuze and Guattari as what we might call “transformers”: they intervene in established philosophical problematics in order to de-stabilize them, reworking old concepts and forging new connections among the distinctive features composing them.² What is distinctive about the Anti-Oedipus, in this light (and perhaps this is what makes its mode of intervention seem more than just philosophical), is that its de-stabilization of established problematics involves making new connections with historical context, as well as re- aligning concepts into new constellations.³ A term such as “de-coding,” then, will best be understood not in terms of any content of its own, but in relation to the concepts it transforms in the course of producing schizoanalysis out of the problematics of historical materialism and psychoanalysis in the wake of the events of 1968 in France, and–for the purposes of this essay–how it illuminates the transformative force of the works of that great 19th- century figure of transition, Charles Baudelaire.⁴ My aim here will thus be not so much to explain what de-coding means as to show how it works and what it can do in the way of textual and socio-historical analysis of Baudelaire.

Since concepts as transformers intervene in other contexts instead of governing domains of their own, they have no independent, autonomous content, and depend instead on their use for whatever content we can ascribe to them. In other words, what makes philosophical concepts “user- friendly” for Deleuze and Guattari is also what makes them so challenging: they are strategically underdetermined, and thus only take shape–to borrow one of Deleuze’s favorite polyvocal expressions–“au milieu”: in context and in between their point of departure and a point of arrival or connection with some other phenomenon or event.⁵ Connecting schizoanalysis with Baudelaire for one thing endows the notion of de-coding with features– notably the linguistic or rhetorical tools of metaphor and metonymy for close analysis of poetic texts–it does not obviously possess in the Anti-Oedipus itself; and at the same time it in turn situates the evolution of Baudelairean poetics in the broader cultural and historical context of the emergence of market society, which is ultimately responsible for de-coding in the first place. The de-coding of modernism in Baudelaire will, in this context, turn out to be not only what happens to an earlier romanticism he puts behind him with the invention of modernism, but also what happens to that modernism itself, especially in the late prose poems. By repositioning Baudelaire in relation to and somehow already beyond the very modernism he contributed so much to inventing, a schizoanalytic reading can help situate Baudelaire in postmodern context. But first, a few words about de-coding.

De-coding is, in the first place, Deleuze and Guattari’s translation into semiotic terms of the concepts of rationalization and reification, by which Weber and Lukacs designated the historical replacement of meaning by abstract calculation as the basis of social order. More in agreement with Lukacs than with Weber, they explain this process as a function of the capitalist market and the predominance of exchange-value. To be more specific, de-coding is linked to axiomatization, the process central to capitalism whereby streams of quantified factors of production (such as raw materials, skills, and knowledges) are conjoined in order to extract a differential surplus; de-coding both supports and results from axiomatization, transforming meaningful qualities into calculable quantities. Deleuze and Guattari disagree radically with both Weber and Lukacs, however, in considering de-coding not as sterile disenchantment or hopeless fragmentation, but as the positive moment in the dialectic of capitalist development: as the potential for freedom and permanent revolution, opposed by the forces of re-coding and capitalist authoritarianism.

At the same time, however, that de-coding transforms rationalization and reification into semiotic terms, it translates the semiotics of Lacanian psychoanalysis into historical terms. Of central importance here is the pair of concepts that parallel de-coding and re-coding in the Anti- Oedipus: de-territorialization and re-territorialization. Derived from Lacanian usage–where “territorialization” designates the mapping of the infant’s polymorphous erogenous zones by parental care-giving–these terms come to designate a crucial dynamic of the capitalist market: the disconnection and reconnection of bodies and environments (e.g. the disconnection of peasants from common land by the Enclosure Acts in England, and their re-territorialization as wage-labor onto textile looms in the nascent garment industry). The primary difference between these parallel conceptual pairs is that de-territorialization and re- territorialization operate on physical bodies and involve material investments of energy (as in production and consumption), while de-coding and re-coding operate on symbolic representations and involve investments of mental energy (as in cognition and fantasy). This dual transformation of concepts serves to hinge together labor- power and libido (called social and desiring production in the Anti-Oedipus), and produces a revolutionary historical-materialist-semiotic psychiatry: schizoanalysis. I should note that the distinction between material and symbolic investments virtually disappears in Deleuze and Guattari’s later works. But the benefits of retaining the term “de-coding”–for cultural and literary studies at least–are threefold: it designates semiotic processes that are legible as such in texts and cultural artifacts; it construes those semiotic processes in psychoanalytic or psychodynamic terms (following Lacan); and it at the same time connects both texts and psychodynamics with history and political economy–attributing them ultimately to the spread of the market and the rhythms of capitalist development.

The translation of Lacanian psychoanalysis into historical materialist terms depends on an ambiguity inherited from Levi-Strauss as to the status of the Symbolic Order–an ambiguity crucial to Lacanian therapy: is the “Symbolic Order” a purely abstract, logical structure, or is it historical and concrete? For Deleuze and Guattari, the answer is clear: the Symbolic Order is historical; it is the actual ensemble of codes governing meaning and action in a given social formation. But for Lacanian therapy, the Symbolic Order entails the following paradox: On one hand, the Symbolic Order is the basis of human identity-formation: in saying “I” and accepting a proper name derived from the Name-of-the-Father, the organism becomes a human subject spoken by the language-system, forever alienated from his or her “true” pre-linguistic being and dependent for any sense of self on the Symbolic Other. On the other hand, the Symbolic Order is an illusion, and the Symbolic Other is not a person but a place: the place occupied by the “sujet- suppose-savoir” (the subject who is presumed to know, to possess authoritative knowledge)–and this is an empty place, occupied by the Lacanian therapist only in order to refuse the imputation and indeed deny the very possibility of such knowledge and authority. To put this paradox in other terms, the Symbolic Order is lived in two different registers: from the perspective of the Imaginary register, the Symbolic Order is centered on and governed by a Symbolic Other who possesses the phallus as sign of authority and from whom the individual derives his or her sense of fixed identity and meaning; from the perspective of the Symbolic register, the Symbolic Order is a realm of fluid rather than fixed identities, the phallus is a sign of infinite semiosis rather than of stable meaning, and the Other is a fictional persona in an empty place. Following Lacan, Deleuze and Guattari designate the Symbolic register’s radically fluid form of semiosis free from identity-fixations as “schizophrenia”–but they will ultimately locate and define it historically rather than clinically.

For although they acknowledge the radical implications this paradox of the Symbolic perspective on the Symbolic Order entails for therapy, Deleuze and Guattari nonetheless insist that it has specific historical conditions of possibility. And insisting that the Symbolic Order is historical means exposing it irrevocably to difference, contingency, and change: by examining different social formations (in Part III of the Anti-Oedipus), they are able to show that the fiction of a centered Symbolic Order belongs to another, older social formation based on stable codes, and that capitalism by contrast thrives on and indeed fosters through de-coding the meaningless and identity-free “schizophrenic” semiosis characteristic of the Symbolic register; hence the subtitle of the Anti- Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. The intervention of de-coding in Lacanian psychoanalysis thus transforms a paradox lying at the heart of radical therapy into a recognition of historical difference, and produces the strong claim that the Lacanian perspective is made possible by market de-coding under capitalism.

The crux of that historical difference is this: Social relations in a coded Symbolic Order are qualitative and significant: women in tribal societies, for example, are valued as the source of life and the very cornerstone of meta-familial social relations in a kinship system fully charged with symbolic meanings. The basic social relations in the de-coded Symbolic order of capitalism, by contrast, are quantitative and strictly meaningless: workers (of whatever gender) are equated as abstract, calculable amounts of labor-power within the cash nexus of the market. In this regard (though without using the term de-coding, of course), Marx had already discerned an illuminating parallel between Martin Luther and Adam Smith: for Luther, the essence of religion was not found in objects of religious devotion, but in subjective religiosity in general; and for Smith, the essence of wealth was not found in objects of economic value, but in abstract productive activity in general. And Smith’s insight, Marx argues, was made possible by the practice under capitalism of measuring value in terms of abstract labor-power.

To this parallel, Deleuze and Guattari add a third term: Sigmund Freud, whom they call “the Luther and the Adam Smith of psychiatry.”⁶ For Freud, the essence of libidinal value is found not in the objects of desire, but in desire itself as an abstract subjective essence, as objectively-underdetermined, de-coded libido. Freud’s insight, too, Deleuze and Guattari argue, was made possible dialectically by the capitalist subsumption of all social relations under the market and exchange-value–except the relations of reproduction, which restrict desire to the abstract poles of the nuclear family. So between the extremes of Daddy as Oedipal agent of castration and object of identification and Mommy as forbidden object of desire, market de-coding makes “all that is solid melt into air,” as Marx put it: the market “mobilizes” desire, in other words, by freeing it from capture by any stable, all-embracing code–only to recapture it, it must be said, via the re-coding of advertising, for example, which re-territorializes it onto the objects of the latest administered consumer fad.⁷

Within the framework of psychoanalysis, meanwhile, Lacan takes the de-coding of desire one important step further than Freud: it is not the actual persons of Mommy and Daddy that shape desire in the family, but rather the functions of the metonymic search for mother-substitutes as objects of desire and metaphoric identifications made in the father’s name. And when such metaphoric identifications break down or are refused (“foreclosed”), according to Lacan, the result is a predominantly metonymic form of desire no longer structured by the nuclear family or any other stable code, but mobilized by the infinite semiosis of language as a purely abstract signifying system devoid of meaning: schizophrenia. From the perspective of schizoanalysis, however, such a radically unstructured form of desire constitutes not a clinical case or exception to the norm, but the very historical rule or tendency of capitalism; schizophrenia becomes the absolute horizon (or “limit”) of social (dis)order and psychic functioning, produced by the de-coding processes of the market.⁸

My claim is that Baudelaire can be added as a fourth term in the series of parallels linking Freud with Luther and Adam Smith: because for Baudelairean modernism, aesthetic value is found not in the objects of poetic appropriation, but in the activity of poetic appropriation itself–whence the oxymoron in the title of his major collection The Flowers of Evil) and his claim to be able to extract modernist poetry from absolutely anything–from Evil, from sheer boredom (spleen), or even from mud (as he says).⁹ Abandoning and indeed actively rejecting the fixed values imposed in the Symbolic Order, Baudelaire opts instead for a metonymic poetics that approaches the infinite semiosis of a completely de-coded Symbolic register. In the modernity that Baudelaire was among the first to diagnose, value–religious, economic, libidinal, poetic value– does not inhere in objects, but is subjectively (and even schizophrenically) bestowed. Baudelaire is thus in an important sense the Martin Luther-Adam Smith-Sigmund Freud of poetry, an early champion of de-coding within poetry and aesthetics, and one representative of a world-historical transformation in this field just as Luther, Smith, and Freud were in theirs. (There is another, less flattering sense in which Baudelaire represents the Luther-Smith-Freud of poetry, however, to which I will return below.)

It is this figure of Baudelaire as epitomizing a crucial turning-point in the history of Western culture at the emergence of modernism that the notion of de-coding enables us to recover from the so-called “rhetorical” school of deconstructive criticism. Members of this school–I am thinking in particular of Barbara Johnson, and her ground- breaking readings of matched pairs of Baudelaire poems¹⁰— were among the first to see important epistemological or ideological implications in the Jakobsonian distinction between metaphor and metonymy, when one or the other aspect of discourse predominates in a given literary text. In comparing verse and prose versions of the same poem, Johnson argued that metaphoric discourse–predominating in the verse poems–represents delusory adherence to the metaphysics of identity, while metonymic discourse– predominating in the prose poems–entails heroic acknowledgment of uncertainty, contingency, and flux. But this seminal insight is then immediately recontained as an undecidable binary opposition–metaphor and metonymy are legible in both verse and prose, she insists–lest it open onto the historical conclusion that Baudelaire’s poetics evolved from predominantly metaphoric to predominantly metonymic, and that this evolution aligns with his rejection of romanticism and the turn to modernism.

This strategy of containment is based on a misreading of Jakobson–who would surely have been very unhappy to hear the rigorous distinction he proposed between metaphor and metonymy considered “undecidable.” According to Jakobson, the metaphoric axis of discourse is based on the identity or equivalence among terms as defined by the storehouse of the language-system functioning “in absentia” (as Saussure put it) “outside” the linear time of utterance. The metonymic axis, by contrast, sustains the process of combining different terms contiguously to form a chain of signification “within” time–that is, in the duration of utterance. The metaphoric axis is thus a function of the language-system, and appears to exist as a given, outside of time, in contrast to the metonymic axis which is precisely the sequentiality of actual discourse as it is produced in context and through time. Jakobson thus concludes that every sign used in discourse has “two sets of interpretants . . . the code and the context.”¹¹ And we may surmise that when one set of interpretants diminishes in strength or importance, the other set will come to the fore.

This is precisely what happens in Baudelaire: metaphoric poetics predominates in the early poetry, but gives way to metonymic poetics in the later poetry. The single Baudelaire poem everyone is likely to be most familiar with–“Correspondences”–is, ironically enough, the very poem against which nearly everything he later wrote is directed; it sums up a metaphoric poetics of romanticism expressing the harmonies enveloping man in nature outside of society and time–and it is this romantic poetics that is virulently rejected by Baudelairean modernism, where metonymic reference to the present moment and context prevail, instead.

“Correspondences” appears in an introductory group of poems that treat the relation between the misunderstood artist and his philistine society: the ungainly poet is cruelly taunted by uncomprehending humanity in “The Albatross,” while in “Elevation” he soars high above the mortifying world of earthly existence and “effortlessly understands/ The language of flowers and all silent things” (lines 19-20). Such inspired communion with nature becomes the subject of the well-known fourth poem of the cycle, “Correspondences,” whose title and first phrase (“Nature is a temple . . .”) depict nature as a realm of equivalences between the divine and the human, a realm where everything ultimately appears to be just like everything else. The poem’s insistent use of metaphor and simile promotes a poetic vision able to unite interior and exterior, essence and appearance into an organic whole.

In the opening poem of the following cycle, “Beauty,” things are very different. Where “Correspondences” abounds in metaphorical figures of equivalence, transparency, and wholeness, “Beauty” insists instead on metonymical figures of exteriority, mechanical causality, and comparisons of degree. The temptations of metaphor and simile are proferred, but ultimately refused, as the poem dictates a very different form of poetic investigation. The simile of the poem’s first line (“I am beautiful, o mortals, like a dream of stone”) is a case in point: a resemblance is proposed, but in terms so bewildering as to obscure the comparison they are supposed to serve. For what is so beautiful about a dream made of stone, or a dream about stone? We may be tempted to posit statuary as an interpretant for this opening simile: but then why does Beauty-as-statue inspire in poets a love that is “eternally mute, like matter” (line 4), as the closing simile of the first stanza puts it? A poetically fruitful comparison would surely not silence poets, who of all people should be able to give it voice.

The opening simile of the second stanza reinforces these perplexities, by comparing beauty with a sphinx that is “incomprehensible” (line 5). And the strange juxtaposition in the next line (“I combine a heart of snow with the whiteness of swans” line 6) demonstrates how misleading external appearances may be: the swans’ whiteness, suggesting innocence and purity, covers a snowy-white heart of coldness and cruelty. By the time we reach the third stanza, correspondences between inside and outside have become completely undeterminable and appearances evidently deceiving: the poets remain transfixed by what Beauty calls her “grand poses” (grandes attitudes, line 9), but are completely unable to determine their authenticity. She appears, she says (line 10), to have borrowed them from the proudest monuments: if she has borrowed them, are they really hers? And if she hasn’t borrowed them, then why is she pretending to? No wonder the poets’ love remains eternally mute: their metaphors prove unable to determine Beauty’s true inner nature.

Yet it turns out that the inaccessibility of Beauty’s essence enables her actual effectivity in the last stanza of the poem:

For I have, to fascinate those docile admirers, Pure mirrors that render everything more beautiful: My eyes, my immense eyes of eternal light!(12-14)

Her identity lost in questionable comparisons of metaphorical equivalence, Beauty’s effects on things are henceforth measured in metonymical comparisons of degree: she renders things more beautiful. It is not through essences that Beauty reaches poets, but through things; not by relations of interiority and transparency, but of exteriority and mechanical causality. Denied access by the “pure mirrors [of] her eyes” to Beauty’s essence, the poets remain fascinated by proliferating images of the more and more beautiful things illuminated by them.¹²

Defying metaphoric appropriation and totalizing expression, Beauty is henceforth to be appreciated through her incremental effects on the external world. And indeed, in the subsequent poems of the cycle (especially “The Mask” and “Hymne to Beauty,” which Baudelaire added to the second edition of the collection), Beauty appears only in fragments and random images, valued not for her (or as an essence), but for her contingent impact on the poet. This metonymic poetics intensifies in the “Spleen” poems at the end of the first section of the collection, and reaches its zenith in the “Parisian Tableaus” section, with its insistent reference to scenes of Second Empire Paris, despite the agonizing inability to confer meaning on those scenes. The de-coding of metaphor, meaning, and identity thus fosters not sheer meaninglessness, “undecidability,” or the abyss, but rather metonymic reference to context–even if such reference must at the limit forgo any claim to stable meaning.¹³

The poetics of metaphor and metonymy in Baudelaire therefore do not represent the poles of an undecidable binary opposition, but terms in an historical evolution from romanticism to modernism. Moreover, Baudelaire’s poetry does not merely reflect the processes of de-coding characteristic of modern capitalist society, it actively participates in them. It is true, of course, that Baudelaire’s life-span corresponds to the take-off period of modern French capitalism, with the banking elite coming to power in 1830, followed by the influx of Californian and Australian gold in 1849, and the founding of the first investment banks and the unification of markets by the rail system under Napoleon III in the 1850s and 60s. But even more important was Baudelaire’s personal investment in romantic-socialist hopes for the Revolution of 1848, which was to crown the revolutionary tradition by finally bringing true workers’ democracy to France. For when the radical- democratic ideals of 1848 are crushed by the coup d’etat of Napoleon in 1851, Baudelaire (among many others) responds by actively repudiating his adherence to those ideals and adopting instead a stance of cynical disdain for modern culture and society. Baudelaire’s modernism emerges here, as defensive repudiation of the romantic enthusiasm he once shared for the figures of nature, woman, and the people. So in this literary-critical context, the introduction of the notion of de-coding transforms the deconstructive binary opposition metaphor/metonymy into a historical matrix for understanding the emergence of modernism in Baudelaire as the metonymic de-coding of romantic metaphoricity in revenge for the shattered hopes and ideals of 1848.

Central to Baudelaire’s evolution from romanticism to modernism is his notorious masochism, about which so much has been written (mostly from various psychoanalytic perspectives).¹⁴ Schizoanalysis will insist upon transforming masochism from a psychological into a socio- historical category, situating it in the period following the failures of the 1848 revolutions, when the literary works and essays of the “original” masochist, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, were so popular throughout Europe. Here I refer to Deleuze’s study of Masoch, although it predates schizoanalysis and uses the discipline-bound terms “de- sexualization” and “re-sexualization” in place of de-coding and re-coding.¹⁵ To derive the specificity of real masochism from Masoch’s own literary oeuvre, Deleuze draws on the Freud of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which explores the relationship between pleasure and repetition: what lies “beyond” the pleasure principle is not so much exceptions to it, but rather its grounding in repetition and the death instinct. Under the influence of the death instinct, even the pleasure-principle becomes, as Freud put it, “innately conservative”: repetition grounds the stimulus-binding energy that links present perception with memory-traces of past gratification, thus enabling the pleasure-principle to operate and govern behavior. Usually, repetition and pleasure work hand-in-glove: we repeat what has previously been found pleasurable, which is to say that present perception is eroticized or “sexualized” and governed “conservatively” by memories of gratifications past.

But the relation of pleasure and repetition can vary: less usually, as in the case of trauma dreams, for instance, repetition operates independently of the pleasure-principle, “de-sexualizing” perception and repeating something not pleasurable, but extremely displeasurable, something traumatic. Here repetition is severed from drive- gratification, and serves instead as an ego-defense to reduce anxiety, by developing ex post facto the stimulus- binding recognition-function whose absence occasioned the trauma in the first place. Still less usually, as in the case of perversion, the de-sexualization of perception is accompanied by the re-sexualization of repetition itself: instead of repeating what was initially found pleasurable, pleasure is derived from whatever is repeated. Now we might well expect desperate measures for reducing anxiety to proliferate in a de-coded Symbolic Order, which no longer protects the psyche from traumatic stimuli by binding them according to established codes of meaning. But the question remains: how can the repetition of pain, of all things– and especially one’s own pain–reduce anxiety and procure pleasure? Here, Deleuze invokes the conclusion of Reik’s clinical study of masochism: accepting punishment for the desired act before it occurs effectively resolves guilt and anxiety about the act, thereby sanctioning its consummation.¹⁶ But he then goes on to ask, why would preliminary punishment serve the end of obtaining pleasure? Under what conditions does this masochistic narrative-kernel (punishment-before -> pleasure-after) become effective? This is where analysis of Masoch’s fiction proves illuminating.

Masoch’s hero typically arranges a mock contract according to which he willingly suffers regular and systematic domination and punishment at the hands of a beautiful woman. The functions of this fantasy-contract are several: first of all, it reduces anxiety about punishment by meticulously specifying when, where, and how such punishment is to be carried out; secondly, it explicitly excludes the Father, the usual authority-figure, and transfers his Symbolic authority to the woman; then, by actively soliciting punishment, the contract invalidates the Symbolic authority responsible for the suffering incurred: since the punishment is undeserved, blame falls on the figure meting it out, instead. With the Father-figure excluded and his authority denied, the masochist hero ends up enjoying relations with the woman which the Father normally prohibits. In the context of mid-19th century France, this fantasy-scenario presents an allegory of the anti-authoritarian ideals of 1848, with the de-coding of the Father-figure in Louis-Philippe accompanied by re-coding on the Mother-figure of Marianne and the Second Republic.

Yet, in a way Deleuze does not fully appreciate, the masochistic scenario just described is in Masoch’s fiction embedded within a narrative that produces results very different from the utopian ideal projected by the contract. In Masoch’s stories, the Father-figure supposedly excluded from the fantasy-contract suddenly re-appears, and is in fact joined by the woman in administering new forms of torture that exceed and thus break the terms of the contract. So at the end of Masoch’s stories, the masochistic fantasy-scenario crumbles, leaving the hero with a galling sense of having been duped and a bitter desire for revenge. And the ex-masochist hero in Masoch’s stories indeed takes his revenge, with a ferocity bordering on sadism. The conclusion of Masochian narrative thus represents not the anti-authoritarian utopia of idealized relations with the ideal Mother-figure, as pictured in the masochistic scenario, but rather a vitriolic and often violent cynic who now despises anyone (even or most of all himself) foolish enough to have taken his ideals and desires for reality. Such is the story that Masoch told–and that his innumerable readers throughout late-19th century Europe read–over and over and over again: as in a trauma-dream, this compulsion to repeat represents defensive preparation for a cataclysmic event…that has already occurred. And for Baudelaire, as for so many of his French contemporaries, the real event that represents as it were the return of the Father ruining the Mother-and-son’s anti- authoritarian utopia, is the incredible rise to power and coup d’etat of Napoleon III, the founding of the authoritarian Second Empire on the ruins of the democratic Second Republic.

What’s more, anyone familiar with biographies of Baudelaire will recognize this story of the return-of-the- Father destroying the Mother-and-son’s idyllic utopia as a repetition, from Baudelaire’s own childhood, of his mother’s remarriage to an ambitious young military officer several years after the death of Baudelaire’s real father: this uncanny “coincidence” is for schizoanalysis what made Baudelaire the lyric poet of his age, to paraphrase Walter Benjamin. In schizoanalytic terms, then, “masochism” is not the name of a psychological category, but a historical strategy for de-coding social authority while transforming romantic idealism into the disillusioned cynicism of modernism.

This is not to say that the evolution from romanticism to modernism in Baudelaire can be understood as some kind of linear progression from metaphor to metonymy: metaphor doesn’t simply disappear, but reappears in Baudelairean modernism transformed by metonymization into a corrosive irony.¹⁷ Our account of the de-coding of modernism in Baudelaire, meanwhile, remains still too abstract as long as metonymy as a free form of desire induced by the market and metonymization as a formal development of Baudelairean poetics are linked by mere parallelism: Lacan’s and Johnson’s quite different transformations of Jakobson’s concept of metonymy must be completed and brought to bear on the evolution of Baudelairean poetics as a whole (not restricted to individual poems or pairs of poems, as in Johnson and in Jakobson himself). Here, Walter Benjamin’s own historicization of psychoanalysis via a reading of Baudelaire constitutes an invaluable point of departure. What Benjamin saw was that Baudelaire’s best poetry was formulated as a defense against the traumatic shocks typical of urban life in the de-coded Symbolic Order of nascent capitalism. Baudelaire’s shock-defense takes two forms, which correspond to the title of the well-known first section of The Flowers of Evil, “Spleen and Ideal.” “Ideal” designates a metaphoric defense that re-codes potentially traumatic experience in the nostalgic terms of a lost yet rememorable harmony with nature outside of time (as in “Former Life,” for example); “Spleen” designates a metonymic defense that defuses potential trauma simply by locating an experience as precisely as possible in time (see “The Clock”)–though at the cost, Benjamin suggests, of robbing it of any lyric content.¹⁸

As invaluable as it is, Benjamin’s reading overlooks the importance of the prose poem collection and even of the “Tableaux Parisiens” section added after “Spleen and Ideal” to the second edition of The Flowers of Evil–where a very different form of poetics and response to market de- coding prevail. What Benjamin didn’t see is that cycles of protective re-coding alternate with cycles of exhilarated de-coding in the verse collection, as the poet alternately seeks out and then withdraws from contact with the Real. Nor was he able to appreciate the way in which the predominance of metonymic poetics transforms the cycles of de-coding and re-coding in the verse collection into simultaneous re-coding and de-coding in the individual poems of the prose collection, as the high-anxiety trauma and shock-defenses of earlier work give way in the later work to a very different defense based on psychic splitting.

Historically speaking, once ambient de-coding reaches a certain threshold of intensity, whatever stability and coherence the ego may have possessed dis-integrate, and the unstable, split subjectivity of so-called borderline conditions replaces oedipal neurosis as the predominant form of psychological disturbance–as nearly all the post- Freudian psychoanalytic literature from Fenichel to Kristeva and Kernberg attests.¹⁹ But in the case of Baudelaire, who after all experienced de-coding at a considerably earlier stage of capitalist development, there had to have been a precipitating cause for severe splitting: it was, as I have suggested, his experience of Napoleon’s coup d’etat, which shook Baudelaire’s psychic structure to its foundations and propelled him from a relatively stable romanticism, through masochism, and into the supremely flexible, if not indeed self-contradictory, borderline condition characteristic of his modernism.²⁰ Borderline conditions by themselves, however (and regardless of the degree to which Baudelaire “actually” lived or “merely” staged them in his poetry²¹), are not sufficient to account for Baudelairean modernism; there had to have been some figure to serve as ego-ideal around which a new, post- romantic personality could form, in order to sustain and sanction the enduring ambitions of Baudelaire the writer: this figure, it turns out, was Edgar Allan Poe. Identification with Poe as a fellow writer shunned by contemporary society fosters a narcissistic reaction to the underlying borderline condition, so that the extreme instability and psychic splitting characteristic of the latter become a new form of defense.

This is the stance that emerges in the “Parisian Tableaus” section of the second edition of The Flowers of Evil; it is epitomized in “The Game” (“Le Jeu”), in which the poet sees himself in a dream sitting off in a corner at a gambling-house, silently watching the players and whores feverishly pursuing their ends, and is shocked that he actually envies them their “tenacious passion”:

I saw myself, off in a corner of the grim gambling-den, Leaning on my elbows, silent, cold, and envious, Envying the gamblers their tenacious passion, The old whores their dismal gaiety. And all of them cheerfully selling, right in front of me, One, his long-held honor, the other her good looks! And my heart was alarmed at my envy of these poor souls Racing zealously toward the gaping abyss, Who, drunk with their own passion, in the end all liked Pain better than death and hell better than nothingness!(15-24)

Not only is the poet only an observer within the dream (lines 15-16), but he then takes his distance from this dream-self, cynically demystifying in waking consciousness the very passions he envied in the dream (lines 21-24).

Such splitting appears even more starkly in the figure of the prose poem narrator, for whom it serves to establish a more or less comfortable distance from scenes of former selves in degraded commercial context–former selves (romantic idealists, most notably) who have been split off from the observing narrator yet retain a certain fascination as objects of his rapt attention and of poetic depiction.²² This narrative stance is most clearly illustrated in “Loss of a halo,” where the de-coding of romantic views of the poet’s vocation, already accomplished on the level of poetics in “Beauty,” has become an explicit prose theme. In a brothel, the narrator runs into an acquaintance who expresses surprise at finding the illustrious poet in such a mauvais lieu. The poet immediately launches into a long explanation of why he is there: while dodging on-coming traffic on his way across the boulevard, his halo dropped in the mud; not having the courage to retrieve it, he decided it would be better to lose his insignia than to break his neck. Then, looking on the bright side, he realized he could now “stroll about incognito, do nasty things, and indulge in vulgar behavior just like ordinary mortals.” The acquaintance expects him to advertise to get his halo back, but the poet will have none of it: dignity bores him, and now he gets to enjoy himself. Besides, he imagines the fun he will have if some scribbler picks it up and dares to put it on: “What a pleasure to make someone happy!–especially someone who would make me laugh! Think of X, or Z! Wouldn’t that be droll!” Here we see the narrator exercising an invidious superiority over his interlocutor and other writers who still believe in the “aura” of an older, romantic version of the poet, one the narrator has left behind.

But this sense of superiority, it turns out, was not a given but an achievement, and was in fact achieved at the expense of Baudelaire himself in an earlier incarnation. For the journal anecdote on which the poem is based reads very differently from the published version: here, the narrator does recover the halo, and still values it highly enough to consider even its momentary loss a bad omen.²³ The lost halo, in this light, would be precisely the one awarded the romantic poet of “Benediction” for his suffering at the beginning of The Flowers of Evil. This idealistic self has in the final version completely disappeared beneath the narrator’s cynicism, having been projected onto X, Z, and the interlocutor, all of whom continue to value the outmoded ideal. Moreover, the loss of the halo is now not merely the subject of a story: it is an event recounted by a narrator to a listener within the poem; it has become an occasion for the narrator to attain a position of superiority over his fictional audience. And he is now at one remove from the experience: Baudelaire has transmuted the original account and the uneasy feeling it provoked into the snide banter of a world-weary and slightly sullied roue, and in the process utterly rejected the romantic ideal of the poet he himself once espoused, if not embodied. Such a position of serene indifference or actual disdain for cultural ideals characterizes Baudelairean modernism at its apogee. And yet…and yet….

And yet there are at least two senses in which Baudelaire’s prose poem collection goes far beyond the split stance of the modernism adumbrated in the “Tableaux Parisiens”–far enough, perhaps, to attain a certain postmodernism. For one thing, although Baudelaire’s identification with Poe as martyr to a philistine society was supposed to elevate him above the crass world of commerce and mass-democratic society, the modernist poetics he developed turned out to be strictly complicitous with the capitalist market. By locating aesthetic value solely in the activity of poetic appropriation and distancing himself from the objects of that appropriation, Baudelaire comes to occupy the position of what Jacques Attali calls the “designer” or “programmer,” whose basic function within capitalism is to endow more or less worthless objects (such as “designer-jeans”) with semiotic surplus-value in order to enable the realization of economic surplus-value by promoting their purchase by consumers; the most familiar form of programming, in other words, is advertising.²⁴ This is the second sense in which Baudelaire can be considered the Martin Luther/Adam Smith/Sigmund Freud of poetry, for each of these figures, too, re-imposed a moment of re-coding on the radical indeterminacy of de-coding, according to Deleuze and Guattari: Luther re-codes pure religiosity onto Scripture; Adam Smith re-codes abstract labor-power onto capital; Freud re-codes polymorphous libido onto the Oedipus complex. Baudelaire, similarly, re-codes an increasingly metonymic poetics onto the prose poem narrator-as-programmer.

Inasmuch as Baudelaire’s mature poetics functions in this way to valorize from the re-coded perspective of the borderline-narcissist narrator various forms of de-coded experience that have been distanced or rendered virtually meaningless in themselves, it acts in complicity with and even as a prototype for the kinds of debased commercial activity modernism was to have rejected and risen above. And this is a complicity that Baudelaire himself acknowledges in the prose poem entitled “The Cake,” where inflated rhetoric endows a nearly worthless scrap of bread with so much semiotic surplus-value that it becomes the prized object of a fratricidal war.²⁵ Such recognition of the ultimate inseparability of high and low culture, of aesthetics and marketing, has become a hallmark of what we today call the postmodern condition–in large part because modernist “defamiliarization” has indeed become the all too familiar marketing strategy Baudelaire “foresaw” it could, now used for selling everything from standard-brand beer to haute couture perfume.

And yet it must be said at the same time that Baudelaire never whole-heartedly adopts the aloof and superior position of the modernist programmer: an abiding sympathy for his idealistic former selves remains a central feature of the prose poem collection, visible in the narrator’s recurring shock of recognition that the poor victims of commerce and philistinism he has been watching from a distance are none other than the poet himself. Nowhere in the prose poem collection is this more poignantly depicted than in “The Old Clown,” in which the narrator happens across an aged carnival clown sitting alone, ignored by the joyous throngs surrounding him. While observing him, the narrator suddenly “feels his throat wrung by the terrible hand of hysteria,” and when he tries to “analyze [his] sudden grief,” he realizes he has just seen an image of “the aging man of letters who has outlived the generation he had so brilliantly amused; [an image] of the old poet bereft of friends, family, children, worn out by poverty and the public’s ingratitude”–an image, that is to say, of his very self. Whereas the narrator of poems such as “Loss of a halo” (and “The Projects”) manages to retain or quickly regain his composure in the face of former selves, defensive splitting in many other poems (including “A Heroic Death” as well as “The Old Clown”) fails abruptly, putting the narrator back into agonzing contact with romantic ideals that are alive in memory despite their historical defeat (which is the theme of the prose poem entitled “Which one is the true one?”).²⁶

To be sure, there is a tendency in Baudelaire to repudiate the romantic narrative of French history as progress toward social democracy in the name of modernism, a tendency to transform erstwhile idealism into pure cynicism. What could be more cynical than to capitalize on the defeat of one’s ideals by adopting the position of programmer and contributing to the realization of surplus-value, including and especially one’s own? Such borderline-narcissist cynicism, incidentally, is precisely the stance of Baudelaire’s current-day, American avatar, Madonna, who acts out degraded split-off selves who she knows will shock and sell, but always from an ironic distance that leaves her integrity as programmer and her command of a share of the profits intact.²⁷ But Baudelaire, it seems to me, never quite occupies such a position. And this is not just because (as Bataille reminds us²⁸) he represents in material terms a colossal failure as the “lyric poet of high capitalism”–unlike Madonna. It is because, however much Baudelaire repudiates narrative and history, he never manages to completely hide his profound sympathy and lasting identification with the victims of the capitalist market: he never fully occupies the modernism he himself invented.

Is such identification with the victims on Baudelaire’s part a mere vestige of his erstwhile romanticism? Biographically speaking, perhaps so. But I would argue that it becomes available or interesting to us under specifically postmodern conditions, when we become willing or able to see more in Baudelaire than the invention of modernism for which he has been canonized. Surely his recognition of the potential of modernist poetry for market programming has little enough to do with romanticism, and everything to do with postmodernism today. In any case, the anti- universalizing and anti-individualist principles of schizoanalysis suggest a version of literary reception theory (akin to Benjamin’s “redemptive” literary history) according to which a process of socio-historical rather than narrowly psychological transference will make certain features of a literary work become visible when changed circumstances bring one historical moment into unexpected alignment with another.²⁹ In this light, as our postmodernism rejoins Baudelaire’s pre- and/or post- modernism by means of such historical transference, modernism appears in between as an attempt to capitalize on market reification itself, with its segregation of formal innovation in the restricted sphere of high culture from homogenizing repetition in the general cultural sphere, as a vehicle or opportunity for aesthetic development.³⁰ And it would appear by now that this attempt has, if not failed in some simple and total way, then certainly run its course, accomplished all that it can–and is therefore being surpassed.

Antonio Negri has, to my mind, proposed the most acute way to situate this historical reconstruction of the relation between the premodern, modern, and postmodern in a figure such as Baudelaire: in terms of the difference between merely formal subsumption and real subsumption of labor by capital.³¹ If, as Marx said, society sets itself only the tasks it is able to accomplish, then we may understand the kinds of formal freedom and equality associated with romanticism, the sovereign individual, and representative democracy, along with the kinds of formal innovation associated with modernism, as historically necessary and indeed fruitful stages in the development of modern culture, but stages which have by now been superceded, as the full socialization of production under conditions of real subsumption renders the individual romantic subject obsolete, and calls for new developments in collective freedom, substantive equality, and general cultural innovation alike. In this light, “The Voyage” (the concluding poem of the second edition of The Flowers of Evil) might be understood to prefigure, in its insistence on the value of unending travel for its own sake, the notion of permanent revolution as it appears on the historical horizon once capitalism has exhausted all of its positive potential–and more specifically to prefigure, in its strategic use of the anti-lyrical, plural personal pronoun “we” throughout, the kind of collective nomadism on a new earth that Deleuze and Guattari envisage in the Anti- Oedipus as the next stage of social development.³²

Notes

1. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, The Anti-Oedipus (New York: Viking, 1977) and Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Minuit, 1991).

2. On the differences between philosophical concepts and scientific “functives” (fonctifs), see Chapter 5 of Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?. While not Deleuze and Guattari’s own, I have found the term “transformers” useful for capturing the operational value of Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts; so has Reda Bensma, in “Les transformateurs- Deleuze ou le cinema comme automate spirituel,” forthcoming.

3. This would be the “utopian” dimension of the philosophical concepts deployed in the Anti-Oedipus, according to Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (95).

4. On the relations of the Anti-Oedipus to May 68, see my “Schizoanalysis: the Postmodern Contextualization of Psychoanalysis” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, Nelson and Grossberg, eds. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 405-416, esp. 415. For a fuller treatment than is possible here of the evolution of Baudelairean poetics from the perspective of schizoanalysis, see my Baudelaire and Schizoanalysis: the Sociopoetics of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

5. On the concept of friend and concepts as friends, see Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?, 8-10 and Chapter 3, “Les personnages conceptuels”. On “milieu,” see Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues (Paris: Flammarion, 1977), 69 and passim; and Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?, 94-96.

6. The Anti-Oedipus, 271.

7. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “The Communist Manifesto” in Marx and Engels: Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, Lewis Feuer, ed. (Garden City: Doubleday, 1959) 6-41; the quotation is from p.10.

8. The Anti-Oedipus, 176-77; for a similar discussion of the relation between philosophy and the limits of capitalism, see Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?, 92-97.

9. “I have kneaded mud and made it into gold” (my translation), Oeuvres Completes (Paris: Seuil, 1968), 763.

10. Barbara Johnson, Defigurations du langage poetique: la seconde revolution baudelairienne (Paris: Flammarion, 1979), 31-55; and The Critical Difference (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 23-48.

11. Roman Jakobson, “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbance” in Fundamentals of Language (with Morris Halle) (The Hague: Mouton, 1956), 67-96; the quotation is from page 75.

12. For a more complete comparison of the poetics of “Correspondences” and “Beauty,” see Baudelaire and Schizoanalysis, Chapter 2.

13. On the metonymic poetics of the “spleen” poems and the “Parisian Tableaus,” see Baudelaire and Schizoanalysis, Chapters 3 and 5. On metonymic or “indexical” reference to context in Baudelairean modernism, see Ross Chambers, Melancolie et opposition: les debuts du modernisme en France (Paris: Jose Corti, 1987).

14. On Baudelaire’s masochism, see Rene Laforgue, The Defeat of Baudelaire (London: Hogarth, 1932); Jean-Paul Sartre, Baudelaire (Paris: Gallimard, 1947); and Leo Bersani, Baudelaire and Freud (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977).

15. Gilles Deleuze, Presentation de Sacher-Masoch (Paris: Minuit, 1967).

16. Theodor Reik, Masochism in Modern Man (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1941).

17. For another, quite different account of metaphor in modernism, see David Lodge, The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern Literature (London: Edward Arnold, 1977); Lodge draws exclusively on Jakobson for his understanding of metaphor and metonymy, and not at all on Lacan.

18. Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism (London: Verso/New Left Books, 1973).

19. Otto Fenichel, “Ego-Disturbances and their Treatment,” in Collected Papers, 2 Vols. (New York: Norton, 1953-54), Vol. 2, 109-28; Otto Kernberg, Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism (New York: Jason Aronson, 1975); Julia Kristeva, “Within the Microcosm of ‘The Talking Cure’,” in Interpreting Lacan, Smith and Kerrigan, eds., Psychiatry and the Humanities Vol. 6 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 33-48.

20. “With all the talk of rights these days, there’s one that everyone has forgotten about . . . the right to contradict oneself” (my translation) Oeuvres Completes, 291. On the contradictory nature of modernism, see Charles Bernheimer, Figures of Ill Repute: Representing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989).

21. As Leo Bersani put it, “I don’t mean that Baudelaire was psychotic when he wrote these poems; he does, however, seem to have represented in them a psychotic relation to the world.” Baudelaire and Freud (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 128.

22. For a fuller discussion of narrative splitting in a broader range of prose poems, see Baudelaire and Schizoanalysis, Chapters 6 and 7.

23. The anecdote is found in “Fusees” #11, Oeuvres Completes, 627.

24. Jacques Attali, Noise: the Political Economy of Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), esp. 128-32.

25. For a more complete reading of “The Cake,” see Baudelaire and Schizoanalysis, Chapter 7.

26. For discussions of “Which one is the true one?” “A Heroic Death,” and “The Projects” along these lines, see Baudelaire and Schizoanalysis, Chapter 6.

27. See David Tetzlaff, “Metatextual Girl: patriarchy -> postmodernism -> power -> money -> Madonna,” forthcoming; and my “Baudelaire’s Madonna and Ours,” forthcoming.

28. See his essay on Baudelaire in Literature and Evil (London: Calder and Boyars, 1973).

29. On “historical transference” of this kind, see Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, Hannah Arendt, ed. (New York: Schocken, 1969), 253-64; Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988); Dominick LaCapra, Soundings in Critical Theory (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989); and the preface to Baudelaire and Schizoanalysis.

30. On the general and restricted spheres of culture, see Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: a social critique of the judgment of taste (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984).

31. See Antonio Negri, Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse (New York: Bergin and Garvey, 1984); and The Politics of Subversion: A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century (London: Polity Press [Basil Blackwell], 1989), especially Chapter 3, “From the mass worker to the socialized worker–and beyond” and Chapter 13, “Postmodern.”

32. On the “new earth,” see the Anti-Oedipus, 35, 131, 318-22, 367-82; and Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?, 95; on nomadism as permanent revolution, see my “Schizoanalysis: the Postmodern Contextualization of Psychoanalysis,” esp. 407.

September 25, 2013
On The Bull’s Horn with Peter Handke: Debates, Failures, Essays, and a Postmodern Livre de Moi
Stephanie Hammer

Department of Literature and Languages
University of California, Riverside
HAMM@ucrac2.ucr.edu

The time is past when we can plant ourselves in front of a Vernet and sigh along with Diderot, “How beautiful, grand, varied, noble, wise, harmonious, rigorously colored this is!”

(Lyotard, “Contribution to an Idea of Postmodernity”)

What a wise and beautiful book . . . .

(Erich Skwara’s review of the Essay on Fatigue)

Today what subject would the great metaphysical narrative tell about? Would it be the odyssey and for what narratee?

(Lyotard, “Contribution to an Idea of Postmodernity”)

We are dealing with another one of those postmodern texts in which a funky object de pop-art serves as the pretext for self-reflexive excursions through the time and space of memory . . . .

(Theodore Ziolkowski’s review of the Essay on the Jukebox)

Autobiography is abject unless, in the words of Michel Leiris, it exposes itself to the “bull’s horn.”

(Ihab Hassan, “Parabiography”)

This essay obeys two imperatives;¹ it is being torn in two directions: a critique of Handke’s critical reception as it pertains to the postmodern and a close read- ing of Handke’s recent Essay Versuch) series. I will allow my text to tear, and rather than suturing it together, I display, in advance, the wound that cannot–at least in this space–be closed. As a tribute to and as a critical apparatus for Handke, I will allow it to split, to be uncertain, to be ambivalent. This move will court failure and ensure insufficiency, but it might “correct” the flatness of most Handke criticism: the thematic studies, the stylistic studies, the countless influence studies on him, and more insidiously, the frequent, incestuous comparisons of him with himself. I will try to show that, for the most part, the articles and books on him cannot understand his work because they would master it (with all that such a term implies), and as Handke’s texts resist such hermeneutic sub- jugation, his critics have often descended either to righteous indignation or into summary and description² –colorless repetitions of the objects which they want to comprehend but cannot fasten upon. Can one surrender without submitting to the writing of Peter Handke? Can one’s own writing on him allow itself to be gored by his textual challenges to authority and reconstitute itself through that (fatal? pleasurable?) blow to its own integrity? Perhaps.

In his turning-point exercise of the mid 70’s, The Weight of the World Das Gewicht der Welt), Peter Handke exerted a renewed resistance to the narrative tyrannies of form, which he at once invoked and subverted in such novels as The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick and Short Letter, Long Farewell. In Weight he rehearsed the Russian Formalist view of contemporary society gone numb, but rather than just making language “strange”, he exploded the diaristic form (that humble, non-literary history of the every day that anyone can produce) into an elusive encyclopedia of linguistic snippets–autobiographical sound bytes which might contain information, citation, observation, opinion, dream, or memory. Indeed, as several critics have noted (among them Axel Gellhaus and Peter Putz) most of Handke’s output during that decade consisted of narrative forms made difficult by a perceptual loss of one kind or another which they simultaneously narrated and enacted. But The Weight of the World radicalized the problem of narrative; it documented the author’s hardening refusal to tell, and harnessed that refusal to both a utopian dream of a new mythology and an ironic critique of language practices, including and especially his own.

Much critical energy has already been expended on Handke’s evolution during the 60’s and 70’s, so I will not retread that familiar territory here, although I will, inevitably, refer to it. Instead I would examine an apparent problem–namely the fact that, as difficult as Handke’s narrative forms have always been for even the most agile of critical readers, his prose works of the past decade seem, unbelievably enough, to pose even more daunting challenges. As examples of this new difficulty I will read the trilogy (at the time of writing) of slim volumes entitled Essays produced by Handke in the late 80’s and early 90’s against a variety of concerns, including the resonance of that father-essayist, Montaigne. But before doing this, I am compelled to dismantle the discussions of Handke’s “difficulty” during the past decade–a difficulty which has been discussed, increasingly, in terms of the author’s postmodern affiliations–hence the oppositional pairings of Lyotard and Hassan with recent reviews of Handke’s works by way of preface to my own problematic/problematized “essay.”

What is the origin and history of this connection? Handke’s relation with the postmodern was first articulated by the Klinkowitz/Knowlton book Peter Handke and the Postmodern Transformation in 1983. In a brief opening chapter on postmodern art, that book aligned Handke’s work of the 60’s and 70’s with that of Jacques Derrida (assuming, by implication, a congruence between deconstruction and the postmodern [3-6]), and it argued for a view of Handke’s corpus from 1966 to 1981 along a trajectory which shifted from negative to positive poles of postmodern aesthetics (Klinkowitz and Knowlton, 128-9); the book’s conclusion also made a quick appeal to the category of “new Sensibility”– ostensibly as a corrective to Manfred Durzak’s deployment, a year earlier, of “neue Subjektivitat” in a hostile reading of Handke’s repeated usage of autobiographical material. Ten years later, the Klinkowitz/Knowlton perspective looks simplistic when compared to the complex theoretical dis- cussions of postmodernity offered by Hassan and Hutcheon, among others, but the book’s attempt to move Handke out of the prisonhouse of Austro-German literary traditions was brave and continues to be valuable. Yet, far from being settled, the question of Handke’s connections to postmodernism/ity has taken on an odd intensity and a kind of built-in futility in subsequent discussions. This is, for example, the essential non-dynamic which characterizes Norbert Gabriel’s 1991 essay on Handke’s recent prose work; tellingly, the essay raises and then defers the question of Handke’s place to an unwilling conclusion that the Austrian author’s works, unpleasant as they are to read, are in fact “not bad books.”

The lofty tone of Gabriel’s pronouncements and the strategic use of the issue of postmodernity to damn Handke with faint praise are, I think, symptomatic of a theoretical tack which has proven at least as problematic as the problem it wants to solve; namely, the question of Handke and the postmodern has provided critics with an outlet for an anxiety-ridden false debate about his aesthetic worth, as though the question of his place, once settled, could somehow legitimize (or more likely invalidate) his writing practices once and for all. The gesture of invoking the postmodern works in paradoxical ways in assessments of Handke; sometimes it might imply a comforting, and curious understanding of postmodernism as part of an aesthetic/ethical/political duality wherein it must play the part of the good, the beautiful, the true, and the politically progressive to modernism’s shopworn aesthetic program–a duality which ringingly repeats the binarism of classic/romantic.³

This is the agenda of Hans Joseph Ortheil, who uses an earlier, postmodern Handke to condemn the work of the later, reactionary Handke in Die Zeit Die Zeit 24.4, 1987). Such an outlook also indirectly informs the article of Eva- Maria Metcalf, who argues that Handke is an arrogant, impotent modernist: “in 1967 Peter Handke built himself an ivory tower, and he has resided in it ever since” (369). But elsewhere, as in Ziolkowski’s review, the “fact” of Handke’s postmodern aesthetic becomes a way to dismiss him as unoriginal, leaving Erich Skwara the uncomfortable task of defending Handke’s essay on fatigue through an appeal to neo-romantic accolades which would (while they seemingly challenge Lyotard’s contentions) rehabilitate the con- temporary author into a reincarnation of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, or worse, Goethe. Finally, there are those like Handke’s French apologist/translator G.-A. Goldschmidt, who insist on Handke’s essential realistic simplicity, all the while offering a “modest” commentary of 200 pages (supplemented by photographs and utterances of Handke) to assist in this easy enterprise.

The only person who comes close to articulating the relationship between Handke and the postmodern is Diane Shooman, who boldly compares Handke’s work to Ulysses, Wordsworth, and contemporary painting, and then challenges the Handke/Derrida congruence proposed by Klinkowitz and Knowlton (Shooman 94). She does something else remarkable and controversial; she compares Handke’s work, primarily, to that of a female painter–highlighting, by implication, an aspect of his work which had heretofore gone unnoticed: the gender trouble at work in his writing, and its specifically “feminine” markers (when she presented this analysis at the Modern Austrian Literature Conference a few years ago, it was vociferously decried by practically everyone in the room).⁴

For the most part, Handke’s critical reception veers between an angry dismissal which openly hates what he does and a swooning, predominantly masculine, denial which buries whatever the books might really up to.⁵ He is postmodern when he writes badly, and he is a bad writer because he is not postmodern. He is difficult, he is almost unreadable (Michael Hofmann TLS), he is arch (J.J. White TLS), he is in a literary cul-de-sac (Anthony Vivis TLS); or he writes books which are our “friends” (Skwara) and which are glowing and moving classics (Volker Hage, blurb on Versuch uber die Jukebox, on the last page of Versuch uber den gegluckten Tag, excerpted from Die Zeit). These discussions about Handke contrast so profoundly with the statements of both theoreticians and ex- plicators of the postmodern such as Ihab Hassan and Steven Connor (who simply include Handke on a list of postmodern writers [Hassan 85; Connor 123] without further comment), that I cannot help asking, as does Warren Montag in his angry indictment of the postmodern debate, what lies be- hind this vociferous, yet strangely off-kilter posturing. What is at stake in these critical (mis)readings of Peter Handke?⁶

Much. First, Handke has succeeded too well in the formalist challenge which I invoked earlier; he makes the forms so difficult that we feel the difficulty, rather than the feeling, and get deflected by the perception rather than examining (or sharing) the mood which informs it. Second, Handke enrages German critics and American critics alike, because his recent writing repeatedly indicts Austro-German culture, while at the same time using an increasingly high- style literary language that represents, for Wim Wenders at least, “the most beautiful German written nowadays” (Kunzel 212)–as though Kafka were channeling the spirit of Goethe to write “In the Penal Colony.” Third, he plays a scary, threatening game with male subjectivity, and his recent works are disturbing and destabilizing in ways that his early plays and novels rarely were, for all their violent histrionics, and it is this aspect of his work that his defenders most want to deny.⁷ These threats against male subjectivity are important in another, more immediate way, for they are vocationally and practically, as well as psychically, troubling to literary professionals. By their very nature, Handke’s games with the male subject undermine any “penetrating” analysis which would get to the core of his writing, and so the greatest danger that Handke’s writing incurs on the critic is the almost certain invalidation of the literary-critical project itself, as it is usually constructed; there is throughout Handke’s recent work a questioning of the critical stance as such, and, more precisely, the form through which that stance attempts to legitimize itself and ensure its authority. That form is the essay, and it is no coincidence, both that the essay is the genre of choice for Handke in his work of the late 80’s and early 90’s, and that critical essays about him seem so often doomed to failure. More productive, clearly, would be to shift the ground for the discussion entirely, as Alice Kuzniar has already provisionally done in her powerful Lacanian reading of Across. Her analysis of Handke in terms of the Lacanian “gaze” and what she calls Handke’s “Antwortblick” (seeing oneself being seen [Kuzniar 357]) furthers the critical conversation’s migration out of Germanistik, toward a different realm of poststructuralist theory (psychoanalysis rather than deconstruction) as it pertains to the visual in general and the cinematic in par- ticular–concerns, which as she observes, are sources of continuing interest in Handke’s writing.

But before sketching out the critical venue opened, not only by this shift into visual media, but more importantly, by her invocation of the word “desire” (the ramifications of which Kuzniar does not pursue in her essay), I want to address this difficulty of Handke’s place one more time. The problem is, the non-debate notwithstanding, a fertile one because it points both to the specialness of Handke’s project and to the impossibility of “defining” the postmodern. This impossibility becomes both clear and humorous when, we think of Handke’s aesthetic practices, not against a definition or in terms of a category, into which we must forcibly stuff his corpus, but rather, with the ponderings of Lyotard, who has discussed the postmodern within the following, very large parameters⁸:

The powers of sensing and phrasing are being probed on the limits of what is possible . . . . Experiments are being made. This is our postmodernity's entire vocation . . . . Today's art consists in exploring things unsayable and things invisible. Strange machines are assembled, where what we didn't have the idea of saying or the mat- ter for feeling can make itself heard and experienced.("Contribution to an Idea of Postmodernity" 190)

This non-definition might certainly adhere to Handke’s writing of the 80’s, where he writes repeatedly about the marginal (the threshold in Across), the invisible, the unsayable, and the downright absent, and this fascination with the presence of absence and with the limits/possibilities of repeatability (overtly marked by such titles as Absence and Repetition) expresses itself most typically in Handke’s Essay on the Jukebox Versuch uber die Jukebox), where the quest of the medieval romance is transmogrified into a writer’s futile meanderings in the Spanish countryside, as he looks repeatedly for a jukebox, and for a hotel room that he can be comfortable in.

But listen to how Lyotard describes the postmodern’s adversary–classical aesthetics:

an aesthetics stemming from Hegel, for whom what was at stake was indeed "experience" in the sense of a passion of the spirit traversing perceptible forms in order to arrive at the total expression of self in the discourse of the philosopher . . . . It can indeed be said that there is no longer any experience in this sense . . . . (191)

Here again we find Handke, for this is precisely the challenge to which he returns over and over again–the challenge to create a new narrative and a new experience which will rectify and make good the very real loss of the feeling of experience; Handke’s writing elaborately and ironically mourns the irrecuperability of traditional, western subjectivity as he uses that grief-ritual to look beyond it (as in Nova’s speech at the end of Beyond the Villages Uber die Dorfer]).

In short, can we not rethink Handke’s relation to the postmodern (both in terms of postmodernity, the moment, and postmodernism, the movement), and in so doing rethink the “use” of this term? Is this not one of the reasons why the Handke case is important insofar as it tests the notion of the “postmodern” even as it testifies to the miscalculated ways that it is being invoked? The postmodern is not, after all a category in an aesthetic periodic table (Hassan 33), it is not an either/or proposition, but a “cluster concept” to be explored, to be expanded (hence Lyotard’s title–a contribution to an idea).⁹ If the postmodern can be deployed in this manner, does not Handke’s very slipperiness –this ability to fit in everywhere and rest nowhere; to be at once classical, romantic, modernist and at the same time resolutely anti-classical, anti-romantic, and anti-modernist –suggest, in and of itself, not that Handke is postmodern in the way that Schlegel is Romantic or Joyce is modernist, but that Handke uses the postmodern, ably manoeuvering through the different layers of history–where Schlegel, Buddha, and Credence Clearwater Revival are all equally (non)present?¹⁰ And, if Handke uses the postmodern, he also uses just about every other possible cultural tool: the language and terminology of German idealist philosophy, the topoi of classical literature–both German and foreign, Western and Asian–as well as autobiography and mass media, and, I would argue, a strong awareness of the thematic/formal structures of psychoanalysis–an awareness which Kuzniar has already signalled.

How might such a comprehension of the postmodern reforms and re-forms critical practice vis-a-vis Peter Handke? It tells us this: any reading of his work according to one thematic line, one theoretical approach, or one periodic “place,” or even one question is–as Michael Hays astutely notes in his reading of Handke’s plays–bound to founder; it must automatically invalidate the critical enterprise by its distortion of the text under critical scrutiny, for Handke’s most recent texts are, to misquote Luce Irigaray, not one. Handke’s recent work can, then, be approached only by circuitous navigation through a series of vectors, such as the ones I just suggested above (but not limited to them), which may or may not form a coherent grid and which may not possess a thematic destination–and this irregular flight-pattern might enable us to begin to appreciate the complexity, richness, and the density of his current project. And if this is so, then perhaps Peter Handke can be defended, after all.

Handke’s defense is, I confess, the directive which orients this essay. But against what charge? Difficulty– insofar as his work refuses to be categorizable? Treason –insofar as his work refuses not to change? And here I sense that I am near the mark, for isn’t Handke the subject of so much argument because he will not compose repetitions of Kaspar for the rest of his life, will not cling to the chic malaise of Short Letter? But, even if I can defend Handke, how am I to defend the form which the present defense takes? If form is to be distrusted, including and especially the essay, then the problem of doing Handke “justice” must become potentially overwhelming, for won’t the (my) literary essay also founder in its attempt to analyze his work at all? Perhaps we should elect not to perform an analysis of Handke; instead, we should make him an instrument rather than an object of scrutiny, as Kathleen McHugh has argued in the case of a very different late 20th Century artist/phenomenon–Madonna. I shy away from this possibility, even as I feel obliged to marshall it, because the unlikely comparison interweaves yet another thread in this tangled grid of Handke-difficulties–namely, the degree to which Handke’s public “persona” shapes and predetermines understandings of his work. I would like to deny that Handke has anything in common with Madonna. He is not the pure object of consumerism, as she is; he is not altogether reducible to a media image; he is the creator of texts more than he is the subject of them. Indeed, the plethora of texts represents yet another one of Handke’s features that drives critics crazy; his productivity ensures that he can not be “kept up with”; he remains always ahead of the critical game and seems determined to hold on to his lead till the finish.

But here the contrast falls back into comparison and further, into a near identity between the two “artists.” For Handke’s maneuvers–his melancholic, apolitical posturing, his deployment of various literary-theatrical media–are by no means dissimilar to Madonna’s–to her continual shift of “subversive” fashion affect and to her multiple appeals to different sorts of media expressions– videos, television interviews, magazine interviews, c.d.’s, books. Certainly, Handke wants to manipulate his own public “image” every bit as much as Madonna does–a fact which, like her, he does not conceal but rather foregrounds. There is a stunning example of this tactic in Goldschmidt’s book about Handke. The study is filled with emotionally charged photographs such as one of Handke as a baby in the arms of his young and beautiful mother (whom the critic will recognize as the heroine of A Sorrow beyond Dreams); near the end, however, appears a photograph of the author kneeling on a living room floor, sorting through a box of photographs. Goldschmidt’s caption explains that this is a picture of the author choosing the photographs for the present book. In this terse undermining of the operator/spectator/spectrum trinity proposed by Roland Barthes Camera Lucida 9), the “subject” Handke–the primary spectator of his own spectral image–ironically imposes his authorial (operational) presence on the work meant to objectify him (make him a spectrum)–signalling among other things, that he will brook no unmediated hermeneutic “mastery” of that cognitive object, the author Peter Handke. He will not, to use the parlance of photography, be captured; instead he will own and use all of photography’s image-repertoires in order not to be seen.¹¹ Autobiographical material becomes, then, for both Madonna and Handke, the screen–the veil and the site of media image–that plays out and thwarts fantasies of control–ours and theirs. And if Madonna struts the stuff of self-conscious, parodistic phallic womanhood with a redundant physical presence, Handke’s mournful, aggressive passivity approaches a hysterical masculinity which would pillory itself in one grand performative gesture–a disappearing act.

Thus, even as I attempt to contemplate the receding object of my inquiry–Peter Handke–even as I essay this essay, I must retain something of McHugh’s Madonna argument; I will have to try to read with him as well as about him. How might one read with as well as about Handke? What would such a reading look like? This is one, tentative, possible, version.

And I can use this digression on Madonna and Handke to circle back to the question of desire raised by Kuzniar and to the constant interpretative reduction of Handke’s work to bloodless readings of one kind or another, which are stripped of any affect other than anger/adulation and inattentive to questions of emotionality and sexuality.¹² While Handke’s own writing would appear to shore up such disembodied interpretations, do not readings of his emotionally understated, repressed texts, neglect the very real passion which infuses even his recent works? The question is begged first, by the sheer mass of emotions and violent passions which seethe and explode within the corpus, and second, by the critical oblivion to which they have, for the most part, been relegated. Professional readers of Handke have reflected very little upon the sexually motivated murder in The Goalie’s Anxiety, the conjugal rage between husband and wife in Short Letter, the resentful Oedipal longing to resurrect the dead mother in Sorrow beyond Dreams, and the complementary adulation of the girl-child as muse in Child’s Story. But what of the problematic patriarchal loves invoked in both Across (the father for the son) and Absence (the son’s elegiac adoration of the lost father)? I will speak more of the loves and pleasures of the Essay series in a moment. Finally, we should not forget that there is a profound adoration of the written word in Handke’s writing–an adulation which has become, visceral, desperate, sensual, and topographical.¹³ Throughout the work of the 80’s we wander the divergent landscapes of Europe: Austria, Slovenia, France, and Spain, and these wanderings are chocked full of literary, cultural evocations, providing a simultaneous geographical and archaeological pleasure–clearly announced as late 20th Century humanity’s only possible, imperfect consolation, at the end of Handke’s strange mock-pastoral, Beyond the Villages. Seen from this point of view, it seems no coincidence that, in the Wim Wenders film Wings of Desire Himmel uber Berlin–for which Handke helped compose the screenplay), Damiel chooses to enter the world of “History” (Geschichte)–at once his story and history through desire; though he is bearer of the divine Logos, the male angel recognizes that the word yields meaning when it is made female flesh–and he must descend from rather than transcend his male sterility by falling down to, not rising with the Goethean “eternal feminine.”¹⁴

How then can we not speak of passion, desire, and pleasure when we speak of Peter Handke’s writing? The critical “We” haven’t until now, because to speak of those things in Handke’s writing is to truly expose both him and “us”; to speak about passion/desire/pleasure in his books is to speak about, among other things, misogyny, sado- masochism, womb-envy, paedophilia, passivity, impotence, and castration, and to speak of those things is to come face to face with the deeply problematized vision of male heterosexuality articulated there. Handke is, to paraphrase Woody Allen, polymorphously perverse, but in contrast to Woody Allen’s smugly neurotic eroticism, there is no self- congratulation of that fact in his work.

Within and against this net of observations/questions about Handke, I circle back once more around the tear which originated this essay: Handke and the postmodern/Handke and his refusal to tell in the Essay series. In these pieces, rather than merely detonating logocentrism from the outside, as he had done before, Handke’s work has another exercise in mind. It seems to actively quest for the missing Logos, by looking for it in the “wrong” places. “Fantasy is my faith,” the first-person narrator/actor tells us in Essay on the successful [prosperous, auspicious] Day (55), and a page later proclaims:

And what did this Nothing and again Nothing do? It meant . . . . And so it went here: as for the Nothing of our time, the main thing now is to let it ripen from morning till evening (or even to midnight?). And I repeat: the idea was light, the idea is light.

[Und was tat dieses Nichts und wieder Nichts? Es bedeutete . . . Und darum ging es hier: das Nichts unsrer Tage, das galt es jetzt "fruchten" zu lassen, von Morgen bis Abend (oder auch Mit- ternacht?). Und ich wiederhole: die Idee war Licht. Die Idee ist Licht.](56)

Yet, even as the possibility of Logos is erected, Handke whittles away at the authority of the traditional male subject in increasingly graphic ways as though performing a process of aesthetic self-castration in payment for a new, legitimized, subjectivity. Particularly because he is a male writer–and ostensibly a heterosexual one–it is impossible for me to contemplate the veritable parade of chaste, solitary, passive male speakers who inhabit his works and not see them as postmodern Abelards; nominally heterosexual, but mysteriously incapacitated, they repeatedly express their feelings of and distance from a sexual desire which seems connected to and yet severed from the desire to put the pen to paper. And are not Handke’s cloistered male porte-paroles markers of what Handke is “doing to” meaning, and to meaning’s traditional receiver/producer? To reparaphrase Hassan’s use of Leiris, Handke’s autobiographical doubles not only expose themselves to the bull’s horn, they allow themselves to be gored (they welcome the penetration); this reverse matadorian spectacle is at once the performance to which we are constantly invited to watch in the Handke texts of the 80’s and the radical cure which we might also enact upon ourselves.

The Essays arguably take their cue from the work of Michel de Montaigne,¹⁵ whose work sought also to interweave a number of discursive threads and to create a complex junction where bellettristic (in the literal sense of beautiful writing), philosophy, politics, autobiography, psychology, epistemology and scientific experiment meet. Montaigne has been seen, recently with increasing enthusiasm, as the herald of modern narrative subjectivity in the West (Auerbach), and there are good reasons for this. Relentlessly anecdotal, understated, erudite, and often ironic, Montaigne’s essays bore curious titles which sometimes had only the slightest relevance to the matter at hand (as in “On Cannibals” [“Des Cannibales”]–where cannibalism is mentioned in a sentence), were peppered with epigraphs and textual references, while the arguments were typically roundabout, if they were in fact discernible, and closed with a lack of authoritative conclusiveness which can still be gleefully frustrating to readers. Montaigne was one of the first Western authors to choose to write about mundane subjects (in both senses–worldly things and unimportant things) in an ongoing project which–in his own resistance to narrative–he came to call, not the His- toire de moi, but the Livre de moi, the book of me. Not coincidentally, the essays derive from and return to a sense of physicality–to the limits of the body, its sicknesses, its death–for the “me” in question here is “matiere,” material, stuff, flesh and bones.¹⁶ There is no transcendental subject in Montaigne, but a quirky mind-body which thinks/feels his way through a writing enterprise that, Lawrence Kritzman writes, becomes both “self- generating” and “autoerogenous” (Kritzman 91), and where a neo-stoic masculine impermeability is repeatedly undercut –but not canceled out–by other subject-voices telling fragments of other stories.¹⁷

Handke uses Montaigne–specifically, but not only, the elements mentioned above–and empties him: the eccentric, hidden relevance of the essay titles in Montaigne become non-topics in Handke–passive interim states (Lyotard’s “things unsayable”), useless, peripheral machinery (“things invisible”), and greeting-card cliches which take the place of such idealistic maxims as “to philosophize is to learn to die.” The jouissance which, as Kritzman notes, is appealed to in Montaigne, and which has characterized the modernist sensibility from Joyce to Barthes (and Barth), is excised and–its absence profoundly felt–the procedure leaves Montaigne’s autoerogenous text as a body with uncertain orientations–a masculine text without qualities, though it still desires. And the “subject”–the controlling ego that informs Montaigne– shudders and splits, becoming a series of impossible “selves,” flat subject speakers–at once solemn and droll, lugubrious and elegant–who posture their ways through language gestures in a spectral conversation. Handke’s radical surgery on Montaigne resembles in respects an autopsy performed by a vampire doctor; the postmodern essay drains the life from the modern and lives on, pumped up momentarily with the knowledge and blood of the dissected deceased–undead, glamorous, meticulous, analytical, thirsting. Montaigne’s cannibal text–the admiring com- mentary which devours classical literature whole and becomes itself a literary product–becomes simultaneously Dracula and Von Helsing–the kiss of death and the cure for modernism.

Thus, Handke’s essays tear much further than ever Montaigne did into anecdotal fragmentation, and where Montaigne is smooth, Handke is jagged, jumpy, and pained. The Versuche function ostensibly as ludic reflections upon the interstices where–officially, as far as traditional Western narrative is concerned–nothing is happening,¹⁸ but these exercises are both playful and sad; they play with melancholy, they are melancholy games, and the game consists at once of formal experimentation and of a deadly serious self-practice–a practice which is in turns therapeutic, mutilating, and transformative; pleasurable, and painful. A somber I comments on the combination of comedy, mundanity, and death in Essay on the successful Day:

Yes, it is as though a certain irony belonged here, in the face of my own self as day by day regularities and episodes--irony from in- clination--, and still, a kind of humor, which named itself after the gallows.

[Ja, es ist, als gehorten dazu eine besondere Ironie, angesichts meiner selbst wie der tagtaglichen Gesetzlichkeiten und Zwischenfalle-- Ironie aus Zuneigung--, und noch, wenn schon eine Art von Humor, der nach dem Galgen benannte.](41)

The first in the series, Essay on Fatigue (1989), furnishes the clearest intertextual response to Montaigne in so far as it may be read as a re-vision of the essays on idleness and sleep, but it frames its non-subject matter within a strange dialogue which unfolds between a writer (possibly, but not necessarily Handke) and another speaker. Although much of the discussion is aesthetic, there is a therapeutic thrust to the proceedings; the writer opens the discussion by manifesting an anxious connection between fatigue and fear, while his analytical interlocutor guides him with short, pointed questions, toward a recognition and articulation of his motivations for wanting to talk about fatigue.

The recognition is both utopian and disappointed/ing, and the narrative circling, linking apparently unrelated personal memories and images, resonates with the trauma of a Freudian case-history, where, to quote Peter Brooks, “narr- ative discourse works intermittently in a dialogic manner (Brooks 57). But the psychoanalytic process is flattened even as it is pursued–its “significance,” its deep personal meaning, and claim to utter seriousness are simultaneously posited and erased. Typically, as in those histories, much is said about childhood, school, first feelings of difference from others, but the conversation glistens with artificiality, even as it assumes a predictably sexual character, focussing on the exhaustion that occurs between men and women and what that signifies in their relationship. These observations lead in turn to a revealing and ludicrous reworking of that masculine erotic icon, Don Juan:

I imagine Don Juan . . . not as a seducer, but rather as a tired, always tired hero, into whose lap, at any given time, at the right moment, in the presence of a tired woman, every one of them will fall.

[Den Don Juan stelle ich mir . . . nicht als einen Verfuhrer, sondern als einen jeweils zur richtigen Stunde, in Gegenwart einer muden Frau, muden, einen immer-muden Helden vor, dem so eine jede in den Schoss fallt. . . .](Uber die Mudigkeit 48)

This image of a passively erotic, feminized (the German “Schoss” means both “lap” and “womb”) masculine exhaustion, that drastically revises a traditional Western image of energetic masculine prowess (providing an ironic gloss both on Mozart’s and on Camus’ Don Juan–the man driven by an excess of love/eros), opens the possibility of a new kind of narrative which would fuse poetry and prose as well as “high” and “low” artistic enunciations:

The inspiration of fatigue says less, what there is to do, as than can be left to happen . . . . A certain tired one (masculine) as another Orpheus, in order to gather the wildest animals to himself and to finally be tired with them . . . . Phillip Marlowe--still a private detective--became better and better, more and more clear-sighted in the solutions of his cases, the more his sleepless nights added up.

[Die Inspiration der Mudigkeit sagt weniger, was zu tun ist, als was gelassen werden kann . . . . Ein gewisser Mude als ein anderer Orpheus, um den sich die wildesten Tiere versammeln und endlich mitmude sein konnen . . . . Phillip Marlowe--noch ein Privatdetektiv--wurde im Losen seiner Falle, je mehr schlaflose Nachte sich reihten, immer besser und scharfsinniger.](74-75)

And yet, the speaker cannot practice this art, he doesn’t know the recipe/prescription [Rezept], and the project of Fatigue reveals itself to be a failure on both culinary and medicinal fronts; it cannot nourish and it cannot cure. The speaker can only defer his failure to a future project, as he looks forward at the close of the discussion to another Essay, whose failure is also already pointed out as imminent, by his skeptical interlocutor:

But in all of Spain there is no jukebox.

[In ganz Spanien gibt es doch keine Jukebox.](78)

The curious picture of Don Juan and the sexual problematic which it implies, the warning of failure, and the formal challenges of telling otherwise are progressively radicalized in the next two Essays. If Essay on Fatigue wants (and yet refuses) to be a therapeutic dialogic text which, to paraphrase Freud’s title–remembers, repeats and works through (Brooks 57)–the non-dialogic format of Essay on the Jukebox (1990) plays out a personal obsession; it is a neurotic monologic text which repeats instead of remembering the origin of its trouble. But here again, the “trauma” is trivialized (although it still hurts), for the loss/absence which motivates the text is situated within the boundaries of post-World-War 2 Western popular culture, and as such, it plays out as both a truncated travesty of a 60’s road movie–the meanderings of a disenfranchised, blocked, obsessed writer on a futile quest in the Spanish countryside for a jukebox (whose image only he glances in a B-movie)–and a stripped-down reverse of Proust’s self-reflexive narrative project¹⁹–the epic novel about the writer’s aesthetic education, which prepares him to compose that same epic novel, pares itself to an essay about an essay (by the same title) which cannot get written. Again, as in Fatigue, the crucial moment of the text concerns a heterosexual encounter, which is once again, viewed in terms of non-action. In the middle of the essay, the writer remembers a chance meeting with an Indian woman in Alaska (an intertextual reference to Slow Homecoming), and compares his refusal of her erotic invitation to Parzival’s failure to ask Anfortas the necessary questions to cure him of his terrible wound (a wound in the testicles). This odd simile suggests that what the chaste, frustrated protagonist of Jukebox may fail to admit, is that his impotence with the pen and with the woman links him not with Parzival but with the castrated Lord of the Grail. The connection with Parzival is not coincidental, for the goal of this essay is, unlike the other two, indeed the obtaining of an object, a feminine vessel which, grail-like, incorporates in its musical contents all of the memories, and well-being of the impotent, exiled protagonist (it is the thing that makes him feel safe, grounded, connected)–all of which suggests that this Versuch can be read, among other things, as an always-already failed quest for the eternal feminine, now recognized as a mere machine, and an outmoded one at that (which connects this work with the impossible quest for the mother’s lost history in A Sorrow Beyond Dreams).

At once a companion piece to and a skeptical corrective of the earlier, more mock-impressionist Afternoon of a Writer, Essay on the Jukebox uses the futile pursuit of the feminine machine as a metaphor to talk about not just desire, and writing, but that other elusive feminine machine called “Geschichte” (the feminine German word for “history”). Writing at the time of the demolition of the Berlin wall, the impotent writer bears symbolic witness to the problem of defining historical moments in our time and questions the rhetoric with which the demise of communism is so celebrated, even as the “execution” of its leaders mimics the violence of the deposed regimes. I read the jukebox as the feminized, fetishized repository of ideological formation, and although the writer can neither vanquish his obsession with it nor replace it with something else, he can bear witness to his own discomfort–aesthetic, sexual, political, historical, physical–and, by transference, to ours. At once a critique of history and HIS STORY, Essay on the Jukebox suggests that any story that the masculine, European, and particularly German subject tells may be a dangerous falsification, but still he is driven to try and fail to write. Like Anfortas, the essayist can neither die nor recover and we, like Parzival, cannot choose but watch the ritual with wonder. “Write yourself free” said the priest to the war traumatized protagonist of Gunther Grass’ Cat and Mouse, but Grass believed in an alternative narrative coherence which might guarantee, if not salvation, then at least a cure to male, German guilt–a grace which Handke’s essayist/assayer both fantasizes about and pointedly denies himself in an act of interrupted metaphysical-political onanism.

Essay on the successful Day (1991) is the most overtly ludic of the three texts. Formally indecisive, it plays compulsively with combinations–the dialogic with the monologic, third, with first and second persons, and verb tenses and moods with each other–toward the accomplishment of a key admission (which comes at the end of the “session”)–namely that the essayist/attempter has never experienced the very day of happiness, success, fulfillment which he repeatedly and unsuccessfully tries to describe. It is here that telling otherwise, pleasure, castration, failure, and writing “come” together in one strangely compelling scene. Telling the story of another person (probably himself) the essayist describes an attempt to saw through a log of wood. The description conveys for seven pages the rhythm and pleasure (“Vergnugen”) of the operation–

but then something threatened, if not the overlooked fork in the bough, (which was about a finger's breadth away from the point, where, the already cut through wood fell anyway, of itself into the lap of the sawer), then that very small and hard layer, in which the steel struck on stone, on nail, on bone in one and so to speak, wrecked the undertaking in the last stroke... There it would have been so close to it, that the sawing for itself, the mere finding-itself- together and being-together with the wood there, its roundness, its fragrance, nothing as the traversal/dimension taking of the material there . . . incarnated for him an ideal from a time of disinterested satisfaction/pleasure. And just as the breaking pencil . . . .

[dann drohte aber, wenn nicht die ubersehene Astgabel, so (meist gerade um eine Fingerbreite weg von dem Punkt, an dem das so weit durchschnittene Holzstuck ohnehin dem Sager von selbst in den Schoss fiel) jene sehr schmale und um so hartere Schicht, in der der Stahl auf Stein, Nagel, Knochen in einem traf und das Unternehmen sozusagen im letzten Takt scheiterte . . . . Dabei ware er doch so nah dran gewesen, dass das Sagen fur sich, das blosse Sich-Zusammenfinden und Zusam- mensein mit dem Holz da, seiner Rundung, seinem Duft, seinem Muster, nichts als das Durchmessen der Materie da . . . ihm ideal den Traum von einer Zeit des Interesselosen Wohlgefallens verkorperte. Und ebenso hatte der abbrechende Bleistift. . . ](48)

This pleasure in pain, this union of the cutter with thing cut which in turn becomes imaginative flesh and bone, suggest that Handke is doing far more than just whittling away at Western literature. His autobiographical narratives, in the Essays at least, have become literally experimental operations–performative attempts (and here narrative becomes for Handke the newest of the new drama)–to enact a bloody refinement, to chop away at himself and at the marker of his writerly masculinity, the pencil and to make this aesthetic unmanning serve to create a new narrative. What is or can be the result? “Not nothing,” says Handke’s essayist–neither nothing nor something, which tells itself in past, present, future, and subjunctive, and which not fear its own demise, its own self-forgetting:

And at the end of the day, this one (masculine) would have called for a book--more than just a chronicle: "the fairy-tale of the successful day." And at the very end the glorious forgetting would still have come, that the day had to succeed.

[Und am Ende des Tags hatte dieser nach einem Buch gerufen--mehr als bloss eine Chronik: "Marchen des gegluckten Tags". Und ganz am Ende ware noch das glorreiche Vergessen gekommen, dass der Tag zu glucken habe . . . . (75)

As the epistle of the imprisoned Paul urgently requests sustenance from Timothy in writing (this is how successful Day closes), so does Handke’s unfolding livre de moi– his postmodern odyssey turned gospel (not “truth,” but “godspell”–good spell, magical phrase, discourse, and tale) according to Peter (the shifting rock of an un- derstanding which must always already deny its ground)– supplicate his fellow-neurotic (the reader, us, me) to move beyond a castrated masculine history towards a feminized (?) narrativity which is by its very nature not one, not finished, which may always give birth to another Essay. “Through our own wounds we shall be healed,” observes the card-playing priest in Across (127), and the Essay series empowers us to reread that resonant line differently, and through that rereading to remap the contours of that gargantuan aesthetic anatomy which we name Handke’s. For is it not precisely within the borders of the wounded space carved out by Handke’s pencil upon the body of his own autobiographical text that we are summoned to perform our own flawed testaments and through that spectacle of failure be made, not whole, but perhaps wholly other and new?

Notes

1. Conversations with Robert Gross, Kathleen McHugh, and John Ganim made this essay “happen.”

2. See for example, June Schleuter’s book.

3. This is a repeat of what Ihab Hassan sees as Richard Porier’s problematic attempt to mediate between the two, The Postmodern Turn, 32.

4. A certain “moral” disgust also permeates many of the recent conversations about Handke which I have been a party to. He was pilloried outright at a special section at the MLA in 1986, where he was accused both of selling out and of writing bad books, and in a more recent MLA session (1992), the post-presentation discussion veered strangely between an outright dismissal of his work as postmodern (which in this context, seemed to mean that it was formulaic and predictable) and a neo-conservative insistence that his art was now concerned purely with “aesthetic problems.” In less formal venues, friends of mine in Germanistik usually roll their eyes in annoyance when I tell them I work on the recent Peter Handke, while acquaintances more directly involved in the arts (in my case, a straight female sculptor from Germany and a gay American director) seem to value what he is doing now.

5. This sexually charged denial has been beautifully evidenced in Peter Strasser’s introduction to his essays on the author in which he declares that he has literally “fallen in love” with the work of Peter Handke twice (the first time being a “naive fascination” in contrast to the second, mature alert understanding of the object), only to insist that such a feeling ensures critical objectivity (Strasser 5).

6. That is not to say that Handke’s earlier work has not encountered negative reception. See Rolf Michaelis, “Ohrfeigen fur das Lieblingskind” in the Works Cited.

7. Skwara is a case in point. He discusses the erotic tiredness in Fatigue without realizing the role it plays–not as a state following the act, but as a replacement for the act itself.

8. I invoke Lyotard here, not because he is the ultimate “authority” on the postmodern, but because the tenor of his writing, his interest in language-games, and his gleeful flirtations with pessimism provide a productive ground on which to think about Peter Handke.

9. Bernd Magnus calls postmodern philosophy a “complex, cluster concept” which includes at least ten elements, but probably more. See “postmodern,” Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (in production).

10. This is a corollary to Stanley Fish’s suggestion that we ask, not what postmodernism means but what it does. See Connor on Fish, 10.

11. In front of the lens, I am at the same time: the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use of to exhibit his art. (Barthes 13)

12. An important exception to this rule is Tilmann Moser’s smart, if anxious, discussion of A Moment of True Feeling and A Sorrow beyond Dreams in his general psychoanalytic reading of contemporary German fiction.

13. Richard Arthur Firda is right when he links Handke and Barthes, but the connection has as much to do with erotics as with semiotics (a false dichotomy if ever there was one). See Firda, 51.

14. This is not to say, however, that there are not real problems with this film as bell hooks has observed in her essay.

15. I am not arguing for an interpretation of Handke in terms of “influence;” rather I am using Montaigne as a concrete example of the many occasions when Handke avails himself of the “common discursive ‘property’” of texts (Hutcheon, 124). Certainly, there are other important essayist-mediators, among them, Barthes, himself an admirer of Montaigne.

16. See Jefferson Humphries’ discussion of “matiere” in “Montaigne’s Anti-Influential Model of Identity.” In Bloom.

17. See Zhang Longxi’s intriguing reading of Montaigne in conjunction with representations of the Other in Western Literature.

18. This narrative of the interstice is one of the possible answers which Handke explores in conjunction with Lyotard’s question about the odyssey.

19. And also Thomas Wolfe’s You can’t go home again.

Works Cited
- Auerbach, Erich. “L’Humaine Condition.” In Bloom, 11-39 (originally published in Mimesis 1953).
- Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1993.
- Bloom, Harold, ed. Montaigne’s Essays. Modern critical interpretations. New York: Chelsea House, 1987.
- Brooks, Peter. “Psychoanalytic constructions and narrative meanings.” Paragraph 7, 1986. 53-76.
- Connor, Steven. Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary. Basil Blackwell: Oxford and Cambridge, 1989.
- Durzak, Manfred. Peter Handke und die Gegenwartsliterature: Narziss auf Abwegen. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1982.
- Firda, Richard Arthur. Peter Handke. Twayne World Authors Series. New York: Twayne, 1993.
- Gabriel, Norbert. “Neoklassizismus oder Postmoderne? Uberlegungen zu Form und Stil von Peter Handkes Werk seit der Langsamen Heimkehr. Modern Austrian Literature 24.3/4, 1991. 99-109.
- Grass, Gunther. Cat and Mouse. Trans. Ralph Mannheim. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1963.
- Handke, Peter. Across. Trans. Ralph Mannheim. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1986.
- —-. Versuch uber den gegluckten Tag. Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp, 1991.
- —-. Versuch uber die Mudigkeit. Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp, 1989.
- —-. Versuch uber die Jukebox. Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp, 1990.
- Hassan, Ihab. The Postmodern Turn: Essays in Postmodern Theory and Culture. Ohio State, 1987.
- Hofmann, Michael. “A superior reality” [a review of Absence]. TLS May 24, 1991, N4599:20.
- Hays, Michael. “Peter Handke and the End of the Modern.” Modern Drama 23:4, 1981. 346-66.
- hooks, bell. “Representing Whiteness: seeing wings of desire.” In Yearning: race, gender, and cultural politics. Boston: South End, 1990.
- Humphries, Jefferson. “Montaigne’s Anti-Influential Model of Identity.” In Bloom, 133-44 (originally published in Losing the Text: Readings of Literary Desire, 1986).
- Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. Routledge: New York and London, 1988.
- Klinkowitz, Jerome and James Knowlton. Peter Handke and the Postmodern Transformation. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1983.
- Kritzman, Lawrence. “My Body, My Text: Montaigne and the Rhetoric of Sexuality.” In Bloom, 81-95 (originally published in the Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 13.1 [1983]).
- Kunzel, Uwe. Wim Wenders: ein Filmbuch. Freiburg: Dreisam, 1989. [contains an interview with Wenders concerning his collaboration with Handke for Himmel uber Berlin]
- Kuzniar, Alice. “Desiring Eyes.” Modern Fiction Studies 36.3, 1990. 355-67.
- Lyotard, Jean-Francois. “Philosophy and Painting in the Age of Their Experimentation: Contribution to an Idea of Postmodernity.” In The Lyotard Reader, Ed. Andrew Benjamin. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989.
- Magnus, Bernd. “Postmodern.” Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy. In production.
- McHugh, Kathleen. “Acrostics.” In Sex? Deconstructing Madonna, Ed. Fran Lloyd. London: Batsford Press (in production).
- Metcalf, Eva-Maria. “Challenging the Arrogance of Power with the Arrogance of Impotence: Peter Handke’s somnambulistic energy.” Moder Fiction Studies 36.3 (1990).
- Michaelis, Rolf, “Ohrfeigen fur das Lieblingskind. Peter Handke und seine Kritiker.” Text + Kritik, 24/24a (1976). 80-96.
- Moser, Tilmann. Romane als Krankengeschichten. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985.
- Ortheil, Hans-Joseph. “Das Lesen–ein Spiel. Postmoderne Literatur? Die Literatur der Zukunft.” Die Zeit 24.4. 1987
- Schlueter, June. The Plays and Novels of Peter Handke. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsrugh P, 1981.
- Slovsky, Viktor. “Art as Technique.” In Russian Formalist Criticism, Ed. Lee T. Lemon and Marion Reis. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1965. 11-12.
- Shooman, Diane. “From Episodic Space to Narrative Space: The Search for Unity in Peter Handke’s Fiction and the Paintings of Ursula Hubner.” MAL 23.3/4, 1990. 87-97.
- Skwara, Erich Wolfgang. “Peter Handke, Versuch uber die Mudigkeit.” World Literature Today 64:3, Summer 1990. 460-1.
- Strasser, Peter. Der Freudenstoff: Zu Handke eine Philosophie. Salzburg: Residenz, 1990.
- Vivis, Anthony. “Own goal” [review of Handke’s Versuch uber die Jukebox]. TLS N4566:1073, Oct. 5, 1990.
- White, J.J. “The elusive perfect day” [review of Handke’s Versuch uber den gegluckten Tag]. TLS N4618:34, Oct.4, 1991.
- Zhang, Longxi. “The cannibals, the ancients, and cultural critique: reading Montaigne in postmodern perspective.” Human Studies 16.51-68, 1993. 51-68.
- Ziolkowski, Theodore. “Peter Handke, Versuch uber die Jukebox.” World Literature Today 65:2, Spring 1991. 360.
September 25, 2013
“It Dread Inna Inglan”: Linton Kwesi Johnson, Dread, and Dub Identity

Peter Hitchcock

Department of English
Baruch College, CUNY

Postmodern Culture Version1

it is noh mistri
wi mekkin histri
it is noh mistri
wi winnin victri

(“Mekkin Histri” LKJ)

“The trouble with the English is that their history happened overseas, so they don’t know what it means”

(The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie)

In order to appreciate the achievement of Linton Kwesi Johnson (LKJ), the African/Caribbean/European dub poet, one must come to terms with the cultural specificity of the voice, and what the voice can do. Mekkin histri. Making history? What recidivism might this be at the end of the twentieth century? The double-displacement of an African- Caribbean Black living in England, diaspora upon diaspora, comes with a double-indemnity–making and history. What cultural logic obtains in the construction/reconstruction of subjectivity as subaltern, the articulation of the margin, the trace, the veve, that still allows a trenchant sense of history, of the need to make history? Can we still conceive of subjects that make history, have a history to make, remake at a cacophonous rendezvous of victory? To understand why this notion is not a mystery (the History, for instance, of imperialist certitude) but a problematic, one must understand what makes this history: one must come to terms with the history of the voice, what Kamau Brathwaite calls the “invitation and challenge,”² or what Edouard Glissant defines as “literature” and “oraliture” (the fragmented and therefore shared histories and voices of peoples).³ One can read this history as an introduction in LKJ’s sonorous beat, and one can see this history in a dissidence of voice, in all its synesthesia and dislocation.

The sounds of dislocation. Our trust in electricity makes the archive of the voice seem a recent technology: LKJ himself is “available in all three formats” (CD, cassette, and the fast disappearing LP). But the voice at issue has, shall we say, a much longer geneology, a history that “happened overseas.” Thanks to Columbus’s “discovery” (the kind of “surprise” common to colonialism), the Amerindians of the Caribbean were soon in short supply and so began one of the darkest chapters in forced relocation and labor in human history. Except, of course, that such a chapter remains largely unwritten, not just because of racist ideology, the loathsome lacuna of the “official story,” but because this history is an archaeology of voice, a history intoned more than inscribed. As such, it is a history articulated in the clash and fierce concatenation of colonial power and resistance characterized by the internecine struggles of languages and cultures, Ashanti, Yoruba, Congolese, French, English, Spanish, and Dutch. The word creole only begins to do justice to the range of this struggle even if its logic of hybridity suggests a new understanding of what constitutes “sound” evidence. Theory has trained us, and rightly so, to be suspicious of the voice and the ontology it confers. Yet, what I am calling dub identity is not about the presence of being, but being in between, the “Middle Passages” that Brathwaite (among others) has elaborated, or the “black atlantic” model that Paul Gilroy has proposed.⁴ The problem of dub is the sound of diaspora, and its doubling, its versions. Thus, if the following notes are read as an introduction to LKJ, they only begin to imagine the utterance he makes, in all its complexity, as testimony and travelogue: the subjective states of being, in between.

Obviously, in his history of the voice Brathwaite is not claiming that dub poetry, Jamaican “sound” poetry, the righteous riddim of resistance, is purely a phenomenon of sound (who would want to fall into that Cartesian chasm of speech/writing made infamous by Derrida?). He is saying, however, that without an adequate theory of performativity and voice one cannot hope to fathom cultural expression under the mark of cultural erasure, the colonizer/ postcolonizer’s denial of voice, whether poetic, polemical, or political. For Brathwaite, language from the Anglophone Caribbean is “a process of using English,” not just in the well-documented sense of creolization (patois), but a particular socialization of the voice. Brathwaite’s specific concern has been for an anglophone hybridization bred of slavery and colonization with all the linguistic and cultural displacement that that has entailed. For Afro- Caribbean poetry this has meant not just an agonistic social function but a particular struggle over social forms of poetry. As Brathwaite pithily puts it, “the hurricane does not roar in pentameters.”⁵ Although on one level this means attempting to reproduce the sounds of specific natural experiences of the Caribbean peoples, Brathwaite also wants to emphasize the disruptive potential of these experiences and the resistance riddim they inculcate. So even when Brathwaite displays a particular respect for the poets who challenge English from within (his list includes a tradition from Chaucer to Eliot), they are not the poets of a “nation language,” the product and medium of this radically different purview.

“Nation language” is an extremely problematic term used to register the “submerged” capacity of dialect, of African intonation and derivation. Brathwaite distinguishes nation language from dialect because of the negative connotations associated with the latter (“bad English” etc.) but the concept of nation itself does not arrive free from contaminants, particularly those associated with the identification processes that fueled imperialist subjugation (and in addition leads Cesaire to the abrupt but pertinent conclusion that “nation is a bourgeois phenomenon”). As Benedict Anderson’s oft-quoted analysis of nations and nationality has shown, a national identity may involve active forgetting, a lack of historicity precisely the obverse of Brathwaite’s cultural impetus.⁶ Yet we cannot simply dismiss the prescience of Brathwaite’s appeal based on the sordid histories of Western imperialism. That is to say, a nation looks considerably different through the perspective of an oppressed collectivity which, while not immune to the power abuses that national selfhood may confer, may produce a significant communal resistance in tracing such an identity. For our purposes the paradox of “nation” is appropriate, for what seems to reify “nation” in the Caribbean context can vilify it in the tortuous confines of Black Britain. LKJ’s deployment of “nation language” then, serves to undermine a particularly nefarious manifestation of the nation state. Before examining LKJ’s particular form of dissidence and dissonance, I want to consider how Glissant figures the nation in Caribbean discourse, for he too is deeply concerned with how the postcolonial Caribbean subject finds a voice, makes a history.

As a Martinican, Glissant is less concerned with the hegemony of the English pentameter, but in his poetry, plays, fiction, and criticism he is keenly aware of the psychic disabilities that can accompany acculturation within imperial and colonial codes. Readers of Fanon will be familiar with this critique, but suprised perhaps to find that, forty years later, the dissociation of self endemic to the colonial moment still conditions to a great degree the formation of Martinican identity. For Glissant, the crisis is severe, for without measured attempts to articulate a collective memory, the break from the non-identity or “non- history” as French history, the prospects are indeed bleak, as he shows in a table imbricating economic and literary production.⁷ Within a range of contingent possibilities, Glissant sees “oblivion or organization of a Martinican economy,” “isolation as ‘French’ or integration in the Caribbean,” “sterilization or creative explosion,” and “disappearance of a community or birth of a nation.” The either/or rhetoric might seem uncompromising, but Glissant is attempting to ward off a cultural and political complacency that is eroding a viable Caribbean collectivity. But neither is he separatist: Glissant advocates a cross- cultural poetics, a creolization of cultures that celebrates the strategic value of revoicing the Caribbean’s ingrown diversity outwards. In this sense, creole can no longer subsist as a secret code: by opening to the world it changes itself and the world. But, more importantly, this gives the lie to the totalizing force of History, as a Hegelian construct, for this History is “fissured by histories” as Glissant notes, as Literature is fragmented by literatures, by “oraliture” as he calls it–the submerged voice of the collective.

There is no neat equivalence or complementarity in the formulations of Brathwaite and Glissant, just as one would have to specify the discursive alterity of their African- American counterparts (“nation language” and “oraliture” bear comparison with what Henry Louis Gates Jr. in another context has studied as “signifyin’,” or what Houston Baker has pursued in the Blues as forceful variations of the vernacular⁸), but they both underline that there are conceptual as well as geographic or spatial links between the islands of the Caribbean. Among them, the voice is integral to the function of memory but does not answer the question “Who am I?” that existential staple common to the discourse of colonialist angst (Prospero’s perplexity or Kurtz’s confusion); it does, however, inflect the transcultural “Who are we?” in which the “we,” although radically particularized rather than an illusory unity, recalls a historical dialogue about the cause and course of fragmented community, the diasporic disjunction and displacement wrought by the arrogance of power and the will- to-silence of colonial history. Brathwaite and Glissant, then, speak differently, but they both know the tenor of resistance. And this is as important in LKJ’s Jamaica as it is in Barbados or Martinique–the roots which lead to Inglan.

LKJ was born in Chapelton, Jamaica, 1952. When his mother left for England LKJ soon followed, at the age of 11. They lived on the outskirts of Brixton, well-known for its Afro-Caribbean community, where LKJ experienced not only a taste of home but a new perspective on the metropolitan centre. He recalls: “I [saw] a white man sweeping the streets. All the white people I saw in Jamaica drove fish- tail cars and smoked cigars. So when I saw someone, a white person, actually sweeping the streets it was a bit of a revelation.”⁹ So along with a profound consciousness of racism in London, the postcolonial heart of Inglan, LKJ quickly learned that the white man’s History was also “fissured” by the history of class, a constituent feature of the doubling of diaspora, and a significant mark of LKJ’s political perspicacity. In general, LKJ defies the assumptions that make poet and activist mutually exclusive terms. Not long after leaving school LKJ became involved with the Black Panthers and, although he had a full time job with the GLC (the now defunct Greater London Council) he spent as much time again organizing members, attending meetings, and distributing pamphlets. When the British government found ways to break up the Panther movement it did not stop LKJ’s involvement in Black community politics. By 1976 he was an official member of the Race Today Collective which, under the leadership of LKJ’s friend, Darcus Howe, has become a leading force in Black British struggle. Many of LKJ’s cultural initiatives, like “Creation for Liberation,” have developed under the aegis of Race Today. And, for much of his career, LKJ has maintained a gruelling schedule of readings in schools, universities, colleges, youth centres, community centres, and concert halls (which in part explains why his voice has remained defiantly public and sensitive to community issues). Among many other cultural activities LKJ has organized an international poetry reading (and produced the album of this event), presented a documentary on Carifesta for BBC television called “From Brixton to Barbados” and narrated a series on the history of Jamaican popular music for BBC radio called “From Mento to Lovers Rock.” LKJ is not interested in replacing the Ivory Tower with an Ebony one.

But what are the salient characteristics of the voice that LKJ brings from Jamaica? The voice is set to a rhythm, a beat that enunciates a conundrum, what Glissant calls “inscrutability” as an expression of freedom of Caribbean peoples. If for Glissant, this rhythm is initially characterized by beguine and later by a vibrant hybrid of salsa, reggae, and jazz; and if for Brathwaite what shatters the pentameter is primarily calypso; then for LKJ the riddim is reggae, which invokes both his Jamaican home, and the specific realities of Britain’s Afro-Caribbean communities. Interestingly, the origin of the word “reggae” is largely unknown. In Jamaican English it may recall rege-rege, a quarrel or a row, but it also has been linked to the sound of the guitar in the rhythm and to “raggedy,” meaning everyday or from the people. One thing is certain, since Toots Hibbert, who is usually credited with coining the word, wrote “Do the Reggay” in 1968, reggae followed LKJ to London, rather than him taking it with him.¹⁰ This is important because Black Britons do not just remember the countries of their past, they continually reinvent them as a challenge to the nationhood they now confront. And, as Paul Gilroy has noted, the focus of the alternative public spheres they create is musical.¹¹ Nation languages are sound systems.

If LKJ’s poetry deploys Brathwaite’s sense of “nation language” it does so as an impasse, a knot that cannot simply be untied by more generally accepted definitions of national selfhood. The doubling of diaspora requires a supplementary (simultaneous rather than sequential) notion of such language to acknowledge both the geographic displacement and that, to borrow a popular phrase, “the empire strikes back.” This would be a “version” of “dissemiNation,” in Homi Bhabha’s terms, “the moment of the scattering of the people that in other times and other places, in the nations of others, becomes a time of gathering.”¹² Again, the version is characterized by sound, the community is gathered in an aural mix which, because it is sound (and not whole) is in continual flux: there are versions of versions. The version supplements both the nation and dissemiNation because, although the latter is characterized by a theory of performativity, it elides the “inscription” of the voice in the other narration of nation. For once, the perquisites of deconstruction would seem to mitigate against the realities of a specific diasporic culture even as it aptly describes the decentering and irreducible processes at work. For the sake of argument, let us say (in a creolized version of Marx’s eleventh thesis) that philosophers have grafted the world, the point here is to dub it.

Of course, the heritage of sound serves another national function. Indeed, LKJ’s voice is at once a critique of the imagined community of “Britishness” resplendent in the lamentable wave of authoritarian populism now known as Thatcherism¹³ (Thatcher herself is described by LKJ as the “wicked wan”¹⁴). That nation, despite its recalcitrant xenophobia, is all but dead. The problem, of course, is that this older paradigm of national purity (the little englander mentality) has, in its death throes, created a new culture of white anomie which, though assured of failure, seriously disables a more edifying vision of human community. And the African-Caribbean peoples of Britain, like their post-colonial Asian counterparts, are caught up in the manichean logic of exclusion/inclusion that drives the hegemonic ethnos and its attendant phantasms. From New Cross to Brixton, from Toxteth to Moss Side, from Southall to Notting Hill (a geography not of violence, but resistance and affirmation), this is what I want to critique as the culture and condition of dread. Dread, here, has several meanings that have to be thought simultaneously and in collision for LKJ’s voice and voicing to be understood. Dread has its roots (!) in Jamaican Rastafari, the religious cultural movement, and, in that declension, describes a communal realization: “the awesome, fearful confrontation of a people with a primordial but historically denied racial selfhood.”¹⁵ More generally, it connotes a sense of crisis (“Dread in a Babylon”), whether political or cultural, of apocalyptic nature in which social contradictions cannot be answered accept by an intense destabilization of the “order of things.” And, of course, there is dread as danger, because every stand against injustice invites retribution from those who see inequity as a niggling but necessary byproduct of their barbarism. Then there is dread as defiance:

Maggi Tatcha on di go wid a racist show but a she haffi go kaw, rite now, African Asian West Indian an' Black British stan firm inna Inglan inna disya time yah.far noh mattah wat dey say, come wat may, we are here to stay inna Inglan, inn disya time yah....

(LKJ “It Dread Inna Inglan”¹⁶)

This marks a significant difference with LKJ’s Caribbean counterparts, for there is no ideology of return in LKJ’s view. Brathwaite, for one, went back to Africa, to Ghana, to rediscover his roots, then crossed the Atlantic once more to elaborate on his experiences. And, as is well known, Jamaican Rastafari includes a roots thematic specifically focused on Ethiopia as the domain of Haile Selassie, the reincarnation of Jah (and therefore Ethiopia is viewed as a promised land). Even when fronting Rasta Love, the band he named, LKJ never felt comfortable with this view: “I couldn’t identify with this Selassie thing. I just couldn’t identify with that at all.”¹⁷ So even though rasta provides an oppositional politics for LKJ (in its various challenges to ideologies of racial subordination and, indeed, capitalism), the deployment of dread is quite specific in his work, and is overdetermined by Inglan’s situation.

dis is di age af reality but some a wi a deal wid mitalagy dis is di age of science an' teknalagy but some a wi a check fi antiquityw'en we can't face reality wi leggo wi clarity

(“Reality Poem,” LKJ)¹⁸

In a way, this is closer to Glissant’s notion of decentered Caribbeanness, a condition much more suspicious of prelapsarian origins as a solution to psychological dislocation. When Glissant left Martinique, it was for Paris on a scholarship. The relocation of Afro-Caribbeans to England after the Second World War was not primarily a function of educational opportunities (although these cannot be discounted), but an economic decision fostered by the machinations of a British government newly cognizant of its labor shortages. Dread manifests itself in many ways in LKJ’s poetry but in general it is used to describe the material conditions of Black Britain, or Inglan, an existence suppressed or marginalized in the consciousness of England, or White authority.

Dread is underlined by dub. Dub sharpens the defiance by writing over the OED, by spelling the sounds of actual English usage in the anglophone African/Caribbean community. Dub itself describes the paradox of the poet’s voice, for dub means both the presence and the absence of Jamaican speech rhythms. Again, a confrontation with deconstruction’s primary reflex might seem in order (the word as the presence of an absent voice) but that only partially explains the paradox at issue. Dub is instrumental reggae, reggae with the lead vocal track removed and replaced (by a sound engineer) with various sound effects (echoes, reverberation, loops, vocal bites, etc.). Dub reggae’s very emphasis on production, on mixing, is itself a challenge to the ideology of the artist as performer or originator (and is sometimes snubbed by reggae artists precisely because it threatens or subverts their copy-rights). This feature emerges in many other forms of popular music (for instance, rap, techno-punk, and rave), which all sample each other with wild abandon, but often as much with the voice track as without. But if dub reggae mixes out the vocals, dub poetry lays down the voice as an instrument within the reggae beat; indeed, the voice is so closely allied with this beat that if you remove the reggae instrumentation you can still hear its sound in the voice of the poem. Dub means simultaneously instruments without voices and voices without instruments. This neat chiasmus is not a tribute to the wily signifier so much as a product of dread identity, subaltern subjectivity as sound, silence, and warning. Dub is underlined by dread.

The paradox of dub as it signifies dread is a function of its multi-levelled etymology. Obviously, the lingo of the sound engineer is paramount, although this was formerly associated with the manipulation of sound and voice tracks in cinematic production or the copying of film onto film. Copying is important, both as a productive capacity and as a logic of repetition. Because of the question of property rights, dubbing is tantamount to repetition as sedition (dub has also meant “to forge keys” as well as “to lock up”; and “to invest with a dignity” as well as “to smear with grease” in two other instances of self-deconstruction). Coincidentally, perhaps, dub has an onomatopoeic function, specifically in “dub” and “dub-a-dub,” the sound of a beating drum. As LKJ recalls in “Reggae Sounds,” the drum is integral to the beat: “Thunda from a bass drum sounding/ lightning from a trumpet and a organ/ bass and rhythm and trumpet double-up/ team-up with drums for a deep doun searching.”¹⁹ I will say more about the bass in due course, but the point here is to emphasize dub’s undecidability and its technical associations which are both highly evocative of its cultural politics. The latter, ultimately, is what dread is all about.

Although dub poetry is now associated with a number of poets (Oku Onuora, Mikey Smith, Mutubaruka, Brian Meeks, Breeze, Anita Stewart, etc.) it is almost synonymous with LKJ. Indeed, he claims to have coined the term in the early Seventies.²⁰ For LKJ, dub poetry should be distinguished from dub lyricism, the latter being the process by which deejays lay down their own voice track over reggae (he has in mind Big Youth, U-Roy, I-Roy)–we know this more commonly as “talk-over” or “toasting.”²¹ Dub lyricism is the voice at its most spontaneous for (with the original voice track removed) the deejay can directly involve his or her audience through call and response methods, or by using current events to recontextualize the dread. Toasting, then, is a special skill tuned in to the tenor of the live event which in the Seventies and early Eighties was epitomized by the one thousand watt-plus sound system discos (either those of the clubs, or the more underground roving systems set up in abandoned houses or warehouses or sometimes just in the street until the police or authorities found a way to pull the plug). Obviously, there is some overlap in LKJ’s work: “It Dread Inna Inglan” on the album Dread Beat and Blood begins with call and response and features a crowd chanting “Free George Lindo” (the reference is to a wrongful arrest case in Bradford). Also, the fact that LKJ himself has released dub versions of his dub poetry (most conspicuously, the album LKJ in Dub) and thereby allows his music to be “talked over” would seem to make the practical separation of dub poetry from dub lyricism problematic. The main difference, however, is that dub poetry privileges the word over the music, or else incorporates the rhythm of the instruments into its enunciation. For LKJ in particular, the poetry should outlast its musical accompaniment or affiliation. This is an oddly purist and anti-populist stance but it has several explanations.

The first is that LKJ considers himself a poet, and not a reggae artist. Clearly, he has learned much from reggae and the musical traditions on which it is based (like mento, ska, rude-boy, and rock-steady) but he does not believe that reggae can exhaust the possibilities of poetry in African/Caribbean cultural expression. Indeed, in a scathing review of Bob Marley in 1975 LKJ suggests that it is reggae music’s commercialization which underlines the danger in the poet becoming overly dependent on it. He cites the example of Marley being “found” by Island Records’ Chris Blackwell (referred to as the “descendant of slave masters”) and promoted as a “Rasta rebel” to boost lagging record sales. The irony is obvious:

The "image" is derived from rastafarianism and rebellion, which are rooted in the historical experience of the oppressed of Jamaica. It then becomes an instrument of capital to sell Marley and his music, thereby negating the power which is the cultural manifestation of this historical experience. So though Marley is singing about "roots" and "natty," his fans know not. Neither do they understand the meaning or the feeling of dread. And there is really no dread in Marley's music. The dread has been replaced by the howling rock guitar and the funky rhythm and what we get is the enigma of "roots" and rock.²²

One wonders what LKJ would have to say about Shabba Ranks and other notables of Ragga (a hybridization of rap and reggae) or dancehall stylee? Dread, here, seems to contain its own fear, in this case connected to the rock industry’s economic and race relations: in short, the twin demons of sell-out and cross-over. For LKJ, commercial dread is either dreck or simply a contradiction in terms: it is reggae shorn of its sense of crisis, of its political edge. One could argue that Marley contradicts LKJ’s case, but LKJ’s musical career itself proves that the rock industry is not quite the monolothic capitalist entity that he makes it out to be. Indeed, LKJ’s break into pop occurred a couple of years later in his relationship with Virgin Records. Initially, he wrote biographies to accompany Virgin’s emerging list of reggae artists but eventually he got a chance to cut a record of his poems (drawn principally from the Dread Beat and Blood collection) with a reggae backing (LKJ had been doing this since 1973 with his band Rasta Love, but without a recording contract). While it was Mike Oldfield rather than reggae that catapulted Virgin towards multinational goliath status, LKJ’s point about capital remains pertinent: the corporate deployment of reggae directly supports those it putatively opposes. Taking poetry seriously simultaneously distances the white-dominated media conglomerates for which multiculturalism means capital diversity, while it also assures that the poetry itself can only have a local effect. With the market for printed poetry being so small, the dub poet must rely on live performance as the focus for the message, but for LKJ this means reading principally without the reggae band. Since his “farewell performance” in December, 1985 in Camden, LKJ has made less band-backed appearances, although the release of a new music collection Tings an Times in 1991 underlines that his concert farewell did not end his desire to produce reggae albums. Yet if economic exigency can be seen to compromise LKJ’s poetic principles the general rule remains that he is suspicious of reggae more because of the industry in which it is entwined than its tendency to demote the voice and the dread it embodies.

Connecting this notion of voicing dread and making history suggests an important way of understanding the construction of the subaltern subject. Dub has its own code of othering which distances and/or alienates official discourse while addressing the real foundations of the Black community (the economic plight of postcolonialism, the racism of neo-colonialism, etc.). That the subaltern subject is an active political subject is crucial to LKJ’s history of/in the voice, which provides a significant documentary record of recent race relations in Britain. “New Cross Massakhah,” for instance, is not just a harrowing description of the arson murder of at least thirteen young Blacks attending a birthday party in South London in 1981, but also a story of community outrage, mobilisation, and protest. The Race Today Collective organized a mass demonstration to call attention both to the burgeoning violence against Blacks and to the woeful misrepresentation of the Massacre in the British press.²³ For the poem, the point of crisis is also the point of memory. The narrator of the poem recalls the party as a celebration of community culture (“di dubbin/ an di rubbin/ an di rackin to di riddim”) and the violence and subsequent hypocrisy as an affront to the same, while constantly appealing to the community’s sense of this crisis (“yu noh remembah”). In particular, the poem draws a distinction between this community identity and the infamous “public” which is seen to be much too malleable before the police, the press, and the government’s “official story.” The rhythm of the story switches between the liveliness of the party and the heavier bass beat of the aftermath and this itself is a measure of dread. But the beat underscores the resistance polemic that is the content of the poem (“wi refuse fi surrendah/ to dem ugly inuendoh”). As with many of LKJ’s poems, the dread emerges in the difference between the “England” of the dominant public sphere and the “Inglan” of a historically specific English community. Although the outrage over New Cross was not the only cause, the riots across England in 1981 were a product of this glaring cultural, social, and political discrepancy. In this sense, the dub poet does not describe the crisis but articulates it as a function of contemporary community relations (in Jamaica dub serves a similar agonistic purpose). The aesthetics of dub poetry are not founded on description but praxis and the “wi” of its community appeal.

“New Cross Massakhah,” (like LKJ’s “Di Great Insohreckshan” about the riots of ’81, and “Sonny’s Lettah” about the notorious “sus” law) evokes a poignant aesthetic of song and solidarity–the “Other” talks back, and dialogically. By this I mean to invoke Bakhtin’s sense of the utterance being authored by the other.²⁴ Since the addressor anticipates audience response, the other voice is embedded in the speaker’s text. Each word is structured by the relationship between speaker and listener and the immediate conditions in which that “exchange” takes place. As we know, Bakhtin tended to hypostatize the novel as form, but there is good reason to dialogize dialogics through and beyond that domain. Thus, if the subaltern does not speak, as such, it is only within the restrictive logics and codes of the dominant discourse. This raises the paradox of dub once more, for there the subaltern is not represented but is heard. On the one hand, the social conditions dub critiques engage a particular community and context; on the other, the alienating English of dub distances the normative and normalizing tones of the linguistic orthodoxy (“Queen’s English” or “BBC English,” for instance).

But the language of dub also calls attention to the racial differences that stratify Britain’s working classes. This, of course, has been the explicit subject of several reggae talk-over hits, the most famous of which is Smiley Culture’s “Cockney Translation.” Both Gilroy and Hebdige have provided cogent analyses of this brilliant paean to multiple voicing, but Smiley was not the first to highlight the differences within, in this case, working-class London. Cockney meets patois in LKJ’s 1979 poem “Fite Dem Back” which ventriloquizes London’s white working class as a harbinger of racist attitudes. The clash of language is also a struggle of race relations. The first verse of “Fite Dem back” begins with a “version” of Cockney: “we gonna smash their brains in/ cause they ain’t got nofink in ’em.”²⁵ The second verse replies to this National Front mentality with “some a dem say dem a niggah haytah” and continues, “fashist an di attack/ noh baddah worry ’bout dat/ fashist an di attack/ wi wi’ fite dem back.” The simplified sociology of “us” and “them” (“wi” and “dem”) is, as I’ve argued elsewhere, not a function of crass dichotomous thinking, but a register of strategic opposition.²⁶ Not all Cockneys are fascists, but “dem” who are must be challenged. The value of Bakhtin’s theory of the utterance and, indeed, Brathwaite’s notion of nation language, is that both provide models for understanding community address at the macro- and micro- social levels. And the artist, in both cases, must have a highly developed sense of public voice and responsibility, or what Bakhtin calls “answerability.”

Dub emphasizes what constitutes a voice in social discourse.²⁷ Mikey Smith, whose brutal murder in 1983 cut short the career of Jamaica’s premier dub poet, always wrote his poems, but the scripts do little justice to the instrumentation of his voice in live performance. Brathwaite comments that Smith “published” his poetry at public poetry readings, and notes that transcription of Smith’s voice is especially difficult when he includes noise, such as an imitation of a motorbike, to extend syllables at key moments (I will return to noise in due course). The word “woe” in his poem, “Me Cyaan Believe It” on the album version is a scream of almost four seconds in length, yet in his poetry collection, It A Come, it is rendered as “woeeeeeeee” which, while emphatic, does not convey the effect. Interestingly, at a recent conference in New York honoring Brathwaite, LKJ recited Smith’s poem from memory and followed the rhythm and stress of the album version almost exactly. Clearly, LKJ was dependent on Smith’s oraliture and his own experience of Smith recitations for his performance (the vocal clues are not sufficient in the written text). This underlines a paradoxical degree of unrepeatability and untranslatability in dub poetry that resists its reproduction as writing. The coding of dub is in tune with the live event and the community in which that event occurs.²⁸ Bakhtin’s term “eventness” (sobytiinost’) describes this material specificity, a moment that constrains abstract transcription. Although Bakhtin has in mind an “act” rather than a speech act, he believes such activity should be linked to the process of art, art as an event of being rather than an object of “purely theoretical cognition.”²⁹ Again, the key to the event is the co- authoring of the addressee, a sympathetic “co-experiencing” certainly more possible in an Afro-Caribbean community than, for instance, the halls of Westminster or Scotland Yard in their current forms. What makes for identification in one context might make for alienation and hostility in another. The dub poet is sensitive to the “eventness” of dub poetry and knows that one community’s dread is another community’s fear. LKJ, then, does not “give voice to the struggle” so much as explore how the voice is structured from within by struggle as a material context, both as social oppression and as linguistic violence.

Thus, Bakhtin’s assertion that cultural voice always exceeds the personal, the individual, has a particular resonance in the dub poet’s community address–and for Black Britain at present, this voice is constructed at the margin where it (dialogically) confounds the centripetal logic of a “little englander” mentality. In addition to Bakhtin’s dialogism, such a reading picks up on Homi Bhabha’s notion of “dissemiNation” as a liminality of cultural identity, but double-voicing, in principle, is also highly evocative of dub’s doubling of English. This doubling forms a coda to Gates’s elaboration of the “talking book” in African vernacular traditions because here we have not just texts talking to one another in their revoicing of the history of black struggles but an emphasis on speech qua speech as a (dis)figuring of moribund nationalist ideology. Dub poetry would seem to be a rather obvious “speakerly text,” but it is my contention that it is better heard as a textualizing voice. The four beat bass rhythm of reggae (with its stress on beats two and four) might carry this voice, but what articulates it as such is the ambivalent subjectivity of dread. This is not a jargon of authenticity but an intimation of crisis in excess of its putative speaker. Voice, then, instantiates dread in two ways, the first of which is characterized by Kobena Mercer in his Bakhtinian model of Black British aesthetics: At a micro-level, the textual work of creolizing appropriation activated in new forms of black cultural practice awakens the thought that such strategies of disarticulation and rearticulation may be capable of transforming the ‘democratic imaginary’ at a macro- level by ‘othering’ inherited discourses of English identity.³⁰

The second instantiation, which is not presence but present danger, is (like Mikey Smith’s “woe”) to make the voice noisy; that is, to employ sound as syntax, as syncopation, as “sonority contrasts” (Brathwaite), and as instrumentation. This is the measure of dread beat, for it picks away at authority’s rationalism (Thatcher’s and now Major’s monotonous “common sense”). Dread beat interrogates and interpolates this often harmful status quo by not being quiet. As LKJ notes, “To us, who were of necessary birth, for the earth’s hard and thankless toil, silence ‘as no meaning” (“Two Sides of Silence”). While African American rap has provided an exhortation to “bring the noise,” dub poetry has been doing this for quite some time and belongs to the same tradition of affective sound. But LKJ’s move beyond silence suggests a doubling or troubling of identity for, as Jacques Attali has pointed out, what noise is to chaos, music is to community. Dub fashions both: the noise destabilizes the false ontology of Britishness (an oxymoronic discordant harmony) while the dread riddim provides a musical gloss on the fractured and tenuous realities of the diasporic subject.

I have been trying to suggest how the voice of dub poetry instantiates a version of making history: the voice, here, as an active component of community identity. In the main, reggae has provided dub with its dread riddim but, as we have noted, LKJ believes that dub is not reducible to reggae even if it owes it a rhythmic allegiance. As with most “sound” protest, dub’s doubling provides a subaltern community with a medium for resistance and active intervention in the political arena. While this might seem to confine dub poetry to the margins as subculture, this does not mean cultural subservience. In fact, I believe it is closer to what Deleuze and Guattari have examined as the deterritorializations of “minor literature,” but in this case as a textualizing voice.³¹ LKJ’s “Bass Culture” is typical of the (sub)cultural (sub)version of dub. Obviously, the title puns on bass as being both the instrument of the beat and as being somehow obnoxious or repulsive. Who finds the bass base goes to the heart of the politics of culture that dub foregrounds. On the face of it, “Bass Culture” exudes all the major features discussed so far: the thumping beat of bass is its subject matter, here tied to the beating of the heart but also to Brathwaite’s point about the rhythm of the storm; it is a poem about dread, both as threat and as cultural identity (“dread people”); the violence it registers has everything to do with the tropical storm it imitates and the history of oppression it records and from which it learns; the voice is both musical as it follows the bass line, and noisy, as it makes a thunder crack (“SCATTA-MATTA-SHATTA-SHACK”) a slogan of defiance; the voice is specific about its own musical moment (“an di beat will shiff/as di culture altah/when oppression scatta”) which will pass according to a particular historical situation; in acknowledging the power of the voice (partially indicated in the dedication to Mr.Talk-Over, “Big Yout”) it makes no claims as to its originality but instead emphasizes a shared sense of “latent powa” as a bloodline of history, a “muzik of blood”; and the dread is a threat because it challenges the norm (“the false fold”) in its language, its riddim, and, of course, in its title. But there is also an ambivalence of context in “Bass Culture” that allows dread to signify simultaneously in two moments of identity. The first is the colonial condition in which dread is the “latent powa” that eventually comes “burstin outta slave shackle/ look ya! boun fi harm di wicked.” The second moment, however, is the dread present where this same latency must be utilized to “scatta” oppression within postcoloniality. Dread keeps the “culture pulsin” with bass riddim as long as it is “BAD OUT DEY”–a situation that did not necessarily end with the independence of Jamaica or the migration of some of its population to Britain. Dread, then, becomes a conceptual as well as experiential link in the story of Afro-Caribbeans. Thus, when I suggest that dub identity is about being-in-between this does not mean that the community voiced by LKJ has not arrived in England (we have already noted that it “stan firm inna Inglan”) but that arrival in itself does not end the legacy of racism that structures England’s national selfhood. The dread beat still has that to beat.

But we are left with a central question: does the voice make history or simply record it? The answer lies in the ambiguity of “telling history.” History is that which has disallowed the subaltern voice, and yet talking history permits a trenchant sense of both a subject without a voice and a voice without a subject. That which makes history telling depends upon the specific positions of speaker and listener which are in excess of individuality. LKJ is, therefore, a vessel of history–he carries the voice rather than being coterminous with it. What makes history telling is not the individuation of the voice, as the griots well know, but the process in which the story keeps getting told. If the little englander subject makes the voice self present with the speaker, then dub identity answers by making history a function of the voice. In this sense, you know when LKJ is making history, because the community voice is telling it. Aime Cesaire once pointed out a massive contradiction in European identity in just three words, “Colonization and civilization?” The questions are different now (for instance, racism and multiculturalism?) but LKJ gives voice to current crises in Black Britain by historicizing them. While I have only begun to detail the importance of this history I hope the version here at least underlines that there is a history at stake and a role for the poet in speaking it, in something other than pentameters, and somewhere other than overseas.

Notes

1. A shorter “version” of this essay was first given at the MLA conference in New York, December 1992. The talk was backed with dub reggae, and the intonation of each sentence picked up on that bass beat. The form of the presentation, therefore, attempted to demonstrate the instrumentation of voice in dub poetry. This, of course, included an example of LKJ’s performance–the poem I will discuss later, “Bass Culture.” The present “re-mix” pushes against the impossibility of reproducing that event even as it admits the importance of this form of irreducibility. It is itself a dub version, the voiceless B-side of a reggae record–toned down, of course! A longer version will follow. For more on versions, see Dick Hebdige, Cut ‘N’ Mix (London: Comedia, 1987). Hebdige’s book exemplifies the ability to hear and read the riddim crucial to dread.

2. I refer here to Brathwaite’s provocative essay, “History of the Voice” first presented at Carifesta 76 in Jamaica and subsequently expanded and revised as a lecture given at Harvard University, August 1979. The full text with bibliography has been published as Edward Kamau Brathwaite, History of the Voice (London: New Beacon Books, 1984). My efforts here are strongly influenced by Brathwaite’s emphasis on orality in his essay (his talk, like mine, has an audio track), although I will also focus on the difficulties of representation in his concept of the “nation language.”

3. See Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1992): 77. Both Glissant’s and Brathwaite’s notion of history challenge the totalizing paradigms of Western history (particularly the Hegelian model). The status of the voice in relation to writing, however, is perceived somewhat differently as we will see. Glissant has a deconstructor’s flair for writing that remains suspicious of speech even as he wants to instantiate a “scriptible” voice. Brathwaite, however, is much more sanguine about the scriptability of the voice in its a radical distancing of the colonial word. “Dread” emerges in the tension between these polemics.

4. The dilemma of being in between, or crossing is explored in Kamau Brathwaite’s Middle Passages (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1992), a brilliant collection of poems that fracture English, the page, and any sense of Black diaspora as a unitary experience of dislocation. For more on the “black atlantic” model, see Paul Gilroy, “Cultural Studies and Ethnic Absolutism” in Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler, eds., Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1992): 187-198.

5. Brathwaite: 10.

6. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983). Anderson’s thesis is linked to a simultaneous temporality called “meanwhile” which gives the form of the nation its assumed integrity. As Bhabha has pointed out, this works very well for realist models of representation, but overlooks (or, for our purposes, stutters) the liminality of cultural identity: the “imperceptible” and the unutterable remains just that. LKJ, for one, has attempted to speak what he calls this “silent space.”

7. See Glissant: 94-95. My point in this diversion is to suggest that without an adequate knowledge of the deformations of the Caribbean nation one cannot begin to understand the voice of dread in the metropolitan “center.”

8. See Henry Louis Gates Jr. The Signifying Monkey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); and, Houston Baker Jr., Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).

9. See Mervyn Morris, “Interview with Linton Kwesi Johnson” Jamaica Journal, 20:1 (Feb/April 1987): 17-26. Most of this interview was conducted in 1982, but it was subsequently updated in 1986. As such, it provides an important overview of LKJ’s upbringing and intellectual/political development.

10. Hebdige points out that Toots might have had the term, but the rhythm had appeared on earlier recordings, principally, Lee “Scratch” Perry’s production, “People Funny Boy.” Perry would go on to produce a number of groups, including the Wailers and the Upsetters. See Hebdige: 75.

11. Like many other writers (including Baker and Hebdige), Gilroy connects the black diaspora through the strong musical links between Africa and the Caribbean, North America, and Western Europe. Gilroy’s study breaks new ground in several ways, however, particularly in detailing the complex alliances and oppositions that develop in Black Britain. The nexus of race and class is vital in this regard, as is his analysis of the production and institutionalization of racism in and outside government.

12. See Homi Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Nation” in Homi Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990): 291-322. Interestingly, this concept describes a temporality that distances, so to speak, from within, the History of Western national identity. But, for LKJ, I would argue, this principle itself needs to be qualified in light of the double diaspora, in terms of spatiality and tonality (the focus, if not the function, of the Brathwaite/Glissant metacritiques).

13. See Stuart Hall’s perceptive analysis of this phenomenon in his The Hard Road To Renewal (London: Verso, 1988). It is important to maintain the sense that, although Thatcher embodies Thatcherism, its political formation and deformation pre- and post-dates her terms as Prime Minister.

14. See/hear, Linton Kwesi Johnson, “Di Great Insohreckshan” in Linton Kwesi Johnson, Tings an Times (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1991): 43-44; and “Di Great Insohreckshan” on Linton Kwesi Johnson, Making History (Mango: MLPS9770, 1984).

15. See Joseph Owens, Dread: The Rastafarians of Jamaica (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1982): 3.

16. See/hear “It Dread Inna Inglan,” in Linton Kwesi Johnson, Inglan is a Bitch (London: Race Today, 1980): 14-15; and “It Dread Inna Inglan” on Linton Kwesi Johnson, Dread Beat An’ Blood (Virgin: FLC9009 [tape], 1990). The latter is a reissue of the 1977 album of the same name.

17. See the Morris interview: 19.

18. See hear “Reality Poem” in LKJ, Tings An Times (Newcastle: Bloodaxe Books, 1991): 30-31; and LKJ, Forces of Victory (Mango: MLPS9566, 1979).

19. Linton Kwesi Johnson, Tings An Times: 18.

20. The earliest reference in his work I can find is an essay from 1976. See “Jamaican Rebel Music,” Race and Class, 17:4 (1976): 397-412. Even so, this still contradicts Stewart Brown’s contention that the term was first used by Oku Onuora in 1979. See “Dub Poetry: Selling Out” Poetry Wales, 22:2 (1987): 51-54. There are references in the music press as early as 1974 but these are usually tied to “talk-over” rather than LKJ’s sense of dub as poetry.

21. For more on talk-over and toasting see Hebdige, especially Chapters 10 and 11. Given LKJ’s distinction, it would seem rap is closer to dub-lyricism than dub-poetry because the latter can function as its own instrumentation.

22. See Linton Kwesi Johnson, “Roots and Rock” Race Today, 7:10 (October 1975)): 237-238.

23. Paul Gilroy provides a pertinent analysis of the Massacre and its aftermath in his “There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), Chapter Three. See also, the Special Issue of Race and Class, “Rebellion and Repression,” 23:2/3 (Autumn/Winter 1981/82).

24. The implications of Bakhtin’s theory of the utterance for subaltern studies are discussed in my Dialogics of the Oppressed (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), especially the preface and chapter one. The relevant Bakhtinian texts are: V.N.Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislav Matejka and I.R.Titunik (New York: Seminar Press, 1973); Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems in Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press); The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981); Speech Genres, trans. Vern McGee, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986); and Art and Answerability, ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov, trans. Vadim Liapunov (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990). In many ways, dub is a “version” of Bakhtin’s discourse of the streets which he reads in the organized heteroglossia of the novel.

25. See/hear “Fite Dem Back” in Inglan is a Bitch (London: Race Today, 1980): 20; and on Forces of Victory (Mango: MLPS 9566, 1979). The transliteration of the sound, on this occasion, does not do justice to the effect in the song: “nofink” is actually “nuffink” on the album and is far more evocative of an East End accent. As an Eastender, I appreciate this verisimilitude.

26. See Peter Hitchcock, Working-Class Fiction in Theory and Practice (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1989).

27. This is a constituent feature of what Brathwaite calls “sound poetry.” Legendary among these are Mighty Sparrow, Miss Lou, and Bongo Jerry. The latter’s poem, “Mabrak,” with its invocation of a “black electric storm” and its plea to “recall and recollect black speech” does not go unnoticed in LKJ’s poetry. See Brathwaite: 25-48.

28. LKJ describes this function thus: The kind of thing that I write and the way I say it is as a result of the tension between Jamaican Creole and Jamaican English and between those and English English. And all that, really, is the consequence of having been brought up in a colonial society, and then coming over here to live and go to school in England, soon afterwards. The tension builds up. You can see it in the writing. You can hear it. And something else: my poems may look sort of flat on the page. Well, that is because they’re actually oral poems, as such. They were definitely written to be read aloud, in the community. [Quoted in Andrew Salkey’s introduction to Linton Kwesi Johnson, Dread Beat and Blood (London: Bogle-L’Ouverture, 1975): 8].

29. See Mikhail Bakhtin, Art and Answerability, ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov, trans. Vadim Liapunov (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990): 189. See also, the discussion of eventness in Bakhtin’s work by Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson in their introduction to Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, eds., Rethinking Bakhtin (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1989).

30. See Kobena Mercer, “Diaspora Culture and the Dialogic Imagination: The Aesthetics of Black Independent Film” in Mbye B.Cham and Claire Andrade-Watkins, eds., Blackframes: Critical Perspectives on Black Independent Cinema (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988): 59. Mercer’s approach to Black British film, particularly in its creative use of the Volosinov/Bakhtin text on the “ideological sign,” complements my interest here in the dialogic voice of dub poetry. For an excellent analysis of contemporary British cultural politics see also, Kobena Mercer, “Welcome to the Jungle: Identity and Diversity in Postmodern Politics” in Jonathan Rutherford, ed., Identity (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990): 43-71.

31. See Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). This will be developed in a subsequent “version.” For an application of “minor literature” to postcolonial discourse see Paget Henry and Paul Buhle, “Caliban as Deconstructionist: C.L.R.James and Post-Colonial Discourse” in Paget Henry and Paul Buhle, eds. C.L.R.James’s Caribbean (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992): 111-142.

September 25, 2013
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An anthology of essays from Postmodern Culture is available in print from Oxford University Press. The works collected here constitute practical engagements with the postmodern–from AIDS and the body to postmodern politics. Writing by George Yudice, Allison Fraiberg, David Porush, Stuart Moulthrop, Paul McCarthy, Roberto Dainotto, Audrey Ecstavasia, Elizabeth Wheeler, Bob Perelman, Steven Helmling, Neil Larsen, David Mikics, Barrett Watten. Book design by Richard Eckersley.

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- Chicago Journal of Theoretical Computer Science
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- Differences
  A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies
QUEER THEORY: LESBIAN AND GAY SEXUALITIES
(Volume 3, Number 2)
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Teresa de Lauretis: Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities An Introduction
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  Volume 15, Number 1
SPECIAL ISSUE

FLAUNTING IT: LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

Kathryn Baker: Delinquent Desire: Race, Sex, and Ritual in Reform Schools for Girls

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Scott Bravmann: Investigating Queer Fictions of the Past: Identities, Differences, and Lesbian and Gay Historical Self-Representations

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Greg Mullins: Nudes, Prudes, and Pigmies: The Desirability of Disavowal in Physical Culture Magazine

JoAnn Pavletich: Muscling the Mainstream: Lesbian Murder Mysteries and Fantasies of Justice

David Pendelton: Obscene Allegories: Narrative Structures in Gay Male Porn

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- The Electronic Journal on Virtual Culture
We are very pleased by the great interest in the Electronic Journal on Virtual Culture. There are already more than 1,280 people subscribed.

Our first issue was distributed in March 1993. The future looks very interesting. Editors are working on Special Issues on education, law, qualitative research, and dynamics in virtual culture.

The Electronic Journal on Virtual Culture (EJVC) is a refereed scholarly journal that fosters, encourages, advances and communicates scholarly thought on virtual culture. Virtual culture is computer-mediated experience, behavior, action, interaction and thought, including electronic conferences, electronic journals, networked information systems, the construction and visualization of models of reality, and global connectivity.

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- Eternal Network: A Mail Art Anthology
“Eternal Network: A Mail Art Anthology” by Chuck Welch is to be published in Fall 1994 by University of Calgary Press. The 42 chapter, 350 page text includes an index, 147 illustrations and six major appendices including the largest extensive listing of underground mail art zines in existence. A thorough listing of nearly 100 international private and institutional mail art archives appears in another important appendice.

But what is mail art? Mail art is a paradox in the way it reverses traditional definitions of art; the mailbox and computer replace the museum, the address becomes the art, and the mailman brings home the avant-garde to mail artists in the form of correspondence art, e-mail art, artistamps, postcards, conceptual projects, and collaborations. “Eternal Network introduces readers to a lively exchange with international mail art networkers from five continents. The book include snail mail and e-mail addresses, fax, and telephone numbers for many active mail artists. Readers are invited to participate — to corresponDANCE with global village artists who quickstep beyond establishment boundaries of art.

Among the forty-two distinguished contributors appearing in “Eternal Network” are New York City art critic Richard Kostelanetz; physicist, poet Bern Porter; Director of the Museum of Modern Art Library, Clive Phillpot; famed Fluxus artists Dick Higgins and Ken Friedman; University of Iowa art historian and archival director Estera Milman, and mail art patron Jean Brown who has collected the world’s largest assemblage of mail art material now undergoing documentation at the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities.

Many of the forty-two chapters appearing in “Eternal Network” are original, unpublished essays pertaining to the origin and history of mail art networking, collaborative aesthetics, new directions for mail art networking in the 1990’s, mail art projects exploring the interconnection of marginal on and off-line networks, mail art criticism and dialogue, and finally, parables, visions, dances, dreams, and poems that articulate the living mythology of mail art.

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- 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.

——————————

GENDERS is published triannually in Spring, Fall, Winter
```
       Single Copy rates: Individual $9, Institution $14
                  Foreign postage, add $2/copy
       Subscription rates: Individual $24, Institution $40
             Foreign postage, add $5.50/subscription
```
Send orders to:

University of Texas Box 7819 Austin TX 78713

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- Hot Off the Tree
HOTT — Hot Off The Tree — is a FREE monthly electronic newsletter featuring the latest advances in computer, communications, and electronics technologies. Each issue provides article summaries on new & emerging technologies, including VR (virtual reality), neural networks, PDAs (personal digital assistants), GUIs (graphical user interfaces), intelligent agents, ubiquitous computing, genetic & evolutionary programming, wireless networks, smart cards, video phones, set-top boxes, nanotechnology, and massively parallel processing.

Summaries are provided from the following sources:

Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, San Jose Mercury News, Boston Globe, Financial Times (London) …

Time, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report …

Business Week, Forbes, Fortune, The Economist (London), Nikkei Weekly (Tokyo), Asian Wall Street Journal (Hong Kong) …

over 50 trade magazines, including Computerworld, InfoWorld, Datamation, Computer Retail Week, Dr. Dobb’s Journal, LAN Times, Communications Week, PC World, New Media, VAR Business, Midrange Systems, Byte …

over 50 research journals, including ALL publications of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies, plus technical journals published by AT&T, IBM, Hewlett Packard, Fujitsu, Sharp, NTT, Siemens, Philips, GEC …

over 100 Internet mailing lists & USENET discussion groups …

plus …
- listings of forthcoming & recently published technical books;
- listings of forthcoming trade shows & technical conferences;
- company advertorials, including CEO perspectives, tips & techniques, and new product announcements.
BONUS:

Exclusive interviews with technology pioneers … the next two issues feature interviews with Mark Weiser (head of Xerox PARC’s Computer Science Lab) on ubiquitous computing, and Nobel laureate Joshua Lederberg on the information society

TO REQUEST A FREE SUBSCRIPTION, CAREFULLY FOLLOW THE INSTRUCTIONS BELOW

Send subscription requests to:

listserv@ucsd.edu

Leave the “Subject” line blank

In the body of the message input: SUBSCRIBE HOTT-LIST

If at any time you choose to cancel your subscription input: UNSUBSCRIBE HOTT-LIST

Note: Do not include first or last names following “SUBSCRIBE HOTT-LIST” or “UNSUBSCRIBE HOTT-LIST”

The HOTT mailing list is automatically maintained by a computer located at the University of California at San Diego. The system automatically responds to the sender’s return path. Hence, it is necessary to send subscription requests and cancellations directly to the listserv at UCSD. (I cannot make modifications to the list … nor do I have access to the list.) For your privacy, please note that the list will not be rented. If you have problems and require human intervention, contact:

hott@ucsd.edu

The next issue of the reinvented HOTT e-newsletter is scheduled for transmission in late January/early February.

Please forward this announcement to friends and colleagues, and post to your favorite bulletin boards. Our objective is to disseminate the highest quality and largest circulation compunications (computer & communications) industry newsletter.

I look forward to serving you as HOTT’s new editor. Thank you.

David Scott Lewis
Editor-in-Chief and Book & Video Review Editor
IEEE Engineering Management Review
(the world’s largest circulation “high tech” management journal)

Internet address:d.s.lewis@ieee.org
Tel: +1 714 662 7037
USPS mailing address: POB 18438
IRVINE CA 92713-8438
USA

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- Announcing a New Electronic Journal:INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND DISABILITIES
Below is information about the journal, including the table of contents for Volume I, no. 1, as well as information on editorial staff and explicit instructions for subscribing or using the journal via gopher.

IT&D V1N1 Table of Contents 230 lines

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND DISABILITIES

ISSN 1073-5127

Volume I, No. 1 January, 1994

ARTICLES

INTRODUCING INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND DISABILITIES

(itdV01N1 mcnulty)

Tom McNulty, Editor

BUILDING AN ACCESSIBLE CD-ROM REFERENCE STATION

(itdV01N1 wyatt)

Rochelle Wyatt and Charles Hamilton

ABSTRACT: This case study describes the development of an accessible CD-ROM workstation at the Washington Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped. Included are descriptions of hardware and software, as well as selected CD-ROM reference sources. Information is provided on compatibility of individual CD-ROM products with adaptive technology hardware and software.

DEVELOPMENT OF AN ACCESSIBLE USER INTERFACE FOR PEOPLE WHO
ARE BLIND OR VISION IMPAIRED AS PART OF THE RE-COMPUTERIZATION
OF ROYAL BLIND SOCIETY (AUSTRALIA)

(itdV01N1 noonan)

Tim Noonan

ABSTRACT: In 1991, Royal Blind Society (Australia) and Deen Systems, a Sydney-based software development company, undertook a major overhaul of RBS information systems intended to enhance access to RBS client services as well as employment opportunities for blind and vision impaired RBS staff. This case study outlines the steps taken and principles followed in the development of a computer user interface intended for efficient use by blind and vision impaired individuals.

THE ELECTRONIC REHABILITATION RESOURCE CENTER AT
ST. JOHN’S UNIVERSITY (NEW YORK)

(itdV01N1 holtzman)

Bob Zenhausern and Mike Holtzman

ABSTRACT: St. John’s University in Jamaica, New York, is host to a number of disability-related network information sources and services. This article identifies and describes key sources and services, including Bitnet listservs, or discussion groups, the UNIBASE system which includes real-time online conferencing, and other valuable educational and rehabilitation-related network information sources.

THE CLEARINGHOUSE ON COMPUTER ACCOMMODATION (COCA)

(itdV01N1 brummel)

Susan Brummel and Doug Wakefield

ABSTRACT: Since 1985, COCA has been pioneering information policies and computer support practices that benefit Federal employees with disabilities and members of the public with disabilities. Today, COCA provides a variety of services to people within and outside Government employment. The ultimate goal of all COCA’s activities is to advance equitable information environments consistent with non-discriminatory employment and service delivery goals.

DEPARTMENTS

JOB ACCOMMODATIONS

(itdV01N1 jobs)

Editor: Joe Lazzaro

lazzaro@bix.com

K – 12 EDUCATION

(itdV01N1 k12)

Editor: Anne Pemberton

apembert@vdoe386.vak12ed.edu

LIBRARIES

(itdV01N1 library)

Editor: Ann Neville

neville@emx.cc.utexas.edu

ONLINE INFORMATION AND NETWORKING

(itdV01N1 online)

Editor: Steve Noble

slnobl01@ulkyvm.louisville.edu

CAMPUS COMPUTING

(itdV01N1 campus)

Editor: Daniel Hilton-Chalfen, Ph.D.

hilton-chalfen@mic.ucla.edu

Copyright (c 1994) by (IT&D) Information Technology and Disabilities. Authors of individual articles retain all copyrights to said articles, and their permission is needed to reproduce any individual article. The rights to the journal as a collection belong to (IT&D) Information Technology and Disabilities. IT&D encourages any and all electronic distribution of the journal and permission for such copying is expressly permitted here so long as it bears no charge beyond possible handling fees. To reproduce the journal in non-electronic format requires permission of its board of directors. To do this, contact the editor.

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Tom McNulty, New York University

(mcnulty@acfcluster.nyu.edu)

EDITORS

Dick Banks, University of Wisconsin, Stout
Carmela Castorina, UCLA
Daniel Hilton-Chalfen, PhD, UCLA
Norman Coombs, PhD, Rochester Institute of Technology
Joe Lazzaro, Massachusetts Commission for the Blind
Ann Neville, University of Texas, Austin
Steve Noble, Recording for the Blind
Anne L. Pemberton, Nottoway High School, Nottoway, VA
Bob Zenhausern, PhD, St. John’s University

EDITORIAL BOARD

Dick Banks, University of Wisconsin, Stout
Carmela Castorina, UCLA
Danny Hilton-Chalfen, PhD, UCLA
Norman Coombs, PhD, Rochester Institute of Technology
Alistair D. N. Edwards, PhD, University of York, UK
Joe Lazzaro, Massachusetts Commission for the Blind
Ann Neville, University of Texas, Austin
Steve Noble, Recording for the Blind
Anne L. Pemberton, Nottoway High School, Nottoway, VA
Lawrence A. Scadden, PhD, National Science Foundation
Bob Zenhausern, PhD, St. John’s University

ABOUT EASI (EQUAL ACCESS TO SOFTWARE AND INFORMATION)

Since its founding in 1988 under the EDUCOM umbrella, EASI has worked to increase access to information technology by persons with disabilities. Volunteers from EASI have been instrumental in the establishment of Information Technology and Disabilities as still another step in this process. Our mission has been to serve as a resource primarily to the education community by providing information and guidance in the area of access to information technologies. We seek to spread this information to schools, colleges, universities and into the workplace. EASI makes extensive use of the internet to disseminate this information, including two discussion lists:

EASI@SJUVM.STJOHNS.EDU

(a general discussion on computer access) and

AXSLIB-L@SJUVM.STJOHNS.EDU

(a discussion on library access issues). To join either list, send a “subscribe” command to

LISTSERV@SJUVM.STJOHNS.EDU

including the name of the discussion you want to join plus your own first and last name. EASI also maintains several items on the St. Johns gopher under the menu heading “Disability and Rehabilitation Resources”.

For further information, contact the EASI Chair:

Norman Coombs, Ph.D.

NRCGSH@RITVAX.ISC.RIT.EDU

or the EASI office:
EASI’s phone: (310) 640-3193
EASI’s e-mail: EASI@EDUCOM.EDU

Individual ITD articles and departments are archived on the St. John’s University gopher. To access the journal via gopher, locate the St. John’s University (New York) gopher. Select “Disability and Rehabilitation Resources,” and from the next menu, select “EASI: Equal Access to Software and Information.” Information Technology and Disabilities is an item on the EASI menu.

To retrieve individual articles and departments by e-mail from the listserv: address an e-mail message to:

listserv@sjuvm.stjohns.edu

leave subject line blank

the message text should include the word “get” followed by the two word file name; for example:

get itdV01N1 contents

Each article and department has a unique filename; that name is listed below the article or department in parentheses. Do NOT include the parentheses with the filename when sending the “get” command to listserv.

NOTE: ONLY ONE ITEM MAY BE RETRIEVED PER MESSAGE; DO NOT SEND MULTIPLE GET COMMANDS IN A SINGLE E-MAIL MESSAGE TO LISTSERV.

To receive the journal regularly, send e-mail to:

listserv@sjuvm.stjohns.edu

with no subject and either of the following lines of text:
subscribe itd-toc “Firstname Lastname”
subscribe idt-jnl “Firstname Lastname”

(ITD-JNL is the entire journal in one e-mail message while ITD-TOC sends the contents with information on how to obtain specific articles.)

To get a copy of the guidelines for authors, send e-mail to:

listserv@sjuvm.stjohns.edu

with no subject and the following single line of text:
get author guidelin

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- M/E/A/N/I/N/GA Journal of Contemporary Art Issues
M/E/A/N/I/N/G, an artist-run journal of contemporary art, is a fresh, lively, contentious, and provocative forum for new ideas in the arts.

M/E/A/N/I/N/G is published twice a year in the fall and spring.
It is edited by Susan Bee and Mira Schor.

Subscriptions for

2 ISSUES (1 YEAR):
$12 for individuals:
$20 for institutions

4 ISSUES (2 YEARS):
$24 for individuals;
$40 for institutions
- Foreign subscribers please add $10 per year for shipping abroad and to Canada: $5
- Foreign subscribers please pay by international money order in U.S. dollars.
All checks should be made payable to Mira Schor

Send all subscriptions to:

Mira Schor
60 Lispenard Street
New York, NY 10013

Limited supply of back issues available at $6 each, contact Mira Schor for information.

Distributed with the Segue Foundation and the Solo Foundation

Back
- Modern Fiction Studies
MFS, a journal of modern and postmodern literature and culture, announces the following forthcoming special issues:

February, 39.1: “Fiction of the Indian Subcontinent”

May, 39.3: “Toni Morrison”

November, 40.1: “The Cultural Politics of Displacement” Barbara Harlow, guest editor

We also continue to accept submissions for forthcoming special issues on “Autobiography, Photography, Narrative,” Timothy Dow Adams, Guest Editor (deadline: April 1, 1994); “Postmodern Narratives (deadline: October 1 1994); “Sexuality and Narrative,” Guest Editor, Judith Roof (deadline: March 1, 1995).

MFS is published quarterly at Purdue University and invites submissions of articles offering theoretical, historical, interdisciplinary, and cultural approaches to modern and contemporary narrative. Authors should submit essays for both special and general issues in triplicate paper copy or duplicate paper copy and IBM-compatible floppy; please include a self- addressed, stamped envelope for the return of submissions. Send submissions to:

Patric O’Donnell
Editor
MFS
Department of English
Heavilon Hall
Purdue University
West Lafayette IN 47907-1389

Address inquiries to the editor at this address or by e-mail at

pod@purccvm (bitnet);
pod@vm.cc.purdue.edu (Internet)

Subscriptions to MFS are $20 for individuals and $35 for libraries. Back issues are $7 each. Address subscription inquiries to:

Nel Fink
Circulation Manager
MFS
Department of Englis
h Heavilon Hall
Purdue University
West Lafayette IN 47907-1389

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- Minnesota Review
Tell your friends! Tell your librarians! The new Minnesota Review‘s coming to town!

Subscriptions are $10 a year (two issues), $20 institutions/overseas. The new Minnesota Review is published biannually and originates from East Carolina University beginning with the Fall 1992 special issue.

Send all queries, comments, suggestions, submissions, and subscriptions to:

Jeffrey Williams, Editor
Minnesota Review
Department of English
East Carolina University
Greenville, NC 27858-4353

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- NOMAD
  An Interdisciplinary Journal of The Humanities, Arts, And Sciences
Manuscript submissions wanted in all interdisciplinary fields!

Nomad is a forum for those texts that explore or examine the undefined regions among critical theory, visual arts, and writing. It is a bi-annual, not-for-profit, independent publication for provocative cross-disciplinary work of all cultural types, such as intermedia artwork, metatheory, and experimental writing, as well as literary, theoretical, political, and popular writing. While our editorial staff is comprised of artists and academics in a variety of disciplines, NOMAD strives to operate in a space outside of mainstream academic discourse and without institutional funding or controls.

Manuscripts should not exceed fifteen pages (exclusive of references); any form is acceptable. If possible, please submit manuscripts on 3.5″ Macintosh disks, in either Microsoft Word or MacWrite II format, or by E-mail. Each manuscript submitted on disk must be accompanied by a paper copy. Otherwise, please send two copies of each manuscript. Artwork submitted must be no larger than 8 1/2″ x 11″, and in black and white. PICT, TIFF, GIF, and JPEG files on 3.5″ Macintosh disks are acceptable, if accompanied by a paper copy (or via E-mail, bin-hexed or uuencoded). All artwork must be camera-ready. Submissions by regular mail should include a SASE with sufficient postage attached if return is desired. Diskettes should be shipped in standard diskette mailing packages.

Subscriptions: $9 per year (2 issues)
Send Manuscripts and Inquiries to:

NOMAD, c/o
Mike Smith
406 Williams Hall
Florida State University
Tallahassee, Florida, 32306
msmith@garnet.acns.fsu.edu

“In NOMAD, the rarest combinations of interests are treated with respect and exposed to the eyes of those who can most appreciate them.”

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- OctoberArt | Theory | Criticism | Politics
The MIT Press
```
Edited by: Rosalind Kraus
            Annette Michelson
            Yve-Alain Bois
            Benjamin H.D. Buchloh
            Hal Foster
            Denis Hollier
            John Rajchman
```
“OCTOBER, the 15-year-old quarterly of social and cultural theory, has always seemed special. Its nonprofit status, its cross- disciplinary forays into film and psychoanalytic thinking, and its unyielding commitment to history set it apart from the glossy art magazines.”
```
--Village Voice
```
As the leading edge of arts criticism and theory today, OCTOBERfocuses on the contemporary arts and their various contexts of interpretation. Original, innovative, provocative, each issue examines interrelationships between the arts and their critical and social contexts.

Come join OCTOBER‘s exploration of the most important issues in contemporary culture. Subscribe Today!

Published Quarterly ISSN 0162-2870. Yearly Rates: Individual $32.00; Institution $80.00; Student (copy of current ID required) and Retired: $22.00. Outside USA add $14.00 postage and handling. Canadians add additional 7% GST. Prepayment is required. Send check payable to OCTOBER drawn against a US bank, MasterCard or VISA number to:

MIT Press Journal / 55 Hayward Street / Cambridge, MA 02142-1399 / TEL: (617) 233-2889 / FAX: (617) 258-6779 / E-Mail: journals-orders@mit.edu

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- RIF/TE-Poetry Literary Journal
In all arts there is a physical component . . . We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts.

–Paul Valery

This list was formed to serve as a vehicle for (1) distribution of an interactive literary journal: RIF/T and related exchange, and (2) collection of any information related to contemporary poetics.

RIF/T provides a forum for poets that are conversant with the media to explore the full potential of a true electronic journal.

Dynamic–not static, RIF/T shifts and riffs with the diction of “trad” poetry investigating a new, flexible, fluid poetry of exchange.

Archives of e-poetry and related files are stored in the e-poetry FILELIST.

To receive a list of files send the command

INDEX e-poetry

to:

LISTSERV@UBVM

or

LISTSERV@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU

as the first line in the body of your mail message (not your Subject: line).

To subscribe to e-poetry, send the command

SUB e-poetry your name
to:

LISTSERV@UBVM

or

LISTSERV@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU

via mail message (again, as the first line in the body of the mail, not the Subject: line). For example: SUB e-poetry John Doe

Owner: Ken Sherwood

v001pxfu@ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu

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- SSCORESocial Science Computer Review
G. David Garson, Editor
Ronald Anderson, Co-editor

The official journal of the Social Science Computing Association, SSCORE provides a unique forum for social scientists to acquire and share information on the research and teaching applications of microcomputing. Now, when you subscribe to Social Science Computer Review, you automatically become a member of the Social Science Computing Association.

Quarterly Subscription prices: $48 individual, $80 institutions Single Issue: $20 Please add $8 for postage outside the U.S. Canadian residents add 7% GST

Duke University Press/ Journals Division / Box 90660 /Durham NC 27708

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- Studies in Popular Culture
  Dennis Hall, editor.
Studies in Popular Culture, the journal of the Popular Culture Association in the South and the American Culture Association in the South, publishes articles on popular culture and American culture however mediated: through film, literature, radio, television, music, graphics, print, practices, associations, events–any of the material or conceptual conditions of life. The journal enjoys a wide range of contributors from the United States, Canada, France, Israel, and Australia, which include distinguished anthropologists, sociologists, cultural geographers, ethnomusicologists, historians, and scholars in mass communications, philosophy, literature, and religion.

Please direct editorial queries to the editor:

Dennis Hall
Department of English
University of Louisville
Louisville KY 40292
tel: (502) 588-6896/0509
Fax: (502) 588-5055
Bitnet: DRHALL01@ULKYVM
Internet: drhall01@ulkvm.louisville.edu

All manuscripts should be sent to the editor care of the

English Department, University of Louisville, Louisville, KY 40292

Please enclose two, double-spaced copies and a self-addressed stamped envelope. Black and White illustrations may accompany the text. Our preference is for essays that total, with notes and bibliography, no more than twenty pages. Documentation may take the form appropriate for the discipline of the writer; the current MLA stylesheet 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.

Studies in Popular Culture is published semiannually and is indexed in the PMLA Annual Bibliography. All members of the Association receive Studies in Popular Culture. Yearly membership is $15.00 (International: $20.00). Write to:

the Executive Secretary
Diane Calhoun-French
Academic Dean
Jefferson Community College-SW
Louisville, KY 40272

for membership, individual issues, back copies, or sets. Volumes I- XV are available for $225.00.

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- VIRUS 23
For those brave souls looking to explore the Secret of Eris, you may wish to check out VIRUS 23.

2 and 3 are even and odd, 2 and 3 are 5, therefore 5 is even and odd.

VIRUS 23 is a codename for all Erisian literature

Don Webb
6304 Laird Dr.
Austin TX 78757
0004200716@mcimail.com

VIRUS 23 is the annual hardcopy publication of A.D.o.S.A, the Alberta Department of Spiritual Affairs.

All issues are available at $7.00 ppd from:

VIRUS 23
Box 46
Red Deer, Alberta
Canada
T4N 5E7

Various chunks of VIRUS 23 can be found at Tim Oerting’s alt.cyberpunk ftp site (u.washington.edu, in /public/alt.cyberpunk. Check it out).

For more information online contact:

Darren Wershler-Henry
grad3057@writer.yorku.ca

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- ViViD Magazine
The first issue of ViViD Magazine is now available. ViViD is a hypertext magazine about experimental writing and creativity in cyberspace. We are actively seeking contributions for the next issue.

The magazine is presented in the colorful, graphics environment of a Windows 3.1 Help File. You will need Windows 3.1 to read the magazine.

The magazine will also be available via anonymous FTP at “ftp.gmu.edu”, to obtain it:

ftp ftp.gmu.edu

username: anonymous
password: (your email address)

cd pub/library
binary
get VIVID1.ZIP

For more information on ViViD, contact the editor, Justin McHale.

Internet address:

jmchale@gmuvax.gmu.edu

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- Zines-L
announcing a new list available from:

listserv@uriacc

To subscribe to Zines-L send a message to:

listserv@uriacc.uri.edu

on one line type:
SUBSCRIBE ZINES-L first name last name

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- Postmodern Culture announces the relocation of PMC-MOO
PMC-MOO has moved. To connect to PMC-MOO, you must now:

telnet

hero.village.virginia.edu 7777

Once you’ve connected to the server, you should receive onscreen instructions on how to log in to PMC-MOO.

PMC-MOO is a real-time, text-based, virtual reality environment in which you can meet other subscribers of the journal, sponsor or participate in live conferences. PMC-MOO also provides a way to share and discuss, in real time across the internet, any texts accessible from a gopher server, including those generated by Postmodern Culture and by PMC-TALK. Finally, it provides an opportunity to experience (or help to design) simulated object-lessons in postmodern theory.

Your experience of PMC-MOO will be considerably more enoyable with a client program: clients for Mac, DOS, and Unix are available via anonymous ftp from:

parcftp.xerox.com

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- AHC’94 — Hull Conference
Association for History and Computing UK Branch Conference

The Seventh Annual Conference of the Association for History and Computing (UK Branch) will be held at the University of Hull between 12 and 14 April 1994. As well as existing members of the Association, we are anxious to see those of our “mainstream” colleagues who have so far resisted the blandishments of Information Technology, but think they might now want to get involved — particularly with the impending arrival of courseware products coming out the Teaching and Learning Technology Program (TLTP).

The “major” theme of the conference will be to explore what computerate historians have to learn from disciplines cognate with History, or those from which we have traditionally filched elements of our methodology. We hope to have sessions which focus on Anthropology, Art History, Economics, Geography, Sociology and Textual Studies, with reference to time-frames ranging from the medieval to the near-contemporary.

The “minor” theme is to be the role of computing in the modern History Curriculum, broadly defined: from what’s going on in secondary schools and colleges post-National Curriculum; through the undergraduate program, with special reference to TLTP products; to the IT component of postgraduate training courses being developed under the 1+3 arrangements favored by ESRC and the British Academy.

We shall, of course, be issuing invitations to a number of keynote speakers, but would be very grateful to receive offers of papers on any of the subjects identified above.

Further particulars and booking forms can be obtained from:

Steve Baskerville
Dean of the School of Arts
University of Hull
Cottingham Road
Hull, HU6 7RX
Phone: 0482-465684
(Secretary: Louise Danby)
E-mail: s.w.baskerville@amstuds.hull.ac.uk

Ten years ago, before the celebrated Westfield Conferences that gave life to the AHC, there was a select gathering of people interested in historical computing met at Hull to discuss their common interests. We would like to see as many of you as possible come here again in 1994 to discuss the agendas of the next decade!

Steve Baskerville
University of Hull

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- 4CYBERCONF:
  4th International Conference on Cyberspace
  May 1994
In May of 1994, The Banff Centre is Virtually the Only Place to be

The Banff Centre for the Arts, in Banff, Alberta, Canada will host two important conferences on cyberspace and virtual reality. The first conference, 4CYBERCONF, to be held May 20 through 22, is a prestigious annual event that brings together theoreticians and practitioners to discuss the implications of cyberspace.

Immediately following is the ART AND VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS SYMPOSIUM to be held May 23 and 24. This event focuses on artistic approaches to virtual reality, providing an opportunity for critical inquiry of the political, practical and aesthetic concerns around new media and cultural practices.

Over the course of the two conferences, the work of eight groups of artists who have completed virtual environments at the Banff Centre will be installed at various sites.

Participants may register for either or both events.

4CYBERCONF –
THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON CYBERSPACE
MAY 20, 21, and 22, 1994
THE BANFF CENTRE FOR THE ARTS

INTRODUCTION

4CYBERCONF deals with the issues of cyberspace on many different levels. The technologies of virtual reality, networking and digital media are investigated from a critical standpoint that examines their social and cultural impacts and meanings. This conference considers cross-cultural contributions to the space and time of cyberspace, embraces the challenge of design for virtual environments and cybersound and suggests a new perception of space that challenges conventional views. Cyberspace is a space in flux where shared identities collide with discussions of diversity and the most potent constructions are the discussions that define and delineate these new environments.

In the matrices and the nets, there is a growing society that ranges from architects to aboriginal artists to anarchists, from cyborgs to Silicon Valley sophisticates to cyberpunks. 4CYBERCONF offers the opportunity for exchange within and between these confluent and diverse interests.

CONFERENCE FORMAT

The Fourth Conference on Cyberspace is scheduled to take place over three days, with regular sessions, demonstrations and a “birds of a feather” meeting space for conference participants to exchange ideas and information. In addition, there will be an evening Round Table Discussion on Friday, May 20th and a Dinner on Sunday, May 22nd.

CALL FOR PANEL AND PAPER PROPOSALS

This is a call for paper and panel proposals, approximately twenty of which will be selected by the Program Committee for development and presentation at the conference. Papers submitted by individuals will be grouped by the Program Committee by theme.

The following is a list of the general topics of interest to the Program Committee.

ECONOMICS OF CYBERSPACE

Everyone talks about the information economy but few are willing to face up to its implications: A nation’s wealth will be based on the information it produces. Commercial services may become the primary focus of the Net. Our copyright laws will need to be totally re- written for cyberspace. Intellectual property will become the most valued commodity of this new economy. Who will determine what’s public domain and what’s privatized? This session will deal with those issues and will provide a forum for exploring a dramatically different approach to economic issues.

THE SOUNDS OF CYBER

Cyberspace will be an environment vibrant with sound. While much of the technical investigation of virtuality has concentrated on the image, some of the richest and most compelling results have been achieved with audio. This theme will focus on the aesthetics, theory and practice of creating sound in immersion environments, as well as the synergy of sound and image in virtual space.

DIVERSITY, TECHNOLOGY AND CYBERSPACE

It is tough out there on the planetary streets, but is cyberspace a territory with a better immigration policy? How do individuals and groups gain access to cyberspace? Are technologies culturally, linguistically and gender specific? Are questions of authenticity relevant in cyberspace? How can technology be created and applied to serve the needs of varied communities, such as aboriginal groups and those from the myriad of cultural diasporas? How are the social constructions of body, gender, desire, race, place, economy and language built in cyberspace? What is imported, what is modified and what is created in human interaction and meaning within cyberspace; how does it then affect other experiences?

CYBER NARRATIVES

How and to whom are stories being structured and told in cyberspace? What are the entertainment industry`s distribution outlets? What tools are available to create cyber tales – and do these permit creative expression? What are the structures of interactive texts? What is the relationship between reading and authoring, viewing and creating? Are there existing forms of criticism – for example, architectural, literary, film, media, art, cultural studies – relevant to describing cyber stories? What new critical tools do we need? Are there genres in cyberspace?

THE POETICS OF CYBERSPACE: DESIGNING THE VIRTUAL

Traditional concepts of design travel poorly in cyberspace. Papers are invited that investigate the new design issues that must be resolved if virtual environments are to become compelling, evocative and effective. New tools and new approaches and the role of the design profession in cyberspace are critical aspects of this investigation.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Proposals for papers and panels should be presented in abstracts of approximately 1000 words. Panel proposals should include abstracts of papers. Copies of illustrations and photographs can be submitted at this time. Persons proposing a panel should contact potential panelists prior to submitting. All proposals are due in hard copy and on disk at the address below by February 15, 1994. Papers selected for presentation, either as part of a theme session or a panel, are due May 1, 1994, in hard copy and digital form. Selected presenters will be notified by March 15, 1994. The final papers should be between 3000 and 6000 words. Papers will be allotted a half hour for presentation. Panels should not exceed one hour.

Videotapes, recordings and other forms of presentation will be considered as part of panels or as a component of sessions. Submitted material on videotape, optical disk, film, and other media, will be returned.

Brief biographical information may accompany submissions on a separate page.

Because all accepted abstracts will be published as the Collected Papers of the Fourth Conference on Cyberspace and available at the conference, we ask that you observe the following format guidelines:

Proposals should be printed on one side of 8.5″ x 11″ paper, single spaced, with one inch margins and in 12- point Times-Roman, unless there is specific artistic purpose to breaking this convention. Do not number the pages. Provide six copies, and a floppy disk with both ASCII and Word versions.

The first page should start with:

TITLE
(Proposed Session)
Your Name
Your Affiliation
Body of paper or abstract

DEADLINES

FEBRUARY 15, 1994 Deadline for submission of papers, abstracts and proposals inclusion in 4Cyberconf.

MARCH 15, 1994 Notification date of selection for presentation:

APRIL 8, 1994 Deadline for registration for both conferences: (Late registration will be available as space permits and at an extra charge)

NOTE: Submission of an abstract or proposal indicates your intention, obligation, and capability to write/present/demonstrate the corresponding, full- length work if chosen.

All materials should be sent to:

4CYBERCONF
THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON CYBERSPACE
Submissions
Media Arts
The Banff Centre for the Arts
box 1020-8
Banff, Alberta, T0L 0C0
Canada

E-MAIL: 4cyber@acs.ucalgary.caPHONE: 403-762-6652
FAX: 403-762-6665

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- The Art and Virtual Environments SymposiumMAY 23 and 24, 1994
  THE BANFF CENTRE FOR THE ARTS
The ART AND VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS SYMPOSIUM will be held immediately following 4CYBERCONF and is intended to facilitate dialogue and debate among artists, presenters and participants.

This is an invitation to attend this two-day event that will include presentations and discussions on art, culture and new media technologies in the 1990s. In addition, virtual environment artworks will be exhibited and discussed by the artists. Since many of these works will never be shown again, this symposium represents an opportunity to experience and analyze some of the worlds that are shaping developments in virtual reality.

The eight groups of artists who participated in the Art and Virtual Environments Project, include: Will Bauer and Steve Gibson; Toni Dove and Michael Mackenzie; Diane Gromala, Marcos Novak and Yacov Sharir; Perry Hoberman; Ron Kuivila; Brenda Laurel and Rachel Strickland; Michael Naimark; Michael Scroggins and Stewart Dixon. Over the past three years, these artists have explored this innovative medium at Banff and in the process developed important advances in the field.

Presentations on art and virtual environments will be made by writers and thinkers invited to investigate current cultural practices. Speakers may include Frances Dyson, N.Katherine Hayles, Michael Heim, Erkki Huhtamo, Rob Milthorp, Margaret Morse, Jeanne Randolph, Allucquere Rosanne Stone, Nell Tenhaaf, Gene Youngblood and others. Writings on art, culture and virtual environments have also been commissioned to stimulate discussion and analysis of culture and new technologies. The end result is one of the most important critical investigations in the short history of virtual reality.

The Art and Virtual Environments Project, undertaken by the Computer Applications and Research Program at the Banff Centre for the Arts, has been funded by The Department of Canadian Heritage and CITI (Centre for Information Technologies Innovation). The Banff Centre gratefully acknowledges the generous contributions of the Art and Virtual Environments Project sponsors: Silicon Graphics Inc., Alias Research, The Computer Graphics Lab in the Department of Computing Science at the University of Alberta, Apple Canada, The Intel Corporation, and AutoDesk Inc.

LOCATION

Both conferences will be held at The Banff Centre, Banff, Alberta, Canada. The Centre provides a comfortable setting nestled in one of the most picturesque environments in North America. Founded in 1933, The Banff Centre has evolved into an exciting, multi- disciplinary entity that is an experience unto itself. Artists, academics, professionals, business leaders, administrators and scientists come here to learn in an efficient, service-oriented setting that happens to be surrounded by some of the most breathtaking mountain wilderness in the world.

Banff is located 125 kilometers, or a scenic 1 1/2 hour drive, west of the city of Calgary. The Calgary International Airport services daily flights from most major centers in Canada, the United States, Europe and the Orient. Bus service is available directly from the airport or downtown Calgary.

For Further Information Regarding Registration Please Contact:

Virginia Campbell
The Banff Centre for Conferences
Box 1020 – Station 11
Banff, Alberta
Canada T0L 0C0
Tel: (403) 762-6202
Fax: (403) 762-6388

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- Chaos and Society ConferenceUNIVERSITE DU QUEBEC A HULL CHAOS AND SOCIETY CONFERENCE
  June 1-2, 1994
This is a summary of the information that will shortly be available on the University of Quebec Gopher. Anybody who wants more information, or a hard copy of this information (plus a small ad to be posted on a physical bulletin board), should contact:

Prof. Pierre Lemieux
Pierre_Lemieux@uqah.uquebec.ca

1. About the University

The Universite du Quebec a Hull (UQAH) is a branch of the University of Quebec. It is located in Hull, in the Province of Quebec (Canada), just across Ottawa in the National Capital Region.

2. The Chaos and Society Workshop at UQAH

The June Conference is organized by the Chaos and Society Workshop, directed by Prof. Alain Albert et Prof. Pierre Lemieux. The objective of the Chaos and Society Workshop is to stimulate research on the relations between chaos theory, complexity and the study of society (especially the idea of a spontaneous or anarchistic order).

One of the topics that has raised some interest recently at the Workshop were the ideas discussed by Prof. Albert and Lemieux on the possibilities of building models of Artificial Anarchy.

3. The June 1-2, 1994, Chaos and Society International Conference

3.1. General Description

The objective of the Conference is to bring together an interdisciplinary group of academics and scholars interested in the interface between chaos and complex-system theory and the social sciences. This two-day conference is to be held on June 1 and 2, 1994, in the Hull-Ottawa region (Canada). Formal papers will be presented and discussed. Papers can be presented in either English or French. (Most will probably be in English.) We are exploring the possibility of simultaneous translation during some of the lectures and discussions.

Examples of Topics of Interest:
- What is the significance of the chaos paradigm for the social and humane sciences (including economics, sociology, political science, ethnology, philosophy…)? To which extent can society be analyzed as a chaotic, complex or living system?
- What can nonlinear dynamic simulation techniques contribute to the study of society?
- What is the meaning of information, evolution, and spontaneous order in the social sciences as compared to the physical sciences?
- To which extent were these elements already present in some schools of social sciences (v.g., the Austrian School of Economics)?
- After Artificial Life, what is the future of Artificial Economics, Artificial Politics, Artificial Sociology, etc.?
- What is their relevance to contemporary problems?
We expect a group of 50 to 75 participants, mainly academics, at the Conference.
They will include:
1) Authors of papers;
2) Discussants who will comment on the papers and start the workshop-type discussion.
3) Simple participants (academics, scholars, students, government officials and business executives) who will be able to attend the lectures and participate in discussions.

Here is a tentative schedule as of December 15, 1993:
```
Wednesday, June 1
8:45-10:30      Opening, paper, comment and discussion
10:30-11:00     Coffee break
11:00-12:45     Paper, comment and discussion
13:00-14:45     Lunch for all participants
15:00-16:30     Workshops I, II, III
16:30-17:00     Coffee break
17:00-18:30     Workshops I, II, III
19:00           Dinner for all participants


Thursday, June 2
8:45-10:30      Paper, comment and discussion
10:30-11:00     Coffee break
11:00-12:45     Paper, comment and discussion
13:00-14:45     Lunch for all participants
15:00-16:30     Workshops I, II, III
16:30-17:00     Coffee break
17:00-18:30     Workshops I, II, III
18:30           End of Conference
```
The Organizing Committee is made of
- Dr. Jacques Plamondon, Professor of Philosophy of Science and President of Universite du Quebec a Hull (UQAH)
- Prof. Paul Bourgine, Director of the Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Life Laboratory, CEMAGREF (Antony, France)
- Dr. Bernardo Huberman, Research Fellow, Xerox PARC
- Prof. Alain Albert, Professor of Economics, Business Administration Department, UQAH
- Prof. Pierre Lemieux (Conference Director), Visiting Professor of Economics, Business Administration Department, UQAH
3.2. Call for Papers

Any person interested in presenting a paper must E-mail a one page abstract to the Organizing Committee before January 31, 1994. Each submission must contain the author’s name, affiliation, address, telephone, fax and E-mail numbers. The Organizing Committee will reach a decision on accepted papers and notify the authors in February. Accepted authors will then be asked to send their papers (hard copy and electronic version) before April 30, 1994, so that they be made available to discussants in time. Papers may be in English or French. They will later be published in the conference proceedings.

Please send abstracts to:

Pierre_Lemieux@uqah.uquebec.ca

3.3. Registration
```
Registration fees (in Canadian dollars)
Category        Before Feb. 28, 1994    from Feb. 28 to April 30
Academics               150                             250
Students                150                             150
Others                  300                             500
```
The registration fees include dinner on June 1 and lunches on June 1 and 2. Registration fees will be reimbursed if registration is canceled before April 30, 1994. All registration must be paid before April 30, 1994. Please make your check to the order of “Universite du Quebec a Hull.”

________________________________________________________

Registration form

First Name, Middle Initial, LAST NAME:
Title:
Name and title preferred on badge:
Occupation:
Organization/Company:
Address:
Telephone:
Fax:
E-mail:
I would like to register as:
```
        author of paper
        discussant
        participant
```
Please send check (to the order of “Universite du Quebec a Hull”) to Prof. Pierre Lemieux

Date:
Please note that all registrations must be paid by check before April 30, 1994. (Special rates apply before February 28; see above.) Please make your check to the order of “Universite du Quebec a Hull” and send to:

Prof. Pierre Lemieux
Universite du Quebec a Hull
P.O. Box 1250, Station B
Hull, Quebec J8X 3X7
CANADA
Fax: 1 (819) 595-3924
E-mail: Pierre_Lemieux@uqah.uquebec.ca

3.4. Hotel Accommodation, Information and Registration

Forthcoming.

3.5. Logistics Information

Located on the Quebec side of the Ottawa river, Hull is only a few miles from the National Capital of Canada and 10 miles from the Ottawa International Airport.

3.6. Important Deadlines To Remember

January 31, 1994 Authors who want to submit papers must have sent a one-page abstract. See “Call for Papers”.

February 27 Last date to register at reduced tariff. See “Registration”.

February 28 Accepted authors will have been notified by Organizing Committee. See “Call for Papers”.

April 29 Last date to cancel registration and get a reimbursement. See “Registration”.

April 30 Authors must have sent their papers. See “Call for Papers”. Last date to register. Registration fees must be received at UQAH. See “Registration”

4. Whom to Contact

For any information on this Conference, please contact:

Prof. Pierre Lemieux
Universite du Quebec a Hull
P.O. Box 1250, Station B
Hull, Quebec
Canada J8X 3X7
Tel.: 1 (819) 595-3833
Fax: 1 (819) 595-3924
E-mail:Pierre_Lemieux@uqah.uquebec.ca

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- EJVC: Electronic Journal of Virtual Culture
EJVC is a new peer-reviewed electronic journal dedicated to scholarly research and discussion of all aspects of computer- mediated human experience, behavior, action, and interaction.

Information about EJVC may be obtained by sending e-mail to:

LISTSERV@KENTVM.BITNET

or

LISTSERV@KENTVM.KENT.EDU

with one or more of the following lines in the text:

SUBSCRIBE EJVC-L YourFirstname YourLastName
GET EJVC WELCOME
INDEX EJVC-L
Also, the file is available by anonymous ftp to:

byrd.mu.wvnet.edu

in the pub/ejvc directory.

Back
- Call for Submissions
Hypertext Fiction and the Literary Artistis a research project investigating the use of hypertext technology by creative writers.

The project consists of evaluations of software and hardware, critiques of traditional and computerized works, and a guide to sites of publication.

We would like to request writers to submit their works for review. Publishers are requested to send descriptions of their publications with subscription fees and submission formats. We are especially interested to hear from institutions which teach creative writing for the hypertext format.

To avoid swamping our e-mail account, please limit messages to a page or two in length. Send works on disk (IBM or Mac) or hardcopy to:

Hypertext Fiction and the Literary Artist
3 Westcott Upper
London, Ontario
N6C 3G6
E-mail: KEEPC@QUCD>QUEENSU.CA

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- THE JOURNAL OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE AND POPULAR CULTURECALL FOR PAPERS
Scholars are invited to submit manuscripts/reviews that meet the following criteria:

ISSUES: The Journal invites critical reviews of films, documentaries, plays, lyrics, and other related visual and performing arts. The Journal also invites original manuscripts from all social scientific fields on the topic of popular culture and criminal justice.

SUBMISSION PROCEDURES: To submit material for the Journal, please subscribe to CJMOVIES through the listserv and a detailed guidelines statement will automatically follow.

To subscribe, send a message with the following command to:

LISTSERV@ALBNYVM1:

SUBSCRIBE CJMOVIES YourFirstName YourLastName

Manuscripts and inquiries should be addressed to:

The Editors
Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture
SUNYCRJ@ALBNYVM1.BITNET
or SUNYCRJ@UACSC2.ALBANY.EDU

MANAGING EDITORS:

Sean Anderson and Greg Ungar
Editors
Journal of CriminalJustice and Popular Culture
School of Criminal Justice, SUNYA 135
Western Avenue Albany, NY 12222

INTERNET:

SA1171@ALBNYVM1.BITNET or GU8810@uacsc1.albany.edu

LIST ADMINISTRATOR:

Seth Rosner
School of Criminal Justice, SUNY
SR2602@uacsc1.albany.edu or SR2602@thor.albany.edu

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- Call for papers: The Linguistics of Humor
High quality papers are solicited for a symposium on the state of the art in the linguistic analysis of humor to be held at the forthcoming ISHS ’94, the Annual Meeting of the International Society of Humor Studies in Ithaca, NY (June 22-26, 1994).

Papers in all areas of linguistics dealing with theoretical, empirical, and applied aspects of the study of humor, joking, laughter, etc., from the point of view of linguistics are invited for the first ever symposium on the linguistics of humor.

Send three copies of a one page (250 words max) abstract to:

Salvatore Attardo
Youngstown State University
Dept. of English
Youngstown, OH, 44555-3415
USA
E-mail attardo@cc.ysu.edu

E-mail submissions (ASCII text, TeX/LaTeX or binhexed Macintosh MSWord) are encouraged.

Abstracts should state name, affiliation and address of the author(s) and state clearly the problem(s) addressed, the solution(s) provided, and the methodology adopted. An extra page for references, examples, etc. is allowed. References and citations should use the LSA or HUMOR style sheets.

Deadline for abstracts: February 15, 1994. Submitters will be notified of acceptance by March 20, 1994. Authors should register for the ISHS conference with:

M. A. Rishel
Writing Program
375 Roy H. Park School of Communications
Ithaca College
Ithaca, NY 14850
Ph. (607) 274-3324
Fax (607) 274-1664
E-mail rishel@ithaca.bitnet

If you have already submitted an abstract to M. A. Rishel and wish to be considered for the symposium, submit the abstract to S. Attardo with a cover letter clearly stating this fact.

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- Conference AnnouncementLITERARY TEXTS IN AN ELECTRONIC AGE:
  SCHOLARLY IMPLICATIONS AND LIBRARY SERVICES
31st Annual Clinic on Library Applications of Data Processing

April 10-12, 1994 Graduate School of Library and Information Science University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Electronic technologies are not replacing the book so much as they are changing its form and its role in scholarship. Rising interest in electronic texts is evident in the development of new computational approaches to the study of literature, the appearance of electronic text centers on university campuses, and an expanding publishing industry in electronic books. This conference will examine the role of electronic texts in the humanities and the implications of these technologies for libraries. Conference speakers will discuss this latest development in the human pursuit of the literary arts from a variety of perspectives, including the production and acquisition of electronic texts, strategies for storage and dissemination, software for the retrieval and analysis of electronic texts, problems of bibliographic control and intellectual property, and publishing trends.

Offered in conjunction with the conference is an optional preconference workshop in the practical use of Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) in the organization of electronic texts for interchange and research. Conducting the workshop will be C.M. Sperberg-McQueen, an editor of the recently released Guidelines for Text Encoding and Interchange, a text- representation standard based on SGML syntax.

Who should attend: This conference will be of interest to librarians, academic computing staff, publishers and distributors of electronic texts, and humanities scholars interested in the possibilities of electronic texts.

PROGRAM

Sunday, April 10

11am-5pm Registration

1-4:30pm Preconference Workshop on using Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) C. M. Sperberg-McQueen Editor, Text Encoding Initiative University of Illinois at Chicago

5-6:30pm Reception

6:30-7:30pm Dinner

8pm Keynote Address (Lincoln Hall Theater) AUTHORS AND READERS IN AN AGE OF ELECTRONIC TEXTS Jay David Bolter Professor School of Literature, Communication, & Culture Georgia Institute of Technology

Monday, April 11

8-9:30am ELECTRONIC TEXTS IN THE HUMANITIES: A COMING OF AGE Susan Hockey Director Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities Rutgers and Princeton Universities

THE TEXT ENCODING INITIATIVE: ELECTRONIC TEXT MARKUP FOR RESEARCH C. M. Sperberg-McQueen Editor, Text Encoding Initiative University of Illinois at Chicago

9:30-10am Break

10-11:30am ELECTRONIC TEXTS AND MULTIMEDIA IN ACADEMIC LIBRARIES: A VIEW FROM THE FRONT LINE Anita Lowry Head, Information Arcade, Main Library University of Iowa

HUMANIZING INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY: CULTURAL EVOLUTION AND THE INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF ELECTRONIC TEXT PROCESSING Mark Tyler Day Associate Librarian Indiana University

11:30am-1pm Lunch (on your own)

1-2:30pm COHABITING WITH COPYRIGHT IN AN ELECTRONIC ENVIRONMENT Mary Brandt Jensen Director, Law Library Professor, School of Law University of South Dakota

STANDARDS, INTERCONNECTIONS, AND THE NONPROFIT DOMAINS Michael Jensen Electronic Media Manager University of Nebraska Press

3-5pm Software Demonstrations

5-7pm Dinner (on your own)

7-9pm Software Demonstrations

Tuesday, April 12

8-9:30am THE FEASIBILITY OF WIDE-AREA TEXTUAL ANALYSIS SYSTEMS IN LIBRARIES: A PRACTICAL ANALYSIS John Price-Wilkin Information Management Coordinator Alderman Library, University of Virginia

THE SCHOLAR AND HIS LIBRARY IN THE COMPUTER AGE James W. Marchand Professor Department of Germanic Languages and Literature University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

9:30-10am Break

10-11:30am THE CHALLENGES OF ELECTRONIC TEXTS IN THE LIBRARY: BIBLIOGRAPHIC CONTROL AND ACCESS Rebecca Guenther Network Development and MARC Standards Office Library of Congress

PROJECT GUTENBERG: TRYING TO GIVE AWAY A TRILLION ETEXTS BY THE END OF 2001 Michael S. Hart, Professor of Electronic Text Executive Director of Project Gutenberg Etext Illinois Benedictine College

11:30am-1pm Lunch (on your own)

1-2:30pm DURKHEIM’S IMPERATIVE: THE ROLE OF HUMANITIES FACULTY IN THE INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES REVOLUTION Robert A. Jones Professor, Department of Sociology University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

THE MATERIALITY OF THE BOOK: ANOTHER TURN OF THE SCREW Terry Belanger University Professor, University of Virginia

GENERAL INFORMATION

Location: Except as noted, all conference events will take place in the Illini Union on the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1401 W. Green St., Urbana, Illinois.

Registration and Fees: The fee for the conference is $340 ($380 after March 11, 1994), which includes the Sunday night dinner, refreshments, and a copy of the Clinic proceedings. Registration for the optional SGML workshop is $40. Registration is limited, and early registration is recommended. A limited number of reduced-fee registrations are available for those who might otherwise be unable to attend; for consideration, submit a written request by March 11, 1994.

Transportation: Champaign-Urbana is served by TWA, Midway Express, American Eagle, and Northwest Commuter. AMTRAK service is available from Chicago and points south. Champaign is located 135 miles south of Chicago on Interstate routes 72, 74, and 57.

Accommodations: Rooms have been allocated for participants at the hotels listed below. Participants must make their own reservations, and should do so before March 9, 1994. Please indicate that you are attending the library data processing conference.
```
    Illini Union                  University Inn
    1401 W. Green St.             302 E. John St.
    Urbana, IL  61801             Champaign, IL  61820
    (217) 333-1241                (217) 352-8132
    Single: $54 + tax             Single: $54 + tax
    Double: $62 + tax             Double: $61 + tax
```
Continuing Education Units: Participants will earn 1.1 CEU for attending this meeting.

Refunds: Refunds will be made if you find that you cannot attend and you notify us in writing by March 16, 1994. You must cancel your own hotel reservations.

IF YOU WOULD LIKE MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THE CLINIC, PLEASE CALL (800) 982-0914 OR (217) 333-2973, OR SEND YOUR QUESTION VIA ELECTRONIC MAIL TO:

DPC@ALEXIA.LIS.UIUC.EDU

REGISTRATION FORM

Literary Texts in an Electronic Age:
Scholarly Implications and Library Services

31st Annual Clinic on Library Applications of Data Processing

April 10-12, 1994
Graduate School of Library and Information Science
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Registration Form
```
Name
____________________________________________________________
Title____________________________________________________________
Organization Name________________________________________________
Business Address_________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
Phone Number (___)_______________________________________________
Email
address____________________________________________________
```
Registration Fees: $340 ($380 after March 11) ________ $40 SGML workshop ________ TOTAL FEES ________

Method of Payment: __Check enclosed (make payable to GSLIS/University of Illinois) __Charge to credit card __Visa __MasterCard Card #___________________________Exp. date_______ Signature________________________________________

Any special needs (access, meals, etc.)?_________________________ _________________________________________________________________

If there are issues you are especially interested in, or if you have particular questions about the topics that will be addressed at this conference, please write them below. We will pass them along to the speakers. _________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________

You may register by mail by sending this form to the address below, by phone (217-333-2973 or 800-982-0914), by fax (217-244-3302), or by electronic mail:

(dpc@alexia.lis.uiuc.edu)

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Graduate School of Library and Information Science
Library and Information Science Building
501 E. Daniel St.
Champaign, Illinois 61820-6212

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- CALL FOR PAPERS, PANELS, AND PRESENTATIONS
National Symposium on Proposed Arts and Humanities Policies for the National Information Infrastructure

On October 14th, 15th and 16th, the Center for Art Research in Boston will sponsor a National Symposium on Proposed Arts and Humanities Policies for the National Information Infrastructure.

Participants will explore the impact of the Clinton Administration’s AGENDA FOR ACTION and proposed NII legislation on the future of the arts and the humanities in 21st Century America.

The symposium will bring together government officials, academics, artists, writers, representatives of arts and cultural institutions and organizations, and other concerned individuals from many disciplines and areas of interest to discuss specific issues of policy which will effect the cultural life of *all* Americans during the coming decades.

To participate, submit a 250-word abstract of your proposal for a paper, panel-discussion or presentation, accompanied by a one-page vitae, by March 15, 1994.

Special consideration will be given to those efforts that take a critical perspective of the issues, and are concerned with offering specific alternatives to current administration and congressional agendas.

The proceedings of the symposium will be video-taped, and papers and panels will be published on CD-ROM. For further information, reply to:

jaroslav@artdata.win.net

via return e-mail.

Thank you, Jay Jaroslav

—

Jay Jaroslav, Director jaroslav@artdata.win.net CENTER FOR ART RESEARCH 241 A Street Boston, MA voice: (617) 451-8030 02210-1302 USA fax: (617) 451-1196

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- Announcement and Call for Submissions:
  Postmodern Culture
Postmodern Culture
A SUNY Press Series

Series Editor: Joseph Natoli
Editor: Carola Sautter

Center for Integrative Studies, Arts and Humanities Michigan State University

We invite submissions of short book manuscripts that present a postmodern crosscutting of contemporary headlines–green politics to Jeffrey Dahmer, Rap Music to Columbus, the Presidential campaign to Rodney King–and academic discourses from art and literature to politics and history, sociology and science to women’s studies, form computer studies to cultural studies.

This series is designed to detour us off modernity’s yet-to-be- completed North-South Superhighway to Truth and onto postmodernism’s “forking paths” crisscrossing high and low culture, texts and life-worlds, selves and sign systems, business and academy, page and screen, “our” narrative and “theirs,” formula and contingency, present and past, art and discourse, analysis and activism, grand narratives and dissident narratives, truths and parodies of truths.

By developing a postmodern conversation about a world that has overspilled its modernist framing, this series intends to link our present ungraspable “balkanization” of all thoughts and events with the means to narrate and then re-narrate them. Modernity’s “puzzle world” to be “unified” and “solved” becomes postmodernism’s multiple worlds to be represented within the difficult and diverse wholeness that their own multiplicity and diversity shapes and then re-shapes.

Accordingly, manuscripts should display a “postmodernist style” that moves easily and laterally across public as well as academic spheres, “inscribes” within as well as “scribes” against realist and modernist modes, and strives to be readable-across-multiple- narratives and “culturally relative” rather than “foundational.”

Inquiries, proposals, and manuscripts should be addressed to:

Joseph Natoli
Series Editor
20676jpn@msu.edu

or

Carola Sautter
Editor
SUNY Press
SUNY Plaza
Albany, NY 12246-0001

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- Call for PapersPSYCHE: an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness
You are invited to submit papers for publication in the inaugural issue of PSYCHE: an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness (ISSN: 1039-723X).

PSYCHE is a refereed electronic journal dedicated to supporting the interdisciplinary exploration of the nature of consciousness and its relation to the brain. PSYCHE publishes material relevant to that exploration form the perspectives afforded by the disciplines of Cognitive Science, Philosophy, Psychology, Neuroscience, Artificial Intelligence, and Anthropology. Interdisciplinary discussions are particularly encouraged. PSYCHE publishes a large variety of articles and reports for a diverse academic audience four times per year. As an electronic journal, the usual space limitations of print journals do not apply; however, the editors request that potential authors do not attempt to abuse the medium. PSYCHE also publishes a hardcopy version simultaneously with the electronic version. Long articles published in the electronic format may be abbreviated, synopsized, or eliminated form the hardcopy version.

Types of Articles:

The journal publishes from time to time all of the following varieties of articles. Many of these (as indicated below) are peer reviewed; all articles are reviewed by editorial staff.

Research Articles reporting original research by author(s). Articles may be either purely theoretical or experimental or some combination of the two. Articles of special interest occasionally will be followed by a selection of peer commentaries. Peer Reviewed.

Survey Articles reporting on the state of the art research in particular areas. These may be done in the form of a literature review or annotated bibliography. More ambitious surveys will be peer reviewed.

Discussion Notes critiques of previous research. Peer Reviewed.

Tutorials introducing a subject area relevant to the study of consciousness to non-specialists.

Letters providing and informal forum for expressing opinions on editorial policy or upon material previously published in PSYCHE. Screened by editorial staff.

Abstracts summarizing the contents of recently published journal articles, books, and conference proceedings.

Book Reviews which indicate the contents of recent books and evaluate their merits as contributions to research and/or as textbooks.

Announcements of forthcoming conferences, paper submission deadlines, etc.

Advertisements of immediate interest to our audience will be published: available grants; positions; journal contents; proposals for joint research; etc.

Notes for Authors:

Unsolicited submissions of original works within any of the above categories are welcome. Prospective authors should send articles directly to the executive editor. Submissions should be in a single copy if submitted electronically of four (4) copies if submitted by mail.

Submitted matter should be preceded by: the author’s name; address; affiliation; telephone number; electronic mail address. Any submission to be peer reviewed should be preceded by a 100- 200 word abstract as well. Note that peer review will be blind, meaning that the prefatory material will not be made available to the referees. In the event that an article needs to be shortened for publication in the print version of PSYCHE, the author will be responsible for making any alterations requested by the editors.

Any figures required should be designed in screen-readable ASCII.

If that cannot be arranged, figures should be submitted as separate postscript files so that they can be printed out by readers locally.

Authors of accepted articles assign to PSYCHE the right to publish the text both electronically and as printed matter and to make it available permanently in an electronic archive. Authors will, however, retain copyright to their articles and may republish them in any forum so long as they clearly acknowledge PSYCHE as the original source of publication.

Subscriptions:

Subscriptions to the electronic version of PSYCHE may be initiated by sending the one-line command, SUBSCRIBE PSYCHE-L Firstname Lastname, in the body on an electronic mail message to:

LISTSERV@NKI.BITNET

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- RESEARCH ON VIRTUAL RELATIONSHIPS
```
Have you had an interesting virtual relationship  
    on electronic networks? A research team wants    
    your story. Material acknowledged and terms     
      respected. Both research articles and a        
        general press (trade) book planned.          

            Mail to Either Address                   
          USA:                 CANADA:    
           
                     -or-
```
VIRTUAL, PALABRAS P.O. Box 46, Box 175, Stn. E Boulder Creek, Toronto, Ontario California 95006 CANADA M6H 4E1 E-Mail (internet): yfak0073@vm1.yorku.ca Fax: (to Canada): (416) 736-5986
```
  
              
  -> Please re-post to relevant network sites <-     
  ( A Distributed Knowledge Project Undertaking )
```
Back
- SCREENSITES 94
April 22nd and 23rd, 1994
The Graduate Program in Communications
McGill University
Montreal, Quebec, Canada

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS

SCREENSITES 94 is a conference organized by the students of the Graduate Program in Communications, McGill University. Papers, presentations, panel discussions, and informal gatherings will discuss the screen as sites of knowledge, control, culture, aesthetics, interaction, power and experience. This conference will give participants a chance to present their ongoing research to an audience from a wide variety of disciplines and fields.

The “screen” occupies an increasingly significant position in 20th Century culture. New cultural sites and structuring metaphors inevitably accompany screen-dependent media such as film, television, virtual reality, and computers. These phenomena deserve continued critical attention. This conference seeks submissions that will enhance our understanding of the screen– its lure, its formal properties, its varied uses, its economy, and its ubiquity. Should metaphors of sight be the favored analytical preoccupation when describing the screen and the fixation of its viewers, or would metaphors of “site” hold greater promise? Do screens have distinct, cross-contextual implications or are “effects” more usefully understood as they are determined and/or discovered by users, producers, viewers or spectators? How might the contributions of Communication Studies, Film Theory, Cultural Studies, Queer Studies, and Performance Theory be helpful in elaborating the utility of screen- or non- screen-specific modes of analysis? Papers addressing issues of class, race, ethnicity, taste and proclivity, gender and orientation are encouraged along with interdisciplinary and multi-theoretical approaches.

SCREENSITES 94 will be held at The Graduate Program in Communications building which is located on the main campus of McGill University in the centre of downtown Montreal. For more information please call 514/398-7667 or make contact by e-mail:

CYWB@musicA.mcgill.ca

Send abstract or paper submission on disk or hard copy, by mail or fax to:

SCREENSITES 94
Graduate Program in Communications
McGill University
3465, rue Peel
Montreal, Quebec
H3A 1W7
tel.: 514/398-7667 or 514/398-4110
fax.: 514/398-4934
electronic mail: CYWB@musicA.mcgill.ca

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: 28 FEBRUARY 1994

– FIN –

La meme-chose en francais (sans accents):

A l’ecran 94- Invitation a soumettre des projects de conferences

A l’ecran est un colloque organise par les etudiant-e- s du Program d’etudes superieures en communications de l’Universite McGill. Conferences, sessions plenieres, et rencontres informelles seront l’occasion de se concentrer sur l’ecran, et sur l’ecran en tant que source d’information, de controle, de culture, d’esthetique, de societe, de pouvoir et d’experience. Ce colloque donnera l’occcasion aux participant-e-s de presenter leurs recherches a un public provenant d’un grand nombre de disciplines au Program d’etudes superieures en communications.

L’ecran occupe une position importante dans la culture du vingtieme siecle. De nouveaux sites culturels et de nouvelles metaphores accompagnent inevitablement les media qui dependent de l’ecran: le cinema, la television, la realite virtuelle et les ordinateurs. Ce colloque sollicite des soumissions que contribueront a notre comprehension de l’ecranQ sa predominance, son attrait, ses proprietes et ses divers usages. Les systemes d’echanges symboliques que determinent la valeur culturelle et economique sont aussi dignes d’interet. Par exemple, les metaphores visuelles devraient- elles etre au centre de nos preoccupations lorsqu’on s’interesse a l’ecran et a ses publics, ou devrait-on plutot utiliser a des metaphores de lieux? Les ecrans ont-ils des implications concretes qui persistent a travers les contextes, ou doit-on s’attarder aux effets qui sont determines et/ou decouvents per les utilisateurs, les productrices, ou les spectateurs? Quelles sont les contributions des domaines des communications, des etudes du cinema, des etudes culturelles, des points de vue “marginaux”, des theories de la performance face a ces questions? Les conferences traitant des questions de classe, de race, d’ethnicite, de genres et d’orientation sont encouragees, de meme que les approches interdisciplinaires et multi-theoriques.

Le Program d’etudes superieures en communications est situe sur le campus de McGill, au centreville de Montreal. Pour plus d’information, veuillez composer le (514) 398.76.67 ou communiquer per courrier electronique a l’adresse suivante:

CYWB@musicA.mcgill.ca

Back
- FEMISA
FEMISA@mach1.wlu.ca

FEMISA is conceived as a list where those who work on or think about feminism, gender, women and international relations, world politics, international political economy, or global politics, can communicate.

Formally, FEMISA was established to help those members of the Feminist Theory and Gender Studies Section of the International Studies Association keep in touch. More generally, I hope that FEMISA can be a network where we share information in the area of feminism or gender and international studies about publications or articles, course outlines, questions about sources or job opportunities, information about conferences or upcoming events, or proposed panels and information related to the International Studies Association.

To subscribe:
send one line message in the BODY of mail-message

sub femisa your name

to:

listserv@mach1.wlu.ca

To unsub send the one line message

unsub femisa

to:

listserv@mach1.wlu.ca

I look forward to hearing suggestions and comments from you.

Owner: Deborah Stienstra

stienstr@uwpg02.uwinnipeg.ca

Department of Political Science University of Winnipeg

Back
- HOLOCAUS: Holocaust list
HOLOCAUS on

LISTSERV@UICVM.BITNET

or

LISTSERV@UICVM.UIC.EDU

HOLOCAUS@uicvm has become part of the stable of electronic mail discussion groups (“lists”) at the University of Illinois, Chicago. It is sponsored by the University’s History Department and its Jewish Studies Program.

To subscribe to HOLOCAUS, you need and Internet or Bitnet computer account. From that account, send this message to:

LISTSERV@UICVM.BITNET

or

LISTSERV@uicvm.uic.edu

SUB HOLOCAUS Firstname Surname

Use your own Firstname and Lastname. You will be automatically added. You can read all the mail, and send your own postings to everyone on the list (We have about 100 subscribers around the world right now).

Owner:

JimMott@spss.com

The HOLOCAUS policies are:
- 1. The coverage of the list will include the Holocaust itself, and closely related topics like anti-Semitism, and Jewish history in the 1930’s and 1940’s, as well as related themes in the history of WW2, Germany, and international diplomacy.
- 2. We are especially interested in reaching college teachers of history who already have, or plan to teach courses on the Holocaust. In 1991-92, there were 265 college faculty in the US and Canada teaching courses on the Holocaust (154 in History departments, 67 in Religion, and 46 in Literature). An even larger number of professors teach units on the Holocaust in courses on Jewish history (taught by 273 faculty) and World War II (taught by 373), not to mention many other possible courses. Most of these professors own PC’s, but do not use them for e-mail. We hope our list will be one inducement to go on line. HOLOCAUS will therefore actively solicit syllabi, reading lists, termpaper guides, ideas on films and slides, and tips and comments that will be of use to the teacher who wants to add a single lecture, or an entire course.
- 3. H-Net is now setting up an international board of editors to guide HOLOCAUS policy and to help stimulate contributions.
- 4. HOLOCAUS is moderated by Jim Mott (JimMott@spss.com), a PhD in History. The moderator will solicit postings (by e- mail, phone and even by US mail), will assist people in subscribing and setting up options, will handle routine inquiries, and will consolidate some postings. The moderator will also solicit and post newsletter type information (calls for conferences, for example, or listings of sessions at conventions). It may prove feasible to commission book and article reviews, and to post book announcements from publishers. Anyone with suggestions about what HOLOCAUS can and might do is invited to send in the ideas.
- 5. The tone and target audience will be scholarly, and academic standards and styles will prevail. HOLOCAUS is affiliated with the International History Network.
- 6. HOLOCAUS is a part of H-Net, a project run by computer- oriented historians at the U of Illinois. We see moderated e-mail lists as a new mode of scholarly communication; they have enormous potential for putting in touch historians from across the world. Our first list on urban history, H- URBAN@UICVM, recently started up with Wendy Plotkin as moderator. H-WOMEN is in the works, with discussions underway about other possibilities like Ethnic, Labor, and US South. We are helping our campus Jewish Studies program set up JSTUDY (restricted to the U of Illinois Chicago campus, for now), and are considering the creation of H- JEWISH, also aimed at academics, but covering the full range of scholarship on Jewish history. If you are interested in any of these projects, please e-write Richard Jensen, for we are now (as of late April) in a critical planning stage.
- 7. H-Net has an ambitious plan for training historians across the country in more effective use of electronic communications. Details of the H-Net plan are available on request from Richard Jensen, the director, at:
  
  campbelld@apsu
  
  or
  
  u08946@uicvm.uic.edu
Back
- NewJour-L@e-math.ams.org
NewJour-L aims to accomplish two objectives; it is both a list and a project.

FIRST:

NewJour-L is the place to announce your own (or to forward information about others’) newly planned, newly issued, or revised electronic networked journal or newsletter. It is specially dedicated for those who wish to share information in the planning, gleam-in-the-eye stage or at a more mature stage of publication development and availability.

It is also the place to announce availability of paper journals and newsletters as they become available on electronic networks. Scholarly discussion lists which regularly and continuously maintain supporting files of substantive articles or preprints may also be reported, for those journal-like sections.

We hope that those who see announcements on Bitnet, Internet, Usenet or other media will forward them to NewJour-L, but this does run a significant risk of boring subscribers with a number of duplicate messages. Therefore, NewJour-L IS filtered through a moderator to eliminate this type of duplication.

It does not attempt to cover areas that are already covered by other lists. For example, sources like NEW-LIST describe new discussion lists; ARACHNET deals with social and cultural issues of e-publishing; VPIEJ-L handles many matters related to electronic publishing of journals. SERIALST discusses the technical aspects of all kinds of serials. You should continue to subscribe to these as you have done before, and contribute to them.

SECOND:

NewJour-L represents an identification and road-mapping project for electronic journals and newsletters, begun by Michael Strangelove, University of Ottawa. NewJour-L will expand and continue that work.

As new publications are reported, a NewJour-L support group will develop the following services — planning is underway & we ask that anyone who would like to participate as below, let us know:
- A worksheet will be sent to the editors of the new e-publication for completion. This will provide detailed descriptions about bibliographic, content, and access characteristics.
- An original cataloguing record will be created.
- The fully catalogued title will be reported to national utilities and other appropriate sites so that there is a bibliographic record available for subsequent subscribers or searchers.
- The records will feed a directory and database of these titles.
Not all the of the implementation is developed, and the work will expand over the next year. We thank you for your contributions, assistance, and advice, which will be invaluable.

SUBSCRIBING:

To subscribe, send a message to:

LISTSERV@e-math.ams.org

Leave the subject line blank.

In the body, type: SUBSCRIBE NewJour-L FirstName LastName

You will have to subscribe in order to post messages to this list.

To drop out or postpone, use the standard LISTSERV (Internet) directions.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT:

For their work in defining the elements of this project and for their support to date, we thank:

Michael Strangelove, University of Ottawa, Advisor
David Rodgers, American Mathematical Society, Systems & Network Support
Edward Gaynor, University of Virginia Library, Original Cataloguing Development
John Price-Wilkin, University of Virginia Library, Systems & Network Support
Birdie MacLennan, University of Vermont Library, Cataloguing and Indexing Development
Diane Kovacs, Kent State University Library, Advisor

We anticipate this will become a wider effort as time passes, and we welcome your interest in it. This project is co-ordinated through:

The Association of Research Libraries
Office of Scientific & Academic Publishing
21 Dupont Circle, Suite 800
Washington, DC 20036
e-mail: osap@cni.org

(Ann Okerson)

Back
- popcult@camosun.bc.ca Popular Culture
The POPCULT list is now in place. It is open to analytical discussion of all aspects of popular culture. The list will not be moderated. Material relevant to building bridges between popular culture and traditional culture will be very strongly encouraged.

To subscribe, unsubscribe, get help, etc, send a message to:

mailserv@camosun.bc.ca

There should not be anything in the ‘Subject:’ line and the body of the message should have the specific keyword on a line by itself.

S

ome keywords are:
SUBSCRIBE POPCULT
HELP
LISTS
SEND/LIST POPCULT
UNSUBSCRIBE POPCULT

It is possible to send multiple commands, each on a separate line. Do not include your name after SUBSCRIBE POPCULT. In some ways this server is a simplified version of the major servers, but it is also more streamlined. I recommend, to start, that you put SUBSCRIBE on one line, and HELP on the next line. That will give you a full listing of available commands.

To send messages to the list for distribution to list members for exchange of ideas, etc, send messages to:

popcult@camosun.bc.ca
```
Owner:
```
Peter Montgomery Montgomery@camosun.bc.ca Professor Dept of English ph (604) 370-3342 (o) Camosun College (fax) (604) 370-3346 3100 Foul Bay Road Victoria, BC Off. Paul Bldg 326 CANADA V8P 5J2

Back
- Humanities Consultant Job Posting
Princeton University

The position of humanities computing consultant at Princeton University is part of a dynamic and forward-looking team of instructional and media specialists whose mission is to support teaching and learning. Please submit resumes to the address below — e-mail submissions are particularly welcome. Apply promptly, as we would like to fill the position immediately. You may also send questions about the position directly to me:

balestri@phoenix.princeton.edu.Diane Balestri
Manager, Instructional and Media Services
Princeton University

SEARCH REOPENED

Humanities Consultant

Information Services within CIT at Princeton University seeks a consultant to support faculty members and students in humanities disciplines who use information technologies in teaching and research. The consultant will join the Instructional and Media Services group.

Responsibilities include: proactive consulting with humanities departments and faculty about instructional and research needs; identifying, installing, testing, and documenting software tools and applications; supporting faculty and students in software use. In addition, the consultant will work closely with the language laboratory coordinator on acquisition, installation, and use of software and multimedia applications for language instruction. The consultant will provide expertise in text data bases and text analysis for faculty in all disciplines and expertise in word processing and printing with non-Roman characters and fonts.

Qualifications: minimally, a Master’s degree in a humanities discipline. Excellent knowledge of one or more foreign languages required. Strong background (at least two years) supporting computer users in one or more of the humanities disciplines taught at Princeton. Knowledge of both instructional and research applications is required, as is the ability to work on multiple projects simultaneously and to move easily among a variety of hardware platforms, including Intel-based and Macintosh systems. Must enjoy outreach to faculty in humanities disciplines and must possess superior oral and written communications skills.

Application deadline: February 10, 1994.

Send resume and letter of application to:

Bruce Finnie
Computing and Information Technology
87 Prospect Avenue
Princeton University
Princeton NJ 08544
609-258-3943 (fax)
finnie@pucc.princeton.edu (e-mail)

Princeton University is an equal opportunity, affirmative action employer.

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- NEH DEADLINES
Below is a full list of application deadlines for NEH programs, plus contact numbers for individual programs. All telephone numbers are in area code 202. To receive guidelines for any NEH program, contact the Office of Publications and Public Affairs at (202) 606-8438. Guidelines are normally available at least two months in advance of application deadlines.

DIVISION OF EDUCATION PROGRAMS

James C. Herbert, Director (606-8373)
```
PROGRAM / CONTACT                         DEADLINE         
PROJECTS BEGINNING
```
Higher Education in the Humanities (Lyn Maxwell White; 606-8380) 1 April 1994 October 1994

Institutes for College & University Faculty (Barbara Ashbrook; 606-8380) 1 April 1994 Summer 1995

Science & Humanities Education (Susan Greenstein; 606-8380) 15 March 1994 October 1994

Core Curriculum Projects (Fred Winter; 606-8380) 1 April 1994 October 1994

Two-Year Colleges (Judith Jeffrey Howard; 606-8380) 1 April 1994 October 1994

Challenge Grants (Thomas Adams; 606-8380) 1 May 1994 December 1994

Elementary & Secondary Education in the Humanities (F. Bruce Robinson; 606-8377) 15 March 1994 December 1994

Teacher-Scholar Program (Annette Palmer; 606-8377) 1 May 1994 September 1995

Special Opportunity in Foreign Language Education Higher Education (Lyn Maxwell White; 606-8380) 15 March 1994 October 1994

Elementary & Secondary Education (F. Bruce Robinson; 606-8377) 15 March 1994 October 1994

DIVISION OF FELLOWSHIPS & SEMINARS

Marjorie A. Berlincourt, Director (606-8458)
```
PROGRAM / CONTACT                       DEADLINE          
PROJECTS BEGINNING

Fellowships for University Teachers
(Maben D. Herring; 606-8466)            1 May 1994             
1 January 1995

Fellowships for College Teachers &
Independent Scholars
(Joseph B. Neville; 606-8466)           1 May 1994             
1 January 1995

Summer Stipends
(Thomas O'Brien; 606-8466)              1 October 1994           
1 May 1995

Faculty Graduate Study Program for
HBCUs (Maben D. Herring; 606-8466)      15 March 1994        
1 September 1995

Younger Scholars Program
(Leon Bramson; 606-8463)                1 November 1994          
1 May 1995

Dissertation Grants
(Kathleen Mitchell; 606-8463)           15 November 1994     
1 September 1995

Study Grants for College & University
Teachers (Clayton Lewis; 606-8463)      15 August 1994           
1 May 1995

Summer Seminars for College Teachers
(Joel Schwartz; 606-8463)
   Participants                          1 March 1994            
Summer 1994

   Directors                             1 March 1994            
Summer 1995

Summer Seminars for School Teachers
(Michael Hall; 606-8463)
   Participants                          1 March 1994            
Summer 1994

   Directors                             1 April 1994            
Summer 1995
```
DIVISION OF PRESERVATION & ACCESS

George F. Farr, Jr., Director (606-8570)
```
PROGRAM / CONTACT                         DEADLINE         
PROJECTS BEGINNING

Library & Archival Research Projects
(Vanessa Piala/Charles Kolb; 606-8570)  1 June 1994             
January 1995

Library & Archival Preservation/Access
Projects (Karen Jefferson/Barbara
Paulson; 606-8570)                      1 June 1994             
January 1995

National Heritage Preservation Program
(Richard Rose/Laura Word; 606-8570)     1 November 1994          
July 1995

U. S. Newspaper Program
(Jeffrey Field; 606-8570)               1 June 1994              
July 1995
```
DIVISION OF PUBLIC PROGRAMS

Marsha Semmel, Acting Director (606-8267)
```
PROGRAM / CONTACT                         DEADLINE         
PROJECTS BEGINNING

  Humanities Projects in Media
(James Dougherty; 606-8278)            11 March 1994           
1 October 1994

  Humanities Projects in Museums &
Historical Organizations
(Fredric Miller; 606-8284)             3 June 1994             
1 January 1995

  Public Humanities Projects
(Wilsonia Cherry; 606-8271)            11 March 1994           
1 October 1994

  Humanities Projects in Libraries
(Thomas Phelps; 606-8271)
```
Planning 4 February 1994 1 July 1994 Implementation 11 March 1994 1 October 1994 Challenge Grants (Abbie Cutter; 606-8361) 1 May 1994 December 1994

DIVISION OF RESEARCH PROGRAMS

Guinevere L. Griest, Director (606-8200)
```
PROGRAM / CONTACT                         DEADLINE         
PROJECTS BEGINNING

  Scholarly Publications
(Margot Backas; 606-8207)
  Editions
(Douglas Arnold; 606-8207)            1 June 1994              
1 April 1995

  Translations
(Helen Aguerra; 606-8207)             1 June 1994              
1 April 1995

  Subventions (606-8207)              15 March 1994          
1 October 1994

  Reference Materials
(Jane Rosenberg; 606-8358)
  Tools
(Martha B. Chomiak; 606-8358)         1 September 1994          
1 July 1995

  Guides
(Michael Poliakoff; 606-8358)         1 September 1994          
1 July 1995

  Challenge Grants
(Bonnie Gould; 606-8358)              1 May 1994             
December 1994

  Interpretive Research Programs
(George Lucas; 606-8210)
  Collaborative Projects
(Donald C. Mell; 606-8210)            15 October 1994           
1 July 1995

  Archaeology Projects
(Bonnie Magness-Gardiner; 606-8210)   15 October 1994          
1 April 1995

  Humanities, Science, and Technology
(Daniel Jones; 606-8210)              15 October 1994           
1 July 1995

  Conferences
(David Coder; 606-8210)               15 January 1994        
1 October 1994

  Centers & International Research
Organizations (Christine Kalke; 606-8210)
  Centers for Advanced Study            1 October 1994           
1 July 1995

  International Research                1 April 1994           
1 January 1995
```
DIVISION OF STATE PROGRAMS

Carole Watson, Director (606-8254)

Each state humanities council establishes its own grant guidelines and application deadlines. Addresses and telephone numbers of these state programs may be obtained from the NEH Division of State Programs.

CHALLENGE GRANTS PROGRAM

Applications are submitted through the Divisions of Education, Research, and Public Programs. Deadline is 1 May 1994 for projects beginning December 1994.

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- GOPHEUR LITTERATURES
Announcing the “gopheur LITTERATURES” at the Universite de Montreal.

Address:

gopher.litteratures.Umontreal.ca 7070

or through the University of Montreal Main Gopher:

Address:

gopher.Umontreal.ca

Gopher servers are sprouting like mushrooms these days. Not only universities have gopher servers, but also departments now. They can be very useful tools to locate information and students here are very fond of them. They are also the first step towards much more sophisticated modes of accessing collections of research and bibliographic data, e-texts, etc…

The “Gopheur LITTERATURES” at the Universite de Montreal (UdM) just happens to be the first gopher dedicated to teaching, research and publications on French Literature, Quebecois Literature and Francophone Literatures, and also the first gopher to do so in french, albeit without the accents for the moment. (In the future we will offer the choice between ASCII and ISO-LATIN, as is currently being done on others gophers in the province of Quebec).

The “Gopheur LITTERATURES” is in construction. This means it will be evolving. Items on the main menu indicate a program of research conducted at the Department of etudes francaises. The goal of the gopher is to offer electronic documentation on the Departement d’etudes francaises, and to establish a resource center for information, tools, links, documents, local and international, to be used by the computing community of French scholars and students.

All comments and suggestions of sites of interest to French Studies should be sent to:

Gophlitt@ere.Umontreal.caChristian Allegre
allegre@ere.umontreal.ca
Universite de Montreal
Departement d’etudes francaises
September 24, 2013
Malice: The New American Hero

M. Daphne Kutzer

Department of English
State University of New York at Plattsburgh
kutzerdm@splava.cc.plattsburgh.edu

Malice, Directed by Harold Becker. Screenplay by Aaron Sorking and Scott Frank. Castlerock, 1993.

The latest contender in the Woman as Evil Bitch Film Sweepstakes is Harold Becker’s Malice. The film is less interesting for its portrayal of the Bitch, Tracy (Nicole Kidman), than for its view of what makes a Real American Man. The character of Tracy–a beautiful fraud who pretends to love children and her husband while plotting with handsome Dr. Jed Hill (Alec Baldwin) to make herself sterile and thereby collect insurance money–doesn’t add much to the string of recent screen villainesses in Fatal Attraction, The Hand That Rocks The Cradle, Basic Instinct, and others. All share the central quality of denying their feminine and motherly sides and/or exploiting their sexuality to ensnare hapless men. However, the development of the character of Tracy’s husband Andy (Bill Pullman), along with the ultimate fate of handsome Jed Hill, shows us that something both old and new is happening to the men in these films. Dan Gallagher (Michael Douglas) in Fatal Attraction (1988) is guilty of bringing evil into his domestic Eden, and in the end his wounded wife must kill the bitch. The only man aware of the bitch’s true nature in The Hand That Rocks The Cradle (1993) is the mental handicapped black handyman, Solomon (Ernie Hudson): the scientist husband is blind to her true nature even once he knows her true identity. In both these films the male “heroes” are weak and ineffectual, if not emasculated. Nick Curran (Michael Douglas again) in Basic Instinct (1992) is made of sterner stuff, but despite his nickname of “Shooter,” the film hints that he, too, will be a victim in the end. Malice provides a step–forward?–in the development of the American film hero, at least in the genre of thrillers.

The male leads of the film are Andy and Jed. Andy’s shortened name suggests his initial weakness, while Jed’s name suggests his hunkiness–it’s the sort of name you find attached to cleft-chinned romantic soap opera heroes. The names match the physical attributes of each character. Bill Pullman’s Andy is slightly built, has a non-descript face, and is always dressed in a corduroy or tweed jacket, button-down Oxford cloth shirt, and knitted tie–suitable if stereotypical garb for an Associate Dean of Students. Jed is the former high school running back, solid and athletic (we see him jogging energetically, for instance, while Andy drinks coffee), and the film allows him to doff his shirt frequently, so that the viewer may admire Alec Baldwin’s broad and hairy chest.

The way each man handles his women is also instructive. Andy has married, according to the local campus newspaper, his “favorite student.” We aren’t meant to raise our post-Anita Hill eyebrows at this. The detail is provided so that we may understand that Andy is not man enough for a Real Woman: he needs a “student wife,” someone young enough to be malleable in his inexperienced hands.

Of course, Tracy turns out to be anything but malleable. The film foreshadows this by way of a sex scene between Andy and Tracy. The happy couple are eating take-out Chinese in bed (perhaps a reference to the scene in Woody Allen’s Manhattan, which also concerns the power balance between an older man and a younger woman). Andy can’t handle the chopsticks, and says to his wife, “Would you think any the less of me if I used a fork?” Tracy coyly begins to feed him from her chopsticks, and before we know it she is straddling him and they are having sex. It is Tracy who is on top, both literally and figuratively. She is less prudish and more aggressive than her husband; she doesn’t mind the curtainless windows and he does. Andy remains passive throughout, and all we see of his naked body is a scrawny lower leg. You can tell he doesn’t jog.

Jed, on the other hand, is a Real Man. When we see him having sex, Jed is energetically on top–so much so that he is keeping Tracy and Andy, who live a floor below, awake. We see his bulging biceps and naked torso, and when his partner asks him to slow down on the booze, he replies, “I am impervious to alcohol.” Hard drinking, hard working, and hard playing: an admirable example of the American male.

But in the end it is Jed who is killed by Tracy the Bitch, and Andy the Wimp who ends up the hero. How does this happen?

It happens improbably, of course. There has been a serial rapist loose on campus, and indeed the rapist’s actions lead to the initial meeting between Andy and Jed– Jed miraculously saves the life of one of the victims, Andy comes to thank him and discovers that Jed is his old high school running back hero. Before long Andy asks Jed to rent the upper floor of his run-down Victorian house. What Andy doesn’t know, of course, is that Tracy and Jed are hatching an evil medical plot right beneath his roof, and that one reason Tracy becomes upset with Jed’s energetic sex life is that she has been having an affair with him herself. Andy is not only cuckolded, but cuckolded under his own roof, by someone who is also “cuckolding” (as it were) his wife.

No one counts on the rapist, however. One of Andy’s students fails to show up for an appointment, and the dedicated dean drives to her house to talk to her. We aren’t surprised when he discovers her raped body in the backyard. The local (female) detective asks Andy to give a sperm sample to clear him of suspicion. Furious, he says, “Am I a fucking suspect?” This is the first time he uses the “f” word, but not the last. Up to this point in the film he has been fucked over by the judicial system and by his friend and his wife, and he has not done any genuine fucking himself, although he will ultimately fuck up the insurance scheme. When he is asked to fuck himself, he finally rebels. I emphasize the word “fuck” because it is the biggest linguistic clue in the film as to Andy’s growing manhood. Jed has used it early on–when lambasting a medical colleague, he says, “Do that again and I’ll take out your lungs with a fucking ice cream scoop.” Tracy also uses the word–and the instant Andy starts to, we know his luck is changing.

But first Tracy leaves him. Her ovary has burst, Jed performs emergency surgery, and with Andy’s permission removes both ovaries, even though one of them turns out to be viable. Tracy sues Jed (this is part of their scheme, of course) and leaves Andy. Disconsolate, Andy works late, goes to the basement for a lightbulb, realizes the janitor is the rapist, and socks him into unconsciousness after a battle that leaves Andy with a bloodied face.

A lightbulb has literally gone off for Andy. Directly after his capture of the rapist, the police detective tells him that the sperm sample he gave showed that he is sterile –and Andy knows Tracy was pregnant when she had emergency surgery. Here is proof that he has been cuckolded and that Tracy is not what she seems. Andy goes off in a fury to Jed (whom he does not yet suspect); to Tracy’s lawyer, whom he assumes is also her lover; and to Tracy’s alcoholic mother (played wickedly well by Ann Bancroft) in search of clues. Everyone he sees says, “What happened to your face?” Of course, in one sense he has lost face completely, courtesy of Tracy, and he has also lost his manhood in that he knows he can’t father children. But in other ways he has re-cast his mild-mannered professor’s face in the shape of the hero’s. He tells the detective, “You want something done right, goddamn it, you call a teacher,” and when Jed asks what happened to his face he says, “I beat the shit out of a seriously disturbed serial rapist.”

Andy gets final proof of what is going on when he sees Tracy and Jed together and when he finds a medical syringe in his house. He then confronts Tracy. Tracy doesn’t understand that Andy is on top now, however. She thinks she can seduce him into going along with her scheme. She, too, asks what happened to his face, and he says, “I tripped.” This is meant to be ironic–it plays to his old role as ineffectual academic, not his new one as manly hero. Tracy, once she realizes things aren’t going her way, gets up in a hug and Andy says, “Sit the fuck down.” Stunned by this verbal virility, she says, “What?” “I said, sit the fuck down. I’m running the show now.” “What do you want?” “What does any man want? I want the Red Sox to win the World Series.”

This little scene, more so than the fight with the rapist, shows us that Andy is now a Real Man. He can take charge of a woman and make her do what he wants her to do; he can say “fuck”; he can toss around sports references just like Jed Hill. He ultimately asks for half the insurance money, although by now the viewer knows this is just one more step in Andy’s revenge plot.

Just as Andy’s masculinity is on the rise, Jed’s is declining. He and Tracy have argued over what to do about Andy and the child witness Andy claims to have. Jed is for compromise–he says give Andy half and be done with it. They argue so heatedly that Jed finally hits Tracy to put her in her place. At first this appears to be in line with Jed’s he-man qualities–but then he makes the mistake of apologizing. In the ethos of the film, this shows him to be weak, despite all of his macho sex and surgery. He is willing to compromise; he is appalled at Tracy’s plan to kill an innocent child; and he apologizes for using physical violence against a woman. What is the proper fate for such a man? Why, death, of course. Tracy plugs him twice with a gun, then goes off to commit child murder solo.

She is foiled in her plot–Andy knows what she is going to do and substitutes a dummy for the boy. Tracy ends up going to jail. Andy ends up with a sprained arm, and when we last see him, the female detective (whose only role in the denouement is to masquerade as a nurse and mother), says, “You’re supposed to put ice on that.” He replies, “Fine. I’ll have mine with some scotch on top.” And off they go. Now Andy is the hard-drinking, swearing, womanizing Real Man, and the film’s end hints that he will end up next with a (psuedo) nurse, just like Jed.

Malice has links with its predecessors that go beyond the Evil Bitch stereotype. First of all, it shares with them a particular, strategic deployment of the word “fuck.” In all of these films we are given to understand that when a man uses the word, he is a Real Man: when a woman does, she is the incarnation of evil, no matter how beautiful she may be. Peyton (Rebecca deMornay) in The Hand That Rocks The Cradle provides a nice example of this. She twists the arm of a six-year-old schoolyard bully and says, “I’ve got a message for you. . . . Leave Emma alone. . . . If you don’t I’m going to rip your fucking head off.” A scene or two later, she says to Solomon, the wiser-than-he-seems handyman, “Don’t fuck with me, retard.” She not only says “fuck” but picks on children and the mentally handicapped– hard to get much bitchier than that.

Second, all of these films portray men as for the most part weak and dim-witted, their wits especially dulled by the siren calls of evil women. Dan Gallagher in Fatal Attraction has the perfect life, until Alex seduces him into a one-night stand and all hell breaks loose. In the end, he is still so weakened by her that he cannot kill her. He misses one chance in Alex’s kitchen, when he nearly strangles her but then backs off–he’s a nice middle-class lawyer, after all–and botches another in his own bathroom when he thinks he has drowned her, but hasn’t. It’s up to his wife, battered and weak from a car accident, to find the gun and fire the fatal shot. Matt McCoy’s Michael in Hand That Rocks The Cradle has facial expressions blanker than those of the handicapped Solomon, and although other men salivate at the sight of Peyton, he seems oblivious to her charms until nearly the end of the film. Even when he knows who she really is, he is reluctant to call the police and forgets to ask for the house keys when he throws her out; his wife has to ask for them. And in the final confrontation, he is completely out of the action, left in the basement with broken legs while the quick wits of a child and Solomon give Claire the chance to send Peyton out the attic window to her death. Nick in Basic Instinct is apparently somewhat shrewder, but even he misses out on crucial clues, is incapable of saving his best buddy from death, and is obsessed beyond reason with the pantyless femme fatale played by Sharon Stone.

Even more interesting is the attitude towards paternity in these films. The fathers in Fatal Attraction and The Hand That Rocks The Cradle appear on the surface to be loving and involved parents: Dan Gallagher buys his child a pet bunny rabbit; Michael sings operetta to his daughter and plays board games with her. But Dan’s bunny ends up boiled because he has put carnal desires before fatherly duty, and Michael should not be so willing to turn over so much of the family’s care to a nanny.

Nick in Basic Instinct has the paternalistic job of policeman, but he also has the nickname “Shooter,” earned by his tendency to wound innocent bystanders. He is not a father, nor does he show any desire to sire children by Sharon Stone’s Catherine, but he is a symbolic and murderous father. In this he points the way to Malice and what may be the latest trend in cinematic visions of manhood.

In Malice paternal behavior leads one first to marry the Evil Bitch, and then to discover raped bodies in the bushes. Finding out one is sterile, however, leads to the possibility of endless sexual play without consequences — unless you choose a Sharon Stone, that is. Malice‘s Andy is smarter than Basic Instinct‘s Nick: he figures out the entire scheme on his own, cancels the bitch out of his life, takes up with someone who will nurture him rather than the other way around, and is freed from having to worry about unanticipated pregnancies (one of Dan Gallagher’s problems) or from ever having to worry about evil nannies in his childless household. He’s smarter than scheming Dr. Jed Hill, who ultimately is killed not only for greed, but for his paternal feelings towards an unknown child. Paternity is lethal all the way around in these films.

The New American Hero, at least in the genre of popular film, is no New Age Sensitive Guy or angst-ridden Iron John. He’s an updated John Wayne–he can swear and drink, but he doesn’t smoke; he has brains but knows how to use his muscles; and most importantly he can have guilt-free, child-free sexual relationships in which he, of course, is always on top.

September 24, 2013

Month: September 2013

Notes

Symposiasts:

A Metapoetics of Memory

The Fall of Soviet Man

Whose Subject?

Works Cited

Works Cited

Works Cited

Gramsci and “Us”

Gramsci and Cultural Studies

Gramsci’s Corpus

Notes

Works Cited

Introductory Note:

Wednesday, February 3

Friday, February 5

Saturday, February 6

Monday, February 8

Tuesday, February 9

Wednesday, February 10

Sunday, February 14

Monday, February 15

Tuesday, February 16

Wednesday, February 17

Thursday, February 18

Saturday, February 20

Sunday, February 21

Wednesday, March 24, 1993

I. On (Pure) Rhetoric

II. Sign Models

III. Movement and Meaning

IV. Conclusion

References

The Theology of the Text

The Non-Reader

Literal Translation

Materialist Reading

Concrete Theology

Notes

Works Cited

The Interviewers:

“A Fantasy” To “Confession”

“A Precedent” To “The Untrustworthy Speaker”

“A Fable” To “Animals”

“Saints” to “Snow”

“Terminal Resemblance” to “Celestial Music”

Notes

Works Cited

Notes

Works Cited

Dedicatory Epistle to the Reader

Fables of Digestion

From Citation to Sublimation: Metaphors Of Evacuation

The Postmodern Subject: An Epiphany Of Sorts

Notes

Works Cited

Connectionism and Its Consequences

Works Cited

Works Cited

I. Fear of Music: Postmodernism and Music Television

II. Meaning, Power and the “Scandal” of “New Populism”

Works Cited

I. The Text

II. Postmodernism, Si or No?

III. Practice, Temporality, Embodiedness

IV. Gender, Habitus, and Us

V. Present and Absent Others

Note

Works Cited

I. Philosophical Homelessness

II. Hermeneutic Oscillations

III. Whatever Being

Notes

Notes

Works Cited

Works Cited

Introduction

Physics and Tropes

Dynamics and Thermodynamics